00:00:00
check out what uh what time is it over there well we started at 8 A.M so now it's 8 28. it's 8 28 I'm going to be on
00:00:06
the slopes at 11. yeah so I'll be out there skiing I'm in niseko uh in Japan to take a quick
00:00:13
flight to sappora saboro and then you drive two hours into the mountains yesterday cat skied there's an abandoned
00:00:19
section by the way in honor of you I grabbed a Sapporo from the fridge today wow very nice this week's episode
00:00:25
brought to you by so they drive the catski up and then you ski down and it's all fresh track so it's literally an
00:00:32
abandoned ski resort you know during the financial crisis here I I just asked you what time it was that's all I asked you
00:00:40
it's called small talk it's called banter I thought you might be interested in your bestie's life but apparently not
00:00:47
[Music] [ __ ] man David said
00:00:56
we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it [Music]
00:01:04
let's get to the show everybody wants to hear the show a lot of news going on and I you know in our industry there's been
00:01:10
a big discussion about rsus and stock options both the cost of these things and then there's another issue of people
00:01:17
staying private for too long if you remember for folks listening Airbnb Uber
00:01:23
famously took over 10 years to go public people like uh Bill Gurley wrote about this hey you should get public
00:01:29
when the window is open obviously the window is closed right now or largely closed stripe now people are speculating
00:01:35
they missed their window they have a four billion dollar tax bill due to cover expiring employee rsus those
00:01:42
are restricted stock units and at the same time Foursquare a company from the Web 2.0 ERA this is you know 10 15 years
00:01:50
ago when they were very popular check-in software Mobile location app they are going to let their previous
00:01:57
employees stock option grants expire according to the information they issue these options in 2016 seven year window
00:02:04
before expiration more than 100 form employees will be impacted and some of them are the very early team
00:02:10
members and this employee stock option problem is becoming acute because hey
00:02:16
you people waited to go public basically what happens is you grant an RSU which is effectively
00:02:23
W-2 income when it's realized with an expiration date but that expiration date forces you to
00:02:32
be public so that that RSU can be exchanged for value and that's like a 10-year window so then these guys have
00:02:37
to go in and modify that date and push it out by another four five six years or whatever
00:02:43
that is a deemed event by the IRS that then creates withholding tax issues
00:02:49
right so you then have to you then have to withhold tax on behalf of the employees and so that Collective number
00:02:54
is the 4 billion that stripe is trying to raise according to a leaked pitch deck uh stripe implied they needed 2.3
00:03:01
billion in capital by the end of queue on 2023. they're working with Goldman Sachs to raise a few billion at a 55
00:03:07
billion dollar valuation that's down 42 from the peak of 95 billion in 2021 one
00:03:13
wonders if they had gone public what their valuation would be right now can we just say real quick why this matters Jacob like yes so anyway why does it
00:03:20
matter yeah why does this why does this all matter why do we care thank you that's where we're getting to I posted a
00:03:25
link this is a 2013 interview that Zuck did with Michael Arrington of TechCrunch
00:03:33
and if you go all the way back the apprehension to go public
00:03:40
was one thing that we really anchored to a lot at Facebook in the early days and
00:03:46
at the time I don't know if you guys remember but there was these Arcane laws around the number of shareholders that
00:03:52
you could have and I think the issue specifically was that after 500 shareholders you have to
00:03:57
publicly release your financials and so we did all kinds of things to make sure we never hit the 500 cap and we tried to
00:04:05
push the IPO data as far out as possible because we thought that it would keep people more focused
00:04:12
and then in 2010 or 11 I told this story a couple times one of the things that I was
00:04:18
advocating for pretty aggressively was trying to Launch a mobile operating system to compete
00:04:25
with IOS and Android and we had put together all this work and brought in Intel and ATT and all these people and
00:04:30
it came down to the fact that we needed a couple billion dollars to float this thing and we didn't have that money so the
00:04:37
only solution to that would have been to go public but it wasn't the right moment in time and Zach was uncomfortable with
00:04:42
it a year after going public one of the things that he said publicly in this TechCrunch thing was wow I should have
00:04:48
just gone public sooner it wasn't nearly the bad thing that I thought it was going to be and when you look
00:04:53
subsequently at how much money they've spent in AR and VR spending half a quarters of that cash
00:04:59
could have given them the chance to disrupt Android and iOS in 2010 and 11 which in hindsight is obviously a
00:05:06
no-brainer BET right so even though I think we at Facebook were the ones to
00:05:11
really put this in the water table about not going public I think a lot of startups should have
00:05:18
gone back to First principles to really question whether waiting as long as possible actually makes sense so I was
00:05:24
curious about the stripe situation so I asked my team to do a little bit of work on how would you value this thing if it
00:05:31
were going public and the interesting thing about stripe is that it operates in a really
00:05:36
transparent middleman business so what's interesting about stripe is that so many
00:05:42
of the people in the ecosystem are public and so what that means is you can build
00:05:47
a pretty accurate mosaic of how well or not well that business is
00:05:52
doing by interpolating all the other data from all of these other companies that are public and are forced to report
00:05:59
and so there's like a couple of really interesting things that jump off this page and so the first thing that we did was
00:06:05
we looked at what is the future profitability look like acts of growth and what's interesting is
00:06:13
that you look at companies like visa and MasterCard that are doing quite well and have done really well for a long time
00:06:19
but you look at this outlier in Adian and adyan is probably the most obvious
00:06:25
competitor to strike and the thing that is demonstrated here is how incredibly
00:06:32
profitable this business is and how much operating leverage they
00:06:38
have which means that their Opex is relatively constrained because it turns out in the X and Y axis
00:06:44
here just so people who are listening can understand the chart sure so if you take the market cap on the x-axis and
00:06:50
divide it by their sales estimate you get a multiple of the Enterprise Value to their sales
00:06:55
got it and if you look at the 2024 estimated ebit to margin that
00:07:01
they're forecasting X of their long-term sales kicker what
00:07:06
you start to get a sense of is the operating leverage that this business has and so all of this basically Nets
00:07:14
out to three interesting takeaways when stripe got underwritten at 96 billion dollars
00:07:22
it's this data point right here where you know you see a stripe previous round 5x Enterprise Value to divided by 2024
00:07:30
divided over there they're long-term their long-term ebitda exactly by their sales assistant and then if you look at
00:07:35
the 55 billion valuation it's down so what it looks like is happening is appropriately so
00:07:41
people are doing the right thing which is they're re-rating the stock right by approximately 50 60 percent
00:07:49
but what's interesting is not where they are in terms of where they used to be but the
00:07:56
interesting thing is where they are relative to their most obvious competitor ajin so Nick please bring up the next one so this is where things get
00:08:03
really interesting because we looked at what was adyan and what was Stripes gmv per employee
00:08:11
a couple of years ago before all hell broke loose in the private funding markets and what you see is they were
00:08:18
pretty equivalent businesses and they had roughly the same amount of employees
00:08:23
but this crazy thing happened which is that if you look at the gray bar this is the number of employees at
00:08:29
stripe has it went crazy from a little over 2000 to almost 8 000
00:08:35
so a four action of employees X in 24 months they added 6 000 people just
00:08:42
pause for a second on that six thousand people in 24 months in 700 days or so right three people a day and if you do
00:08:49
the same calculation for Auden it shows that they a little bit less than Group by about 75 percent
00:08:55
and then if you look at the growth of gmv and you impute how productive is each employee
00:09:02
basically this is the the story of what's happened to stripe and audience which is that ajin has found operating
00:09:08
leverage that's right so they've found and maintained incredible profitability
00:09:14
and stripe has added an enormous number of employees now the question is why
00:09:20
right so it turns out that these guys at the Top Line are growing roughly the same except adien actually
00:09:27
takes meaningfully less on a per transaction basis than stripe does and
00:09:32
the reason is that audience Services these large head customers I think big bulky folks that have huge amounts of
00:09:39
transactions and so as a result have pricing power and stripe has some of those customers as well in fact they just announced that
00:09:46
they're going to process a large portion of Amazon's payment volume but what's happened at the same
00:09:52
time is that those kinds of deals aren't necessarily that profitable and so you
00:09:59
have to hire a lot more people to build a lot more features so that you can generate revenue from the long tail of
00:10:05
customers all of these smbs and this is the tale of these two companies which is that stripe has some head customers but
00:10:11
many many tail customers ajian has mostly had customers fewer
00:10:16
tail customers and so the leverage in the business is that audience has most of these employees
00:10:22
in Europe where the cost of these folks is much much cheaper and they have less than half the number
00:10:28
and so as both of these companies continue to grow you have one that has maintained
00:10:33
and frankly raised their long-term profit projections because they see it
00:10:38
in the business even at lower transaction costs and stripe which is having a little bit
00:10:44
more trouble so I thought it was a really interesting expose the the takeaway for me is that if you were
00:10:50
sitting inside the company and obviously hindsight is 2020. the most profitable thing they could
00:10:56
have done from an Enterprise Value perspective would probably have been to go public in 2018 2019.
