FULL INTERVIEW: Anjney Midha on Fixing AI’s Biggest Bottleneck

First time with his new fund, AMPBC. He's here in the waiting room. He's here with us in the TV panel.

How you doing?

Man, that's mine's generational run.

Yes. Generational run.

Oh, I'm just getting started, guys. No, generational run is used for people who are retiring.

Oh yeah. That's true.

That's true. I think it's appropriate to— I think it's important to recognize when you're on a generational run that you realize you have to actually level up even further if you want to stay on the same trajectory.

Yeah, yeah.

Because if you just get complacent, then—

Yeah, it's important to count the chickens before they hatch. That's what you're saying?

No, no, no, the opposite.

Anyway, it's great to have you back on the show. Thank you for having me. It's been fun to— but yeah, catch us up to speed on—

Yeah, when did the fund launch? What's the strategy? And yeah, walk us through the current thesis for how you want to actually develop the firm.

No, I think we should talk about something more interesting. Let's talk about eBay. Let's talk about eBay.

Okay, yeah, what you got?

Okay, so, so here's what I'm— and I want you guys to kind of spar with me, right? I looked at the— you know, Ryan did the CNBC interview and everybody's like pinging me and saying, oh my God, this makes no sense, blah blah. And, and so here's my, my take on it, okay, which is that like if you read the GameStop deck like carefully for eBay most of what's been said about the deal in the last 48 is basically totally wrong. I, I read— I was just before jumping on, I was reading Michael Burry's piece on it, which you guys should check out. Yeah. Um, and he's right that the leverage is pretty tight, but I think he's answering the wrong question. And so is Ryan on CNBC, where he's, you know, they keep asking him like, where's the cash? How are you going to fund it? Yeah, 50% cash, 50% stock. I, I don't think the question The question isn't can GameStop afford eBay? The question is whether the underlying business actually works. And I think it does, but not for the reason I was expecting Ryan to pitch. Okay. So if you pull up eBay's 10-K from February.

Yeah.

Fiscal '25. And I did not understand this until I read it. eBay spent $2.4 billion on marketing.

Mm-hmm.

How many new users did they get for that? I mean, you guys are marketers, you understand. 1 million.

Whoa, that's crazy.

The user base went from 134 million users to 135 million users after spending $2.4 billion on marketing.

So, and that's basically, they're basically, you, you would have to imagine they're just having to reacquire all their old users, people that have been on the platform before, or maybe even lost their account and they're, they're, they're coming back.

I don't know, but it's like, that's $2,400 of marketing per new user on a site that every American already knows exists. Sure.

Yeah.

So where's all that money going? Right? So I don't think Cohen is, I don't think he's buying eBay. Like just watching Ryan, I don't think he's buying eBay because he thinks he's smarter than eBay's product team. I think he's buying eBay because he can see $2 billion of fat that Wall Street has been pricing as fixed costs. And so he goes, okay, let me cut that. And the interest on the debt just pays for itself. Mm-hmm.

Interesting.

Right.

But he doesn't necessarily want to say that because he could kind of give that idea to the bank.

But he still has to put the money together. Right. But is your thesis that like the deal is coming together? He has investors that he's talking to, but it's too early to say, oh yeah, I actually do have a fund that's going to give me another 5 over here. I got 7 over here and it will math out, but just give me a week. Or is there something else going on?

It depends on which investor he's talking to. But if he was pitching me, here's what I would underwrite, right? I'd say, okay, that's the floor. The floor is Ryan's going to cut $2 billion from this thing. Yeah. Put that into Treasuries and we're going to make more money than it's currently yielding. Okay. So that's the floor. Now, the ceiling, because I'm a technology investor. Yeah.

The opportunity. Bull case.

Bull case. So Amazon's used and collectibles business has been flat for 6 years. They tried Renewed, they tried Collectibles, they tried Trade-In. None of it scaled. You cannot put a 1962 Mickey Mantle card through the same warehouse as a phone charger. That category, that category, right, Collectibles, is structurally defensible against Amazon. Okay, Amazon is for phone chargers, Mickey Mantle for eBay, right? Yeah, eBay has the marketplace. GameStop has— GameStop has like 1,600 stores that could physically verify Sure.

