TickerTain
TickerTain
NewsroomShortsPortfolioConvergence
NewsroomShortsPortfolioConvergence
$ANTHROPIC·$MA····$INTC····$BLUE-ORIGIN·$SPCX····$CRWV····$CRM····$MSFT····$NVDA····$ORCL····$CURSOR·$AAPL····$OPENAI·$AMZN····$UBER····$GOOGL····$META····$TSLA····$DATABRICKS·$PERPLEXITY·$LYFT····$NBIS····$TSM····$LITE····$ANDURIL·
$ANTHROPIC·$MA····$INTC····$BLUE-ORIGIN·$SPCX····$CRWV····$CRM····$MSFT····$NVDA····$ORCL····$CURSOR·$AAPL····$OPENAI·$AMZN····$UBER····$GOOGL····$META····$TSLA····$DATABRICKS·$PERPLEXITY·$LYFT····$NBIS····$TSM····$LITE····$ANDURIL·
←

clay bavor

T3 · host / generalist

Co-founder of Sierra, an AI company building customer-service agents. He previously spent 18 years at Google, including leadership roles in virtual and augmented reality.

4 calls·4 names·100% bull·last heard 3 months ago·20VC
track record

no scored calls yet — needs a stated position or a categorical verdict, with a matured window vs SPY

top calls

highest conviction · one per company
1sthigh conviction
$GOOGLAlphabet

Bavor: Google's mission-aligned culture can solve anything when smart people pursue truth

Clay Bavor, after 18 years at Google, argues the company's combination of an ambitious enduring mission, incredibly smart people, and a culture valuing truth-seeking in service of that mission makes it capable of solving virtually any problem when aligned.

20VC2026-07episode →
2ndmedium conviction
$NBISNebius

Bavor believes Nebius claim: 10x GPU supply would still sell out in a day

Bavor validates Nebius founder's claim about insatiable GPU demand, using it to support his thesis that GPU capacity and power remain the fundamental constrained inputs creating a floor on token economics for both frontier and open models.

20VC2026-07episode →
3rdmedium conviction
$PLTRPalantir Technologies

Bavor: Sierra borrowed Palantir's forward-deployed model, aims for larger scale

Bavor explicitly credits Palantir's forward-deployed engineering model as the inspiration for Sierra's approach, noting Palantir has 'low hundreds of customers' while Sierra intends to operate at much larger scale across industry verticals.

