Uncapped #57 | Andrew Feldman from Cerebras

Andrew Feldman (0:00)

You have board meetings every six weeks. All you've got to say is, still can't make it.

Right? That's the board meeting. What else are we gonna talk about? Still can't make it, again and again.

Jack Altman (0:10)

They're like, should I get in? Can I do anything to help? That's right.

Andrew Feldman (0:14)

They're like, can we help? I was like, nope. But we always believe that if we could make it, there would be huge demand for it.

Jack Altman (0:24)

All right, super excited to be doing this today.

Andrew, thanks a bunch for being here. Andrew, you're the CEO and Founder of Cerebras, which is obviously one of the most important chips companies, and also really happy to have my partner Eric here, who's going to be half host, half guest, who has been working with Andrew since the beginning. But thank you both for making time. What I want to start with is it's 2026 now, and obviously Cerebras is very important in the AI landscape. But you started the company in 2016, and AI was not what it is now back then. So, I guess, what was the kind of head space then? What was the idea, the insight? Like, what were you building when you started the company, and what was the thinking?

Andrew Feldman (1:07)

Well, Jack, thanks for having me. It's always fun to hang out with Eric, so I appreciate you having me.

I think as a computer architect, when you see a new workload on the horizon, you get excited.

It's very, very difficult to win share in a mature market in compute. And so when something new emerges, you get excited and you lean forward and you say, well, can I make it faster? Can I build a chip that is better at this work? And then you ask the other question is, is there enough of this work to justify building a chip that's better? So you have two questions. Can I and should I? And what we saw with AI was an extremely computationally intensive workload. Unlike, for example, the rise of ARM processors for cell phones, that they weren't computationally intensive, they were power intensive, right? We saw a problem that was going to be hard on compute.

And we saw that what was being used was an architecture that was being remodeled for it. And that we could build something better. And that was sort of the insight. And then it was a long hard slog.

Jack Altman (2:30)

Before we go to the long hard slog, Eric, obviously for you, like as an investor, you were not also in this AI era, but you saw something that made you invest. And you were, I think, previously not a chips investor, and you've done more like...

Eric Vishria (2:44)

And probably never will be again.

Jack Altman (2:45)

Probably never will be again. Would you do that every time again? Was there something that made it clear to you?

Or what happened for you when you made the investment?

Eric Vishria (2:55)

I think one of the scariest things about venture, and I think about this all the time, is the more you work on companies and you see the challenges and you see how hard it is, you build up scar tissue. And then the thing is, well, you should do it again, but will you do it again? And I ask myself that all the time. You actually need some naivete. Like you need to have this like can do attitude and this like naivete around it to attempt it. Like otherwise, you just don't do it again. And I've definitely built up a bunch of scar tissue.

And I don't know, had I actually had any idea how hard it was gonna be for them, like how much science and technology had to be built, how many innovations, how many times like the company was gonna come to the brain.

Andrew Feldman (3:50)

Don't tell your VCs how hard your shit is. The moral of the story is tell them it's no problem.

Eric Vishria (3:55)

Keep it inside. Push it down.

Andrew Feldman (3:57)

Push it down. Don't tell them.

Jack Altman (4:00)

I'm doing great.

Andrew Feldman (4:00)

It's a big hard problem. All's good, man.

Jack Altman (4:02)

Yeah. So what happened? So you basically, you start the company, you get to the tape out and then you're done, right? It's like that?

Andrew Feldman (4:08)

No, never.

Jack Altman (4:09)

So how's it go? So what happened?

Andrew Feldman (4:10)

I think we had, you know, this isn't our first chip company.

This is my fifth. And the team had been together, the founding team had been together at the last one. And we had some really clear sort of philosophies on what you should do. And our view is that if you're going to attack Goliath, if there's a giant standing in the market, like Nvidia was even at that time, that being a little bit better or a little bit cheaper is not an available strategy, right? They had high margins. So if you come in and even if you're two-thirds the price, they can just cut costs. They can just charge less. They can bundle it. They can do a hundred other things. What that means is you have to go out with something way better, 10, 100, 500 times faster. You have to come up with a product that has a value proposition that even if the other guys give it away, all right, they can't compete.