He’s optimizing the view.

I’m optimizing for shade, actually.

Trying to get out of the.

Oh, fucking Christ, you look like a moron.

I mean, this dipshit showed up.

He showed up to my beach club yesterday, and it was basically like someone had taken a mummy

and then wrapped a mummy inside of a white sheet and then presented him at this place.

Oh, he lathered in his like SPF 500.

And so I said at one point, let’s go for a walk.

And this asshole had the nerve to grab his cell phone

and a battery pack for the cell phone.

I forced him to leave the phone.

He felt naked.

Then I made him take off his shoes and socks.

And then I tried to get him to take a shirt off.

We got almost all the way there.

Yeah, that makes sense.

All right, everybody, here we go.

Three, two.

We open source it to the fans and they’ve just gone crazy.

Hey, everybody.

Hey, everybody.

Welcome to everybody’s favorite game show.

Guess who’s not in Italy?

With us today.

David Sachs wearing sunglasses with the view of an ocean clearly on a nautical vessel.

And I am in an old apartment in the center of Florence.

And Chamath is at his hideaway somewhere in the countryside.

And Friedberg is in front of a abstract piece of art.

Two people high on crystal meth trying to break into his car in San Francisco.

I’m no longer a San Francisco resident.

I’m proud and sad to say after 20 years of living in the city,

I have relocated still in a not to a nondescript location still in California, but

enough said in the Bay Area.

So with us again, obviously, Rain Man, the dictator and back from a week off the queen of

Kenwah.

What?

Tell us, Queen, you had a big week, you had some nice ink come out some press

about the production board raising some monster round.

And you took the week off.

Give us the feedback.

What was it like taking a week off from the pod?

And now you’re getting press and you’re becoming a public figure.

What’s it been like for you the past week?

And tell everybody what went down with this new fund.

You know, my strategy was to take a week off from the pod and then have the ratings go up.

And then I could quietly and nicely exit as a member of the cast.

But unfortunately, I’ve been drawn as Al Pacino said, just when I thought I was out, I am back

in.

So it’s I missed you guys.

I actually listened to the all in pod for the first time ever.

Last week, you guys did a great job.

You mean you’ve been complaining these other last 41 times without even listening to it?

You know, I will say I listened to it while we’re on it.

But this was actually really interesting.

Because I’ve never actually.

That’s big of you.

You’re actually listening while we’re taping.

We do it ourselves.

I hear the whole freaking thing in real life.

So listening to it, I found it really entertaining.

And I think I have a better appreciation.

It’s less about some of the points and facts we make, which I’ve been pitching and complaining

about the topics and, you know, where we go with the conversation and stuff.

But it’s just generally just nice to just hear everyone, you know, kind of shoot the

shit.

Anyway, good job.

So you’re saying you’re a fan of the all in pod?

I might get a wet your beak mug from one of our fans.

I have one.

I have three.

Someone sent me a whole gift basket from the kid who’s paying for college based on our IP.

It’s all good.

No.

So we announced our TBB funding last week, too, which I have been running the production

board for 4 years now, a little over 4 years.

It’s been my primary vehicle where I’ve been primarily incubating new businesses and making

some investments from the balance sheet.

You know, we’ve raised several rounds of capital over the last few years.

We’ve never talked about it publicly.

We’ve never done press around it.

But as you guys know, the primary reason for going public with it was really just to

gain recruit interest in the work that we’re doing.

So we really want to see great people be made aware of the work we’re doing at the production

board and at each of our individual businesses.

So we could start to at least get folks knowledgeable and aware of us.

So when we reach out and folks are interested in thinking about what else they might want

to do with their careers and their lives, we’re hopefully there for them.

So it was great.

It’s nice to share what we’re doing.

We also shared 5 of our businesses that we’ve incubated, several of which have been stealth

up until now.

One of which, Jason, I think you’ve referenced in the past, our molecular beverage printing

company, Canna.

So that one’s starting to emerge a little bit more now after several years of R&D and

work.

So we’re making progress now.

And I’ll hopefully have more to share over time in terms of what we’re doing.

But we’re excited.

And it’s great to have great investors.

Yeah, it’s a great piece in CNBC by Ari Levy.

