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E43: Innovative venture strategies, Zymergen's implosion, Square acquires Afterpay & more

August 06, 2021 / 01:31:11

This episode covers topics such as David Sacks' recent funding success, the challenges faced by Zymergen, and the implications of Square's acquisition of Afterpay. Guests include Chamath Palihapitiya, Friedberg, and Sacks, who discuss their experiences in venture capital and the tech industry.

David Sacks shares insights on raising $1.1 billion for Craft Ventures, emphasizing the focus on marketplaces and SaaS. He explains the growth of his fund and the strategies behind it, highlighting the importance of milestone-based investing.

The conversation shifts to Zymergen, which faced significant setbacks after its IPO, including a 70% stock drop due to product pipeline issues. Friedberg elaborates on the challenges of deep tech companies and the importance of product-market fit.

Square's acquisition of Afterpay is analyzed, with discussions on the implications for the fintech landscape. The guests express concerns about the consolidation of power within the industry and the potential for financial de-platforming.

The episode concludes with reflections on the importance of due diligence in venture capital and the narratives that shape investment decisions.

TL;DR

David Sacks discusses his fund's success, Zymergen's challenges, and Square's Afterpay acquisition, highlighting the need for due diligence in venture capital.

Video

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he's optimizing the view now i'm optimizing for shade actually
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i'm trying to get out of the oh [ __ ] christ you look like a [ __ ] look at that i mean this dip [ __ ] showed
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up he showed up to my beach club yesterday and it was basically like someone had taken a mummy
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and then wrapped a mummy inside of a white sheet and then presented him at this point at this place oh he lathered in his like
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spf 500. and so i laughed at one point i said at one point let's go for a walk
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and this [ __ ] had the nerve to grab his cell phone and a battery pack for the cell phone i
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forced him to leave the phone he felt naked then i made him take off his shoes and socks and then i tried to get him to
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take his shirt off we got almost all the way there yeah that makes sense all right everybody here we go three
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two three
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[Music] hey everybody hey everybody welcome to
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everybody's favorite game show guess who's not in italy
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with us today david sacks wearing sunglasses with the view of an
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ocean clearly on a nautical vessel and
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i'm in an old apartment in the center of florence and chamoth is at his
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hideaway somewhere in the countryside and friedberg is in front of a abstract piece of art
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two people high on crystal meth trying to break into his car in san francisco i'm no longer a san
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francisco resident i'm proud and sad to say after 20 years of living this city
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i have relocated still in a not to a nondescript location still in california
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but uh you're in the bay area enough i'm in the bay area so with us again obviously raid man the dictator and back
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from a week off the queen of quinoa what ha tell us uh queen you had a big
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week you had a some nice ink come out some press about the production board raising some
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monster round and you took the week off give us the feedback
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what was it like taking a week off from the pod and uh now you're getting press and you're becoming a public figure
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uh what's it been like for you the past week and tell everybody what went down with this new fund you know my strategy was to take a week
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off from the pod and then have the ratings go up and then i could quietly and nicely exit um as the as a member of the cast but uh
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unfortunately i've been drawn as al pacino said just when i thought i was out i am back in so uh it's i missed you
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guys i actually listened to the all in pod for the first time ever last week you guys did a great job
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you've been complaining these other last 41 times without even listening to it you know um i will say i listen to it
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while we're on it but this was um actually really interesting because
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that's big of you you're actually listening while we're taping we we do it ourselves i hear the whole
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freaking thing in real life so listening to it i found it really entertaining and i uh
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i think i have a better appreciation it's less about some of the points and facts we make which i've been pitching
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and complaining about the topics and you know where we go with the conversation and stuff but it's just generally
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just nice to just hear everyone you know kind of shoot the [ __ ] anyway good job so you're saying you're a fan of of the all in pod
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i might get a wet your beak mug from one of our outfits i have one i haven't i actually use it you sent me
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a whole gift basket from the kid who's paying for college based on our ip
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it's all good um no so we yeah we announced our tpb funding last week too which i have
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been running the production board for four years now a little over four years it's been my primary vehicle where i've been
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primarily incubating new businesses and making some investments from the balance sheet uh you know we've raised several rounds
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of capital over the last few years we've never talked about it publicly we've never done press around it but um
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as you guys know the primary reason for going public with it was really just to gain recruit interest in the work that
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we're doing so we really want to see great people be made aware of the work we're doing at the production board and
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each of our individual businesses so we could start to um you know at least get get get folks
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knowledgeable and aware of us so when we uh reach out and and folks are interested in thinking about what else they might want to do with their
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careers and their lives you know were hopefully there for them so that you know it was great i mean it's nice to kind of share what we're
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doing we also shared five of our businesses that we've incubated several of which have been stealth up until now
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uh you know one of which jason i think you've kind of referenced in the past our molecular beverage printing company canna so that one's kind of starting to
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emerge a little bit more now after several years of r d and work so we're kind of making progress now
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and i'll uh hopefully have more to share over time in terms of what we're doing but we're excited and it's great to have
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great investors come in yeah it's a great piece in cnbc by ari levy uh i guess you gave him he's a great
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journalist by the way like old school legit journalist yeah and i think fan of the pod how did
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you pick ari to be the the vehicle for this to use a pr firm where you just decided i'm going to share it with this one person
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we had a mutual person who's npr who introduced us i didn't want to go do a broad pr thing so i was just kind of like um
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let's get you know i was going to do my medium post which i wrote was like a blog post and that was the primary content and then it
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was like let's just find someone good who can kind of at least you know push people to that content that can speak well to our business and you know he was
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recommended i've never met him before great guy so you know we just wanted to kind of get that one piece done anyway he did a
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great job he said he i think he's been on your show right but if you're you're he's shown my show he's been on this week in startups yeah and i
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i see him when i used to go to cnbc i would you you walk down uh at one
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market you used to go there trim off too and you walked down like a row of journalists and as you go to get on set i don't know
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this time to youtube one or two of the journals will intercept you and try to get a story so he would always tell me hey i heard that
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travis at uber was this or whatever uh but great job on the inc it's great to see you uh
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you know raised 300 million there was a lot of references to larry and sergey and google maybe you could tell us
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what how much uh who who led the round this 300 million dollar round and what's google's involvement when i first
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started the production board it was my i had made personal investments with my own money and started some businesses
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with my own money and i had a series of dinners and conversations with larry page about like
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doing something together with alphabet i knew larry from my google days obviously um and uh you know we ended up kind of
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after a bunch of conversations with folks at the level below kind of saying let's i didn't want to manage a fund and i
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didn't want to go work at alphabet so the idea was i would set up a holding company kind of a permanent company
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that like any business has a balance sheet with cash on it and can do stuff with that money and alphabet invested in the holding
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company they put some cash in and this was four years ago and they became a minority shareholder and had a board seat and i set up a
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board and so that's the work and then we've raised another round since then and then we just raised this round we announced last week
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and so our you know the round was i think uh i don't know if we announced but it was kind of co-led by blackrock
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we had um you know morgan stanley koch industries bayley gifford allen and company
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um foxhaven arrowmark just a bunch of really high quality long-term institutional investors alphabet put
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more money in the the gates family office called cascade has been an investor with us for a while
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so they all put money in into the round and um you know it's it's great because we can
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use that capital to build new businesses and support some of our existing businesses so some of our businesses are really
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hard deep tech companies we don't want to have to go rush out and raise venture money or and we don't want to have an incentive to try
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and mark the asset up and you know get a good mark on it so really we can use some of our money now to support some of our businesses
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until they're ready to go commercial or until they're ready to raise outside capital if that makes sense for them not always going to make sense
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um and so we have so you and you own 100 of every business that comes out of here
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then you find a management team as we discussed and then spin them out chamoth what do you think of this venture studio
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approach which has only really worked for bill gross from idealab and maybe john borthwick with beta works
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in new york and i guess science maybe worked as well with dollar shave club but here you have
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you know i think fredberg a great um entrepreneur as well uh doing this what are your thoughts on this studio model going long
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uh in in building companies in a studio system well i think it means a lot of different things to different people so i'm not
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sure honestly what a venture studio is that's different in somebody else's view
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than what freebrook is doing but what i will say is that the different thing that he's doing which i believe in
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is you have to become uh extremely hyper focused um you know i think that there was a
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moment where if you look at when idealab was really successful or when beta works was really successful
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in the case of idea labs they had a very specific prototypical web 1.0 business betaworks had a very prototypical web
