Thomas Laffont | All-In Summit 2024

kotou is one of the most successful hedge funds of the last two decades the largest startup Fund in the world right now they are very discreet started with $50 million and now you're managing roughly 50 billion from C to Thomas leant what separates the truly exceptional companies is to realize that actually sales and product are different sides of the same coin there was a Confluence of trends that made us feel like we needed to be president the valley the reason we decided to kind of get into this business is to find great entrepreneurs and find great [Music] companies all right thank you everybody um so my name is Thomas I work at CO2

I've been a day one listener of the all-in podcast so when they called me and they said would you be willing to present I said you know absolutely tell me when then they told me well you're going to have the graveyard shift the absolute last slot I said I can handle it no problem then they said by the way we are going to put Mark Benny off the goat of enterprise software right before you the return of TK and some guy who figured out how to fix aging I still got it and the reason is because what I know is that to me the besties are a band and they have what all great bands have which is number one is they have

talent but number two they have chemistry and you can't teach either but you need both to be great and they're great but also like all bands we know they like to have new albums and experiment with new producers in a new sound so I think we've heard a lot about the new sound it could be geopolitics or free speech and look I know those are important issues but being a day one listener I love the old album the first tracks we ever heard to me those are the ones that Will Go On The Greatest Hit album and so I knew that if I came I would bring you back to the old days and to me

um I love the new stuff too don't get me wrong but it's fun to play some of the classics and what I love so much is listening to each bestie give their point of view about Venture Capital about IPOs about technology and so what I aim to do here is a bit kind of level set on the conversation and they'll join me afterwards and lucky me I get to jam with the band for a bit so um all right so let's dive in I hope that this presentation kind of informs a little bit about what we see in the Unicorn economy so let's start at the top let's just look kind of at funding and what we can see in this slide is that funding is still actually pretty healthy now it's normalized post a covid

bubble but it's still if you compare it to historical averages it's still quite healthy but if we look at exits which is Define of the cash that's returned we see a bit of a different story where actually we're at pre levels Without Really any substantial increases since all of the capital that went into during Co and one of the main reasons for that is that the three kind of traditional exits for companies are blocked today so if you look at private equity for example very um sensitive to interest rates and so there's been kind of fewer buyouts despite record amounts of dry powder for that asset class if we look at IPOs well we're

going to dig deeper into that peel the onion a little bit so I'll talk about IPOs in a minute and since um your know political issues have been so present here we know that regulator has had a major impact on company's ability to buy other companies ironically and I think somewhat perversely one of the byproducts of constraining big companies from buying small companies is it hurts small companies first of all it makes them less valuable because if an investor you think that big companies can't buy small companies anymore you may adjust what you think that company's worth but to me even more importantly small companies can create a true sense

of urgency in big companies if you're sitting at Amazon or Google and you're meeting these small companies now you don't have to worry about your competitor buying that company because you know that the government will make it really hard that gives you time and we think that urgency is really important so we certainly hope that whoever wins uh the election they will rethink this strategy because we think it's really important to have a healthy ecosystem and m&a is a really big part of that so if you put all of that together you see that in fact you wouldn't be surprised by this chart which shows that the distributions from VCS back to their

investors are essentially at alltime lows almost back to um Financial kind of Crisis levels so if you think about our industry is a business now and we looked at the cash flow statement of the Venture Capital industry it probably wouldn't look too good we've raised a lot of money and we've given very little back we are bleeding cash as an industry and it's ironic because many of us as investors have told on companies they need to get fit they need to generate cash but we as an industry haven't done that yet so what's left well what's left actually is still a very substantial

economy what we call kind of the Unicorn economy there's about 1,500 companies by our count that are private companies with a last round of greater than a billion Gavin Baker who's another great investor who I follow actually came out with a statistic that said there's more private companies in Tech that are worth more than a billion than public ones which is kind of an incredible statement to kind of think about on top of that if we just kind of look at um employee growth which I kind of think is a decent proxy for how this ecosystem is doing we can see that there

