What are they going to spend those $2B on?
Signing bonuses for 10 engineers.
Mira Murati’s AI startup Thinking Machines valued at $12B in early-stage funding
201–210 of 260 posts
Re: Mira Murati’s AI startup Thinking Machines valued at $12B in early-stage funding
#202On Shark Tank if you walk in and say “I have no revenue, no viable business model, and an idea that’s easily copied in a space that’s rapidly marching towards commoditization. I’m asking for $5 billion for 25% of my company.” You’d be laughed off the set. In the increasingly frothy world of GenAI that’s a Wednesday and you get the cheque. If it looks like a bubble and smells like a bubble… The tech is cool, but inves…
If it's actually that easy, why don't you do it? Are you seriously just leaving $5 billion on the table? I'll tell you why you won't. Because you wouldn't get it. Because it's not that easy. Mira Murati is not some rando off the street. Ilya Sutskever is not some rando. Zuckerberg is not paying Millions to randos of the street to come work for meta.
Tell me one unique skill, from any of those individuals you quoted, that is worth even 0,01% of $5 billion, for a non existent company with a non existent product.
Re: Mira Murati’s AI startup Thinking Machines valued at $12B in early-stage funding
#203Could somebody explain why there is so much negativity towards Thinking Machines in this thread? I realize that they haven't publicly announced a product yet but presumably the VCs have some idea of what Thinking Machines is building, and they have some pretty significant OpenAI talent on board, including Murati herself. Some amount of skepticism is warranted, of course, but a lot of these comments read as closer to…
True. People here can be like this. I have not forgotten even the greatest juice maker of all times, Juicero was similarly disparaged with all this negativity.
So was Dropbox famously
Re: Mira Murati’s AI startup Thinking Machines valued at $12B in early-stage funding
#204On Shark Tank if you walk in and say “I have no revenue, no viable business model, and an idea that’s easily copied in a space that’s rapidly marching towards commoditization. I’m asking for $5 billion for 25% of my company.” You’d be laughed off the set. In the increasingly frothy world of GenAI that’s a Wednesday and you get the cheque. If it looks like a bubble and smells like a bubble… The tech is cool, but inves…
You mean, "I have no revenue and no business model but I was the CTO of one of the most important technical companies of this generation, we put out one of the fastest growing SaaS products of all time in a completely new technical category."- not sure how much more signal you would need than that. I don't really get why anyone would be confused about why they are throwing money at her. It's an extremely large amount…
Analysis like this, was what took Yahoo to hire Marissa Mayer :-))
Re: Mira Murati’s AI startup Thinking Machines valued at $12B in early-stage funding
#205On Shark Tank if you walk in and say “I have no revenue, no viable business model, and an idea that’s easily copied in a space that’s rapidly marching towards commoditization. I’m asking for $5 billion for 25% of my company.” You’d be laughed off the set. In the increasingly frothy world of GenAI that’s a Wednesday and you get the cheque. If it looks like a bubble and smells like a bubble… The tech is cool, but inves…
Whenever I hear someone say this I file them under 'techie with no business sense or appreciation of user value'
Re: Mira Murati’s AI startup Thinking Machines valued at $12B in early-stage funding
#206Could somebody explain why there is so much negativity towards Thinking Machines in this thread? I realize that they haven't publicly announced a product yet but presumably the VCs have some idea of what Thinking Machines is building, and they have some pretty significant OpenAI talent on board, including Murati herself. Some amount of skepticism is warranted, of course, but a lot of these comments read as closer to…
> but presumably the VCs have some idea of what Thinking Machines is building you imply that VCs are rational because bet their own money, which in current complicated world probably is not true. VC funds get money from complicated funnel likely including my/your retirement account and country public debt, VC managers likely receive bonuses for closed deals and not long term gains which may materialize in 10 years. S…
So your position is that a VC will invest $2B in a startup on vibes alone without having any idea what they're building, because it is not literally their money? That seems like a significantly stronger and less plausible claim than mine, which his merely that a prospective $2B investor has access to more information about the company's plans than we do and that their investment is at least some indication that there is a real product in the pipeline.
Re: Mira Murati’s AI startup Thinking Machines valued at $12B in early-stage funding
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well a lot of people on this forum are founders or early employees in startups. Every dollar vcs set on fire chasing some obviously stupid idea, waste on crypto memecoins, etc is a dollar that is not helping some legitimate startup get funded.
Yes, but when you put it as "why are you investing in these bad ideas? Invest in mine, it's obviously much better", it sounds a lot more self-interested (and far more likely to be wrong).
You asked how it hurts people. That is how it hurts people.
Re: Mira Murati’s AI startup Thinking Machines valued at $12B in early-stage funding
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
> but presumably the VCs have some idea of what Thinking Machines is building you imply that VCs are rational because bet their own money, which in current complicated world probably is not true. VC funds get money from complicated funnel likely including my/your retirement account and country public debt, VC managers likely receive bonuses for closed deals and not long term gains which may materialize in 10 years. S…
So your position is that a VC will invest $2B in a startup on vibes alone without having any idea what they're building, because it is not literally their money? That seems like a significantly stronger and less plausible claim than mine, which his merely that a prospective $2B investor has access to more information about the company's plans than we do and that their investment is at least some indication that there…
> that a prospective $2B investor has access to more information about the company's plans than we do and that their investment is at least some indication that there is a real product in the pipeline.
there is a funnel of investors: say retirement account holders put money into some retirement fund, fund manager put money into some "innovation fund", "innovation fund" put money in VC fund. All middlemen get % cut, VC likely watch slides about some product roadmap, but they more interested in closing the deal, get % cut and move on.
Re: Mira Murati’s AI startup Thinking Machines valued at $12B in early-stage funding
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
By that logic it almost sounds as if Meg Whitman was highly qualified to run HP…
She was qualified. Are you saying that her previous experience shouldn't have counted as a positive attribute for being hired?
It's true that eBay did well during her tenure. And it's also true that she was a better grownup than the people running it before. But she also said that a monkey could drive the train. Would someone else have done better? Could a monkey have delivered the same results? We'll never know, but the experience at HP doesn't validate her as a business genius.
Re: Mira Murati’s AI startup Thinking Machines valued at $12B in early-stage funding
#210Andreessen Horowitz is not gambling with their own money: https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/andreessen-horowitz... Moreover, if some banks will fail in the aftermath, they'll be bailed out at the expense of you know whom.
How do you think VC firms work? There is no "own money". Their entire business is getting rich people, institutional investors, governments, pension funds, endowments etc. to give them money and investing that money in startups, keeping a cut for themselves.
None? I think almost all VC partners are vested in their funds. They have skin in the game. Yes, they do profit from managing the money of others, but I think it's rare for them not to be putting their own money on the line.