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Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala

September 20, 2024 / 01:24:50

This episode covers the All-In Summit, guest contributions, and the recent Federal Reserve interest rate cuts. Key discussions include the success of the summit, the performance of various guests, and the implications of economic changes on the market.

The hosts discuss the All-In Summit, praising Chamath Palihapitiya for his organization and the positive feedback received. They highlight the contributions of various team members, including graphics and moderation, which led to a successful event.

Jason Calacanis shares insights on the recent Federal Reserve interest rate cuts, explaining the potential impact on the economy and stock market. The conversation touches on inflation rates and the Fed's approach to managing economic tensions.

David Sacks and Chamath discuss the implications of AI on customer support and the potential disruption in various industries. They emphasize the importance of adapting to technological advancements and the evolving job market.

The episode concludes with a discussion on the challenges faced by venture capitalists in the current economic climate, including the difficulties in generating liquidity and the impact of inflated valuations from previous years.

TLDR

The episode discusses the All-In Summit's success, Fed interest rate cuts, AI's impact on jobs, and venture capital challenges.

Episode

1:24:50
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all right everybody welcome back to the Allin podcast the Channel's been active we're in the Afterglow we're in the
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Allin Summit after it's so glowing that freeberg couldn't make it he has been writing a
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high Nick told me that in the last week just we uh we've only put out a half the
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clips and they've already gotten 20 million views oh my Lord I you know I I I so we'll be we'll be around 50 million
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I think when all the clips are released and you let it bake for a couple of months that is an astoundingly large
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amount of breach yeah and that's just YouTube we're not doing it on the podcast feed right now YouTube and X
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well hopefully we get it on the podcast feed we get another 50 million uh but uh
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free Berg's in his Afterglow couldn't make it but he's very busy right now look how happy he is the summit went
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well is that marijuana I think he's making potatoes I think that's his farm but I mean the smile is incredible it's
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marijuana it's free BG's version of founder mode he's in that's freeberg founder mode he's hitting the bong his
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founder mode [Music] gives let your winners [Music] ride and instead we open sources to the
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fans and they've just gone crazy with it queen of he is uh he's in the Afterglow um and
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he won't be with us this week um but uh he organized such a great conference don't you think J he did great uh I mean
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he really took charge of that and just did an amazing J I would like to give him his flowers absolutely it is like at
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least a trillion times better than the first and at least 50% better than the second I mean that's how it should go
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you know when you create something in the world chth what you want to do is you want to H you want to hand it off to
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Professional Management to then scale it right not everybody can do the creative
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act of actually forming something you need to have these operators to go and then execute your vision and uh I just
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want to give free to break his flowers for executing incredibly well we all play a role jamat saaks launched a
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tequila company I want to say thanks to uh Friedberg he did all of these great speakers big thank you to our CEO John
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who put together all the operations Nick did incredible Nick did incredible incredible job with those opening
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Graphics they went viral uh Zach helped with the graphics you had young Spielberg chipping in you had Laura did
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an amazing job with Stage management and of course you know I focused on the moderation I got a lot of great things
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so everybody plays a role you got Sachs with the tequila Friedberg Laura Zack Spielberg Nick John everybody
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brought something to the table are you congratulations to everybody you scale through people
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that's it scale through people that's it did anybody nobody got the joke we chth everybody contributed you
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understand Sachs new tequila company John operations your freeberg content me with the being the world's greatest
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moderator up there what ch's contribution oh yeah chath showed up chath chth looked great I showed up
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that's just he showed up and looked great I brought my two votes and I brought my vision absolutely I would
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also say fan favorite you what you really did that was amazing was you took a lot of selfies I was very proud of
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both of you with the fans service and fans were very pleased that you guys took so many selfies you know we got a
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lot of feedback too coming in so it was uh pretty pretty great feedback do you think that you did
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better as moderator because you finally let go of just the conference organization what
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yeah I think that you were able to focus on your unique value ad instead of immersing yourself in a bunch of details
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that could be handled by the team I agree um it was absolutely process to get you to let go well you know you have
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it's it's a fair point I I did people did say my moderation was dialed in and I appreciate that positive feedback from
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everybody and um yeah there is something to having people you trust with the content thought your moderation was
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excellent this time it was better than before because I think that you're actually exceptional as a moderator and
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I think you're mostly average as a conference [Laughter] producer I do think as a moderator
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you're excellent I mean like some of the most memorable moments were you basically drawing out contrasting
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opinions and the way that the people engaged with them was so healthy and good that was the I think the curring
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theme so I gave you an enormous amount of credit I think you did an exceptional job but I also think it's because you
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were able to focus on what you great at I I do agree with that I was talking to Jade about and she said and Nick also
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pointed out you were really dialed in J what what's up and I said I'm not worrying about the party and the vendors
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and the front desk and the sponsors and it is actually you're able to to focus did you have some favorite moments
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yourself there saxs any favorite moments for you or panels or things maybe that exceeded expectations for you well I
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thought the Mir shimer Jeffree Sachs panel was great I thought it would be which is why I helped organize it but I
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was just glad that the audience so many people in the audience reacted and said that was the surprise head of the
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conference I would say that was my favorite of the event one of the best panels I've ever been part of it's the
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most viewed it's like slightly above elon's one really oh just behind El elon's slightly ahead but yeah it's
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still like growing it's like finding an audience well I think that I think that if you if you look at the one from last
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year greme Allison where he got a standing ovation the thing is there are these Village Elders where they are at a
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point in their life where they're willing to just be a truth teller but often times they're
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deplatformed and we have the ability to actually bring some of the smartest of them on and give them a voice and it's
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incredible how much they resonate because what they say is so logical and sensible that's a that's a really
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important thing that we have now at our disposal and I think that people really appreciate it you know so we're like a I
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think we're doing a really important job in doing that and now the question is what village Elders do we get next year
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to keep you know being truth tellers well give us your thoughts you know there's an all-in um Twitter handle and
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he's chamath David saxs and I'm at Jason and freeberg at freeberg just tell us who you think would be great but saaks I
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know you're super excited and want to give Biden his flowers the FED just cut rates 50 bips and the stock market is uh
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tearing it up right now on Wednesday fed cut interest rates by a half a percentage Point taking them down off of
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a 23-year high we've been talking about this God for two years here on this podcast First Rate cut since March of
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2020 which is about when we started this podcast jpow basically said the FED thinks inflation is coming down to
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around 2% nicely and they don't want the job market to soften any further than it
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already has he also mentioned mentioned immigration has helped soften the market
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uh the labor market as well obviously with all those new people looking for jobs so in the last two months July and
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August CPI has been at a two- handle we talked about that 2.9% in July 2.5% in August here's the CPI over the last
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decade obviously massive boom uh in interest that you see there from 2021 to 2023 many obviously think we're going to
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have more R Cuts probably every meeting for a little bit and um Dow's already at an all-time
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high surge 300 points on the news here's um here's uh some interesting data about the 50 basis
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point kickoff Cuts so uh this is where it gets interesting chth fed only started publicizing their interest rate
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changes in 1994 since '94 fed has initiated a cutting cycle six times here's the chart take a good look at
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that 95 98 2019 they started with 25 bips 01 and 07 after the great financial crisis they started with a 50 bip cut so
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obviously there was an emergency 50 bip cut in March of 2020 when Co hit 0107 2020 very severe
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situations and the what happened in the markets is what I want to discuss uh with both of you today in 20 2001 Market
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fell 31% in the two years after that rate cut in 2007 Market fell 26% after 2 years so and 2020 despite all the fears
