SPEAKER_03: Hey, everybody, welcome to another episode of the all in podcast, your favorite podcast. And a lot of a lot of topics on the docket, including, well, we'll get to that in a minute. Tons of stuff to talk about not just politics, but a lot of tech news. You do sound really hungover today, J. Cal you sound
SPEAKER_02: like an old man that's been smoking cigarettes for three weeks. You sound erect. How big was your nightlife night? Admit
SPEAKER_02: it. I didn't go that big. Let's get one to Charlie. It was like
SPEAKER_03: a six. There's like a Martin Sheen in his 30s. What does that
SPEAKER_01: mean? One to Charlie had a couple of beverages. I'm sorry, on a scale of one to Charlie Sheen. I don't think I've ever been past the one in my life. So what is a six is like, you know,
SPEAKER_03: Paris Hilton, you know, in her heyday or like Lindsay Lohan in Hollywood in the 90s. It's like, you know, like a good time, but not crazy. Didn't they have to go to rehab? Charlie she cannot say it was just like Lindsay Lohan. Wait, Lindsay Lohan, the
SPEAKER_00: one who went to rehab like five times. That's a six. I don't
SPEAKER_00: want to know what seven is.
SPEAKER_03: Joining us, of course, the queen of Kenai is here. The thriller from a milla Valley. He puts the anxiety got his degree from his Google pedigree, the Sultan of Science, David Friedberg with us again. All right, next up, of course, is our of ARR. He perfected the flywheel with his boy Peter TL LPS. Don't be nervous because he's only investing in software as a service, the world's biggest asshole, the Ray man himself. David Sachs. He's a sassle. That might stick. I don't know. I
SPEAKER_00: feel like this might be heading towards kind of like a high
SPEAKER_02: school talent show kind of episode. But yeah, go ahead. And
SPEAKER_03: finally, the king of spax himself, the guru of growth, he puts the dick in dictator, he's going to upset her with a sweater from off poly hop to. All right, boys. I can't let the audience know I can't keep this up every week. Yes, yes, it's
SPEAKER_00: become a very anticipated new feature of the show. It's a new
SPEAKER_03: feature. But you know, I forgot we had like wet our wet your beak and you know all this stuff and all these flows we come up we come up with new things. All right, listen, just a quick programming update all in summit sold out. Basically, it's going to be a great show. We got about a dozen speakers lined up all kinds of great folks. And three great parties I want to highlight. Monday, Sunday night will be the poker tournament that's going to be our goodfellas Godfather kind of theme dressed to impress the family. Night number two Monday night is going to be our Havana white party where your best linens and whites and then closing night party on Tuesday night is going to be our Miami Vice big 80s party neon and t shirts under suits, it's going to be a hell of a party to 2
SPEAKER_02: million 999,700 people don't give a shit about what you're talking about right now. There's like, we're gonna go to this party that you're throwing and
SPEAKER_03: 700 tickets. I think there's gonna be 700 tickets issued and there'll be probably 400 people at the party. So they were pretty good parties. Uh huh. We're in the party business here
SPEAKER_02: at the all in pod. Well, I mean, the world needs some good
SPEAKER_03: parties, in my opinion, it's gonna be three back to back great parties. And the theme of the conference is the problem I most want to solve in the world or the problem I most want to see solved in the world. So we're asking every speaker to think about that. And we're going to kind of talk about the world's biggest problems. And then who actually wants to solve them. The world needs more parties. Well, that's that's what I'm doing. That's my that's gonna be my 10 minute talk. My TED talk. I've been I've been watching the we work show. Have
SPEAKER_02: you guys been watching it on TV plus? Yeah. elevating the world's Jared Leto is so friggin good in that as that. Yeah, it's incredible. He got to get an M.E. like elevating the world's consciousness as the mission and then just throw parties is the way to do it. You really like yeah, it's
SPEAKER_03: aspirational. The world's consciousness with your with
SPEAKER_02: your summit. I told Bill pocketing millions of dollars.
SPEAKER_00: It's not gonna make a profit. Whatever profit it makes is
SPEAKER_03: gonna go to chamat star chamber 50 person conference he's doing with the all in brand. So everybody gets to leverage the old brand. Yeah, you first you did it sacks with your call in now I'm doing it with the summit. She's gonna do it his think tank and I'm not gonna do it coming soon from Friedberg the
SPEAKER_03: all in unique special lose weight. Like your besties. He's
SPEAKER_01: gonna the it's the all in brand that allows you to lose weight in the following way. He brings his best vegan chef to you. Oh, yeah. Some fucking tempeh garbage and vegan shakes your
SPEAKER_02: favorite chamat is double fucking yuck. Right? Yes. You
SPEAKER_01: don't have to eat it. You're you're in a caloric deficit for the month that that person refuses to leave your house. Boom. You lose everything. So you lose. They're like, Hey,
SPEAKER_03: what's up? Kenwire? You're like, No, and then this weight. No, that's pretty good. Give me give me give me my olive infused
SPEAKER_01: beef, please. The olive infused beef. No, I'm sorry. Not all of infused. All of these beef only ate olives guys, right? And then we murder them and eat them. You're gonna have a great life.
SPEAKER_03: You guys need to elevate your consciousness. Okay. Have a
SPEAKER_02: party. Let's go. We need to get some morels and some chickens
SPEAKER_03: and make some yesterday we have morels. Sean made morels. White
SPEAKER_01: asparagus with morels for you. So good. So good. The morale
SPEAKER_03: season has started. Everybody enjoyed lots of different news this week. You guys appeal you guys appeal to the common man.
SPEAKER_02: The morale season has started. Morels are that expensive tempeh
SPEAKER_01: is more expensive than and morels 100% that vegan bullshit is way more expensive than normal people. Alright, listen, we have to elevate the world's consumption of steak and meats.
SPEAKER_03: I think a good place to start is we've been talking by the way, by the way, have you guys ever looked at on the back of any
SPEAKER_01: carton of oat milk? How much chemical nonsense is in that stuff? Yeah, no, not really big. Can that really be good for you?
SPEAKER_03: No. You know what I want? Oh my god. Give me Where's the where's
SPEAKER_01: the oat milk that's just oats and water? doesn't exist. It
SPEAKER_01: doesn't exist. It's like soy lexicon xanthan gum like is that stuff can't be good for you. You know, sacks drinks and a 12
SPEAKER_03: ounce glass of milk with every dinner. They just drink some of
SPEAKER_01: the almond the almond milk at like the Whole Foods riddled with sugar and all this other nonsensical chemicals as well. Man. I mean, I mean, people trash milk, I get it. But like, and as if you're lactose intolerant, I understand you're in a pinch. But why go to an alternative milk that is just riddled with just all of this terrible, terrible stuff. You
SPEAKER_03: know, sacks used to love to eat brie cheese so much that whenever we'd have a party, somebody would do the three blocks with the shoot with the wheel of brie. He literally eat an entire brie wheel and sugar. No, they would put the brown sugar on
SPEAKER_01: top, they would belt it in sacks. Freeburg sacks is eaten an entire brick of brie in front of us. What was the origin of
SPEAKER_03: your brie obsession sacks Stanford happened to Stanford.
SPEAKER_01: You just think I would think that would be great. What's the matter? You
SPEAKER_03: just don't have I mean, what about cheddar? What a great American cheese? No, you just prefer the French? Yeah, you know, you still got that fetish for
SPEAKER_02: I gotta go. We got shit to do.
SPEAKER_01: Sac sacks is that fermented kombucha?
SPEAKER_00: This is just plain iced tea. Sometimes it's good to be normal.
