Sam Altman: prediction

Transcript context

…Why can’t I be an optimist but not an optimist about VC? I think new ideas will come through established companies. They’ll be funded by private equity. They’ll happen in China. But the exact formula where you can afford to make so many mistakes because the hits are so big — to what extent does VC rely on that kind of rapid scalability that may not come back? It does rely on that, and that’s why the industry came about, really, truly, at a time when software happened. Software is very unlike any other good because the marginal cost is zero and networks are so powerful. It’s always tempting to say that the big companies in any industry — you’re never going to compete with them. They will be the big ones forever. It is also possible that the next set of companies, the next set of $100 billion startups are all going to be synthetic bio companies, or nuclear fusion companies, or whatever. But the big companies in any moment always look like behemoths that you will never be able to compete with, and 10 years later, it always looks so obvious about how they got beaten — or 20 years later or whatever it is. It does even feel to me, myself, this current generation of tech hyper caps, I’m almost willing to say this time it’s different, but I know in my heart that there will be technological change that will happen at a rate that the companies can’t do or require a level of risk they can’t take. It has been a bad bet to bet against new companies for centuries, and I think that will keep happening. Your conceptual model of venture capital — what do you take to be its origins? Is it the early voyages of discovery, finding the New World? Is it whaling ships? Is it Silicon Valley in the last 50 years? Is it Hollywood movies? Where does it start for you?…

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