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Market ripped 44% over two years what's the more likely scenario chth is this similar to the Doom great financial
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crisis or similar to 2020 well I think 2020 you have to put it at Big asteris because the question
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is what would have happened had there not been covid and had there not been an entire global shutdown so if you go back
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to that chart you could probably just extrapolate and cut out that part that's flat because the part that's flat from
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2020 to 2022 was largely artificially created because on top of that we injected so much money into the economy
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the reality is we probably would have raised at some rate of change that you could have predicted from 2016 so what
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do you what do you take away from that I think that you have to like realize we are at a point in the economy where you
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cut rates because there's tension and there's tension between employment and unemployment there's
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tension between earnings growth and contraction and so it's a stimulatory move so if you look through that
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stimulatory move why is the Fed doing this and why will they cut probably all the way down to two or 3% by the end of
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26 it's because we now need to stimulate the economy again so the reason why markets tend to fall once the rate cut
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cycle starts is because the next couple of quarters sort of demonstrate what I think the FED is expecting which is that
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there's pressure in the economy we have not seen that flow through in earnings or in how companies describe markets on
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the field by and large except for a few so I think this part of the cycle now will be about all of these companies
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telling us whether there's nothing to see here or whether there is actual real pressure and if there is real pressure
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it'll probably look like the several times before where you're just going to have to contract the value of financial
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assets because they're just not worth as much when they're earning less okay saxs
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any thoughts here just balls and Strikes I think a lot of people are commenting on the fact that the only other two
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times where we've had a 50 basis point rate cut in modern history it has been just before a recession so I think this
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happened in 2001 2007 right before the recession and the FED had to do a dramatic rate cut because they could see
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in the data that things were weakening so a lot of people are asking the question well is that what's going on
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here now Pal's comments though are indicating that the econom is in good shape he said the economy is in very
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good shape that um basically indicating that they had tamed inflation and that they would look to cut another
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50 basis points this year so Pal's rhetoric is uh in a way at odds with the magnitude of this cut the you know so
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why didn't they just cut 25 basis points I think people are trying to figure that
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out reading the tea leaves into 50 because they could just do 25 a month sure mon the econom is hot yeah if the
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economy is hot why would you tiptoe into rate cuts uh and just do 25 now that's the key
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thing if you look at the The Dot Plot and if you look at where the Smart Financial actors are betting where rates
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end so it's hard to sort of like look at any point in time 50 now 25 later what does it all mean it's very hard to know
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but what is much clearer is where do we think terminal rates will be in even in the next 18 months and it is
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dramatically lower for where they are now and I think that support sacks your that argument that you just made which
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is if you're going to basically cut this aggressively over the next year to year
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and a half by the estimates of very smart Financial actors whose job it is to spend every day observing the FED
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then they must see something because otherwise as you said you could take a much more gradual approach and so I
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think that the Smart Financial actors are guessing recession or guessing contraction I think what they're also
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guessing is similar to nonfarm payrolls we're going to go through a couple of difficult GDP revisions probably
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downward and I think that will have an impact to people's sense of how the economy is
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doing even more than what their sense is today which is already teetering on it's
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at best okay and I think all of that has to play itself out so it's going to be a very
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complicated and dynamic fall in that respect yeah and and I think so much of this has to do with Unemployment uh we
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had that period where so many jobs were available remember we talked about it here 11 12 million jobs available at the
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peak we can debate the numbers of course but we all saw it where you just couldn't hire a talent in America there
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was so few people available to to take positions and man has that changed and you get to see it on the ground in early
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stage startups where this whole narrative I don't know if you saw it in your board meetings but hey we can't
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find a person hey we're looking hey that search is still going we're still looking for a director of sales we're
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still looking for sales people we're still looking for developers we're still looking for operations people now it's
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the opposite it's like I I just I'm hiring producers here in Austin because I'm building in my inperson studio we
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had like I don't know a dozen viable candidates for this position and I had a hard time picking between you know the
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top three now that's distinctly different than my experience for the last five to 10 years where you were
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like how do we how do we fill this role so I think that employment has been broken
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and that's the thing that has me concerned because with all these people who came in through the southern border
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and then you have people Outsourcing to other countries I wonder if Americans are going to lose so many of these midp
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paying jobs and this will dovetail into our next story about Amazon making Cuts I'm very worried about the the hollowing
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out of the upper middle class that Elite group of $150,000 jobs that then employ nannies
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and spend money in the economy I wonder I don't know if you're seeing that in your company sacks
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I'm not worried about the hall out of that that class you have disain for them but I
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mean just in terms of the labor market what do you see you know in companies right now you know hiring the talent
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pool Etc well I mean in tech things are are pretty good I mean they they're not as absurdly frothy as they were during
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the bubble of 2020 and 2021 but things are good you have this huge AI Tailwind now and there's just a ton of investment
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going into AI there's a little bit of A Tale of Two Cities going on if you're in
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AI things are really bubbly and if you're outside AI they're they've return to much more normal levels in terms of
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valuation and Company operations all that kind of stuff just to go back to the state of the economy for a second
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the the reason why a lot of people were predicting a recession including me for a while is that the yield curve
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inverting has been an almost perfect gug of whether a recession is coming it's when basically the FED raises short-term
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interest rates above long-term interest rates normally long rates are the ones that should be higher because investors
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demand a higher rate of return to tie up their money for longer so something's really off and kind of broken when short
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rates go above long rates the yield curve inverts and it's always been the Prelude to a recession but the recession
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doesn't come when the yield curve inverts it usually comes when the yield curve de inverts
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and the reason for that is because the FED now sees weakness and dramatically cuts the short rates so in other words
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it jacks up the short rates to control inflation that works it trickles through the economy the economy cools down and
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then the FED says oh [ __ ] maybe we've over corrected they slam on the brakes and then they cut rates to basically
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make up for the effect in the economy so the yield curve has finally de inverted
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and the question is just do we now get that recession or did the FED manage this to a soft Landing I don't think we
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know I'm not I'm not like calling recession but this is the the thing that people are concerned about yeah well
00:17:35
saak we were talking about AI in the group chat right yeah I think it's now becoming really clear that call centers
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are going to be the first really big disruption caused by AI yeah I mean all the level one customer support is going
00:17:47
to get replaced by AI I mean llms plus voice cuz you know open AI just released their audio
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API you saw that at the All In Summit we released A Mir shimer AI yeah where we trained it on all of his work and you
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can go to Mir shimmer. and ask a questions and it will tell you the answers in his voice because we cloned
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his voice using resemble AI anyway so AI can do voice now and it can be trained extremely well on large data sets to
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give you answers to questions which is pretty much what customer support is so I think it's now becoming clear that I I
00:18:28
think within the next two to three years you're going to see a massive disruption
00:18:31
in that I agree with that massively and I think there's another underreported story which is people don't like to call
00:18:39
and talk to a customer service agent like an actual human if they can avoid it they would much rather go on YouTube
00:18:45
and say how do I fix this or you know ask chat GPT how do I fix this it's like I don't want to waste another person's
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time just give me the answer as quick as possible and AI will give you the answer
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quicker YouTube will give you the answer quicker I've had so many times where I have people who work for me who are like
