E26: State of Venture Capital, plus fan questions on longevity, decentralization & quantum computing

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sax is there something you object to  here the poker one and net worth no i mean that's fine i don't give a [ __ ]  about longevity or quantum computing but here's the good news david it's not  all about you there's four people you could have two people who like the  topic and then you could just ask them a

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probing that's fine it's fine just  tell me when it's over i'll do you know hey everybody hey everybody welcome to the all  in podcast i'm jason calacanis and with us today again the queen of quinoa david friedberg sans  his dog in the background sorry for those of you

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who love his dog he's gonna walk he'll be back in  like 10. he'll be back and he'll be in the seat uh and the rain man himself david sachs  ultra focused on sas and marketplace startups and involved in some illegal trafficking of  red pills straight up from honduras to cuba

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and then through miami making the red pills making  their way to california and finally daddy's back the spackmaster himself bestie see  the dictator bank account replenished he'll be rebellionized by firing on all cylinders  oh it's so so you know live by the spec die by the spec that's what they always say in this  business but you know what we have been

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absolutely inundated with i kid you not hundreds  of questions from you our loyal audience and when this thing is over we are going on  world tour we'll see you in vegas we'll see you uh in uh at the royal albert hall in uh london  and miami all cities are on the agenda let's take

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our first question from you the audience to what  extent are you guys waiting how's everyone doing all right answer the questions but it has a i mean  look at this guy he got his ass kicked and he's back i'm doing really really great what about the  rest of you guys you guys played poker this week

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who played poker it was a bloodbath well  although you know it's so funny because like we played i played uh a very big game the week  before and then we step into our game which is like i think still quite big but i could not  rub two cards together to make a hand and i uh i went off like a rocket ship i just lost  it somewhere and just despite that despite

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that every time i chamath and i were heads up  at hand he just smashed absolutely smashed me and then i was like you know what i'm not going to  be bullied anymore and then i stand up to him and he's got the nuts each time uh i was down i did j  cal i did run you over i mean the number of just

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complete bluffs i ran on you oh the first and i'm  just like oh he's totally got my number tonight after bluff after bluff after bluff and then i  showed him the nuts five times in a row it was beautiful so i'm stuck a model y and i come back  and i win a used prius i'm just leaving it at that

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i lost a mid-sized home in phoenix arizona i  think you lost the bentley okay don't cancel us please uh sex did you play i wasn't there in  that game but i played in uh la game a couple of nights ago and uh any celebrities yeah me  me sacks and oh god you guys don't count names or podcasters no there was one there was one  unnamed celebrity we can't say what what but

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no we can't say but we all want we'll just give  us a genre politician an athlete okay yeah i won in in that game but i lost uh i lost in a  different game this past week and it wasn't pretty yeah wait sexy sexy are you what are you playing  yeah i think he may be playing actually i mean

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beep that out would you nick beep it out but we  could all laugh at him for being so precious oh you i'm sorry do your lps think you're supposed  to be in san francisco investing in startups no no they they know i go wherever the deals are  oh really miami what did you get a deal would

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you get a deal on some croquettes and a cuban  sandwich two for one there's no copies there when do you think you'll make an  investment in the miami-based company do you think that'll happen any time what's  happened already has it happened are you in i've invested in a miami company i've got like  six yeah i well there's some companies that are

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moving to miami that i'm already in you know  chamath and i are both in pipe right and and uh part at least the ceo the company just  moved to miami so that's two of four two or four besties in pipe thanks by the way how  did you miss that j cal they they advertise

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on your show and you didn't think to try to  access that the lp beep that we all share wanted everything and he couldn't fit me in  and i was like how about a slice and he's like is that lp me no there's another lp that sacks and  i share who got their beak significantly doused in

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that one but i'm just gonna i'm gonna get the kid  to give me a 25 basis points and uh advisor share so i'm getting a slice no matter what yeah good  good luck with that good luck with that good luck the train's off the station the train's off  the station dude that that company's worth a couple billion dollars in less than two  years of its existence good luck with that

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jason okay well it's right we call it a making  i don't know what you guys are seeing but my god early stage valuations went bonkers  i had one company that raised that don't run it i have all kinds of  data okay right so today we're going to do some audience questions and then we're going  to do the state of vc we're running through

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a deck we're running through everything that is  changing right now in venture capital and early stage investing and it is changing very quickly  here's a question from leonard uh oh musics to what extent are you guys interested in longevity  in your opinion what technologies could help us

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live longer and healthier lives freedberg that's  got your name on it why don't we start with you um on this one i would uh point folks to read the  book lifespan by david sinclair who's a researcher at harvard and he's done a lot of kind of leading  work on on basically calling aging a disease and

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life extension so the book lifespan highlights  i think a lot of his research and findings and paths forward uh for um for improving uh  longevity and basically you know it comes down to what he defines as kind of an early switch  that evolved in evolutionary biology in every cell in every living organism where  the cell is either in growth mode or repair mode

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and the trick is can you get the gene to switch  on that puts the cell into repair mode and if you do that the cell fixes itself and you and the  cell lasts longer and the organism lives longer and so they've identified a number of genes that  trigger this in a number of compounds that trigger

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expression of those genes and there's a  number of things you can do lifestyle-wise to trigger these genes basically to get  yourself to live longer so fasting is a good one and then there's a bunch of compounds that you  can take that mimic fasting on a cellular level like metformin and rapamycin i'm on metformin  i think a couple of you guys are on metformin

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right yeah yeah and then and then the nad  plus supplements um which you say mmn subs yeah nmn nmn and nad plus um so there's two  there's two compounds nmn like nancy mike nancy and then nr and those you can buy a product  called true niogen on amazon which which has those

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compounds and you take about a thousand milligrams  a day and um anyway all of this stuff's laid out in his books and it supports a lot of the research  that's being done obviously fasting and exercise also trigger this gene expression and enable  kind of um measures of longevity uh to kind of

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be showing up biologically but um i think i think  it's a it's an emerging field and there's a lot of deep work going on and as people have highlighted  the the process of aging is a biological process that theoretically we can stop and potentially  reverse and there's a lot of new work that's

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being done in stem cell therapy that may kind of  elicit some new paths forward here so arguably someone is alive on planet earth today that could  live past the age of 200. um so it's an exciting field and lots of kind of path forward i'll uh  i'll tell you for what it's worth my regimen

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um and oh god here we go thirst trap photo coming  in three no uh so so i i i do uh the following so um i take uh a statin now it was 10 milligrams now  i'm at 20 milligrams um i take metformin and all of this i take sort of in a preventative posture  um because my cholesterol wasn't super high

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but it wasn't super low it's like sort of like  in the 160 170 180 but now it's sort of like 120. um and then metformin i take preventatively as  well i'm not pre-diabetic um and then a couple of vitamin d and some other stuff but then here  are these things that i do that i think could be valuable for some folks listening uh there are  these places now that exist they're popping up

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one company that you can check out is called  pre-nuvo p-r-e-n-u-v-o um they are in vancouver they're in la they're in redwood city so  mid peninsula for those in silicon valley and what you can do is you can get a head to toe  uh mri so you know there's no radiation you know you could do these things you know every other  week if you wanted to it takes about an hour

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and what happens is they can basically uh look  through your entire body um your musculature your organs um from the literally from the tip of  your head all the way down to your ankles and they can spot a lot of stuff that may not otherwise  uh be seen and so you know every three or four

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years to get one of these scans you could see a  lesion um you could see the beginnings of a tumor you know i did one a few weeks ago touchwood  it was great nothing nothing so much does it cost um there's a range of prices um and i think  those prices will come down the range of prices

