Azeem Azhar
๐ค SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
I would say, I think that's exactly the right thing for them to do anyway.
As an investor myself, I want to invest in people who have optimistic views of the future and therefore believe you need to plant seeds today in order to harvest them in two or three or four years.
And particularly in a business like this where there is no asset, there's no hotel that's
been built that can be resold to another property developer.
You know, it's an intangible asset that may not have that much salvage value, especially if people in the team leave.
I think exactly the right thing to do is to be building out ahead of time and you see that investment J curve.
I think the two kind of challenges around this model are
Number one, is the open AI model the only way to do this?
And I don't just mean from the financial side.
I also mean from the strategic focus side.
We've seen Anthropic do something completely different.
And the second challenge is, and I think we went part of the way to answering this question, is, is there a path to positive unit economics?
In other words, are they producing something for X dollars that they can sell for 1.3 X dollars?
Are they producing something for X dollars that they sell for half an X dollar?
Which was the story of a lot of the .com, right?
Cosmo.com and all these other things.
And I think we got partway to answering that second question, which is that
Yes, it's expensive.
Yes, there is, you know, some kind of gross profit margin.
The level that we estimate, I think Hannah can speak more accurately to this, is, you know, lower than a traditional software business.