Uncapped #58 | David George from a16z

David George (0:00)

If the premise of your question is, is this going to be successful or that thing is going to be successful? The answer in AI is probably and. Like it's just the most exciting time, you know, to ever be an investor and in the technology markets.

Jack Altman (0:11)

And keeping up with it is going to be hard.

David George (0:12)

Keeping up with it is going to be hard.

Jack Altman (0:17)

All right, David, I'm really excited to do this. I've been I've been really looking forward to this. So thanks for thanks for coming by.

David George (0:21)

Yeah, great to hang with you.

Jack Altman (0:23)

So one of the topics that's been on my mind a lot that I think you've got really good thoughts on is something that my partner, Eric Visschia, said recently on the invest like the best podcast. It was basically he was like, it's all going to work.

It was in the context of people question, is it going to be open source or frontier? He's like, the open source is going to work, the frontier is going to work. Is it going to be Nvidia or is it going to be new chips companies? He's like, there's going to be both. You can go on and on through the stack in AI. Eric's point was basically like, people are asking the wrong question of just like, is it this or it's that? He's like, it's both. I'm curious how you think about this at Andreessen and in your seat.

David George (1:04)

Yeah, of course. I am very, very closely aligned with Eric on this point that it's all going to work. I actually like the way that he framed it up. I framed it up slightly differently, which is just like the answer to all this is and.

If the premise of your question is, is this going to be successful or that thing going to be successful? The answer in AI is probably and. I think it's awful to start just like, where are we? So right now, from an infrastructure build out standpoint, we just surpassed the railroads as a percentage of GDP, which has been recovered.

Jack Altman (1:36)

It's like 3% now or something like that.

David George (1:37)

Yeah, exactly. And look, it's probably going to get harder and harder to build data centers, which we could talk about later, but I think that's going to 10x. So right now, what's happening is basically. As a percentage of GDP, you think? I think it will, no, I think hopefully that will drive GDP growth and this is going to take many years. So it won't 10x in one year.

Jack Altman (1:53)

But we will spend many trillions.

David George (1:54)

But we will spend many trillions, right? So like all of this success, which is the greatest, fastest success we've ever seen in business, which is basically opening iAnthropic together. And then if you add in SpaceX AI now with cursor, they're call it like 120 billion of revenue and they add more revenue per month than all the hyperscalers, except for Amazon.

Jack Altman (2:13)

It's crazy.

David George (2:13)

Now all of that is on the back of just actually a small amount of people paying for stuff. So it's like 30 million coders in the world or the vast majority of the revenue. There's 1.5 billion knowledge workers, but like basically all of this, which is like adding more revenue than the best businesses that have ever been created is on the back of a small group.

Jack Altman (2:32)

That's actually a really interesting point, that it's over a billion users of these things. And we think about it that way, but it's actually, you're saying 30 million are spending basically.

David George (2:39)

30 million. So there's a billion consumer users. And by the way, we should talk about consumer because we're like nowhere in consumer right now, even though there's a billion users. But in the enterprise, basically the vast majority of the revenue is coming from just a small amount of coders. And this is like, in power terms.

Jack Altman (2:51)

Even within that 30 million, I'm sure it's a power law.

David George (2:53)

It's a massive power law. Like we, I'm sure you've talked to your companies and the top million of the 30 are spending just a massive amount. And so if you take an optimistic view of what that means, like the potential is so much greater than what has actually diffused into like everything beyond those million people. And so again, there's one and a half billion knowledge workers and we're just talking about B2B. And so it's just a massive amount that is going to happen in what I think is going to be like the next five years. Right now, demand is totally insatiable, right?