Nico Rosberg on the Booming Business of F1 | All-In Live from Miami

[Music] former F1 driver champion in 2016. He's getting into the venture business. Please welcome Nico. They started the season with 20 drivers and they would end the season with only 18 of them left. Wow. What was the craziest you've ever been involved in? Well, my my rival was my teammates. So, unfortunately, it really becomes like an enemy in a way. What were your first few deals? 11 laps, for example. Holy Good for you. This used to be an extremely dangerous sport. You had people dying every year in these tiny little cars with no roll cages, etc. But over time, it's become

incredibly safe. The number of people dying went from, you know, a couple dozen a year in the ' 50s, '60s, '7s, and now it's gotten incredibly safe. How scary is it to drive in those cars? And how do you get over that fear of death? First of all, hello everybody. That's a pretty That's a pretty intense start to the to the conversation. I just show Good job interviewing Jacob. World team world best. I I I got to get right to it. It's like set the mood. How are you still alive? How are you? Why haven't you died yet, Nico? I looked at that car. Justify yourself. Why is there no canopy on it? Why are your head exposed? It's so crazy

what you're doing or what you did. So, no, you're absolutely right. And I know um better than most people also because my father actually was a Formula 1 racer. Yeah. And he was racing champion. And a champion. I didn't want to say but yes, he was also a world champion. But you you were sorry I asked you backstage. You're one of only two fatherson world champions of all time. That's true. Pretty incredible. Which is very special. So I mean your dad's out there racing. You're at home with mom I assume. This has got to be terrifying to watch your dad do this. So at in his day they started the season with 20 drivers

and they would end the season with only 18 of them left. So it was a 10% chance more or less that you wouldn't make it through the season which is just that's crazy. Wow. I mean what then if you do an 8-year career like what are your odds? Like that's not looking very good. So there to your point. Yeah. Yeah. It was a death every 100,000 miles. Now it's a death every 67 million miles. I was very lucky because by the time I came in they had carbon fiber chassis. Um they had roll they have a roll hoop now you know and this this protection this halo around your head which recently saved a couple of lives in the last 5 years cuz Maxappen who's now the the the four-time world champion at the

moment. He landed on Lewis Hamilton's head in Italy with the full car and it was this halo that saved Lewis Hamilton's life. So, we're very very lucky how the sport has progressed um with the safety. How did you start drive? How old were you? Because um I didn't realize yesterday I go into the suite that we have and they say this kid is 18 years old as a driver. I had no idea that kids that young were driving. How old were you when you started and at what point did you start to become competitive? So, it's a bit like with with every sport that you have to start very very young. I started I was six, started go-karting I was six and then racing 10 years old. Now they start

racing at year at when they're 8 years old. So Antonelli, who was on pole position yesterday, the 18year-old, uh he started racing he was eight. He was in my go-karting team when he was 12. So I know him very very well and he is a generational talent, but it's very early for him cuz he's only 18. And he he took over the car of the greatest of all time. Lewis Hamilton left Ferrari, left Mercedes to go to Ferrari. and Antonelli took this car from Lewis Hamilton. That is insane pressure. Answer this question if you could. You said generation. I'll try I'll try my best. So if we had to design some kind of a model you could

you define the features that he had when he was six, seven or eight years old that could have predicted how good it was? Like is it the Metaclorian? Like so is it the Well, Anakin Skywalker was really good. I don't know. Nico specialist on Star Wars lore and anyway the metacloran to find the do you think that you could design something where people kids could come and take some kind of test you look at your reflexes or your you know your eye twitch speed or the way your brain works and is there a pattern do you think that is genetically predisposes some people to just be exceptional? So we've not come to that

point yet that we actually go through such tests. But I think there are a couple of things that would that would kind of satisfy that and one is your speed of processing because in a race car you're going at 220 mph and you have so many inputs flying at you and not only visual also sensual. Yeah. Everything and also sound um with the engine and everything and you have to process that so rapidly. How did you train for that? Um I even had a uh a computer program which I developed just for myself actually where I would have all these different inputs. So uh audio, touch, tactile had like a thing around here um and and even then visual on the computer and I would be catching these

inputs like and trying to break my record and the faster I would go the faster the program would go. Um so I was trying to develop these kind of things that to train my brain to move faster and react. reaction time is the key skill set of a driver. It's one of the ones. Is it also being courageous and like something with your amydala where like you don't have fear? There's that certainly. Yeah. Although I would say that I am actually someone who's quite fearful. Um and but when you're in it, you kind of also get used to things. Yeah. And you start to feel quite safe in the car nowadays. Um because I'm not a crazy adrenaline junkie unlike most other drivers actually out there like