has been a significant slowdown post the digital uh transformation of Co and you can see that employee growth and by the way this is xai um which is an important statement and we'll get to AI in a bit but you can see that basically the lowest levels of employee growth for this cohort um you know in almost 15 years that obviously also impacts their financing so if you look at the average company in kind of a um preco era they would tend to raise around generally less than 600 days and Bridge rounds and down rounds were about 30% of the total rounds well in today's market you can see something very different you can see that it's now greater than 100 days and

you can see that the mix of down rounds and Bridge rounds as a percent of total rounds is up to almost 63% so even when they do get a financing the financing look very different and so if you look at what that means on a cohort basis and this is one of my favorite charts because I think it kind of tells the story of this era in one slide you can see that the 2016 cohort the way to interpret this is the 2016 cohort which is the top slide the green line after about 13 quarters 80% had either raised the new round or exited so 80% you can see that in the 2021 cohort that number is down almost in half so significantly below and if you

see at the 22 cohort which is the most recent cohort that we track because obviously you need to give companies at least a year to make the analysis useful you can see that those companies are tracking even below the 21 cohort now we can't BL blame the public markets you know the NASDAQ is at almost an all-time high the NASDAQ has had a massive uh performance but the index doesn't tell the whole story and I think we need to kind of go one layer below to really kind of understand what's going on so if you look at the recovery which is the piece that I kind of focus on since Co you can see that the index

actually had very strong performance right up almost 122% right since 2019 but if you look at the two buckets that I've highlighted which I've kind of created two unprofitable Tech is one and SAS is the other the reason that I chose those two is I think that they best mirror potentially the Unicorn economy in the private markets you can see actually that those are down the most from the co high and have recovered the least since 20 2019 significantly kind of trailing the index now you might say look this is a bunch of really bad companies so it makes sense my argument to you was be there's incredible companies in this

cohort and I've just picked three but let's look at these three door Dash block and Shopify three incredible entrepreneurs Tony from door Dash Jack from block and Toby from Shopify you can see that these companies have incredible scale if you just look at the um the gmv and the revenues you can see that over this period of time they got significantly more profitable but you can see that on a PE basis the multiple shrank significantly and the growth just wasn't fast enough to kind of offset the lower multiple now if we look at IPOs this chart basically one way to look at it is of all of the IPOs since

2020 if you look at the value created or destroyed from their IPO price you can see it as as a cohort we've destroyed almost 225 billion in market cap offset by the value creation of 84 so net negative as a cohort this slide every time I look at it I still quite can't believe what it says so we had to quadruple the facts but it is the fact is that since 2022 both in 22 23 and 24 we had fewer IPOs than in 2008 and 2009 the depths of the financial crisis in 2001 and 2002 post the greatest bubble in history in Tech I mean I remember in 2008 you know sitting at my desk and we would get

reports that Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs were going out of business that's how dire those times were there were still more IPOs in that environment than in today's environment so I was talking yesterday to um a late stage uh founder very large valuation a very kind of well-known company and he was asking for the difference between private investors and public investors and what I told them is I said by and large your private investors only compare you to companies that are very similar to Yours by which I mean if you're a venture investor you look at a Silicon Valley um uh named fund back company and you compare it probably to another company

backed by another Silicon Valley fund Etc and you try and pick the best as you see fit from those types of companies very similar to yours but the public markets work really differently and it's really important to understand for CEOs that public markets have options those investors may look at the risk-free rate 5% to be able to earn with literally no risk whatsoever they may look at depending on how you want to bucket it the Magnificent 6 or seven these are the largest companies in the world incredible businesses with cosos like Mark Zuckerberg and you get to own that cohort at a pretty cheap earnings