SPEAKER_01: Or normal sweetened. Oh, oh, you're back on trying to catch
SPEAKER_03: up. Trying to catch up. Okay, here we go. Listen, we've been
SPEAKER_03: talking a little bit about the contraction in tech, the growth stocks, having their multiples lowered, and we knew this was coming. But it's been a horrible week for large companies. Starting the layoffs, we knew this was coming, we predicted it probably six months ago, fast comm is a one click checkout startup fast.co. They announced they're shutting down on Tuesday, this after the company grew to 450 employees, and generated reported $600,000 in revenue, I think that their employees could have made more money if they did one door dash a day delivery. At its peak fast was burning $10 million a month according to reports, I think the information got most of this information while only generating about 50k a month in revenue. Their hundred $2 million Series B was led by stripe in January of 2021. Company raised $124 million in total also better calm, which we talked about you remember, they had their horrific, cringe worthy founder lay off a bunch of employees over zoom. And they laid off 900 people December 1 3000 people on March 8, according to TechCrunch. For the 5000 remaining employees on April 5, better.com offered corporate and product design engineering employees the opportunity to voluntarily resign in exchange for 60 days paid severance and health insurance coverage. Better CEOs Vishal Garg, hopefully I'm pronouncing that correct noted the uncertain mortgage market conditions of the last couple of weeks have created an exceedingly challenging operating environment for many companies in our industry. And then going to go puff, which, you know, I had the founder on this week and startups and he's a pretty good you know, like pretty realistic about the margins in that business. They're making a modest cut of 3% of their 15,000 staff seems like a reasonable thing to do, given how the market has changed. But again, their valuation was absurd. 1.5 billion at 40 at a $40 billion valuation in December. Shamath, you predicted a lot of this, and that people would have to sharpen their pencils. We had a discussion about this, you know, the good times are our IP. What's your take? Is this the beginning of the end? The middle? Where are we at in the cycle? And what's the reasonable thing for founders to do here? I think so we probably should take the the macro and then
SPEAKER_01: boil it down to the startup. So at the at the macro level, I think that we're playing a very different role in the market. I think that we're playing a very dangerous game of chicken with the Fed. And you can kind of summarize it in the following way, which is that, you know, three or four months ago, we only thought that there was going to be a handful of interest rate increases. And increasingly, what has happened, the market has remained so resilient, that the Fed has sort of put out more and more data as the data has justified them more aggressive. And it kind of crescendoed this past week where they basically said, Listen, you know, we're going to move by 50 basis point increments for the foreseeable two or three rate hikes, and we're going to start quantitative tightening. What does that mean? That means that instead of basically printing money and coming in and buying securities from the market, right, so what happens when they enter the market with money that they literally do print, and buy your bonds, they're giving you cash in return. And typically, what that has led to is the inflation of all assets, right, equity assets have gone up, bond assets have gone up, because there's just nothing else to buy. When quantitative tightening happens, they reverse that. And what they're going to do is about $95 billion a month of the opposite action, which means they're taking money out of the system, right? Or in this case, what they're going to do is they're going to let a bunch of maturities roll off and not rot, not renew them. Okay, so why is this important? Well, it's important because, you know, we're still 4% from the highs. So we have 7% inflation, we have all this crazy stuff happening, we have a war, you know, going on, we have massive price issues, we have supply demand issues, and the market keeps shaking it off. So I think what the Fed's going to do is get even more aggressive, you're going to probably see, you know, a lot of 50s, maybe even a 75 point hike, you probably are going to see them, you know, even ratchet up quantitative tightening, until there is a bit of a bloodletting in the equity market. They need to see that the markets crack. And so they literally need to see what
SPEAKER_03: percentage draw down or just to go sideways. What do they need to see in order to look where is it inflation coming down a couple of points? Well, the problem that we suffer from is
SPEAKER_01: that they're going to look at the highest level indexes, right? They're not looking at single stocks. And so when they like when you and I think this market is down 4%, we don't feel that because some of our companies are down 50 and 60%. Right. But that's because we're all focused on high tech growth. But they look at the broad indices and the broad indices have held up really well. And mostly, it's because you know, if you look inside the S&P 540% of every dollar is, you know, Apple, Amazon, you know, Microsoft, etc, Tesla. So we're in a situation where I think until the Fed see that there's a massive trading of liquidity, which means like you see these indices crack big time 35 3600 in the S&P, they're just going to keep ratcheting things up. As it comes all the way down to our companies in Silicon Valley and tech. What that means is like you have to start planning for the worst. And I think the worst means that there's an 18 month period where you cannot raise money on your terms, you have to raise money on the market terms. And so if you're not a position to show good growth over these next two years, I would encourage you to just get your balance sheet in order to wait it out. Sachs nuclear winner is a possibility here markets for
SPEAKER_03: startups. Raising money, again, as Ron saying could be on the terms of the capital allocators. What's your advice to founders? What are you seeing in the boardrooms that you're on the board of? And if you were running one of these high growth companies for the past year, what are the first two or three things you do? I mean, the first thing you got to do is look at your burn
SPEAKER_00: multiple. I mean, how much are you burning relative to how much incremental air are you generating? You look at fast, they raise 120 million, what like a year ago, that they're out of money now. So they burnt 10 million a month, like you said, here's the crazy thing, if they just slammed on the brakes three or four months ago, when we were talking on the spot about the coming downturn, they could still have $30 million in the bank, that's a lot of money. The only reason it doesn't seem like a lot of money is because they've been burning 100 million over the past year. But objectively $30 million is a growth series B, which is actually a lot of money for a company that only has 100,000 in revenue. So they could have saved that company if they had slammed on the brakes three months ago and rationalize the cost structure and they didn't say hit the wall at 100 miles an hour who's responsible when
SPEAKER_03: something like that happens, David, because you we've all seen it. What is the suspension of disbelief that creates this kind of stupidity? That I mean, that's what it is. I mean, you've got you've got
SPEAKER_00: people who are kind of drinking the Kool Aid, and there's nobody advising them to stop or if there is or not listening. I mean, look, PayPal had this situation back in 2000, the year 2000, right after the dot com crash, we were burning $10 million a month like fast, we had no revenue and no business model. Okay, we had said the service would be always free. We had four months basically of life and we pulled up on the throttle. And what we did is we basically introduced paid accounts, we started charging transaction fees, and we cut the we cut the cost structure of the company. And we made that last $40 million last a lot longer than four months. It lasted until we could then do another fundraise the following year. And we were able to then raise with good numbers, real revenue, a business model, etc. So, you know, and that was because we were just paying attention to the changing environment, the world had changed from sort of the pre dot com crash, you know, 1999, your business model didn't matter, your margins didn't matter. Revenue didn't matter. None of that stuff mattered. All that mattered was growth. But by, you know, mid 2000, everything had changed. So you have to be attuned to what the fundraising environment is looking like. And if you're a high burn company right now, that's not generating a lot of revenue to go along with it. You better slam on the brakes and rationalize your cost structure before it's too late. David, tell me like, what do you think is going on in this board
SPEAKER_01: meeting? I mean, like, this is a group of incompetent incompetence.
SPEAKER_00: I don't even know who's on the board because stripe led two rounds, I think. And so is that part of it, David, that you and listen, we all love
SPEAKER_03: stripe. It's a great company. It's it's a legendary company. But one of the reasons we don't like to have strategic says maybe they're not thinking the same as a proper capital allocator. And for them, this is peanuts. Right? Exactly. No, look, the reason why it's strategic
SPEAKER_00: investor, sorry, I think the reason why strategic investor invest is because it's strategic for them. I mean, it was in stripes interest to try and back a winner in the whole ecommerce checkout line, sort of payment space. And so they did that. And I don't even know if they had a board seat. And so no one was really but I don't I don't understand that strategic
SPEAKER_01: decision, because I suspect the rationale somewhere internally in in stripe, which is pretty flawed is, hey, we can't do it ourselves. Because if we did, we will be competing with our customers. But picking a winner and putting $120 million is tantamount to the same thing. So I don't understand. I mean,
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it doesn't make any sense, right? And stripe raise money at a what $9,500 billion valuation. So look, it all flows down from, you know, the the frothiness at the peak.