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2.0 kind of social business they all work because these guys were experts in those things and so
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i'm pretty bullish on what friedberg's doing just because he's not trying to boil the ocean he's being very specific around you know
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synthetic biology and i think that that is probably what got other people excited because then
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not only from friedberg's execution capability which i really believe in but then now think about it if you're an investor
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i don't want to put my money into something that all of a sudden looks like nine other things
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where all of a sudden it creates a lot of correlation that i didn't really know existed especially when i'm investing
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hundreds of millions of dollars it's a very big deal that a lot of investors have and so when freebur can very
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legitimately say look i'm you know explicitly focused in this thing
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and then he also said and friedrich you may want to talk about this and this is the only thing i'm going to focus on
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it gives an investor a lot of confidence because it's like here's a really smart guy who's done this before he's going to stay in this swim lane and do something
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really specific here and now i can understand how it fits into the rest of my portfolio so i think that there is a lot of value for
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um investors in a bunch of different ways so i don't know i'm i'm super excited i appreciate that i mean i think like
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one of the things that mattered to me jason and the way i kind of frame it like a lot of people think oh venture studio it's about how many things you
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crank out that's like y combinators model for me it's not about how many businesses you start it's about absolute
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value creation so you know you have to do the the things that you have the resourcing to
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do with the objective being to drive business value as a whole so that means doing one thing doing
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three things doing five things it's not about how many things you know whatever the right balance is it's not about just cranking out
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businesses because each one of these things we have to continue to be active and we need to continue to build
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and when we start a business we reserve a good chunk of the business as equity for the team that works on it so it's
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not like we're 100 owners right we've got to get the right people they've got to feel like and act like owners in that business with us
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you wind up owning 50 or ballpark 40 what do you think it actually varies quite a bit so you
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know without getting into too many details i mean you know when we start the business we're the majority owner and in many cases when we've brought in
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other investors over time we get diluted down to become a minority owner so 30 or something like that like as if
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you did the series a or something but but in many cases we end up being um you know we want to continuously fund some of
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these businesses um because it may not make sense to bring in outside investors and
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and we'll continue to be the majority owner and but we create an independent board we make sure that the the team feels like it's an independent
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business and we give them a lot of infrastructure and tooling finance hr legal facilities uh support recruiting support etc and
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obviously templates for how to succeed and and play books and so on so that's a lot of what i would call our platform value
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amazing another bestie housekeeping by the way david sacks is an investor in
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tpb i don't know if you guys knew that invested around ago so good good job saks good job saks is that another
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unicorn for me technically yes look at you
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uh well in other news uh sax this is like the victory lap uh episode
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saks you announced you're closing 1.1 billion dollars with a b in craft's
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third fund and explicitly talking about focus to chamot's point explicit focus on marketplaces and sas
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uh maybe you could explain uh how long it took you to raise the 1.1 billion i think the first phone was 300 million
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the second was 600 million so you're basically doubling each time almost i mean the first time was 350
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second fund was 510 this one is 1.12 billion
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it's going to be 612 million for venture which is c series a series b and 510 for growth
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and yeah we are focused on sas and marketplaces i kind of run the sas practice and my
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thesis is really the same as it was when i was doing yammer which is apply consumer growth tactics
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to enterprise software make it go viral inside companies uh sort of sell it bottom up through the
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average employee as opposed to top down through the cio uh and then the other gp in the fund
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jeff floor is focused on marketplaces he was the founder ceo of stubhub which was one of
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the original e-commerce marketplaces on the web and uh so he leads the marketplace practice and
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those are also you know i would say along with sas marketplaces are the best kind of internet businesses to to create
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and so we've just decided to focus on those two areas and that's kind of enough for the world for
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us and in related news your project call-in which is a
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podcasting plus casual audio application has been doing great in beta
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yeah and uh i'm proud to announce that uh we had a small allocation for our syndicate
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the syndicate.com which is my syndicate and then the all-in syndicate which we created as a lark
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uh between those two syndicates my syndicate had 900 requests to invest
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over i think seven million dollars we had a small one million dollar allocation and we basically did a lottery uh so
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something like one in i don't know seven or six got in and then the all-in syndicate
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also filled up and then the all-in syndicate no carry no fees everybody gets a free ride thanks to
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david sacks and uh that's our first all-in syndicate chipping away at my core business
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and eating my lunch thank you and that the all-ins that they all unsyndicated is is going to be 250 000
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uh 250 1 000 checks with no feet no carry and um the company
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is paying the administrative expense of that we just want to let you know 250 of our listeners what their beaks
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yeah so and uh is it open yet sex like can anyone download the app and use it yet no it's
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still in private beta we're going to open up soon you know we'll certainly getting better i was looking at it the other day it's
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getting really tight i mean can i talk a little bit about it or do you not want to keep it yeah go for it yeah well i mean here's the genius of it
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um and i mean that sincerely uh not just because you gave me an allocation but um clubhouse when you go to
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clubhouse if you miss the great conversation it's gone and clubhouse has really bad audio
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quality and the rooms are and there's really you know there's clubs as a concept but in
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call-in uh everybody creates a show then the show is syndicated to an rss
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feed like a podcast so you can basically start your own podcast with no staff no post-production you
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just talk and then it goes out to an rss feed so we're thinking david and i of doing like a post uh show after all
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in like two days after just to talk to the fans and do like a little private group thing but it's kind of like a really nice overlap
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of podcasting and um yeah well i was going to say it's it's basically long tail podcasting using social audio
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as the gateway drug to you know to long tail podcasting uh because is a company worth
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4 billion yet we have we internally marked up the round four times
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like jason horowitz did with clubhouse let me ask let me get your mouth in the conversation jamal what do you think
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of a venture firm making a seed investment at 100 million then a billion
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then at 4 billion for a product that you know it's largely sideways
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this is like internal three bets and marking it up 10x and then 4x so 40x lift over three rounds
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what do we think of this i think the best venture firms shouldn't give a [ __ ] about any company
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and i don't think that they really do
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if they're very savvy they should be doing exactly what andreessen
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um you've seen the articles about tiger you've seen all these other folks the real question is maybe if you want
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can you please explain what they're doing and what they're doing is
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to me if you understand the investing landscape makes a ton of sense which is
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technology used to be the small niche and so we used to only get you know when
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i started social capital there was probably 25 to 30 billion dollars a year flowing into venture just in 2011.
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fast forward a decade we have like 120 billion dollars a year going into tech and it's going up like
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crazy and if you're the best brands
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you're going to get the overwhelming amount of interest from people who want to get into the asset class as the asset
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class expands right so if all of a sudden you know you decided to invest in private equity
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when private equity was going bonkers you're not going to take as much of a shot on an emerging manager you're going
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to want to take a shot on blackstone or kkr right and that's what's allowed those folks
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carlisle to scale aum just unbelievably blackstone i think is under management exactly half a trillion
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dollars now at blackstone similarly there are these indelible brands in venture
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and when everybody realizes they need to be long tech they jump in now when they do that you
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have to understand who these people are there are two things that matter one they are people like pension funds
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and their hurdle rate meaning you know what are they trying to do better than
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in terms of it of a rate of return is in the low to mid single digits that's really important
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to know nine percent ten percent not even but not even not even five percent six percent okay and then
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the second thing you need to know is that these guys have so much money that they would rather when they spend an hour meeting with you
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they'd rather give you a 50 million dollar check than a 5 million dollar check a 5 million dollar check just compounds their problems
00:19:09
so if you put these two things together it makes a ton of sense for companies like andreessen to now focus on the velocity of money
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raise a fund put the money to work raise a new fund in a very systematic way that
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everybody can understand and can predict so that andreessen can tell their lps on a calendar guys i'm going to be back to
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you in 18 months guys i'm going to be back to you in a year and be able to scale the capital and i think if you if you look at it in
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that framework it explains and recent it explains excel it explains sequoia and by the way
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it's a brilliant strategy because these guys still make two and a half percent on the money
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they end up returning the market beta meaning what the average market would do anyways
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plus a little bit of alpha right so they'll still do a little bit better than the market which means they'll be able to raise money
