The Trillion-Dollar AI Hardware Opportunity (Navin Chaddha, Managing Partner at Mayfield)

**Mario Gabriele** (0:00)
So when Mayfield talks about being people first, how does that functionally play out?

**Navin Chaddha** (0:04)
The entrepreneur kind and age and where they come from doesn't matter. What matters is alignment on values and culture, and that can only happen not in one meeting. It happens by spending time together.

**Mario Gabriele** (0:18)
I know that you've spent a lot of time thinking about the vibe coding movement. Why do you think this is a movement with real staying power that can produce truly massive companies from it?

**Navin Chaddha** (0:27)
We're going to be vibing with everything. It's going to be like electricity, water. Everybody will use these vibe tools and create companies that you and I can't even imagine what they will be today.

**Mario Gabriele** (0:38)
I'm curious how you think as this accelerates, will we find places where we productively introduce friction for the user, because it's important for them to somehow think about it?

**Navin Chaddha** (0:49)
So the skills you need will have to be augmented and up-level to do new things versus the things we were used to doing. We have to just let go because if you don't let go of those, we're going to become dinosaurs.

**Mario Gabriele** (1:06)
Hey, I'm Mario, and this is The Generalist Podcast. As the saying goes, the future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed. Each week, I have conversations with the founders, investors and visionaries living in the future to help you see what's coming next and understand it better. Today, I'm speaking with Navin Chaddha, the managing partner of Mayfield. Navin has one of the most unique vantage points in Silicon Valley. He previously founded three companies of his own, taking one of them public during the.com era, and has spent the last 20 years as a venture investor at one of the industry's most storied firms. His track record has secured him a place on Forbes Midas List a remarkable 17 times. Navin is more excited than ever about the opportunities in tech today and those in AI in particular. In our conversation, we discussed Mayfield's people-first approach to investing, how vibe coding is transforming consumers into builders, and the stealthy billion-dollar start-ups popping up in AI hardware. I walked away from this conversation with practical insights about where the real money is flowing in AI infrastructure and the unglamorous niches experiencing hypergrowth. If you enjoyed today's episode, I hope you'll consider subscribing and joining us for some of the incredible ones we have coming up. Now, here's my conversation with Navin. I'm really excited to have today's episode brought to you by GoFundMe Giving Funds. I want to tell you about a new product GoFundMe has launched called Giving Funds, a smarter, easier way to give, especially during tax season, which is basically already here. GoFundMe Giving Funds is the DAF or Donor Advised Fund from the world's number one giving platform, trusted by 200 million people. Make a tax-deductible donation to over 1.4 million nonprofits with zero admin or asset fees. If you already have a DAF, GoFundMe Giving Funds will cover any DAF pay fees to transfer your existing fund over. It's basically your own mini foundation without the lawyers or the admin costs. You get the tax deduction now, potentially reduce capital gains, and then decide later where to donate from 1.4 million nonprofits. All of this is in one simple hub with one clean tax receipt. You can lock in your deduction now and decide where to give later. It's perfect for tax season. Join the GoFundMe community and start saving money on your tax bill, all while helping the causes you care about the most. Start in just a few minutes at gofundme.com/mario. That's gofundme.com/mario.
This episode is brought to you by Auth0. Auth0 is an easy to implement, adaptable authentication and authorization platform. Think easy user logins, social sign-on, MFA, and robust role-based access control. With over 30 SDKs and quick starts, Auth0 scales with your product at every stage. Auth0 lets you implement secure authentication and authorization for your preferred development environment. You can use all your favorite tools and frameworks to manage user logins, roles, and permissions. Auth0's new offering, Auth for Gen.AI, is currently available for developer preview. Secure your AI agents and integrate with the Gen.AI ecosystem using features like user authentication, Token Vault, which calls third-party APIs on a user's behalf, Async Authorization, and Fine Grain Authorization for RAG. What typically takes 50 plus lines of code is reduced to just a few, so you can focus on building the AI apps yourself, rather than worrying about how to secure them. If you're a developer looking for an easy and powerful way to secure your applications, get started for free now at a0.2 slash mario. Navin, I've been really looking forward to this conversation, and just before we pressed record here, you actually ended up unwittingly setting up my first question for you. You showed me a cricket ball that you pulled from a visit you had in London, and in researching, I saw that you were in fact a cricket fanatic. After going to my first match a few months ago, I thought I would start with a thematic question, which is, what are the investing lessons or parallels that you take from cricket?