SPEAKER_01: No, I'm saying I think I would have, it would have been much more credible for stripe to say this is a critical piece of the infrastructure and value chain and payments that we want to own. So we're just going to go and put some of our better engineers as like a, you know, side project and see if we can tack away at something that works. I mean, I think a lot of people would have adopted it. But I guess there was a clear stripe was on the board index
SPEAKER_03: was on the board. Okay, that's interesting. I mean, those are some good
SPEAKER_00: investors. There's there's on the board index and who else? According to crunch base,
SPEAKER_03: stripe was on the board, a business development person from their index was on the board, and Dom the founder. And looks like Brian sugar, who I know, who is an angel investor and a founder. But who knows if that's outdated information in crunch. Remember when Philip Kaplan used to run a website called fucked
SPEAKER_01: company? Absolutely. A friend of mine. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03: Do you want to tell the fuck company story? Jake out for all
SPEAKER_01: the people that have no idea. I mean, basically what happened was.com the.com world was
SPEAKER_03: imploding. All the employees didn't have a voice. There was no social media at the time. There was no blogs at the time. The only thing you could really publish on the in the world was like a geo cities page, you could put up a homepage if you knew how to do HTML, is even pre myspace. And so a friend of mine Phil Kaplan, who does a very successful company called distro kid now started fuck company. And it was a message board. And what he basically let people do was he would write three headlines one sentence each kind of like before Reddit existed where you just put a one line hit and then there was comments underneath them. It's a this company, we just got an email, this company's laying off people, and he would beat all the news stories to the layoffs because he would just run with any email that came in. And then people would detail and savage the management of those companies underneath that for malfeasance and explain exactly how ridiculous the spending was in that era where people were burning money like drunken sellers. I think this time around, it's probably important for employees
SPEAKER_01: to understand a couple things. One is like, who doesn't know what they're doing, right? So like companies that are making layoffs, those are those are happening, they shouldn't get punished for that. But you got to think like the fiduciaries that are ripping this money in. I mean, do you really want to be the person that goes to work at a company that's backed by these folks in round two? I mean, that's not a signal like, like the opposite has always been a signal, right? Meaning when Mike Moritz makes an investment, we all pay attention. Because we all think, wow, there's a picker, you know, and he did that with stripe and with so many other, you know, great companies. And so the likelihood of an employee wanting to work for a Mike Moritz backed company or Mike Moritz governed company is very high. Right? Same thing with girlies, you know, same thing with a lot of a lot of really, really good investors, John Doerr. But the opposite should also be true then. Because if it if you really want to work for a Peter Thiel back company, you should probably not work for one of these companies, where these folks who are just completely absent are also governing the board. Because that just means like, nobody knows what's going on. We haven't had proper governance
SPEAKER_03: for a long time in Silicon Valley. So I mean, I think that's what we're reek we crashed, we crashed and the drop out were in some ways about incompetent boards, both of those TV shows. No, I mean, I definitely see this. You know, I
SPEAKER_02: think you guys know the the incentive for a traditional venture capitalists that that that maybe isn't, you know, motivated by improving their craft. But they're motivated, you know, incentivized primarily by making money is to raise more capital and get more deals. And as you guys know, like every venture firm has maybe one or two superstars, and then they fill out the ranks and hire a bunch of folks who are maybe not superstars, or they don't pay as much attention, you know, it used to be maybe a VC would sit on a handful of boards. And now it's like you're the board representative for 12 companies. And that's a you know, you're not going to be able to provide quality time and service to and support to the CEO and the company. And more importantly, as you guys point out, like not provide good governance and governance isn't just about are you signing the docu signs as they come in to approve stuff. But it's about actually critiquing the business strategy with the CEO at the board discussion, critiquing the spending, reviewing the financial plan, making sure that everyone's aligned that this makes sense in this funding environment to continue to do this work. And I don't see that a lot. I don't know about you guys, but I see a lot of VCs either handering to the CEO because we have founder culture, hysteria and Silicon Valley where it's true, the best founders make the 1000 x returns, and that's it. But that doesn't necessarily mean that the rest of the businesses should be left to their own vices, just because there are a few ultra successful founders that there are a lot of businesses that actually need governance in order to achieve outcomes. And I see that lacking heavily in Silicon Valley, because the VCs are more incentivized to raise more money to make more investments and then pay less attention and just go raise the next fund. Well, I think I think you said the key thing. There are really very few star pickers in our business. It
SPEAKER_01: takes decades to really prove that out. And, and those popular, but those people that are real pickers, I don't think put up with bullshit from they're not just pickers, like so john doerr was deeply involved in Google in the early
SPEAKER_02: days, like you're right. I'm simplifying our job. But what I'm saying is, our job, okay, at the end of the day is we're
SPEAKER_01: picking, okay. And then once you pick, you got to do the work. If you pick poorly, and you do the same amount of work, it doesn't matter. Nobody's gonna remember you. Yeah, what ends what ends up
SPEAKER_02: happening is the VC flushes the deal because it's not going to be the hundred bagger. They don't pay as much attention. They let the thing right into the sunset. And they're moving on to the next thing. But there is still a duty of doing responsibility, I think, to the shareholders and the employees of that company, to, you know, do what Saks mentioned, which is, can you reduce burn under these circumstances? And can you actively engage as a board member to encourage leadership to do that? And that doesn't happen. You said the key thing, there are few practitioners that really have the gravitas to
SPEAKER_01: actually enforce those decisions. So, you know, there's a reason why in during the great financial crisis, there was only one organization that even had the courage, forget whether it was right or wrong at the time to even write the RIP good times deck, right? It was Sequoia. Nobody else dared to even put that on the page, let alone give it to all of their companies, knowing that it would leak less they'd be wrong. And the reason Sequoia could do it is they're looking at a 40 year franchise and saying the integrity of our franchise is at stake, we need to keep doing what we've done before. And what it did, I think in that case was pulled along a bunch of folks that were not as good as the top few folks. And it helped reorganize because if you see the three or four years after that GFC deck, Sequoia flush that whole business, right, there's an entire turnover of that team. And so I think what it speaks to is, and we talked about this in a few episodes ago, if you're seeking out a U M, you're going to hire a very different kind of person than if you're helping trying to help build companies. And the difference is that when you're trying to raise a U M, your customer is not the company, but your customer is the LP. And what the LP wants to do is be able to write their investment memo and not get fired. And the way that you do that is by pointing to the team and saying, well, this person worked at this company, this person was a VP of that company. And it seems credible. But between but being able to invest, and being able
SPEAKER_01: to actually be a good operator is so different. Look, I'll also say one thing that's important. You know, I
SPEAKER_02: don't like this celebration or sorry, that the mockery and the entertainment that comes from failure, I, I thought fuck company. Like I was young when it when it was out. And you know, I would read it and kind of giggle at the stage and say, stupid companies, they got funding. You know, but to me, it's not like the kind of thing that could should kind of be funny or laughed at, or even to mock failed companies. I mean, it's cynical. I think the capital that's available in the markets today to say,
SPEAKER_01: that wasn't that that's not what fuck company was. I don't think it was people taking potshots as much. Oh, yeah, there was a lot of that. And because yeah, there
SPEAKER_02: was a thing to admit. But would you admit in fairness that there was a lot of
SPEAKER_01: people telling the truth? Oh, yeah, yeah, totally. No, no, but
SPEAKER_02: but but a lot of it was like this mockery, like, can you believe this shit even existed? yada yada. And the cynicism, I think, you know, kind of, you know, it's, it stales out the opportunity for for capital to support, you know, new, new ventures, new initiatives like this. You know, I also think that these businesses that today are looking to raise capital that are, you know, let's call them good businesses, they have a good opportunity, they're going to be challenged in a marketplace where everyone is cynical. And I'll say like, scarcity breeds success, when there wasn't a lot of venture money. And there were only a, you know, kind of a few investments that could be made each year, there was a decision making process that says, you know, look, how valuable could this be, versus this other opportunity that I could invest my capital into that says, okay, the best opportunity wins and gets picked and gets capital in a world where everyone was raising a billion dollar second fund, or a $3 billion fourth fund. And you suddenly had an influx of $100 billion of venture money in a year. It's a lot like what we saw in crypto markets, which is an extraordinary explosion and highly speculative bubble assets. And a lot of these businesses maybe shouldn't have existed in the first place, too
SPEAKER_03: much demand for the stock of private companies, and all the
SPEAKER_02: hedge funds that came into it all the mutual funds, like enough supply of great founders and serious teams that are working
SPEAKER_03: hard on this. I think with the case of fast, I agree with your general sentiment about dunking. In the case of fast, what you had was a founder who was on Twitter every day, tweeting about how great the company was in giving startup advice while he was taking none of it and should not have been giving any of it because they didn't even have product market fit lesson
SPEAKER_02: learned, you know, you know, you know, who should be criticized? The next person that backs that guy. That's it. You know, that guy is he's got a very interesting history actually, as
SPEAKER_00: well. I think if they didn't do any diligence on him, apparently
SPEAKER_03: he had two companies that were kind of major red flags. And I think the diligence issue sacks is one, maybe you are having a similar experience to me on the early stage. We were seeing deals last year close in a week. We normally have 30 days to vet a deal in maybe a week or two to get our diligence wrapped up. Sometimes these things overlap, but it's what was it, you know, historically, a four to six week process, and then it went down to a four to six day process. And then people were meeting with you one day and saying they're closed the next. Were you did you feel like over the last couple years, people were doing proper diligence or not? And what impact did diligence have on any of this? You know, certainly, I can't speak to what our competitors
SPEAKER_00: were doing. I don't think our diligence process changed much, we would just have a mentality of when there was a deal that was urgent, we would drop everything and focus on that deal and get our work done. And it can be done quickly. Although it's easier for SAS companies, because the metrics that you're looking at are so standardized, it's just, it's an easier process. What's the most important thing in diligence? In your mind? What
SPEAKER_03: is the like, bullet that like people can't the silver bullet thing people can't fake?
