Please join me welcoming Vinod Cozler to Sage. Vinod? Oh! How are you? How are you doing? Legend! Legend! I'm going home with you! Let your winner ride. Brainman David Satter. I'm going home with you! And it's said we open source it to fans and they just go crazy. Love you guys. I see you. We can come home with you! Please! Wow! Legend! How are you? Legend!
请和我一起欢迎 Vinod Cozler 加入 Sage。Vinod?哦,你好吗?你怎么样?传奇!传奇!我要跟你回家!让你的胜利继续。Brainman David Satter。我要跟你回家!并且据说我们会将它开源给粉丝们,他们会疯狂的。爱你们。我看见你们了。我们可以跟你回家!拜托!哇!传奇!你好吗?传奇!
Vinod, good to see you just by way of background. I think we all know Vinod. Vinod is a legend and a friend. His Indian Army officer dad wanted his kid to join the army and Vinod decided instead to go into business after reading about Intel and getting inspired by co-founder Andy Grove and immigrant who got funding for his start up in Silicon Valley. Vinod later got a Masters in Biomedical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon on a full scholarship. Stanford GSB rejected him twice. He finally got accepted and received his MBA in 1980. And he worked at several startups, some of which failed. And then one of them worked out pretty good. Some micro systems.
Started it in 1982 with his Stanford classmate Scott McDeeley, Andy Bechtelstein, and Bill Joy. Vinod raised $300,000 in seed capital from venture firm Kleiner Perkins Coughfield and Byers and within five years, son made a billion dollars in annual revenue. He became a GP at Kleiner where he helped create NextGen, which he sold to AMD for 28% of its market cap, the first successful Intel microprocessor clone company. And his largest return to date, maybe we'll talk about this today, was Juniper Networks, where the firm's $3 million investment in the 90s earned $7 billion.
他在1982年与他的斯坦福大学同学Scott McDeeley、Andy Bechtelstein和Bill Joy一起创办了该公司。Vinod从风险投资公司Kleiner Perkins Coughfield and Byers筹集了30万美元的种子资金,并在五年内公司年收入达到了10亿美元。他成为了Kleiner的合伙人,在那里他帮助创建了NextGen,并将该公司以28%的市值出售给了AMD,这是第一家成功克隆Intel微处理器的公司。迄今为止,他的最大回报可能是Juniper Networks,该公司在90年代对其进行的300万美元的投资,赚取了70亿美元的收益。
In 2004, he launched Coastal Adventures. 2006, I pitched him and he rejected me as an investor in my company. I came back in 2011 and he led my series B, and I had three competing offers, and I picked Vinod. So, Vinod's been a great partner. By the way, I will also give you guys, I had offers from, I guess I'll say it, founder's fund and Andreessen Horowitz for my series B, Vinod gave me the lowest valuation, and I still took his offer. Entry price manager, the ad mode value.
Vinod's whole point was VC's typically add negative value. We're going to put a senator on your board that we know that knows this, and that firm and the other board members they brought and the partners they brought to the table for me were incredible. And he's been a great mentor and advisor. I'll also say I always gave people advice on Vinod because I get a lot of reference calls, like, should I take money from Vinod? I heard he's paying in the ass sometimes, and I'm like, let me tell you something about Vinod. I've never told you this in public, but I said, the thing about Vinod is you go into a meeting with Vinod, and he's like the oracle in Neo, the matrix. You go in the kitchen, and he's like, you know, she says, know thyself. She pulls out the chocolate chip cookies. She says, am I the one? She says, you're not the one. Kicks him out. He has to ultimately decide what the right decision is, and Vinod will cast for you a vision of all the things that you can be common and push you and try and make you extend your vision for your business and what is possible. And through that thought, through that conversation, through the vision hearing that he can help you do as an entrepreneur, sometimes you need to listen and sometimes you need to ignore the bullshit advice he gives you. But I will say that the role he plays is really important, and I've seen it work across some of the most important companies. In Silicon Valley in the world today, so Vinod, thanks so much for being with us.
You know, advice to all the entrepreneurs. Most VCs want to be your friend. And so they are hypocritically polite, instead of brutally honest in a way that can actually help you make a better decision. And that's sort of religion for me. I prefer brutal honesty to hypocritical politeness. And when people don't do that, they are actually harming the aunt nor. And having the aunt nor like them more. That's not my game.