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I don't know how to do that and I literally would walk up to their computer and load YouTube and type in
00:19:07
how do I blank and there's a video there watch it on two speed you can do it that's what's you know gonna also kill
00:19:14
this like I I don't want to talk to a human just change my flight just you know question yeah I mean you talk about
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disruption call centers are a very big part of the economy in certain geographies Denver Sal Lake I mean parts
00:19:28
of yeah exactly it's a really big deal if like half the cost gets ripped out of those call centers where would you move
00:19:36
those people if you if you had your choice could they move to sales well I think sales will be the one that's
00:19:41
disrupted after customer support but um but I don't know I think it's going to be very disruptive one of the reasons I
00:19:48
think this is you know in the early days of llms people were saying that legal services would be disrupted and you saw
00:19:55
some very highly valued startups Rock up based on that I think the problem with that is the error rate so when you think
00:20:04
about AI applications you have to think about what is the tolerable error rate that the industry will allow because we
00:20:13
know that AI get things wrong they can hallucinate and you're never going to be able to make it perfect I mean you can
00:20:18
improve the quality but it's still going to have some errors and when you're dealing with like legal services for
00:20:23
example you just can't have mistakes it's just not tolerated however customer support is different customer support is
00:20:30
already organized into levels level one level two level three based on difficulty and there's already in a
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sense a mechanism for failover if like the level one customer support person can't answer the question they kick it
00:20:43
up to level two so there's a place for llms to start in customer support which is replacing all the level one and then
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working their way up the chain to level two as they get better and better and so
00:20:58
what I'm saying is that the level of accuracy now especially with the new PhD level reasoning models is good enough
00:21:05
yeah we don't need to wait for like some perfect llm model and I think this is why this is going to be a big big
00:21:11
disruption let me people potentially are going to have their their jobs disrupted
00:21:15
or at least transformed well it could be the end of the entire career as well jamath if you were to look at this 4x4
00:21:21
sort of quadron chart that sax is describing which is the cost of an era you know and
00:21:29
um the actual complexity of the job perhaps or the cost of the job how do how do you look at this I know you're
00:21:38
working on software that kind of does this with your startup as well I mean I'll
00:21:46
preview one use case from 8090 which is pretty stunning you know we work with an a very
00:21:56
large regulated highly regulated company public company and they have a very complicated
00:22:08
set of people and processes because of the the field in which they're in and David your point is exactly right
00:22:17
it took us a fairly long time but we're at a point now where we've been running AI powered
00:22:27
software versus the old Legacy deterministic solution and we've been running it at 100% accuracy now for
00:22:36
about 10 days so this is still very new and it's an incredible thing because to your
00:22:43
point our first version was like a in the mid 80s then we were in the mid90s then we were you know 97 98% but there
00:22:51
was still errors and it just took a lot of engineering to figure out how to get to 100 but now it's at 100 and it's been
00:22:58
consistent at 100 and so we're all kind of like scratching our head because now the next step is well what do we do to
00:23:04
your point what what do we do do we so we're we're figuring that out right now but the art of the possible is that
00:23:15
I think well-crafted AI software is as good as deterministic software in the sense that the error rates will be
00:23:23
equivalent in production and at the level of very highly regulated public company and I think that's the gold
00:23:31
standard because in those sectors those companies have zero tolerance it's not a
00:23:37
toy it's not even you know level one customer support it's system of record type work yeah but it shows what's
00:23:46
possible and to your point saaks we're doing that today even though they're the best models imagine how good those under
00:23:52
the underlying models will get in a year from now yeah right and we'll be able to
00:23:57
take on more and more work it's it's very stunning actually it's really have you guys worked with the 01 preview yet
00:24:03
I I just literally have been using this new reasoning engine that open AI released and it is extraordinary and
00:24:10
it's kind of thinking about the next three or four prompts you would do and I literally just got this while we're on
00:24:15
the show I've hit the I've hit the limit for my paid account because this thing is so intense on compute I guess well
00:24:23
the thing with o1 is that I think it's starting to add reasoning but the way that you do reasoning
00:24:29
is sort of this idea that you have this Chain of Thought and I think that that's
00:24:33
a very powerful but early concept and as we refine those ways in which these models get the better answers the
00:24:43
wonderful thing is that open AI will preview o1 and then they'll have the actual 01
00:24:50
production build probably in the next couple of months which will be probably pretty spectacular but then you'll see
00:24:55
something from Claude you'll see something from llama and the real art I think and this is where I do think it's
00:25:02
a little bit of alchemy still which I think is good because it it keeps humans involved all of us involved
00:25:08
yes is how do you Stitch all of those things together to get to a 0% error rate what what sack said you know how do
00:25:15
you minimize the blast radius and how do you make sure these things are super high quality right well and people don't
00:25:22
it's still a very hard technical problem go ahead SX and then I I'll show you what so yeah one of the reasons why I'm
00:25:27
bullish on this customer support use case is because there's a very large data set to train on you've got all of
00:25:33
the product documentation that companies very created you've got all the previous
00:25:37
email support you know and calls yeah the calls have been recorded so you can out train the AI on that so there's a
00:25:45
very large body of data to train the AI model on and it's not necessarily the most proprietary it's not like dealing
00:25:53
with people's medical records or or even confidential legal documents something like that so the data is readily
00:25:59
available and then the foundation models are getting really good I think there's
00:26:02
a big question here about value capture which is there's a number of startups now that are becoming very highly valued
00:26:09
that are chasing this disruption this sort of customer support agent disruption and they're getting into very
00:26:17
high valuations even unicorn valuations already and the question is well wait if
00:26:23
if the foundation models are advancing at such a rate exactly like a year from now why couldn't a like a developer just
00:26:29
a startup of a few guys take next year's model train it and then commoditize the you're you're making such a good
00:26:38
point this so when we were trying to figure out like what applications we would build and like which sectors of
00:26:45
the economy we would go after I was like guys we got to go after the hardest most
00:26:50
regulated places because those are the things and places and people that have absolutely zero tolerance for error and
00:26:57
where you're going to need to do some amount of customization and and specialization
00:27:03
to actually solve these problems and S to your point like when you see and I said you cannot we cannot touch customer
00:27:09
service we cannot touch it because it's going to get commoditized and run over by these
00:27:15
foundational models within a year right you you'll be able to deploy these it's just too easy you'll be able to do it on
00:27:22
a local computer I mean you'll just download the entire database of every call on a MacBook with by the way just
00:27:29
to build on that that the other thing that's now possible and you saw this with Clara because Clara put out this
00:27:34
like cryptic tweet press release where I think maybe it was in their earnings Nick maybe you can find this where
00:27:40
they're like we've deprecated Salesforce and worked it that like range how how can a company that big deprecate those
00:27:48
two systems of record how is that even it's how is it means they're writing their own right well I'll tell I'll tell
00:27:54
you how it's possible and so this is like this next crazy thing that's been happening we've been doing a version of
00:28:00
this to go after some other sources of software we haven't had the balls to be honest to go after s force or or work
00:28:08
day but here's how they do it they write these agents and these agents can spawn
00:28:13
other agents right so it's very classic kind of machine that builds a machine and you start to observe the inputs and
00:28:19
outputs of a system right I'm I'm hyper simplifying but I'm just it'll make the point and over time what the agents
00:28:26
start to do is by observing the inputs and the outputs they start to guess on what the intervening code is and the
00:28:32
code pths must be in the middle to generate the outputs based on these inputs and so over time what happens is
00:28:38
you develop a digital twin and then you run that against that counterfactual against workday or Salesforce and then
00:28:47
at some point you're like it's the same and you you just turn it off and you're saving yourself tens or hundreds of
00:28:54
millions of dollars so that's it's a version of what CL did it takes an enormous amount of technical strength to
00:29:02
do it it also takes tremendous I think Executive courage and Leadership because I think that's a very difficult decision
00:29:09
to embark on but if you're an engineer that must be an unbelievably exciting technical challenge to be a part of but
00:29:17
but that's the basic premise of what they were able to do hopefully they share more and maybe
00:29:23
they even open source what they did because I think it would just be an amazing thing for all of us to look at yeah I
00:29:30
mean to to restate it watch people use a piece of software and then based on what
00:29:36
they do you could write the code which you could take a video of a video game today like Angry Birds and somebody did
00:29:43
this you give the Angry Birds iPad you know game from 15 years ago to AI it's going to back into the code just by
00:29:52
watching it so why not just watch people use Salesforce or workday and those are
00:29:56
very expensive products thousand of dollars per user right I want to I want to get Sax's point of view like the
00:30:01
thing in Enterprise software that we were always told is you cannot touch these systems of record don't ever start
00:30:06
a systems of record company don't try to touch these systems of record companies
00:30:10
don't you know try to disrupt them it's an impossible task but then the question
00:30:15
is if you have these things why do you necessarily need a system of record in the way that you
00:30:22
needed to before when you're writing all this clunky deterministic I don't well I
00:30:27
saw the clar story where they said they were going to rip out Salesforce and and
00:30:31
work day because they were able to write their own bespoke code using AI I mean I
00:30:36
have to say I'm a little bit skeptical of that story for a couple of reasons one is if that's their goal why wouldn't
00:30:42
they have open- sourced this these products they created you might as well get the whole ecosystem working on it
00:30:47
because they're not trying to sell this product that they've internally created they're just trying to rip out the cost
00:30:53
so why not let the whole ecosystem see it the other thing is if it's so easy to do why hasn't the market already been
00:31:01
flooded with new startups that are effectively able to reverse engineer I don't think you're right I don't think
00:31:07
it's easy to do because I don't think there's a generalization here that's producti do you know what I mean like I
00:31:13
do think that these are very custom specific things so maybe there's like some scaffolding but I don't think that
00:31:19
that scaffolding has a ton of economic value I think it's really good open source stuff yeah I think it's what you
00:31:25
build on top of it and so that hasn't been figured out yet for sure yeah look I I think that if you're only using a
00:31:32
few use cases of these big complicated software packages then yeah it's probably easier than ever to deprecate
00:31:40
them you know eliminate them from your stack and just have your own internal engineers build specifically what you
00:31:45
need in a more tightly integrated way I think that is possible Nick show this tweet to these
00:31:52
guys here's the tweet this is this was a crazy one yeah so so look at but look at
00:31:59
the code look at the actual product itself for a second yeah but the product's garbage I mean look how