SPEAKER_00: Probably off sheet customer references. So the first thing we do is focus on the on the metrics, right, and the financials, the SAS metrics, all that kind of stuff. But then you want to talk to customers, and you want to understand the value they're getting out of the product. And ideally, they're off sheet customers. Explain what off sheet just means that, you know, you frequently ask a founder to give you customer references. Those are on sheet references, the off sheet references are the ones that you find yourself that they never gave you. So like, the easiest off sheet references to do are when your own portfolio companies are using some other like piece of software, and they tell you about it. So no, you know, it's a totally non conflicted situation. So that's what you're looking for. So what are your companies is using stripe, they tell you how
SPEAKER_03: great stripe is, they tell you what's good, what's bad about it. But right references you're giving. So it's sort of like backdoor references. If somebody tells you here's my references, you can do the same thing on founders to you can have on
SPEAKER_00: sheet and off sheet references for founders. And you can do it for VCs. Yeah, but but look, I think I think it's probably a little bit unfair to blame the board of this company too much. Because the reality is that VCs don't have the leverage or the power in this business. I mean, it's found this this whole construction, the industry is set up around founders, and at the end of the day, it's up to the founder to run the company and they get to do what they want. Unless they do something criminal, otherwise, they're gonna be able to do whatever they want. And I disagree. Hold on board boards generally are very deferential to founders. And if the founders not willing to listen to advice, what are you going to do about that? Well,
SPEAKER_01: that this is but this is the point you're making, I think is not right. You think that if Peter Thiel gave some advice to slow the company down that this guy would have not taken it? Of course, he would have done I don't know, I don't know about
SPEAKER_00: that. And we would have to consider it if Mike Moritz
SPEAKER_01: actually said it, he would have had to consider it. I think what you're actually speaking to is in the hold on in the rush to put so much money to work. We've elevated people who don't understand what the job is to do the job. And if they're not credible, of course, they're going to be ignored. We all have ignored stupid board members. You've done it too, David. But even you know, let's let's actually look at Yammer as an example, there were one or two of us that you would talk to pretty consistently. You didn't talk to all of them. I would
SPEAKER_00: always seek out advice. Look, a good a great founder, a good founder always seeks out advice, no question about it. But look, this idea that it's governance versus advice. I mean, the problem with it being governance is all the institutional incentives for VCs are to be pro founder. So no one wants to jam a founder by making them do something. You don't want to do well, I'm just saying that's that's the way it is. No, to be clear, that became a competitive tactic that
SPEAKER_02: emerged as more venture capital funds were raised and more venture capital was raised from LPS. Prior to that there was a scarcity of venture capital, and VCs could be could have good governance and not have to have this whole pro founder model that became the thing that founders fund and Andreessen and others kind of proclaimed as being core to their advantage and the reason to pick them over some other VC who's going to meddle in your affairs. And by the way, both are true. There are most VCs as Vinod has said publicly, add negative value. And I totally agree with him on this, because they are many VCs particularly the ones who aren't, you know, valuable and don't really have much to add, try to add stuff, try to say stuff, and they just, you know, create negative value in the process. But on the other hand, the whole pro founder model led to the we work and Ubers of the world that, you know, I think we That's right. There's a trade off. I mean, look, I remember
SPEAKER_00: in the 1990s, the default was the founders got replaced. Right? Like, as soon as the company's successful, you hire a professional CEO. That was just like rule of thumb.
SPEAKER_03: Schmidt, I mean, even the mighty Google did that. Yeah, no, I mean, that was, by the way, that was the point I
SPEAKER_02: was trying to make, which was like, so much of john doors influence was in getting Larry and Sergey to take Eric on a CEO. And I really do think that that was like, you know, a critical move that created probably the most valuable company in history. Right. And you know, it's, it was an important, imagine if you had one of these founders fund. And by the way, you know, as you guys know, I'm very close to the guys that founders fund and but but imagine if you had a founders fund type approach where you said, look, Larry and Sergey are the founders, they know what they're doing, let them do it, as opposed to the john door nuance of, let's make sure that we think about the development of this company successfully over time, and then convince Larry and Sergey through a bunch of meetings and riding bikes and whatever else they did with Eric, you know, to like, and then and then what about Jim Breyer? Didn't he bring Cheryl over to Facebook? I mean, like, there's a lot of these stories of the really, you know, the VCs that really changed the trajectory of the business through their work, right. And but look, all I'm
SPEAKER_00: saying is that the good VCs can still have that influence, but it's in the form of advice rather than governance, right? The look, we just don't call the shots. You're right. It's it is
SPEAKER_01: it is advice. But but for example, governance as an example, in every board that I take, the first thing that I say is, here's the template I want, I'm not going to ask you a bunch of stuff, but I just want some transparent reporting. And the first page is always how much money at the beginning of the month? How much money did you burn? You know, how much equity did we give out? How much is left in the pool, simple basic checks and balances, right where you're not asking all kinds of crazy questions. You're just like, all right, how much money are we burning? How much dilution did we take? Now tell me what we've done. And those are simple elements of governance way before you get into a level setting. What's the speed of play? What's what's the elevation? Where are
SPEAKER_03: we at? What's the altitude? And when you ask people for this today, actually, not to yeah, I don't know anyone that doesn't do that. I'll be honest,
SPEAKER_02: like, yeah, anybody that doesn't do it honestly, is being that's
SPEAKER_01: not what we're talking about. I don't know anyone that doesn't
SPEAKER_02: do that. I mean, I'm talking about, I would love to see I would love to see a little bit of that going on. There's a
SPEAKER_01: little bit of that to see a fast board deck and to see if that first page is that page, the first page and by the way, you know where I learned that from, from Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins, because back in the day, what I saw from founders was, oh, this is the first thing I have to report on. I was taught by founders when I was when I was a principal at Mayfield, they're like, this is how you do the job. And I was like, Great, thanks. I mean, I was, you know, sitting beside these guys that were old hands at doing it. And that's how I learned this business through that apprenticeship. But there was governance and advice. And the governance is just about being transparent about how much money are you burning. And so you can't, you know, to David's point, if you had just seen that data, even if you take those board decks, by the way, because you have these information rights, I don't know about you guys, but we did it, we did it as well, you take the board deck, you circulate it to your other partners. There's lots of
SPEAKER_01: times where I see board decks and companies where one of my partners are on the board, and I send them an email of like, hey, here's some bullet points of things to think about that I've seen before, etc, etc. You don't think nobody at stripe or index could have said, you're burning $10 million a month, and there's no revenue. So the point is that data is not 30 or $40 million
SPEAKER_00: in the bank. Give me a break, guys. So this was a whole cataclysmic failure
SPEAKER_01: at the advice level and at the governance level. And all I'm saying is, it's a good lesson for folks to learn. Absolutely. Yeah. So let me point people's attention to two
SPEAKER_00: articles I wrote that I think are relevant. So first, we actually published an article on the SAS board meeting deck that we like people to use. And obviously, they're free to use or not. To Chamas' point, right up at the top as a context center, we need to know what's your monthly burn and how much money is in the bank. And that and then we just divide those things to create runway. We don't like looking at projections for runway totally. We just look at how much you burn last month and how much money you got in the bank. They were down to 30 or $40 million burning 10 million a month, somebody should have like throw up a red flag and said, better slam on the brakes right now because you're gonna be out of business in three or four months. So that's that's sort of piece number one. The other piece was an archive wrote a couple years ago called Blitz fail, which is how not to go off the rails because a lot. There's a lot of literature out there about blitz scaling. And a lot of startups think they need to scale as rapidly as humanly possible. And I wrote this piece about how fast growing companies that raise lots of money at high valuations, basically go off the rails, and they end up imploding and there's like 11 reasons why this happens. I sort of categorize them. One of the biggest ones is founder psychology, you have a founder who believes that things are always going to be up into the right. It's funny, they're always described the same way, described as visionary, charismatic, and the word crazy is often used, but it's crazy good. And then when everything goes to shit, all of a sudden, the word crazy means something pejorative and bad. And, you know, the problem is that, you know, these characteristics of being highly visionary and charismatic, they also can be combined with an unwillingness to listen to advice. And so, you know, founders who have those qualities, they're they can be a good thing, but they have to seek out advice from people who've had experience, otherwise, they're gonna make a mistake and hit the wall. Being delusional is, you know, what
SPEAKER_03: you need to start these companies like I'm going to beat these incumbents, I'm going to change the world, it a little bit of delusion is good, but not when you're looking at the runway, right? Like, that's when you need to be pragmatic. I think, you know, there's a term of coachability, you know, how
SPEAKER_02: coachable is this person as a CEO as a leader. And I do think that coachability goes hand in hand with intellectual curiosity. I mean, if you look at the colosons, Patrick percolation, and how much breadth he has, and some of the topics he's interested in, and the things he writes about, it indicates to me a high degree of intellectual curiosity. And people who are intellectually curious, generally are very humble, because they're constantly seeking things they don't know. And they recognize that they don't know a lot of things. And in that same kind of mentality, they are willing to recognize that other individuals can have good points of view that can inform their perspective, and they're willing to change their perspective. And I think that's a really key correct key thing that if you look across the range of successful founders CEOs that scale to $100 billion plus valuations for their businesses, that to me is one of the more common threads is this kind of intellectual curiosity, which translates into a coachability, which translates into an adaptability as and being willing to take advice. And so your board is a tool, not kind of a governance structure sitting over you. We think the less you are like that, the more you are likely to feel like your board is a governance structure, an umbrella sitting over you telling you what you can't do.