And is that what you mean when you say most VCs add negative value?
当你说大多数风险投资家都会带来负面价值,你是否指的是这个?
Well, they take a very short-term approach. Just going through a situation. Companies being recap, they ask us to participate. I said, you are hanging on to revenue that is bad revenue. If you get rid of it and restart the company with positive revenue in the right technology approach, would participate and even lead. But they are hung on to revenue since the beginning of this year. By the way, three years ago, I asked them to take a technology approach as opposed to a people approach the business. They did not because revenue came fast. The technology took time to develop. And they didn't investigate. Now they are going back.
And I just got an email today saying they are happy to take our approach of really investing in the technology, lower one rate, not trying to show higher revenue so they can be acquired instead build a company. That's fundamentally the kind of thing I run into constantly. So I want to start our conversation with AI.
I'm going to kick this off. You invested in OpenAI. You have been investing in AI technology as people are framing it today for some time. Can you share with us a little bit about how you became an investor in OpenAI in the context of the AI trajectory that you have been seeing for some time? And also maybe give us a little color because we haven't had this question answered on our show about how OpenAI went from nonprofit to for-profit and what the future is for OpenAI.
Let me tell you a more general story first starting with the Internet. In 1982 when we started Sun we bet on the Internet. Only company to bet on the Internet. 1996 since you brought up Juniper. The Internet was growing but not yet clear. The senior management of every major telco in the United States told me they would never adapt TSPIP for the Internet. And I said fine we'll build Juniper to build TSPIP. Cisco told me they would never do TSPIP above what is probably your home service today OC12. Never. And so we built TSPIP. Why? Because we've seen the Internet on the next financial and the flat part of the exponential looked very uninteresting and nobody believed in it. We invested in Juniper for the 2500X return for us at Cliner. One of the largest returns in venture at least when Wall Street Journal did a piece on the SNAP IPO of largest venture returns ever. But we believed in something and did that.
How it relates to OpenAI? Probably year 2000 I gave an interview with the New York Times. My son just sent it to me so I remember it. And I said AI will be powerful enough. We don't know when. But we'll have to redefine what it means to be human. And I understand Stephen Wolfram had some interesting comments in that area so happy to talk about it. Ten years ago I wrote two blogs. The first one was called Do We Need Doctors? With the premise that AI would replace the expertise of doctors and let them do the things humans do really well. So 20% doctor, 80% AI is the thing I defined. And I wrote another blog called Do We Need Teachers? Because the only way to scale education at an equal level for every kid was with AI. That was January of 2012. So about 12 years ago.
So five years ago, late 2018 is when I started talking to Sam, the opportunity came up to do something with OpenAI. I said this is a clear back. I couldn't predict when things will emerge, how much capability will happen, how fast. But you didn't need to know that. Whether it was in three years, five years or ten years. I was pretty convinced it would be pretty phenomenal and there would be practical applications along the way. They would have a large impact long before we got to AGI. So we placed the back. We placed the long term back. You know, this audience is going to hear from Bob Mungard. You know, five years ago I placed the back on the fusion. For the same reason, if we get it to work, these are him longest returns, big bets. But reasonably high probability of success initially, but very high payback. And I was so convinced in OpenAI, I placed twice, our initial investment was twice the largest previous investment I had made in 40 years in venture capital. 2x, the largest bet I had ever placed initially in a company.
How did that go from nonprofit to for-profit and raise venture money? You know, those are details. But I would say the point, there are plenty of nonprofits in Europe that have for-profit arms. Right? It's a very good model to sustain and generate profit for a nonprofit to skip. Like I think the European model, some of these examples are really, really great. IKEA, BOSH, they have very large nonprofit ownership. And I think that's a very good model to skip. I mean, I just mentioned, do we need doctors? My son's building a primary care doctor, AI. My wife's doing a primary care or tutor AI as a nonprofit. It really doesn't matter how you do it. The question is, how can you gather the resources to scale the social good you're trying to do, whether with a doctor or with a tutor for every kid on the planet?
