You know, if you want to change the world, you have to believe you can change the world. What you're really trying to find is are they literally the best in the world at a thing, and that's always the thing that's worth investing in, as opposed to they're pretty good at a lot of things, and I can't figure out what they're not good at. We just have a higher concentration of talent here than that's probably possible in a company in terms of sheer IQ.

It's pretty different than a company in that with a company there are functions, there are things you know people there are very specific outputs that you're driving to. I'm not really telling him [a GP] I'm not giving him that much direction. I'm more kind of helping him understand the process or like how the process of the conversation affects the process of investing and you know kind of how you work your way to the right answer, taking the right amount of risk. The biggest mistake we make is we get too wrapped around the axle about some weakness that a company has as opposed to focusing on what they're great at and how great they are.

The most important observation, and this is a conversation Mark and I had with the late great Dave Swensen back in 2009. And what Dave said was an investing team shouldn't be too much bigger than a basketball team. A basketball team's like five people who start, and the reason for that is the conversation around the investments really needs to be a conversation.

The only way to do it is to verticalize. Software was eating the world, so we had to get bigger in order to address the market. But I didn't want teams being bigger than a basketball team. The communication across the teams, we do in different ways. If the teams are very close like AI infra and AI apps, then we have people from each team going to the other team's meetings. We have the GP offsite twice a year with not much agenda. Politicking gets deincentivized and that's what we have here.

If you think about my job, a lot of it is kind of setting the direction and then making decisions when things get into conflict or we're not sure what to do. Decision making, what makes you good at it? It's a combination of intelligence and judgment, which is a combination of intelligence and knowledge. The knowledge in an organization tends to live with the people doing the work, not the managers.

It's talking to people who are at the point of attack, talking to entrepreneurs. I just spend enough time in the team meetings and I end up knowing a lot about a lot of things. A key thing for leaders is you never want people to think "oh we shouldn't bother them with that." Generally people aren't looking for correctness, they're just looking for clarity. If you have clarity, you can move.

We have had a few [vertical ideas] that people have proposed that we haven't done. One was kind of ESG kinds of things, clean tech, green energy. We thought that the right lens on that was much more going to be American Dynamism, because it wasn't weirdly constraining and it was much more oriented around the economic outcome as opposed to the "do good by doing well" phrase.

Investing is hard enough without introducing other criteria other than "is this thing going to be a giant company and make a lot of money." The US really does have to modernize the way they do defense, we really do have to get much better intelligence in public safety, we've got to solve the energy problem. I want to know what the fund idea is, how do I make money? We have investors, we got to make money.

AI is such a disruptive phenomenon that every incumbent is under threat. A lot of the ways you deal with the threat is you just acquire the DNA of the future. Three or four years ago, people believed the big foundation models would be these giant brains that could do anything better than anybody. It has not played out quite like that.

For any particular use case, the fat tail of human behavior ends up being something that you have to model and understand very well. Cursor consists of 13 different AI models. The complexity of the application itself is very high and is not subsumed in the foundation model. We've never seen demand like this. We've never seen valuations rise like this, but we've never seen demand rise like this either. The Nvidia multiples aren't outrageous when you look at the growth rate and the size of the earnings.