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

is a General Partner at Benchmark. We cover the AWS call almost every investor got wrong and what it means for who wins in AI, how CEOs who cling to old playbooks are destroying equity value, and the chemistry he needs to feel before backing a founder. This episode is brought to you by⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠: Ramp. Ramp⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠'s mission is to help companies manage their spend in a way that reduces expenses and frees up time for teams to work on more valuable projects. Go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ramp.com/invest⁠ to sign up for free and get a $250 welcome bonus. Vanta.⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Vanta is trusted by thousands of businesses, Vanta continuously monitors your security posture and streamlines audits so you can win enterprise deals and build customer trust without the traditional overhead. Visit vanta.com/invest . Rogo. Rogo is an AI-powered platform that automates accounts payable workflows, enabling finance teams to process invoices faster and with greater accuracy. Learn more at Rogo.ai/invest . WorkOS. ⁠WorkOS⁠ is a developer platform that enables SaaS companies to quickly add enterprise features to their applications. Visit WorkOS.com⁠ to transform your application into an enterprise-ready solution in minutes, not months. Ridgeline. ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Ridgeline⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ has built a complete, real-time, modern operating system for investment managers. It handles trading, portfolio management, compliance, customer reporting, and much more through an all-in-one real-time cloud platform. Visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ridgelineapps.com . Timestamps: (00:00:00) Welcome to Invest Like The Best (00:02:20) Learning the World Through Fireworks (00:05:42) AWS Was Going to Eat Everything (00:07:40) The Zero-Sum Thinking Trap (00:09:01) Comparing Cloud and AI Adoption (00:11:03) Becoming Enterprise's AI Sherpa (00:13:05) Building Sandcastles (00:14:55) The Return to Being Technical (00:17:13) The Shifting Competitive Frontier (00:22:10) Why the Old Playbook Fails (00:27:53) Energy as the Binding Constraint (00:29:38) The Cerebras Story (00:37:57) The Virtue of Productive Naivete (00:39:19) What Robotics Still Needs (00:45:58) What Makes a Great Board Partner (00:51:13) Raising A Growth Fund (00:55:39) What the Big Winners Taught Him (00:57:37) Hard Work Versus the Hole-in-One (00:58:38) The Best Reasons to Go Public (01:01:09) Debates Inside Benchmark (01:02:16) What If It All Works (01:03:35) What Geoff Hinton Got Wrong 08.11.2026 Hosted by Patrick O'Shaughnessy

I love asking you and all your partners this every time we hang out, which is, okay, you've got these singular investments. You don't do that many investments each per year. And then the ones that go on to work — so far Sierra and Fireworks certainly are — you get to learn so much about the world through the lens of the company. So I'd actually love to do both of those, maybe starting with Fireworks. What do you know, or what have you learned about the world and how it's reordering itself based on watching the world through the lens of Fireworks that would maybe be surprising or interesting?

One really interesting thing is these models are big. These are 2 trillion, 3 trillion, 4 trillion parameter models. It turns out running those models is damn hard and running them efficiently is super hard. The way to see this, and everybody can see this, which is everybody from AWS to Azure to GCP to the neoclouds to the Fireworks, Basetens, and Togethers of the world — all of them. They all run these stock open-source models that are available in their developer pools and everything else. And that's what it is.