multiple for companies that even at the trillion dollar scale are growing in excess of 15% pretty amazing oh and on top of that there's a new type of company the AI company and those companies are growing at incredible scale and they're growing sometimes at 50 60 or 100% And you get to back a Founder like Jensen at Nvidia who many people don't know but is the longest tenear founder CEO in Silicon Valley and I can also buy those companies at pretty reasonable earnings multiples and finally just in case you think oh I'm only talking about big companies you actually get to buy also an incredible set of smaller companies

we just had Travis on from Uber but whether it's door Das or instacart or block you can see that even great new companies like those are available at pretty reasonable multiples so it's really important for CEOs to understand who is the competition for the capital that you're trying to raise and the public market can be tough and this is one of those moments where the public market is tough because what essentially the public market is telling you is that we want it all we want you to be profitable we talked about that already we want you to grow so you have to be in a big market and have a big Trend but by the way we also want you to have

scale that's a lot to ask for but the good news is within this cohort of unicorns we've already identified a good list of companies we're lucky to be investors I think in about eight or nine of them that match that criteria and I think all of these companies on this slide will one day make for incredible public companies so what it make of all this well I kind of wanted to end uh I only have two charts left but I wanted to kind of end on this chart um this chart is from Andrew McAfee who has an incredible substack which I encourage all of you to follow what this chart looks at is it looks at the average age of the top 50 US public

companies weighted by market cap okay so average age of the top 50 US companies by market cap so what do we see in this chart and by the way he goes back to 1926 it's hard to get data that goes back to 1926 believe me we tried so what this shows actually is you can look from 1926 through to almost the late 80s the biggest companies are the oldest companies and they keep getting older which means that the biggest chance of you becoming a big company was to have been a big company in the past so you can see that that kind of can atrophy but it doesn't take a mathematician which I'm not to see that

something kind of happens in the let's call it mid 90s the average age starts to reverse what happened technology happened technology is the great resetter of the business World it can take an incredible company and turn it into dust just ask Blackberry or Nokia or other companies that have been on the wrong side of a trend and what you see in this chart is you can see that actually the past 25 years have been really good for young companies which is why another inverse way of looking at it is what is the average founder year of that cohort of companies and you can see that that cohort of companies is getting

younger so the reason why I'm still an incredible optimist about our industry and about technology is because technology is still the most disruptive force and we haven't even talked about Ai and robots and all of the incredible things that are kind of happening so I kind of wanted to put it all together and kind of use the concrete examples um this is one of my favorite charts what this shows is the valuation of two companies that are kind of competing with each other um their Enterprise data companies they make essentially a way to store data in the cloud so you can see the blue line is snowflake it's a public company today

and you can see that the red line is data bricks and it's kind of interesting to see what do we take from this chart while we can see okay a lot of volatility in the public markets valuation going up then down kind of a rise in the private Market but there's other ways to kind of look at this you can see that data bricks there's been a lot of talk of founder mode right the the besties talked about it on the podcast last week data bricks is a founder-led company snowflake was more of a managerial Le company maybe that's one way to kind of interpret what happened maybe another is

to say if you're a public company and you need to be profitable for your shareholders and your biggest competitor is private and can incinerate and burn a lot of money maybe makes a difference though when I mentioned to Ali the co of data breaks that I was um using this chart he told me please remind the audience that I'm growing in excess of 60% so I put that that while I'm burning money I'm actually getting much more efficient so I said that I would obviously say that and he also gave me a a non-public data point around his Cloud business which is now 500 million of a RR which was almost zero a few years ago so I kind of Lent to in on that

because I think that um what I love the most about technology and markets is you can't be complacent you always have to stay on the um on your toes and part of why I love the podcast so much is it always makes me rethink my assumptions and I'm really grateful um to the besties for that so with that I think they'll come on and we'll chat about this and I think all the other topics that you guys want to talk about wow thank you so much for that that was amazing than con gra you thanks brother that was great thank you J moth uh sent someone to Sax's house to steal Wine Not Ste did you go to which seller