00:11:01
because they could have raised max value at Max valuation cleaned out all these
00:11:06
options issues and have a huge balance sheet of cash with which to do stuff whether it's Acquisitions or other
00:11:12
things because the thing that I struggle with is is there going to be long-term profitability in all of these tail products because if you look in the SAS
00:11:19
ecosystem in stocks I'll hand the ball to you there's companies building all this other stuff and these Point
00:11:25
products are probably pretty good too sax what do you think about ad gen going after the fat part of the long tail and
00:11:31
then stripe going after the long tail having many more customers well I think they're both viable strategies
00:11:36
and I mean I've actually written about this I wrote a Blog some time ago called Enterprises versus smbs who's the better
00:11:42
customer for B2B SAS companies and I think the sort of old school traditional
00:11:48
view is that Enterprises were always the best customers because they have the biggest budgets that translates into the
00:11:53
biggest annual contract values or acvs this provides the highest Roi on sales
00:11:59
effort so now you can make a sales driven distribution strategy pencil in the first place the prospects are easy
00:12:05
to identify you know after all if you're going after the Fortune 500 you can just make a list of the 500 companies so I
00:12:11
think the traditional gold standard was sort of the head like you're saying
00:12:17
Jason the Enterprises however I think in recent years has become more popular to pursue the
00:12:23
stripe strategy of the sort of more SMB why is that more popular well because first of all startups are the smbs are
00:12:30
more early adopters so when you're a startup and it's way easier to satisfy their standards to satisfy their needs
00:12:38
their needs are less complicated you don't have to have sock 2 compliance and everything else if you're more
00:12:44
risk-taking right yeah if you solve an immediate pain point for them they'll just buy it okay whereas Enterprises are
00:12:50
more late adopters they tend to be more skeptical of new software categories yeah I think in addition to that the SMB
00:12:57
sales cycle is really quick I mean I'd say typically one to two months you can close a deal the sale itself is simpler
00:13:03
like I said the product requirements are simpler and the low end of the market tends to be the most underserved part so
00:13:10
it's great to play where the incumbents are not that's a traditional strategy as you go after the low end of the market
00:13:15
that's been kind of overlooked or ignored and that's kind of what stripe has done here too is no one was really surveying these these uh developers so I
00:13:23
tend to think it's a good strategy too and and the truth is it's not one or the other I think you just have to pick you
00:13:28
know what's your battles that you want to fight and some starts to go after Enterprises and some will go after smbs
00:13:34
and it really comes down I think to founder market fit I think Founders who are better at sales can probably skew
00:13:40
more towards an Enterprise got it strategy whereas if you're more of a product founder you go after smbs
00:13:46
brilliant summary overtime sax for a company to thrive over long periods of time do you have to service both or do
00:13:53
you think you can stay in one of those things and grow indefinitely well what I've seen is that if you start the low
00:13:58
end of the market with smbs over time you can move up Market because what happens is that as your product gets
00:14:03
more and more sophisticated and your company and your ability to execute and deliver gets more sophisticated you can
00:14:09
start satisfying the needs of bigger and bigger companies so you Start SMB then you go mid market then you eventually
00:14:14
get to Enterprises I think if you start with Enterprises it's very hard to go down Market because it's a lot easier to
00:14:21
add requirements to your product than to actually strip complexity of a product that's actually surprisingly difficult
00:14:27
to do so I I think it's I think either strategy can work either you start the low end and move up Market that's the
00:14:33
classic Christensen innovators dilemma type thing or you you just start the top and you stay at the top it makes sense
00:14:40
it's just I mean adding 10 people a day over two years that's a large number of people to add to a company well In
00:14:46
fairness the stripe they were very honest about this and they were like we overestimated got confident and we over hired and they found that all the
00:14:52
coordination costs this access point became too high that's exactly what the Collison said in their memos so I think that they're trying to course correct
00:14:59
and get back to this I think the point that I'm making unemotionally I don't own stripe nor adjun I don't have a
00:15:05
horse in this race is more that in this market specifically in these middlemen highly transparent middlemen
00:15:11
markets it's very difficult to hide the cheese meaning the ability to get to an
00:15:17
extremely precise valuation model is pretty easy you know this was half a
00:15:23
day's work that we did and the point is all this data is out there and so it means that if you're going to go
00:15:29
public as a company like this you have to be quite thoughtful about how outside and folks will value you
00:15:35
because the terminal buyer is very very sophisticated and pretty smart about how to think about spaces like this Freeburg
00:15:41
when you look at this it kind of dovetails with the get fit Brad gerstner Ilana Twitter doing more with less
00:15:48
employees Zuckerberg again says he is getting rid of managers he's asking
00:15:53
managers to sax his discussion about you know the layers of management that got added and added where high performance
00:16:00
would be would have five people put under them 10 people put under them is it going to be are you impressed with
00:16:07
how quickly the industry is responding to this new environment or are they not responding fast enough
00:16:13
in terms of head count Revenue because now we're looking at Revenue per employee this really never looked at that it's been a decade since we looked
00:16:20
at that this is a little bit of a different situation where it's about the scalability of a business
00:16:28
like when I look at like the value that a business has created you start first with like can you make a product can you
00:16:34
sell the product do people want to buy the product and then you know can you make money selling it and then there's
00:16:40
this metric that a lot of people use which is LTV to CAC which is the lifetime value of acquiring a new
00:16:46
customer divided by the cost to acquire that customer but I think you can generalize that ratio to talk about
00:16:52
business performance more broadly which is you know Capital deployed which is
00:16:57
typically what CAC is used in terms of growth on the denominator and then Capital returned over time which can be
00:17:03
the numerator and so you know you can kind of think about that LTV to CAC ratio being
00:17:09
something more broadly defined as something like roic or what have you the the question for the scalability of any
00:17:15
business is does that ratio whether it's LTV to CAC or roic return on invested
00:17:21
Capital does it get bigger or smaller does it increase or
00:17:26
decrease does that ratio increase or decrease as you get bigger as you spend more money as you deploy more money if
00:17:31
it's getting smaller then mathematically you can resolve pretty quickly to the asymptotic valuation that that business
00:17:38
will achieve or the asymptotic revenue that that business will achieve and that's a very scary kind of circumstance
00:17:44
when a business that's tracking that metric starts to see that metric shrink if that metric is growing then you have
00:17:52
an you know a hyperbolic kind of moment then you can build platforms and add products and invest very heavily
00:17:59
and take lots of risk and take lots of bets when it's going the wrong way you have two options number one is you
00:18:05
have to make a change or a pivot in the business to get it to go the other way or number two is you have to take
00:18:11
advantage of that moment before the market finds out about that moment because as soon as the market realizes
00:18:16
that that ratio is going the wrong way your valuation multiple what you're worth as a multiple of Revenue or profit
00:18:22
shrinks dramatically because then the market can also see that asymptote and outcome so I think it's very often the
00:18:28
case that one should you know as a board member as an investor urge entrepreneurs CEOs Founders managers to think really
00:18:35
clearly about that metric what's the right way to to find the denominator and Define the numerator in our business and
00:18:41
Define that ratio over time and as soon as it starts tracking the wrong way you have a moment you can either fix it or
00:18:48
you got to go sell the business or go public and raise capital before the market catches on and your valuation shrinks so I think what just
00:18:55
said yeah so when I see what Jamal's showing in this data and talking about this the shrinking valuation issue for
00:19:01
stripe it really I think highlights this important point this broad point which is did they miss the window did they
00:19:07
miss the moment where suddenly you know the shrinkage is causing you know an asymptotic outcome for this business
00:19:13
that it makes investors a little bit like well I'm not as excited about that because it's not there's no there's no
00:19:18
longer as much upside and it might be time to kind of devalue the company and did they miss the moment to go public raise a bunch of capital
00:19:24
you know to to go and try new things and hopefully pivot into a way so I don't know enough about the business but
00:19:30
that's my broad kind of assessment of this this morning the interesting thing about that space we talked to one of our
00:19:36
friends at our poker game who runs a large consumer-facing business and I don't know if you were there for that
00:19:41
conversation on Freeburg but I was you were there yeah and one of the interesting things he said is we are at
00:19:47
a level of scale where we just bit these guys against each other and these things tend to now be lost leaders
00:19:53
for them which is to say effectively that cost structure becomes really important so
00:19:58
your CAC becomes very important because your ltvs are capped right and the ltvs are capped because these companies have
00:20:04
enough negotiating leverage to say well if you want my business here's the cost of doing this business which
00:20:10
makes a ton of sense if you're any large purveyor of services that require Payment Processing infrastructure so one
00:20:17
of the interesting Dynamics I think we're learning in this market is how it's really not a market right there are
00:20:23
segments and there's embedded profitability in each segment so to your point free bird this is the sum of at
00:20:29
least three or four different LTV to CAC ratios right right looks very different
00:20:34
which is why you have to build a ton of features and the head just wants Pure Play and
00:20:39
it's all about cost First because all of these guys want to pick up every nickel and dime that's on the
00:20:45
floor because for them on billions of transactions is Meaningful to them it's an it's an it's an EPS miss or or beat
00:20:52
right for them which has huge implications to their stock this is a market that I think is going to be really fascinating to uncover and peel
00:20:58
back the layers of over the next few by the way we haven't even talked about what stripe does as a business I know we have a diverse audience that doesn't all
00:21:04
come from text yeah so stripe is will process your transactions but they were the first people to make it as simple as
00:21:10
putting a snippet of code into your app to process a payment they can be with Visa Mastercard in those other places
00:21:15
they charge you a percentage of each transaction so to tremont's point these larger and so devs developers five ten
00:21:24
years ago love this because they could instantly get payments right it's abstracted the whole thing just the same way cloud computing does Right storage
00:21:30
at S3 Etc so you can kind of think about it that way but a large whale in the system of
00:21:35
which you said adyan has a lot of whales not a lot of long tail stripe because it's developer friendly and a snippet of
00:21:40