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are from like 1500 to 2500 so it's not expense  it's not cheap sorry um but here's what they're able to do they're building a corpus of all these  images where they're running uh machine learning on it and they're getting better and better  at identifying anomalies and so as a result

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of that they're able to actually take the mri  images and they can do fewer and fewer scans to get the equivalent resolution so two things  will happen one is the scan time will come down right so it was an hour and a half now it's sort  of right under an hour it can probably be as low

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as 40 minutes which is relatively tolerable for  most people and then the cost will come down into the hundreds of dollars because you'll be able  to very rapidly assess um so i do that and then the second thing is for anybody with heart  disease in their family i really implore you

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one of my friends actually is flying down from  toronto i'm taking him to my cardiologist in la and there's a thing called heart flow  and what heart flow is is a contrast ct which basically means they inject a dye and then  they put you under a ct and they they map out

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your heart and you can literally see the calcium  buildup you can see the state of your arteries um and you know what probably people don't  know is when you have a calcium score you know most of us it's zero but when it  starts to be non-zero it doubles every year and by the time it gets into the thousands you're  basically guaranteed to get some form of cardiac

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issue um and so it doesn't seem like anything if  your cardiac score is 20 except it goes to 40 80 160 and all of a sudden within five six  years you're really in the red zone for a heart attack or something um i've done it  twice now um every five years i do it um and touchwood you know my my calcium score is  still zero um but in any event uh that's what

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i do for longevity i kind of preventatively  at the cellular level with some drugs and then just trying to catch cancer and heart disease  on the front end uh otherwise eat three balanced meals and exercise and sleep a lot sax uh  you obviously don't care about longevity

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uh any thoughts here i mean sax has looked like  he's a thousand years old since he was seven no he was when he was in 12th grade he looked  like he was a vice president united states yeah guys just just let just let me know when this  conversation is over i've been doing my email

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oh it's so great all right end my life now i [  __ ] hate it you don't you guys like i just lost two years right now sax has got an early spot  both on the rocket ship to mars and he's got an inside vip to peter thiel's blood boy project  and so either way he's getting off the planet or he's going to refresh his blood or both so  he's good all right action bias asks please

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debate decentralization of monetary value ultimate  threat for insiders power erosion i interpret this as a as a bitcoin question so yeah i think one of  the most interesting things happening in the world today is this is what's happening with bitcoin  right it's and and you're seeing the price go up

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because a bunch of institutional investors  on wall street are all getting into it now it's gone from retail to institutional and  the narrative basically it's a really profound narrative which is it's the separation of money  and state so if you think about like one of the

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most important events in human history was the  separation of church and state where we no longer looked to the state to determine you know what  religion everyone was going to be well what crypto is introducing is this idea that the government  cannot control the money supply i think that's

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what he's talking about with the decentralization  is that you could have a currency that everybody in the world believes in that no government can  control that's the separation of money and state now this is just really a narrative right  now i mean and who knows if it will actually come true but the interesting thing is that if  everybody does believe in it it will come true

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and so bitcoin's been sort of described as the  bubble that never ends because if everyone kind of buys into this bubble it actually comes true  so i think it's very interesting and you're seeing um because bitcoin is kind of perceived as the  antidote to inflation and money printing by the

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government i think you're seeing it take on new  urgency now because the government just keeps printing trillions and trillions of dollars of of  new money doesn't this threaten government so if government um doesn't have control over monitoring  financial transactions and have control over

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the accounts in which the financial assets sit  which is effectively the notion of decentralized anonymized wallets then um how does the government  secure taxation which is requisite for their ability to fund well they're good to fund the  state right and so what happens to the state well so there's an enormous amount of leakage  that happens today in assets that actually

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get financialized but in the gray market and i  think the the beautiful thing is on the one hand you know we become less focused on like the m1 and  the m2 money supply like the physical printable distributable money that we can see and touch and  it gets replaced with virtual currencies that are

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tied to other things i think what the the the the  person who wrote the question is asking really is more about defy and what's happening sort of like  on the ethereum you know 2.0 erc20 contracts all that stuff which is sort of much more next-gen  i think than bitcoin and i think at some point

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we should deep dive into it but what i would  say friedberg is all the leakage you have today goes away in a world of defy because you will  financialize every single asset possible you know you'll financialize your homes you'll financialize  your cars your watches your jewelry your art you'll financialize every random thing maybe  even your career and how people will trade it

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absolutely your career and and the thing is by  by monetizing it and financializing it you can borrow against it you can trade it you can pull  forward value into the future against it but it'll all be tracked and so as long as the government  then says listen we're going to enable it all

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but there needs to be an off-ramp to taxation  and that's pretty simple because a physical house exists in the world you can't hide the existence  of a physical house but it's not anonymized right chamath and so i you know you want to track it i  mean that's the challenge is if no i'm saying if

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it is anonymized then the government uh can't  track it and the government i think these are these are two separate things some assets will  live anonymously and those are the assets that don't need to exist in the real world but i  think what this will create is a world where all of these assets that actually really exist in  the real world it'll be fine that it exists and

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that people get taxed on it but it'll be much  more legitimate and i think it'll be simpler and so i think people will trade off incremental  taxation for incremental monetizability i'll give you an example let's use real estate there is no  reason why every single piece of land everywhere

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around the world isn't written into a ledger with  knowledge of who owns it such that the person that owns it could trade it could borrow against  it um could sell it uh yeah yeah yeah could it fractionalize it even if you can't fractionalize  in the real world because your neighbors won't let

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you set it up into four lots you could do that  online online and so today what will happen is that you know that person has a level of wealth  and what they do instead take the united states is they'd lobby lobby lobby to create all this  convoluted real estate tax law to make their life

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simpler but if you actually unlocked the ability  to focus on revenue versus expenses you just wouldn't focus as much on the taxation because  you'd say well i can make so much more money if you judge just to you know sort of answer the  question here from the from the reader from the

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listener i think you can really judge this based  upon how much it's being pumped by the people who own it and they are absolutely dogged religious  about this it's like talking to and you know person who's you know met jesus and now everybody  has to be a christian and you can also look at the

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people who are opposing it i don't know if you saw  yellen um and then um christine lagarde she came out against it yellen's come out against it india  might ban it and then you have obviously china is coming out they're digital ones so i think it's  gonna be there's going to be a dogfight here

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where governments are not going to easily give up  their control of this and there's many ways they can make a bunch of red tape to slow this down  and in countries that are authoritarian they can outright ban it let's take another question by  the way there's like three outcomes here right

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i mean you could either see bitcoin for example  you know being banned and that's going to be ugly um and obviously there would be significant  financial loss at this point i mean to sax's point at some point there's so much asset value tied up  in bitcoin it's too big to fail sorry david banned

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by who oh that that's chinese government this this  is what they're trying to do on some of the states right and they're trying to make it illegal for  citizens to transfer money in and out of the asset class i think i think it's i think it's a bigger  threat to countries that want to impose export

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or currency controls and export restrictions  but but frankly if you're a country that's not afraid of currency movements because you're not  trying to do something oppressive to your people i don't think you have that much to fear here  i mean there are other ways of trying to hide

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assets or hide money besides bitcoin and every  transaction every bitcoin transaction is written into the ledger i think you have to be pretty  dumb to try and commit a crime with bitcoin because there's going to be a permanent record  in the blockchain forever of that transfer and then there's companies that that provide that do  kind of uh sleuthing and try to you know unravel

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you think tax evasion in the united states  is going to be difficult um with bitcoin if i accrue a bunch of value in bitcoin am i going  to be able to evade paying taxes on those gains and convert that bitcoin into physical assets  by purchasing it from another bitcoin wallet

