Village Global

"You have to leave your fingerprints all over it." Ray Dalio on building an AI that actually thinks like you: "Each person will have what I would call 'my AI.' It's going to reflect you, your values, your particular things. But it's a lot of work — that's why you have to leave your fingerprints all over it and get it trained." "People ask me questions. They ask it, they ask me, and it gives an answer. I look at the answer and curate it to make sure it's the same. That probably takes me two hours a day." "I want to make great decisions. I know what I want in life. So I have to have it being operated like me — just more intelligent and better used. It's that oneness." From a live conversation in NYC between Villege Global Chairman Reid Hoffman and Ray Dalio, moderated by Ben Casnocha.

"AI margins don't look like SaaS margins. They look really thin." Evan Conrad, Founder & CEO of San Francisco Compute Company, on why GPU cloud economics are fundamentally different: "In CPUs, the customers of the cloud are SaaS companies. Build something once, sell it infinite times. Fat margins." "The problem of GPUs is that's not how AI works. You're generating a video, your customer pays you, and you turn around and use compute for that video. Every time. Your margins stay roughly the same." "You as the customer need to be price sensitive. It is a requirement of your business. That means you push down prices for your GPU cloud too." "You care less about fancy managed services and you care more about price — as long as reliability and security are there." Worldbuilders — Village Global Podcast

Congrats John Zhao and the Blossom team on their $20M Series A! We led Blossom's first institutional round because we saw in John the kind of founder who could move the needle on one of the biggest gaps in American healthcare. Blossom is an AI-native psychiatry platform: copilots that help clinicians make better decisions, agents that check in on patients between visits, and automation that makes in-network care actually scalable. It's been special to watch this team build with such focus and urgency around a problem that matters deeply. Excited for what's ahead.

"We never gave the software away for free. No one got any code from us without paying." Bhavin Shah, Founding CEO of Moveworks, on landing the first deal without giving anything away: "A lot of executives say, 'I love startups. I work with startups all the time.' You have to ask them, 'How many dollars have you put against startup software?' If the answer is zero — you know to run." "After an hour-long session, he's like, 'How much is this going to cost me?' Had to muster up a lot of courage, but I'm like, 'How about 50K?'" "We had done some work to find what was meaningful enough that they'd pay attention — versus so insignificant that they'd just miss meetings and not call us back."

"If you think you have certainty, that will screw you up." Village Global Chairman Reid Hoffman on investing through AI and geopolitical disruption: "You might have a theory of the game — which is good to have because then you're testing and monitoring. But if you think you have certainty, that will screw you up." "Does the AI disruption and the geopolitical disruption create new business models? That's what makes the difference. Part of what makes Google is AdWords — not just the amazing technology, but the rocket fuel." "Reed Hastings says, 'If you're wrong in a strategy and it doesn't hurt, you weren't really committed to the strategy.' I think that's correct." "If you aren't genuinely pained by the risk involved in a potential strategic choice, it's probably not a very meaningful risk." From a live conversation in NYC between Reid Hoffman and Ray Dalio, moderated by Village Global GP Ben Casnocha.

New Recall Sessions episode — and a first for the show. Somrat Niyogi sits down with two founders building competing AI-native CRMs. Doug Camplejohn is the Founder & CEO of Coffee. He ran Sales Cloud at Salesforce as EVP and GM — their biggest product. Before that, he led Sales Navigator at LinkedIn. He's had four exits, including Fliptop (acquired by LinkedIn) and Mi5 Networks (acquired by Symantec). Patrick Thompson is the Co-Founder & CEO of Clarify. He co-founded Iteratively, a customer data platform acquired by Amplitude in 2021. Before that, he led design for Jira Software at Atlassian. Both went from running products with massive customer bases to doing founder-led sales all over again. A few highlights from the episode: Doug on why CRM has always been misnamed: "CRM has been a lie from the beginning. It's not about customers, it's not about relationships. It's really about management. It should just be called M. It's been a forced data entry march for reps." Patrick on why you can't shortcut the category: "We didn't realize how much work was gonna be involved in getting to first base on a CRM. The amount of stuff for table stakes is insane." Doug on vibe coding a CRM: "You can vibe code a CRM in a weekend. Congratulations. You just created a contact manager — 1987 version of ACT." Full episode link in comments.

"Who can I trust? Who's going to be here for the long haul?" Bhavin Shah, Founding CEO of Moveworks, on how to actually pick your investors: "I surrounded myself and the company's cap table with deep enterprise infrastructure geeks — people who knew this stuff really well, who got it." "I get a lot of calls from VCs saying, 'Can you do a reference? We're trying to win this deal.' The founder said it all comes down to who gives the best term sheet. I was like — that seems like an auction." "Our Series B — we got another offer from a VC who gave us the highest valuation. But I didn't take his money. I went with the folks I could look at and say, 'It'd be a ton of fun to build a company together.'" "Some people go for the highest bidder. I definitely don't recommend it. What you want is someone who's got the commitment to you as a founder for the long haul."

"You may be the smartest founder, you may have the best tech, but if it's the wrong timing — your grapes don't grow. They don't taste good." Bhavin Shah, Founding CEO of Moveworks, on how he validated the idea before building: "Any idea we had, we would take to friends who were capital allocators and say, 'What do you think? Are there companies already doing this? Is this the right vintage?'" "ServiceNow had gone public, quarter over quarter growth. I was like, 'This space is interesting. No one talks about it.' But they didn't focus on the AI aspects." "It wasn't a made-for-Hollywood story where you can't find a cab in Paris so you start Uber. It was systematic conversations with five or ten CIOs. 'What are you doing to solve your tickets?' All very manual responses." "And then we thought — what if we automated these? What if we did it end to end?"

Parth Patil on why voice is the highest bandwidth interface to AI: "I can speak at 140 words per minute. I could basically speak an essay in two minutes. The transcript is garbled, stream of consciousness — but then an LLM's on the other side and it distills it down into the actual plan." "Typing three pages? I'll never do that. What you want is that raw brainstorm capability at the speed that you can think." "Voice allows us to get this high bandwidth output from our mind into the model." "You're not writing a document. You're talking to something that's capable of that level of depth and nuance." Parth is the AI Specialist for the Office of Reid Hoffman. Full conversation with Sam Kirschner on the Village Global Podcast.