20VC2026-07episode →

most discussed · click a bar to filter

  • $NBIS
  • $PLTR
  • $GOOGL
  • $CRM

recurring themes

  • AI Infrastructure2
  • Frontier AI Models1
  • AI Coding Agents1
  • AI Agents1
  • AI Geopolitics & Export Controls1
4 total
$NBIS
···
Nebius
MEDclay bavor·20VC·3 months ago·Open Models vs Frontier Models: Who Actually Wins? | The $100K Token Budget Every Engineer Will Need
Bavor believes Nebius claim: 10x GPU supply would still sell out in a day
Bavor validates Nebius founder's claim about insatiable GPU demand, using it to support his thesis that GPU capacity and power remain the fundamental constrained inputs creating a floor on token economics for both frontier and open models.
"We had the founder of Nebius on the show the other day and he said that if they 10x supply, they could still sell out in a day... I believe that. I believe that and I think that t…"
12:42
$PLTR
···
Palantir Technologies
MEDclay bavor·20VC·3 months ago·Open Models vs Frontier Models: Who Actually Wins? | The $100K Token Budget Every Engineer Will Need
Bavor: Sierra borrowed Palantir's forward-deployed model, aims for larger scale
Bavor explicitly credits Palantir's forward-deployed engineering model as the inspiration for Sierra's approach, noting Palantir has 'low hundreds of customers' while Sierra intends to operate at much larger scale across industry verticals.
"I would say rediscovered and borrowed this model from Palantir and we came to it almost accidentally... my understanding is Palantir has kind of low hundreds of customers. We are…"
30:07
$GOOGL
···
Alphabet
HIGHclay bavor·20VC·3 months ago·Open Models vs Frontier Models: Who Actually Wins? | The $100K Token Budget Every Engineer Will Need
Bavor: Google's mission-aligned culture can solve anything when smart people pursue truth
Clay Bavor, after 18 years at Google, argues the company's combination of an ambitious enduring mission, incredibly smart people, and a culture valuing truth-seeking in service of that mission makes it capable of solving virtually any problem when aligned.
"What people underestimate about Google is when you have the alignment of an ambitious, enduring mission, incredibly smart people and a culture that values truth and building in se…"
63:43
$CRM
···
Salesforce
MEDclay bavor·20VC·3 months ago·Open Models vs Frontier Models: Who Actually Wins? | The $100K Token Budget Every Engineer Will Need
Bavor: Marc Benioff is extraordinary, Brett Taylor learned selling from the best
Bavor praises Marc Benioff as 'extraordinary' and the best seller he's ever met, noting co-founder Brett Taylor's time at Salesforce was formative for Sierra's sales motion and enterprise approach.
"Brett having spent time at Salesforce really learned from the best. Like Mark is extraordinary and so he's the best seller I've ever met."
61:47
9
Frontier AI Modelstailwind
Unbounded demand for frontier intelligence; open models serve commoditized tasks via distillation
Frontier models will retain value for high-stakes complex domains (coding, science, legal) where demand for intelligence is effectively unbounded. Open weights models will handle commoditized workloads via an 'assembly line' of distilled former-frontier models. Chinese open models largely distill US frontier runs; US labs won't open-source competitive models due to business model conflict.
9
AI Infrastructuretailwind
Token costs face structural floor from GPU scarcity; engineer token budgets heading to 20% of salary
Reasoning models (o1) dramatically increase inference compute per token, while GPU supply constraints (power, capacity) create a hard floor on token pricing. Bavor predicts steady-state token spend per engineer will converge to ~20% of salary (vs ~3.8% today), making token budgeting a new CFO capital allocation for CFOs.
9
AI Coding Agentstailwind
AI-native engineers 3-20x more productive; internal agents run company operations
Engineers using Claude Code/Codex achieve 3-20x feature shipping velocity. Sierra built 'Pine Cone' — an internal agent with MCP gateway accessing all company systems — that runs engineering, hiring, strategy (Sierra Brain), and operations. Hiring process now AI-native: candidates build with coding agents during interviews.
9
AI Agentstailwind
Effectively unbounded enterprise demand for AI agents; forward-deployed model accelerates adoption
Enterprise buyers are in market simultaneously due to board pressure, creating unprecedented pull. Sierra's Palantir-inspired forward-deployed engineering model (deeply embedded with design partners) compresses time-to-value to weeks, enabling Sierra to serve 40% of Fortune 50 and win against both startups and incumbents.
7
AI Geopolitics & Export Controlsmixed
Chinese open models rely on US frontier distillation; US labs won't open-source competitive weights
The performance gap between US and Chinese open models stems from Chinese companies' willingness to do scaled distillation of US frontier models. US labs and hyperscalers have no incentive to release open weights that compete with their own frontier products, creating a structural dynamic where Chinese open source leads on availability but follows on capability.
7
Cybersecuritytailwind
Offensive AI capabilities ratcheted up five notches; cybersecurity a 'pretty good bet'
AI-driven offensive cyber capabilities have dramatically increased, making defense more critical than ever. However, the defensive solution may ultimately be frontier models themselves (Mythos, Codex) rather than narrow security products, creating uncertainty for pure-play cyber vendors.
6
AI Infrastructureheadwind
On-device AI cannot alleviate frontier compute constraints; thermal limits bind
While on-device AI will improve consumer applications and may enable 'home appliance' compute boxes, thermal and power limits on phones prevent meaningful contribution to frontier training or high-throughput inference. The bottleneck remains data-center scale GPU/TPU clusters.