Podcast

Invest Like the Best

Patrick O'Shaughnessy explores business, investing, and company building with founders, investors, and operators.

Invest Like the BestAug 11, 2026

Eric Vishria - A Decade of Lessons Investing in Software & Hardware - [Invest Like the Best, EP.486]

Eric Vishria argues that AI is following a cloud-like path toward oligopoly, but with even faster enterprise adoption and new bottlenecks in energy, compute, and product design. He also shares hard-won lessons from Cerebras, robotics, and AI-native go-to-market, emphasizing first-principles thinking and founder chemistry.

Invest Like the BestAug 4, 2026

Gavin Baker - AI Market Jitters - [Invest Like the Best, EP.485]

Gavin Baker argues the July selloff in AI stocks disconnected public-market prices from improving fundamentals, with GPU availability, rental pricing, token demand, and hyperscaler operating cash flow all moving higher. He says the biggest risk is regulation, while long-term compute demand could still be enormous if AI monetization, open-source dynamics, and new infrastructure financing models keep compounding.

Invest Like the BestJul 28, 2026

Sam Altman - How to Make an Abundant Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.484]

Sam Altman argues OpenAI is refocusing around abundant, cost-effective intelligence, backed by massive compute, custom chips, and industrial-scale data centers. He also discusses robotics, ChatGPT’s origin, frontier model competition, AI security, and why he thinks the next few years will bring major product and capability shifts.

Invest Like the BestJul 21, 2026Matthew Smith

Matthew Smith — Natural Gas: The Next Bottleneck - [Invest Like the Best, EP.483]

Matthew Smith argues the U.S. is heading into a natural gas supply crunch by 2028-2030 as AI data centers and LNG exports compete for a constrained system. He says the bottleneck is deliverability and infrastructure, not geology, and sees nuclear and residential solar as key long-term responses.

Invest Like the BestJul 14, 2026John Kim

John Kim - How to Raise a Few Billion Dollars - [Invest Like the Best, EP.482]

John Kim argues that fundraising is fundamentally about trust, not just persuasion or logic. He lays out a practical playbook for raising capital: start with high-trust backers, build consensus, differentiate clearly, and keep the story simple enough to repeat.

Invest Like the BestJul 7, 2026Jeremy Giffon

Jeremy Giffon - The Billion Dollar PDF - [Invest Like the Best, EP.481]

Jeremy Giffon argues that in private markets, narrative is often the real bottleneck: capital follows the best story, not just the best business. He also maps a broader shift in media, finance, and culture toward timeline-native institutions, algorithmic attention, and a new elite made of posters rather than billionaires.

Invest Like the BestJun 30, 2026Gavin Uberti, Rob Wachen

Etched - Building AI Hardware to Make Inference Faster and Cheaper - [Invest Like the Best, EP.480]

Etched is building a full inference stack, not just a chip, with a custom architecture optimized separately for prefill and decode. The founders argue that low-voltage operation, cluster-scale memory, and extreme vertical integration will make inference dramatically faster, cheaper, and eventually one of the largest markets in the world.

Invest Like the BestJun 23, 2026Vlad Barbalat

Vlad Barbalat - Investing $120 Billion in Permanent Capital - [Invest Like the Best, EP.479]

Vlad Barbalat explains how Liberty Mutual Investments manages roughly $120 billion of permanent capital across insurance reserves and surplus, using a long-term, liquidity-aware framework rather than market forecasting. He also discusses branded capital, AI, geopolitics, and how his immigrant background shaped his views on risk, entrepreneurship, and continuous improvement.

Invest Like the BestJun 16, 2026

Kareem Amin - The Unusual Approach to Company Building - [Invest Like the Best, EP.478]

Kareem Amin explains how Clay grew by targeting creative go-to-market users with an unusually powerful, open-ended product and usage-based pricing. The conversation then broadens into his philosophy on courage, justice, self-respect, vision, meditation, and why not every company should be forced to scale forever.

Invest Like the BestJun 9, 2026

Alex Sacerdote - How to Invest Through Technology Cycles - [Invest Like the Best, EP.477]

Alex Sacerdote argues that AI is creating a new technology stack, with Anthropic emerging as his highest-conviction private investment because leading models, enterprise distribution, and coding use cases are starting to compound. He also lays out Whale Rock’s broader S-curve framework for investing in tech, then applies it to AI infrastructure, software disruption, and how his firm uses AI in research.