The good.

Sure. That's a real moat. Yeah, yeah. And it's worth more in the AI era than the human era. Right? Why? Because when AI agents— I collect— I love collect like rare pens. Okay. This is a Montblanc. Sure. As I get older, I love it.

I like that.

I'm a pen guy. Yeah. And I love old vintage glasses. I don't know if you can see my Jacques-Marie Mag box in the back, but—

Oh, cool.

Nice.

But when I'm out of time, what do I do? I have Claude go look for rare pens and glasses for me online. The biggest problem with used rare asset purchases is fraud. Yeah. So I often will tell— so Claude will be like, Andre, I found this amazing pen, this Montblanc pen. And I say, okay, can you triple check that it's, it's real? It's not fake. Yeah. And that's where things go off rail because there's no way for him to verify that without messaging the agent and so on. Yeah. But if you have 1,600 stores where people who have Montblanc pens can go and physically verify those assets at GameStop. Sure. Now Claude just says, yeah, I checked, it has the physical verification stamp from somebody.

Brought it in.

Exactly. So you can't— you need physical verification built into the system for agentic commerce. And look, the reason I know this is real is because a few years ago, I think you guys, we talked about this last time, but I sold my last startup to a company called Discord in 2020, peak pandemic. So I come on as the head of platform. My, my, my job is supposed to be, you know, you know, build SDKs, APIs, and so on for gaming. We helped this company called Midjourney get going, AI, you know, generate. But 12 months later, suddenly I find myself running without realizing an e-commerce business because it was the summer of NFTs. And the Bored Apes are blowing up. And suddenly we have more than $10 billion of GMV flowing through Discord by self-made channels.

Yeah.

Jason and Stan are like, hey, brother, your job is to capture a piece of that pie. Yeah. OK, homework accepted. So we start doing a deep dive. And we realize ultimately what these users need and pay for— so you have liquidity, right? Ultimately, that's what a marketplace like eBay and Discord provide in sort of community commerce is liquidity. But you cannot provide liquidity if you don't have physical verification. And for Discord, that was just out of scope. Used sneakers.

Well, and it worked. You're saying it worked for NFTs because you had the on-chain—

Yeah, you don't need any physical. There's nothing physical to verify.

—that you owned it, and you can transact. Yep.

Exactly. And so, we are bootstrapping the e-commerce platform at Discord with NFTs. But of course, everyone on the board is like, well, how long are NFTs going to last? It's a fad. So, Ansh, what else is coming? And we go look at rare sneakers or keyboards, like pens, all this stuff that nerds like me love. But for those, you need physical verification. And once we realized physical verification was out of scope, we nixed the project.

Yeah, you're not going to go have the 1,400 like retail locations where people can drop things off. Yeah, that's quite interesting.

So, that's when I realized, okay, eBay is this undervalued asset. And I hope that Ryan has figured it out as well. Because if he hasn't, he's giving me ideas.

Yeah, yeah. Have you tried to walk through what— given that you're probably more AGI-pilled than than I would say 90% of VCs. Have you tried to play out what is it, how would you build eBay from the ground up today with an agent-first approach? Is that even the right question to ask?

Look, I have not, guys, 'cause right now I'm a computer infrastructure guy, right? We started AMP as this public benefit corporation whose job is to be an independent system operator of the compute grid. We think about, We think we're roughly in like 1885 industrial England where the steam engine's been invented. Everybody knows that you can make cool new products like, you know, steel and notebooks and pens and cars. And there's this very scarce input called coal that everybody is hoarding. In this case, it's compute. And when I— if you fly over industrial era England, you'll see all these factories getting set up and everyone's running a generator in their backyard at half capacity. I'm going, this makes no sense. If I'm looking at all my portfolio companies, you know, these clusters are running at like half utilization. In fact, Elon's like got 500,000 GV300s in Memphis running at 11% MFU and less than 60% node allocation. I mean, this is $12 billion of compute being wasted. So I set up Amp as an AI infrastructure organization where we buy a bunch of compute, we do long-term leases, we pull all those clusters on the grid, we coordinate capacity, drive up utilization, And by the end of this year, I think we'll have several billion dollars of compute coming online. But that's what I've been focused on night and day since I left Andreessen Horowitz in January. And so no, I have not had time to look at how to redo eBay. But if Brian called, I'd probably help him out. But right now, it's wartime on compute, guys. It's wartime.