00:32:05
ridiculous this is but that was 600 sorry it was a billion dollars that so here's
00:32:12
theor paid Oracle 600 million to build our course management portal it's built on top of oracle's people soft Suite
00:32:19
which they refuse to customize without an extra 400 million to hit 1 billion New Yorkers got the image below and pay
00:32:25
5 million plus a year for hosting look this this is egregious government waste I mean that site looks like it's
00:32:33
pathetic I mean honestly this looks like it a it could have been done with a SharePoint site and you pay some
00:32:39
consultant to stand it up and for 1% of the cost and to there are better plat more modern platforms than that so this
00:32:47
is just incredibly wasteful and inefficient government spending they're going for retro they were going for
00:32:54
retro they wanted to hearken back to the 90s the reason I wanted to I wanted to show
00:33:00
this to you is I think that these kinds of things will not be possible in the future I just don't see how one could
00:33:08
spend a billion dollars if one tried to to enable that feature it be impossible right but that that that 600 million
00:33:16
that was wasted on that um crappy portal that shouldn't have happened even without AI right because there's like
00:33:23
much better ways there you could you could buy a much better product for 1% of the cost so or .1% of the cost there
00:33:29
must be some regulatory capture going on here where somebody's got a reput Rel that's what I'm saying like a
00:33:36
10year relationship with somebody in Albany that you know at previous Fraud and Abuse it's the same thing that's
00:33:44
happening with um rural internet you paradoxically is our next story so let's go for it in related news of our
00:33:54
government burning our money we're all Brad BR band rural broadband and EV charging 42 billion and 7.5 billion
00:34:03
almost $50 billion combined let's just go over these two programs real quickly here both were part of the $1.2 trillion
00:34:11
infrastructure bill in 20121 42 billion carved out to provide high-speed internet to people living on farms in
00:34:20
rural locations 7.5 billion carved out to build 500,000 EV Chargers over 10 years it's been a thousand days days
00:34:27
since the bill was passed so let's check on the progress zero people have been connected according to FCC commissioner
00:34:34
Brendan Carr and eight 1 2 3 4 5 6 seven eight e Chargers have been built as of May according to Auto Week Magazine
00:34:44
what's even crazier Private Industry already solved these problems United Airlines just announced they're putting
00:34:50
starlink on a thousand of their planes and they're going to offer it for free and starlink now has 2500 planes under
00:34:59
contract with a bunch of other Airlines and uh in the second half of 2023 alone the private sector built over a thousand
00:35:08
charging stations in the US these are two problems that's have already been solved sacks why are we burning $50
00:35:17
billion in the future with on things that have already been solved we've solved for this you I own
00:35:26
electric cars I you know the answer you know the answer say the answer Jason corruption no come on Jason
00:35:34
incompetence really graft keep going I mean you tell me corruption graft buying votes from your
00:35:45
constituents they haven't they haven't delivered any of it incompetence yes well there's there's a couple things
00:35:52
going on here so one is typical government waste Fraud and Abuse where theyve allocated 42 billion for Rural
00:36:00
internet haven't hooked anyone up and we could spend a fraction of that giving people Starling and allowing the private
00:36:08
sector to do its job and why even pay for it tax why are we paying for it if it's available for 100 bucks that that's
00:36:14
the Baseline but it's worse than that because on top of the waste Fraud and Abuse and the fact that the government
00:36:20
is grossly incompetent inefficient you also have naked political retaliation going on here Ah that's the answer yeah
00:36:28
exactly and Brendan Carr who's an FCC commissioner pointed this out he said that in
00:36:33
2023 the FCC cancelled or revoked an $885 million contract with the company by claiming starlink is not capable of
00:36:42
providing high-speed internet then a year later yeah of course that was a lie and then a year later the FCC is now
00:36:50
claiming that Starling provides so much high-speed internet that the word monopoly should be uh tossed out yeah so
00:36:57
look this is just it's pure naked retaliation the the Biden Harris Administration doesn't want to admit
00:37:04
that Elon has the best solution for Rural internet just like they couldn't admit he made the best electric cars
00:37:11
remember when they did that EV Summit and they didn't invite him that was just nakedly political um because
00:37:17
he's so look I mean the the Biden Harris Administration it look it's blue no matter who and Elon has drifted from
00:37:26
being sort of in independent and not he was blue what it is Ian voted for Hillary and Obama he said he's no longer
00:37:35
team blue and so they're punishing him for this yeah and it's costing taxpayers a huge amount of money I I think this is
00:37:41
one of the worst Decisions by the current Administration and if Trump gets in there he should reverse it on day one
00:37:47
well I wean need to investigate I mean I think how we got to the point of wasting
00:37:51
50 billion dollar that requires an investigation I think chath your thoughts one comment is
00:37:58
and this is so sad but I'm so desensitized by the amount of waste that I don't know whether 50 billion is a lot
00:38:05
or a little anymore when it comes to the United States government isn't that sad
00:38:09
like because now everything I hear is hundreds hundreds of billions and trillions but 50 billion is an enormous
00:38:17
amount of money right well that that's such a good point and I remember you know back in the day 60 Minutes used to
00:38:24
do these segments on waste Fraud and Abuse at the Pentagon different parts of the government $42 billion just spent on
00:38:31
something that really taxpayers could have for free or without the government getting involved and you know 42 billion
00:38:37
that was lining someone's pocket when the service doesn't even work that would have been a scandal and the media would
00:38:42
have covered it but the media doesn't even cover it these days and again it's because the media has become so tribal
00:38:48
that it's better dead than red and blue no matter who and so because the media would have to admit that elon's already
00:38:55
solved this problem they just can't go there they won't even cover this and so we have no accountability there's no
00:39:01
accountability on the government if I had to just take a step back and just generalize going forward do we want to
00:39:08
live in the kind of administrative state where they will pick people that they dislike based on
00:39:20
totally random criteria a tweet a meme a post and then all of a sudden punish a bunch of the rest of us because of that
00:39:31
they're punishing all of America because they collect our taxes to waste on it and then they punish the people that
00:39:38
they actually say they're going to uplift by not delivering what they promised and if you take Elon out of it
00:39:44
for a second the the problem was when we crossed the chasm and did it with the first guy him but the reality is there's
00:39:52
only one of him and then there's a lot of the rest of us and what will happen is people just get added to this list of
00:40:00
folks that certain nameless faceless people in the administrative State dislike and what happens is the country
00:40:08
slows down and the country wastes money and the country pilers it away and that has to stop and so what really bothers
00:40:15
me about these things is a I don't know how to UND desensitize myself to the fact that all of a sudden now because of
00:40:22
just all of this sloppy waste I didn't react as much as I should have to just $50 billion being flushed down the
00:40:30
toilet on these two projects and then two Jason your point it is a solved problem that you can give incredibly
00:40:39
cheaply and the fact that it's not left to private Enterprise to solve this and instead it's just Brazen partisanship
00:40:47
combined with retaliation combined with incompetence votes by giving this money to other vendors who are giving them
00:40:55
donations and just to give the Democrat what happens if then Trump does the same
00:41:00
thing for a solution that you support and you need and you think should be everywhere the point is we don't want
00:41:06
any of this stuff under any Administration andar it's and the minute that one Administration breaks the seal
00:41:14
and makes it acceptable it becomes part of the water table and that's the real problem we broke the seal on this crazy
00:41:22
multi- multi- trillion dollar spending and it is just never stopped since then and you know the incentives really
00:41:28
matter uh if you look at a private company if you were at clar and to our previous story and you go to the boss
00:41:35
and say I know how to get rid of these this wasteful spending we're doing here we can get rid of all tier one calls
00:41:41
with AI and save that money you get a promotion if you're in the government you can't if you're a
00:41:48
politician and you cut this program your constituents get upset you don't have that stuff being built in your District
00:41:55
there's a perverse incentive that you can't buy buy the votes which is why these folks are constantly trying to buy
00:42:00
votes and the good news is the good news is I I really applaud the people that have the courage to show the stuff on X
00:42:09
to tweet this stuff out so that the rest of us know about it and the person that
00:42:13
talked about the NYC thing but then the next step has to happen which is that we
00:42:18
all need to decide that this stuff needs to stop other it's going to bankrupt our
00:42:22
country and we have to celebrate it that's the key if we can celebrate people save money again like mle is
00:42:29
getting a lot of credit and that's up to us leadership in podcasting or the media
00:42:34
or influential people who have followings if you point out hey this is a waste go save this money and somebody
00:42:39
does save the money well why don't we start celebrating people saving the money and doing the right thing here
00:42:44
because this is our children's future is it true that kamla was the Broadband Zar
00:42:50
that was responsible for this thing I mean it's who knows it's just no because I saw it I I saw that a bunch of
00:42:56
senators wrote letter to her and they claimed that she was the Broadband Zar but I don't know if that's true or not
00:43:02
true and whether she was remember she was the AIS are I mean the administration did put her nomy in
00:43:10
charge of various technology initiatives here's an idea save money get the get the best solution at the lowest price
00:43:17
and then re-evaluate that as you go and I just want to point out with the it's a
00:43:21
this is a a subtle point but Elon also open sourced his patents for the superchargers and let anybody do them
00:43:29
and he opened up the superchargers to other vehicles which he didn't have to do and when they gave him a loan back in
00:43:37
the cindra days and the Fisker days remember they gave these incentives in the form of loans he's the only guy who
00:43:42
paid it back everybody else failed so now you're punishing the guy who actually built the infrastructure for
00:43:48
both of these projects so the reward for actually doing the right thing which starlink did SpaceX did and Tesla did is
00:43:56
to be punished and then you're giving a leg up to somebody else who's building these Char who's more qualified to build
00:44:01
these charges at scale or a satellite Network at scale the person who's already done it he's already done it I
00:44:07
do worry that there's a growing version of the Elon derangement syndrome that's also kind of like festering yeah for
00:44:16
sure which just it just stops people from thinking rationally of course I mean we're talking about laying fiber
00:44:23
lines cable modems to people who are hundreds of miles into the countryside that makes no sense when you can just
00:44:31
beep put a satellite dish up today what are we even talking about I mean government has never been
00:44:37
particularly efficient but there was a period of time where people would at least care about wanting to make it more
00:44:44
efficient and it would be a scandal if there was political corruption to try and bias the result in a way that
00:44:51
actually deprived the intended recipients of the program from getting the services they were supposed to get
00:44:56
and cost cost the government way more money than it needed to we're so far beyond being that country anymore where
00:45:04
we actually debate the best policy we're now it's just like we're Waring political tribes and the objective of
00:45:12
the party is to punish its political opponents to engage in retaliation and to basically loot the public coffers as
00:45:21
much as possible on behalf of their constituents and that's what's basically happening you know it's completely
00:45:26
dysfunctional well let's use this podcast if you see government ways tell us no really cares because the media
00:45:31
doesn't really shine a light on it because they're they're completely tribalize as well I agree with
00:45:36
everything you're saying except the last part I don't think it's on behalf of their constituents I don't think any of