code they have this huge long tail anybody can do stripe in fact people who are using things like sub stack or patreon I believe they can just drop in
00:21:47
their stripe account so people now businesses of one have a stripe account they just drop it in there so for me
00:21:53
that seems like a huge potential in the future because some of those could be and it gives whales in the system and
00:21:58
the long tail gives stripe a lot of pricing power because there's there's no way for any one of those entities to
00:22:04
have enough leverage to tell stripe hate I don't want to pay 2.9 Plus 20 or 30 cents a transaction right
00:22:11
whereas if you go to the head I think adyan is charging like 1.3 or four percent so yeah it's a wholly different
00:22:18
Market and the pricing as a result is totally different yeah it's interesting to me
00:22:24
sax that we now are getting down to you know brass tax here we're analyzing
00:22:29
these money printing businesses and saying what is the ultimate value of this 10 20 years from now tremath and I got a
00:22:36
front row seat to that because there's a natural audience to every single service for AOL it was 30 million paid Subs a
00:22:43
month at I think the peak was 30 bucks a month people were paying per month so at
00:22:48
the time 24.99 yeah so you know you start looking at those numbers you know a billion dollars a month almost in just
00:22:55
and it was a fixed cost business but then boom it just hit a ceiling and competition emerged emerged in the in
00:23:01
the um case of uh broadband and then that business just slowly deprecated over time so sex what does this moment
00:23:09
tell you for Founders a lot of the listeners here and capital allocators in terms of assessing businesses for the
00:23:14
last and this will pivot into our next Story the last couple years you know if you were a first-time fund manager you were investing in 19 2019 to 2021 High
00:23:22
valuations those those funds are they ever going to be able to throw a profit and then people were investing in those
00:23:29
based on momentum logo chasing this is now back to you know sharpening your
00:23:35
pencils build Gurley style investing yeah yeah I mean we've talked about it before there's nothing new here
00:23:41
when you're in a boom the only three things that matter are growth growth and growth and when you're in a downturn the
00:23:47
three things that matter are growth burn and margins it's not that growth
00:23:53
stops mattering it's just that people also care about burn and margins and you know the companies that share the worst
00:24:00
are the ones that have inefficient growth that basically have burned a lot of money to grow
00:24:06
they have you know low or negative gross margins they are burning way too much money the burn multiple doesn't make
00:24:11
sense basically the ratio of money burnt to net new ARR that they're adding those
00:24:17
companies get called out when all of a sudden you have a regime change like we're seeing now CAC is one of the early
00:24:23
signs of this uh tremap you and I saw that remember AOL was sending DVDs everywhere and CAC became
00:24:30
two or three hundred dollars for every AOL subscriber and then they were playing this funny accounting game I
00:24:35
don't remember this chamoth where they were saying hey the LTV is like five years for an AOL they were looking back
00:24:40
at that number not forward with Broadband coming and so like we could totally spend 300 on TV ads to get a
00:24:46
dial-up customer at 24 a month and boy did that whips on them so I listening to
00:24:52
everybody talk here I'm just like wow keep your eye on the CAC folks the customer acquisition cost how much you get you spend to get a new AOL Netflix
00:24:59
or SAS product or a stripe customer is critically important we look really
00:25:04
closely at [ __ ] payback you know how many months does it take to to pay back the cost of acquiring a customer
00:25:11
we don't look at that exclusively though because you know what expenses go into CAC is highly dependent on your
00:25:18
accounting unpack that for a second because there's the money you spend on a Facebook ad or a LinkedIn ad or any other great platform for driving you
00:25:25
know customers to sign up for it yeah yeah spend money on an ad or you spend money on a sales person obviously that
00:25:32
goes into CAC but then what about sales operation head count does that go in is that op site count or is that
00:25:38
sales ad count is that customer acquisition or something else so there's a lot of like subtle accounting
00:25:44
decisions that have a big impact fun with numbers that number well this is why this is why I've always recommended just looking at burn multiple what I
00:25:50
really want to know is how much money is this startup burning in relation to how much revenue it's adding just like the
00:25:56
ratio of those two things I burned 100 yeah so yeah you spend
00:26:01
three hundred thousand dollars and we burned a hundred thousand dollars and
00:26:06
then we added a hundred thousand dollars in new customers ARR uh so that's 1X so
00:26:13
that you have on your chart here burn multiple of 1 to 1.5 or under one is amazing or great
00:26:19
but if you burn two hundred thousand and added a hundred thousand yeah I warn Founders going into this year do not
00:26:25
have a burn multiple greater than two because there's just so many headwinds right now that what happens is if you
00:26:31
end up missing your revenue forecast your burn multiple is going to look terrible it could shoot up to three four
00:26:37
five and up so it's better to have some cushion by going into the year being super efficient on the converse side
00:26:43
Friedberg if you're a lifetime value of a customer is incorrect
00:26:49
which we're seeing now with people canceling SAS products or reducing the number of seats or in cloud computing
00:26:57
people are now saying hey maybe I should take myself out of the cloud and host my own servers or some of my own servers and reducing their Cloud Bill Cloud uh
00:27:04
growth is slowing at azure across the board Amazon web services Etc the the it's
00:27:11
still growing but it's slowing the growth so that LTV if you get that wrong that can whip saw you as well yeah yeah
00:27:17
I mean LTV which is like what do you make over time from a customer or
00:27:22
however you want to assess it a market deployment
00:27:27
it should be on kind of net cash meaning like how much profit do I pull back into my bank accounts at the end of the day
00:27:33
after paying third parties and internal people and where a lot of people I think
00:27:40
in models I've seen on you know what's the lifetime value of a customer
00:27:46
they kind of take either revenue or just the simplified gross profit number but the reality is if you're scaling the
00:27:51
number of Engineers you need because you have many more customers and you've got customer service calls and you know
00:27:57
you've got to do custom deployments with your customers all of that kind of adds up to additional cost and some of these
00:28:03
businesses you see that the SAS companies for example that all have gotten their multiples hammered it's
00:28:09
because the kind of microscope has come out at this point to some degree set aside General macro economic factors
00:28:16
that are driving some of the multiple compression but as the microscope has come out it turns out that the efficiency of the business is not what
00:28:23
everyone hoped and dreamed a SAS business might be that the efficiency of the business maybe looks a little bit more like either a Services business or
00:28:30
there's a big kind of scaling Hardware component that the margin that you actually make for every dollar of
00:28:35
Revenue you generate fundamentally is smaller than you know what you think it is
00:28:41
you have to add people to support and Ops and new servers and all the stuff you're highlighting and a lot of that's
00:28:47
excluded and then it doesn't take like you don't realize all that when you're small or when you're medium and growing
00:28:53
you realize that when you're bigger when you're bigger you're like oh wow how do we get these costs out well if we cut these costs customer quality would
00:28:59
decline customers would churn all this bad stuff would happen so yeah that LTV number is generally not right and that's
00:29:06
why I say it's much more about kind of a true roic calculation which is how much Capital am I deploying and it's not just
00:29:13
being deployed in Market installers it's being deployed in other ways and then how much Capital am I making back net
00:29:18
profit over time and I think that's the right way to always analyze a business generally but
00:29:24
like particularly in businesses where it's easy to obfuscate either of those numbers and they could seem like it's an extraordinary business
00:29:30
you can get hurt when you get bigger or when you're scaling and in a market like this where you're trying to go public it's like whoa
00:29:37
that really hurts you know so I think that's a lot of what we're seeing let's talk about the other side of the tablet we've been living through a zerist zero
00:29:44
interest rate hallucination basically people were growth growth growth logo
00:29:49
logo logo whatever when they're making these bats Capital allocators now we're back to breast
00:29:56
hacks okay what's the margin what's the lifetime value and is this actually real is there a real business here or is this
00:30:02
just a grand hallucination that hallucination exists not on only on the founder side but on the capital
00:30:07
allocator side this week we had a uh interesting
00:30:14
semi-viral thread on Twitter somebody named Tyler tringus he's an early stage
00:30:19
investor don't know who that is but he did a thread predicting a16z just to pick out one firm
00:30:26
was a zero interest rate phenomenon and an incredible machine to accumulate AUM
00:30:31
assets under management and so what were your thoughts just writ large
00:30:37
on the capital allocator side of this Grand hallucination of zero interest rates
00:30:43
I mean I think it's a little unfair I think this is written more just to try to generate views and clicks because
00:30:49
okay you have to see the underlying return data to really have a sense of knowing is it
00:30:56
I think it's fair to say a couple of things that there was probably two and a half or three years of capital raised in
00:31:03
the industry that's going to get really put under pressure
00:31:09
and the reason is that there is not a lot of time diversity in that money meaning people got it and they put it
00:31:15
into the ground right away and one of the principles of having a more predictable return set
00:31:23
of returns over time is that you leverage time right so if you had a hundred dollars and you wanted to have a
00:31:30
diversified stream of returns you're much better off spending
00:31:35
a dollar a month for a hundred months versus ten dollars a month for 10 months
00:31:41
so just that thing will cause a lot of impact in headwinds for a lot of the
00:31:47
capital in 2021 and 2022. then the other thing you have to keep in
00:31:52
mind is that over many cycles where we've had high rates and low rates and medium rates
00:31:58
our industry typically returns a dollar sixty for every dollar it raises
00:32:04
and that's over many cycles and so if you believe that we're going to revert to the mean
00:32:09
out of the trillion dollars we've raised maybe we'll return
00:32:15
1.6 trillion now that sounds good except the problem is that 1.6 trillion is
00:32:20
marked at five and a half truly so you could have to give back so
00:32:25
there's a lot of pain you're gonna have to give back a lot of paper profits in order to get back to that 1.6 and be
00:32:31
okay with it and the question is what has happened in decision making in the meantime meaning how many people did you
00:32:37
hire how many deals did you do that you regret and then how does it change your
00:32:43
psychology and how you treat the next investment that comes over the desk can you separate yourself from these bad
00:32:49
losses and not be on tilt and make a good decision hmm so you had a terrible two-day
00:32:55
session like Phil Hellmuth did last week losing 350 000 can you play the next week and not be on tilt and start to
00:33:02
build back your stack and make 30 000 a night for 10 nights or 10 of the next 20 15 sessions or whatever it is it's
00:33:08
actually had a rebuttal or something you wanted to add to this no not really rebuttal I mean look I think if you're going to be intellectually honest about
00:33:14
it I think that 2021 is gonna be is gonna likely be not a great vintage for
00:33:20
VC why because we're just yeah the valuations were just really high they've