SPEAKER_01: I don't think that's what governance means, by the way. Well, governance meant it's meant to look out for the
SPEAKER_02: shareholders. That's the job. Right. But to act as a fiduciary doesn't mean to like tell the
SPEAKER_01: CEO what to do. This is my point. Like, yeah, I'm just saying,
SPEAKER_00: I think he's right about I think free works right about how boards are often perceived by founders. I think there is an increasing, let's call it a Hollywood director, a Hollywood auteur mentality towards VCs. JCal and the All In Podcast, right?
SPEAKER_00: Well, it's, it's basically it's basically look, there there are certain incubators out there and accelerators and whatever who teach these young founders, that it's all about their vision. And anyone who stands in the way of it is basically interfering with them. They are the auteur, like a Hollywood director, and you got to stay away from those suits, the studio guys, right? Whatever. That's the mentality they're trying to, they're teaching them an adversarial mentality, an adversarial mentality. And look, there are to chamois point, there are plenty of VCs who don't know what they're doing. They have no useful advice to offer. But the better mentality to teach a founder would be like, look, the world is so complicated and building a company is so complicated, it's gonna be 10 times more difficult if you don't seek out advice. So go find board members who will let you ultimately do what you want, but will still give you the advice if something's going wrong.
SPEAKER_03: And what was true at one point in time when Paul Graham gave this advice, and he set up y combinator, you don't want to say their name, but it is Paul Graham had a terrible experience in his company with venture capitalists. So he set up that wartime stance between founders and the investment community. And you know, founders fund became the antithesis of the traditional venture funds, and they were going to be founder focus. So but that advice then might have been true. And now it's not now we've sung the pendulum too far the other way. We did two things because we saw this 10 years ago when I started seed investing. And then when I started building positions of over 5%, I just said to founders, if we own over five or 10%, we should have an option of a board seat. And we'll do board seat, we'll do board training with you. We'll just teach you we'll take like, here's some decks that we've seen from other, you know, here's some decks that are available. And we'll show you what a board is like. And then I would have three founders come to sit on one board meeting. And I would do three back to back board meetings, bring your counsel, bring your founders and sit in on the other two board meetings. And we'll have a little Socratic discussion about what was good about each board meeting, we did board meeting training as a proxy for venture worthiness later on. And when those companies did go out to get venture, and they had an Aesop and they had board minute meetings, they just looked more impressive to the venture community. So I know people say don't do a board, it's not cool. It actually turns out doing a one hour board meeting four times a year, six times a year, even as a seed stage company. It's it does differentiate you to the venture community, I find. Alright, moving on. And speaking of boards, Elon bought a chunk of Twitter last week, a 9% stake and he's joining the board. That makes him the largest individual or the largest shareholder, individual or institutional. He bought the shares in March, Twitter CEO Prague agarwal tweeted, I'm excited to share we're appointing you on us to our board. And then jack, tweeted in support. I'm really happy you on his join the Twitter board exclamation point just to give some level setting here. In Q4 of 2021. Twitter had 1.5 billion in revenue up 22% year over year, they've really been starting to ring the register over there. Daily active users are solid but modest 217 million daily active users 38 million of which in the US 179 million are international. And their stated goals for Q4 of next year 2023. So in a year and a half, they want to have 315 million, and they want revenue in 2023 to hit 7.5 billion again, they're on a $6 billion run rate. So I guess that would be an increase of 25%. Just general thoughts on and Elon obviously has been making some Twitter suggestions for the product. Sax you worked with Elon at PayPal. Thoughts on what this does for that wasn't like you're laughing.
SPEAKER_02: It's like such a funny transition. Sax you work with Elon and PayPal. Work for you.
SPEAKER_00: I'm sure he's gonna have some great product ideas. But what this is really about is free speech. You know, right before Elon announces he was doing polling, asking the Twitter user base whether Twitter was succeeding or failing in this mission to be an open town square and open marketplace of ideas. Something like 70% said they were failing at it. Elon, on many occasions has spoken up for free speech. He believes that Twitter's historic mission is as an open town square. And I think he's going to bring that emphasis to the board. And it's a great thing. Now, I think the person who had the best take on the reaction to this was Mike Solana. And he had a few funny tweets about this.
SPEAKER_03: Who does he work for? Is he a Founders Fund guy?
SPEAKER_00: I think Yeah, I think he works for Peter or Founders Fund, but he's got a he also writes a great news substack newsletter, kind of like a blog post called pirate wires. worth checking out is he's a pretty, in addition to being a pretty sharp analyst, he's actually says a lot of funny things to his iconoclastic. And yeah, he he he he he'll, he'll swing the
SPEAKER_03: sword.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah. So the way he put it is that, you know, Elon joining the board has all the worst people on Twitter furious. They think that this guy might actually say free speech and for authoritarians, that is an existential threat. And then he added, I don't get what the problem is, guys, if you want censorship, you can just go build a new social media company and do censorship there. It's a free market, thereby turning on its head everything they've been saying, which is, you know, when the people who the authoritarian, the authoritarian people who love censorship, whenever anyone complained about censorship, they would always say, well, just go create your own social network. You know, we're free to do truth, whatever. Exactly. Well, this is this is the free market acting in a way they don't like, which is finally somebody who believes in free speech is one to stand up by the largest stake in Twitter joined the board. I mean, this is fabulous. I think it's really fabulous. I think it's pretty amazing. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03: And the stock went up 30%. What do you think? Yeah. I texted you guys in the group chat. I think that if he is able
SPEAKER_01: to make free speech cool again, he'll, he'll actually do more doing that than potentially through SpaceX and Tesla. And that's already saying a lot. Because free speech really is this fundamental principle of democracy. And it's been decaying. We don't know the implications of a large technology company, keeping free speech as a principled pillar of their reason to exist. Right? Because we have seen free speech kind of decay. And we've seen sort of, you know, random decision making that seems arbitrary by a lot of these technology companies. And, you know, the payments companies, free broke was mentioning Visa and MasterCard earlier in the group chat. But all of these things can change on a dime if Elon makes free speech cool again, and figures out a way to make that a principle that everybody can embrace. Because then if you really believe in that, then you go to the next logical conclusion, which is what David has said for forever, which is the only solution to, you know, speech you don't like is more speech. And then that creates a surface area that I think you can technically maneuver around. So meaning what are the real problems in all of this speech creates, it creates a, you know, content moderation issue, right? It creates a spam issue, and it creates a sort of wisdom of the crowd's ranking rating issue. So misinformation comes to mind. Yeah, but that's it. That's the wisdom of the crowd's ranking rating issue in my book. So I guess the point is that, you know, if he can get the Twitter employee base, fundamentally on side of this idea of free speech as a principle, that's I think is enormous, because you know that none of the other big tech companies will ever even do that. And the capital structures of those companies will never allow a single strong voice like his to enforce that idea. So this is the only company where that could happen. And I think, you know, we want to see what this how this plays out. I think it's a really, really big deal. All right, free bird. Yeah, I'll tell you what I think.