did you go to the secret seller or the the seller the main seller the main seller or the house seller which one they they know not to go to any other seller but the the Reser the real seller the real seller I think probably the best moment that you and sax had around wine was he poured a wine at a poker game that you did not like and I kid you not Troth took his glass it and went like this and poured it on the floor in David Sax's house when was that really we weren't outside on the lawn this was in Sax's living room honestly stop stop the that happen or not I'm going to get from Nat for that story it was in my basement

poker basement and it was not we're it was not an in is not a typical basement you shouldn't use that term but there was no rug this was a marble floor to be clear not true wherever m is it could be clean it was more like okay Thomas let me ask you a question um actually after that oh my God stop thas what happened after guys we got we got on Jam raided my wine seller and found all the latash oh he did that's right oh my God that is true and then I yeah CU you hit it I think they went through uh a case lash yeah start to come out don't stop on my behalf sit here all day let's talk let's talk to Tom just so if you invested in the cues

in the NASDAQ and held it for 10 years you make 7.5x um this is a couple months old if you invest in the top 10 by market cap companies in the queue you make 8.7 so 9x if you invest in the S&P over 10 years you make 3.2x um and sorry sorry if you invested in the um yeah I'm sorry that was incorrect if you invest in the top 10 of the cues you make 8.7x and if you invest in the cues you make 5.2 so 5x 9x why would I invest in Venture at all as an Institutional Investor is and is that going to shift because you have to be in basically the top two funds five funds to beat the

returns you make just by buying an index of the NASDAQ and how how do institutional investors rationalize investing in Venture funds at all given how much much value is acing to public companies in technology versus the private companies have you tried the mtet Thomas just te up a softy for me right to to te me off um first I ask myself that question all the time right and because we sit in both public and private markets we bit have this unique ability to kind of look at both and try and use one to make better decisions than the other I think what's implicit in your question is is what happen has happened over the next

decade going to happen over the next one yes right because I also remember a time where um and I think this was roughly call it the 2010 period where Google was like flat for seven or eight years right um from like 07 to I think the next seven or eight years right and that's how the market was digesting Facebook and kind of things like that so I think the question you have to ask yourself is we have now multiple multi-trillion doll companies right um three trillion doll companies with app and Nvidia are those companies going to 10 trillion um and so you know to me it's not necess as obvious maybe it was

obvious you know 10 years ago and we all should not have invested in Venture 10 years ago because we should have just owned Apple and Google and meta and others you know the question is as investors we get paid to think about the next decade right and so I think the question for you know all of us and is well what do we think's going to happen in the next decade and to me it's not as clear just because those big companies are so big now right um is are we going to see the same pattern occur I mean sometimes law of large numbers and other things like that would say no there's another I think part of this which is when you invest you have to get some risk premium

for where you're investing and you know the the complicated thing with Ventures when I started my business I think when David and Jason started his actually also when you started um your investment business we typically thought 7 to 10 years were going to get out of these businesses and return Capital to shareholders and then all of a sudden it's doubled and now to your point you have wars in Europe you have wars in the Middle East you have this potential thing sort of Damocles hanging over us in China and Taiwan there's risk everywhere and theoretically what is supposed to happen is you're supposed to get paid a risk premium to be IL liquid

and not be able to get out over periods of time where any of that stuff could happen right so how does that start to play into the mindset of the investor that was giving all this money in the first place how does that change you know it's a great question I was talking to one of the partners of a leading seriesa firm a brand name that that all of you would know and what was interesting about their business is that buying large their average funds were were doing the same but the problem is at the time liquidity had doubled and so if if you just think about it on an irr basis all of a sudden I'm down half half right yeah so that's a huge problem and

