The AI Price War Nobody Saw Coming with FirstMark's David Waltcher

**Dan Nathan** (0:00)
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**Dan Nathan** (1:33)
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All right. Welcome to the OK Computer Podcast. I am Dan Nathan. I'm here at FirstMark Capital's Global HQ here, and I'm with partner David Waltcher. David, welcome to the podcast.

**David Waltcher** (2:10)
Thanks for having me.

**Dan Nathan** (2:11)
I'm excited to do this. You and I have chatted a bunch over the last, let's call it a couple of months since I've been here and gotten to know a lot of your partners here. Obviously, I go back with Rick and Amish, and what we're doing in this series is we're trying to get a sense of the different focus that you guys all have, like different verticals and how you think they come together, where you had been as an investor pre-2022 or late 2022, and how you see that industry or those industries in general being disruptive or the pivots they made. We want to talk about China and a lot of the stuff that's going on there, and what the threats are over here, and maybe exits, IPOs, maybe M&A. I mean, you played in infrastructure software and security, and it seems like if those companies didn't make the right pivot, at least in the public markets, the way I think about it, they've kind of just been left for dead. So maybe it's a bit of a baby with the bathwater, but maybe we're seeing some signs of life of possible M&A, whether it be strategic or from PE, that sort of thing. Let's start really quickly with your background, because you started a venture the way I think a lot of kids in college would love to start and venture right after and get going. And I hear this so much because it's such an amazing sort of field and you guys get to do so many cool things that it doesn't look like in the public market. So let's talk a little bit about it. You're in this amazing firm, Accel. You start out as an intern. How did that all happen and how did you get here at FirstMark?

**David Waltcher** (3:37)
Well, how did it happen? I mean, mostly serendipity, also different era. So like this was the late 2010s. I was literally looking on Handshake, which now is a very popular data platform that competes with like the Mercores and the Scales. But at the time, Handshake was really for 20, 21 year olds to find internships at college. And Accel was having a, what are they called? Information session. And I just went and had an interview.

**Dan Nathan** (4:02)
There must have been like thousands of kids though, who wanted that job.

**David Waltcher** (4:04)
Yeah, you know, there were, but even 10 years ago, like that was a, it was a very different time in the venture world where of course it's the buy side and you have a lot of the finance folks that would love to sort of supercharge their path into the buy side and do that out of school. But at the same time, venture was more of a cottage industry back then, right? Like I don't have the numbers off the top of my head, but like by any metric, whether it's dollars invested in the venture ecosystem, number of firms, this industry has ballooned in the last 10 years in a, in a pretty major way.