someone you find that they are adrenaline junkies. Yeah like someone like first tappen is fearless like completely um or even Hamilton you know they're proper quite nutcases. Um so the paths are a little different for everyone. Yeah, there's different characters to the personality type. There is a then of course there's hand eye coordination. So to your point, Chamath, for young kids, probably there's a high chance that you put a tennis racket in their hand, they'll also be pretty good, very very quickly. And it's a similar set of skills. Can we shift and talk a little bit about the business of Formula 1. I mean, we were

talking backstage before the show a little bit and you shared some of the anecdotes about some of the valuations and what's happened over the last decade, decade and a half. maybe you can, you know, just kind of paint a picture for us on how this has evolved as kind of a business and where things sit today, where they're where they're headed and what's driven that. Yeah. So, um I'm a venture capitalist myself and that's why I'm very interested in the business side of uh of sport and F1 has gone through such an incredible inflection and there's a couple of factors that have come into play. They brought in budget caps for the teams. So the teams were spending just on sha on

their car development like north of 200 million a year and now it's like limited to 130 million a year just for the chassis itself not excluding engine drivers and top personnel. $130 million on how many cars is that like for a well there's 10 teams. Yeah. No, but is the 13 cars? Two race cars per year. Per year. But that's just the chassis. You then have the engine which is another 70 million. You then have the top driver who takes 50 million a year or 100. No, 100. No, that was the verse stopen rumor to go. Yeah. Plus marketing plus plus you get to maybe 70 80. Yeah. So fielding a team is how much? Fielding a

team is around uh you get close to 300 million. Wow. Yeah. But you're saying that the budget cap allowed everything to kind of So the budget cap brought in this cap for developing the chassis to 130. Um then suddenly Netflix also came in and Netflix has just made the sport so much more popular. It's unbelievable. Really changed the land. Just in the US you've gone from in a couple last couple of like six years 20 million fans to like 50 million fans. It's more than doubled only in the US alone. What do you think Netflix did? Right. So Netflix the owners of F1 are Liberty. Yeah. Which is a US right. It's a US-based uh company and they did very

well. They opened up social media. The new generation of drivers are really social media savvy and are are like the fan base is 40% women in America. How many women here today are F1 fans? Loads. There we go. Okay. Not too bad. Um, are all the drivers as good-looking as you or No. No. I don't want to go into that kind of Don't be to yourself in Miami. So, the audience blew up. The audience is has blown up. And you asked me what did they get right? So, what did they get right? The Netflix show, for those of you who have seen it, it's like a reality TV show. It's not just a sports documentary like, hey, this guy won here, but they go, they

managed to capture these personas behind the scenes and you really get to see the human beings behind the sport and that's very special. and they tried to replicate it in other sports like I think golf and tennis and it didn't work out as well because I think they got a little bit lucky also that here quite a few characters allowed them and completely opened up and allowed Netflix to capture the real intense behind-the-scenes moment and it's just fascinating to follow. Yeah. Um, so that's what we're before if you come in as an outsider, I had this experience like what team are you, you know, who you support like I'm not really sure,

but once you get to know the personalities, you have a vested interest, you have a history, there's something that you can contextualize. Let me just end on the on the business part. Yes. Um, so teams like 10 years ago, F1 teams were like worth $150 million. Yeah. And they would lose 50 million a year. And now the top teams go for five to six billion dollars 10 years later. It's like eye watering. It's incredible. Each other on the when you're driving the race, you try to like Yeah. bump into each other, you know. 100%. It's part of the game. Yeah. You have to unfortunately. Explain cuz I'm a neoight. I don't understand it. And I I

see like once in a while these NASCAR guys pull over, they get out, they throw their helmets at each other, you know, they get really upset. They seem like but they seem like hillbillies. You guys seem like a bunch of Europeans and like you guys seem like you're fancy, like a little more elegant. What What do you guys do? Do you guys like spray with Cleico on each other or something? Like how do you guys mess with each other? Nico didn't watch. So the the word we had one guy pushed it was first stop and pushed the other guy and he got like one week of community service. So uh that was a that was as far as it went. That's as far as the physical but when you're in the car.

Yeah. It's fierce. It's fierce. So take us through like what was the craziest you've ever been involved in altercationwise? Well, my my rival was my teammate. My rival was Louis Lewis Hamilton at the time. We were both racing for Mercedes. Any Lewis Hamilton fans here today? A little bit. Okay. Send me here. Good. Actually, Nico, can you talk about that in that period? He's so dominant, but the car is so dominant and then you win. What is it like where you're teammates with your biggest competitor? Like what is that dynamic like? That psychological dynamic? It's Are you friends? Are you guys friends or So with Lewis Hamilton, we were actually