There's a lot of discussion about how jobs might be displaced because of AI. You've seen, I guess, three or four of these amazing efficiency cycles. What's your take on that? Because this one does feel qualitatively different. And it does seem to be moving at a faster pace. So the speed at which AI is moving, and just the leaps and bounds of how it's making people augmented, you're saying 80% AI, 20% doctor. What do you think this does to jobs and do you have those concerns of displacement that a lot of people seem to be concerned about?
I think it's a genuine concern. Okay. The path to getting to that point. So let me start with that. I think that in 2025 years from now, I think the need to work will disappear. People will work because they want to work, not because they need to work. And nobody wants a job doing the same thing for 30 years on an assembly line at GM. There's a set of jobs nobody wants to do that we shouldn't really call jobs. They're absolute. Sorry, yeah. So hopefully those disappear.
I love my job. So 25 years from now, health permitting. I'll still be doing the same thing lightly. I'm 68, so, you know, and Warren Buffett's gone a lot longer than I have. I'm very passionate about what I do. I enjoy it so much. I do it for free and I'll keep doing it. And other people work. There will be new jobs. What do you call jobs or what people get paid for? So it's ex-games for spent a job? I don't know. I don't call it a job, but it is a passion that can pay. So I do think the nature of jobs will disappear.
Now, societies will have the transition from today to that vision of not needing to work if you don't want to. It will be very messy, very political, very. I would say controversial. And I think some countries will move much faster than others. I suspect, let's take something I'm very hawkish on, China. They will take a Tiananmen Square tactic to enforcing what they think is right for their society over a 25-year period. We will have a political process which I prefer to the Chinese style. You like the debate over the tanks. Well, debate always improves things, but it also does slow down. And certain societies may choose not to adapt these. And I think the societies that do that will fall behind. And I think that's a massive disadvantage for our political system. We may choose not to do it. We've done it before.
But we've also seen massive transitions before. Agriculture was 50% of US employment in 1900. By 1970, it was 4%. So most jobs in that area, the biggest area of employment, got displaced. We did manage the transition. Well, cost went down and productivity went up. So I do think we will have to rethink, so the one thing I would say is capitalism is by permission of democracy. And it can be revoked, that permission. And I'm worried that this messy transition to the vision I'm very excited about may cause us to change systems. I do think the nature of capitalism will have to change. I'm a huge fan of capitalism. I'm a capitalist. But I do think the set of things you're optimized for when economic efficiency isn't the only criteria will have to be increased. So disparity is one that will be increased. I first wrote a piece of 2014 in Forbes. It was a long piece that say AI will cause great abundance, great GDP growth, great productivity growth, all the things economists measure, and increasing income disparity. That was 2014. And I think I ended that to close this answer off, where we will have to consider UBI in some form. And I do think that will be a solution. But meaning for human beings will be the largest problem we face.
My follow-up, which is if you give people UBI, do you have concerns of the idle mind? And what happens? We've seen in other states when 25% of young men maybe don't have jobs, their minds wander in bed, things happen. And so what do you think the societal issues will be if we do offer UBI? I think we will have issues, but we will eliminate other issues. There's pros and cons to everything. It's very hard to predict how complex systems behave. And it's very hard for me to sit here and say I have a clear vision of how that happens. But I, for one, am addicted to learning. I know other people addicted to producing music. All of those are reasonable things for people to find meaning in or personal meaning. Yeah, there's others, like I said. Just want to perfect their participation in a certain sport. Or I love X Games because it wasn't even remotely considered a sport not that long ago. So, things, passions will emerge. And I think if people have very early in their life the ability to pursue passions, I hope that adds the meaning human beings will need. And in some sense, that's what I was talking about in 2000 when I said we'll have to redefine what it means to be human. Your assembly line job won't define you for your whole life. That'd be a terrible thing. Yeah.
In the AI landscape, just going back to that for a second. You have a lot of these big companies who seem to have been caught flat-footed, so they're acting pretty aggressively. I think even yesterday there was a leak of something where Metas trying to really superpower Lama II and then create some high-performance cloud that they effectively want to give away. We talked about this a little bit on the pod, but the idea seems like the big companies want to scorch the earth on the foundational model side. Then you have some other big companies that are working on Silicon.