I think part of the reason I kind of wanted to to to bring this up is I do think it's a problem that we need to kind of address as an industry and I think it starts with boards and it starts with Founders right and investors I was chatting with Bill Gurley um you know in the green room before and he he told me he said well look Thomas you know you're you guys are part of the problem kind of doing this and I said you're right you're absolutely right we contributed to it interrupt what what did he mean by that that we were giving liquidity to uh secondaries and Founders and you know companies that should be public by giving them private Capital we were essentially enabling them to stay

private longer making the problem worse correct is that true yes but if that were true wouldn't wouldn't value creation acre to those private companies and the performance of can I just go back and just add a Nuance to that but I said Bill realize that also you guys are also part of the problem because you're on the boards that are also letting this kind of happen right so we have as an ecosystem right I don't think like to me the IPO chart is kind of an existential one for our industry right I mean if we don't get these companies to go public um in my opinion we are um as an industry going to have to face really hard questions

with the ultimate funders of of our industry who by the way are not our funds but are the investors in our funds right and eventually they are going to demand from us right um Capital back well sorry Tom and Thomas just to build on your point it's actually not even those nameless faceless people because so much of that money for example in Sovereign wealth funds and Pension funds theoretically come from these citizens who will at some point need the money because all of these other existential issues that they're dealing with and so these these pension systems and others will really have to just justify um while you know they say I'm going to swing for the fences here to

make up for my deficits but with those deficits aren't actually made up and you've paid 2% a year for 13 years and you burned through a quarter of your capital in fees and you have nothing to show for it the jig is going to be up I think I mean that's totally right and look I think it's going to be um my biggest other fear you guys can tell I have a lot of fears so um but my other one good investor yes is that we're creating a worst cohort of companies because of this right because at the end of the day I do believe that you guys all sit on a tons of boards right I do think that it can be I think part of why the all-in podcast got so popular is there was a sense that you

guys were saying to uh the public what people were afraid to say in public or what actually you were saying Behind Closed do right and I think it can be very difficult in boards to go against a founder or a CEO even just propose something a different path right you know the high school I went to San high school in Brooklyn had a a sign above the the door when we walked in every morning the truth shall make you free and I think a big part of what we have to realize in an industry is staying private and giving the founders massive amounts of secondary not modest modest we all agree um and keeping these P companies public too long um and then private too long uh

you know it's just bad hygiene and bad discipline allowing Founders or telling Founders the VCS are the enemies like Paul Graham essentially does um saying governance isn't cool um you know most of the companies I've invested when they fail and they don't have governance say to me if only somebody cared enough to help us solve our problems and I say well remember I said would you like to start board meetings quarterly for one hour and I'll come to it and they said yeah and we got advice from people don't have board Mee me ings you know at some point we have to have discipline and we have to accept the truth and the truth is you know on a on a societal level 40%

of the country does not own equities and they believe that everybody's getting rich but them and they're voting for socialism and they're voting to not let these companies merge and grow which is now going to freeze the system and if the system freezes because of Lina KH who was picked on a strictly political basis because she's anti-tech and because that gets votes from a bunch of socialist voters uh who feel disenfranchised now we got to solve the disenfranchised problem um but we also have to create jobs and we have to create the next companies and I I encourage people who maybe who are anti-tech who are anti- capitalism to imagine a world in which we didn't have

Google Apple Tesla Facebook Microsoft Uber door Dash as our companies in our country and you know what that looks like that looks like Europe and that looks incredibly slow growth and and it looks like all the growth comes from government ask question yeah and I know but I mean we have to be adults in the room here and tell the truth age I'd like to ask Thomas a question before I'm sorry it's the montet talking clearly I mean it's amazing I think you bring up something that again is something that it's the quiet part said out loud which is maybe we have this cultural issue and I actually have a lot of empathy for where this cultural issue

came from your seoa and you've done it a certain way but then now you're andreon or your Social Capital your craft you have to decide how you're going to disrupt and you say the thing that the other person is not saying but then it the it just gets out of control what do we do to fix the problem um how do we collectively identify a set of solutions what do we do I I think to me the the most obvious is we have to take our companies public because to your point Jason the public market is the great disinfectant the public market doesn't care that you're a CEO and you're going

