This is my sixth conversation with @GavinSBaker. As always with Gavin, the conversation covers a lot of ground, but we spend the most time on watts and wafers. We discuss: - Why the wafer shortage may prevent an AI bubble - Data centers in space (reframed) - Elon's Terafab and the new chip companies challenging Nvidia - Usage-based pricing - The disaggregation of GPUs - DRAM, frontier tokens, and open source Enjoy! Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 7:55 Anthropic and OpenAI Valuations 12:58 Watts, Wafers, and Infrastructure 14:39 Orbital Compute and Data Centers in Space 22:49 Avoiding the AI Bubble 28:26 Terafab and the Future of US Manufacturing 32:16 Returns to the Frontier 37:23 Continual Learning 42:03 New Chip Companies 48:52 Extending GPU Lifespans and Private Credit 51:22 The Application Layer 57:32 The Token Path and Open-Source Dynamics 1:01:37 Cybersecurity 1:05:46 Diversity Breakdown 1:11:59 Assessing the Big Tech Players in AI 1:19:02 Geopolitics, Personal Safety, and the AI Horizon

My conversation with Alex Sacerdote, founder of Whale Rock Capital Management. Alex runs more than $17B and has been one of the best performing tech investors for years, though he keeps a low public profile. As you'll hear, he is singular in how he thinks about investing through technology cycles. For over 25 years, he has built his entire investment framework around a single idea, the S-curve. We discuss: - The AI L-Curve - When to buy into an S-curve and when to sell out - The de-commoditization of data center hardware - Why he went net short software - His two models for tech adoption - Finding alpha Enjoy! Timestamps 0:00 Intro 9:55 AI's L-Curve 19:31 Whale Rock's S-Curve Playbook 26:14 Spotting Inflection Points 32:02 Finding AI Winners 40:04 AI vs Software 48:13 The Hardware Renaissance 58:04 Why Investors Miss AI 1:05:18 Whale Rock's Research Machine

in markets, to go long on something is to bet it grows more valuable over time. much of the conversation today is short on humans, wagering that ai makes people redundant. we believe the opposite is true for the industries @ThriveHoldings operates in. we are long humans. thriveholdings.com/long-huma…

My conversation with Alex Sacerdote, founder of Whale Rock Capital Management. Alex runs more than $17B and has been one of the best performing tech investors for years, though he keeps a low public profile. As you'll hear, he is singular in how he thinks about investing through technology cycles. For over 25 years, he has built his entire investment framework around a single idea, the S-curve. We discuss: - The AI L-Curve - When to buy into an S-curve and when to sell out - The de-commoditization of data center hardware - Why he went net short software - His two models for tech adoption - Finding alpha Enjoy! Timestamps 0:00 Intro 9:55 AI's L-Curve 19:31 Whale Rock's S-Curve Playbook 26:14 Spotting Inflection Points 32:02 Finding AI Winners 40:04 AI vs Software 48:13 The Hardware Renaissance 58:04 Why Investors Miss AI 1:05:18 Whale Rock's Research Machine

My conversation with Alex Sacerdote, founder of Whale Rock Capital Management. Alex runs more than $17B and has been one of the best performing tech investors for years, though he keeps a low public profile. As you'll hear, he is singular in how he thinks about investing through technology cycles. For over 25 years, he has built his entire investment framework around a single idea, the S-curve. We discuss: - The AI L-Curve - When to buy into an S-curve and when to sell out - The de-commoditization of data center hardware - Why he went net short software - His two models for tech adoption - Finding alpha Enjoy! Timestamps 0:00 Intro 9:55 AI's L-Curve 19:31 Whale Rock's S-Curve Playbook 26:14 Spotting Inflection Points 32:02 Finding AI Winners 40:04 AI vs Software 48:13 The Hardware Renaissance 58:04 Why Investors Miss AI 1:05:18 Whale Rock's Research Machine

My conversation with Alex Sacerdote, founder of Whale Rock Capital Management. Alex runs more than $17B and has been one of the best performing tech investors for years, though he keeps a low public profile. As you'll hear, he is singular in how he thinks about investing through technology cycles. For over 25 years, he has built his entire investment framework around a single idea, the S-curve. We discuss: - The AI L-Curve - When to buy into an S-curve and when to sell out - The de-commoditization of data center hardware - Why he went net short software - His two models for tech adoption - Finding alpha Enjoy! Timestamps 0:00 Intro 9:55 AI's L-Curve 19:31 Whale Rock's S-Curve Playbook 26:14 Spotting Inflection Points 32:02 Finding AI Winners 40:04 AI vs Software 48:13 The Hardware Renaissance 58:04 Why Investors Miss AI 1:05:18 Whale Rock's Research Machine