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holder i mean how realistic is tax evasion  going to be uh and how much would because that's ultimately what the u.s government would mostly  well so you would convert cash into bitcoin and then you want to sell your bitcoin at some point  you're gonna have to sell it i mean there would be

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a uh there'd be a a realization of what i'm saying  transfer to a seller of an asset of another asset that's willing to accept bitcoin and receipt and  so to anonymize wallets i don't know i mean that transaction is going to live on the blockchain  forever and it's going to live in the books of

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whoever the seller is what are they selling you  a car a house whatever i mean that that transit a watch i mean look if it's a personal item maybe  but if we're talking about a substantial asset like a house or a company or  something they're going to need to the other side of the transaction is  going to need to report the realization event

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so you're going to have to have two people collude  to engage in tactics seems like a really stupid thing to do legally incorporated businesses are  going to be mandated to do effectively identity verification much like we have to do under the  patriot act with all the the financial totally

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totally buyer yeah ultimately how the compromise  arises right yeah i'm not i i'm not that worried about i i feel like this whole like silk  road type bitcoin will be used illegally thing is like kind of a old meme about it that i  think that the fears are like greatly exaggerated but the the thing that jumps out at me about all  the critics of bitcoin and i'm i'm not like a

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pumper or whatever but i do i do own some um is  that the thing that like all these like critics don't seem to understand is the technology that's  the common denominator whether it's like howard marks or warren buffett or charlie munger or  whoever they're they're all like great investors

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or whatever but they're not technologists and  blind spot yeah it's a blind spot and the thing they don't understand about the technology is  that bitcoin is the first digital asset to ever be created that you can't create infinite copies  of right so think about like a song or a photo or

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a video or whatever anything that's digital you've  always been able to make an infinite number of copies isn't that what the word digital means is  that it's infinitely copyable so how do you have digital money that can't just be infinitely  copied but obviously that would destroy the

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value and that was the genius of bitcoin is  that every transaction's written into this ledger the blockchain is decentralized and nobody  over the last decade or so has figured out how to counterfeit bitcoin how to make a duplicate how to  double spend bitcoin as long as that remains true

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then bitcoin can serve as money if everyone  believes in it um the day that someone figures out how to counterfeit a bitcoin how to double  spend it it's all worthless but a lot of people have been trying over the last 10 years they've  never figured out how to crack it by the way that's a great it's a great transition to the  next question sorry i don't interrupt you but

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no it's a perfect transition and uh next up  adil says can one of the besties explain the power of quantum computing and how it can change  industries like medical pharmaceuticals any good companies that are leaders in quantum computing uh  i'll i'll i'll i'll take a cut at this one so um

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and the reason um i pointed it out is because  a lot of people do talk about quantum computing uh potentially being a path to cracking  the hashing functions in bitcoin mining and potentially overwhelming the network and  effectively counterfeiting the the bitcoin uh ledger um and so uh technically a quantum  computer is a computer that uses qubits

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which is a a storage of a quantum state versus  a storage of a binary state which is a a binary digit which is called a bit in traditional  computing classical computing a one and a zero a one and a zero and a quantum or qubit a quantum  state can uh be a much more dynamic function

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and so it's a it's a state that is a very analog  and very representative of kind of a much more kind of broader condition than just a one or a  zero it could be a one to zero or neither right it could have neither state as well about it as a  wave function and um and so a qubit can only exist

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in a in a piece of matter uh where you can hold  the fidelity of a quantum state meaning it can't be disturbed so right now all quantum computing  gets disturbed it all has some error-prone context to it and so in order to use qubits to do  calculations we use what's called quantum error correction on those qubits and so we adjust the  the qubits and the output to try and resolve it

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a qubit with no errors is called a logical qubit  and the logical qubit has not been built it would require very very very low error rates um and  there's a bunch of uh and and there's a bunch of theories around when this is going to happen  when are we going to have truly logical qubits

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um when does the error rate get low enough  that these qubits are are truly kind of useful now there is an estimate that the number of  logical qubits needed to crack rsa 2048 which is the big kind of encryption standard um which could  kind of break the whole crypto currency model um it would require about 4011 logical qubits  um today the largest um the largest quantum

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computer has about a hundred qubits that are  very noisy and so it's less than one logical qubit and so we would need somewhere between a  hundred thousand and a million qubit computer to be able to have enough quantum supremacy to  be able to tackle a project like cracking rsa

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2048. and to and by some estimates and some people  have tried to estimate when this would happen and the estimate currently by some researchers is that  this there's a less than five percent chance this happens before the year 2040. so we're talking  somewhere between the year 2040 and the 2060

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when we get a quantum computer that has enough  logical qubits to be able to crack a problem like um you know rsa 2048 and basically make  all crypto fail and between now and then a lot of people are working on quantum cryptography  which is new methods of encryption that are kind

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of built for the quantum era and the quantum  frontier now what's more interesting is that over the next 100 next 10 years or so the current  super noisy super low fidelity quantum computers can be used to simulate quantum states which is  the condition of atoms and molecules and use that

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to do better modeling of physiochemical properties  of material that's where the breakthroughs will happen in the next decade so all the hard  discrete problems that we kind of theorize about cryptography and other stuff that's decades away  in this decade we are already going to start to

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see quantum computers have breakthroughs in how  material how atoms and molecules interact with each other for example finding proteins that can  do a better job of having an enzymatic reaction in the physical world where we can now  potentially pull nitrogen out of the atmosphere to make fertilizer or or drugs or um or specific  protein targets that can go in the human body

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and have specific functions by modeling what we  can't do with traditional computers today modeling the quantum properties of those molecules  and how they interact with other molecules and then building really cool predictive  models that we can then turn into products

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and that's going to be chased really hard this  decade everyone's going to be going after it and we already have enough compute power  i don't think that there's any leader in quantum computing today these are all still  science experiments they're all breadboards ibm google microsoft a bunch of research labs a  bunch of startups are all kind of basically

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doing the same thing with different types of qubit  technology but they all have very high errors they all have very low qubit computers and so it's  still unresolved who's going to come out with some companies two companies to follow are d-wave  which was started in 99 so just to give you

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an idea of how long people have been working  on this 22 year old company i know uh steve jervison's been backing it for now in its third  decade and then ionic is that the other one i o and q i i think like quantum facts right quantum  computing is like fusion yes it's like it's like

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a technical problem that has attracted people  who've had more money than common sense um and it's just basically a way to burn an  enormous amount of money over 20 or 30 years and the problem with that is that you start to  build in technical craft anything that is still in r d phase 20 years in needs to get scrapped  and rebuilt from scratch because everything has

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changed including the people even the 20 year olds  that started are now in their 40s and have kids and just have a competitive it's a great point  jamaat and so and so like you got to just scrap these projects and start all over again because  the the problem is you need somebody completely

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naive to look at this problem in 2021 and say well  okay how are we actually going to really solve like the coherence problem i don't know how are  we going to build a gate array uh i don't know and you have these very um formulaic ways that we knew  based on what technologies were available in 99

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or 2000 to start with and i think that's probably  part of why we framed the problem as largely sort of this thing of like okay maybe there's like a  integer factorization thing you can do and it's like i don't know i'm uh i'm deeply skeptical  yeah well i agree and by the way this is why

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sorry can i just say one last thing this is why  alpha fold beat quantum computers to the solution of protein folding uh and and the reason was they  were just like ah we'll just take a different run at it completely different people a completely  different technical framework and modality

