Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy · Colossus | Investing & Business Podcasts

David George - Building a16z Growth, Investing Across the AI Stack, and Why Markets Misprice Growth

·1 hr 7 min·5 clips

David George argues ChatGPT's chatbot is too limiting—AI will become proactive with memory and multimodal capabilities.

Patrick O'Shaughnessy's Invest Like the Best features David George, who runs the growth investing practice at a16z and whose portfolio reads like a map of the defining companies of the current technology era: Databricks, Figma, Stripe, SpaceX, Anduril, OpenAI at the frontier, and Cursor, Harvey, and Abridge among the newer AI generation. George structures his AI outlook around two questions: what do consumers do with AI, and what do enterprises do? On the consumer side, he argues that ChatGPT has grown faster than any product in the history of technology, reaching Google's scale approximately four times faster, but that a chatbot is too limiting a form factor for the long term, and the shift from reactive to proactive AI is the real prize. He draws a historical analogy to Facebook and Google monetization, noting that analysts once assumed $20 per user was the ceiling for consumer internet, and a decade later both companies were at $200 per user in the developed world. On the enterprise side, George argues AI will be used to replace and augment human labor at scale, with the entry-level white-collar workforce being the most immediate target. He explains his team's strategy of investing across the full AI stack: model layer, infrastructure and tools, and applications, and why he sees applications as the layer that will capture the most value over time. George describes his decision-making process without a traditional investment committee, his method for winning competitive deals by building founder relationships years in advance, and why he recruits for what he calls a Yankees-level culture. He explains why markets chronically misprice consistent growth: investors anchor on a company's current revenue multiple rather than asking what the compounded value of 30% or 40% growth over a decade actually produces. His framework for pull businesses versus push businesses explains why he finds companies like Stripe or Figma structurally superior to those that require constant sales effort to retain customers. Most great technology markets end up winner-take-all, George argues, and the job of a growth investor is to identify which company in a given category has crossed the threshold where their lead becomes self-reinforcing. He is drawn to what he calls the technical terminator founder: someone who builds an exceptional technical product and simply will not stop until they have won. The conversation is detailed and model-driven without being abstract, grounding every framework in a specific investment or founder story from George's portfolio. Essential for anyone investing in or building at the growth stage in AI; a useful reference for the investment theses that are currently driving the largest checks in venture.

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