I guess you gave him he’s a great journalist, by the way, like old school legit journalist.

Yeah, I think fan of the pod.

How did you pick Ari to be the vehicle for this?

Did you use a PR firm where you just decided, I’m going to share it with this one person,

we had a mutual person who’s in PR who introduces I didn’t want to go to a broad PR thing.

So I was just kind of like, let’s get you know, I was going to do my medium post, which

I wrote was like a blog post.

And that was the primary content.

And then it was like, let’s just find someone good who can kind of at least, you know, push

people to that content that can speak well to our business.

And you know, he was recommended.

I’ve never met him before.

Great guy.

So, you know, we just wanted to kind of get that one piece done.

Anyway, he did a great job.

He said he I think he’s been on your show, right?

He’s been on This Week in Startups.

Yeah.

And I see it when I used to go to CNBC.

I would you walk down at one market, you used to go there to him off to and you walk down

like a row of journalists.

And as you go to get on set, I don’t know if this happened to you, Chamath, one or two

of the journals will intercept you and try to get a story.

So he would always stop me.

Hey, I heard that Travis at Uber was this or whatever.

But great job on the ink.

It’s great to see you, you know, raise 300 million.

There was a lot of references to Larry and Sergey and Google.

Maybe you could tell us what how much who led the round this $300 million round.

And what’s Google’s involvement?

When I first started the production board, it was my…

I had made personal investments with my own money and started some businesses with my own money.

And I had a series of dinners and conversations with Larry Page about

doing something together with Alphabet.

I knew Larry from my Google days, obviously.

And we ended up after a bunch of conversations with folks at the level below saying,

I didn’t want to manage a fund.

And I didn’t want to go work at Alphabet.

So the idea was I would set up a holding company, a permanent company

that like any business has a balance sheet with cash on it and can do stuff with that money.

And Alphabet invested in the holding company.

They put some cash in.

This was 4 years ago.

And they became a minority shareholder and had a board seat and I set up a board.

And so that’s the work.

And then we’ve raised another round since then.

And then we just raised this round we announced last week.

And so our… The round was… I think…

I don’t know if we announced, but it was co-led by BlackRock.

We had Morgan Stanley, Koch Industries, Bailey Gifford, Allen & Company.

Foxhaven, Arrowmark.

Just a bunch of really high quality, long-term institutional investors.

Alphabet put more money in.

The Gates family office called Cascade has been an investor with us for a while.

So they all put money in into the round.

And it’s great because we can use that capital to build new businesses and

support some of our existing businesses.

So some of our businesses are really hard, deep tech companies.

We don’t want to have to go rush out and raise venture money or…

And we don’t want to have an incentive to try and mark the asset up and get a good mark on it.

So really, we can use some of our money now to support some of our businesses

until they’re ready to go commercial or until they’re ready to raise outside capital,

if that makes sense for them.

Not always gonna make sense.

And so we have a lot of flexibility.

And you own 100% of every business that comes out of here,

then you find a management team, as we discussed, and then spin them out.

Chamath, what do you think of this venture studio approach,

which has only really worked for Bill Gross from Idealab,

and maybe John Borthwick with Betaworks in New York,

and I guess science maybe worked as well with Dollar Shave Club.

But here you have, you know, I think Friedberg, a great entrepreneur as well, doing this.

What are your thoughts on this studio model going long

in building companies in a studio system?

Well, I think it means a lot of different things to different people.

So I’m not sure, honestly, what a venture studio is.

That’s different in somebody else’s view than what Friedberg is doing.

But what I will say is that the different thing that he’s doing,

which I believe in is you have to become extremely hyper focused.

You know, I think that there was a moment where if you look at when Idealab was really successful,

or when Betaworks was really successful.

In the case of Idealabs at a very specific prototypical web 1.0 business,

Betaworks had a very prototypical web 2.0 kind of social business.

They all work because these guys were experts in those things.

And so I’m pretty bullish on what Friedberg is doing,

just because he’s not trying to boil the ocean.

He’s being very specific around, you know, synthetic biology.

And I think that that is probably what got other people excited.

Because then, not only from Friedberg’s execution capability,

which I really believe in, but then now think about it.

