Mike Mignano

“We've got this infrastructure and now it's time for the applications to be built. It reminds me a lot of the early days of the internet when we built out fiber and we built out broadband. And then we had these new technologies to play with. And the internet came along and an application layer came along and took advantage of that new technology.”

“We're really interested in the Rebel Alliance. This new universe of open weight models and open source harnesses and distributed compute and agents, right? Human aligned agents. And I think when you put things out into the world, you're sending up a bat signal that's telling these early stage founders... this is the VC or this is the person or this is the team I should be talking to.”

“If Granola gets inside of your organization and everyone in the organization starts using it and producing and accumulating all of this amazingly rich and valuable context, that's not something you as an enterprise want to give up. You've built out this incredibly rich history of information that actually helps you work better. I think this era of building AI products is in many ways about being first and about moving really, really fast.”

“Not only do I think that that's not true, I also just think it's not really fun. And what fun can we have as venture capitalists if we don't believe that startups can take down the Goliath?... There are always going to be startups and founders and entrepreneurs that specialize and do the really hard things before anyone else has thought of them that end up prevailing.”

“I really believe in Substack... I think we're moving more and more and more towards a world of self-publishing and people controlling their own destiny in terms of media... no company, maybe other than X, has done a better job of that than Substack.”

“I would say tied for my favorite seed fund has got to be Haystack. I'm just a huge fan of Semil and Divya and the work they do. It's an incredible fund. Obviously, they've produced some generational outcomes.”

“Abridge has been working on this problem for close to 10 years now. And it's given them a massive advantage... you can't just walk in the door and say, hey, we're going to do healthcare now... That ends up being a form of a moat.”

“One interesting idea I heard was this notion of almost a bounty model at the routing layer where the routing layer gets rewarded for choosing the right model, right? So if you choose the most efficient model or the best model for a certain task, that's when they collect a fee. And I thought that was kind of an interesting idea. Haven't necessarily seen it built out yet, but I thought it was a pretty interesting idea.”

“We've seen mentions of things like these on X recently. Meta, Uber, Microsoft, and Wall Street... if you're a startup and you're coding, I want to be using the frontier. I want every advantage I can get against Salesforce.”

“One of the biggest lessons I've learned from Fred is that there is really nothing more important than your relationship with the founders.”

“I was really fortunate at Lightspeed to collaborate closely with Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross before they went over to Meta. And yeah, when Nat would send me a deal... I always knew to pay attention.”

“People are coming into Suno. They're making music for the pure joy and entertainment value of making music... AI has made music creation so much fun that you're making music to make music.”

“I think the Lightspeed Growth Fund is phenomenal. Again, they've done Anthropic. They've done XAI. They've done SpaceX. They've done amazing, amazing investments over the past four years of AI.”

“When I met Bryn, I was blown away. Force of nature, founder. Such clear vision, such deep domain expertise... she took that domain expertise and said, I know how to build a tabletop gaming console now with the same hardware and the same supply chains and just crushed it.”

“One of my former partners, Jeremy Liu at Lightspeed, I made this mistake a few times and he called me up one day and he said, hey, I think you're projecting as a former founder. And he's like, in my experience, that's very, very dangerous and very risky.”