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infinitely so if i'm just using the public market or the venture market it's a venture market
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no but that'll decay right so that'll decay down to the two to 10 or 12 but my point is it's
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still better than the five or six percent these pension funds and other folks need to earn so today the goal of
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every fund that's successful that has a brand david's included should be do good deals
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make sure you're in things that that can work and the thing that david has which other folks know is david can help
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make things work when they're not necessarily obvious but then pound the money in and then raise more
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money as fast as you can because then you know it helps the investor that's what they want and
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they're happy to pay you and then for you the gp you start to make enormous fees and
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the whole cycle works so for and recent i think that's the calculus it's like
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[ __ ] if i can put 100 million in that's 100 million less i have in my fund now i can go i'm 100 million closer to
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raising the new fund okay now the criticism has been freedberg i'll go to you
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it's bad hygiene for the same firm to mark up the same product three times in this case you
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know um clubhouse what's in it clubhouse so is that a warning sign for you that it's a
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bubble or it's kind of the the worst case i've heard is like marking up your own book self-dealing whatever
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how do you look at that issue freeberg and then i'll go to you sex well if it were spacex you would look
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like a genius so you know i think we can criticize it
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until what's up or what's that and sequoia has done this many times where they've been the lead in multiple rounds
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in the company and they have high conviction in the quality of a business and they don't want to bring other investors in and when you have high conviction and
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you can continuously buy more of the stock and buy more of the company and be a bigger owner and then it works out you look like a
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freaking genius and so i don't want to criticize the investing style of these guys i mean time will
00:22:02
tell if they made good bets or not as a whole you can kind of make the case maybe that they're trying to be asset managers and
00:22:08
drive assets under management up and gain more fees but i think lps are a little shrewder than that they'll kind of take a smarter look at that
00:22:14
at the end of the day the guys that are known for doing this like sequoia and founders fund and others
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have had incredible returns by doing exactly this so the strategy does work and you know
00:22:25
you just have to have to do it with the right businesses and that i think that will you know demonstrate the quality of your
00:22:31
investing acumen all right sax any further thoughts on that the marking up your own book is
00:22:37
that something you plan on doing with this new fund and having the growth and how would you look at hey call in starts getting some traction
00:22:44
does that mean your growth fund is going to go mark it up and take that those shares or do you think that it's better hygiene to
00:22:51
have the market price it well i guess it just depends i mean the growth fund does give us the
00:22:57
ability to double down at a later stage on our own early stage companies but you do have to be really sure when you do that because
00:23:04
it does you know it certainly raises questions if you're wrong right that you wouldn't have with any
00:23:10
other investment so it just it definitely raises the stakes you have to be really certain i guess
00:23:16
but you know if colin's a big hit do we go raise you know a growth round yeah and now i think what we might do in that
00:23:22
case because we incubated it is we'd let somebody else lead the round and then we would participate so you have some third parties setting the
00:23:28
price because we incubated the company and frankly that's what we did with the round that you just participated in
00:23:35
is craft participated but we did not set the terms it was actually uh gold crest and sequoia co-led the
00:23:43
round with craft when you incubate a company like that let me ask another technical question
00:23:48
because the audience last week or in the week before really responded well to us talking about this as opposed to
00:23:54
covet and delta variant uh which we'll talk about at the end of the show for those people you can basically turn
00:23:59
off the show at 50 minutes or 75 minutes when we talk about the effect of the pandemic but uh and
00:24:05
i'm hoping you're thinking right now about who's not in italy i hope we'll get back to that again
00:24:11
when you incubate a company like that who owns the original founder shares craft the organization david sacks the
00:24:18
individual came up with it what's the inside baseball there so it's sort of all the above
00:24:23
and uh we meaning craft uh have a deal with our lps that's
00:24:29
called an lpa limited partner agreement and one of the things that was negotiated when i found a craft four years ago was
00:24:37
the terms on which craft would incubate deals and um and so it's all predetermined what i get
00:24:44
as a founder what what our funds get what the lps get so there can be no
00:24:49
argument about it later and uh this is this i call it well we've actually done
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now we have a few incubations in development you know for me it's really important to
00:25:01
scratch that product itch you know i'm originally a product guy and um and i you know i love investing in
00:25:08
helping companies but occasionally about i'd say maybe once a year i get a product idea that i think is worth
00:25:14
developing and so this gives us the ability to incubate it so we did it a few years ago with a crypto company
00:25:19
called harbor we ended up selling that company to bitco which just announced the largest uh acquisition of a crypto
00:25:26
company uh galaxies acquiring it for something like 1.2 billion so anyway so harvard i think um will
00:25:33
work out uh you know once that deal closes and collins the second one there's a couple other things that are still
00:25:39
you know they're too early to talk about but um but i think colin will be the the second one to to launch chamoth as
00:25:45
an lp in a lot of funds what do you think when somebody comes to you and says i want to in my lpa
00:25:52
my limited partner agreement have the ability to incubate these companies that a good trend bad trend
00:25:57
how do you think about it i think it's great i mean i don't really you know push back on a single chairman
00:26:03
in the lpa because i'm only doing it mostly to support people and so whatever terms they want they get
00:26:10
from me and you know kind of just like let them go and hope they get lucky you know
00:26:16
i have a very different approach to to these kinds of things because i'm not necessarily trying to compound my
00:26:21
capital i'm just there to sort of enable folks and you know take one percent of the fund or sometimes a little bit more if i really
00:26:28
have an asymmetric view on a specific thing that they're doing but otherwise i just take one percent sign the thing and
00:26:35
you know wish them wish them the best and then try to support them and that's all i'm trying to do if i
00:26:42
believe in what how they're investing and the deals they've done uh you know however they do it is fine with me i
00:26:48
want to go back to something which is i actually think it's not a question of hygiene it's really a question of governance
00:26:54
because when you do these things and you mark these companies up the real question if a company stops working is they tend
00:27:01
to have too much money and then they tend to not have enough governance and the reason is because governance
00:27:06
typically comes with board diversity and board diversity comes with more and different investors who have
00:27:13
different you know puts and takes at any given point in time that diversity is very helpful to
00:27:19
keep everybody on the same page and to actually get a decent outcome when things aren't working as much now
00:27:24
when things are working obviously nobody cares you know because like you can just have jim getz on the board of whatsapp with john
00:27:31
and it's all kind of said and done it's not been to the right so as we're saying when things are when
00:27:36
things are good nobody complains yeah no and you know this may be a good jumping off point for
00:27:41
uh you know we wanted to talk about xymogen today can i say one thing before we get into zymogen which is just look i think there's all sorts of new
00:27:48
models now with with just sort of tech and the money going into tech the venture capital exploding
00:27:53
there's all these innovative new models and i think it's all for the good a studio that i think is great is
00:27:59
uh what um uh jack abraham's done with atomic you know they've produced multiple
00:28:04
unicorns out of there because jack is just a phenomenal idea guy he's like a 10x
00:28:09
idea guy so he then as part of atomic comes up with the idea and then brings on a operating partner and that model
00:28:16
works for them and then you know he just partnered with keith raboy on open store
00:28:21
and keith decided to become the ceo and keith is still a gp at founders fund
00:28:26
so we're seeing like the blending of these models you know it used to be that you made the decision to become a vc and
00:28:32
your career as a founder was just over it was like this line that could ever be crossed again and now you're seeing the
00:28:40
blurring of these lines and look i think it's good for everybody because frankly when you know keith or you know
00:28:47
what i'm doing with call-in we remind people that we're still founders and product people
00:28:53
and you know not just sort of semi-retired guys and frankly it's like it's good for what we do as investors
00:28:59
i mean we saw it with uh mike spicer who is a partner at sutter hill he incubated it started and was the original
00:29:05
uh head of snowflake uh which was a map and before that he's this is his third so you know right
00:29:11
he did pure storage he did snowflake i think he did lace works incredible he's incredible he's just
00:29:17
[ __ ] money it's just just just folks that don't know snowflake you know it's an enterprise software company they make software so
00:29:23
he's a venture capitalist he started this company while working as a venture capitalist they brought on a great ceo and some
00:29:29
incredible guy later who's frank slootman who's a legend and the company just went public
00:29:35
last year i think or the year before and they're worth 82 billion dollars today um and so it
00:29:40
really highlights that while this guy is still operating as a venture capitalist and a gp he's been able to generate incredible returns for his fund
00:29:47
um and and build amazing businesses at the same time so i mean spicer spicer is a perfect example because i
00:29:54
i've known him since like the early 2000s and at one point spicer started this um
00:29:59
consumer company called bix and i was like we were like an investor i was a small investor in bix
00:30:05
and uh and it got i think it required by yahoo and it was always curious because like spicer was clearly the smartest one in
00:30:12
the room and it's like he was kind of grinding this consumer thing and then he left yahoo went to sutter
00:30:18
hill and he basically said you know what [ __ ] this i'm going back to my roots because before that he was a pretty traditional enterprise
00:30:24
guy and he just crushed it it's kind of like michael jordan was finally like ah [ __ ] baseball i'm going back to basketball
00:30:30
and it's like reed hoffman and neil bustery at greylock right i mean these guys are incredible operators business builders
00:30:37
and they continue to do that work while uh while being partners in the vegetable we have three directions we can go
00:30:42
moving on zymergen zymergen's so interesting i think we should do it okay let's do zymergen i agree all right so
00:30:49
for people who don't know zymer jim went public uh 31 dollars a share in april uh traded as high as 48 shortly after
00:30:55
that um i had the uh ceo on my podcast and uh i was
00:31:01
confounded trying to understand the business you had told me i had asked you for some questions free
00:31:06
berg and you gave me some choice statements of what to ask which can i say no i don't think so
00:31:13
okay anyway you gave me some choice questions i didn't ask them exactly the way you said them uh but here is the quote of what
00:31:20
happened on tuesday uh zymogen stated the following zymogen recently became aware of issues
00:31:26
with its commercial product pipeline that will impact the company's delivery timeline
00:31:31
and revenue projections accordingly the company no longer expects product revenue in 2021
00:31:36
and expects proven product revenue to be immaterial in 2022 they also announced
00:31:42
that the founding ceo josh hoffman who was on this week in startups to maybe a month ago
00:31:49
stepping down as ceo will be replaced and zymogen stock then dropped 70 percent on
00:31:55
the news i don't know if this was a spec or not softbank hype though it was a straight ipo in the stock right
00:32:00
80 yesterday 80 a day after going public three months ago yeah so i think freeberg a good way to start
00:32:06
would be what did they say they were going to do and then why has this happened
00:32:12
so zymergin and a couple companies like them started around the same time which is around
00:32:17
2014 uh 2013 2012 that era 2015 even and um
00:32:22
the the promise of these companies is truly to be everyone wants to be this platform for
00:32:27
synthetic biology and what that means is they can take cells and in a smart way edit the cells
00:32:33
and get those cells to make things that humans need and so you can kind of think about making materials like silk
00:32:39
and leather and plastics and you can think about making food like egg proteins and milk proteins and so on
00:32:45
and you can think about making industrial products uh you know enzymes and things that might be used in laundry
00:32:50
detergent other applications and so for years you know we've gotten dna sequencing cheaper
00:32:56
we now have dna writing and editing cheaper we've now got other tools to basically screen sell so we have these
00:33:02
the set of tools where these synthetic biology platform companies popped up and said you know what we're going to put all these tools
00:33:08
together and build a platform for editing sales and doing a better job of making things and we're going to get into all these
00:33:14
markets and zymergen when they first started were like several other companies like
00:33:19