If you’re an investor, I don’t want to put my money into something that

all of a sudden looks like nine other things,

where all of a sudden, it creates a lot of correlation that I didn’t really know existed,

especially when I’m investing hundreds of millions of dollars.

That’s a very big deal that a lot of investors have.

And so when Friedberg can very legitimately say,

look, I’m, you know, explicitly focused in this thing.

And then he also said, and Friedberg, you may want to talk about this.

And this is the only thing I’m going to focus on.

It gives an investor a lot of confidence, because it’s like,

here’s a really smart guy who’s done this before.

He’s going to stay in the swim lane and do something really specific here.

And now I can understand how it fits into the rest of my portfolio.

So I think that there is a lot of value for investors in a bunch of different ways.

So I don’t know, I’m super excited.

I appreciate that. I mean, I think like one of the things that mattered to me,

Jason, and the way I kind of frame it, like a lot of people think,

oh, Venture Studio, it’s about how many things you crank out.

That’s like Y Combinator’s model.

For me, it’s not about how many businesses you start.

It’s about absolute value creation.

So, you know, you have to do the things that you have the resourcing to do

with the objective being to drive business value as a whole.

So that means doing one thing, doing 3 things, doing 5 things.

It’s not about how many things, you know, whatever the right balance is.

It’s not about just cranking out businesses.

Because each one of these things, we have to continue to be active.

And we need to continue to build.

And when we start a business, we reserve a good chunk of the business

as equity for the team that works on it.

So it’s not like we’re 100% owners, right?

We’ve got to get the right people.

They’ve got to feel like and act like owners in that business with us.

You wind up owning 50% or ballpark 40%.

What do you think?

It actually varies quite a bit.

So you know, without getting into too many details, I mean, you know,

when we start the business, we’re the majority owner.

And in many cases, when we’ve brought in other investors,

over time, we get diluted down to become a minority owner.

So 30% or something like that, like if you did the series A or something.

But but in many cases, we end up being, you know,

we want to continuously fund some of these businesses.

Because it may not make sense to bring in outside investors.

And, and we’ll continue to be the majority owner.

But we create an independent board, we make sure that the team feels like it’s an

independent business.

And we give them a lot of infrastructure and tooling, finance, HR, legal facilities,

support, recruiting support, etc.

And obviously templates for how to succeed and playbooks and so on.

So that’s a lot of what I would call our platform value.

Amazing.

Another bestie housekeeping.

By the way, David Sacks is an investor in TPB.

I don’t know if you guys knew that.

Around ago.

So good job, Sacks.

Good job, Sacks.

Is that another unicorn for me?

Technically, yes.

Look at you.

Well, in other news, Sacks, this is like the victory lap episode.

Sacks, you announced you’re closing $1.1 billion with a B in Kraft’s third fund,

and explicitly talking about focus to Chamath’s point,

explicit focus on marketplaces and SaaS.

Maybe you could explain how long it took you to raise the $1.1 billion.

I think the first fund was $300 million.

The second was $600 million.

So you’re basically doubling each time?

Almost.

I mean, the first one was $350, second fund was $510.

This one is $1.12 billion.

It’s going to be $612 million for venture, which is C, series A, series B, and $510 for growth.

And yeah, we are focused on SaaS and marketplaces.

I kind of run the SaaS practice, and my thesis is really the same as it was when I was doing Yammer,

which is apply consumer growth tactics to enterprise software, make it go viral inside

companies, sort of sell it bottom up through the average employee as opposed to top down

through the CIO.

And then the other GP in the fund, Jeff Floor, is focused on marketplaces.

He was the founder CEO of StubHub, which was one of the original e-commerce marketplaces

on the web.

And so he leads the marketplace practice.

And those are also, I would say, along with SaaS, marketplaces are the best kind of internet

businesses to create.

And so we’ve just decided to focus on those two areas.

And that’s kind of enough for the world for us.

And in related news, your project call in, which is a podcasting plus casual audio application

has been doing great in beta.

Yeah.

And I’m proud to announce that we had a small allocation for our syndicate, the syndicate.com,

which is my syndicate, and then the all in syndicate, which we created as a lark.

Between those two syndicates, my syndicate had 900 requests to invest over, I think,

$7 million.