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and a completely different risk profile and  age as well a company to keep an eye on in the fusion space commonwealth fusion systems um  wait zach what were you gonna say what i was gonna say is that the main thing i was thinking  about while you were giving that dissertation on qubits or god knows what is that is i would  never invest in this that's all i was thinking

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is i would never invest in this yes you're exactly  on sas and markets that's exactly what church yeah that's exactly what jamaa said definitely seven  kings and five aces look these are science fair experiments you know with indefinite time frames  this is basic r and d that should be done at

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universities these concepts are not ready for  commercialization exactly what they said about uh ai and then now it's infected in every  company so no that's not true no because there completely disagree with you because okay there  were there was a practical commercial revenue

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generating opportunity for ai and machine learning  literally from the start of computing it it took several iterations there's no use case for fusion  energy i mean of course there is no i'm not no but it's it's still at the basic r d stage basic yeah  i will i'll partially agree with you jason in the

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sense that i was not investing in ai 10 years ago  because i thought at that stage it was still in the realm of science fiction but we just announced  two deals the last two days two seed deals viable which is basically an ai voice of the customer  it slurps in all of your customer feedback and

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then gives you answers and then the other one is a  copywriting one it's a copywriting ai called copy dot ai which literally writes your site  trying to get a slice right now yeah now yeah we we might give you a slice  jason stop being so skeptical but yeah but but here's here's what's changed right  is these are seed companies with just a handful

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of employees they're built on gpt3 so you had  this like basic like r d done it creates this platform called gpt 3. it's like aws that's right  yeah you can now build companies on top of that so i mean look it you know what i invest in are  the commercialization of of of new technology

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waves um those technology waves happen because  of deeper r d what do you think about vr and ar because it is the same conversation with vr and ar  like are these worthy investments or not i think i think sax's point is such a good one because  what he's saying is um is what i think has

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happened over the last century the government  the best role the government can provide is to take on that technology risk that large capital  intense technology risk this was the case with the manhattan project and we got nuclear energy  out of it it was the case with apollo project we have the space industry as a result now and  it's what happened with the human genome project

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and now we have an incredible genomics revolution  and arpanet and and that extensive early stage de-risking requires an incredible amount of  capital that's very low returning it doesn't return anything it's what saks is saying is later  is the the commercialization where do we have um

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uh a heuristic a theory a best practice around  when something goes from a research project to being commercially viable they're signals i mean  platform platformification seems like one that you pointed out david if it's a platform and you can  use it easily yeah i think i i think i think you

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can tell when the amount of capital required  to get it off the ground goes to something reasonable like a few million dollars as opposed  to hundreds of millions of dollars whenever and jason you've talked about this that any company  that's trying to raise hundreds of millions of dollars or you know has a billion dollar plus  like evaluation before shipping a product

33:01

is presumptively fraud there's still too much r  d involved i mean look venture capital is a miles milestone based investing model you take a little  bit of seed money you create a prototype you get some proof then you raise a series a you get 10  million you get some customers then you raise 25

33:19

million and you scale the company and it's based  on milestones it's actually a very efficient way of investing and when somebody wants to skip over  all those milestones they say no we need hundreds of millions of dollars to launch this thing  you have to ask why is this is this idea really

33:33

ready for commercialization what's your mother's  response to that because you've done deep tech investing and you've done i mean virgin galactic  would fall into that or no yeah so like how do you think about deep tech investing tomorrow in  like where where like there's a role for venture

33:46

capital private market you know dollars yeah i've  done i've done a lot of deep tech investing and my whole thing was i've always looked at at the  point where something is completely de-risked technically and it's about then the exploitation  of a market otherwise it's exactly what david

34:03

said so i'll give you an example a company called  relativity space is now the second most valuable private space flight company after spacex okay  yc company i love the series a um what were they trying to do there they their their stated goal at  the time was we want a 3d print the entire rocket

34:22

and the entire engine and i said wow okay well  when we did the math and we tried to figure this out and have the same launch capability as spacex  all of it comes down to okay well how do you want to de-risk this and what tim and jordan's first  idea was well first we want to basically prove

34:40

that we can actually get a certain printing  capability done because you're talking about these extremely you know energy intensive  extremely technical printers and effectively writing printer drivers right and to be doing it  at a scale where you can hand that off to nasa and they can take that engine literally strap  it down with chains called the hold down test

35:02

fire the engine and say it works doesn't blow  up doesn't blow up and i said to tim how much does that take and tim was like i could probably  do that on 10 million bucks i said you're done on 10 million dollars yeah and it was 100  million 100 the only person that would have written a 100 million dollar check to de-risk  that doesn't understand what they're trying

35:22

to prove at that point in time because what he  was trying to prove was the the ability to use the printer he wasn't saying i'm trying to  build a next generation rocket motor right so similarly with virgin you know virgin got to  a point where it's like it had flown demonstrably

35:39

in the air so what did it prove it proved the  flight profile worked it proved the engine worked it proved all the navigational componentry  worked and it proved the safety envelope work which means that it could basically act as  a glider under all kinds of boundary conditions

35:55

that's an enormous amount of technical progress  and then at that point there i'm willing to invest billions of dollars and so to david's  point you have to have a new model early too like that's one of the things about being an  entrepreneur is figuring out how you stay alive

36:07

while you answer these questions and you came up  with a brilliant one or whoever was doing virgin galactic which is people will overpay but virgin  was a 14 year process where richard branson to his credit did exactly what david said here's  10 million dollars get to milestone one here's

36:25

25 million dollars get to milestone two he did  the exact venture capital model it's just that he did it by himself i think what david is  saying which i agree with is you should never short-circuit that and say here's 500 million  dollars pre-series a yeah sure you'll be working at something for 20 years with nothing to [ __ ]  show for it as in fusion as in quantum computing

36:46

all right you'll end up with let you end up  with a a magic leap or theranose theranose or it looks like it's a fraud but magic leap  just looks like it's technically incompetent or it's too hard of a technical problem to  solve in the amount of time and the amount right technical incompetence well i don't  know if it's incompetent this might be

37:07

it might be a 20-year problem as opposed to a five  but why are you taking this emotionally technical incompetence is the opposite of technical  competence competence means you can do it technical income okay okay you were saying that  that group of people is incompetent i'm saying the

37:19

word followed by the word incompetence technical  incompetence okay when you're saying it i'm think you're describing the person not the problem  it could have been too hard to lift for them so yeah okay well the last question is about  access to private equity but let's just go

37:33

into this stack here now one of the things we  wanted to talk to today chamoth had a good idea venture capital is changing rapidly um the  last decade has seen more change in venture capital than i would argue the four decades or  five decades that venture capital has existed in other words more change um i'm gonna go  through some of those changes how it affects

37:52

the entrepreneur how it affects the investor  chamath was nice enough to put a deck together and then i guess jason will figure out a way  to post this into the youtube or something like that yeah you know what we'll put in the show  notes a link to this google presentation and

38:06

nick can pull up the slides when working and also  i think i think if folks can give us feedback this is kind of a new thing for us we're trying to  experiment which is sort of this is like a half teaching half discussion on something we all  wanted to talk about and hopefully you guys get

38:20

some value from it but uh tell us if it's not so  uh i i want to thank uh carmen collins on my team who helped put this together but let me just  uh go through this state of venture capital um so a couple of high-level points there's like some  really important trends at play the first is that

38:37

there really is now underneath a massive  change in the players in this game founder demographics are changing slowly but  surely we're going to go into that in a second traditional vc investors are getting disrupted  we're going to go that we're going to go into that and then this model which i love of let me know  how i can be helpful quote unquote basically