them as services business so they would go to big partners like dupont and say hey let us make a new enzyme for you pay off 25 million
00:33:26
up front and then we'll get a royalty on the back end when that product eventually goes to market and they did that for years they went
00:33:32
after insecticidal products they went after plastics and materials and all sorts of stuff
00:33:38
and as is the case with a lot of deep tech it turns out it's really friggin hard you know these tools might be there but
00:33:44
like we saw with the clean tech era where everyone thought they could make oil from sugarcane you know 20 years ago
00:33:50
using the same sort of approach to get the unit economics meaning can you make the product cheap enough it's really really hard
00:33:56
that means you've got to get these sales to be just perfect and you got to get the systems to be perfect and so at the end of the day they went
00:34:01
through a lot of customers at xymer gym that paid them tens of millions of dollars and zymergen didn't have anything at the end of the projects to
00:34:07
say here's something that works that you guys are willing to pay for that you're gonna go take to market because it really wasn't that compelling the unit
00:34:13
economics weren't good enough and it didn't really have big breakthroughs for any big industry and so zymogen like other companies in
00:34:20
the space pivoted and said you know what we're going to now be a products company so we're going to make our own products
00:34:26
instead of just being a services company and as they started to get into that they decided that their first big product would be this kind of
00:34:31
you know plastic for for um for for cell phones or whatever protective film and
00:34:38
in the meantime what happened is it takes so much money to do all this r d to run all these labs to have all these robotic arms that they have that are
00:34:44
moving test tubes around hundreds of people building and running these labs and um and so they've had to raise money and in
00:34:50
order to raise money as you guys know you have to kind of hype a story you have to say look we're gonna change the world we're reinventing everything we're
00:34:57
using synthetic biology to rebuild everything yada yada and the story resonates with me because
00:35:02
i truly do believe that the potential is there but the timing and the sequencing of these things is hard as is the case with a lot of deep tech
00:35:08
companies when you get too far ahead of the curve and you start saying i'm going to do x y and z but you can really only do a b
00:35:14
and c today you raise money saying i'm worth billions of dollars you raise hundreds of millions of dollars and the hype has to keep stepping up and
00:35:21
they eventually got into the trap that a lot of companies got into which is taking money from softbank and softbank said here's 400 million
00:35:27
dollars at a 3 billion evaluation a few years ago and they said great let's run at it let's be a product
00:35:32
company and they burnt through a lot of that money and suddenly they didn't have any products to show because deep tech is hard it took a lot longer than anyone thought
00:35:38
and what will you know we better try and craft a narrative and get public and so they did that they got
00:35:44
public and um you know a lot of what they had been telling people was coming was coming it's going to be here soon
00:35:50
didn't really work so they had to pivot the business they had to become a product company they kept telling folks they were going to be x y and z
00:35:56
months away uh and they were gonna be able to hit these targets on the product and it turns out it was always a little bit a little bit further away a little
00:36:02
bit further away and then boom they have a big board review recently and they look at the product pipeline and they look at where they are and they're like oh this really
00:36:08
isn't gonna work and the whole thing you know falls apart because everyone was banking on this
00:36:13
massive return and everyone missed the story which is that they've been doing this for many years and had to eventually
00:36:19
abandon and pivot away from their business because no one was willing to pay them for it so truly they never found product market
00:36:25
fit in their first generation of their business and they never found product market fit in the second generation of the business
00:36:31
and it's really worth taking a watchful eye based on this this learning which is just a fundamental basic
00:36:37
premise for starting a company do you have product market fit and can you make money from your product and if you can't answer those two things
00:36:43
there isn't a business and then the third thing is how valuable is the company as a function of how much you can grow and so you know um they really hadn't
00:36:50
even gotten past phase one and everyone kind of wanted to believe the hype so it's a bit disappointing to see
00:36:55
but it's really going to impact the industry broadly because now people are going to say a lot of synthetic biology companies are
00:37:01
smoking mirrors and they're really not there yet so a lot of folks in the industry are really concerned right now so to dovetail this with the previous
00:37:07
discussion sacks funding your own company over funding of companies we talked about hey if it goes
00:37:13
well like whatsapp did uh well you're a genius but if it doesn't go well
00:37:18
and you get ahead of your skis you don't have product market fit and you've raised a bunch of money then somebody becomes the bag holder no
00:37:25
jason it's it's even it's even bigger than that it's it's not just that it happened just in the private markets and we then you
00:37:31
had jp morgan and goldman sachs take them public and then they raised you know another half a billion dollars
00:37:37
in the public markets and then they shut the bed right and we seen the same thing this is
00:37:43
the same week that nicola founder who went out by spack and was
00:37:48
going to compete with tesla and ford there he's now under indictment for
00:37:53
lying and selling shares also known as security fraud probably going to go to jail i had him
00:37:58
on the podcast that was underwhelming so saxon we look at these which is it
00:38:05
should we on a hygiene basis be throttling these companies and have milestone-based financing or
00:38:11
or is this the sign of a top in the market that people are able to go public people are being given large amounts of
00:38:16
money by softbank and these things probably people should pump the brakes yeah look softbank is engaged in a style
00:38:24
of investing that we would never engage in it's absolutely antithetical to the way that we
00:38:29
invest right they're making 500 million dollar seed investments in massively overvalued companies
00:38:35
you know we we are one of the reasons why we like sas and marketplaces at craft is they're very milestone based i
00:38:41
mean we you know if we invest before you have a functional product it's going to be at a seed valuation you
00:38:48
know like a 10 cap 10 million dollar valuation not in the billions uh like you know like zymergen uh and
00:38:55
you know we're gonna in order to do a series a by and large we need to see some revenue you know um and then you know if we're
00:39:01
gonna do a growth round we need to see more revenue and more customers and so you know you you show incremental
00:39:07
progress you know we're we're engaged in milestone based investing where the amount of money you raise and the valuation
00:39:14
you're able to get scales with the amount of proof that you have delivered you know to investors about
00:39:21
the company and the crazy thing about these like spectacular implosions and they're usually around deep tech is
00:39:27
because these entrepreneurs can tell a story and people just seem to suspend belief and don't demand any proof
00:39:33
for years and years so it was thera knows it was nikola and alzheimerjin
00:39:39
and i think by the way deep tech is it's it's not that we should dismiss technically difficult problems we should
00:39:46
engage and fund and build great businesses that are technically difficult how much should we fund them for how
00:39:52
many months or quarters yeah but or i mean what's important is you know what is the
00:39:58
representation that's being made and i think there's only one hype man on planet earth that is good enough to pull
00:40:04
this off uh and actually deliver the goods at the end of the day it's probably elon like because you know he funded these
00:40:10
businesses that were deep tech businesses tesla and spacex for many many years he was able to get investors excited he
00:40:17
funded them himself he felt like he fought himself for but remember most of the capital i mean he put in some capital but
00:40:22
the vast majority billion no with tesla he put in 50 million and went bankrupt he went bankrupt he was living off a 200
00:40:29
000 alone from a billionaire friend of ours yeah yeah no no no beep that part out you're not
00:40:36
allowed to say sorry sorry sorry elon only self-funded the first couple hundred million of these companies he delivered revenue
00:40:42
very early on you remember at tesla he first developed the sports car right the roadster and that was really
00:40:48
150 000. he sold 100 in advance not dissimilar
00:40:54
to uh virgin galactic's playbook right and maybe that's an important lesson right like in deep tech
00:41:00
uh you can't just say i'm going from zero to one with billions of dollars over decades you know that that's a
00:41:05
government-funded program well or you can if it's your own and that's what say that's what branson did so at bezos when
00:41:12
i showed up richard had spent 1.1 or 1.2 billion of his own money and i thought i mean at some point in
00:41:19
the game it's that's that's skin of the game i mean bezos has been funding blue origin for 20 years right i think they take
00:41:26
necker and mosquito island if he if that doesn't work out i mean there was also quibby that's another
00:41:32
story yeah quibby it didn't even involve deep tech it didn't require any scientific breakthrough it just required some
00:41:38
marketing proof that people were interested in that format and they just lose a billion dollars
00:41:44
well basically katzenberg along with meg whitman who was kind of a weird choice to be a
00:41:49
co-founder because she's more of like the like the late stage ceo you bring on to take the company public once it's
00:41:55
already working she's not really like a she's not a product innovator no she's not yeah but katzenberg katzenberg
00:42:02
is though right katzenberg's obviously very creative and so they came up with this idea he knows talent so they came with this
00:42:08
idea to build a studio they put a billion dollars into creating short 10-minute videos the problem was there's no proof that the market was
00:42:15
wanted that format they should have spent five or 10 million proving that the format made sense and then
00:42:21
spent a billion dollars if it worked and um you know i just i i don't
00:42:26
understand why why um founders or really investors kind of put up with these
00:42:33
types of stories look at wework same thing yeah there is not a shred
00:42:38
we were about a shred of evidence that there was an economically viable model there and yet billions and billions of dollars
00:42:44
went into that company before the bottom line well it actually in fairness disagree i disagree on that one too much because the first couple years was economic
00:42:51
viable it just wasn't a software business they had great gross margins it just wasn't scalable like software exactly
00:42:56
there's no leverage in the model it was just purely like go lease something for x dollars and then sublet it for x plus y
00:43:01
you know x plus y dollars and and it worked it just like how do you scale that and then they got ahead of their skis and did all sorts of crazy stuff to get
00:43:08
the tech valuation hold on a second but it's not like you can just go to the store and buy it off the shelf like there's a tech valuation
00:43:14
thing you can buy other people had to believe it as well and those other people were also pretty
00:43:20
credible smart people were they the later stage people do you read the we work book the later stage
00:43:26
ones i think we're like we're like evading the thing that that we're not saying which is that as much as we all want to
00:43:33
believe that we're all doing incredibly incredibly diligent work there are a lot of examples where belief
00:43:42
trumps logic and even the smartest people just look past the obvious and we just
00:43:49
talked about four pretty obvious examples in no world should a credible tech
00:43:54
investor not be able to do a simple valuation or see a business model and
00:43:59
brazenly believe a real estate business is a tech business at the same time there should be no
00:44:05
world where you know your pitch something that is just so incredibly grandiose from a
00:44:11
technical perspective and be and the reason you invest is actually because you don't understand it
00:44:17
because if you did you'd be more critical that's [ __ ] insane well you this is the thing people
00:44:22
reverse examples these examples exactly that yes they're
00:44:27
suspending disbelief and they're not doing the basic tenets of investing which is milestones
00:44:34
talking to the customer these are blocking and tackling i think it's more than jason it's greed
00:44:42
it's criminals let's be honest this friday some of it's fraud so re read the quote read the quote from
00:44:48
the u.s attorney of manhattan who said milton with respect to nikola lied about nearly every aspect of the business
00:44:53
people like that need to go to jail okay big time in jail big time the startup world the investing
00:44:59
world only works if investors can trust the information and the financial statements are being
00:45:05
given by operators because we have to make decisions quickly and if they give us bogus numbers how
00:45:11
are we supposed to make educated decisions well some people don't want to do diligent sacks people don't want to do diligently we
00:45:16
look at metrics we always look at metrics okay we look at um look we can get we can do the metrics in one day
00:45:22
churn we look we look at arr we look at net revenue retention we look at churn we look at cac
00:45:28
and we look at your financials we can do it in one day okay it's not an invasive process we can decide very very quickly
00:45:34
because we know what numbers we're looking for and how to read the statements so the question for you
00:45:40
when the founders say i have a competitive process we don't want to do all that has that been happening in today's crazy
00:45:45
market where people say the train's leaving the station and we can't do diligence we don't have time for this are you ready
00:45:53
has that happened to you in the last six months in in a sense but we say to them listen here's what we need and if you give us
00:45:58
these numbers today we can make a decision within 24 hours so and there's no reason we can't and by the way they have those numbers and if
00:46:04
they say they don't have those numbers they're too incompetent to be funded because these are all the course ass metrics that you should have to be tracking your
00:46:10
business so we would never make an investment without seeing the sas metrics for a sas business
00:46:16
yeah let me just step in for a second because i think there's two camps one is businesses companies that
00:46:22
operate a business and what you're talking about it makes a lot of sense you could have looked at the business metrics of work
00:46:27
and made an assessment of the quality of that business or nikola or nikola well on the other hand or if you have
00:46:33