best friends when we were 14 years old. We grew up racing together in the same team. Best friends, but when you get to F1, it's just so intense and so much is at stake. And if it's just the two of you racing for race wins every single time, it you can't stand him. You hate him. Yeah. It goes into hating. Yeah. Hate. I can see the content. Do you talk during the week or you don't even really interact? No, you don't interact much. So, unfortunately, it really becomes an like an enemy in a way, you know, and internally in your own team. Yeah. It's a horrible dynamic cuz also even your the rest of the team then need to start to be neutral. They can't take any sides. So, even when you win, it's not

like everybody's like leaning in with you. It's really a tough situation. So it's like two people in the same project who can't stand each other. Freedberg yet they keep but you keep working together. How much of that um fed your decision to retire literally days after you won the That was a little I think that caught some people off guard. Can you just tell us what happened? I was in my prime and I won that championship which for me was my dream come true and it was extremely intense. Thank you. It was extremely Thanks, Mom. I got one I got one clap from my mom sitting in the very big fan. Way to go, mom. Um, yeah, it was extremely intense and for me it just felt like the right

moment to I had a young daughter at home. She was one year old. Family um just felt like the right moment. I was in one piece to your comment it being dangerous and I just decided rationally you know I never wanted to exit on the way down. That's something I definitely wanted to avoid. I wanted to exit at the top and that was my moment and and I decided to pull the trigger. Has there been a good ROI for the car companies that that have invested in F1 in that all this money that they spend other than the notoriety? Are they inventing things that we all use and see and interact with day-to-day in our own daily driving experience or not really?

So, you probably will be driving an AMG at some point. I had an AMG at one point. There you go. Um, and there is tech from the F1 team in there now. Okay. From the for the hybrid from Mercedes. Yes. Hybrid and yeah, every every car car company will be benefiting. But the return on investment is also in terms of marketing. Mercedes there's a calculated return on investment which is 2 billion for their brand annually and they don't actually invest money anymore because the team is profitable now and highly profitable like these teams make 200 $300 million in profit every year. So they now have $6 billion valuations. Is

have we kind of peaked from your point of view? Is the market and the valuation curve still being climbed? There's still a lot of uh there's still a lot of upside at the moment because this growth has just happened in the last 5 years. Yeah. And there's still I mean even America there's still loads of growth potential. More races. There's licensing. The sport hasn't really even tapped into that yet. Do you think there's something about sports that are kind of more tuned to the way our brains now operate in a social media world, like a fast-paced world? Like, you know, golf became Liv. I mean, Liv really kind of changed the the face of golf. There's

now baseball's obviously dead. I mean, MLB has been on the decline for years in the United States. Not saying anything negative about baseball. I'm just saying that the viewership is going down. No, no, no, no. You're you're But there's also these conversations about basketball, the NBA. I'll tell you this crazy anecdote. I I was a co-owner of the Warriors. I sold two years ago. A friend of mine, friend of ours is in the market for a sports team and he went to Europe to look at a bunch of soccer teams and then we were all having dinner and his bankers produced this study that showed exactly this problem which is young people their attention span is shrinking. As it shrinks there are

certain sports they just cannot watch anymore. And it's totally correlated the negative viewership in baseball, the increase in the use of clips. So people are willing to watch baseball clips. They will not watch a baseball game to save their life. People will watch basketball clips. They won't watch basketball. The NBA's moving to clips. Yeah. And so it's this weird construction, but in some ways F1 is very set up for this already naturally, right? Do people don't really watch the whole sport as much as they want to watch clips. I'm guessing it's not that hour. How long is this race on sight? It's not that long. It's never

been and it's not that long. I mean that's the thing about but you guys also have a lot of a lot of data telemetry like you can feed that kind of anxious mind and there's no breaks it just goes I'm not I'm not sure if you have a point there unfortunately but um but pretty diplomat I was just trying to move the conversation no what I can say is that our sport has like the highest engagement rates across all sports even comparing to NBA and everything um but why is that I think there's just a huge hype at the moment and maybe yes maybe okay Maybe a little bit. It is fast-pacing. There's there's incredible action scenes like thrilling action. There's huge crashes. Did you not want

to get in the business given your knowledge and your experience? You didn't want to be in the because you you now have transitioned into venture capital. How did you make that decision versus working in the business of Formula 1? Oh, great question. Um because um yeah, that's a good qu. So, in Formula 1, what jobs would have been left for me now after driving would be for example running a team. But running a team is 24/7. Like you need full commitment. You need to move to the UK. All the teams are in the UK. It's a full life dedication. And I've been I've done that. Been there, done that. Now I want

more freedom in my life to define my my calendar and everything and be at home more. And so that job for example would not be a possibility and not something I want to do. And then beyond that, yeah, you can be a driver manager, but even there you need full commitment. So tell tell us about this transition then to tech and investing and venture and what was that journey and what attracted you to that? I was always inspired by people like Elon Musk who obviously you talking about uh before and those achievements that you have this idea and then you achieve something which has impacts like millions of lives. I just found that fascinating. Um so I I always just