00:33:25
come down by what at least 50 percent on average maybe more more maybe 50 now but
00:33:33
you still have more medicine to take I think when you look at some of the things you know a lot of these companies are growing into their valuation look I
00:33:39
think for any given set of companies for any portfolio the most important thing is what's in the portfolio so if in 2021
00:33:48
you had the founding of the next Google or whatever that effect is going to swamp the effect of price levels in that
00:33:55
year because of the power law again the number one most important thing is just what's in that portfolio what's in that basket the second most important thing
00:34:02
is the entry prices and obviously if the entry prices are twice as high in a
00:34:07
given year than they are and every other year and twice as high as what the exit multiples are going to be in 10 years
00:34:13
when that portfolio becomes liquid that's going to hurt the returns but we
00:34:18
won't know which of these effects predominates until five years from now when we see more you know I mean when I
00:34:25
saw that tweet thread I thought maybe this is an issue for some Venture firms but we're not going to see even the
00:34:31
inklings of it for another five or seven years takes a while you know that's a problem that may manifest itself in year
00:34:37
10 and between now and then any firm that has a good track record of
00:34:42
returning capital or frankly has a good brand and good marks will still raise an inordinate amount of money because this
00:34:48
is an asset class that I still think on the margins is a more of a must-have asset allocation than a
00:34:56
on the margins I'd just rather ignore it because you know it is the future of how GDP will get created and so everybody
00:35:02
kind of has to pay attention imagine if in 2021 the you know the next great Mega
00:35:09
outcomes in AI were created right because those Founders were just slightly ahead of the curves you know they were like a couple years out of the
00:35:14
Curve if those create you know the next whatever trillion dollar companies
00:35:20
Google Apple then the fact that price levels were 2x what they should have been won't matter what will really
00:35:26
matter is the distribution there'll be a bunch of bad portfolios there'll be some really incredible ones and that's the way it always is with Venture the thing
00:35:32
to keep in mind is in 21 and 22 rates were still effectively too low and I think we did this analysis Nick you can
00:35:38
throw up that thing but it's not correlated with big outcomes those vintage years 2023 is the is the
00:35:46
first vintage year where we're actually starting to see high enough rates that have historically generated that kind of
00:35:52
return and so I do agree with you David I just think it's shifted out by a couple years 23 24 25 those can be some
00:36:00
real power law years I think because we're going to have just based on what the FED is saying
00:36:06
five and a half percent interest rates for the foreseeable future which is it's a huge it's a huge number the risk
00:36:12
that's a huge I'll tell you what that is you know what it is though chamoth I think to build on your point and
00:36:17
Freiburg I'll bring you in on the air for this creates an environment in which discipline on all sides of the table
00:36:24
boards management teams investors Rank and file everybody has to be focused
00:36:29
everybody has to have sharpened swords and that little bit of headwind is and
00:36:34
the the ability to raise Capital being harder is building more reserve and more
00:36:40
resilience and grit in this set of Founders it's kind of like parenting in a way like if you are too permissive you
00:36:46
give too many options kids aren't disciplined and now this group of entrepreneurs I'm seeing who haven't
00:36:51
given up my Lord are they becoming animals in terms of like pure Samurai in
00:36:57
terms of how they're running these businesses anything that's not efficient projects that were the third or fourth
00:37:03
most important project cut cut cut now it's taking them 18 months Freeburg to maybe get discipline but maybe you could
00:37:09
speak to the next three years and the opportunity for investing in this cohort
00:37:14
because man that last cohort is going to be really really challenged and they'll probably do
00:37:20
six percent returns just like your money market account can do right now five or six or what bonds can do but this next
00:37:27
group man we're seeing dogged entrepreneurs who are focused on reality and there's no hallucination now that
00:37:33
this is going to be easy there is no Grand Illusion here uh what are you seeing in the marketplace about if if the market
00:37:39
average return inventor in early stage investing is going to be six percent remember it's it's not evenly
00:37:46
distributed so you know 80 percent of funds could end up having net negative
00:37:53
real returns and 20 make money and then those there'll be a very few that will make real money
00:37:59
and you know that's the the nature of having you know a very kind of low average return
00:38:06
on the industry is there may be a lot of wipeouts on the investor class folks that have only had one or two
00:38:12
funds and then just got blown up in the cycle um I think there's two groups of companies out there one is companies
00:38:18
that obviously have been funded and are doing stuff and are active businesses and they've raised money in the past and
00:38:24
that's where there's going to be really ugly times I've mentioned this in the past but I do think that there's a significant number
00:38:30
of these companies that if they were to be truly valued on first principles in private markets today they'll get valued as
00:38:37
at a value that's less than their preferred equity which means that there's a difficult restructuring needed in the
00:38:43
company and not everyone's going to be willing to embrace that so that's what's going to trigger a lot of the wipeouts in the market it's not like the
00:38:49
businesses are valueless it's at the capital structure makes it difficult to refund them to fund them and continue
00:38:55
their their operations now for all the new businesses as you highlight man there's so much extraordinary
00:39:00
leverage out there you know left and right I think we talked about this maybe a year ago that
00:39:07
there was a big bubble coming in AI but I mean left and right in nearly every Market every segment
00:39:12
you won't see a pitch deck that doesn't have those two letters in it right uh I mean I'm sure you you guys find me yeah
00:39:18
it does feel it is it is hard not to feel like you're a
00:39:26
little bit of a lemming if you buy into the AI stuff but I will say that the use cases we're seeing are really really
00:39:31
incredible totally I didn't feel this way with the last couple of waves like the whole web 3 thing never totally made
00:39:37
sense and crypto always felt a little bit speculative like kind of unsure but the AI thing seems like it's going to
00:39:43
deliver real value and I'm seeing like already three major Enterprise use cases number one is just Auto summaries like
00:39:51
being able to summarize very quickly a thousand articles or a meeting you know spitting out a like a
00:39:58
summary of what just happened in a meeting and it could break it down between a recap and action items it just does all the work for you
00:40:05
second thing is like in-app customer service kind of like a co-pilot but there's no reason to contact customer
00:40:10
support anymore because you can just ask the AI inside the app and like application right and they'll be faster
00:40:17
right that sounds like a power narrow sacks yeah they'll get it right it's like a power user who's sitting next to
00:40:23
you it's your co-pilot and is making you much more effective in the app and then the third thing we're already seeing is
00:40:30
autocomplete for everything I mean it is like Bonkers how you know how you get like little types suggestions in email
00:40:36
yeah but it's like two or three words the AI is going to be able to do type ahead for any content type
00:40:44
to-do lists tables it's so it's Bonkers you see it in Google you see it in
00:40:50
Google Sheets now like if you type you know equal sum it's like oh here's what the seven most likely things to happen
00:40:56
next are in which case it's kind of like you use the chess.com app I don't know if you've used it with like the heads up
00:41:01
display where it's showing you the different moves and this is a book Move versus this is not a book let me make a
00:41:07
prediction all of the things that you guys said I think are incredible consumer surplus business opportunities
00:41:13
which means that the ultimate Winner Is Us
00:41:20
incredibly incredibly productive and more leveraged in how we spend our
00:41:26
time which will allow us to do all kinds of other interesting things with all the time that we save that I think is almost
00:41:31
now a certainty the problem with consumer surplus businesses is oftentimes there is no
00:41:38
money made in the funding of them and really where the money is made isn't enabling it so for example so far what I
00:41:45
would say is there's very little money that has been made in AI there's been an enormous amount of money
00:41:51
that's been made by Nvidia and the reason is because they are the
00:41:56
pick and shovel provider in the into the industry and so that's an example
00:42:01
AMD I think can also benefit so the Silicon players seem pretty obvious here maybe some of the cloud players
00:42:08
um the problem is the cloud players are trapped inside of other big companies with many other business models but I just want to put out there that I think
00:42:14
David you're right that the consumer a hundred percent wins but
00:42:20
economically it's not clear to me that there is a winner that is Venture fundable well hold on a second
00:42:26
yeah the Levi strausses of the world right in the Gold Rush the people that made the picks and shovels and the jeans
00:42:32
are sure to make money yeah and the people that pan for gold is much more speculative and harder to see right now
00:42:39
yeah so I think you have a point that so I
00:42:44
mentioned three use cases I think are killer use cases I've already seen demos of today and when you look at them
00:42:50
you're like okay this has real applicability I mean the AI is going to be it's going to powerfully change our
00:42:56
work lives I'm just focused on Enterprise so now I don't know who benefits economically from that that
00:43:01
functionality that I mentioned I think is likely to be pretty commoditized pretty soon but it's going to be
00:43:08
incorporated into lots of different apps and ways that are hard to predict right now I think that this AI Revolution is going
00:43:15
to do for SAS what mobile did for you know a lot of the web 1.0 companies
00:43:21
where like for a lot of these web one companies they were either disrupted by mobile or they are turbocharged by
00:43:27
mobile so you think about Facebook it successfully made the transition and mobile made its business so much better
00:43:32
because people were just using it a lot more on their mobile devices there are a lot of other businesses that just kind of fell by the wayside because they just
00:43:39
couldn't make the adaptation from desktop to mobile Computing I think AI is going to be like that for SAS where
00:43:46
there's going to be a lot of SAS product service right yeah you're a hundred percent if
00:43:51
you can incorporate the AI into your SAS product put in a co-pilot put in autocomplete and all sorts of other
00:43:57
forms of value that we're just scratching the surface of you're going to be able to deliver so much more business value but if you're not able to
00:44:03
do that and somebody else can then you're gonna get disrupted look at some of these Enterprise spaces like
00:44:08
take something like APM right like application Performance Management that's an entire ecosystem of Enterprise
00:44:13
companies it's probably 10 15 20 billion dollars of collective market cap
00:44:19
and I'm just going to say something not to not defend anybody but like that can mostly be automated by AI
00:44:25
those are simple heuristics that can be embedded in a way that's completely novel where this code Library just gets
00:44:31
dropped in and all of this stuff happens relatively automatically now so there are all kinds of other sectors
00:44:37
to your point that get crushed then the question is who provides that layer now for free in their existing SAS toolkit
00:44:44