So yeah, I want to talk about AMP, but I also want to talk about— just last question on the combination of eBay and GameStop. I get the thesis, the bull case. GameStop is $10 billion. EBay is like $48 billion right now. You put them together, maybe you get to $100 billion. I'm in for the bull case. The question is like, what's going on with like the plan? Because it feels like Ryan just doesn't have the capital, but then he announced it. Like, what do you think is happening behind the scenes? Because there's one thing where you could throw it out as like, oh, like these two companies should work together. Here's a bull case. Let me know if you want to be on the team that does this. And then there's the other one, which is like, make the offer, before the capital's lined up, but I just haven't been through enough of these stories to actually understand like why it's playing out this particular way.

To be honest, I think he's sitting there with, I think he has $9 billion of cash. He's in a $10 billion company. I think when he announced this, I think he expected the stock to pop like crazy and he'd be going on CNBC being like, this merger could make sense. Sure. And I think that—

We'll issue another $20 billion of equity and then we'll merge or something.

And I think if you looked at, I think if you looked at like how, kind of frothy some things in the market could be. You could have imagined that playing out. I mean, the Allbirds thing was— I'm sure you appreciated that from a meme standpoint.

Direct competitor to you, by the way. Yeah, direct competitor.

You got to be careful. AMP versus Allbirds will be the new horse race.

Oh, no.

Anyways, that was my read because GameStop is basically valued at like— the brand and all the retail locations and everything is valued at like $1 billion, right? He's getting no credit for all the cash.

Yeah. So to be clear, AMP is not a cloud business. We are— so I started AMP as a holdings business. Yeah. And I've got an infrastructure business and a capital business. And the infrastructure business secures compute and passes it on at cost to our portfolio companies. We have more than $1.3 billion in commitments for our first fund. I've been at it 8 weeks. And so we do do venture capital investments. We put $300 million into Anthropic. Yeah. Oh, okay, cool. We need to raise another roughly, you know, $6.5 billion this year. And a lot more is getting committed by the day. Yeah, but we give away the compute at cost to the independent ecosystem because my belief is that, you know, that they're like sort of the optimal unit of research today is a like a focused, talented team outside of the hyperscalers, you know, Anthropic and Coding, which was— I was the first one of the first. I'm certainly— I think I'm the first angel investor, if not the first investor in the round.

They're saying you're the Jason Calacanis of Anthropic.

Unfortunately, J-Cal, I could never top J-Cal, but like J-Cal's intern or something. Fine, I'll take the win. But I think more importantly, like, I think compute is the strategic asset which I've been yelling about for 4 years, and it's a primary bottleneck on these teams. And if you're not at the hyperscalers, you just can't get access. So we buy up that compute, we give it at cost to the portfolio teams, and then we reinvest the profits of carry and fees to buy more compute and so on and so forth. And so I'll take as much capacity as I can get from Allbirds. I love it when new people go into the business because that gives us more supply. So if you're the Allbirds CEO listening to this, please send us your compute. We'll take it all. That makes a lot of sense.

What are you excited to invest in? You're investing in teams that need a lot of compute. You're trying to find things that aren't going to get steamrolled by Anthropic, who's another big portfolio company. There's—

There's applications and stuff. There's real opportunities everywhere. There's a lot of other different things that need compute, but what do you think's—

Because I feel like a lot of VCs are— would never say this out loud, but a lot of, I get the sense from a lot of VCs that they're kind of like paralyzed where they're like, they really don't, they don't have a clear sort of understanding of where things will be in 5 years and they feel like they need to be active. And so it's a mix of like doing new Neo Labs, doing some Neo Neo Labs, maybe doing some application layer stuff and just kind of praying. But I would hope that you have a, given your background and how you're approaching this, you have like a stronger thesis on where the opportunities to invest at the early stages.