Fascinating that the radio is the third fastest technology in history to reach 50% penetration It spread faster than the internet (only AI and the smartphone beat it) But the dishwasher took 47 years I loved Alex's analogy for the two models of adoption, the radio and the dishwasher: "We commissioned Horace Dediu, who used to work with Clayton Christensen, to go look at S-curves over the last 100 years. The radio S-curve is one of the fastest ever. But the dishwasher S-curve is the opposite, because it needs to be plugged into the back end. B2B stuff can take a long time, because it needs to be plugged into the existing systems. Consumers generally tend to go a lot faster. I covered B2B internet at Fidelity. The underlying infrastructure wasn't in place for B2B to happen. It ultimately happened 20 years later, with SaaS. That is a risk with AI, in that these big companies are very security-conscious and can be slow to move. There are a lot of cultural issues with AI, where you really need a few evangelists to push it through. The top management needs to push it through, but then IT is saying this is risky. And that happened with cloud too. Everybody was afraid that it's not secure to have your data in the cloud. And then we saw the CIA do it, and we saw Capital One. We talked to the Capital One CIO, who said it's more secure in the cloud. And then it really started to take off. But what's amazing about AI is that you just open up the browser and it's there. And so that's why we're getting this straight up, we call it the backwards L-curve."

My conversation with Alex Sacerdote, founder of Whale Rock Capital Management. Alex runs more than $17B and has been one of the best performing tech investors for years, though he keeps a low public profile. As you'll hear, he is singular in how he thinks about investing through technology cycles. For over 25 years, he has built his entire investment framework around a single idea, the S-curve. We discuss: - The AI L-Curve - When to buy into an S-curve and when to sell out - The de-commoditization of data center hardware - Why he went net short software - His two models for tech adoption - Finding alpha Enjoy! Timestamps 0:00 Intro 9:55 AI's L-Curve 19:31 Whale Rock's S-Curve Playbook 26:14 Spotting Inflection Points 32:02 Finding AI Winners 40:04 AI vs Software 48:13 The Hardware Renaissance 58:04 Why Investors Miss AI 1:05:18 Whale Rock's Research Machine

My conversation with Alex Sacerdote, founder of Whale Rock Capital Management. Alex runs more than $17B and has been one of the best performing tech investors for years, though he keeps a low public profile. As you'll hear, he is singular in how he thinks about investing through technology cycles. For over 25 years, he has built his entire investment framework around a single idea, the S-curve. We discuss: - The AI L-Curve - When to buy into an S-curve and when to sell out - The de-commoditization of data center hardware - Why he went net short software - His two models for tech adoption - Finding alpha Enjoy! Timestamps 0:00 Intro 9:55 AI's L-Curve 19:31 Whale Rock's S-Curve Playbook 26:14 Spotting Inflection Points 32:02 Finding AI Winners 40:04 AI vs Software 48:13 The Hardware Renaissance 58:04 Why Investors Miss AI 1:05:18 Whale Rock's Research Machine

Another great example of the alpha in seeing things firsthand. Alex explains the difference between spotting consumer and enterprise trends: "Andy Grove says when you have strategic inflection points, you can't trust the data. And strategic inflection points are about intuition and anecdotal evidence. We invested in the mobile video game S-curve for so long. The screens were small and the processing power wasn't good, so you had all these casual games. But then I was in China and I saw this little 12-year-old boy with a huge phone playing an awesome video game. I'm like, "It's now coming to the phone." So it's visual. Enterprise is hard because you can't see it. So we go to the Gartner IT Symposium, 30,000 American CIOs go there. We saw this happen with Splunk - the room where they were explaining it was standing room only. And with AWS, we went there and the grand ballroom was completely packed, and that was at nine o'clock. And at 10 o'clock the grand ballroom was completely packed. So you could see the demand exploding before it happened."