Can you just walk us through in your mind how you've organized, where the value is getting created, where there'll be product value, but no economic value, etc. Going back to OpenAI, part of my interest in funding OpenAI was when I looked at it, there was two major centers of excellence in AI. There was Google, they had DeepMind and Google Brain, but Google. Then there was an effort at Biden, and I was very worried the Chinese might win that. I'm hawkish on China, I have no trust there. I love Graham Allison's book, Destin for War. I'm a complete believer in that thesis. But I thought it'd be valuable to create a third center, and that was part of the motivation in funding OpenAI. I'm really glad Metas doing it, and others are trying to do it. And there's efforts in every country. Every country wants their national AI. I think more competition, especially in the set of countries subscribing to Western values, is good. And I think that will sort out. But I would say the following. Almost all the efforts I have seen are very limited. They're all trying to scale LLMs. And I spend my time looking at what besides LLM will play an important role. I haven't seen one effort among the majors that isn't following the same model. More NVIDIA GPUs, scale parameters, more data. Instead of saying, are there other methods?
So I'll mention we made an investment in a symbolic logic idea. Would that be dramatically additive? And just like OpenAI didn't look that interesting for five years ago, 2018, late 18, is when we really made our decision to invest, it got took a while to get organized. But I'm saying what else would look like that in 2028? Would it be symbolic logic? All in dust in anybody doing that? Are you really trying to do that? Are you really trying to do that? Is it completely other ways, like multi-agent systems? There are going to be other axes in which we will see progress. Said differently, do you need to make sure there are other axes so that we're not looking back a few years from now? Is there a massive kuda lock-in? Nothing can happen without one gatekeeper? The great thing about Wensher and Wensch-Gapless is they like to play long bets. So I'll place all those long bets on alternative ways to learn, and not replace, but add to LLM. I think it's the more likely scenario, though who knows.
But even among just, imagine LLM's do it all. It's good that there's multiple players. And so more big companies pop up, great. I also do think governments will have their own efforts. China, of course, has won, but plenty of other rumblings of governments trying to put together an effort in my country. And that's all good. Tell us up-leveling away from just AI, but broadly speaking, venture. Give us the state of the Union of Venture Capital in September 23.
So let me give you a perspective. I've been doing venture for some 40 years. In that time, I have not seen, and people get surprised at this, one example of a large innovation that came from a large company or institution. So the only thing you can do, not one. The only two examples I could find was in the early 70s, which was if you go back 50 years, when I was Bank of America put debit and credit on a plastic cart. Like, that wasn't even a major innovation, but I'll give them that. But I couldn't think of examples like that. Could you have with the iPhone maybe? That was Steve Jobs. I think it was a founder led. I should have said founder led innovation is a more accurate description. I like that one.
Did General Motors do driverless cars or Waymo? Would somebody at Avis do Uber? Would somebody at Hilton do Airbnb? Would somebody and Elon speaking next, but somebody at Lockheed Martin do Space X or Rocket Lab? We investors in Rocket Lab, so I'll like it a little more. They do have a superior strategy, but Space X has done a great job. But think of every large social change. Is there a large company that played? The only thing somebody came up with was debt structuring that the bankers did. And I said, they didn't take any risk. They took a risk with somebody else's money. But I think a lot of people's money is easy to play with, whether you're in finance or in government. Other people's money is easy. But my idea is innovation comes from groups like this. And I'm completely convinced I lost the original question, but this is very innovation will come down.
Yeah. So any large area you'll be hearing from Bob Mumgard, you know, four or five years ago, invested in fusion. It may fail. I think we are much more likely to succeed sitting here today than fail. But it's possible. Can you talk about that just while you're on fusion? We've got both Bob and David from Healing On Tomorrow Morning. Yeah.
是的。所以在任何一个大的领域里,你会听到来自鲍勃·曼加德(Bob Mumgard)的声音,你知道,四五年前他投资了核聚变。核聚变可能会失败。我认为我们今天坐在这里成功的可能性比失败要大得多。但它是有可能失败的。你能在谈论一下这个问题吗?我们明天早上有鲍勃和大卫(Bob and David)来分享一下吗?
And there's broadly, call it, six or some number of general architectural approaches to solving the future. Yeah, there's six approaches, a dozen companies. I think it's. Well, now they're 70, but yeah. It's just ballooning, but how do you think about the role that a Commonwealth, or even an open AI, I guess, how big of a role does capital play in getting there? Because what makes Commonwealth different is how much capital they've raised. A billion dollar plus at this point, open AI, similar. The decision as an investor, how much of it is predicated on this team or this architecture? Let me tell you the commonwealth story before Bob has a chance to tell you. Does he hear, by the way? To my.