Look, in some sense, it's back to the future. I started my career at Kleiner Perkins when I was 19. My first board seat was as an observer with John Doerr when I was 20. I wasn't old enough to drive, technically, or drink, sorry. I didn't have a driver's license. I wasn't old enough to drink. And I got the chance to apprentice with like the greats, like, you know, Brook Byers. And look, that's the vintage of venture capitalists I grew up admiring. Like Arthur Rock. And that's my, you know, our thesis at Amp on the venture capital side. Our business is called the Amp Foundry, where we help create, co-design, you know, new labs one at a time. My current one is called Periodic Labs, and we just decided to lead this series. I led the seed round last year with Liam, who was the co-creator of ChatGPT, and Doge, who was there, who led some of the quantum physics teams at DeepMind. And we're trying to find new high-temperature superconductors there with physical— we have a 30,000-square-foot facility in Menlo Park. I spend 3 days a week there. We do a standup every morning from 8 AM to 8:30 AM, and then we make our priorities and then go execute. And, you know, basically we have AIs predict new materials. We then have robots synthesize the new materials. We then have an X-ray diffraction machine that tests whether the material has the properties that robots— the AI said. And then we pipe that verification loop back into the training run, like, as many times as we need for the agents to continue predicting new superconductors. And in the last 90 days, we've had more material verifications than I think in the last decade in the field. And so I'm a huge believer in unblocking frontier progress in domains where the verification sort of loop is clearly just like, we know it's going to work, but execution is the bottleneck. And then I like having these, the best teams, the best scientists, the best engineers, the capital, the compute, and the commercial help they need. Now, I think that the beauty about having Anthropic around is that it's made this idea of the bitter lesson and scaling legible to the capital markets. So now instead of me having to call up 22 friends and getting 21 nos, which was the case with the seed round of Anthropic, Now I make 2 calls instead, we get like, you know, like we get 3 times oversubscribed. So capital is no longer the bottleneck, which is phenomenal. You know, again, we've been at it 8 weeks, have more than $1 billion committed for my first fund. I'm a solo key man GP on the fund. And there's lots of institutions, pension funds, sovereign funds who are like, how much more can you put to work, especially in publics, privates, buyouts? It's a bonanza for people who want to be true partners, who want to be the Arthur Rock of this era. I think if you believe in the bitter lesson, it's not new. It's been around for ages. You and I The three of us talked about this like over a year ago at the last recent Horowitz AGM. Yeah, still bitter. I'm more Zen than I am bitter.

How are you thinking about building out the team on both sides?

Trust is the moat. So there's 5 of us on the team. My full-time engineering co-founder is Sebastian Lobo. We were roommates 14 years ago at Stanford, and then he went on to build a grid and turned into a great—

Overnight success. There we go.

What was that one? Overnight success.

Overnight success. Thank you.

12-year overnight success in California. Exactly. So Seb and Mihai built the Borg/Xborg GQM scheduler, which kept the Google internal capacity pool at more than 95% utilization. There, if it was at 94% utilization, that was considered a major outage globally. Wow. Andrew Erskine is my partner on the operations side. He was a partner at Oric, which was the outside counsel for Anthropic. And he was my GC at Ubiquiti6, which was the company I sold to Discord. And then Rosie, who was my chief of staff, ran comms for me from Edelman when I was at Andreessen Horowitz, you know, when I was a VP there.

And so you got the band back together.