We had a small $1 million allocation.

And we basically did a lottery.

So something like one in, I don’t know, seven or six got in.

And then the all in syndicate also filled up.

And then the all in syndicate, no carry, no fees.

Everybody gets a free ride, thanks to David Sachs.

And that’s our first all in syndicate, chipping away at my core business and eating my lunch.

Thank you.

And the all in syndicate is going to be $250,000, so it’s $250,000, $1,000 checks with no fee,

no carry.

And we’re, the company is paying the administrative expense of that.

We just want to let 250 of our listeners wet their beaks.

Yep.

So, and-

Absolutely.

Is it open yet, Sachs?

Like, can anyone download the app and use it yet?

No, it’s still in private beta.

We’re going to open up soon.

You know, we’ll certainly announce it on the pod.

It’s getting better.

I was looking at it the other day.

It’s getting really tight.

I mean, can I talk a little bit about it or do you not want to keep it?

Yeah, go for it.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, here’s the, here’s the genius of it.

And I mean that sincerely, not just because you gave me an allocation, but clubhouse,

when you go to clubhouse, if you miss the great conversation, it’s gone.

And clubhouse has really bad audio quality and the rooms are, and there’s really, you know,

there’s clubs as a concept, but in call in, everybody creates a show.

Then the show is syndicated to an RSS feed, like a podcast.

So you can basically start your own podcast with no staff, no post production.

You just talk and then it goes out to an RSS feed.

So we’re thinking David and I of doing like a post show after all in like two days after

just to talk to the fans and do like a little private group thing.

But it’s kind of like a really nice overlap of podcasting.

And yeah.

Well, I was going to say, it’s, it’s, it’s basically long tail podcasting,

using social audio as the gateway drug to, you know, to long tail podcasting.

The cut is a company worth 4 billion yet.

Have we internally marked up the round four times?

Like Jason Horowitz did with clubhouse?

Let me ask, let me get your mouth in the conversation.

Jamal, what do you think of a venture firm?

Making a seed investment at 100 million, then a billion, then at 4 billion

for a product that, you know, it’s largely sideways.

This is like internal three bets and marking it up 10x and then 4x.

So 40x lift over three rounds.

What do we think of this?

I think the best venture firms shouldn’t give a shit about any company.

And I don’t think that they really do.

Because if they’re very savvy, they should be doing exactly what Andreessen

you’ve seen the articles about Tiger, you’ve seen all these other folks.

The real question is maybe if you want, can you please explain what they’re doing?

And what they’re doing is, to me, if you understand,

the investing landscape makes a ton of sense, which is technology used to be the small niche.

And so we used to only get, you know, when I started social capital,

there was probably 25 to $30 billion a year flowing into venture.

Just in 2011.

Fast forward a decade, we have like $120 billion a year going into tech,

and it’s going up like crazy.

And if you’re the best brands, you’re going to get the overwhelming amount of interest

from people who want to get into the asset class as the asset class expands, right?

So if all of a sudden, you know, you decided to invest in private equity,

when private equity was going bonkers, you’re not going to take as much of a shot

on an emerging manager, you’re going to want to take a shot on Blackstone or KKR.

Right.

And that’s what’s allowed those folks Carlisle to scale AUM just unbelievably Blackstone,

I think, under management, exactly half a trillion dollars now at Blackstone.

Similarly, there are these indelible brands in venture.

And when everybody realizes they need to be long tech, they jump in.

Now when they do that, you have to understand who these people are.

There are two things that matter.

One, they are people like pension funds.

And their hurdle rate, meaning, you know,

what are they trying to do better than in terms of a rate of return

is in the low to mid single digits.

That’s really important to know.

8%, 9%, 10%.

Not even, not even, not even, not even.

5%, 6%, okay?

And then the second thing you need to know is that these guys have so much money that

they would rather when they spend an hour meeting with you,

they’d rather give you a $50 million check than a $5 million check.

A $5 million check just compounds their problems.

So if you put these two things together, it makes a ton of sense for companies like Andreessen

to now focus on the velocity of money.

Raise a fund, put the money to work,

raise a new fund in a very systematic way that everybody can understand and can predict.

