Eric Vishria - A Decade of Lessons Investing in Software & Hardware - [Invest Like the Best, EP.486]
Episode publishedPodcast: Invest Like the Best with Patr...Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
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Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of Positive Some. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of PositiveSum. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of PositiveSum may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. To learn more, visit psum.vc.
I love asking you and all your partners this every time we hang out, which is, okay. You've got these singular investments. You don't do that many of investments each per year. And then the ones that go on to work, so far Sierra and Fireworks certainly are, you get to learn so much about the world through the lens of the company. So I'd actually love to do both of those, maybe starting with Fireworks. What do you know or what have you learned about the world and how it's reordering itself based on watching the world through the lens of fireworks that would maybe be surprising or interesting?
One really interesting thing is these models are big. These are 2,000,000,000,000, 3,000,000,000,000, 4,000,000,000,000 parameter models. It turns out running those models is damn hard and running them efficiently is like super hard. The way to see this, and everybody can see this, which is everybody from AWS to Azure to GCP to the Neo Clouds to the Fireworks based hand togethers of the world, like all of them, they all run these stock open source models that are available in their developer pools and everything else and that's what it is. The performance difference for a Fireworks versus a cl
Do you think that's just a moment in time thing? And I'd love to just hear you riff on like Cloud. You watch Cloud very carefully and closely. Know a lot about it. And the adoption curve there versus how people use these things and the nature of those two businesses in comparison. It's tempting to say there will be one or two scale winners that typically have been in the commodity market. Totally. Where cost to serve is everything, and scale drives cost to serve down, and that's the whole story.
I think the AWS example is so good. Okay, so 2006, you have S3 and EC2 Watch, right? Their compute platform and their storage platform is the first two AWS offerings in 2006, and you kind start talking about it in late two thousand and six or whatever. 2006, 2007, I think the 2007 annual letter, Bezos talks a lot about AWS and why it's important, why it's interesting and everything else. And the investor reaction is just not good. I think if you put 30 of the smartest investors at that time in a room and ask them, what's the probability that this AWS business is a good business with durable lo
Anthropic's gonna do everything.
Right. Really? Is that really right? To me that view that it's just like, oh, this one company's gonna eat it all, doesn't hold. And I would tell you that scaling, while cloud scaled very quickly, cloud did not scale anywhere close to as quick as what's
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