It's, it's, it's the Anj reunion, basically. And, you know, we put— we called AMP, uh, not after my initials. Sometimes people think that. It's not Anj Mittal Partners, anything like that. It's about energy. It's about, you know, ampere is the unit of energy. And we want to amp things up because we think we're entering like the great renaissance in technology. And, you know, if you can have a small team that trusts each other across context, you know, compute, capital, sports teams, buyouts, leverage technology, all of this stuff is These are all buckets and categories that we've all put— traditional capital allocators have put around these asset classes that shouldn't exist. And I think if you have the flexibility to go back to first principles with a small team that you trust, you can execute with orders of magnitude less size of a team as a firm in this new era with the right tools. I don't know if that makes sense. No, totally.

You mentioned taking positions in public companies. The fund structure is a PBC. Are you also an RIA? How are you thinking about navigating both of those asset classes since that's a little bit— We are in process.

OK. Yes, we are in process of becoming an RIA because we founded the firm barely 90 days ago. But I'm used to that cadence because Andreessen Horowitz was an RIA. I was a general partner in the AI infrastructure fund for several years, as you guys know. And we were an RIA. I'm used to the compliance, the regulatory sort of guardrails we got to follow. And I think LPs trust us to have that cadence from day one. And so we're going to make sure that we— Zach, if you remember, 12 years ago, Zach went on TV to say, move fast and break things. And then you have to update the thing to be like, move fast with stable infrastructure. And I think we move fast with stable infrastructure from day one, essentially, because we are an AI infrastructure team. Yeah.

Talk about the PBC. Like, if I'm playing back, like, what year were you referencing? 1850 or something like that? 1885. 1885. So if I go back to 1885 and I think about the financiers that created the industrial build-out, they were not— public benefit corporations. They were personal benefit. Yeah. And I mean, there was a lot of good that was created. We got railroads and trains and, you know, machinery and cars and all sorts of things out of the Industrial Revolution. There were also things that were rough and there was unionization and battles and back and forth. Like, what is the PBC in service of solving? What? Why PBC?

Yeah, great question. So there's the— I'll tell you the substantive answer and then the vibes answer, right? Sure. So From a substantive perspective, we do two things, right? We have a venture capital business and we have an infrastructure business. Both things have this very unique property called positive externalities. When implemented correctly, venture capital can unlock massive positive externalities for the ecosystem and for the world because you end up funding innovation when done correctly. And then infrastructure, the same, right? When you have compute that's used by small, focused, down-dense teams like Anthropic that's able to produce 10 times more SOTA capabilities than like DeepMind, which is, you know, 60,000 or 160,000 people. Then you're generating positive externalities for the world by being much more efficient per unit of input with the output they create. And so I was like, huh, well, what happens when as an economist you look at positive externalities? Usually you have market failure, you have underconsumption of that good. Well, how do you correct the market failure? Usually you get the government to intervene. But if you don't have the government intervening in time, what do you do? You become a private sector participant. And then if you look at the arc of 1885, you know, private sector businesses that ended up correcting market failure by by producing public benefits, they ended up getting regulated as utilities. That's what AMP is. AMP is a self-regulated utility that provides venture capital and infrastructure to the world's leading scientific teams. The next Dario, the next, you know, Guillaume at Mistral who created Llama, the next Robin who created Stable Diffusion. These are my generation's smartest minds. I'm not smart enough to be, you know, them, but I can be their intern. And instead of waiting for the rest of the space to come up with standards and institutions to enforce this, we're like, dude, let's just do it ourselves and show the world you can have fun while doing it with a small team. You don't need to be, you know, some— something called a, um, you know, with like these words like RIA, multi-stage asset class firm, doesn't matter. Just let's skip ahead to the part, the good part, and, and like, you know, use all the proceeds that we get from management fees and carry to keep the space like innovating at the pace that we were promised 12, 13 years ago, and instead we got tweets and not flying cars. You know, when I was at Stanford, I got the chance as an undergrad, I had the chance to take Peter Thiel's class, Zero to One. And he was, you know, his whole moniker was we wanted flying cars and we got, you know, 140 characters, 240 characters. Thank you. And now I'm back at Stanford teaching CS153, which is the largest class on campus. It's called AI Coachella. We've got thousands of people following along. It's called Frontier Systems because it's all possible now. We're literally— in our lifetime, we're going to have flying cars. We're going to have room temperature superconductors. We are going to solve cancer. We just want to do it in a way that's stable, predictable. We want to skip all the boom and bust cycles. And the way to do that is to lead by example and say, hey guys, the public benefit is to provide goods and services that are utilities and make sure that we don't— like, let's be the adults in the room and not do the stuff where we tried to be robber barons and monopolists and got greedy along the way. And so, that's the substantive answer. The vibes answer is, look, I don't want to get sued by shareholders for whom it's not legible why I'm giving away billions of dollars of compute at cost to portfolio companies, right? Because that's what we're doing. And that shareholder— you could argue that shareholder value that we're destroying, but I would argue in the long term, we're actually creating orders of magnitude more value. And if you look at Ben Jerry's, you look at REI, they've become stable enduring businesses in categories that are fairly crowded. And eventually, I do think technology and AI will get crowded, it will get commoditized because technology is never the moat. Trust is. Community is a moat. Culture is a moat. Execution is a moat. And so, we're trying to skip ahead to that part, but it takes time for people to get aligned.