or their product that now all of a sudden captures more value as a result and they can sell it for pennies because
00:44:50
it's incremental to them in terms of their margin and revenue I think you're right Hardware wins I think cloud wins
00:44:56
Big because if you keep adding to these you know uh models and ones 10 20 better
00:45:03
people are going to be willing to pay for that but then when you think about consumers whether they're Enterprise or actual consumers I believe this stuff is
00:45:09
going to provide so much value that people are going to take their wallets out and be more than willing to spend for it it's more valuable than Netflix
00:45:15
description okay I'm gonna take this side of it imagine you take your videos of you learning to ski and you put it
00:45:22
into an AI coach and it's like here's how to and it just draws on it here's how to be a better steer this is going
00:45:27
to blow people's minds and you'll be more than willing to spend 25 bucks a month I disagree with that and the reason is because we've spent now two
00:45:35
decades in that's a lot of muscle memory to unwind of people that have been
00:45:40
consistently given More For Less and I think that we shouldn't underestimate the expectations we've all
00:45:46
collectively created by building software tools that have that inherent deflationary aspect to them and so I
00:45:53
just think that it's gonna it's a very high high bar I still think there are subscription services to be built I don't disagree with you there Jason I
00:45:59
just think that in general though the de facto business model that we've created in Tech is more for Less
00:46:05
and we've used technology to give us operating leverage to create margin structures that other companies couldn't
00:46:10
copy and I still don't and I think that AI accelerates that not changes it
00:46:15
I think it's going to be the opposite if you look at Netflix if you look at Disney they've been raising prices
00:46:21
providing more value I think that this is going to provide so much value that the incremental 10 bucks a month five
00:46:26
bucks a month per employee is going to pay off so much that this could be of slack or like some presentation software
00:46:33
there are a lot of people who are making PowerPoint AI PowerPoints where it makes you a new deck or a figma with AI these things are
00:46:41
going to be so powerful people are like it's totally worth an extra 100 bucks a month because I can get rid of another employee this one employee can now do
00:46:46
the work of three [ __ ] it man I'll give you a thousand dollars deflation a really good a model if you just added
00:46:52
the LTV event the software company is going to make more money I'm just saying it's deflationary that's deflationary
00:46:57
okay it's deflationary on the entire economy but that software company that figures out how you can fire two
00:47:03
accountants and keep one and make them as good as you know three yeah
00:47:08
software right you're selling consumer surplus okay I think we're in agreement Freebird sold them as silence you want
00:47:14
to chime in on this you still with us Southern silence okay technology drives prices down
00:47:22
well technology is about doing more with less right it's about doing more with less and the AI helps you do so much more with the same amount of time or
00:47:29
less time I think your whole point about Disney and Netflix Etc is because they aren't you know innovating on either
00:47:36
side and so in order to drive earnings growth they're having to raise prices but that doesn't speak to the benefit of
00:47:41
Technology they're innovating massively they're adding massive features to their products and massive new shows I mean I
00:47:48
think there's pricing power in this AI thing that that's just my belief I could be wrong about leverage yeah I mean look
00:47:53
I think I think your point like so my general rule of thumb tell them on technology is
00:48:00
the technology Creator the technology company should generally be capturing
00:48:05
about one-third of the value that they deliver to the customer unpack that why where do you come up with that so
00:48:10
I mean it's just kind of where and give an example yeah yeah so like let's say that
00:48:16
you as a food delivery company you have to pay a human 10 bucks to deliver food
00:48:22
from you now let's say I run a robot my amortized cost of running that robot is uh two bucks so it's eight bucks cheaper
00:48:29
or call it one dollar so it's nine dollars cheaper I should charge you four bucks
00:48:35
you know because four bucks is super competitive with the existing market and it'll keep me competitive against the
00:48:40
other automation companies that are going to start to emerge it's just kind of how market dynamics end up working out if you charge too
00:48:46
much you're going to invite people to come in and compete with you if your Command Technology commoditizes remember all technology commoditizes over time
00:48:53
and if you don't charge uh enough you're not going to make enough money to
00:48:59
be able to reinvest in scaling your business and doing more kind of interesting things as a platform so you
00:49:05
know generally AI provides more leverage to Sax's point if I can build an application I don't know if you guys have seen these incredible UI apps that
00:49:11
are built in AI now where I can say with a prompt hey yeah we talked about it two weeks ago yeah right make me a dog
00:49:17
walking app interface and it builds like the three steps of the dog walking app and gives you a bunch of options and you can pick the one you want I would
00:49:23
typically have to pay a design firm fifty thousand dollars to do that work for me so if it'd be AI is doing it
00:49:29
automatically you know I should be paying let's say fifteen thousand dollars for that product for that capability the
00:49:36
margin on that is 100 try 50. right whatever it is very low and the margin on that's 100 whereas the margin on
00:49:42
paying people to do design work as a design firm is very you know not not a great margin you're having a page you
00:49:49
know why we're having that we're working it out in our heads right now one group of us is talking about comparing AI
00:49:55
software and AI services to the existing software stack and then on the other side of the discussion we're comparing
00:50:00
it to the humans who are currently doing that work imagine the six percent that two Brokers get you know doing a the sale of a
00:50:07
million dollar home and that's sixty thousand and AI could negotiate that and find you a Better Home and sell your
00:50:13
home for the optimal price for less than that sixty thousand what would you be willing to pay for that
00:50:18
right and the same thing with the designer of the logo I don't think that's how it's going to play out exactly jaycal because to completely
00:50:24
eliminate a job function you have to do you know 100 of it and you have to it you know 100 of the job function as but
00:50:32
as well as or better than the human whereas I think as opposed to a model where you solve the human in the loop
00:50:38
but they're much more productive because they're working with an AI they're augmented they're performing The Iron Man like
00:50:45
model so that's more effective yeah so I think if there's a job reduction it
00:50:50
would be more the case where they've got a team of five accountants and they go to two or three because now they're just
00:50:57
much more productive I don't think they go to zero that's my sense anyway I look at
00:51:02
Outsourcing as a possible corollary to this you remember when you moved the accountants to Manila where their
00:51:08
knowledge workers there and it knocked out half the price two-thirds of the price whatever it was this just feels like that
00:51:14
on steroids to me if you have a business model like you know Infosys or Tata or one of these things that's lever to
00:51:20
utilization rate this is the most obvious way to basically add many
00:51:25
potentially percentage points if not tens of percentage points of utilization to your business that's all money free
00:51:31
money for you right because now you'll have fewer people they'll be more utilized and they'll have more leverage
00:51:37
because they'll be using a bot or some AI agent to help them write code
00:51:42
write unit tests all that typical stuff that right now you Outsource and even if you pay a marginal cost
00:51:48
you add the labor Arbitrage to technology Arbitrage now all of a sudden these businesses look really really interesting
00:51:54
yeah customer support definitely gets revolutionized right because
00:52:01
the initial it's a no-brainer you know the first line of defense is going to be the AI using you know text to voice and
00:52:10
it can choose what language it wants to Output to what accent so you'll never know that you're you'll think you're
00:52:15
talking to someone locally literally you'll be in 50 languages with
00:52:20
the right answer and you don't need to build up that entire group I mean this I
00:52:25
think we're underestimating in some ways yeah but what's going to happen here but my point is I think that a lot of the
00:52:31
customer support inquiries just go away because the help the assistant gets built into the tool directly so you
00:52:37
never even get the coaching you as you go yeah like why did you you know if you can just ask it people
00:52:43
do that right now on YouTube if you just type the question into YouTube and you find the video that takes five minutes
00:52:49
but you're saying this is gonna take 15 second sex because it's gonna be right there I think what Zach said before is
00:52:54
hugely important when you think about how AI touches non-technology businesses what he said is the boundary condition
00:52:59
which I think is right I think he nailed this which is the boundary condition for AI to replace a human is where the
00:53:06
threshold error rate of that AI is the same or less than the human right if you look at very complicated
00:53:13
markets where does regulatory capture rear its ugly head it's in allowing humans to be
00:53:19
error prone and you can't do anything about it take Health Care if you go into a hospital there's a certain error rate
00:53:25
in every surgery right there's a certain error rate in the things that happen but there's probably a whole bunch of
00:53:32
ways in which that entire infrastructure can be made much much better with AI right a robot that does laser-guided
00:53:38
precision surgery characterizing tumors 100 with 100 accuracy so you always get 100 of the
00:53:45
cancer out when you go and get surgeries done all these things are possible now and all of a sudden you take these error
00:53:52
rates that can be high as as high as 20 or 30 so for example breast cancer surgeries the dirty secret of our
00:53:58
healthcare industry is that has a 30 error rate you know that can and should go to zero and now all of a sudden so
00:54:05
these highly regulated markets I think can become much much more efficient and
00:54:10
and leveraged and at past that consumer surplus onto people in that case it's
00:54:15
healthfulness which I think is a is a big deal interesting
00:54:21
yeah incredible I mean it I got all the videos I got all the loops I went to the one down on El Camino Real it was like
00:54:29
going to a spot in and out no big deal but I got the results and it's like oh here here's a tiny of little the Lings
00:54:34
that are not worth cutting your body open to look at but just so you know your knee your shoulder your kidney
00:54:40
there's a little paw up here there's a little polyp here whatever there's a little growth here but let's see in two or three years just monitor it and I'm
00:54:46
like oh my God I'm so grateful if this thing gets down to like 500 bucks which it obviously will or a
00:54:51
thousand bucks and everybody's doing it and then all that data's in there and then the AI is looking at it like you're saying I mean the the early detection
00:54:59
was the AI able to tell the doctor how full of [ __ ] you were
00:55:04
you know you're not supposed to eat for 24 hours so they they didn't get an accurate reading on BS
00:55:12
there's your cold oven everybody yeah I here's a really important clip for
00:55:18
Founders uh Play the Steve Jobs clip this is super important when looking at web3 versus AI to Sax's point you've got
00:55:27
to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology
00:55:33
you can't start with the technology and try to figure out where you're going to try to sell it and I've made this
00:55:39
mistake probably more than anybody else in this room and I've got the scar tissue to prove it and I know that it's the case and as we