38:59

eroding um and seeding ground to what we call solo  capitalists and we'll talk about that which is probably the most disruptive trend in venture  second we'll talk about the inflation in the amount of money that's going into these companies  which really means more money at higher prices and

39:16

why that's good in some ways and actually bad in  some other ways this goes back to david's point of you know not being forced to generate milestones  sooner uh and then the third is that it's really now a founder's market and i think this is really  important because you know you've seen an enormous

39:31

amount of dilution and lack of control for uh  founders and employee teams and companies and i think that there are some really disruptive new  ways that completely usurp traditional venture non-diluted forms of financing we'll talk about  that so let me just level set for you guys i asked

39:49

the following question what are the demographics  of the united states and here's what they are in the united states today 59 percent of people are  white non-hispanic 12 and a half percent are black 5.8 are asian 18.7 are hispanic and 2.3 are  multi-race if you map that to vc founders

40:15

77 of vc founders are white 1 are black 17.7  are asian one point eight percent are hispanic and two and a half are multi-race so amongst  multi-race asian and white you either are at or over indexing your representative population  and blacks and hispanics this is not anything new

40:35

but massively underrepresented if you take it from  a gender females have lower representation among founders but it's growing so the us is basically  50 50 male female female founded companies were 23 percent of all deal activity in 2019 that's that's  pretty good um up from 12 in 2010 although racial

40:56

diversity is still pretty lacking which we know  and then the young tech bro stereotype is cracking uh which is this is incredible 2019 study in  the times showed that the average age of a tech founder is david sacks what do you think it is the  average age of a tech founder median or average

41:14

mean or a median average average well i saw  i saw your deck so isn't it something like it was surprisingly 35 40. 42. for example no  i'm seeing a lot i think i don't know just to pause here for a moment what do we still  found a company you can what do we think is given we you had the longevity question earlier  and then you have people you know generating

41:36

wealth and starting companies in their 40s 50s  and 60s who then underwrite it themselves right until they get to product market fit and  then raise money what do we think is the best zone for an entrepreneur in terms of having  a great outcome i've always thought that the look i when i how old was i i was  31 32 when i started social capital

42:02

i mean this is a multi-billion dollar enterprise  i feel like i'm reasonably successful at it but i was preparing for the first 13 or 14 years  of my professional career i learned some good things i learned some bad things i learned tactics  that worked i learned strategies that didn't so

42:18

thirties or forties or well literally in my  50s in my experience for me and i think it's for personal for everybody i was best positioned  to know what to do and at least iterate in my 30s and i think in the absence of an idea that has  some network effect or something that's sort of

42:38

like supernatural outside of your own control i  think the older you are generally probably the better prepared you'll be yeah i agree i mean i  did paypal when i was still in my 20s but i wasn't the the founder of the company i was  recruited to it at a very early stage i didn't really start yammer until well i guess i  started the predecessor company genie when i was

42:57

34 and then yammer pivoted into yammer when i  was 35. i mean absolutely that's that's like that's like a good level of preparation you know  unless you have a spectacular idea for a startup you should probably get some experience first 100  percent free burger any thoughts there on what's

43:17

the kill zone best time to launch companies  in your mind or investing companies or where founders everyone's got their own path you  know i mean zuck and sergey and larry and uh bill gates they started right out of college  without any experience but um i mean i worked

43:33

at i had two jobs uh in tech before i started  my first company in yeah um and so i had a lot to draw from and that really informed me but i  think everyone's different i mean some people if you have the idea if you have the idea by all  means do it in your 20s you know absolutely i mean by by far the the greatest kind of like measure  of whether and when you're kind of prepared for

43:56

this is your ability to continue learning you know  continuous learning to me is one of the greatest predictors of entrepreneurial success and all the  guys that have lasted for decades from bezos to zuck to you know larry and sergey you know they  were continuously evolving themselves because

44:10

they were continuous learners bill gates is bill  gates is the penultimate example of this right i mean this guy has reinvented himself a thousand  times that what you said is so important i'm gonna change my answer i think i started social capital  when i was actually the most able to get out of

44:26

my own way and learn continuously yeah yeah you  know one thing i'd add to this is it's so much easier to be a founder now today then i mean look  i i remember i joined paypal in 1999 that was my first startup it was like really hard to get into  entrepreneurship in the 1990s you know the vcs

44:45

had tremendous power and control they would  routinely replace founders ceos you know everyone had to go to sandhill road to get capital  it was hard to even know how to network your way to sandhill road it was just much much harder  to be a founder it was much harder to raise money it was hard to know what to do and then  i think actually one of the things that really

45:06

changed things was with blogging emerging in the  mid 2000s it led to a proliferation of information where now you know other founders started blogging  investors started blogging and there became a wealth of information out there so you could learn  how to do it and then of course you had incubators

45:23

and so on like yc so there became more of like  a playbook for just like how you actually get a company off the ground when i graduated law school  which was 1998 i i knew i wanted to get into business and entrepreneurship i really had no idea  how to do it and if it wasn't for a phone call

45:38

from peter thiel i'm not sure i would have gotten  into it you know but now now everybody knows what to do can i ask you a question then so let me  let me give you a stat and i'll ask a question what do you think that story would be david for  somebody that wasn't a white man so here's the

45:53

step here is the data the percentage of female  vc decision makers has grown by more than 2x uh what that means is about firms over a billion  dollars about a quarter of them have at least two plus female decision makers but 61 of them have  zero and 80 of venture firms still have no black

46:12

investors how do you correlate or intersect  that idea of ease of starting a company with the pattern recognition of those folks and  the inability to sort of maybe map to people with black skin or women i mean i think that what  silicon valley and what venture capital represents is opportunity right and we have to extend that  opportunity to as many people as possible i mean

46:38

that's really the the key here is we do need  to make it as widely available as possible by the way i mean one way to slice things is the  percent percentage of uh diverse representation within the ranks of venture and private equity um  but there is a equivalent scaling in the number of

46:56

venture firms and the amount of venture capital  since you know saks and and you and i and all of us kind of entered the technology industry  kind of early 2000 um and the number of firms that exist today that are kind of micro firms and  scaled firms i think presents um a much larger set

47:14

of opportunity you're right there are still uh  standards um and there are still challenges in diversity and kind of having access but there  is so much more access than there has ever been um and that's really changed the landscape  i mean folks coming out of college can get

47:29

a million dollars that was kind of unheard of back  in 1999 or or the reality is like there's so many incubators i mean it's not as if jason or yc or  any of these folks give millions of dollars right jason like these checks are still really small  so the point is you can build something if you

47:45

have the skills to build something the the the the  gap right now is that there's a lot of people who have ideas about what they want to do but they  have no skills and i think what we found in a vibrant market like today i mean this is the most  vibrant i've ever seen it there's at least three

48:01

or four times as many startups to choose from  at the earliest stages and what we're seeing is the number of vcs has not grown at that  level it has grown the number of players has grown but not at that level therefore  the average quality of a deal has gone up the average quality of a funded deal has gone up  but the average quality of a startup has gone down

48:21

does that make sense yeah so the ones that  get funded are better than ever but the one the average is lower because there's so many doing  it and then just the best piece of advice i have is when we talked about continuous learning is  if you are not building the product in some way

48:34

or selling the product in some way then what are  you doing at this startup like you either build it or you sell it like there really isn't much  more there and a lot of people just have ideas and no ability to execute you really have to be a  developer designer ux person marketer something uh

48:49

in terms of getting this product out to the world  what uh what do you guys think about this other trend which i think is really important which is  the atomization of these firms so you know we're moving from a world where people used to care  about name the brand sequoia excel uh and then