this on the other hand you have companies i'm saying not their notes and not nikola because those are not businesses yet those are still in
00:46:40
technology development they're deep tech so what happens is the founder the ceo the management team
00:46:46
they put together their own representation of the metrics that they believe should matter
00:46:51
and then they try and show how those metrics translate into value over time so there's no revenue there's no
00:46:57
customers there's no profits what they're saying is we can in the case of zymergen
00:47:02
we've got x number of experiments we can run per day and as a result those experiments should
00:47:08
translate into y discoveries per year and those discoveries should translate into z dollars of revenue per year
00:47:13
and that's where the pyramid gets built and the same was true of nikola the same was true of a lot of these companies where they say
00:47:18
we can do x therefore we're worth y and it's that sort of narrative that investors then say my god the story is
00:47:25
so compelling if you're right i want to believe it i want to put the money in and i want this thing to work
00:47:31
and therefore i'll fund this thing um and i think and i think that's what we've seen continuously it started with
00:47:36
the cleantech industry and now we're seeing it increasingly with all magical companies
00:47:41
magically and in a lot of these cases by the way i will also say nicola it's you know it's easy to do that but
00:47:48
it shouldn't be a representation that the entire set of opportunities is a false narrative absolutely there are many great
00:47:54
businesses in biotech that actually do deliver the goods and they turn into incredible companies there's a synthetic biology competitor
00:48:00
to zymergen who i spent a bunch of time with i'm not going to say the name of the company
00:48:05
and they and i and i asked them uh what gross revenue simple question
00:48:11
what's your gross margin what's your revenue what are your cogs what's gross margin and i got an
00:48:17
asterix laden answer what does it mean astrix lighting answer it's kind of like adjusted ebitda adjusted for what
00:48:25
speak english that's what you got to tell them speak speak [ __ ] english this is like when i would come home my dad said where's your report
00:48:32
card i say you know it's interesting my report card yeah i don't have it so
00:48:37
where is it i passed and then i you know again it's still shocking to see the number of people that will still do
00:48:44
these deals and look maybe it all works out in the end
00:48:49
but i tend to think like if you can't present things simply and you can't explain things simply
00:48:55
that's on you however if then you still do that and you still have good intentions maybe
00:49:01
you don't but then investors toe the line the problem is there's this momentum thing that happens
00:49:07
among investors as friedrich said where the fomo kicks in and some of the smartest people become some of the dumbest [ __ ] people
00:49:14
no they are suspending disbelief like you would not believe in the industry right well because it's not their money i mean look at the end of the day why
00:49:20
does it happen meaning how can a zymogen ipo happen like this or nikola like meaning if you look under
00:49:27
the hood in the s1 i was trying to find it in the s1 was there somebody that actually did
00:49:32
like some due diligence into highline clearly not was there was there a
00:49:39
synthetic chemist or a synthetic biologist that basically helped clearly not um did everybody say
00:49:46
that that was okay clearly yes you know um did i don't know anybody get under the hood
00:49:52
of nicola uh and actually like look at the engine make sure the thing worked i don't know by the way people did there
00:49:59
just were enough people that didn't that they were able to get a financing done right and i think that that's the important point is there's enough
00:50:05
private markets i'm talking about two public market examples you're not allowed to have sex sequester diligence when you're
00:50:10
going through an ipo yeah it's not how it works by the way i i like do you guys know the difference between humans and animals
00:50:18
there's one there's one distinguishing characteristic that that that i think uh making choices
00:50:24
making narratives narratives narratives stories this all comes down to narratives like there are dolphins that can communicate
00:50:29
with one another there are monkeys that sit in a tree and they can warn each other about approaching predators meaning that there
00:50:35
are other species that can communicate what humans can do that no other species can do is create a narrative
00:50:41
to create an ethereal belief in something that does not exist and get others to believe in pursuing
00:50:47
religion democracy the financial institutions the monetary system a business like this they're all the
00:50:54
same it's all about someone saying hi alive nichola yeah no exactly
00:51:00
and i think in all these cases by the way this is the cliff notes version of sapiens everybody yes
00:51:05
yes let's know it's version of sapience i have a funny thera-nose story um if you guys want to hear it let me
00:51:11
just finish this one point like there's a fundamental premise which is humans want to believe and so when you have a barnum type
00:51:19
person show up when you have a you know a compelling narrative and a compelling deliverer of that narrative
00:51:25
whether it's a religious leader or or a presidential or a government leader
00:51:30
or a business leader and you want to see what they're selling come to reality you want to write a
00:51:36
check you want to put your time or your money into seeing that thing come reality no no i i fundamentally
00:51:41
look at you're you're missing a key point it's not their money so stop saying that go ahead they would not put
00:51:48
their children's [ __ ] education account into these companies they're putting other people's money
00:51:53
they're putting other people's money this is the key thing not enough skill and they always put their time into
00:51:58
these companies for the same reason people join their money people trade off money and
00:52:04
time all right my point of people will take their time they're giving up the opportunity cost
00:52:09
of working somewhere else to go work at these companies david david i honestly i really [ __ ] disagree with you here the reason why
00:52:15
somebody goes and works at this company because they believe there's positive signaling from a soft bank okay so these people
00:52:22
are smart they think this money must mean it's real they think i'm now going to commit my
00:52:27
reputation and my time to get options because obviously these folks must have done their work how i'm not making the mistake and
00:52:34
that's the lie because those folks are not doing the work you're both making sense there's a group of people no there's a group of people placing
00:52:41
bets who are placing bets of other people's money
00:52:46
you would do different diligence let's be honest the zymogen ipo the traditional ipo would have been
00:52:53
entirely different if they had to write if the underwriters were at risk for their own net worth it would be and
00:53:01
if their stock was locked up of the management teams for five years or ten years i do agree with that point
00:53:07
i do agree with the point you're making foreign sacks from a boat go yeah i'm not i'm
00:53:13
not disagreeing with chamoth but the the point the point that resonates with me that friedrich said is
00:53:19
actually the book sapiens really did impact my thinking as a vc which is you know yuval harari
00:53:25
makes this point that it's narratives that kind of define you know humans and that's what binds us
00:53:30
together in societies and frankly the vast majority of narratives throughout human history have just been wrong
00:53:36
but they still worked as good stories binding people together and i kind of and i kind of applied that to vc which
00:53:42
is the vc process revolves around a pitch it's a narrative session where the
00:53:48
entrepreneur goes up there yeah and presents a narrative and then everyone debates the narrative and decides whether they buy into it
00:53:54
and you know after reading sapiens i'm like this whole process like is stupid how do i get out of a
00:54:00
narrative driven investing philosophy and that's where i'm back to look i understand sas i know what the metrics
00:54:06
are supposed to be um also listen to the pitch i want to hear it but to show me the numbers first
00:54:11
and at least i can get to a decision that's somewhat grounded in reality because i think most of what
00:54:17
the vc process does is just measure a founder's ability to tell narratives and that may be correlated with their
00:54:23
ability to do marketing but it's not correlated with whether their idea is fundamentally correct or not it's
00:54:28
fine in the seed state it's fine in the seed stage i think yeah i think there will be the least amount
00:54:34
of fraud when you either have um irrefutable metrics
00:54:40
or the investor has to invest their own money yep that's the gold standard everything
00:54:45
else is just you know catch's catch can and you're just gonna have a bunch of trash yeah here's how i'm handling at the early stage saks you
00:54:52
because you get to meet my companies uh i have told them to craft their narratives around their traction now
00:54:58
because i know that all this performative stuff is nonsense so when you meet those companies they do a three minute pitch it's the majority of it is here's the
00:55:05
product here's the traction and i accept people based on traction and then i give them more money as the traction
00:55:11
goes up and we bet four or five times on the same company based on metrics and i tell them all
00:55:16
you're coming to the accelerator here's 100k if you want more money from us we'll keep giving you money if you can grow 10
00:55:23
or more per month on real metrics period and we will keep giving you money
00:55:28
forever right and i like these launch um like demo sessions that you do with us because now you force them
00:55:35
to base their presentation around a chart so at least i can see some metrics and the other thing we do similar to you
00:55:41
is i always start with a product demo our motto is show me the product not a powerpoint because the
00:55:47
same powerpoint can describe 10 or 100 different products it can describe a product that might be great
00:55:52
it can describe a product that sucks totally so show me the product and now at least i'm grounded in what you're doing and i'm not just listening to some story
00:55:59
by the way i'll i go back to this i still think that funding narratives makes a ton of sense in the early stage cd i rip i rip in
00:56:07
50k to 5 million dollar checks all the time i could care less if it sounds reasonable i'd take a punt at it right
00:56:13
but the minute that i'm writing a 100 or 200 or 500 million dollar check i pay [ __ ] attention yes because it's my
00:56:19
money it's my money and and go back to this when it's not their money you're going to see
00:56:24
this thing riddled with fraud you're going to see cases like this stuff constantly and the person that pays the
00:56:30
price where i do agree with freeberg is the employee because they mistakenly think that these folks must know what
00:56:36
they're doing but the reality is it's not it's somebody else's money they don't really care they're just doing a job they want to get paid themselves
00:56:42
and so this is how these success you got you guys let me just give you some specifics on the zymergen scenario so they're going to go public right
00:56:48
leading up to their ipo the stocks at 31 bucks and the ipo so if you're an employee and you have
00:56:54
stock options in xymerogen you have the option to exercise your stock options any time which means you
00:57:00
buy the stock at your strike price and then you can sell the stock later when the ipo is over
00:57:06
so a lot of employees you know exercise their stock options meaning they put their own money up to buy the stock
00:57:13
at ten five bucks four bucks whatever it is and they actually owe taxes on the difference between their
00:57:19
exercise price and the fair market value at the time that they exercised so if the stock goes public at 30 bucks
00:57:26
and they exercise they got to pay taxes as if the stock was at 30 bucks and then they end up in the situation where um
00:57:33
they can't actually get liquid and so there was a lot of employees that got really screwed on this transaction
00:57:39
when uh when zymergen went public because they thought the company was going to be worth you know 10 20 30 40 50
00:57:46
and now the stock's at eight bucks uh and they're gonna actually owe money to the irs and they paid for their stock option so
00:57:52
it's a it's a it's a brutal scenario when it plays out for employees and i just feel really bad for a lot of it really really great
00:57:57
you know um smart people that work there uh that take a massive hit on this thing i i hired two more researchers on my
00:58:04
team just to do diligence at the syndicate and i would say between 20 and 30 percent of
00:58:12
deals that look great when we get under the covers and look at the diligence we look
00:58:17
at the cap table we look at the revenue we look at the accounting we asked them who's doing their accounting we asked them for bank
00:58:23
statements we asked them for incorporation docs we asked them for ip assignments this is like the basic blocking tackling
00:58:29
20 to 30 percent do not pass diligence and we find stuff that is crazy
00:58:34
i had one founder give themselves a loan and then we didn't know about it and then we find out about it later they they did a loan
00:58:41
and the company owes them hundreds of thousands of dollars had another one where they were presented their uh
00:58:47
revenue is reoccurring and it was a a it was a cruel basic it wasn't accrual based county was a
00:58:54
cash-based accounting and i'm like yeah what is going on here you you're basically lying
00:58:59
and you're misrepresenting your company don't do that it's called securities fraud when you make a representation don't
00:59:07
ever bend it or exaggerate it just tell the truth
00:59:12
period what's the thera-nose story jamal i need the thera-nose story and then i'll give you a follow-up
00:59:18
story the uh theron story is so i had i had a couple i had a very famous
00:59:23
investor tell me this was like 2015 2016.
00:59:28
uh and i said guys you know we were just talking i said what do you like what do you like like you know we all kind of talk like that
00:59:36
at some point whenever we interact you know um and he said this company theranos you have to maybe
00:59:41
it was 2014. anyways 2015. theranos theranos theranos
00:59:47
and uh i i said are you an investor and he said no but i wish i was it's incredible
00:59:54
and i tried to get an introduction and i thought okay this is um uh this is gonna great story interesting
01:00:01
i couldn't get an introduction but then i find out who the board is and instantly i get turned off
01:00:08
so in my mind i had a very negative impression because the board was literally not all 90 year olds and i
01:00:14
thought what do 90 year olds know about you know uh blood testing and you know
01:00:19
basically building a tricorder and at that time you know i think i told the story before but i had burned
01:00:25
about maybe 50 75 million bucks on six different startups trying to do this like you know in situ
01:00:31
kind of like you know finger prick blood testing blah blah blah so i was really fascinated with the space a
01:00:37
year and a half later a guy that i work with at facebook a very senior guy says to me i'm thinking and i was trying to recruit him
