Miles Dieffenbach
@Curiousjorge65
@CarnegieMellon Endowment Managing Director of Investments / Used to play football @ PSU & Steelers / Tech enthusiast / Tweets my own
Idk long big cap tech has been a decent investable theme and has been in a bull run for basically 23 years, 22 bagger from an ETF
Investing themes don’t last long…act accordingly !
Index Ventures doesn’t get enough credit. Largest shareholder in Wiz, second largest in Scale AI, largest in Figma, all are generational >$15b exits within 4 months. Top 3 VC firm globally, and arguably #1 IMO due to the consistency in fund size and returns they put out
Pretty incredible, seeing automation and robotics improve productivity/efficiency right in front of our eyes. Packages delivered per employee has increased by 80% since 2020 while employees per facility are down -40%. $AMZN is a beast of a robotics company.
Fun memories, go PSU!
We're 65 days away from Penn State football as we look back on Miles Dieffenbach's (@Curiousjorge65) Penn State career, and his success off the field after he retired from the game of football. blackshoediaries.com/2025/6/26/2445…
Wrong take. Ellison is much richer because he didn’t sell shares and has steadily been buying back 2% of the company every year for 30 years! Increase ownership from 17% to 40%. $CRM made a lot of dilutive acquisitions and Benioff steadily sells his shares yearly
Oracle is 2x a Salesforce, but Ellison is worth 25x Benioff?…. What This Says about the limitations of the SaaS business model.
The reality is that the hyperscalers are spending so significantly on capex, hurting profitability through depreciation, that to maintain current margins they have to trim OPEX. They can use "AI" as the reason, I think it's more so a need versus a want.
Have we seen peak employment at Mag 7?
Agree. Also, multi-stage PMF is quite good for most founders. Low touch, extremely high price, good brand to help with hiring, and "potential" for big Series A/B and founder secondary. Need to have a real edge for a true Seed fund to partner with top founders today. Tough market.
My $0.02. A mega-VC with $5-10B annual funds is really searching for only one thing: a company they can pile over $1b into with a potential for 5-10X on the $1b. With this, seed fund is inconsequential money used to increase the odds of main objective. You are collateral damage.
It's so interesting. Either incumbent SaaS is getting disrupted by AI natives because AI revs isn't showing up in numbers, in which that means most of $2trn of VC Unicorn NAV is likely toast too. Or, hyperscalers are overinvesting near term by an extreme amount. Both are negative
Aggregate net new ARR added in Q1 from the software universe isn't looking good! Down nearly 30% YoY from Q1 last year
I think we're going to look back in 20 years and gasp at the fact that we had humans driving 4k pound steel machines at 60+ MPH resulting in >1 million deaths annually. What a time to watch Waymo scale.
Kids chasing dogs, chasing balls on the streets of LA… once again, @Waymo AI with advanced sensing making our roads safer.
$GE split the business in 2021 and had a total market cap around $50b. The four businesses are now worth >$400b. What a remarkable turnaround story. Wonder what this would look like if $GOOG decided to split the business into Search/Mobile, Waymo, Youtube, Cloud, and Deepmind?
For reference the Nasdaq was flat for 16 years following the pop of that bubble
If you ever wondered what the late 90s felt like in the Bay Area during the .com boom ... this is as close as I've seen it in the last 25+ years.
Roberto Campos Neto joining the leadership team for $NU focusing on international development and public policy. Roberto is widely regarded as one of the best central bankers of this century, most notably instituting and leading the rollout of Pix. reuters.com/business/finan…
This gets said a lot but I’d disagree. VCs today make more money than ever, multi-stage VCs strategy (scaling AUM) is one of the highest margin business out there with 70-80% EBIT after salaries to team. Sure prices paid and VC $ itself is commodity, but the business isn’t
Venture capital has transitioned from a high-margin boutique business to a low-margin commoditised industry. There is no going back.
LOL this is the perfect two sentences on the state of VC today
The new investments feel like 2020 The existing portfolio feels like 2008