Yeah. Yeah. I'm sure he's here somewhere because they're meeting him in half an hour. Oh, yeah, he must have a backstage. But here's the thing. They may have raised a lot of money. It took double digit millions to handle the single biggest risk in building the architecture. Right? Which was, can you build a 20 Tesla man? Yeah, the magnet. Right? And Bob and I had this discussion. I said, if fusion doesn't work, but you can build a 20 Tesla magnet, we got lots of interesting applications in nuclear medicine. Yeah. You know, a fusion reactor is a particle accelerator. That technical breakthrough we can pivot somewhere else. Yeah, nuclear medicine, MRI machines, lots of areas. So let's go build with double digit millions, which is not a huge amount in the context of the upside of maybe a bigger upside than the 2500x Juniper had. If you solve the fusion problem, there's still a 10x upside if you just solve the MRI machine problem. So you're thinking of probabilities.
Well, and today we're not. But when we started, that was clearly to look at off-raps, right? Like, where else could we go if we only had double digit millions? We didn't. We built the magnet. If we didn't build the magnet, we failed. That's venture capital. So how do you know that that investment at this point is still a good investment or you keep putting more capital in if there's now six competing architectures, any one of which could have their own breakthrough that could yield better economics?
So we've continued to invest in it mostly because I think Bob's just phenomenal CEO. And if anybody can make this happen and the world needs it to happen, Bob can. But I'm also optimistic and as you know, we invested in Sam too, he invested in Healyan. I think there's more than one approach that could be successful. In fact, I guess 15 years from now, we'll be looking at one more than one company that's successful. Zach, you had a question. I want to make sure you got to ask. Well, let's let the data finish up. Okay. I thought it was finished. Anything else?
So my view is large problems like that. You'd think GE would solve. Not a chance. Not a chance. Right. Siemens, not a chance. Yeah. You know, we take any of these. One of my favorite, you take large problems. One of my biggest beefs is the traffic in cities. I actually think we are very much on track to replace most cars in most cities in 25 years. How? By building a different kind of public transit system. Anybody want to invest in it? I'm really excited about it. You know, we're going to the way of autonomous cars for consumers or taxis. Autonomous cars in public transit will increase throughput. The only thing fixed in cities is lane rate. You have a road certain size. You don't destroy buildings on both sides. So if you can increase passengers per hour through it, and by the way, bicycles don't. We love bicycles, but they don't.
Scooters don't. Public transit autonomously driven in small parts will make public transit on demand so unscheduled, on demand, anytime of the day or night, end point to point. You don't stop for anybody else to get up. It's a beautiful way to do change cities. I think it'll happen. There's no question about it. It's also like overpool, but with a larger mini bus type format. No, no, no. You don't want to go to mini bus because then you'll have to stop for other people to get up. So just autonomous. If it's two or four person vehicles, it's faster than your private car. It doesn't stop at traffic lights. It's on demand. You don't have to park it. I could go on and on. I don't want to spend too much time on one particular idea.
But all I'm saying is whether it's fusion or public transit and we're doing 3D printed buildings, one of my favorites is a new, and you were asking about this, a music model to produce music that is not trained on any YouTube or public music. So completely IP free of any constraints. Like I'm really excited about it. They've built an outfit in Australia and they've just produced a, released a product that would be the mid-journey for music. Like, you're really excited. What's your favorite genre of music? What do you like to do? I'm not a huge music fan, to be honest. I hate to hear about it. But you know, I love a great challenge when this entrepreneur came to me and said, hey, in some period of time, say 10 years, and this was four or five years ago. And long before AI was a big thing, he said, I want to produce a music, a song, a top 10 music song, untouched by a human. I said, I love a challenge like that. Let's go. It literally took me half an hour to say, I'm in. No diligence. Didn't need all that.