00:45:40
us see any benefit from any of this spending no no I meant they're donors the they donor constituents they not not
00:45:47
the citizens of the country but who but who's winning in this it's not like this
00:45:52
42 is is 42 billion lining the pockets of I don't know name me how do you think all those fiber companies that are going
00:45:59
to lay that fiber are going to get that money and then and then they're going to
00:46:03
cont it's been it's been three or four years they they haven't done a single thing I mean I still think they're cash
00:46:09
the checks yeah it seems like we're at the stage of just pure incompetence and retaliation we're not even at the stage
00:46:14
of actually even giving it to anybody else I mean that would be so they're giving the money away and they're so
00:46:21
incompetent they're not getting the political benefit from it no they're so incompetent they can't get out of their
00:46:25
own way but somebody's getting that call it 50 billion that we don't need to spend and the way that money is awarded
00:46:33
is going to be political we're going to think that they're going to turn around and give big political contributions of
00:46:38
course they well I think I think that I think the good news is that the more of these things we shine a light on the
00:46:43
harder it'll be to hide when these grants are actually given or what the execution is and
00:46:50
running list let's start a running list no to your point Sak maybe like you know
00:46:54
we need a Revival of the 60 minutes you know waste Fraud and Abuse on this program we'll do it at the end of the
00:47:00
show every time we have a running list at allin.com of just every of one of these scandals and we'll feature it so
00:47:06
leak it to us first send it to us my DMs are open all right listen early stage investing has always been hard there was
00:47:13
a tweet storm this week that y combinator might be having a hard time replicating their early success we'll
00:47:19
discuss it now a thread this week from ex user molsen Hart caught a couple people's eyes he made the case that it's
00:47:25
been a rough decade for y based on the accelerator top companies page YC list as top companies by 2023 Revenue there
00:47:34
and uh you'll notice there's not a lot of companies from the recent cohorts out of the 50 companies featured only three
00:47:38
are from the classes after 2020 most of them being from the early 20110 10 obviously that's because they've been
00:47:45
around longer but it sparked a big discussion that there were so many winners from the 2009 to 2016 era and
00:47:53
that uh maybe the class size at YC has expanded a whole bunch and maybe that's part of the problem but there's a bigger
00:48:00
problem in VC that we've talked about here here's a chart from Carta that just shows the percentage of VC funds that
00:48:07
have made a distribution since 2017 over 40% of 2018 vintage funds have not made a single distribution yet uh
00:48:16
and it's getting to the point year five six or seven where you probably should have had some distributions occur
00:48:22
obviously a lot of this has to do with maybe m&a and those early winds being taken off the table we've talked about
00:48:28
that a whole bunch but here's the chart that kind of gets really interesting an explosion in fund managers occurred as
00:48:37
we all know and this chart shows from pitchbook the first time first time VC managers that raised a second VC fund as
00:48:44
a share of all firsttime VC managers and it's now down from above 50% to below gosh 15% so what are your thoughts
00:48:55
here Chima my gosh Venture is a really really tough business every year for the last seven six years seven years I have
00:49:07
published my returns which most VCS don't want to [Music] do I do it because I go back and I look
00:49:15
at it and I think having public accountability actually drives some good decisions they they may
00:49:22
seem suboptimal in the moment but they in in the long run turn out to be good decisions and the biggest one has been
00:49:31
generating liquidity so Nick you can throw up this thing but I'm sure there are funds in each of these vintages that
00:49:38
have done way better than me so I'm not I'm not saying you know it is what it is
00:49:42
but what I want to point out is if I go and look inside of these funds and tell you how hard it has been to generate
00:49:49
this DPI it's like it's like dragging an entire just sack of potatoes over the Finish Line
00:50:01
like like a truck of dead bodies over a Finish Line it is super super hard and the things that we have fought are
00:50:10
two one is that the gation of companies has totally blown out we used to be in a
00:50:17
world where by year five six or seven you could return money you just can't do that anymore unless you get
00:50:22
extraordinarily lucky which by the way I got when saaks was running Yammer it was an enormous win for all of us but
00:50:31
that is just exceptionally rare and that was m in year what five or six sacks there's so few there's so few
00:50:37
entrepreneurs capable of that he's one of maybe five or 10 so other than that I've never really had a company that has
00:50:46
generated liquidity in year five six or seven they've always generated if they've generated it at all in years 11
00:50:53
12 and 13 and so the problem with that is that at some point you have these paper marks that say you're winning and
00:51:02
things are working but there's no path to liquidity so then I what I did was I stepped in to the secondary markets and
00:51:10
I would sell and it would really upset certain Founders but I was very clear that when
00:51:19
I was running outside capital and I was running outside capital on behalf of really organizations that I believed in
00:51:26
the broad Foundation the Mayo clinics Memorial slone ketering my job was to get them money back you know these were
00:51:33
their Pension funds these were the things that they use to build facilities cancer research cancer research I didn't
00:51:39
have the you know ability to just sit on my hands and say oh you know what you're
00:51:44
15 don't worry so it it's just meant to say that the the tactics of generating liquidity and Venture are very
00:51:53
misunderstood and very underappreciated and even then you sell something that are just absolute winners that had you
00:52:01
waited another five or six years would have turned another you know one or two turns but that's not the job the job is
00:52:09
not to maximize absolute every single win the job is to return capital in a reasonable time period so that your
00:52:17
investors don't run out of money to give you yeah it's a it's a tough game man it
00:52:22
is really really really tough yeah and the the insight and and Sorry by the way and I feel this now because you know the
00:52:28
last five or six years has been entirely my own capital and my gosh it's hard yeah managing liquidity is it's
00:52:35
impossible especially when you can't rely on anybody else so well and thank God for the secondary markets even
00:52:41
emerging because at the same time that the secondary markets emerged and people were willing to buy Venture assets you
00:52:48
know going into their second decade I would have been in real trouble without the without reasonably liquid myself
00:52:54
included I mean my numbers my numbers would be a quarter of what they are yeah and I I took advantage of almost every
00:53:00
time I had one of those opportunities to sell some shares pair some positions and
00:53:04
that's how we got our DPI as well because let's face it Lina con and the anti-tech sentiment has led to these
00:53:12
large companies not buying startups and instead they compete with them they just
00:53:16
say We'll build it inhouse because you're not letting us buy it and it's broken the entire ecosystem now that's
00:53:23
broken the the IPO process is broken I tried to flip that on its head with backs you know some worked some didn't
00:53:34
many didn't in the end many of mine didn't work out at the end there was a period where it looked like it was
00:53:39
working but these are all attempts at changing the liquidity cycle yeah of these companies because the way that
00:53:47
things stand today we are not in a sustainable industry it is if you raise funds and think about fee generation but
00:53:55
it is not if you think about returning money to Founders LPS getting employees compensated for many years of you know
00:54:02
toil that they put in it's very tough game right now well Sachs right now we're seeing people do things like
00:54:09
selling you know their early SpaceX or their early stripe whatever it is to other VCS to later stage funds a lot of
00:54:17
ways to try to secure DPI what's your thoughts on the state of venture today given all this data that we're looking
00:54:24
at today well two two points so first I agree with chamath that the amount of time it takes to generate an outcome for
00:54:32
I'd say most startups is longer than the 10-year period of these funds and these
00:54:37
funds can be extended up to 12 years usually but then what do you do after that I this takes a lot longer than that
00:54:43
in a lot of cases to generate a meaningful outcome I just had two companies that I invested in in my
00:54:49
second fund so in 2019 and 2020 so four years ago and five years ago just got marked up and it was a big markup the
00:54:57
company's doing well I call them late bloomers it took four to five years for them to accomplish what they wanted to
00:55:04
in terms of like building out the tech I mean I invested at like the earliest stage so that's how long it took and now
00:55:09
they just did growth rounds and they're kind of Off to the Races but you know I could easily be 10 years from here to
00:55:15
get to yeah a liquidity event so you're talking about more like 15year funds so I agree with that point the second thing
00:55:21
though is that the big thing that's happened in our industry is we had a bubble in 2020 and especially
00:55:29
2021 and we just had a ton of capital come into the industry because the fed and the the um federal government aird
00:55:37
dropped 10 trillion do liquidity onto the economy in reaction to covid and not all that money went into VC it went into
00:55:44
a lot of places but the VC industry was flooded with cash and you see this in the deployments I mean in those bubble
00:55:51
years there was something like 200 billion a year of capital deployment when normally it's 60 to 100 billion so
00:55:58
if twice the amount of money is going into the industry and is being deployed and rounds are now twice as big and
00:56:04
valuations are twice as big that has a huge outcome a huge effect on returns so for example the average Venture fund is
00:56:12
like a 2X return but if the entry prices were artificially double then there goes
00:56:18
your return right there you get 2X 1X so I think we're just in The Hangover of this massive liquidity bubble that
00:56:26
didn't originate in the Venture Capital industry it came from frankly the federal government but we're just
00:56:32
Downstream of that now what I would say is I I do think we're at the tail end of
00:56:36
working that out and the good news is that we now have maybe the most exciting Tech wave ever which is AI definitely
00:56:44
the most exciting Tech wave since the internet came along in the mid to late 90s so the hope is we're finally going
00:56:51
to have like really exciting things to invest in again but but yeah look I think think we're at the tail end of the
00:56:57
last cycle and the beginning of a of a new cycle and vintage Distortion is so real you know it's very hard to
00:57:04
understand how each of these vintages with your late bloomers or overpriced things company's getting hundred million
00:57:11
rounds totally at a billion dollar valuation before they have product Market fit and those
00:57:16
distortions were just so pronounced the last five to 10 years that we're now sorting them out like a like a house of
00:57:23
mirrors where you don't know who's tall who's fat who's skinny what the reality is here and the other big thing is this
00:57:28
peanut butter effect that you know I tweeted about today you know during Peak Zer you had all these exceptional team
00:57:35
members you know the number two three four five person at a company that was doing great they would leave to start
00:57:42
their own company so the talent got spread then you had so many of these Founders rushing into the same vertical
00:57:48
so you'd have 20 startups because there was too much Capital pursuing the same opportunity you pursu the same
00:57:53
opportunity what happens to earnings they get spread then what happens to customers they get spread across 20
00:58:00
different products competing for the same customer and then what happens with you know ownership Stakes for us as GPS
00:58:07
and LPS chamath the ownership Stakes because the valuations went up so much they got spread like peanut butter and
00:58:14
instead of a series a getting you 20% of a company it got you 10 instead of a c check getting you 5% it got you one
00:58:20
there's no DPI possible you nailed it and saaks nailed it but but and the thing to remember is both of those two
00:58:26
things now work together to erode the return stream for the general partner but really most importantly for The
00:58:33
Limited partner so I I do think that we are in a situation where the average returns are going to Decay by 50 to 100%
00:58:41
because of what sack said and because of what you said on top of that I don't think we know what the actual cap
00:58:48