01:00:43
to come work at one of my companies as ceo i'm thinking of going to theranos and i said
01:00:49
just go to the interview and tell me what happens uh before i you know try to convince you to not go
01:00:56
he goes into the to the interview to be ceo of this [ __ ] company they don't let
01:01:04
him pass reception they interview him in a makeshift room outside of the meeting and he said well
01:01:10
can i you know go inside and you know when do we have a follow-up interview you know i'd like to meet some of the
01:01:16
team i want to see what it is and uh they said no no we're good here's
01:01:21
your offer letter do you want to join well can i see the device can i try it i don't know
01:01:27
no we're good let's go and i said to this guy i said how can you [ __ ] join this company i
01:01:32
mean it's not like you're you're coming in as like a junior flunky you know you're coming in as the second or third most important person in this
01:01:38
business you haven't been past reception you don't even know what's past reception you don't even know what your
01:01:44
office will look like you don't even know if you like the office furniture at that basic level think about
01:01:49
everything else that comes after that and then you know what happened happened so what a disaster william perry former
01:01:55
head of secretary of defense henry kissinger we didn't just it was like it was a
01:02:01
bunch of grand poobah types that's how you knew it was a red flag if you got one of those guys you got one guy like
01:02:08
kissinger on your board it's okay if they're all like that it's a problem problem huge red flag i go on cnbc i
01:02:15
just had uh john kerry roo from the wall street journal who broke this thing wide open on my podcast
01:02:21
and i started getting all these inside tips about
01:02:26
theranose and one of them was that elizabeth holmes and bahwani who was the ceo were in a relationship together they
01:02:32
lived at the same address all this nonsense and i checked with kari roo and i'm like hey is this true and he's like yeah
01:02:37
that's true yeah i was like why don't you report it's like i'm just chasing it down whatever it'll be in the next story so i go on cnbc and i was like listen
01:02:45
when there's smoke there's fire if they had the device my game theory is if you have the device you show it if
01:02:50
you don't have the goods you don't show it period end of story i think my gut tells me this is a total fraud it'll be zero
01:02:57
and they're like oh and i was like yeah and you know when the ceo and the ceo are in a relationship that's bad and they're like what and they
01:03:03
didn't know this and i like they're like are you sure and i'm like yeah that's what people are telling me i don't know if it's true or not i don't
01:03:09
know first their knowledge but that's what i think is going on so this whole thing blows up calacana says this blah blah blah cnbc
01:03:16
that night i got invited to bib's house in the valley for movie night
01:03:22
we've all been to that yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah i walk in there's zuck there's this famous person
01:03:30
there's this googler that person it's you know it's 50 people and the celebrities who are
01:03:37
in the blockbuster movie are there i think it was the movie arrival but i'm not going to make any i don't want to
01:03:43
give away whose house it was i go to the secret movie night i walk in
01:03:48
i get greeted and i kid you not 15 feet in front of me looking directly at me
01:03:53
is elizabeth holmes and i get with like 10 feet and she just looks at me snarls and walks away
01:03:59
it's like the most uncomfortable moment of my life clearly a giant scam and fraud and
01:04:06
she's going to go to jail too by the way she's going on trial this month august i believe she'll be on trial it's taking way too
01:04:12
long i hope she goes yeah i mean the justice system's a little bit screwed okay we're we got to wrap up i guess you have a
01:04:18
pretty good you have a pretty good track record of calling out these frauds i think it's a service to the community
01:04:24
yeah i agree you're one of the few who actually does it you got any other budding frauds well you called out ripple right oh let's not
01:04:30
go let's go easy on the ripples there's some people who are friends with people well i think while you're back it off
01:04:38
i'm not backing off i just don't want to lose a member of our little quartet here but i will say uh that my my fraud of
01:04:45
the moment the one that's making my spidey sense go crazy is tether usdt
01:04:52
these these guys are i mean this feels like it is going to be a 60
01:04:57
billion dollars oh okay this is the crypto thing there's a crypto stable coin the idea is
01:05:02
they said it's one dollar in u.s currency one dollar per tether always
01:05:09
and then over time we find out maybe they don't have a dollar in their bank account for each one
01:05:14
the new york attorney general finds them 18 million says you can't work with anybody in new york they say we're not a fraud and i'm
01:05:20
like well what about the attorney general who said you were a [ __ ] fraud and they're like yeah yeah no no that was a misunderstanding yadda yadda i'm
01:05:26
like there's no misunderstanding you know what we should do you know what we should do we should get all the fans the all in
01:05:31
pod we're going to declare a certain time and date where and we encourage everyone who's in tether to pull out a tether
01:05:37
to stress the system and see what happens yeah let's stress test well the problem is you don't actually own your tethers
01:05:43
that's the other scam it's like eight or nine of these offshore unregulated crypto
01:05:50
exchanges not the ones in the united states that are highly regulated like coinbase this is offshore and there are white
01:05:57
what i've been told is you can create an exchange yourself with white label software and pop up your takeout you're
01:06:16
on right now yeah there's some other people i want to call out there's some other people i want to call out so let's move on to it oh
01:06:23
scott galloway [ __ ] oh no no free he's small potatoes but is it a small potato irrelevant doesn't
01:06:31
look like thirst and hell the third on his uh he does he dies yeah all right so
01:06:36
jason's in florence chama uh chamath is at his estate i'll tell you where i am actually
01:06:42
jake i appreciate this i'm on a boat uh outside elba which um is the police it's where
01:06:50
uh napoleon was in prison i'll actually i'll show you the the prison where he was where he was kept i think you can see it
01:06:57
if i get to the right spot you know what we put the nicola founder in there and we'll put uh elizabeth holmes in there same place
01:07:03
can you see that the uh just see your [ __ ] ugly face or whatever and your beautiful yacht
01:07:09
[Laughter] how much are people going to hate us three of us are in italy in august
01:07:15
it is like the stereotypical work hard and you'll be understanding too of course of course i'm staying in
01:07:21
an airbnb it's costing me 350 euros a night for four bedrooms i feel pretty good about myself i'm the
01:07:26
center of florence i think it's you you're spending about the same amount on your boat right 350 400 euros a night per room yeah i
01:07:34
got i got the airbnb deal talk talk to us about after pay sacks okay so well first i mean if we're going
01:07:39
to call somebody out first i want to call out paypal okay what's going on there i actually wrote a blog post about it um
01:07:45
called the no buy list basically paypal is creating the equivalent of a no-fly list
01:07:52
with respect to their search terms well for anybody who they put does they deem as deplorable or
01:07:58
undesirable basically they're working with the adl the anti-defamation league and the southern poverty law center splc
01:08:06
to create lists of people and groups who they are going to ban their accounts now
01:08:11
let me i got to say this the adl and the splc are storied institutions that did great work combating both
01:08:18
anti-semitism and racism but they are now under new management
01:08:23
and new leadership and they have greatly expanded their missions the adl was originally about stopping
01:08:28
anti-semitism now it's about uh basically opposing extremism or white supremacy
01:08:35
and you know in any of the places they find it and so for example they've taken positions on u.s supreme
01:08:41
court nominations um i mean it's like they've gone very very far afield
01:08:46
um of their original mission splc has gotten sued a number of times for putting people on these lists
01:08:52
they put sam harris at some point on the list they put another human rights person on this anybody who challenges
01:08:57
any or has any guest on their podcast that they the southern poverty law center doesn't like they
01:09:02
right they basically blacklist them right right and the list has become very expansive they become very expansive so so here
01:09:09
here's the problem is you now have look before this was just some ivory tower
01:09:14
you know uh non 501 type thing where they would basically it was hyperbolic rhetoric they would
01:09:19
basically call these people and groups names but now paypal is operationalizing these banned lists
01:09:25
they're turning it into a no buy list they're saying we're gonna cut off your account and that's very dangerous because we've
01:09:30
already seen the precedent with speech online that we had a bunch of social media companies
01:09:36
banning people from participating in online speech now what paypal is potentially doing
01:09:41
is banning people from that from financial access and losing your right to speech is bad
01:09:47
but losing your right to make a livelihood is even worse and i think republicans in
01:09:52
congress need to say to dan schulman first of all it'd be great for him to haul him up there
01:09:57
in front of congress to a hearing like they did with jack and zuck and sundar haul him up there and say to him in no
01:10:04
uncertain terms we see what you're doing we don't like it we oppose it we're gonna get on our hind legs and fight
01:10:10
this uh if you try to deny americans their right to access the new economy
01:10:17
we see no reason for your company to get any bigger we're going to oppose every acquisition you ever do and we may not be in power
01:10:24
today but one day the tide will turn we will get control of congress and at that point you know um you know
01:10:31
elephants have long memories so you know we're watching you and you know it's been a long time since republicans
01:10:38
thought of their role this way for the last few decades they've been very lazy or fair with respect to the economy but there's a very successful republican
01:10:45
president on mount rushmore teddy roosevelt and he's on mount rushmore because he busted up
01:10:50
the cartels and the oligarchs of his era and he fought for the rights of the of the common american to make a
01:10:57
living that is the playbook that republicans need to follow right now okay henry belcaster you got
01:11:02
that clip it right here let's get some animations on top of it let's go all right square has bought
01:11:07
after pay for 30 billion which represents a large portion of their outstanding equity it's an equity-based deal what do we
01:11:14
think freeburg they issued a third of their stock um uh to buy this company so basically
01:11:19
square's a public company they you issued shares to after pay shareholders and after pay only represents about four
01:11:27
percent of squares revenue so they gave away a third of their company to increase their revenue by four
01:11:33
percent that that's the pessimist view of the business now if you kind of think about square
01:11:39
they've got two businesses that are equally sized one is like a consumer business uh this cash cash app yep yeah and they
01:11:45
do a bunch of stuff including crypto in there and then they have another app uh another set of tools for merchants which
01:11:51
is businesses on the other side so it's a mark it's becoming more of a marketplace business and the idea is that this after pay deal
01:11:58
can solidify their ability to basically be a lender to their consumers and provide a
01:12:04
tool to merchants to increase sales because the way after pay works it's a buy now pay later
01:12:09
product these have been around for a long time and you can basically make a purchase uh online without having to put down a
01:12:16
credit card or to pay for it and they instantly run a credit check on you and instantly offer you credit to buy that thing and then you pay in
01:12:22
installments over time and so it allows people it allows websites and businesses to get more consumers to buy stuff
01:12:28
because it's really easy for them to buy stuff if they don't have the money today right and by the way this this yeah this business
01:12:33
this business content has been around for a long time there's a company called bill me later that was bought by paypal in 2008 for a
01:12:39
billion dollars and it was a similar thesis right so the thesis you know what's old is new again
01:12:44
the thesis is if you can provide these tools to merchants they will get more sales and paypal on the other side would make more
01:12:50
money because consumers would spend more through the system um and and i think that's the same model with square but most important so we're
01:12:56
seeing square consolidate the marketplace dynamics in their business they're also effectively stepping up and
01:13:01
competing and making sure they're locking in the competitive advantage they have with having this two-sided marketplace
01:13:07
against emerging competitors like a firm uh and so far enough was the original yeah the public
01:13:13
capital markets will always reward great growth strategies
01:13:21
the minute that they announce this deal this the market cap of square went up by almost 25 the deal is free free now what i repeat
01:13:28
they just acquired a 30 billion dollar company for [ __ ] free which is what happened with whole
01:13:34
foods and amazon here is the secret hiding in plain sight that and not enough ceos
01:13:40
understand about the public markets and so for the ceos out there listening there are two ways for you to get
01:13:45
constantly rewarded by the public markets number one is what square did which is
01:13:50
to incrementally acquire feature after feature after feature the thing with buy now pay later is that it
01:13:57
is not a company it has always been a feature and it's a feature of a much larger financial services platform and i think square is
01:14:04
proving that and everybody else over time will realize that goldman sachs and apple are about to do something
01:14:11
there with buy now pay later as well for themselves they already apple already does it for the phones so the idea is that this is
01:14:18
just a credit feature that should be on every single major network i wouldn't be surprised if whatsapp and
01:14:24
facebook had a buy now pay later feature amazon overtime everybody needs to have this feature
01:14:29
you can't build a company around it and so if if square can basically continue to
01:14:34
acquire or build adjacent features that consolidates the
01:14:39
financial services stack for their consumers the stock market will reward these guys they'll be able to grow and buy things
01:14:45
for free for the next five or ten years the second way that corporate uh that companies can get
01:14:53
rewarded in the public markets is if you look at your costs and you flip them
01:14:58
from a cost or an expense into revenue and the gold standard is amazon so
01:15:05
if you guys look back i'll just give you a very quick example because it's incredible in 2005 year end 2005 amazon
01:15:12