49:05

now they they named the person right and they'll  probably follow that person wherever they are so what do we think about that there's a really  interesting tweet from eric taurenberg he said founders don't want to raise money from  institutions as much anymore they want to raise money from individuals and then if you marry  that with what's happening with angellist and

49:24

all this other stuff isn't that the trail of  breadcrumbs for how like vc just kind of in some ways just kind of gets blown up the way  that it's normally been done i remember as a founder um when i started my company in 2006  there was a lot of this conversation in as

49:42

sax pointed out in the blogger community blogging  community and with like various websites that rated vcs and there was generally a trend in  the support network among ceos adventure firms of talking a lot about make sure you  pick your partner don't pick the firm and so this i don't know if this is necessarily  a new trench moth it's certainly something that

50:01

i remember being top of mind 15 years ago when  i started my first company and so much of it was about make sure you have the right partner  because that's who's gonna be on your board that's who you're gonna spend time with that's who's  going to recruit executives with you that's who's

50:13

going to be helpful in finding your next round of  funding for you um and i feel like that's that's always been the case but you're right the brand  value of a firm has certainly become less useful and folks have struggled to kind of figure out  i think a solution here i mean you see what

50:27

andreessen horowitz did they launched in 2009  and really focused on trying to be this kind of full service provider to startups and i don't  know how much that matters as much anymore as much as making sure you've got a great  partner from the firm that's helping you with your business i i don't know it's actually you're  right freeberg that's a continuing trend what i'll

50:44

say is the top firms are still as attractive or  more attractive to founders the loser in this i believe is the mid-tier firm or the lower tier  firms that actually none of the partners there are all that great the performance is not that great  their value-add is not that great but when you

51:00

do get a sequoia or an andreessen when i put craft  in this as well when you get one of those all-star vc firms to join your board specifically that is  the key when they join the board they own over 10 you are anointed in a way that is transcendent  you will get pounded with inbound from the

51:18

second tier and third tier firms who want to  triple your evaluation and give you 20 million bucks it happens like clockwork in fact there  were a couple of firms like was it dag the one sacks that would always follow on sequoia deals  and so there were firms that were built around

51:33

that was their lp pitch dags lp pitches we just  we will mark up every sequoia deal exactly so i mean one you know it was one page so it's like  if you can't get into sequoia and you're willing to wait an extra round don't invest in tag well  and then now i think the big trend here is those

51:48

firms in dreesen and sequoia are now full stage  where they have the late stage growth they have a scout program they have a seed program they have  a series a program so it's a full life cycle it's not those guys also it's just it's all these other  big crossover guys that have come down tiger co2

52:05

durable i think that's the biggest trend of the  last uh 15 years chamac and i think it is what has enabled the proliferation of early stage  startups and enabled the valuation increments and the capital that flowed in the early stage  is the um is the scale down from the big guys i just want to kind of do a quick walk down  memory lane because when you guys said you

52:24

wanted to talk about this i kind of remembered i  got my series b term sheet in 2008 i guess it was and um and or 2009 and i had three venture firms  uh andreessen was one of them that gave me a term sheet uh and the interesting thing about at that  time with andreessen was they gave me a term sheet

52:41

i was trying to raise 30 million dollars and they  said we want to give you 40 million and they up the valuation significantly and um and there was  a i ultimately went with coastal ventures but there was this trend um that andreessen was kind  of imparting and i heard about it a lot from other

52:56

entrepreneurs was that they were going out and  offering more money than the founder was asking for or seeking at higher valuations and it was  this trend towards saying like go grab the market because the interesting thing about web scale  economics and um you know web scale businesses

53:11

is you get so much leverage and you can get  extraordinarily rapid growth i mean the rate of growth could be infinite um and and the leverage  could be infinite and so if you do it at the right round i think that's but so much of this was and  then obviously that so that was a huge step up and

53:26

i remember andreessen horowitz beginning 2009 kind  of started to build a reputation for doing this of of kind of you know putting larger checks out  and saying go scale and then the big crazy thing was the crossover guys started coming in and  offering bigger checks in kind of this proven stage growth stage kind of funding and then  obviously the big step up with softbank and

53:44

softbank with the 100 billion dollar vision fund  and and ultimately what exactly did that disrupt freeburg just hang on so when all these things  happened those large chunks of capital became available and the valuation step-ups were so  significant for these later stage startups that the money flowed down and more money was  raised in earlier stage venture that enabled this

54:03

proliferation of capital in this proliferation  of new startups and enablement of startups at the earlier stage because of all the crossover money  that started to come in and the blitz scaling of proposals and lots of money that was being thrown  at the later stage that to me felt like the reason

54:17

all of the earlier stage stuff proliferated  was because of the the amount of capital the later state you're absolutely right and now  ten years later here's where we are in the early specs are the next step champ because like totally  i think what you did is you know we pre-2009 there

54:31

was 10 billion dollars a year in specs then when  you started this in 2009 it stepped up to 2019 it stepped up to 13 billion last year 80 billion was  raised in specs this quarter 100 billion in specs and stacks are that you cross over investing it's  taking you know growth stage private equity style

54:47

risk in the public markets with this proliferation  of capital and we're seeing the benefit in the early stage and founders and entrepreneurs are  seeing the benefit because there's so much access to capital on the back end you can take more  risk on the early end and you can make more bets

54:59

and and i think you know i think it's the next  step up and we just keep seeing these step ups yeah i tend to think that the growth stage is the  most troubled and challenged because at the early stage you can get a guy like saks or jkl on your  board and you can grind and i think that that's

55:12

really important to get the product market fit and  at the public stage you can get somebody like me and you know we can help transact and actually  help optimize and run the business for scale and value but in the middle you have all these  weird dynamics that no longer maybe not don't

55:26

make as much sense so just to give you a sense of  it the average deal size okay so the typical round is up 3x over the last 10 years 3x that that  is absolutely anecdotally in my experience uh in late stage investors are doubling and  tripling down on these mega deals so that that average round size is up 5x in the last decade  um the the typical pre-money on a growth stage

55:53

deal in 2010 was 100 pre this is for the top  quartile uh and it's now or sorry for this is for the average it's now this is for a growth  stage yeah growth stage 100 pre is now 570 free wow yeah it's getting crazy it's really it's  really really getting crazy tiger it says here

56:13

in the notes tiger global has announced the deal  according to pitchbook every 48 hours in 2021. that's fabulous that's [ __ ] fantastic  what tiger i think has figured out is there they started as public market investors  and worked their way down the stack right so they're very familiar with the public market  valuations they're seeing that these sas companies

56:35

are you know we i remember 10 years ago when i was  doing yammer we thought that the best outcome that you could have as a sas company was like a one to  two billion dollar exit that's why when microsoft offered us 1.2 billion in 2012 we took it right  we're like we could work five more years maybe get

56:50

to a two billion dollar outcome well now you're  seeing what slack just got acquired by salesforce for close to 30 billion it's pretty routine to  see sas companies ipoing it now 10 20 30 billion and up and so the exits are just so much bigger  than anybody thought 10 years ago and we were the

57:09

optimists by the way there's a good tweet on  this by um it was jay malik basically he gave some stats he said that uh if you're wondering  why everyone wants to invest or be a vc today the stats from pitchfork provide an answer we had  43 billion in exits in 2010 we had 290 billion

57:27

in exits in 2020 so we had about 7x roughly  greater exits over the course of a decade now the average deal size has grown 3x and there's  a lot more money going into venture capital but the reason why you're having all this money  go in and all these new players is because the outcomes are so much bigger and then he said  and i agree with this wouldn't be surprised if vc

