The 18x Midas Lister Betting $3B on AI (and calling most of it fake) | Navin Chaddha, Mayfield

Navin Chaddha is the Managing Partner at Mayfield. He’s made the Forbes Midas List 18 times, and thinks a lot of the AI revenue everyone's chasing right now is fake.

Mayfield is a 56-year-old firm that backs founders at the paper-and-pencil stage. They’re investing $3 billion into AI, but Navin warns the market is overcapitalized by a factor of 10x.

We get into what’s actually going on with the $1B+ funding rounds, the $25 trillion of value AI has to justify, the dangers of FOMO, how he separates vibe revenue from real revenue, backing vertical models instead of horizontal ones, why inference will dwarf training, how a startup actually beats a $100 billion incumbent, the people x-ray behind his founder bets, what cricket taught him about running a company, lessons being the last founder to IPO before the Dot Com Crash, what he learned working with Satya Nadella, and the unfinished business still driving him.

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Timestamps:

0:00 Lumilens: Zero to $3B revenue in 14 months

0:50 Connecting GPU's is AI's next bottleneck

5:07 Mayfield: investing $3B in AI and semiconductors

9:39 Where a $1B round actually gets spent

12:51 The six-layer AI stack, and who needs mega-rounds

15:00 Why AI is overcapitalized by 10x

17:47 FOMO is for sheep

21:13 Vibe revenue vs real revenue

22:45 Backing vertical models

24:22 The best firms have one North Star

27:18 Are semiconductors still cyclical?

29:10 Why inference will dwarf training

31:19 What happens after every infra build-out

36:27 2 billion Gemini users isn't real AI adoption

38:21 What a correction does to AI stocks

40:46 How FOMO pulls VC's into hot categories

44:13 What Navin looks for in founders

50:23 Why "everyone hates this category" can be a buy signal

54:12 The argument against the cloud everyone got wrong

57:20 What white-collar work AI teammates will take

1:01:45 How AI startups beat incumbents

1:06:54 Why startups die of indigestion

1:11:49 Mayfield’s secret formula: people-first

1:19:18 What cricket taught Navin about building companies

1:23:17 Dropping out of Stanford to start VXtreme

1:29:22 Blitzscaling to blitz-failing: the last IPO before the Dot-Com Crash

1:31:25 Joining Mayfield instead of starting a 4th company

1:33:29 Unfinished business (backing a $1T company)

1:35:54 Could you tell Satya would run Microsoft?

1:38:58 Investors he respects, founders he missed

Referenced

Mayfield: https://www.mayfield.com/

Lumilens: https://lumilens.com/

Lumilens Raises $700M: https://www.wsj.com/tech/startup-raises-700-million-to-replace-data-center-wires-with-light-adc74358?mod=e2twd

Built to Last by Jim Collins: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=built+to+last+-+jim+collins&adgrpid=186020621003&hvadid=779535177756&hvdev=c&hvexpln=0&hvlocphy=9218885&hvnetw=g&hvocijid=9037174021105194159--&hvqmt=e&hvrand=9037174021105194159&hvtargid=kwd-362242264527&hydadcr=21907_13365950_10662&mcid=f1dd2c5deb5539b7afc6bcdfee5613c8&tag=googhydr-20&ref=pd_sl_4b3f3t1l23_e

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