wanted to pursue that path. So I started investing as an angel investor and now a second. Oh take it easy. Angel investing. What are you doing after the show? Did you ever read the book Angel? It's a phenomenal book in 12 languages. Yeah, I'll sign a copy book called Angel. It's 84 pages long. What were your first few deals? Uh 11 Labs, for example. Um Oh, good for you. Yeah, that's uh that's gone really well. Um how did you find that? Yeah. How did that How did that come about? I mean, I'm really putting an effort into this community as well. I'm spending a lot of time in in Silicon Valley meeting everybody and and also

connecting to the European corporate landscape. So I'm bringing customers, revenues, connecting, building bridges cuz there's a unique angle that I can bring, you know, thanks to my sports past. So I've just built my way into it and built a reputation and then and then you start getting the opportunities. What themes, Nico, have you invested in that today you would not invest knowing what you know today? Not the ones that are Yeah, that's um the the flying taxis, the vitals, for example. Um yeah, Germany was leading the way on those. You have Joby, for example, Joby Aviation, which is probably currently best positioned in the US. Um but Germany was leading the way with two two

horses in the race and and both of them have run into trouble. One is bankrupt, one was both bankrupt, I think. Um, so that's something that then in hindsight you of course if you had uh read the book, you would have known hardware is hard, right? I would have avoided that. You should have gotten that chapter. Get a highlighter out. Hardware is hard. Hardware is even harder now with the tariffs. I'm hearing now like I have a um I invested also in a cyber escooter here in New York called Infinite Machine and now with the tariffs because the supply chain is so concentrated on in in China um it's it's just it's a complete

mess. Yeah. Nico, what about the political landscape in Europe? There was a pretty important election in Germany. It seemed to kind of go down the middle. What goes of Europe? What's happening in Europe? The investability of Europe, the ability to do business in Europe. What do European industrial businesses do? There's a ton of skill. There's a ton of cash. When you talk to those folks, what do you tell them? I know you're very, very bearish on Europe. You wouldn't put a dollar there, but uh is that correct? Well, no, for sweaters and wine, he puts much more than a dollar. That's true. It's pretty prolific. It's a really good

question. I actually think industrials chargers, right? Yes. Industrials, I would industrials, I think there's tremendous skill. Yeah. outside of industrials I think it's hard. Yeah. So we have the we have the problems with regulatory frameworks being way too cumbersome. Um we have the geographic fragmentation in Europe which is very different to the US. Um politically it's it's really I mean quite in a bad place at the moment and so yeah I understand but at the same time as you said talent density is insane. The universities are some of the best in the world. So that's where our hope is in the next generation

that's coming now. Stick to the Nordics. And the Nordics are very powerful. Yes. But Spotify a little bit. There's a lot of hope still. Yeah. Hey, what's your daily driver? Daily driver is a Porsche. A Porsche. And then when you're with your with your with your daughter, I don't know how old she is, but you ever like pull some tricks and like does she like, "Hey, Dad." No. She shouts, "Drive slowly, daddy." Really? I'm not I'm not allowed to drive fast with her. No. terrified, which is fine. Which is fine. You you don't want her to get into the family business. No, no, no. What? Okay. What are some investments that you're

really excited by? Beyond uh 11 Labs, um there would be Applied Intuition, another one. Oh, great business where I'm uh where I'm in. That's a really really interesting company. It's a company that supplies software primarily to all the legacy car manufacturers that have not managed this transition to being software first like Tesla has shown the way. Um and this It's like scale AI for automotive in some ways, right? For part of the business. Yeah. Nico, you're going to fit right in. Have you learned to play poker yet? I'm a good poker player. You're a good poker player. We'll see you on Thursday. Excuse me. Hold on, Nico. Now you dec. Thanks for coming out. Thanks to

our new bestie, Nico Rosberg, for joining us in Miami for F1. And thanks to you, the audience, for tuning in. If you want to come to our next event, it's the All-In Summit in Los Angeles, fourth year for All-In Summit. Go to all-in.com/events to apply. A very special thanks to our new partner, OKX, the new money app. OKX was the sponsor of the McLaren F1 team, which won the race in Miami. Thanks to Haidider and his team, an amazing partner and an amazing team. We really enjoyed spending time with you. And OKX launched their new crypto exchange here in the US. If you love All-In, go check them out. And a special thanks to our friends at

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fans and they've just gone crazy with it." Queen of [Music] Besties are gone. That is my dog taking a notice in your driveway. Oh man, my habitasher will meet me up. We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy cuz they're all just useless. It's like this like sexual tension that we just need to release somehow. Wet your feet. Be your feet. What? We need to get Mercury's [Music] back. I'm going all in.