57:47

hits 1 trillion by 2030. so we're seeing just the  i mean i remember 20 years ago when i first got into the business you know like silicon valley  was a small little um concentric circle around stanford and now it's spread to san francisco  and the entire bay area and to other cities

58:05

and it just keeps getting bigger and bigger it's  the digitization of every market right i mean every traditional business every traditional  industry is being digitized in some way or another and so it's no longer a tech enabler  of other industries it is the industry itself

58:18

we know that this the brand really matters in  the early stage because they anoint you and they bring so much value in terms of working with  you to solve problems we know with spax whoever and ipos whoever is anointing that really  matters right the sponsor but in the middle

58:34

is all that cash now move to a a game of who will  pay the most for the least rights in other words series b to you know when you get involved  tomorrow is that just it's such a good point you're so what you're now teeing up jason  is this next big category which is if it's undifferentiated capital at some point you're  going to go to the logical conclusion which is

58:57

i don't want any dilution from this i'm happy  to take dilution in the series a when i get you know craft or sequoia or benchmark i'm happy to  take dilution in the ipo because that's sort of the necessary process of you know diversifying  the stock ownership getting you know my users

59:12

and my customers to be able to own the stock etc  etc but in the middle now you have these companies like pipe and clearbank where now all of a sudden  you can grow jason in your bcd rounds and you have zero dilution so if you're a founder you know the  best formula is going to be take series 8 and seed

59:29

capital from an expert single you know gp brand  person who knows that business category so well right if you're starting a sas company you  should probably get your seed from saks you know raise your a from some expert or what let  me say differently seed from j cal a from sax

59:48

and then go to pipe and clear bank and fund it  all based on your recurring revenue growth and then go public via spec so just to give you some  uh data that i got from piping which means you would just to give people an idea of what the cap  table would look like there you would dilute ten

1:00:01

percent in your your seed round twenty percent in  your a now you still have seventy percent of the company and you just sell your yearly contracts  ahead of time to pipe and you're done by the way can i can i tell the story about pipes so pipe um  yeah that's kind of grateful thanks for including

1:00:15

free break david david can i can i give the stat  from pipe and then tell the story go ahead sorry you guys are all investors in this company  no not me and you david they let us our beaks my beak is so wet can we get a profile  that beak let's see i don't know why it is it is oh my lord it is people don't realize  it really is hold on let me compare it to this

1:00:37

okay it's a beautiful pretty i'll tell  you let me tell let me tell the pipe beak wedding story because harry harry the  founders told the story he came in to meet with me my office at kraft this is pre-koved  when people actually met in person um our our principal who's based in la michael tam you knew  harry from his previous startup and brought him in

1:00:55

i i heard the pitch which is basically to advance  the the full value of these contracts for sas companies and others but it was so obvious right  because if you're a sas company you spend roughly about a year of of uh revenue on cac customer  acquisition costs but the customer only wants

1:01:15

to pay you monthly and so you have this huge  negative cash flow cycle so what if you could just take that contract and monetize it right  away get the full value of the contract advance then you can plow it into the next the next um  you know customer acquisition cost and you don't

1:01:30

need to dilute yourself with venture capital  i said yes to harry in like 15 minutes i think it's the quickest i've ever given a term sheet  we invested 2 million in the company in a 12 cap and we did the deal that day so within  nine months of launch pipe has connected 3 500 customers and over a billion plus of ar  to investors willing to purchase that revenue

1:01:55

uh to be clear it's a marketplace they're not  buying the debt anybody can go on the marketplace and say i will buy slacks revenue for 91 cents  on the dollar but something more speculative they might pay 85 so this is a brilliant thing  is that they're not they're not providing

1:02:11

the lending off their own balance i suppose a  clear bank which does in charge of six percent i'm talking about your book unless you  guys share it i'm going to go to the video yeah let's do it freeburg hey freeburg  let's launch a bio company together and we'll block out these beaks go work on  your life extension we're working on

1:02:32

our monetary extension right here yeah  you need more money you need more money so clearbank works with e-commerce companies so  what you do is you stitch in your connections to shopify and stripe etc they're able to monitor  how well you do and then they'll basically help

1:02:47

finance you again non-dilutively so clear bank  companies captured 55 more growth in 2020 than the prior year so even in the midst of  covet these companies did really well they have revenue based financing they've invested  a 1.6 billion dollars to date and it turns out that you know their investor composition eight  times more women funded than traditional vc by

1:03:08

the way i want to be clear i was also a series a  investor in clearbank i mean i am such a believer in this middle section of venture disappearing  like when you have these growth rounds they're undifferentiated and they shouldn't be dilutive in  any way shape or form the founders should figure

1:03:25

out how to grow non-dilutively the minute that  they have some semblance of product market fit so then the dilutive the dilutive points are  the bookends yeah this is kind of the idea with like indiegogo and some of the gofundme types or  not gofundme the other uh things where you could

1:03:39

basically pre-sell consumer products too right  where you could get funded in a similar way and you could see the same transitioning into kind of  hardware businesses and other and other consumer businesses right there's an even bigger there's an  even bigger trend that happened that i can talk to

1:03:54

which is equity crowdfunding cf but i don't want  to take you off your deck so do you want to keep going on the deck or you want the only the only  last thing i say is that uh the other big thing as friedberg says is like um so let me just  summarize so it's kind of like i think where we're

1:04:07

all going to is we see the venture capitalists  changing the financial stack yeah um it's going from organizations and these amorphous amorphous  financial orgs down to individuals as that happens i think what we're all kind of stating is it's  incredibly valuable at the earliest stages to

1:04:26

align yourself with a person that knows your  business or your market right and that's worth some amount of dilution it's almost like  getting a quasi co-founder right so in the seed in the series a but i think so that's one really  important point of what's happening in the market the second thing that i think we're all saying  is why are we deluding ourselves to grow in

1:04:47

these middle rounds if you don't have to it's  unnecessary and there should be really clever ways of non-dilutively financing yourself and as as the  market becomes more and more sophisticated there will be more companies beyond pipe and clearbank  to be clear but the point is that every kind

1:05:03

of company that has product market fit should be  able to finance themselves non-dilutively in the b all the way to the d and the e and then the third  thing which is sort of what friedrich says is this last book end is then you have sort of the path  to going public and this is where the spac makes

1:05:18

a ton of sense because you have a very certain  cost of capital you can now architect a cap table where the founder remains in control where  they and the employees are still more than 50 and you pull in the time of the ipo why is  that important typically today these companies

1:05:33

were taking 12 plus years to go public now with  spax they've come back in and they're closer to seven and eight years the reason is back to that  argument of like if you want to be a winner take most outcome the most important thing you need at  scale is money and the way that you get money is

1:05:50

by opening the kimono on your finances and showing  people who have lots of money why they should give it to you and not something else and so by going  public in years six seven and eight that's where you pull in the billions of dollars so you can  dominate what we're seeing is massive competition

1:06:06

in the financing of massively competitive  startup scenes in other words the entrepreneurial ecosystem has never been this  vibrant and i want to point out one thing that the sec has done that has is going to change things  dramatically i believe when syndicates first came out everybody said they were stupid nobody  would ever do it first one we ever did famously

1:06:29

was com.com we put in 328 thousand dollars became  worth over 100 million we're on track this year to do five deals a month 60 deals and we'll put 50  million to work this year at the syndicate.com think about that my fund is 44 million that's over  three years so now the syndicate's gotten so big

1:06:46

um that she's just on the syndicate well exactly  so i i'm gonna tell my lps the next time around let's have a discussion about this but anyway i  want to point out what republic.co happened this week republic.co is equity crowdfunding this means  civilians can invest there used to be a cap on an