So that Andreessen can tell their LPs on a calendar,

guys, I’m going to be back to you in 18 months.

Guys, I’m going to be back to you in a year and be able to scale the capital.

And I think if you look at it in that framework, it explains Andreessen, it explains Excel,

it explains Sequoia.

And by the way, it’s a brilliant strategy because these guys still make 2.5% on the money.

They end up returning the market beta, meaning what the average market would do anyways,

plus a little bit of alpha, right?

So they’ll still do a little bit better than the market,

which means they’ll be able to raise money infinitely.

So if I’m at Andreessen and I’ve had a-

Do you mean the public market or the venture market?

So venture market typically does 20%?

No, but that’ll decay, right?

So that’ll decay down to 10% or 12%.

But my point is, it’s still better than the 5% or 6% these pension funds and other folks

need to earn.

So today, the goal of every fund that’s successful that has a brand, David’s included,

should be do good deals, make sure you’re in things that can work.

And the thing that David has, which other folks don’t, is David can help make things

work when they’re not necessarily obvious, but then pound the money in and then raise

more money as fast as you can.

Because then it helps the investor, that’s what they want, and they’re happy to pay you.

And then for you, the GP, you start to make enormous fees and the whole cycle works.

So for Andreessen, I think that’s the calculus.

It’s like, shit, if I can put 100 million in, that’s 100 million less I have in my fund.

Now I can go, I’m 100 million closer to raising the new fund.

Okay.

Now the criticism has been, Friedberg, I’ll go to you, it’s bad hygiene for the same firm

to mark up the same product three times.

In this case, you know-

Clubhouse.

What’s the name?

Clubhouse.

So is that a warning sign for you that it’s a bubble?

Or it’s kind of the worst case I’ve heard is like marking up your own book, self-dealing,

whatever.

How do you look at that issue, Friedberg?

And then I’ll go to you, Sax.

Well, if it were SpaceX, you would look like a genius.

So, you know, I think we can criticize it until-

Or WhatsApp.

Or WhatsApp.

And Sequoia has done this many times where they’ve been the lead in multiple rounds in

the company and they have high conviction in the quality of a business and they don’t

want to bring other investors in.

And when you have high conviction, and you can continuously buy more of the stock and

buy more of the company and be a bigger owner, and then it works out, you look like a freaking

genius.

And so I don’t want to criticize the investing style of these guys.

I mean, time will tell if they made good bets or not as a whole.

You can kind of make the case maybe that they’re trying to be asset managers and drive assets

under management up and gain more fees.

But I think LPs are a little shrewder than that.

They’ll kind of take a smarter look at that.

At the end of the day, the guys that are known for doing this, like Sequoia and Founders

Fund and others, have had incredible returns by doing exactly this.

So the strategy does work.

And, you know, you just have to have to do it with the right businesses.

And then I think that will, you know, demonstrate the quality of your investing acumen.

All right, Sax, any further thoughts on that?

The marking up your own book?

Is that something you plan on doing with this new fund and having the growth?

And how would you look at, hey, call in starts getting some traction.

Does that mean your growth fund is going to go market up and take that those shares?

Or do you think that it’s better hygiene to have the market price it?

Well, I guess it just depends.

I mean, the growth fund does give us the ability to double down at a later stage on our own

early stage companies.

But you do have to be really sure when you do that, because it does, you know, it certainly

raises questions if you’re wrong, right?

That you wouldn’t have with any other investment.

So it just it definitely raises the stakes.

You have to be really certain, I guess.

But, you know, if Colin’s a big hit, do we go raise, you know, a growth round?

Yeah.

And now I think what we might do in that case, because we incubated it is we’d let somebody

else lead the round, and then we would participate.

So you have some third party setting the price, because we incubated the company.

And frankly, that’s what we did with the round that you just participated in is

craft participated, but we did not set the terms.

It was actually Goldcrest and Sequoia co lead the round with craft

when you incubate a company like that.

Let me ask another technical question, because the audience last week, or in the week before

really responded well to us talking about this as opposed to COVID and Delta variant,

which we’ll talk about at the end of the show.

For those people, you can basically turn off the show at 50 minutes or 75 minutes when

we talk about the impact of the pandemic.