they had eight and a half billion of sales two billion of net profit their two biggest costs there was
01:15:19
product and shipping so what did they do they started amazon kindle they started amazon basics they started amazon fire they started amazon
01:15:26
echo and all of a sudden that whole thing shrank their gross margins went up
01:15:31
then on the operating expense side amazon was spending six percent of revenue on fulfillment they started a
01:15:37
fulfillment business they were spending five percent of revenue on technology they started aws
01:15:43
they were spending two percent of revenue on marketing they started amazon prime they started they were spending two
01:15:48
percent on payment processing they started amazon payments so if you look at any company like this
01:15:54
square i think stripe is another part of me uh shopify is another great example
01:15:59
where you can see the path to growth if you can see folks acquiring adjacent
01:16:05
features or if you can see folks taking expense lines and turning them into revenue lines
01:16:11
these are in my opinion sure bet companies that compound forever in the public there's great network effects if you
01:16:18
think about financial services for consumers i would argue there's five general categories there's banking
01:16:23
lending trading crypto and insurance and i think in order of retention
01:16:30
meaning how long a customer is likely to stick with a service provider it's banking then lending then trading then crypto
01:16:37
then insurance and in terms of profit generation per customer per year it's trading then crypto then lending
01:16:45
then insurance and then banking and so what we're seeing is a lot of these financial services
01:16:50
providers to consumers in the digital world replacing the old school world by starting to consolidate these categories
01:16:56
in a smarter way than the old school offline companies have been able to do banks need to make money through
01:17:02
overdraft fees they make 30 billion a year in overdraft fees so if you make banking entirely online and make it free
01:17:08
you retain a customer and then you can make money by offering them lending trading crypto some of these other
01:17:13
services and that's certainly the trend i have a big thesis and a big belief that over the next decade
01:17:18
we're gonna see those five categories start to merge and you're gonna have three to five super powers
01:17:23
that are gonna offer a consolidated stack of services and the unit economics are gonna change because they're gonna focus on getting
01:17:29
the high retention products to be cheap and free and then they're going to make money on the high margin product the canary i
01:17:35
completely agree with you and the canary in the coal mine is who will be given a federal banking license
01:17:41
because that is the only gate that the authorities have to king make who those consolidators
01:17:47
will be and that's an easy thing that can be unemotionally assessed or amazon just buy one you have to apply
01:17:53
no you have to this is an incredibly arduous process to get a federal banking license to be cleared by the federal reserve what if
01:18:00
amazon water bank you have to get it approved jason you're not listening to me these are regulatory things
01:18:05
i'm asking a question for the audience you cannot acquisition versus applying okay so even if you want
01:18:11
to you can't just buy a company like you bought whole foods so for example uh i think square now is a federally
01:18:18
licensed bank uh and i believe that at the federal reserve recognizes these guys they can borrow when
01:18:24
they can borrow money at the discount window at the discount rate um as startups get more successful and can
01:18:30
get there those will be the ones that will do what david said because it doesn't matter how many users or how much momentum you have
01:18:37
if you cannot get a federal license to operate you can't consolidate
01:18:42
so you can be a vertically specific great business but eventually you have to sell e-trade morgan stanley is a great
01:18:48
example where you know in the absence and an inability to expand you have to sell yourself because the cost of capital
01:18:55
um eats you up the the the comment on this by the way the most obvious one here which i think is
01:19:01
interesting is the shopify stripe debate because if you look inside the p
01:19:06
l of shopify an enormous line item now about 350 million bucks a year is what
01:19:12
they're paying to stripe and you know there's going to be a lot of pressure over time to figure out what
01:19:17
these big businesses want to do with respect to their payment strategies and and do it themselves because they may be able to save a lot of money
01:19:23
unclear can i be like the lone voice of dissent on this after pay thing oh go ahead yeah well look it's clear
01:19:30
the market loved it jamaat is right about that it's sending a signal to everybody in the in the industry in the finance
01:19:36
industry that consolidation is going to be rewarded it seems like finance is going
01:19:42
to go the same way that media did where you start to see studios in hollywood all get
01:19:47
gobbled up by big tech players sort of the final convergence of digital analog
01:19:52
you're clearly going to see that in banking now too so as a as a business person and as an
01:19:57
entrepreneur i respect and admire what jack dorsey has done with square but
01:20:03
as an american i'm definitely concerned about this accumulation of power and we now see jack is the first person
01:20:10
i don't think it's there's ever been anyone in american history who holds in his hands the right to deny people's speech on a
01:20:17
on a major speech platform and the ability to deny them access to a
01:20:22
major consumer payments platform now he doesn't have dominant market share in either one of
01:20:28
those no he's got less than 10 in each but but he's an influencer and we saw that
01:20:34
twitter was the first site to kick off trump and then in the wake of that every other tech platform did it
01:20:40
and square after january 6 cut off the accounts of everybody who was involved or connected to it whatever that means
01:20:46
and a bunch of other players in the fintech stack did it so we now have this issue of financial d
01:20:52
platforming paypal is already well down that road what will jack dorsey do i don't know i
01:20:58
mean on the one hand why don't you start up why don't you buy or start or incubate your own that's
01:21:03
protection freeze free you're not going to ban people from calling so you win just [ __ ] start your own square
01:21:09
competitors saxon stop complaining jason look these companies have gigantic network effects
01:21:14
paypal is over a 300 billion dollar mark cap company if all of them if they back those 10 if they
01:21:20
knock 10 of people off you get them now you got your now you got your beach head stop complaining it is not it it is it is a non-argument
01:21:28
to claim that a cartel of gigantic fintech companies that have
01:21:33
monopoly scale monopoly network effects acting together that is not a threat to people's rights to have a lot of say
01:21:40
it's not i'm talking about how you can make money from it i'm just talking your book like you're just not making money for me it's not
01:21:46
about making money for me this is no i know but it is an opportunity like who's to stop somebody from creating isn't parlor back
01:21:53
and isn't there some other like um right wing or more conservative twitter
01:21:58
that's booming right now i heard there's another one kara swisher was talking about i'm predicting right now that financial
01:22:03
d platforming is gonna be the big hot potato political hot potato over the next year this is the next wave of
01:22:10
censorship and what i agree with republicans what the republicans on the ftc on that board
01:22:16
need to ask jack dorsey right now is will you import the twitter block list over to
01:22:24
square or will you keep these things separate bestie gusty jack can i just say something sexy poo i
01:22:29
think you're right but if you just want to make a lot of money um and you have to have some financial
01:22:35
stock ownership over the next few years i think the the way to do it is just to kind of like figure out
01:22:42
which of these emerging companies have or are about to get or have disclosed in their earnings that
01:22:47
they're filing for licensure and i think you want to own those things because
01:22:53
the the key thing is like when you get these licenses you just get a cheaper cost of capital it just allows you to
01:22:58
out compete and outmaneuver and then all of a sudden you're competing with these big lumbering incumbents
01:23:03
who just don't have the access to the same flexible technology and they're running code that's you know 40 50 years
01:23:09
old then the policy decision becomes much more complicated because i do agree with you that there's going to be platforming
01:23:15
or de-platforming issues that happen the good thing about this that it is highly fragmented and that there is
01:23:21
in no clear path at least that i see for two or three folks to have 25 to 30 to 35
01:23:27
ownership that already happened sort of in credit cards and i think we've learned our lesson from that it hasn't happened since
01:23:32
i hope it remains that decentralized but what what i think the the reaction of the stock market to
01:23:38
square buying after pay is now everyone's gonna be looking at that and going wait a second i can spend you know a quarter of the
01:23:45
market cap my company and have no position no but david my point that's not what they're saying what they're saying is
01:23:50
hold on a second these companies are features and we want to have folks who are
01:23:55
licensed and capable to consolidate what freed brooks at these five categories and if you look inside a square they
01:24:02
have an incredible lending business they have incredible merchant services business they have a you know a pretty decent and emerging
01:24:08
crypto and trading business right so they're putting all the pieces together that's what they saw and they're licensed right but who are
01:24:14
the big winners in this wave of consolidation going to be at the end of the day it's going to be square it's going to be stripe it might be it's going to be
01:24:20
paypal it's going to be the big online companies not the offline legacy banks
01:24:26
it's the same same thing that happened in hollywood the only studio that didn't get gobbled up
01:24:31
by a tech company is disney right so it's gone eighty percent because they became a tech company and they
01:24:37
become a tech they became a tech company so i think their whole business they're gonna they're gonna catch up to netflix and then they're gonna roll
01:24:42
netflix they're going to roll right over netflix the reality is that there is something about big tech that wants to de-platform
01:24:49
people the legacy analog offline companies were never this moralistic
01:24:55
uh towards their customer base they never d d platformed and banned people the way that these are they limited they
01:25:01
limited their moralizations and their high horse to the oscar awards in the enemies you're correct
01:25:07
jake jacob i'm going to do a i'm going to do a a crazy wine dinner tomorrow night
01:25:14
uh and it's about 45 minutes from you you should take a car um have them wait eat dinner and then
01:25:20
drive back all right i'll try i got i i'm i'm doing i'm going to see david which you know
01:25:26
for me as a lifelong dream every time i i'm going to go see david because not david sacks david
01:25:32
you know the the statue of david which to me is like looking in a mirror my whole life i looked at that
01:25:37
you know that body small stubby schlong i get it but why don't you i have so many
01:25:45
tours i'm doing in florence maybe i'll zip out let's see maybe i'll zip out but i'm going to see you next week it's 45. the question is
01:25:52
freedberg what are you [ __ ] doing get on a plane and come see your besties you're the only person not in italy you come
01:25:58
for three or four days i know you got a pregnant wife i know you got to let you're moving all this stuff you gave up on san francisco let me go talk to her just
01:26:05
come for three days three days get get her some presents and uh maybe get some extra help with that
01:26:12
they're all just sitting there in italy hanging out having mine are literally having the best time but they're living their best lives right now they're like
01:26:17
oh we're gonna take a tour eventually do they wanna get some hours in i mean no okay i'll set my plane it's united
01:26:24
i'll send united for you jacob why don't you come visit me tomorrow you don't need to see a museum
01:26:29
you know you don't want to spend time in museums why are you having a great time with my girlfriends in florence i'll see you all
01:26:42
my mom's here you know like i have a lot of people here for two days and hang out for two days with us
01:26:47
what are you doing 48 hours it's not a big deal bring everybody all right anyway love you guys i love you besties all right y'all
01:26:53
congratulations jake allen rob congratulations on robin hood okay thanks guys
01:27:02
all i gotta say is is my first fund my little 11 million dollar fund right now
01:27:07
you know we'll see what happens a long way to go once again i'll have a top five percent one percent fund the first
01:27:14
fund i did with sequoia with the scouts was like 150 cash on cash who knows this
01:27:20
first fund i did with you guys backing me uh thank you for supporting me that 11 million dollar fund could be
01:27:26
five six jacobs 567 x could be who knows we'll see go big cash on cash yeah you
01:27:31
know it's a good feeling it's a good feeling yeah thank you for the problem we're proud of you saxy poop nice week forever everybody wait did you have any
01:27:37
wins this week aside from spending a lot of money on wine chamois is there any spectacular news that we need to know well i think dave david can confirm but
01:27:44
i think uh i probably made a billion dollars this week all right there you go oh something's
01:27:50
going okay so there must be a smack coming brace no no no no no no no no oh something's
01:27:57
getting sold all right we'll find out next week we'll see you all next week all right bye bye love you guys love you guys love
01:28:04
you besties love you italy of course everybody's favorite the queen of quinoa
01:28:09
the science conductor himself david freeberg all the data all the sockets says go do
01:28:14
whatever you want to do go into a nightclub sweaty robbing
01:28:21
beast nothing else
01:28:28
[Music]
01:28:36
themselves as opposed to just telling them this is a single point that you should believe
01:28:43
[Music]
01:28:54
nothing else matters so much is all about like the good and
01:29:00
evil them and us and we don't recognize that in moments where there are shared values we're just sitting on both sides of the same coin
01:29:06
or recognizing that sometimes having different values doesn't necessarily make someone evil
01:29:16
nothing else
01:29:24
nothing else
01:29:51
oh no i appreciate it i appreciate you i appreciate you i appreciate you you you i appreciate
01:29:58
you i appreciate you i try and kind of elevate the conversation a little bit and why i care so much about this point
01:30:05
go into a throbbing ring of course everybody's favorite the queen of quinoa the science
01:30:12
conductor himself david freeman the quality of the show he calls it the
01:30:18
if freedberg talks a lot it's a great episode go into a throbbing ring all the data
01:30:24
all the time do whatever you want to do go into a nightclub go into a robin red sweaty
01:30:41
nothing else
01:30:48
nothing else
01:30:56
nothing else
01:31:03
nothing else

