Independent consultant, EIR at Balderton Capital, and author of Kellblog.
Silicon Valley, CA
Joined December 2009
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Dave Kellogg retweeted
BREAKING: Nvidia, $NVDA, CEO Jensen Huang sends a company-wide email regarding his recently reported relationship with a Chinese spy.
Dave Kellogg retweeted
Palo Alto Networks CEO @nikesharora’s rule for acquiring companies: No deal until the founder agrees to a joint product roadmap.
He realized this after making a mistake early. Nikesh bought a company, and then wasted 6 months going back and forth about product direction with the founder:
“This founder's like, ‘I started a company with this vision in mind.’” I’m like, ‘Well, you sold the company. Now it's my vision.’”
“I had to sit down and was like, ‘Dude, it doesn't work like that.’ So then we changed our model.”
“I don't sign the definitive term sheet until I get the founder to sign onto a joint product roadmap. I'm like, ‘If you don't want to build what I want to build, then we shouldn't do this.’”
.@NikeshArora grew Palo Alto Networks from $18 billion to $250+ billion in market value. Before that, he spent 10 years helping grow Google’s revenue from $2 billion to $62 billion.
When he joined Palo Alto, he thought cybersecurity was two words. 8 years and 35 acquisitions later, the company has more than 70 products.
His approach: buy the winning team and put its founder in charge. If a startup beat his team with fewer resources, why make its founder report to the person who lost?
Nikesh explains why he makes founders agree to a product roadmap before signing a deal, why he wanted Google to buy Netflix, and how Egon Durban kept him bidding for a cricket team at 6 in the morning.
0:00 The Oculus deal he almost did with Egon Durban
8:45 "I thought cybersecurity was two words"
11:44 Why he buys instead of builds
14:33 Why the acquired founder becomes the boss
16:21 Why he only buys number one or number two
19:30 The 30-day test before every acquisition
33:38 Egon Durban and the 29-round cricket auction
42:32 Why nothing at work stresses him out
44:28 Selling Google ads without knowing the price
49:42 Coming to America with $200
51:58 Raising kids who didn't grow up poor
54:46 Why AI hacking has been good for Palo Alto
Includes paid partnerships.
“A monopoly granted either to an individual or to a trading company, has the same effect as a secret in trade or manufactures. The monopolists, by keeping the market constantly understocked by never fully supplying the effectual demand, sell their commodities much above the natural price, and raise their emoluments, whether they consist in wages or profit, greatly above their natural rate.
The price of monopoly is upon every occasion the highest which can be got. The natural price, or the price of free competition, on the contrary, is the lowest which can be taken, not upon every occasion indeed, but for any considerable time together."
― Adam Smith, THE WEALTH OF NATIONS
I do not understand how this is legal @Ticketmaster.
I want to sell my Smashing Pumpkins extra ticket for $250. That’s the price I chose. I would get paid $212.50 meaning you keep 15%.
But why is my ticket listed on your site for $292.50??? Who gets the extra $42.50?
Dave Kellogg retweeted
A curious feature emerging in VC is the growth of intra-portfolio acquisitions — particularly for megafunds (e.g. a16z, Thrive, Sequoia) and their flagship portfolio companies (e.g. Stripe, Databricks, OpenAI, SpaceX).
These circular financing events involve the flagship absorbing another portfolio company. The investor is effectively on both ends of the transaction and usual market scrutiny on price is avoided.
This is likely a response to the struggle with traditional exits, explained in the article below.
According to a study from Strebulaev and Jackson, only ~3% of mid/senior-level VC will make 10+ successful investments in their career.
Persistence is poor, the market is volatile, and success is inherently unpredictable. Clearly, it's a challenging strategy to sell LPs, if managers are honest about the challenges.
Alternatively, they can just lie.
Instead of dealing honestly with the uncertainty, they can tell LPs that it's obvious who the winners are and the only real constraint is "access" — an idea which conveniently favours incumbents.
It's a simple truth that if a system can be exploited, behaviour will gradually drift toward exploitation. In this case, that vulnerability is the weak GP:LP interface which is dominated by simple narratives.
This alternative "access" strategy is perfectly optimised for the incentives of institutional LPs: All the confidence of brand-name funds, binders of attractive logos, allocation at scale, and zero career-risk.
