The best companies we've invested in, the founders had a point of view about the world that was different from consensus, and they were right. And the hardest part of venture is that you can have a non-consensus view and be wrong, or you can have a consensus view and be right, but only the non-consensus and right leads to the outlier returns.
I remember, you know, back in 2023 and hot on off the heels of of the CO outbreak and uh China being blamed for it that people were saying, you know, China's never going to come back from this. Everyone's hating on China. The world is anti-China. But fast forward 3, four years, what a world, you know, what a difference those years have made.
The thing that makes a great investor is this idea that they're able to hold conflicting ideas simultaneously. They can be a bull and a bear on the same company. They can be optimistic and pessimistic at the same time. And they're able to weigh those things and come to a conclusion that they can act on.
A few years ago, when they set out to build a better AI chip than the largest companies in the world, almost everyone I called told me it could not be done. They have since done it, taping out a working chip on their first attempt and becoming the first hardware company founded after ChatGPT to do so.
It was basically sort of thought to be career suicide. Like of course we know AI doesn't work. You know, we tried it in the 90s, places like MIT and it was a dead end. You know, and that was the prevailing view. But we just felt the small band of us felt that that actually with the right ideas and using learning systems, reinforcement learning and betting on neural networks that a lot of fast progress could be made.
I think the biggest lesson I've learned is that the market is a discounting mechanism for the future, not the present. And what that means is that when things look the darkest, that's often when the best opportunities exist, and when things look the brightest, that's often when the risk is highest.
I think there's a lot of conformity bias in investing and in life generally. If you look at most investment committees, most investment letters, most investment frameworks, they look the same. And I think that there's a reason for that — it's career protection. If you're wrong and you're wrong the way everyone else is wrong, then you're not singled out.
Google search and other revenue was 6.4 billion. Yeah. Uh up 19% year-over-year. I mean two years ago there was the whole like Google search is dead thesis. Uh that has not been borne out at least this year.