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  • 60
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Episode Highlights

  • Guess Who's Not in Italy
    The crew shares their current locations, with David Sachs on a nautical vessel and others in various spots.
    “Hey everybody, welcome to everybody's favorite game show, guess who's not in Italy!”
    @ 01m 07s
    August 06, 2021
  • David Sachs' Fund Success
    David Sachs announces closing $1.1 billion for his third fund, focusing on marketplaces and SaaS.
    “Saks, you announced you're closing 1.1 billion dollars with a b in craft's third fund.”
    @ 12m 24s
    August 06, 2021
  • Call-In Podcasting App
    Discussion about the new podcasting app, Call-In, which merges social audio with podcasting.
    “Call-in is basically long tail podcasting using social audio as the gateway drug.”
    @ 16m 17s
    August 06, 2021
  • Zymergen's Public Struggles
    Zymergen's stock plummeted 70% after revealing issues with its product pipeline and leadership changes.
    “Zymergen no longer expects product revenue in 2021.”
    @ 31m 36s
    August 06, 2021
  • The Challenge of Deep Tech
    Deep tech companies face significant hurdles in achieving product market fit and profitability.
    “Deep tech is hard.”
    @ 33m 44s
    August 06, 2021
  • Milestone-Based Investing
    Investors should engage in milestone-based financing to ensure companies meet their targets before funding.
    “We are engaged in milestone-based investing.”
    @ 38m 41s
    August 06, 2021
  • Narratives Over Numbers
    The VC process often prioritizes compelling narratives over solid metrics, risking poor investments.
    “Most of what the VC process does is just measure a founder's ability to tell narratives.”
    @ 54m 17s
    August 06, 2021
  • The Cost of Belief
    Investors often overlook basic diligence, leading to massive losses for employees in companies like Zymergen.
    “It's a brutal scenario when it plays out for employees.”
    @ 57m 39s
    August 06, 2021
  • The Tether Warning
    Concerns about Tether's financial stability and potential fraud.
    “These guys are going to be a 60 billion dollar problem.”
    @ 01h 04m 52s
    August 06, 2021
  • Square's Acquisition of Afterpay
    Square acquires Afterpay for $30 billion, raising questions about market strategies.
    “They just acquired a 30 billion dollar company for free.”
    @ 01h 13m 21s
    August 06, 2021
  • Decentralized Ownership
    The hope for a decentralized future in technology and ownership remains strong.
    “I hope it remains that decentralized.”
    @ 01h 23m 27s
    August 06, 2021
  • A Billion Dollar Week
    A light-hearted claim about financial success sparks laughter among friends.
    “I probably made a billion dollars this week!”
    @ 01h 27m 44s
    August 06, 2021

Episode Quotes

Key Moments

  • Victory Lap Episode12:24
  • Call-In Launch15:10
  • Investor Genius21:50
  • Milestone Investing38:41
  • Theranos Red Flags1:00:08
  • Financial Platforming1:09:47
  • Decentralization1:23:27
  • Financial Success1:27:44

Words per Minute Over Time

Vibes Breakdown

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