structure needs to be for a successful AI company is it 20 people that does the work of 2,000 now because they all of
00:58:56
these agents and systems that work on their behalf if that's true giving that company hundreds of millions of dollars
00:59:03
is actually the opposite of what you want to do you want to give that company 10 or 15 and then let them cook and so
00:59:10
we have a we have a right sizing of capital problem that needs to happen the data would tell you though that the
00:59:15
industry understands that so the fact that we've gone from 50% of people being able to raise a fund to 12% means that a
00:59:23
lot of people will get washed out of the industry less Capital being raised which
00:59:28
probably is foreshadowing the fact that these companies will need a lot less Capital but you know that has a lot of
00:59:34
implications as it ripples through our economy it has I think it's very good for the early stage I think you know you
00:59:39
guys are very good there you've talked about how it's good for you it's very complicated I think for the expansion
00:59:44
and growth stage capital and then I think it's going to be there's going to be another turn on what happens on the
00:59:51
IPO markets because you can't have so many companies waiting with very very few ways of accessing
01:00:00
Public Market capital and exposure I just think this is that is that is fundamentally broken and we're going to
01:00:06
have to reinvent we tried once with spaxs we're going to have to go back to the drawing board and try again listings
01:00:12
secondary markets that are more fluid I don't know what it is but we need to do something because the status quo doesn't
01:00:17
work I think there's a lot so many good points that we're hitting here I I'll just say the the other thing to build on
01:00:24
your point about hey these take less Capital you have to look at what does your ownership after you've been diluted
01:00:30
half by 50% as a seed or series a investor you're going to be down to half so if you own 10% you own five if you
01:00:37
own seven like YC or we do in a company you're going to own three you're going to really have to model out is the
01:00:44
valuation you're looking at what does it pencil out to for an outcome and when I
01:00:48
did this with our investments I saw a leak in my game which was hey I'm putting a 100K into a $25 million round
01:00:54
or a $50 million round as a followon investment you know to support the founder okay what does that do for my
01:01:00
LPS well that 100K would need to hit some extraordinary outcome 5 10 2040 billion doar in order for us to return
01:01:09
the fund so now my team understands hey take that 125k that 250k that 500k do more four do four more accelerator
01:01:17
companies with it because those could return the fund and that's that fund math people stop doing I think all these
01:01:24
fund managers who are getting wiped out they never penciled out what does this company I'm giving a million dollars
01:01:31
need to hit in order for me to return my fund and now they're finding out that look just tweeted look at that let me
01:01:39
see you know everybody's course correcting I mean it's basically the capital deployments gone back to where
01:01:45
it was in 2019 let's call it so again we had this bubble the foam started building in 2020 but you had Co people
01:01:52
didn't know what to think so there was some restraint I guess and then 2021 it just went
01:01:58
wild that was nuts man midle vintages are just going to be garbanzo beans 21 22 well you know that's such an
01:02:06
interesting point if you could return Capital you're gonna look like a Euro also chth I remember I don't know
01:02:13
if it was Michael Moritz or or Doug Leone but I was talking to seoa about the time dispersion of your fund like
01:02:20
over what period of time are you deploying a fund and man people started deploying funds in 18 months because
01:02:27
they could raise the next fund so quick so like screw it I'm going to deploy this Fund in 18 months 24 months and LPS
01:02:33
were saying to me like how what period are you going to deploy this and I said well you know I was taught by Fred
01:02:37
Wilson and this person 36 months 48 months would be a good window to deploy Capital because you know it SMS it out I
01:02:46
think you're saying the the Dirty Little Secret of the Venture business which is
01:02:50
at some point people get to a fork in the road if they hyper optimize for returns I'll put benchmark I'll put Fred
01:02:57
Wilson in USV I'll put sequoia's early stage fund they have to introduce time diversity they keep the funds small and
01:03:06
they look to hit Grand Slams but there are many other people and I would say the most of the set
01:03:13
outside of that take the road more traveled which is then you optimize for size which then becomes a fee game and
01:03:21
so you optimize for velocity get the funds out as quick as possible raise a new f they have no intention of
01:03:27
generating returns because they have no ability to when you have absolutely no time diversity in this business in a
01:03:33
pool of capital you're giving away one of your best edges David just talked about it as a smart practitioner he was
01:03:39
able to nurture these companies and all of a sudden they start to win if you've all of a sudden flushed all your money
01:03:44
in fund one then you go to fund two fund three by the time something in fund one
01:03:48
hits what are you going to do you're going to cross the funds or you're going to justify taking money from the left
01:03:54
hand to pay the right hand or just going to let your ownership Wayne because you
01:03:58
frittered all the money away these are all the problems that most of these folks have encumbered themselves with
01:04:04
it's very difficult to get out of it's going to take now look In fairness to them they probably you know got good
01:04:10
while the getting's good so they'll make a ton of money and fees but they will not be able to raise funds and those
01:04:15
fees are not clawed back folks for those of you playing along at home just just by the way I feel better about those
01:04:20
late bloomers in my portfolio because I know the marks are real because if they're getting marked up now now then
01:04:26
it's very very solid compared to frankly some of those marks that we got in the bubble year like 20201 I call them tiger
01:04:34
marks whether it was tiger or not it's just less real quite frankly and a lot of those companies are retrenching and
01:04:41
have issues so a mark now it just means something different than a mark then but
01:04:46
look I want to you know just so we're not like totally beating up on VC there was you remember that in this bubble
01:04:53
period of September 2021 everybody thought that this party would just continue forever and this is a good
01:05:01
example from The Wall Street Journal where I was talking about how University endowments were minting billions in
01:05:06
Golden Era Venture Capital so the bubble wasn't just in VC it was in the public markets too because we had Zer right
01:05:13
like interest rates were zero liquidity was just flowing and so it was very easy
01:05:18
for companies to get liquid they ipoed and then the valuations were stratospheric so the distributions LPS
01:05:26
were massive in 2021 and then that led to again more funds be able to raise bigger funds everyone was just kind of
01:05:33
paying it forward and thought the party would just keep going so this is what happens in a bubble is everybody thinks
01:05:40
that it's just going to keep going like that this is why it's so important as a fund manager or an entrepreneur for you
01:05:47
to get great advice from people who've been at this for a long time and focus on the process you cannot control all
01:05:54
these outcomes you cannot control all these meta events what you can control is your relationship with your customers
01:06:01
building a team making great bets supporting late bloomers that's the critical part of all this is the process
01:06:08
and you can make your process better and so with my team internally I'm constantly talking to them about our
01:06:15
selection of companies how we help companies get pulled through and get Downstream funding how we literally our
01:06:21
big effort this year is how do we introduce our companies to the top VC fir terms and we've been working on that
01:06:28
as a internal project right of just getting our great breakout companies to the best investors to increase our pull
01:06:37
through it is a process and you have to trust and focus on your process yeah well look ironically just I mean just to
01:06:46
end on sort of a positive note if these interest rate cuts are real like if we we just got 50 if we get another 50 this
01:06:52
year if inflation's really Tamed and are never going to go to zero but if they go
01:06:58
down substantially and we have this new AI disruption this new AI Tailwind we could
01:07:05
be back in another Golden Era it's not going to be a bubble but it's could be another Golden Era so we'll see start
01:07:12
companies from your lips to God's ears love you guys I gotta go love you all right shth had to go do work
01:07:20
apparently he's starting this New Concept Sachs which jth is actually going to work and uh uh at a company uh
01:07:27
we never got to talk about the uh debate because we were busy doing the summit and we took the week off from a new
01:07:32
episode uh people wanted to hear your take what did you think of kamla and Trump the one and only debate we're
01:07:39
going to hear apparently any any thoughts I think that KLA Harris performed better than
01:07:47
expected she did that I think mostly through having canned answers to topics and she was able to kind of memorize
01:07:56
those answers and and say them and she was never knocked out of her preparation she was well prepared yeah I think she
01:08:05
was well prepared however we now know that these were canned answers because in subsequent press interviews she gives
01:08:10
us the exact same thing it's like a jukebox where you just push the button get the same answer exactly so she's
01:08:16
she's memorized a certain number of talking points and that's all she's going to give you no matter what the
01:08:22
question is and if you saw that it's become a meme now where if you saw that question when she was
01:08:27
asked about inflation there's a pause when she's figuring out which greatest hit she's going to play and then you
01:08:33
know she I guess pushes b26 in her head and then it begins so I was born in the middle class and it's working apparently
01:08:42
right it seems like it's it's helping her yeah I think what you saw is that she got a bounce out of the debate but
01:08:48
now it's sort of like a lot of these um bounces there's been kind of a effervescence to it and then it kind of
01:08:55
Settles down back to their occurring pattern and so I think the election is extremely close but I don't think oh
01:09:01
yeah I mean every day it's like a poll going one way or the other I mean this is the closest of our lifetime maybe or
01:09:08
that I can remember I mean it's nuts how this thing has flipped over and over again what did you think of Trump's
01:09:13
performance were you disappointed there were some rumors uh people were a little
01:09:17
upset that he doesn't prep as much as he should what what's your what's your advice there you know well I mean I
01:09:24
think that uh he was in a very difficult situation you basically had a three-on-one situation where he was up
01:09:30
against not just KLA Harris but the two debate moderators it turns out that lindsy Davis is a comma sorority sister
01:09:38
David Mur was factchecking him constantly and some of those fact checks weren't even correct um for example we
01:09:46
now know that the Springfield City manager has acknowledged complaints about pets being eaten far I was
01:09:54
wondering if we were going to get through it's as far as far back as March there
01:09:58
are videos of him talking about the complaints at city council meeting now you can you can say that you don't
01:10:06
believe those stories or whatever but those reports were real but David Mir fact checked in real time saying that
01:10:14
Trump was wrong and there was like this effort to kind of Gaslight and make him sound crazy during the debate when there
01:10:21
are in fact sources for what he was saying and it might have thrown him off a little bit I noticed like it was like
01:10:26
he I I agree they going into it I think they need to negotiate in the future you
01:10:31
know how they're negotiating the microphones on or off audience on or off I think they should
01:10:38
negotiate are we factchecking in real time or are we not factchecking and who's doing that fact and they only fact
01:10:44
check one candidate for example when KLA Harris repeated numerous hoaxes like the
01:10:48
very fine people hoax the bloodbath hoax the suckers and losers hoax I mean these
01:10:54
are things that were already addressed in the last debate and you know even leftwing sites like Snopes have said the
01:11:00
whole veryify people thing is for people who know that they there's been selective edits and I mean there's been
01:11:06
selective edits forever but that one is particularly egregious it's really egregious the blood bath one is really
01:11:10
egregious too because because he was talking about the blood bath yeah just make it into a January
01:11:17
6th extension which it's not right so she was able to say these things and never got fact checked once which meant
01:11:23
she never got knocked out of her and let's also be honest like Trump is hyperbolic so if you are going to say
01:11:31