to give a referral to the other investor and so you have to become friends and you know that whole thing or the brand of your investor is X or your prior company did y you know at the end of the day the public market will look at your business and so I think encouraging entrepreneurs to go public is really important right let me ask you a question the traditional go model is an IPO you raise capital and you list your shares at the same time those are two separate activities people don't realize they're actually separate your Shares are available for sale on a public market and you're raising capital in the process and you create demand through the capital raising process such that

your shares will go up as they start to trade the model of the direct listing is you just list your shares they start trading they're going to go up they're going to go down we've seen a couple of these in the past few years they're like as soon as it hits the market it goes down it goes up and but the market values the company once the company's been valued and the market stable maybe then you raise Capital at whatever the market tells you the valuation is however there is a very big aversion to direct listings in Silicon Valley and it seems like there's either a failure of the business or it's one of these businesses that are such an outlier of

success that it doesn't matter they're like I don't care I'll just direct list should direct listings become the kind of deao model because otherwise everyone talks about the IPO window being closed the big institutional investors that build the IPO book are all sitting on the sidelines right now they're like I'm not investing in any new stuff for a quarter or two quarters so the IPO windows closed and you can't go public should we not kind of push all up Silicon Valley that like this direct listing might be a better model and I know some have tried to motivate this this transition but it's why isn't it gotten legs and is it a better way so

what I would say to that and trath you you kind of hit on this with some of the work that you've done here but I do think that the recipy to go public is different first of all I can tell you is i' you know we've looked at buying IPOs over 20 years I mean probably thousands of them we couldn't care less whether it's a traditional IPO or whether it's um a direct listing like we care about the business and the price and the mechanics are completely irrelevant to us right um so that's kind of number one but I do think Founders have to understand that the public market itself has changed okay being an active investor in the public market over 20 years has been a really bad business we

are fighting the machines first of all right so uh Ken Griff Citadel Renaissance you know all of these you know quants and algorithms and that's number one we're fighting the indices right massive move away from active investing to passive so being in the quote money management business I mean just look at the chart of tro price and others it's not been a great business so the public business has changed and I think why is this relevant to Founders because I think there's another big constituency that's really important as an example retail right and so if you can tap into a retail investor base and convince a retail base that your business is

worthwhile that's maybe something that 20 years ago you might have said I don't think that's a good use of time I think this year is a really good use of time so going on podcasts right going on CNBC going out and educating the public about your business so that you're not just relying on a frankly shrinking pool of investors in the public market I remember when I started in the late ' 90s early 2000s you had small cap mutual funds in Kansas City and other places their whole business you may remember was taking small companies and bringing them to the public market those they're gone today they're gone today there there's none left right so we need to adapt and I think those are the

conversations that we need to be having I hope that some of the companies that we listed right you guys know these companies you're investors in a bunch of them they're generational opportunities I hope some of those kind of go public right and that we kind of get the do think I just want to build on this um it is one of the most systematically broken things and just even be more specific what happens in Silicon Valley boardrooms is you have folks that are playing a very establishment Insider game and whenever I see that I I just get offended just at at a core level and it's about a certain set of Banks and it's about a certain set of Privileges

and conferences and it's a cabal of and this is what convinces these very impressionable people all kinds of spirous data to say what it is that they want which is not that the company goes public or not public but that they have ball control to help them influence that decision and that's the game and you can look at all the major investment Banks and that's how the game was played and every time there's been an attempt at an innovation people push back severely the the most impressive one that I remember I mean I was part of one version of that just a few years ago with these backs they had a very checkered obviously set of outcomes um but it was courageous to try and the and

when I remember I worked with credit s when I was launching this first one the reason I picked credit s you know why because they were the ones that were totally blackballed in 2004 for doing the Google listing and do you know why what Google did they completely pushed back on the IPO they completely restruct red it from first principles they decided how to do it and when I looked at it and I read the filing documents I was like this is courageous and incredible because if other people follow this it'll unlock money but what happened to that whole model people put it on the side and they were like if you go to credit s this will happen that will happen so the infrastructure pushes