SPEAKER_02: changes. Facebook, Twitter, even Google all acquiesced to significant external pressure over the years. I've said this in the past, I believe the founders of those companies are all philosophically, fundamentally philosophically aligned with the notion of free speech, and absolute freedom of information, you know, enabling truth finding over time. And the the edge cases of those platforms, ultimately identify and uncover ways that they can be used against what, you know, many would consider kind of the betterment of society. And as a result, they acquiesced to external pressure that drives some of these censorship decisions and drive some of these, these behavioral changes by management. But I think that if you concentrate the ownership of those businesses, and rather than have kind of a distributed shareholder base, meaning the public markets were the largest single shareholder in Twitter to date has been jack Dorsey at 2.3%. He actually serves the shareholders, and the shareholders ultimately want to see the stock price go up. And they ultimately want to see the business make more money. And as a result, they don't have the same sort of, you know, the stakeholders there have kind of a different set of alignments over time, you know, they're not necessarily the same long term, or focus meeting, does the philosophy come before the money. And I think as you kind of concentrate ownership, you have the opportunity and the option now to, you know, make make those sorts of decisions that you can't make when you're broadly on stock. But Facebook
SPEAKER_01: and Google are concentrated. Yeah. So what are you talking about? The issue, Chumath is in those companies, they're scared
SPEAKER_03: to death that they'll lose their employees and have chaos at work. No, the issue is government is both. It's pressure your employees. It's pressure from above and below.
SPEAKER_02: It's Yeah, it's shareholders, it's shareholders and government regulators, right. And so in both cases, you have to the pressure and employees. It's a good point. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01: I understand. But I'm not sure how Twitter changes any of that. There it does. I'll tell you why. Because if we look what's
SPEAKER_03: happened is, let's sometime last year, I think it happened around Chappelle. And I think it happened because of Coinbase, we saw a group of folks say, you know what, enough's enough. Yeah, we told you to bring your whole self to work. We told you we would do your laundry. And then at some point, Netflix was like, Listen, you don't have to agree with every comedian on our platform. There's a range of comedians. And if you disagree with this one, you can do a walkout, you can protest, you can make your feelings hurt, or you can choose to not work here. And then Daniel act kind of did the same thing. He said, Listen, at Spotify, we're gonna put labels on it. If you don't like Joe Rogan, don't work here. And then of course, we know Coinbase did it. And Toby from Shopify did it. And I have Twitter doing it. And when you apologize, and you start listening to this very vocal minority, when they're upset, and they want to cancel people, or they want to de platform people, what do they do? They double down, you've shown that
SPEAKER_03: you're going to listen to them. They're not doing it at Coinbase anymore. They're not going to do it at Spotify anymore. They're not doing it at Netflix. And Apple acquiesced, right? They're like, we don't like, you know, Antonio's book, chaos monkeys. And he said these three things in an award winning book that we find are, we're gonna fire him. I think at some point, Apple is gonna have to say, you know what, leave your feelings at work. And this is a company at home. Thank you. This is why
SPEAKER_00: Elon is so dangerous to these people is because he won't be pushed around. The fact of the matter is that this whole woke mob thing, it's a paper tiger, they don't have the support of most of the population. It's a handful of very noisy voices on Twitter, and social media who insist on having a monopoly on the right to shape all of our narratives. And they want to
SPEAKER_01: monopoly on moral outrage. They want monopoly moral outrage,
SPEAKER_00: they want a monopoly, but they also want the monopoly on the ability to basically to define what is acceptable and what the narrative on any topic is going to be. And all it takes is one strong person to stand up to the mob, as we saw Brian Armstrong do at Coinbase, and the mob dissipated. He took, you know, Brian, they go find another target, they find another target. Exactly. So yeah, Elon doing this is a really big deal. Because again, he cannot be pushed around. And he is showing leadership here. And all it will take to end this woke censorship is for other founders to stand tall the way that he won has, and let's let's go into the new
SPEAKER_02: I don't think he'll care what employees kind of gripe about. I don't think he'll care what regulators gripe about. And I don't think he'll care what other shareholders gripe about. He'll talk about the long term opportunity, the philosophical alignment with mission, and and plow forward. And I think that that level of leadership is what separates some, you know, great businesses from others. But this is a very soon, there were moments of D platforming that were earned by
SPEAKER_03: people like Alex Jones, who was saying that the, you know, families of Sandy Hook were false flags, and their children weren't murdered. There are, you know, Milo Yiannopoulos, and some of these alt right Nazi sympathizing people throwing up swats diggers, you know, people promoting violence or brigading on the services to attack people into docs people, those people those were just cancellations D platforming for new tune in your opinion. Well, I mean, anybody inciting violence, I think we would all agree should be dis platformed. Jason, look at how it's evolved. We start with isolated cases,
SPEAKER_00: like Alex Jones, like a Milo that nobody likes and nobody supports. The next thing you know, the President United States is being D platform. But again, that's supposedly based on him inciting a crowd. Then what's happening today. Now we have entire categories of opinion being banned. It starts with code. I agree. I agree. Now there's invalid I anybody who has a dissenting
SPEAKER_03: opinion on COVID gets banned. Now, anybody who has a dissenting
SPEAKER_00: opinion on climate change can be banned. There's a story this week on CNN where Pinterest of all look, Pinterest is a photo sharing site. I don't know no one's talking about climate change on Pinterest. And yet I was but then I got you. I mean,
SPEAKER_00: it just shows this censorship now is on autopilot. I mean, even sites where the conversation is not taking place are banning entire categories of thought and opinion. Because it disagrees with you know what the experts say. And J Cal you could point out your Alex Jones case to make the
SPEAKER_02: case that D platforming should be allowed. The problem is as soon as you make that case, it's only a slight degree point to a slight degree away from the next case and then a slight degree away from the next case. And then fast forward three years, and you're banning entire topics of conversation that ultimately may end up being proven to be a topic of conversation we should have had. And if you look back, by the way, what great movie Woody Harrelson, the people versus Larry Flint, Larry Flint was a pornography. It was easy for everyone to chastise him. And for everyone to say, you know what, let's go ahead and deplatform this guy back then and ban him and charge him by the government. And at the end of the day, he fought for his rights for free speech. Now, all that being said, Larry Flint was publishing using his own printers and selling on the street in a very legally compliant way. There is a difference in having someone else's platform be the mechanism that you use to promote your voice. If they choose like Pinterest and Twitter and YouTube and Facebook and Google to change how their platform operates sacks. I actually think that's a commercial decision made by a private company. They should have the right to do that. But they're going to lose users over time, they're going to end up looking like idiots when they're wrong by banning certain topics that we should be having conversations about over time. And I do think that there are other mechanisms for us to use the free and open internet. This is why I think the free and open internet is more important than anything to have conversations using other platforms. I mean, and I mean, hold on, I just want to respond to David
SPEAKER_03: since he did, you know, counter my point. I agree with you. I think it went overboard. And I think there are more reasons for reasonable solutions. I think a time based ban would have been better for somebody like Trump. And maybe waiting to see what happens with the January 6 Commission putting that aside, I know it's very controversial. You know, when you just look at what Spotify did to our podcast, I don't know if you've looked at us and Spotify, every other episode says COVID-19 information here. I think this is one of the best things if people want to talk about ivermectin. And it's an open science and freeburg. You know more about it than any of us. And people want to debate it. Why not link them to credible sources? I think that's a great solution. I have a question.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah. Is there an oat milk tag on Spotify? Yes. Because there is oat milk, oat milk, oat milk. When you listen to all in pod on
SPEAKER_02: Spotify, there's a tag that says there's COVID COVID-19. Yeah,
SPEAKER_03: get COVID-19 information here. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00: Can I have a go to freeburg's argument about these companies should be free to do whatever they want. So I know that freeburg I want to make two points about this. First of all, I know freeburg is sincere and genuine in that belief. However, most of the people making that argument are completely dangerous about it. Because on the one hand, they say that these companies should be free to limit speech when they like the outcome of that censorship. But meanwhile, in Congress, they're pushing six bills forward to regulate these companies as monopolies. So they don't believe that they should be free to do whatever they want. They believe that they're monopolies. And indeed, many of them are monopolies. And even the ones that aren't monopolies act the same as all the ones they act as a cartel to limit speech. So that's point number one is that nobody believes this argument that these companies should be free to do whatever they want. The second point is that, listen, the founding document of our country is the Declaration of Independence. It says that all of us have rights. They're inalienable. That means they cannot be taken away. Okay. And in the first couple 100 years of this country, it meant that those rights meant that the government couldn't take away your right to free speech. But now today, where does speech occur? It occurs on these giant platforms that are privately owned, they're owned by these large corporations. And the fact of the matter is, if they take away your right to free speech on these platforms, if they censor you, if they do not have a right to free speech in this country, that right needs to be protected. The founding fathers
SPEAKER_03: did not anticipate that for people would be mitigating the majority of conversations online. It's you know, like if you're if you're taking off, if you look what happened to Milo and Alex Jones, like they don't exist in the public sphere anymore, right? Like they've been literally person when these
SPEAKER_00: all get together as a cartel to deprive you of your free speech rights. You have been deep person, you've been digitally deep person, and they're not just doing it on speech. They're also taking away your right to engage in payments in transactions to earn a living. And unless we stop this now, it will get going. We have to address the giant elephant in the room, huge,
SPEAKER_03: which is Trump. I think a lot of this, you know, he hit its pinnacle when people were saying the the sitting president of the United States could not be on Twitter. That was I think we all agree ridiculous and absurd that the president who was duly elected couldn't have a Twitter account. But then with the January six and the inciting of the violence, and you know, all the stuff that's coming out, and obviously, we'll we'll see where that all winds up. I'm curious what everybody thinks here about. Should Trump or is Trump being put back and reinstated on Facebook or Twitter, and it's supposed to be a lifetime ban on Twitter. But if corporate governance changes and people lobby for that, do we think that there is any kind of situation where Trump has his Twitter handle or Facebook accounts reinstated? And should he have them reinstated? I think Jason, what you suggested is probably the most
SPEAKER_01: reasonable thing, which was there was a time based penalty. You know, we're we're getting through, we're probably what a third or two thirds of the way through the January six stuff. So that's going to come and go. And I think all roads will probably lead to a conclusion that after three years, it's probably okay to let this guy back and be able to tweet. I mean, it's not this is not, you know, controversial stuff at this point. You know that the current thing is moving on from Ukraine when
SPEAKER_00: the topic all of a sudden is January six all over again and Trump, which it is on MSNBC, it's all January six all the time again. So listen, I mean, this is not a justification for the widespread censorship that we've seen. Like I mentioned, we've gone so far beyond isolated cases now it's entire categories of thought. And this has to be stopped.
