Eric Vishria - A Decade of Lessons Investing in Software & Hardware - [Invest Like the Best, EP.486]
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, stories, and strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. If you enjoy these conversations and want to go deeper, check out Colossus, our quarterly publication with in-depth profiles of the people shaping business and investing. You can find Colossus along with all of our podcasts at Colossus.com.
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of Positive Sum. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Positive Sum. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of Positive Sum may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. To learn more, visit psum.vc.
I love asking you and all your partners this every time we hang out, which is okay, you've got these singular investments. You don't do that many of investments each per year. And then the ones that go on to work, so far, Sierra and Fireworks certainly are. You get to learn so much about the world through the lens of the company. So I'd actually love to do both of those, maybe starting with fireworks. What do you know or what have you learned about the world and how it's reordering itself based on watching the world through? through the lens of fireworks that would maybe be surprising or interesting.
One really interesting thing is these models are big. These are two trillion, three trillion, four trillion parameter models. It turns out running those models is damn hard. And running them efficiently is like super hard. The way to see this, and everybody can see this, which is everybody from AWS to Azure to GCP to the neo clouds to the fireworks-based and togethers of the world, like all of them. They all run these stock open source models that are available in their developer pools and everything else. And that's what it is. The performance difference for a fireworks versus a cloud provider is like five X. And that is just the speed performance. Then you add on top of that throughput, which is not visible externally, that only visible if you know the economics of these businesses.
And you're like, wait a minute. This is the same open source model with the same NVIDIA hardware. And there's a 5x performance difference and a multiple X throughput difference. And the way to just simply understand that is these companies are paying.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:01–8:36
2
What early lessons from AWS does Eric Vishria think still matter for today’s AI boom?
8:36–20:41
3
How did Eric’s experience with Fireworks shape his view of cloud‑scale compute and AI workloads?
20:41–38:11
4
Why does Eric say the old SaaS playbook no longer works for modern AI and hardware startups?
38:11–57:22
5
What does Eric consider the biggest competitive frontier for AI‑enabled hardware today?
57:22–1:07:09
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
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Ben Thompson on Big Tech, China, and the AI Boom Running Out of Money - [Invest Like the Best, EP.487]