00:55:47
have tried to come up with a strategy
00:55:52
and a vision for Apple um it started with what incredible benefits
00:56:02
can we give to the customer where can we take the customer not
00:56:07
not starting with let's sit down with the engineers and and figure out what
00:56:13
awesome technology we have and then how are we going to Market that um
00:56:18
and I think that's the right path to take can I ask you guys a question
00:56:24
I sometimes I go down these rabbit holes I'll watch hours and hours of Steve Jobs clips what do you think makes him so
00:56:32
calm doesn't he just strike you as incredibly
00:56:37
just like calm and like comfortable with himself and just aware I know what it is he was so much
00:56:44
better and aesthetically Building Product than anybody else he when you think of that
00:56:51
PC era of no taste beige boxes and everybody having no style and just no
00:56:58
Swagger he was studying you know German design Buddhism tripping on acid and
00:57:06
like just understanding the universe at a level that Gates and the other contemporaries weren't they just weren't
00:57:13
as Transcendent in understanding product design as he was so it was like when you were saying you
00:57:19
were playing poker with a bunch of four-year-olds or something that's the analogy he's just on such a
00:57:24
different level that he's watching people make you know as400 and uh you know IBM PS
00:57:31
whatever like just garbage computers garbage operating systems and it's just like the thing is like if you look at
00:57:37
any era just the way that he communicates there's just a level of calm I don't know how to describe it you
00:57:44
understand what I'm trying to say like he he just seems like he just sees through all the noise like he's seen through the Matrix like he's unplugged
00:57:50
himself tax is unimpressed okay there you have it no I'm very impressed with Steve Jobs
00:57:55
I think he understood product development better than anybody else yeah clearly that's it I mean my
00:58:01
favorite is Steve Jobs passage is the one where he describes the John Scully disease do you guys
00:58:07
remember this yeah no oh here it is you know one of
00:58:13
the things that really hurt Apple was after I left John Scully got a very serious disease it's the disease of
00:58:19
thinking that a really great idea is 90 of the work and if you just tell all these other people here's this great
00:58:25
idea then of course you can go off and make it happen and the problem with that is that there is just a tremendous amount
00:58:32
of craftsmanship in between a great idea and a great product yeah so true
00:58:38
yeah I mean I tell people it's like a Rugby scrum you go you know you got to get a whole
00:58:43
team to get the ball down the field it's not like one person put the ball down the field and you know
00:58:49
they kind of maybe suggested a play but once you're on the field Everything Changes and everyone's involved in getting it
00:58:55
down the field that quotes where the name for craft Ventures comes from oh really oh a little known fact yeah I
00:59:01
didn't know that yeah section 230 we talked about last week the Gonzalez versus Google case the
00:59:08
justices heard oral arguments and plaintiffs seem to fare poorly quote from scotus blog Justice
00:59:14
Elena Kagan suggests that it even if section 230 is not well suited to address the current needs of today's
00:59:21
internet such as such a task was best left as we predicted last week I think
00:59:26
sax you did best left to Congress rather than the Supreme Court quote these are not like the nine
00:59:33
greatest experts on the internet Kagan observes actual thoughts yeah I mean this is just uh I think really a quick
00:59:40
update to what we talked about last week the Justice heard oral arguments they seem to be very skeptical of the
00:59:46
plaintiff's arguments even Justice Thomas who has written the most
00:59:51
skeptically in recent years about the broad immunity that tech companies enjoy under Section 230 seem surprisingly
00:59:58
sympathetic to the theory that the ninth Circuit Court ruled on which is that
01:00:04
section 230 protects recommendations as well as a provider's algorithm treats content on its website similarly so even
01:00:11
the Justice who I think was most likely to reign in 230 seem to be
01:00:18
more comfortable with what the defendant which was Google was saying so it looks to me like Google and big Tech are going
01:00:24
to win this one any thoughts no not really I think I want to know
01:00:30
what you guys think about Trump showing up with Big Macs and water in East Palestine I mean he is uh he's a media
01:00:35
genius he beat Buddha judge to East Palestine yeah that was um literally
01:00:40
pull up my tweet I think this is the power we because Trump has been out of the public disease
01:00:48
he's immediate he is a media safon literally Biden is in Ukraine saber
01:00:54
rattling over air Sirens that may or may not be true they were fake who cares who
01:01:00
cares anyway well no no it doesn't matter no it doesn't matter no we don't know we do we do actually
01:01:06
there okay because I don't need to be hold on a second I
01:01:12
don't need to be there because Jake Sullivan participated in a press conference and he was asked by a CBS news reporter if the U.S gave the
01:01:19
Russians any kind of heads up that the president was going to be in Kiev and what Sullivan said and I quote is we did
01:01:25
notify the Russians that President Biden will be traveling to Kiev we did so some hours before his departure for
01:01:32
deconfliction purposes you know what deep confliction is right it's when the U.S
01:01:37
tries to avoid an accidental conflict and you know Putin's not crazy enough to
01:01:42
try and assassinate Biden so the Russians were not attacking Kiev that day in fact they haven't attacked Kiev
01:01:48
as far as I know for weeks so these Air Raid Sirens were basically just pure theater but the amazing thing was that
01:01:54
if you don't know if you don't know that Biden orchestrated is my point people come on Jason doesn't mean Biden pressed
01:02:02
the button so don't don't also take it to the other extreme who knows who went who who why the siren
01:02:09
went off but put it aside this was a joint event between the Biden Administration and the zielinski team
01:02:15
they organized it the whole thing was choreographed how did that red carpet get there Jason was that an accident too
01:02:22
okay let's put that aside accidental I mean let me give you your GOP let me give you your GOP win Donald
01:02:30
Trump is a savant and he went to America to the place that we were reporting on
01:02:36
the under reported story people in East Palestine are being ignored and he comes there to
01:02:44
help the people of America I give you all credit your guy sacks did the most
01:02:50
amazing media move in history he went to Middle America where people are suffering as opposed to a war that
01:02:55
nobody wants to be in and spend all that money on we won't spend money Palestine but we will go spend billions in
01:03:04
you can't go all right you don't know what this reminded me of and you may think this is a weird connection but it
01:03:09
reminded me of the ending to the movie uh boys in the hood do you remember what happens at the end of that movie no I
01:03:15
haven't seen it in years ago okay I was 30 years old but Ice Cube you know plays uh this character Doughboy and his
01:03:20
brother gets killed yep and at the very end of the movie he gives this speech to Cuba Gooding Jr where he says you know I
01:03:27
turn on the TV and there was all this [ __ ] about violence in a foreign land and there was nothing on my brother
01:03:32
getting killed all this stuff about what's happening in our foreign countries nothing about what's happening here and then I think the most memorable
01:03:38
line was either they don't know don't show or they don't care what's going on in the hood right so what's going on
01:03:46
here is the people of East Palestine Ohio are being engulfed in a plume of carcinogens and toxins and Biden is off
01:03:54
right pursuing this crusade in eastern Ukraine and it's not just him I'll I'll
01:03:59
dish out to Mitch McConnell as well Mitch McConnell those are the neocons of or neocons yeah avocado was on TV saying
01:04:06
that the number one priority of the United States right now is defeating Russia in Ukraine it's not helping the
01:04:13
people of of Ohio it is not securing the Border it is not solving crime in our cities it is not making our schools
01:04:19
better it's running off and basically supporting this war in Ukraine so both these octogenarians Biden and McConnell
01:04:27
both they either don't know don't show or they don't care what has happened to the United States of America he's a
01:04:33
genius but it's not even genius I mean it's so obvious that you go there it is so obvious nobody wants to be a judge
01:04:39
didn't go there and Biden didn't go there it's not it's not Geniuses didn't go there where's the Sanders yeah he
01:04:47
hasn't declared no make a trap I think the most senior Democratic person that went over there was Josh Shapiro who's
01:04:52
the governor of Pennsylvania he got there before Buddha judge what is going on I mean and this it's it's a
01:04:59
never-ending war and so you know this is nobody wants to fight a
01:05:04
never-ending War this is this is what God bush in trouble right like this was the big critique it's like we're
01:05:09
spending all this money over in the Middle East on these conflicts
01:05:16
I think actually it's a good analogy so the with Bush senior Bush actually this
01:05:21
is in 1991 he won the Iraq war that was actually a stunning foreign policy success because he actually didn't go
01:05:28
too far he didn't go all the way on the road to Baghdad the way that his son George W bush would creating an epic disaster so
01:05:35
Bush 41 delivered a victory there and he still lost election why because he
01:05:40
seemed out of touch he wasn't focused on domestic problems the American people want an American president to focus on
01:05:47
American problems and even if Biden delivers some sort of victory in Ukraine if he ignores these festering problems
01:05:53
at home then he is I think vulnerable for this re-election but I think the
01:05:59
truth of the matter is that this war is going to turn out much worse than the Iraq war did in 1991 because in 91 we
01:06:07
showed restraint and we knew what our Vital interest was and we kept our objectives limited and we kept the
01:06:13
timetable very short what is Biden doing here Biden won't tell us what the objective is it's just whatever the
01:06:19
ukrainians want he won't tell us what the timetable is it's basically for as long as it takes and then meanwhile this
01:06:25
week you had Kamala Harris go to the Munich Summit declaring that the Russians are guilty of crimes against
01:06:30
humanity which that's something that we could have assessed after the war think
01:06:35
about the incentives you're now giving the Russian leadership before we said that we just wanted them to leave when you accuse them of war crimes it implies
01:06:42
that we're going to go chasing them all the way to Moscow they're not going to want to end this war they can be put on trial at the Hague I mean this is highly
01:06:50
inflammatory so you know this thing is not going in the right direction yeah and that was the thing I didn't like
01:06:55
about Biden's speech over there is just he's escalating escalating escalating hey that we have to stop Putin I mean
01:07:01
which you do he did invade another country he didn't cause three or four hundred thousand Russians
01:07:06
have died according to reports over a hundred thousand ukrainians have died according to votes neither side is given
01:07:12
the accurate number because they don't want to demoralize their constituents but the amount of suffering going on
01:07:17
here is extraordinary and I think it should be the West who is going sen macron send somebody from Germany
01:07:24
send some you know group of people to then go to Ukraine and work this out but
01:07:30
you don't need to go in your saber rattling it was too much saborating for me it is the escalation we need
01:07:37
de-escalation in these situations not saboration but but binders really painted himself
01:07:44
into a corner here because before the war he refused to take NATO expansion off the table he refused to recognize
01:07:50
the Russian interest in Crimea and we gave no support to the Mystic Accords which would have given some limited
01:07:55
autonomy to the Russian speakers in the donbass area if we had just done those three things there would have been no war Bayan refused to do that he refuses