So, until then— Well, we see an AMP joint venture with private equity to help distribute. Diffusion. Yeah. If we can—

Yeah, you know, if you go to our website, it's called amppublic.com, because I do think if you look back to the, like, vulture era of private equity, you remember, like, RGR Nabisco and what barbarians at the gate, we should just learn from their mistakes and go, can we do private equity but done right in an aligned way? Let's not rush to lay off hundreds of thousands of people and then not reeducate them and prepare them for their new opportunities. I'm an optimist, as you guys know. I came from Andreessen Horowitz. So I'm a sort of a rational optimist. I believe the transition can be done in a positive way. Is that me getting kicked off? There's like a bell ringing, but that might be here. No, I don't know. Okay, cool.

No, I'm looking at the only bell we have is this. But no, we're— we got plenty. We're good. Continue, continue.

Everything we do is governed by a public benefit charter. So if we do private equity, you'll be governed in the public benefit. If we do education stuff, that'll be in the public benefit. Yeah. Look, I've made more money than I know what to do in life. I'm 34 and I'm just getting started. So my goal is I'll be remembered for having been a net positive influence on the space. I just got tired of telling people I told you so, because after a while they started looking at my returns and going, why didn't you give me a call? And I said, I did look at your email. I introduced you to Anthropic in the Series A and the Series B and the Series C. And so at some point I was like, you know what, I'm just going to go direct, talk to the LPs, set up a platform, build infrastructure, and hopefully be known as a generally like sane, common sense, rational point of view on stuff that can often be— is not legible to people from different parts of the stack. And that's what the class is about. So cs153.stanford.edu. I would recommend anybody watching go check it out. Um, the lectures are all online and the first one went on Stanford's official page on Thursday. Was that with Scott Nowlin? So Scott— no, actually, uh, Scott is lecture 8. I put up lecture— we put up lecture 1, which is mine, as a kind of the opening act because, you know, Scott is one of the mainliners, the headliners of AI Coachella. Uh, Scott's will be up, um, soon as well. And then Jensen was last week, so I think he followed Scott. Well, last question for me.

Do you think the world is prepared for it not to be a bubble?

That's a good question. The world— is the world prepared not for it to be a bubble? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Inertia is— guys, inertia is a powerful thing. Most of the world still has no idea what AI is. It is crazy. And I've been flying to places where I thought there would be diffusion of AI by now, and they just are barely using Claude, ChatGPT. I mean, these things are still alien to most of the world. And so if we stopped capabilities today and half of us in the AI ecosystem vanished off the planet, nothing would change. It's still so early. Yeah, it is early.

Very cool. Well, great to catch up. Congratulations on a very impressive fundraising and a very unique approach. And looking forward to the next conversation.

Thanks, guys. Generational run, and I hope the acquisition does nothing but give you guys more steroids and more fuel for the fire. We need more of you every day.

Fantastic. We'll talk to you soon. Congratulations.

Thank you, guys. Bye. Cheers.