SPEAKER_03: What you're feeling on Trump should be reinstated with you were running Twitter, would you have done a time based if you don't like Trump just don't follow him? I mean, but but
SPEAKER_00: frankly, it's it's Listen, I don't miss the tweets at all. My thoughts. I don't miss the tweets at all. I really don't.
SPEAKER_00: They were damaging your party. That's how you felt.
SPEAKER_03: My thoughts have evolved before when he first got banned. I was
SPEAKER_01: really supportive of it. And there was part of me which was just afraid that he would get reelected, etc, etc. Now come two years later, and to see all of the stuff and the escalation of de platforming. I think the problem is exactly what you guys have just talked about, which is the person that does it today, points to the person that does it yesterday, who points to the person that did it the day before as the justification. And so even though we don't want to draw a straight line between an Alex Jones and a Trump and climate change, unfortunately, there is this line. And so in general, now, a much more free speech because I think it's much more fragile than I thought it was before. Gotcha. Your opinion has evolved and intelligent people
SPEAKER_03: should respond to new data. I appreciate that. And I was a person that, you know, as David said, was a little
SPEAKER_01: disingenuous in the sense that I kind of was for free speech, as long as it was stuff that I agreed with. But two years later, a much more on David's original camp now, which is we just need to establish this as a pillar of society, and not deviate and find credible voices on both sides. And then algorithmically and through people power, meaning through crowd, you know, wisdom of the crowds type stuff, help people figure out what is truthful and how much truth there is, because that's a tractable problem. But the minute you start canceling stuff today, as I sit in 2022, what I would tell you is I think it's very, very bad, because it's going in a really bad place for your thoughts on Trump specifically, because it does
SPEAKER_03: seem like that's a part of the undercurrent here of, you know, he's going to be coming back possibly going to be running again. And January six is considered the truth social
SPEAKER_02: network, download the app, listen to what he's got to say. It's rocking and rolling over there on the truth app. I heard they took it down like it wasn't even working right. The the new thing he built. But what is next? What is that's back trading at? Was it at 20 billion or something still doing well. But look, they had, you know, obviously a reaction, a market
SPEAKER_02: driven reaction to the fact that he was taken off Twitter. And he said, I'm going to go make an alternative. And that's, you know, certainly proving to be technically difficult. But as we all know, it's not technically impossible. He's just got probably the wrong people working on it. But if they wanted to have an alternative platform for hearing that voice, you know, have at it. I don't know what else to say. I mean, it's Twitter's decision. They're curating their audience. All these guys want to be free speech advocates. But at the end of the day, they're all editorializing. And that's just the world we found ourselves in. I hope you want to take a sledgehammer to that.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, it's exactly what Shama said is they're all they
SPEAKER_00: all believe in free speech and free markets when it produces the outcome they like. But when the outcome is not what they like, all of a sudden, they're like, Whoa, these companies are monopolies. Well, and here's another opportunity. If you're not
SPEAKER_03: libertarian and believe in like, you know, free speech and you know, Constitution, like you could buy shares, you could lead a group, start a DAO, start a hedge fund, whatever, build a block to buy a bunch of shares, and then you can get a board seat on Twitter. And you can have this debate on the board of Twitter. And it's absolutely right.
SPEAKER_01: You are absolutely right. And you can see by the way, you know, small hedge funds with small amounts of capital, like engine number one, you know, they were able to go up against it Exxon and beat them. So to your point, Jason, for the people that actually want to censor more, if they can order more, if they can organize the capital, they absolutely have the right to do that. And I and I think that they if they if they're able to do it, they should win.
SPEAKER_00: That's that's that's what Mike Solano was kind of getting ads like, look, if you don't like if you don't like the the free speech that's happening on Twitter, go create your own social network, because that's what they were saying. Share it by the shares and influence. That's how
SPEAKER_03: corporations work. They share. So the votes. Yeah, Friedberg update us on, you know, the Ukraine is in month two now. I'm sorry for putting the thumb before it's a tough habit to break. Freeburg tell us the the second order third order effects of fertilizer and food at this point, we've had this back and forth. And now I think the world is starting to realize, hey, freeburg was right, these downstream effects are going to be significant. I asked you a question about these, which is,
SPEAKER_03: can the world not mobilize if these are about 1% of the calories 20 or 30% of the calories are in country, could the world not mobilize to find other caloric sources, rice, fish, soybeans, whatever? Or is our system so fragile, that we can't rally around sending food to anywhere on the planet, despite the fact that we can fly anywhere and go on vacation for two weeks anywhere on the planet? No, the food system is complex and efficient. But it does not have strong redundancy
SPEAKER_02: or malleability. So take for example, you know, how do you get flour, you get flour in, in your food, from a food company that bought the flour from a Miller, there are mills around the world that process flat wheat into flour, you can't take that same mill and process corn into flour, there's different technology, different equipment that's used, same with soybeans and so on. So when you look at how the food supply chain is constructed, you know, there's a local point of consumption, which is a store, then there's a food processor, and you work your way kind of up the supply chain. And there's a certain input that's required to make the output that people consume. And so calories while they might be fungible, practically speaking, or philosophical or fundamentally speaking, they're not necessarily fungible, practically speaking on the ground, when you actually try and plug in, let's say, soybeans into the milling supply chain, to make the pasta or the bread that everyone consumes in Tunisia, it's not going to work. And the same is true with rice. And then the more important dynamic force that's underway is that these markets for food and commodities globally, are not controlled by government. They're controlled by private businesses. And there's a market for these products. And so what happens is, as the food supply chain threat hit, countries like China and others started to stockpile, they started to buy lots and lots of supplies, and lots of supply, drive up their stocks and their reserves, you know, for fear of the famine that's about to hit us in about nine months. And when they did that, there was now less food available to Tunisia, to Eritrea, to Egypt, and so on. And so we're starting to see the effects of that dislocation driving dynamic market forces where certain buyers stock up, and then the folks that can't afford to step in not being able to acquire product and being left. So not only do we have a local production differential that makes it hard to have all calories be fungible, we're also seeing this dynamic where there's a bifurcation where the haves have more and the have nots have less. And that's going to really make this famine kind of hit home in a really, really sad way. In the months to come. We're already seeing, as I mentioned two weeks ago, yeah, I, as I mentioned a few weeks ago, the fertilizer problem driving acreage down. So the USDA farm report comes out, they survey farmers and figure out how much they're going to plant every year. And they just downgraded the number of corn acres are going to get planted this year, which is happening, starting this month, from 93 million acres to 89 million. That doesn't sound like a lot, but for my percent, yeah, 4 million acres coming out of production of corn in the US is an incredible amount of calories that are not going to be planted to corn. And so that has all these downstream effects. And again, this, this crop doesn't come to harvest till, you know, September, October, then it's going to get processed and it turns into food. So by the time the the effect of this decision making hit the marketplace, the availability of calories and the stock pallet that's going on, it's like, boom, some countries are going to be, you know, they're going to have a limited budget, they're only going to be able to access so much food, and they can't access any and other countries are going to be fine. The United States can be fine, Western Europe will be fine. China will be fine. Sri Lanka is going to be a mess. Northern and
SPEAKER_02: Eastern Africa is going to be a mess. I mean, there's like places around the world that we are going to have to scramble. I don't have a real easy answer. There's no simple plug and play here. It's going to be a really complex set of problems that are going to need to be solved.
