I missed out on $100M+ by passing on the seed rounds of Suno and Granola.
Mike @mignano did both. He is the single best example in the last 5 years of an operator successfully turning into a GP at a large fund. It is so hard to do. He crushed it.
He has been a friend for 10 years and we shoot the shit today on the biggest questions of the day.
I summarized my notes from the chat below.
1. Do You Have to Produce Content to Do Seed Well?
To excel at seed, you need to put your ideas into the market so founders know exactly what you are looking for. Publishing your theses acts as a bat signal for early-stage founders before they even launch a product. Success comes down to building a great network, sharing your point of view, and betting on people.
2. Single Biggest Lesson About Venture
The biggest lesson in venture is to avoid projecting your own operator ideas onto a founder. It is their company, not yours. Making investment decisions based on your personal roadmap for them leads to bad bets. Venture success requires trusting the team’s independent judgment and execution plan.
3. What Percent of Enterprise Workflows Actually Require Frontier Models Versus Open Source?
Roughly 80% of non-coding enterprise tasks can run well on non-frontier models. Standard workflows like summarization and document generation are well suited to open source, which is improving quickly. This lets enterprises optimize token budgets without sacrificing meaningful performance.
4. Why We Believe Suno Has Unlimited Upside
Suno has unlimited upside because it unlocks a new consumer behavior: creative entertainment. Users generate music simply for the joy of creation, with no need for distribution or monetization. Like YouTube or TikTok, platforms that democratize a creative medium can create immense, generational value.
5. Obliterate, Don’t Automate
Avoid backing software that merely automates existing workflows to make old businesses slightly faster. The true generational opportunities come from completely reinventing industries, like putting an AI doctor in everyone’s pocket, rather than selling incremental efficiency to a corporate middleman.
6. The Shift From Infrastructure to Applications
As the capital-intensive AI infrastructure buildout matures, massive value creation is shifting to the application layer. Similar to the internet after the broadband boom, we are entering an explosion of specialized software. Winning requires an opinionated thesis, early conviction, and exceptional speed.
7. Why Startups Must Maximize Token Spend
While incumbents restrict budgets, startup CEOs should maximize token spend. Frontier models give lean teams a critical advantage over slower giants. Handing low-level tasks to agents preserves small, hyper-efficient engineering teams and keeps them moving at winning speed.
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