1:07:01

equity crowdfunding of one million dollars every  year and there's a lot of auditing and financial review you have to do and you pay six percent to  whoever raised the money but it's it's um there is no sponsor involved in this so as an investor you  don't get me as a lead or chamath as your sponsor

1:07:19

or sax on your cap table but you can go on  to republic now which has a hundred thousand investors on it and gum road which is doing 10  million a year just raised 5 million in one day sahil who was also running a rolling fund with  angellist and he has 8656 investors which means people are putting in under a thousand dollars  each amazing and it's capped at 5 million now

1:07:47

then arlen hamilton who runs backstage capital did  a very non-traditional i'll say raise she's not raising for her fund she sold 10 ownership was in  the process of selling 10 ownership in her venture capital fund startup studio at a 50 million dollar  valuation she's selling 10 of it if you buy shares

1:08:06

in that you don't get carry but you get 10 of her  carrying management fees forever so it'd be like buying 10 of craft or whatever the point is you  the vcs get uh boxed out of this and this imagine if airbnb or uber decided [ __ ] it we're going  to let our drivers buy shares through this and

1:08:27

they said we're starting this crowdfunding for 5  million and they did it every year because you can do the 5 million every single year so every year  you just allow folks who are in your stakeholder pool you email them and then they buy in it's just  absolutely extraordinary can you explain the arlen

1:08:42

thing so she's sorry she sold 10. it's a little  complicated if you page down future earnings yes so if you go to the flow of funds and that  link i sent for public.com backstage she is took all of her different funds and said you can  buy ten percent for five million dollars you own

1:09:02

ten percent of essentially sequoia capital or  y combinator whatever you want to refer to her um you know company as her holding company then  every time she gets management fees every time she has distributions from her carry she's  going to give 10 of that to these folks forever i don't know if that's a great idea but it's a  a new idea um i don't know if the investors in

1:09:25

that are going to get a massive return or they're  doing it because they want to support the cost that's that's incredible my gosh it's so weird  it's so disruptive it's so disruptive wow it's incredible well because it lets anybody really  spin up a new venture firm basically because

1:09:38

there are some startup costs to spinning up a new  venture remember she's been in it she's been doing this for 10 years and really has gotten good for  have to say not a lot of traction um you know from the the classic lps of the world um but now just  like we saw at gamestop just like we see with

1:09:54

bitcoin just like we see with nfts and robin  hood day traders there are new entrants here and i think there's going to be a world  where i will be able to fire up a syndicate and say i would like to raise 10 million but i'm  limiting it to 1 000 per person and 10 000 people

1:10:13

invest or i'm limiting it to five hundred dollars  so instead of you know going away for the weekend or going to vegas and blowing a thousand dollars  somebody could say you know what i'll go to vegas and blow 500 but i'm gonna put 500 in the next  startup i see and this is a democratization that

1:10:28

could change everything and make america so much  more competitive with what we're seeing in china with jack ma disappearing and looking like i've  said i've said this before like like what's what's crazy is like if you talk about like systemic  inequality and poverty it's like the government

1:10:42

loves to give poor people casinos sports betting  and lottery tickets yup but the idea that they could invest a hundred dollars into a startup  is illegal even though startups generate 15 of your caker so even if what you did was you  gen you invested in the market beta of startups let's just say that degrades it would still  probably be close to ten percent and the markets

1:11:04

yeah you'd be you you'd be out of the s p returns  you know over many many years eight percent so 25 percent better it's it's it would be incredible  with by the way 25 better chamath with the outside chance of hitting a home run a grand slam and and  that's why i love this um all right so do we want

1:11:23

to wrap here or anybody have any closing thoughts  well i just think it's like if you think of like that thing of like all the money flows changing  the other thing is like all the people are changing and then what sac said before it's much  much easier because the technologies are changing

1:11:37

you put these three things in a soup and it  just seems like our best days are ahead of us i think it's going to be amazing for  entrepreneurship all the answers are out there if you want to start a company all  the skills are freely available to you uh you can learn anything online i think the message  i really want people to understand is you know

1:11:58

you may you may believe that the world is filled  with inequality and racism and bad actors and you would be right but what's also right is that every  skill can be learned capital is available now more than ever and there is a clear path for you if you  just stop watching television and learn to be a ux

1:12:18

designer a sales executive a marketing or growth  executive or a developer you can change the world and change your lot in life and be really [ __  ] rich don't buy into this victim mentality it's complete utter nonsense that crazy lefties are  saying everybody's stupid and nobody can learn

1:12:36

and i got a bag of red pills here and i have been  pounding them the world is a giant opportunity for all of you i just i think it's time to announce  friedrich and i would like to announce that um we've started a combination uh incubator and uh  early stage venture firm we call it paunch draft

1:12:55

and uh it's play on the words launch and craft i  think the punch is the punch is more just a just what do you want so when we're going to launch  our first syndicate we got to get a deal here somebody's got to find a deal i just i i never get  a million dollars you guys are doing deals left

1:13:10

and right jason you need to assign somebody to  figure this the [ __ ] out because i think there's there are people there there are there are  there are folks listening to this podcast who have great businesses what we should commit  to them is we will help you be the least deluded and we will try to share the beak wedding amongst  all the other folks listening to this so if

1:13:31

you have a great company and you're thinking of  raising capital come to the one of the four of us and we will hand roll a solution for you yes okay  let's just do it it's like it doesn't just do this go to wet your beak okay hand roll hand rule we  will handle a solution that will allow the four

1:13:49

of us plus everybody else in the syndicate to  invest and then we will help you non-dilutively grow your business for as long as possible  and then take it public okay i am setting up wetyourbeak.com which is currently redirecting  to the all-in podcast it's going to be a typeform and the typeform is going to let you i will dilute  your business but uh the rest of you guys can do

1:14:10

it anyway go to wetyourbeak.com and fill out the  form tell us a little bit about your business and what and it will go to all four besties in  the database we'll share it what your beak is the new database i bought the domain but your  beak.com from one of the yeah just said it now

1:14:24

this is the tenth time you've said it i get it we  can collectively we own it i i sh this podcast is rapidly turning into a commercial for uh i think  we have good information now this is this is jay cal's attempt to divert and steal my deal flow  yeah so it's talking about we're partners you're

1:14:45

who did i just bring six seven companies to the  other day craftventures.com do not that's the that's a website that's the website all right yeah  okay don't email me give me a break man come on man we're gonna go how many deals are we in back  all right listen we love all of the audience and

1:15:04

uh we love our besties love you bestie chamoth  love you guys love you free birthday i gotcha love you sexy poo when are we playing cards come  on let's play cards every monday it's monday done done i'm sending the invitation alright everybody  it's another all-in podcast if you want to rate

1:15:21

and subscribe or do anything like that sure why  not uh and uh shout out young spielberg thank you for making all of our great tracks uh do  a search for young y-u-n-g spielberg in europe uh in spotify buy his songs like his songs and uh  he's the greatest uh if you want series a funding

1:15:40

or seed funding david sachs if you want a spec  chamoth and if you want to fold some proteins and um qubits yeah you want to do some cubits  uh get email freedberg somebody told me that the quality of the show he calls it the  friedberg index if freeberg talks a lot it's a great episode when freeberg demers and  doesn't talk a lot it's a [ __ ] episode

1:16:09

it's french for sleep it just means your wet  took a nap you're just it's french for sleep you're just such a heathen more as in more  day a day as in sleep day more you could say demure yeah he demured okay everybody we'll see  you next time on the olympics i love you guys and they've just gone crazy with it we need to get