back on you so I think part of what we need to do is make people open to realize direct listings work now for example I went through a direct listing with slack what we did not learn is that the best price is the day one price so if you have investor pressure the thing that I should have done it was a probably a$ 1.2 billion $1.24 billion mistake I know it because I distributed too late I should have sold every share I didn't know that it was very hard to know that so I think the point is that there is this system of weird incentives that have everything to do with what Barry Weiss yesterday called prestige

and nothing to do with what you said which is disinfecting a business and just let it win or lose yeah so very well said and then I I know you um we'll move on after this but to me Jason there's one other big thing which is cosos need to understand that it's okay for their valuation to go down right there you know it's like this bet Noir in the valley that my God if for some reason your valuation goes down 10 or 15% it's the end of the world guess what it isn't it's the craziest concept I I public stock only goes up right it doesn't like it's like so in Silicon Valley if your Stock's not always going up it's like it's a imature yeah it's so

immature yeah and there's these people that perpetuate that because then they have ball control and it's just not who's in a relation who's married okay we'll give it the final question just okay how many have you been in a in a marriage where at some point the marriage was not always the best you can't ask that and then ask people to raise their hands my point is relationships go up and down correct friendships go up and down businesses go up and down I mean like this is real life well so just this will be our last question yeah just just to wrap things up so I really wanted Thomas to give this speech because I thought this is the nitty-gritty of what

we deal with in the Venture your slides are incredible by the way we'll make them available by the way to everyone so so this is really the Straight Dope on what the Venture Capital industry is dealing with because we had this massive bubble in 2020 and 2021 especially the second half of 2021 where you know we all know that the FED cut interest rates to zero and the federal government air dropped trillions of dollars on the economy and the way that affected the tech ecosystem is we had a bubble like probably the biggest bubble in 2021 that we had since the do bubble and and since then 2022 23 24 we've been dealing with the Fallout and The Hangover from that and I think

that's what your if I was to kind of TDR your slides it's basically we had this incredible bubble now we're in this sort of workout period there's a lot of facets that we double the payback period that's a real problem yeah so that's so and so there's more to work out at the same time I think that we've heard at this conference that some of these emerging Tech Trends are are going to be the biggest we've ever seen Benny off talked about agents of the Enterprise Elon talked about robots so at the same time that I think the tech industry is feeling this huge hangover and it's you know frankly if you're like doing all these workouts with the companies it's pretty miserable but we're seeing these

upward trends that could be the biggest yet D David and I said something backstage I just curious what you think of this we were looking at your slides the one that said the 2022 cohort was below the and uh the comment was and you can just say yes or no but um that's probably where the best companies are going to emerge because they will have the most darwinian risk of demise yeah does that kind of counterintuitively make sense to you or it's not and look it fits within a framework that I really believe which someone kind of told me in the context of China but I think it's appropriate which is you know um dictatorships double down and democrac

is self-correct you know markets self-correct right so I'm a big believer in our ability as a market to kind of self-correct it's kind of why I wanted to show the the slide about the age of companies right because it kind of crystalized what we all believe which is that technology is fundamentally changing the world of of business and markets and kind of I still really believe that so David I 100% agree I just hope like take the AI um Trend as an example right part of also why like talking about this stuff is so we don't just repeat some of the same mistakes right because I always you my role as an investor first and foremost is a version

of the hypocritic oath just Do no harm don't make things worse right um maybe you can't help but at the very least don't like make things worse right and my one worry I kind of said it a little bit before is that some of this stuff is actually making things worse so let's kind of stop doing what we think makes things worse and let's try to focus on again the incredible value creation that will come we have the chart that shows it over 30 years we know that technology creates incredible new companies let's just kind of let that process play out ladies and gentlemen very much thank you Thomas F thank you that awesome thank you thank you