David? Yeah, I think where Chamath was going to go a minute ago about the State of the Union in VC is that we talk a lot on the part about the fact that we've just been through an asset bubble that popped last year. And it really inflated during COVID with all the money printing that went on. And it may have been inflating before that with these ZIRP policies going back, I don't know, 15 years. I guess my question to you is, how much fakeness do you think that created in the ecosystem? Is there any way to even quantify it? I mean, I think we see now that the size of venture funds is contracting, that new funds are going to be smaller. Probably there's a lot of VCs who shouldn't even be in business. I think you'll be happy about that. We've estimated on the pod there's 1,400 unicorns right now. We've tried to sort of get our half of them fake. I guess my question to you is, how much did this asset bubble sort of inflate everything in VC? And where do you think it stands right now?
You know, it inflated things a lot in certain areas and it deflated things a lot in certain areas. But let me give you two analogies to understand this. Investors only, and there's a fair number of investors I hear here, only care about two emotions, fear and greed. And they bounce between the two and there's nothing in the middle. And so the key to being a good investor is saying focus on the long term in the middle. So any time you get a hype cycle, you'll get inflation and then you will get deflation.
But let me ask you the following question. 1998, there was a dot com bubble, a bust. Tell me, and there was clearly a change in Wall Street prices and valuations and all that. There was absolutely no bust in the amount of internet traffic. So if you look at internet traffic, you can't tell when the dot com bust happened.
但是让我问你一个问题。1998年,发生了一个点 com 泡沫,一个破裂。告诉我,沃尔街的价格和估值明显发生了变化。但是互联网流量的数量没有发生任何破裂。所以,如果你看互联网流量,你无法确定点 com 破裂发生的时间。
So I'm saying the reality of using the internet didn't change just because people had inflated values and then deflated them. That's just a fear reaction and a great reaction. Same thing happened with the original bubble in the 1830s in England. If you got the right to build a railroad between two cities, you could offer strips on the market, big bubble. Then a big collapse. But more railroad was built in the 10 years after the bubble collapsed in England in the 1830s than before.
My point is the reality of the underlying business, if you're adding value, does not change that much. It can accelerate a little bit or slow down because less resources are available. But fundamentals is a good way to invest sort of the Warren Buffett method, not the short term, but hey, he's valuing it twice, so let me pay up. And then you'll pay twice as much as that or soft bank will later. I think that's a question of you can't time the market. You can't time the market.
As long as you know that this is an investable technology, an investable trend, timing what price you're coming in at. I mean, this is an older doge in markets. It doesn't really matter what price you're coming at. In inflationary times you pay a little bit more. But you get less dilution later because other people are investing. And then when it goes into a deflationary cycle, you just have to learn to respond quickly. And good investors will help guide entrepreneurs correctly through all those phases. We've seen a lot of that in climate investing.
You know, very low valuations. Look, when we invested in impossible foods, it was a $3 million valuation. Primarily. Crazy idea. Crazy idea. Nobody taught. The plant proteins wasn't a word. Another one of my favorite projects is replace soy as a protein source on this planet. And I think we are well on our way to do that. I'm very excited. But at that level, it doesn't matter whether evaluation in the end goes up or down by a factor of two. It doesn't really matter if you're adding fundamental value and long term things. I know that your long term view is critical to making Silicon Valley work. I think that we all kind of appreciate your leadership, your support, your mentorship. And the fact that you're willing to make those big bets in very low probability outcomes. But if they work, the return is so much more than that multiple, that ratio that you're getting. And it matters so much.
I just want to add, it's just inspiring how much you share with all of us who are behind you and how much we've all learned from you. And I didn't mention it, but you've taken a lot of time for Trimoth. You've taken time for me and my career. And I just think it's like a great gift to us.
I can end with a quick story. When I try to, we really do have to jump. I email, I mail, paper mail. I'm going to try 40 or 50 people to try to get a job in VC in 2000. The only single person sent me a handwritten rejection letter, VK. Give it up.
Good night. Good night. Good night. Good night. Everybody. Yeah. Another standing ovation. Wow. No, thank you. Thank you, sir. It was great. Thank you. That was great. Thank you.
What are we? Let's go. We have to. Let's go. axxLaughs. I'm trying. Bestest is all over. As my dog taking a mission driveways and acts. I am my natural weakie. We should all just get a word in it to have one thing you George. Because your office is like this like sexual tension. You just need to release your outfit. What? You're the B. What? You're a B. You're a B. What? We need to get my bestest on the planet. I'm going all in. I'm going all in.