Unfortunately, the end-product is largely artificial, and it cannot interface well with real, functioning markets — like the public markets or M&A to public companies with reporting requirements (thus falling exits).
This shift in venture capital is effectively captured by Gresham's Law, which describes how bad money tends to push out good money:
"When two forms of the same thing circulate and one is easier to counterfeit, dilute, or exploit, the lower-quality version tends to dominate. The principle is frequently extended beyond currency to any system in which an exploitable substitute can displace a higher-quality one."
Read the full article: blog.joinodin.com/p/the-blac…
Dave Kellogg retweeted
1/ I'll explain exactly how this happened because I'm the person at Forbes who calculates these numbers.
This is going to take some unraveling, but here's a spoiler: The president's answer here is nonsense.
Dave Kellogg retweeted
AI prompt: "Use Singapore Airlines' own brand guidelines and redo their new business class product"
17 seconds, and it looks amazing.
You're welcome @SingaporeAir
Dave Kellogg retweeted
This is so wrong
The reason “Trump didn’t steal the elections” is because we & the pro-voter coalition stopped him EIGHT times over the past 21 months
Here’s how: a thread (1/x)
John's axe and Jerrys' tone. Eyes.
See this Instagram post by @jonathanseidl instagram.com/reel/Dfa587KhE…
Dave Kellogg retweeted
That represented roughly 18% of all Cybertrucks registered in the United States during that quarter. SpaceX subsequently disclosed that it spent $131 million on Cybertrucks in 2025.
Dave Kellogg retweeted
This is the final aesthetic form of the managerial internationalist order and it is sad that Singapore Airlines has finally succumbed to it. It is truly grotesque.
Welcome to millennial grey or as I prefer to call it, the globohomo aesthetic. It signals the triumph of the neutral, the scalable, and what Marc Augé called "the non-place."
These are spaces designed to erase the friction of being somewhere specific and it has now found its full expression in the airline's newly unveiled cabin interiors.
The whole point of this soulless minimalism is to make the transition between places feel effortless, to optimize for global movement, and the result is the smoothing away of rooted cultures, traditions and visual particularities.
You also see this design now in airports, hotels, new apartment builds and AirBnBs. They employ the same materials, the same restrained color palette, the same soft-touch surfaces, and the same implication of competence. You are everywhere but nowhere at once.
The passenger is not meant to feel the particular hospitality or visual culture of Singapore. Who was this designed for? The bean counter? The management consultant? The flagship cabin has become merely a container for productivity and rest rather than an experience with its own local character and heritage.
This is tragic beyond belief because Singapore Airlines still flies the most distinctive cabin crew uniform in commercial aviation: the sarong kebaya designed by Pierre Balmain, unchanged since 1968, its batik detailing a living fragment of Peranakan culture tied to a specific place and history.
Every other airline has updated or abandoned its uniforms for mass production or modern fashion cycles. Singapore Airlines refrained.
Yet for whatever schizo reason, they've decided to yeet their identity everywhere else that matters. The airline that once treated its visual identity as a point of pride has chosen the path of least resistance. The earthy tones are gone. The leather, the wood trim and the art - all gone. Just safe cool grey interiors that are dreary, corporate and characterless.
You legit can't tell if you're in a Silicon Valley headquarters or a German automaker's concept vehicle or in the waiting room of a medical clinic.
Welcome to the internationally interchangeable visual language, which I suppose is par for the course for what Singapore has become - competent, sure, but risk averse, and increasingly unsure of who it is or worse. It's just a well-run node in the global network.
The new SQ business class colour palette is a friendly reminder that you're still very much at work as your ticket is paid for by your employer.
I don't know where the $2 billion went to or how much of it was wasted on useless consultants.
'Buy Singapore' these days either means you get ripped off by a local company slapping its brand over a Chinese OEM or you grossly overpay for a so-so product that's past its heyday, sort of a reflection of the Singaporean graduate market.
It's honestly hard to justify paying for SQ prices especially in the premium cabins when the competition has caught up and layovers are a minor inconvenience when you're like a full 1/3 cheaper or even 1/2 the price of SQ.
Maybe it's just symptomatic of a wider Singapore problem where once the competition catches up, you realize there isn't too much that makes us intrinsically special and to generate more revenue/profits, the easiest option is to turn to foreign labour and crank up the frequencies.