you know oh we're going to fact check Trump like there's a lot of material there and he's just he's a hyperbolic
01:11:37
guy that's kind of his shtick right I mean but but here's the thing is that in the wake of that debate look I I think a
01:11:43
lot of people scoring the debate on like technical Debaters points would award her the the the win for for that night I
01:11:50
don't clearly she won yeah I don't deny that however what I think has been surprising is that in the wake of the
01:11:57
debate you're seeing her support sort of return more to its previous level and so
01:12:04
what I'm saying is the effect of that's wearing off and I think one of the reasons why that's wearing off is
01:12:09
because Trump still has the killer issues in this election he's got the border and he's got inflation and the
01:12:15
economy and Harris may have done well again on debers points but what substantive answer did she give in that
01:12:23
debate except to say I'm not Joe Biden which is I guess true however what you're basically saying is you won't
01:12:30
defend your own administration's record you are the incumbent you're not the change candidate and you're saying that
01:12:36
people should vote for you because you're not Joe Biden well what is it about Joe Biden's record that what is it
01:12:42
about Joe Biden's policies that you don't agree with I mean after all you cast the tiebreaking vote for the uh
01:12:48
inflation reduction act you cast it for the 2 trillion American Rescue plan that
01:12:52
set off the inflation so the debate Moder never asked Harris well what is it about you that is different than Joe
01:12:59
Biden on a policy level other than the fact I thought that was like a great moment for her objectively I think you
01:13:08
and I've said this forever here on this show uh putting our feelings aside about
01:13:11
the candidates I think whoever comes across as the most normal or the most moderate is going to win and I think
01:13:18
she's done a great job of like P convincing those moderates that she's not crazy and he is what what are your
01:13:26
thoughts on that because people looked at this very podcast and they've said to me my God that's the Trump I want to
01:13:31
vote for that Trump 2.0 the Allin Trump and then people are like ah he's going back to the insult comic Trump but I
01:13:38
don't want the chaos what are your thoughts on moderates specifically in the swing States and and this sort of
01:13:44
strategy let's talk about let's talk about the teamsters so Biden when he was still in the race was plus eight among
01:13:51
the teamsters Rank and file and now that uh Harris is the the candidate Trump has
01:13:57
up something like plus 26 with the teamsters yeah why is that cuz she's isn't she pro-union as well he was Union
01:14:04
Joe so I mean it was like in the name I understand why they loved him there's something about her policies and I think
01:14:12
her the the look I think within the Democratic party think it's her personality I think I think it's partly
01:14:18
personality but I also think it's its policies and cultural issues so within the Democratic party there have always
01:14:23
been two tracks there's the beer track and there's the wine track and so you know Bill Clinton was classic beer track
01:14:30
guy right your summit with Obama right and I think Joe Biden was was beer track then there's kind of the wine track
01:14:37
which is the more it's the part of the party that cares about these Boutique cultural issues starting with Dei and
01:14:44
equity and uh trans and things like that limousine liberals is what they used to
01:14:49
be called but I like yours wine liberals or yeah the woke wine basically the entire California Democratic party is
01:14:56
very wi track I mean Gavin is very wine track Comm Harris is very wi track you can understand why a blue collar worker
01:15:03
it doesn't appeal to that they want more of that lunch paale traditional Democrat
01:15:08
but that Democratic party doesn't really exists anymore I mean the Democratic party has evolved to be the party of the
01:15:14
professional class whereas the Republicans are more the party of the working class and you're now starting to
01:15:20
see it I think Biden was the democrat's last vestage of this working-class party
01:15:26
he really worked at being appealing to those voters you know that whole Scranton Joe image yeah and un Joe yeah
01:15:31
exactly whereas kamla when you get her talking in an unguarded moment and is not a canned answer she's going to talk
01:15:38
about diversity equity and inclusion and that's not what your typical Teamster wants to hear let me ask you challenging
01:15:44
question because one it's likes when I ask you a challenge a bit if Trump loses what do you think will be the
01:15:51
cause of the loss if if he loses like strategically when we look back on the last six months
01:15:58
what do you think you would change what would cause it well look I mean the the the the great asset that KLA Harris has
01:16:06
is not her likability it's not her track record it's not her policies it's the fact that she's got the media behind her
01:16:15
and if you look at like for example ABC News 100% of the coverage by ABC News is
01:16:21
positive whereas something like 93% of the of their coverage on Trump is negative and you saw this that before
01:16:30
Harris replaced Biden's the nominee she had very low favorability ratings and then the media basically reinvented her
01:16:36
as this transformative candidate so look when you've got the media willing to operate as day facto members of your
01:16:43
campaign that's tremendously powerful if we had a fair media this election wouldn't be close so that is the
01:16:50
advantage the Democrats had now look should Trump have done the debate with ABC News no I think he should have
01:16:57
chosen more fair moderators I mean to their credit I think CNN played the Biden Trump debate pretty fair and down
01:17:04
the middle but ABC I mean it was predictable that like I said I mean one of the hosts was her sari sister they
01:17:11
friends so you know I I think that if Trump loses you could say that his willingness to walk into the liance den
01:17:19
take on all comers do every interview you could say maybe that wasn't as strategic as what she did but at the end
01:17:25
of the day I think that voters will appreciate that both Trump and JD are willing to do basically every podcast
01:17:32
every interview they're not afraid to answer questions and when they do answer questions you can see them thinking and
01:17:39
they don't give you the same canned answer they've given 10 times before including at the debate so yeah I mean
01:17:45
that's my take what what's yours JK on which aspect be more specific give me a give me a specific what do you think
01:17:51
what do you if if if she ends up winning what do you think the reason will be yeah that's a good that's a good
01:17:58
question if she ends up winning I think it will be that people believe that they I think it will be
01:18:07
that moderates in those swing States and women believe that it's too much chaos and that Trump will be too much they
01:18:16
want a calmer same thing reason Biden W right like that there's this like concept that the adults are in the room
01:18:22
and it will be calm and it won't be chaotic and I think people just still see Trump as a bit chaotic and I I think
01:18:28
that's the big fear and I think they've played the abortion card and the right to choose really well even though Trump
01:18:35
said it here I'm not going to sign the abortion ban I'm Pro IVF I think they have that really great win of saying hey
01:18:41
you bragged about overturning roie Wade probably wasn't smart to brag about that
01:18:46
and they have that clip that they can keep reinforcing so if he does lose and I don't know that he's going to lose I
01:18:51
think there's a lot of people who are going to go in there and vote for him but not say it to pulsers and
01:19:00
not say it to their family and friends because they're embarrassed because of the pressure against orange Hitler or
01:19:07
you know this whole rhetoric that he's going to you know overturn democracy so I think it's a pretty good chance that
01:19:16
he's going to win actually I don't think that this yeah I mean look I I think in
01:19:20
a close race right they say the statistics in a close race favor him yeah look I mean maybe we're asking the
01:19:26
wrong question here which is why would he lose I mean I think maybe the real question is why is he favored to win
01:19:30
because I think the polls including Nate still ver still show him favor to win and I think that when you look at what
01:19:36
the big issues are in this campaign and what has people agitated and upset why they think the country is on the wrong
01:19:43
track something like 65% it has to do with the economy it has to do with inflation it has to do with the Border I
01:19:48
think the on the cultural issues the trans stuff drives parents crazy they don't want the government telling them
01:19:53
what to do with their kids so it's hard to think of a killer issue other than maybe abortion that Harris has on her
01:20:01
side it feels like all the issues cut Trump's way but the again the thing that Trump doesn't have and there's no way to
01:20:07
for him to fix this is the media is just so in the tank for for Harris now you raise a good point look could Trump be
01:20:15
more disciplined yeah absolutely however you know I think that what amplifies that is the fact that the media is quick
01:20:23
to jump on every little thing he says and distorts it and he sets himself up for it you know like part of what makes
01:20:29
him activate the base is that erratic Behavior his stick you know the comedy and then I do believe that it gets
01:20:37
weaponized by the Press because it's like such so easy for them I agree with you that Trump could be more disciplined
01:20:43
however I don't think it's as bad as what you're saying because if it were there'd be no need to make up these
01:20:48
obvious hoaxes there'd be no need to you know lie about the very fine people or or what he said about blood bath so if
01:20:56
he was really saying that many outrageous things why would you need to keep inventing things that he didn't say
01:21:02
and if they're just stacking them yeah the answer to that question is just throw everything you got at him yeah
01:21:06
they're throwing everything at him but look at look at kamla's interviews I mean she hasn't given very many but I
01:21:12
mean her answers are just I mean just watch them I'm not going to characterize them but just just watch her actual said
01:21:18
it I mean Megan KY thinks she's stupid and not bright I mean she's not the most dynamic speaker that's for sure um and
01:21:26
she doesn't seem to be able to uh have a dynamic debate with intelligent people who are experts in
01:21:34
their field let's say you know she can't hold her own in the way you can see JD can right and and Trump Canen uh so here
01:21:42
we go and just on the um on the second assassination attempt I don't know if you even want to go there but I mean
01:21:48
gosh I'm so glad that he didn't get shot at again this is scary stuff folks uh this rhetoric's got to come down I keep
01:21:56
saying it nobody wants to listen to me but man be well let's look at the rhetoric that Ryan Ruth was literally
01:22:05
quoting on his Twitter was saying that Trump is basically existential threat to democracy he was quoting what Joe Biden
01:22:13
and KLA Harris and the mainstream media have been saying chapter and verse uh so
01:22:17
I think that you know if you want to ascribe motivation there where did Ruth get get these ideas they've been
01:22:26
endlessly Amplified by the mainstream media and it's not like a one-off comment it's been the central narrative
01:22:31
for the last several years is that somehow Trump represents this existential threat to democracy and one
01:22:36
way or another that threat must be eliminated and I think Ryan Ruth simply took literally what the mainstream media
01:22:43
has been saying 1% of your followers is what I tell everybody high-profile people you and I both know is 1% of
01:22:51
people in your following and we all have large followings here and and there certainly people who have extremely
01:22:57
large followings 1% are mentally ill like when I say mentally ill I mean severely mentally ill and if it's but 1%
01:23:04
of your following if it's 0.1% this could be thousands of people and this is what happened to John lennin and and and
01:23:10
other famous people who've been killed tragically is those mentally ill people interpret things in a very different way
01:23:17
and when you say you know a phrase that has triggers in it threat to democracy fight like how whatever it is they
01:23:25
interpret it differently and so just please folks when you call the guy Hitler for years and again you
01:23:32
create millions or billions of Impressions around that and it's not like a one-off statement but it's
01:23:37
something that's drummed into the public over and over again it seems to me you're asking for trouble stay safe
01:23:44
please turnone down the rhetoric everybody and we will see you next time on the all in podcast
01:23:50
byebye let your winners ride Rain Man David and instead we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy
01:24:02
with [Music] it besties are that's my dog taking [Music] driveway oh Manet we should all just get a room and
01:24:23
just have one big huge cuz they're all this useless it's like this like sexual tension that they just need to release
01:24:34
someh we need to get mer [Music] our going [Music]