Another great example of the alpha in seeing things firsthand. Alex explains the difference between spotting consumer and enterprise trends: "Andy Grove says when you have strategic inflection points, you can't trust the data. And strategic inflection points are about intuition and anecdotal evidence. We invested in the mobile video game S-curve for so long. The screens were small and the processing power wasn't good, so you had all these casual games. But then I was in China and I saw this little 12-year-old boy with a huge phone playing an awesome video game. I'm like, "It's now coming to the phone." So it's visual. Enterprise is hard because you can't see it. So we go to the Gartner IT Symposium, 30,000 American CIOs go there. We saw this happen with Splunk - the room where they were explaining it was standing room only. And with AWS, we went there and the grand ballroom was completely packed, and that was at nine o'clock. And at 10 o'clock the grand ballroom was completely packed. So you could see the demand exploding before it happened."

My conversation with Alex Sacerdote, founder of Whale Rock Capital Management. Alex runs more than $17B and has been one of the best performing tech investors for years, though he keeps a low public profile. As you'll hear, he is singular in how he thinks about investing through technology cycles. For over 25 years, he has built his entire investment framework around a single idea, the S-curve. We discuss: - The AI L-Curve - When to buy into an S-curve and when to sell out - The de-commoditization of data center hardware - Why he went net short software - His two models for tech adoption - Finding alpha Enjoy! Timestamps 0:00 Intro 9:55 AI's L-Curve 19:31 Whale Rock's S-Curve Playbook 26:14 Spotting Inflection Points 32:02 Finding AI Winners 40:04 AI vs Software 48:13 The Hardware Renaissance 58:04 Why Investors Miss AI 1:05:18 Whale Rock's Research Machine

"I think there's tremendous alpha in the largest cap." Alex manages $17B and runs one of the best performing hedge funds over the last 3 years. "There's a huge structural underweight of the largest tech companies in the world. We also realized that a lot of our performance over the years was from some of the largest companies. There's a belief that there's no alpha in large cap, so the largest pools of capital are underweight this. They have a lot of small and mid managers that are stock pickers because it's intuitive that large cap can't have alpha. In tech, the leader usually grows bigger and wins and develops very high market share quickly, and there's great competitive advantages. So this is gonna lead to massive profit pools and massive market caps. Most endowments are betting against this because they're completely underweight this. I think there's tremendous alpha in the largest cap because a small cap, it just takes one person to figure out it's good and move it up. But it takes a hundred diversified PMs to realize Google's not a loser, it's a winner. And can we figure that out before 95% of those generalist PMs, and we've been able to do it."

"I think there's tremendous alpha in the largest cap." Alex manages $17B and runs one of the best performing hedge funds over the last 3 years. "There's a huge structural underweight of the largest tech companies in the world. We also realized that a lot of our performance over the years was from some of the largest companies. There's a belief that there's no alpha in large cap, so the largest pools of capital are underweight this. They have a lot of small and mid managers that are stock pickers because it's intuitive that large cap can't have alpha. In tech, the leader usually grows bigger and wins and develops very high market share quickly, and there's great competitive advantages. So this is gonna lead to massive profit pools and massive market caps. Most endowments are betting against this because they're completely underweight this. I think there's tremendous alpha in the largest cap because a small cap, it just takes one person to figure out it's good and move it up. But it takes a hundred diversified PMs to realize Google's not a loser, it's a winner. And can we figure that out before 95% of those generalist PMs, and we've been able to do it."

My conversation with Alex Sacerdote, founder of Whale Rock Capital Management. Alex runs more than $17B and has been one of the best performing tech investors for years, though he keeps a low public profile. As you'll hear, he is singular in how he thinks about investing through technology cycles. For over 25 years, he has built his entire investment framework around a single idea, the S-curve. We discuss: - The AI L-Curve - When to buy into an S-curve and when to sell out - The de-commoditization of data center hardware - Why he went net short software - His two models for tech adoption - Finding alpha Enjoy! Timestamps 0:00 Intro 9:55 AI's L-Curve 19:31 Whale Rock's S-Curve Playbook 26:14 Spotting Inflection Points 32:02 Finding AI Winners 40:04 AI vs Software 48:13 The Hardware Renaissance 58:04 Why Investors Miss AI 1:05:18 Whale Rock's Research Machine

"Since when is life about happiness? It's about impact." What Daniel Ek (@eldsjal) told Dara at Allen & Company Sun Valley in 2017 to convince him to take the Uber CEO job. Daniel was also the one who recommended Dara to the headhunter.