David Weisburd

The business model doesn't work.

But it's such a luxury to be in an industry where...

You could spend 15 years with somebody and then they end up writing a $20 million check.

Rahul Mukdal, I don't know if you know him.

He's one of my favorite episodes, episode 199.

And he builds these decades long relationships.

And I've seen it with my own eyes.

He sends me these handwritten cards, which is epic.

I don't even get cards, period, let alone handwritten cards.

But it is one of those hidden luxuries where the stakes are so high, at least the business model works.

Then it's a question of whether you have the patience and the stamina to stay in there.

But the business model rewards those people that are long-term.

To your point, if you do that 50 times today, and one of those bets was $200 million at $5 billion, and you made 50 of these bets, you put out $10 billion, and now OpenAI goes out at a trillion dollars.

So let's say it's 15x on paper, because a lot of these companies that end up scaling, they dilute less than the typical company.

So you might be at a 2x, even if everything else goes to zero.

And it's so hard to internalize that idea because if you don't have an open AI, then you might have a zero with everything going to zero.

But then you have a 2x, which is somewhere around top 33% for a venture fund on that basis.

One other ground truth that both Professor Steve Kaplan and Gregory Brown and other researchers believe in venture is that it's idiosyncratic in the way that the founders are actually the ones picking the VCs.

That seems to be ground truth as well.

It's not actually VCs that are going out and picking.