Episode Highlights

  • The Allin Podcast's Massive Reach
    The podcast has garnered 20 million views and is expected to reach 50 million.
    “Oh my Lord, I think we'll be around 50 million!”
    @ 00m 22s
    September 20, 2024
  • Celebrating Freeberg's Success
    Freeberg organized a successful summit, earning praise from his colleagues.
    “Let's give Freeberg his flowers!”
    @ 01m 42s
    September 20, 2024
  • The Fed's Rate Cut Announcement
    The Fed cut rates by 50 basis points, stirring discussions about the economy's future.
    “The Fed just cut rates 50 bips!”
    @ 06m 54s
    September 20, 2024
  • AI's Impact on Customer Support
    AI is set to disrupt call centers and customer support roles significantly.
    “Call centers are going to be the first big disruption caused by AI.”
    @ 17m 40s
    September 20, 2024
  • AI Disruption in Customer Support
    AI is set to replace level one customer support roles, transforming the industry.
    “This is going to be a big disruption.”
    @ 21m 11s
    September 20, 2024
  • 100% Accuracy Achieved
    AI-powered software has reached 100% accuracy in a highly regulated environment.
    “We've been running it at 100% accuracy now for about 10 days.”
    @ 22m 33s
    September 20, 2024
  • Government Waste in Spending
    $50 billion allocated for rural internet and EV chargers has seen no progress.
    “Zero people have been connected according to FCC commissioner.”
    @ 34m 31s
    September 20, 2024
  • The Cost of Political Spending
    Political partisanship and incompetence lead to wasteful spending that could bankrupt the country.
    “We broke the seal on this crazy multi-trillion dollar spending.”
    @ 41m 19s
    September 20, 2024
  • The Challenge of Venture Capital
    Venture capital faces challenges with liquidity and returns due to inflated valuations and market distortions.
    “The job is to return capital in a reasonable time period.”
    @ 52m 12s
    September 20, 2024
  • The Broken IPO Market
    The current IPO market is fundamentally broken, requiring a reinvention of capital access.
    “We're going to have to reinvent... the status quo doesn't work.”
    @ 01h 00m 04s
    September 20, 2024
  • The Debate Dynamics
    Analysis of the recent debate reveals strategic advantages and media biases affecting candidates.
    “The media willing to operate as de facto members of your campaign is powerful.”
    @ 01h 16m 41s
    September 20, 2024
  • The Stakes of Rhetoric
    The discussion highlights the dangerous implications of inflammatory political rhetoric.
    “You're asking for trouble, stay safe.”
    @ 01h 23m 44s
    September 20, 2024

Episode Quotes

  • It's incredible how much they resonate.
    Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
  • We don't need to wait for some perfect LLM model.
    Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
  • I think this is one of the worst decisions by the current administration.
    Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
  • The job is to return capital in a reasonable time period.
    Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
  • You cannot control all these outcomes; focus on your process.
    Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
  • This rhetoric's got to come down.
    Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala

Key Moments

  • Afterglow Success00:06
  • Job Market Concerns15:09
  • 100% Accuracy22:33
  • Political Spending41:19
  • Venture Capital Challenges52:12
  • Interest Rate Cuts1:06:46
  • Debate Analysis1:16:41
  • Election Predictions1:19:16

Tension Over Time

Words per Minute Over Time

Vibes Breakdown