01:08:02
to take the expansion off the table even today so he has nothing to compromise with he is dug in and the problem we
01:08:09
have now is that it's a lose-lose scenario if the ukrainians keep doing poorly because
01:08:17
right now it looks like they're on the back foot what is the United States going to do we're going to let them lose this war or are we going to keep giving
01:08:22
them more Aid and step in it looks to me like Biden now he has invested in his whole presidency in this and he can't
01:08:28
just let them lose which means more escalation from uh and on the Russian side if the Russians lose then they have
01:08:34
an incentive to use nuclear weapons to rescue the situation so it seems to me that both scenarios here are really bad
01:08:42
and we don't really have a good way out of this we're looking for some sort of magical Goldilocks scenario where the
01:08:49
Russians sort of lose but not enough to use nukes you know the Administration has not given us a clear picture of what
01:08:57
victory looks like here that's actually reasonably achievable in a reasonable time frame at a
01:09:03
reasonable cost what do we think uh a freeberg of Xi Jinping making overtures and hey maybe we should
01:09:10
work towards peace if you follow the money he wants cheap oil he wants this thing to end and he wants the West to be
01:09:15
buying goods from China the West wants to sell a bunch of armaments the military industrial com
01:09:21
complex is absolutely in Delight of replenishing all of these weapons uh
01:09:27
perhaps a little cynical to follow the money concept but what was your take on the chessboard of Xi Jinping he's going
01:09:34
to visit Putin before Biden does and he wants to build Bridges
01:09:39
and we want to say morado what are your thoughts isn't he getting like I mean China buys
01:09:45
energy from Russia today they buy oil on sale at a pretty cheap price so if I'm
01:09:52
China I want this to last longer don't I like why would I want to end this and then have Russia's markets open up
01:09:57
because if their markets open up the markets normalize to market prices right now they're getting a discount so I think yeah
01:10:04
rather they certainly don't want things to escalate the question is how quickly do they want them to de-escalate so if
01:10:10
I'm China I'm kind of probably playing a little bit of a you know middle line here
01:10:16
I I just I obviously don't want to see a big hot War China's got its own domestic problems right now that seem pretty significant and existential and having
01:10:24
access to cheap energy seems like a benefit obviously if there was significant
01:10:29
conflict and escalation of conflict that would be very bad from an economic perspective for China so they they're
01:10:35
probably somewhere in the middle like a slow resolution let's say I don't know I mean this is pure speculation this is
01:10:40
just me but you're a sack search moth Europe isn't going to buy Putin's oil anytime soon right they're now gonna but
01:10:46
he's able to sell it to China and he's able to sell to India and the rest of the world there was actually an article in today's New York Times about how the
01:10:53
West may be unified about Ukraine but the rest of the world is not the article was saying something that Chris the war
01:10:59
said for a while which is we actually don't have the whole world with us at all the brics countries are not with us
01:11:04
the emerging world the whole southern hemisphere basically is not with us they would like the US to play a more
01:11:09
constructive role in finding a peace deal not like you said Jason saber rattling or escalating so the rest of
01:11:14
the world is not happy with us and this is why the Russian sanctions have not been effective I think the Russian
01:11:19
economies had like a three to four percent hit it is not the collapse that was predicted because there are enough
01:11:25
other countries willing to do business with them would this have happened Venture month if Trump was president and how would Trump have handled it do you
01:11:31
think just Game Theory here I'm just curious because Trump almost won right I mean if Trump had won what would this look like would Putin have gone in there
01:11:37
if Trump was president and how would Trump have handled it because Trump seems to think I would have just told him don't do this
01:11:43
and they wouldn't have done it I mean this is the most obvious compliment I can give him I think that he is
01:11:48
exceptionally pragmatic on being anti-war and I think
01:11:54
that that is one of the most positive characteristics that he showed
01:12:00
he was really the only President I think in modern history right sassy poo that hasn't gone misembroiled in a new new
01:12:06
Wars yeah it is the best part of him yeah he's been incredibly incredibly consistent so I suspect that there would
01:12:12
have been some kind of a deal I know that sounds so ridiculous to say but there would have
01:12:18
been a deal with a deal I actually agree he's a deal maker Jason he gave a
01:12:23
statement North Korea he went to North Korea and met with he'll shake hands with anybody exactly he would have fired
01:12:29
all of the the Deep State blob that started to position anything towards a
01:12:35
conflict so I think he would have shut the door so ferociously on Ukraine and
01:12:40
NATO and anybody that crossed that line he would have tarred and feathered publicly and I think the end result
01:12:46
would have been that Putin could have found an off-ramp well before he invaded probably totally yes I I agree blame
01:12:55
Germany for all this right he called it well Trump very early asked the question
01:13:00
why are we spending all this money to defend Germany when Germany has this big pipeline deal with Russia it doesn't
01:13:05
seem like they need our protection they should just pay for it themselves but I think there's a separate point that jamathis made that is a really good
01:13:12
point which is Trump's instinctual resistance to what the Deep State wants
01:13:18
and he actually said it this week he gave a um a two-minute televised statement that was all over Twitter
01:13:23
where he basically made the argument that listen the reason why we're in this war is because the military-industrial
01:13:29
complex and the foreign policy establishment they basically courted this conflict and they are working at
01:13:36
odds with the interest of the American people it's actually a fairly radical critique I don't think a major
01:13:41
presidential candidate has run against the military-industrial complex the way that he is now positioning himself and
01:13:47
let me tell you this you know I've said it before he's not my preferred candidate but if this war spirals out of
01:13:53
control either you know it turns into a even bigger conflict that draws Us in or it
01:14:01
turns into a big recession because I don't think we've seen the last of the supply shocks from this war
01:14:07
if we get a recession that Trump can I think lay at the feet of this war he's
01:14:14
positioning himself to take advantage of this could be a silver bullet for him I don't think he has any other way of winning but you know if this turns into
01:14:20
a big mess you have your tinfoil hat there put it
01:14:26
on for a second I want to talk to tin foil sacks Tim foil hat sacks let's put them the tinfoil hats on here do you
01:14:32
think Putin is escalating this as a way to position
01:14:38
Trump to where Putin says he could say this during the election like listen you know I would love to talk to Trump and
01:14:44
what if Trump goes and talks to Putin or does a phone call with him so wait so so your theory is that Putin
01:14:53
Theory so so your theory is that Putin's
01:14:58
escalating this into potentially a nuclear war to get Trump reelected that's your theory and I'm the 10 Trump
01:15:04
I'm just tinfoil adding it the reason that this has occurred no no now that this has occurred not
01:15:10
that he did he did the elevations you're the one that's in foil hat territory the soil hack corner at the
01:15:17
end Putin the reason why not that he started the war for it that he would end the war to give Trump a win
01:15:24
how's he going to end the war for Trump what are you talking about during the election he's he does a call with Trump and he
01:15:31
says you know I talked to Trump about this and I'd love to do some negotiations with Trump I've always had
01:15:36
appreciation for his ability to help negotiate things I would love I would feel better about negotiating with Trump
01:15:42
who hasn't Sable rattled and told everybody in the world that I have to be that there isn't regime change so I'll
01:15:49
see how you come up with these conspiracy theories and then attribute them to me and called me the tin foil hack guy
01:15:56
I know you just said this is his silver bullet no it's a silver bullet off the
01:16:01
rails yeah if this war goes off the rails and the economy goes off the rails because of this war Trump right now is
01:16:07
positioning himself to take advantage of that fact and um DeSantis is too far some critical things about the war
01:16:13
skeptical I would say things about the war this week so it's not just Trump but look the thing you have to understand about this war is is existential for
01:16:20
Putin it's existential at this point yes he cannot back off and it's extracurricular for us
01:16:26
yeah yeah and that's why Obama said back in 2014 that the Russians have
01:16:32
escalatory dominance they will always climb the escalatory ladder all the way up to nukes if they have to and the
01:16:38
sooner we recognize that fact the better off we're going to be I think the good news is that weird speech that he did where he kind of I didn't see the speech
01:16:45
was it good yeah we just talked about it it was two minutes it was fabulous Sox
01:16:50
just mentioned it the crazy thing is it sounded a lot like we'll be talking on this podcast which is he talked about all these generals that retired Victoria
01:16:58
Newland by name by name by name he he he really did explain to the audience this
01:17:03
because I didn't see this because I'm on a different time zone and it must have broken when I was asleep or it's a two
01:17:08
minute video in which he like I said he attacked the military industrial complex and the foreign policy establishment for creating this war and he mentioned
01:17:15
Victoria Newland by name let me tell you something Newland is going to be it's going to be a very popular message it is
01:17:21
very popular Newland is the falchi of this situation okay the same way that sounds she was supposed to be protecting
01:17:28
us from viruses and then finally ready for some data function research Victoria
01:17:33
news now we got a label 19 misinformation Victoria Newland was supposed to be our
01:17:40
Chief Diplomat with respect to Russia and Eastern Europe and what did she do instead she ginned up this conflict how
01:17:48
we backed an Insurrection in Ukraine in 2014. Jason if you didn't like the
01:17:54
Insurrection of January 6 let me tell you you aren't going to like the Insurrection that she staged in Ukraine
01:17:59
because they brought in these Ukrainian far-right nationalists as the muscle and that is
01:18:04
did he bring Big Macs did he bring Big Macs with him
01:18:09
did you say he brought Big Macs too he's Palestine he brought food to them yeah you're
01:18:17
ignoring what Zach said but no no I got it I I'm not disagreeing with him I think if you want to references
01:18:25
nobody wants to be in a Forever War yeah but let me explain why he mentioned Victoria Newland he mentioned her
01:18:31
because she was the state department official who was responsible for backing this Insurrection of a democratically
01:18:39
elected leader in Ukraine in 2014 named Yanukovych okay Yanukovych was trying to
01:18:45
was doing a balancing act between Ukrainian nationalists and Russia and it
01:18:50
was a very delicate Balancing Act and we basically toppled him and ever since then the relations with the Russians
01:18:57
over Ukraine have been headed south if you're wondering why Putin sees Crimea was in direct retaliation for the coup
01:19:03
that we backed in Ukraine in 2014. this is the origin of the conflict and you
01:19:10
know if you want to understand where this comes from you have to go back to this and the fact that Trump's willing to talk about is pretty incredible I
01:19:16
think that the good news for us is I think that heading into June and the debt Fiasco that's looming I think we're
01:19:24