SPEAKER_01: Well, Sri Lanka does grow a lot of its own food, so they may be okay, because they're right. I mean, they're pretty big net importer. So they make a
SPEAKER_02: lot of food, but they rely on imports a lot for calories there. So yeah, I mean, that's the case with a lot of places around the world. A lot of people think, oh, we have farmers, but most countries, you know, particularly in the developing world are net importers, they rely on third party supplies of food. So sure, but but a lot of what you're talking about, though,
SPEAKER_01: we're not they're they're processed foods that come into the country.
SPEAKER_03: Saxon anything to add here?
SPEAKER_00: Well, I mean, I think that the Ukraine war is kind of entering a chronic phase. I mean, the sort of entering a new phase, the first phase, you'd have to say that the Ukrainians won, you know, the Russia wanted to topple Salinsky's regime, maybe take keef, they obviously failed in that. Now, we're in this phase where the fighting is over in the Donbass. It's basically the civil war has been going on there since 2014. And, and really, that's what it's now about. Salinsky has acknowledged that Ukraine will not be part of NATO. So that issue is kind of off the table. And so what they're really fighting over now is the status of these disputed territories in eastern Ukraine. And I think it's going to go on for a long time. That's what you know, General Milley testified it could go on for years, I guess to become a sort of permanent feature in the background of Biden's presidency. And I mean, I think the good news is that hopefully the war three aspect is off the table. It seems like the calls for us to impose a no fly zone or to put boots on the ground, which you were hearing a lot of a few weeks ago, seems like that's off the table. So now is this going to be a protracted, I think, civil war going on in the Donbass with between Ukraine and and Russia and their proxies, which would mean at sex, correct me if I'm wrong, that Putin will
SPEAKER_03: be hobbled forever, they're not going to be a world power. And his power is going to deprecate because he's going to be busy fighting this non winnable war for some period of time, which is in a way saying Biden did it perfectly and checkmated him. I'm saying that's going to be your assessment. If there's like a civil war going on and and and Putin is crippled, that would be checkmate or no, I think I think that clearly the the State Department strategy
SPEAKER_00: here is to make Putin bleed in eastern Ukraine and to retract this thing and make it go on as long as possible. I think that's a risky strategy. Because this thing could always spin out of control. It's risky, but could it be effective? Is there a chance it
SPEAKER_03: could be effective?
SPEAKER_00: Well, I mean, if the goal is to bleed, bleed Putin, yes, it could be effective bleeding Putin. However, I don't know that that needed to be the key geostrategic objective of the United States right now. I don't know because China is our main threat. China is a peer competitor to the United States. Russia is not our economy is 15 times bigger than Russia's China's economy is about the same size as ours. That is a real threat. So you know, there are costs to us as well. There are clearly cost of Putin of this, but there are huge costs to us as well. Freebird described the risk to supply chain, we've had to now spend a lot more money building up the defense in Europe, we're going to be pinned down in Europe, we should really be moving some of those resources from Europe to East Asia. I mean, that's really where the pivot to Asia is what we thought we were supposed to be doing until quite recently. Now we're going to bog down there. And there's still risks of inflation and recession in the US. And I think if we are in a recession later this year, I think a lot of people in the US will be asking, what was this all for? And if you go read my article that just came out yesterday with those based on my speech, which is published in the American conservative, look, this war was easily avoidable. I mean, the State Department could have avoided this war very easily.
SPEAKER_03: I listened to your speech, I thought your points that you were very clear on, hey, Putin started this, he is the aggressor, it's his responsibility. But you know, we do need to think about our foreign policy as a country. And regime change is probably not a winning strategy for us. Although in this case, it might, it seems like it's a possibility now. So who knows? I don't think we're going to get regime change. But if we do,
SPEAKER_00: there's no reason to believe that we're gonna get something much better. In every case where we push for regime change, we've actually gotten the same or worse. So yeah, I don't think that should be our objective. You know, I look, I think we have a bunch of bad options. Now the war is already started, the best option would have been to avoid this war in the first place. And if this thing drags on for years, and the US economy tips into recession, people will look back and say, why didn't Joe Biden State Department in the year 2021 do a much more effective job preventing this war? Let me ask, let me ask this follow up question as we wrap
SPEAKER_03: here. Chamath, I've been thinking about what what should a strategic objective be for America, and the number one strategic objective I could think of was, or one of the top ones would be to build a strong relationship with India, which obviously, you know, it has an adversarial relationship with China already on the border of Pakistan, and then obviously, you know, has relations with Russia. What would be on the top of each of your lists, acts and Chamath, Chamath, you go first on priority here, if we're thinking fresh looking at the world with China in retreat, sort of disengaging from the West with Russia on their heels, what could the United States and the West do as a preemptive measure to really solidify democracy? And, you know, the the world order a peaceful world order? I'll answer it slightly differently, which is, we need
SPEAKER_01: to put ourselves in a position to not be dependent on any country. Because then we can actually dictate what we think the right approach and solution is from first principles and have the courage to stick it through to get to the other side of it. So there are really two things we need to do. The first, which we've kind of perverted unnecessarily is energy independence. And we've allowed too many people to conflate and muddy the water on what energy independence means, you know, nobody's, nobody was ever advocating for coal. But you know, the amount of coal that we could have burned as a bridge fuel to LNG, which could have been a bridge fuel to things like nuclear and wind and solar. That path was pretty clear. But we got in our own way, we have to get out of our own way. Okay, so energy independence, I think beyond anything else, strategic, probably an order of magnet, it is the most important thing. And then secondarily, there are certain areas for the future of those future economies, where we need to have complete capability and know how. And the most important ones there are the specialty chemicals that we need specialty chemicals that we need to basically support climate change writ large to support battery production writ large. And then semiconductors get those two things completely under us control, on top of energy independence. And honestly, we would be a dominant world power for the next 200 years on our terms. So the road to resiliency, Sachs, you're now the Secretary
SPEAKER_03: of State, what are your key priorities?
SPEAKER_00: The US grand strategy has always been to prevent the rise of a peer competitor who can dominate their region and then challenge us for global hegemony. There's only one country in the world that can do that right now to us, which is China. So the pivot to Asia, as Obama said, was fundamentally correct, but we have not followed through and executed it. And now our attention is distracted and bogged down by what's happening in Europe, I would seek a negotiated settlement to this war. Now that the Zelensky government has survived Putin has been unable to take western Ukraine and furthermore, that Zelensky has given up being part of NATO. The only thing left, okay, is this fight in the Donbass. There's a there's an agreement already on the table called the Minsk accords that can allow us to settle that. Meanwhile, pivot to Asia. Yeah, wrap it up. Meanwhile, pivot to Asia create a strong alliance of countries in East Asia who are threatened by China, we already are friends with many of them. You've got Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, you've got Vietnam, create a balancing alliance of those countries to prevent China from rising to the point where it can threaten us for global hegemony. That should be our main priority geopolitically.
SPEAKER_03: Great. All right. There you have it, folks for the rain man David Sachs, the dictator, Shmaf, Polly, Hoppity. And the Sultan of Science, David Freiberg. I'm your boy Jake out and we will see you all in Miami. May 15 16th and 17th. Love you boys. Bye bye. Love you besties. Bye bye.
SPEAKER_00: Hey, dog. Take it out. It's your driveway. We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they're all like this like sexual tension that they just need to release. What you're about? Be your be. We need to get merges.