going to and I think this will help a lot get distracted with domestic issues in the sense that it'll take some heat
01:19:31
off of escalating all this foreign adventurism you know
01:19:37
this it's such a see like this is such a scene from Wag the Dog
01:19:43
every time there's something inside the United States that we should really focus on we have this Wag the Dog moment
01:19:50
where we get distracted by some adventurism abroad and we forget and we lose sight so we have this East
01:19:57
Palestine thing right now in June we're gonna have to come back to terms with this debt ceiling issue which is a huge one how we're going to resolve it it's
01:20:04
not clear just this week the Federal Reserve basically said hey folks we're taking
01:20:10
rates to five and a half plus and they're going to stay there that seems like no news people just seem
01:20:16
to digest it and move on it's really incredible how we just find we're we are like uh what is it Jason
01:20:23
the dog that chased the bumper and caught the car or whatever yeah you caught the bumper room we've got plenty
01:20:30
of big problems here in the United States plenty of big problems and I don't know that Wag the Dog Works anymore because I think the American
01:20:35
people want like I said they want an American president to focus first and foremost on American problems and even
01:20:41
remember Bush senior in 91 won that war and still lost re-election still lost so I don't think wagging the dog works
01:20:47
anymore it works for some short period of time especially while the media are portraying this year the air raid
01:20:54
theater essentially the people smarten up you're so right so that issue think about bush bush came off of the Persian
01:21:00
Gulf War with like a 91 or two percent approval rating I mean we've never seen anything like it but he violated a
01:21:07
simple tenet of his domestic policy which is read my lips no new taxes boom lost
01:21:13
and it was not even close in the end so I think you're right I think people
01:21:18
really care about the economy go Nikki Haley and do how much do how
01:21:23
much debt do we want to go into over Foreign Wars the only thing I ever liked about Trump was his policy of not
01:21:30
starting Wars and not getting into them and Americans want to focus yeah I'm a
01:21:35
balance sheet voter right now I'm voting based on who is going to be fiscally responsible me and freeburger are in the
01:21:42
same boat here I think we've got to be real careful in how we handle China because you had blinken on all the Sunday shows basically denouncing them
01:21:47
expressing outrage that they might support the Russians acting shocked shocked that they could do that we don't
01:21:53
even have the ability anymore to understand that other countries do things in their own interest and we
01:22:00
can't accept that and instead we act as if foreign policy should be conducted according to this morality play that
01:22:06
we've created and if you don't do what we think is right then we're going to express all this outrage and
01:22:11
condemnation at you and somehow that's going to get you to violate your own interests that's not the way the world works and what we're doing right now
01:22:17
what we're doing right now is pushing China and Russia together into a new
01:22:22
axis block this is very foolish very foolish even during the Cold War okay we work to keep
01:22:29
Russia and China apart and and whatever you think of those regimes today they
01:22:34
were much worse back then remember the Soviets you had a stalinist regime the Chinese had Mao those were two of the
01:22:41
three biggest Mass murderers of the 20th century and Nixon and Kissinger still went to China and shook Mal's hand and
01:22:48
toasted to him because it's important to keep China and the Soviet Union divided and
01:22:53
what are we doing today we are basically pushing them together with all this condemnation and outrage it is not a
01:22:59
smart strategy can't disagree we need to be building bridges with India that's a key key relationship and China I don't
01:23:06
know why we're not figuring out yeah this is poisoning our relationship with India India is the biggest democracy in
01:23:12
the world and our relations with them have gone South since this war because they have a friendship with Russia that
01:23:19
goes I mean I would rather see Biden go to India and start building some bridges there yeah I agree I can't disagree
01:23:25
Jacob how's your fundraising going for lunch run four oh thanks that's a great question you know we're doing that
01:23:31
Public 506c public fundraising thing and so I did a bunch of webinars and without doing a single in-person meeting 51
01:23:38
million dollars in requests came in just you know to a type form basically a form
01:23:44
online and now we're going to be starting in the next month after I get back from Japan actually meeting with
01:23:50
the you know big LPS in the world and I want to make a trip to the Middle East and just go all around the world and
01:23:55
meet all the big funds so thanks for asking yeah I think it's gonna change everything yeah good for you can you
01:24:00
imagine 52 million dollars in commitments before actually doing the actual tour that's
01:24:06
awesome just out of the gate and my last one was 44 and so I think this 506c like I can be public about the fact that
01:24:12
we're raising a fund and so it's just absolutely amazing well congrats and I have one question for you yes go ahead
01:24:18
can you be replaced with an AI the world's greatest moderator I mean it's not going to make great jokes not for
01:24:23
not for now and uh oh you know what I had an interesting point about management fees and these funds um just to Circle back did you know this is what
01:24:31
I heard that Benchmark during that worst vintage you know after I think the great
01:24:36
financial crisis or maybe it was the.com it was either of those they took their management fees because
01:24:42
that fund was so you know challenged they deployed the management fees
01:24:47
into primary investing or I'm sorry to follow on investing on their winners
01:24:52
to regain the results can you imagine in this market a VC who deployed capital in
01:24:58
2020 2021 saying you know what we've got these management fees millions of dollars in the future to pay for
01:25:04
managing these instead of taking that money I'm going to put that into your into the
01:25:09
companies for my launch fund for each month I had a couple of opportunities and I was like you know what I'm going
01:25:15
to take some of the management fees and invest in some of those existing companies to try to Goose the returns
01:25:20
for my LPS and so we're at 104 or 103 invested in the capital just by just
01:25:27
taking a couple hundred grand off of the management fees and I'm like well this is a really interesting track of you like why am I playing for the management
01:25:32
fees or am I playing for the moike I'm paying for the moink right I mean you should be Jason by the way it's not true
01:25:39
that the AI can't tell jokes our friends uh Bill Lee tweeted how the AI told a
01:25:45
joke in this the style of Jerry Seinfeld then he asked us to tell a joke in the style of Dave Chappelle and it refused
01:25:51
so the AI can tell a joke if it wants to it's racist but no only clean jokes
01:25:57
oh I see it doesn't work blue I guess I don't think every I don't
01:26:02
think Dave Chappelle has to be blue but it would not tell us a joke
01:26:09
wow I mean we gotta get Sam he's an iconoclastic like he would be it
01:26:15
Sam would be in the uh par all in 52. well by the way actually he's got a shot there after our last
01:26:22
episode in which we were raising concerns about the AI bias they published a blog post
01:26:27
saying that yes the day after if bias has occurred it is a bug not a feature
01:26:33
and they are trying to be even-handed so I'm glad they have announced that and
01:26:38
that's their standard and we're going to hold them to that standard but I'm glad well they have to be public like this yeah yeah I mean I read the blog post it
01:26:45
seemed reasonable it's great they're addressing it and I also think they're now doing
01:26:50
embedded citations so somebody tweeted at me after we had the whole discussion about credit and when they were doing facts they're
01:26:56
now saying and they haven't made an announcement about this yet but they were saying
01:27:02
according to this Source the following according to this source so they're starting to Source in the copy that's
01:27:08
being written so that's a big step and then I was talking to Adam D'Angelo about Poe which is an amazing app you
01:27:15
should try it I think it's the best one out there right now of all the chats Poe is an app based on the core data set and
01:27:21
I asked the questions about the trip to Japan and the Secco and this and that and it was extraordinary how well done the answer was with bullets and then I
01:27:28
asked them online hey what about citations back to the original quora questions and he said yes we're going to be adding that so and then I was
01:27:34
thinking wow if you add to the Cora Corpus and then they link back to your answer that's awesome for me as a person
01:27:42
who's answered hundreds of questions on core to build my reputation so I think Cora is for me I think Cora is the could be the
01:27:49
Google I think chorus got a better data set and if they play that right I think they could be better than chat GPT
01:27:55
and they said you have the same publishes based on the quora data set data set poet it will answer questions
01:28:02
like the best answers on quora is that where is that you're what you're saying yeah
01:28:07
that's kind of interesting is using quora as the primary data set I'm sure it's using the rest of the web too and
01:28:13
Wikipedia and everything I think I don't know why they're calling it po I think they should just do quora chatbot or
01:28:18
whatever yeah but just try it it's called po download it you can use it today you want to know why I'm excited about that because you got a little
01:28:24
tasty pool you got a little slice I got a little slice of Cora oh good for you well I mean Cora was always like are they ever gonna make money or are they
01:28:30
just going to build this incredible data set and do nothing with it yeah what did I say I said I said AI is gonna be to
01:28:37
the to basically SAS what mobile was to web 1.0 you'll either get disrupted to get turbocharged by it it's gonna be I I
01:28:43
think quora is the number one player in AI going for it I know that sounds crazy
01:28:49
but the fact that and I think Reddit also has this insane potential if Reddit had a chat bot because think about how
01:28:55
many times people do a search and YouTube is the other one where they say what's the best sci-fi movie of the year
01:29:00
or which directors make the best screenplays or whatever and then they put the word Reddit at the end where they put the word core at the end where
01:29:06
they put the word YouTube at the end to just narrow down the Corpus of where to find the answer go I've worked with yeah
01:29:12
I've known D'Angelo for 17 years now smart cat he was the CTO of Facebook when I worked
01:29:18
there the single smartest and best single smartest person I work with
01:29:24
and then separately one of the most absolute genuinely best human beings in the world can we get him out he does he
01:29:30
doesn't is he not a good public speaker or something because I never hear him talk I'd like to get him at all in Summit
01:29:35
maybe D'Angelo is just so superb on every Dimension we should get him on actually just because I didn't know he was working in the AI he has a lot of
01:29:42
interesting thoughts about you know social networking platforms and and he's on the board of opening oh okay
01:29:48
oh get him on the pot or maybe you own Summit 2023 all right everybody it'll definitely make the anti-establishment
01:29:54
list definitely anti-establishment yeah okay so for the Sultan of sneaking out uh he
01:29:59
left and the dictator and what do you want to be referred to now
01:30:05
passages the peaceful pacifist The Peacemaker yeah you are the saxophist
01:30:11
I'm the world's Undisputed greatest moderator on the number one podcast in
01:30:17
the world for now until the AI replaces you yeah I I train the AI to replace your sacks Ukraine UK and Ukraine fight
01:30:23
and binding Biden no Nikki Haley known stop making Nikki Haley happen Dan the data set has been done all right we're
01:30:30
gonna see you next time
01:30:36
Rain Man David's side we open source it to the fans and
01:30:43
they've just gone crazy with it [Music]
01:30:49
besties [Music]
01:31:19
foreign [Music]