But, and I’m hoping you’re thinking right now about who’s not in Italy, I hope we’ll

get back to that.

When you incubate a company like that, who owns the original founder shares craft,

the organization, David Sachs, the individual came up with it.

What’s the inside baseball there?

So it’s sort of all the above.

And we, meaning craft, have a deal with our LPS, that’s called an LPA limited partner

agreement.

And one of the things that was negotiated, when I found a craft four years ago, was the

terms on which craft would incubate deals.

And, and so it’s all predetermined what I get as a founder, what what our funds get

what the LPS get, so there can be no argument about it later.

And this is this call it is what we’ve actually done.

Now, we have a few incubations in development.

You know, for me, it’s really important to scratch that product itch, you know, I’m

originally a product guy.

And, and I, you know, I love investing in helping companies, but occasionally about

I’d say maybe once a year, I get a product idea that I think is worth developing.

And so this gives us the ability to incubate it.

So we did it a few years ago with a crypto company called Harbor, we ended up selling

that company to BitGo, which just announced the largest acquisition of a crypto company

galaxy is acquiring it for something like 1.2 billion.

So anyway, so Harbor, I think, will work out, you know, once that deal closes, and Collins,

the second one, there’s a couple other things that are still, you know, they’re too early

to talk about, but but I think Colin will be the second one to launch

Chamath as an LP and a lot of funds, what do you think when somebody comes to you and

says, I want to in my LPA, my limited partner agreement, have the ability to incubate these

companies that a good trend, bad trend?

How do you think about it?

I think it’s great.

I mean, I don’t really, you know, push back on a single term in any LPA, because I’m only

doing it mostly to support people.

And so whatever terms they want, they get from me.

And, you know, kind of just like, let them go and hope they get lucky, you know, I have

a very different approach to, to these kinds of things, because I’m not necessarily trying

to compound my capital, I’m just there to sort of enable folks and, you know, take 1%

of the fund or sometimes a little bit more if I really have an asymmetric view on a specific

thing that they’re doing.

But otherwise, I just take 1% sign the thing and, you know, wish them wish them the best

and then try to support them.

And that’s all I’m trying to do if I believe in what the how they’re investing and the

deals they’ve done, you know, however they do it is up is fine with me, I want to go

back to something, which is, I actually think it’s not a question of hygiene.

It’s really a question of governance.

Because when you do these things, and you mark these companies up, the real question,

if a company stops working, is they tend to have too much money, and then they tend to

not have enough governance.

And the reason is because governance typically comes with board diversity and board diversity

comes with more and different investors who have different, you know, puts and takes at

any given point in time, that diversity is very helpful to keep everybody on the same

page and to actually get a decent outcome when things aren’t working as much.

Now, when things are working, obviously, nobody cares, you know, because like, you can just

have Jim gets on the board of WhatsApp with yawn, and it’s all kind of said and done.

It’s not been to the right.

So as we’re saying, when things are when things are good, nobody complains.

Yeah.

No, and you know, this may be a good jumping off point for, you know, we wanted to talk

about Zymergen today.

Can I say one thing before we get Zymergen, which is just look, I think there’s all sorts

of new models now with with this sort of tech and the money going into tech, the venture

capital exploding.

There’s all these innovative new models.

I think it’s all for the good.

A studio that I think is great is what Jack Abraham’s done with Atomic.

You know, they’ve produced multiple unicorns out of there because Jack is just a phenomenal

idea guy.

He’s like a 10x idea guy.

So he then as part of Atomic comes up with the idea and then brings on a operating partner

and that model works for them.

And then, you know, he just partnered with Keith Raboy on OpenStore and Keith decided

to become the CEO.

And Keith is still a GP at Founders Fund.

So we’re seeing like the blending of these models.

You know, it used to be that you made the decision to become a VC and your career as

a founder was just over.

It was like this line that could never be crossed again.

And now you’re seeing the blurring of these lines.

And look, I think it’s good for everybody because frankly, when Keith or what I’m doing

with Colin, we remind people that we’re still founders and product people and not just sort

of semi-retired guys.

And frankly, it’s good for what we do as investors.

We saw it with Mike Spicer, who is a partner at Sutter Hill.

He incubated, it started and was the original head of Snowflake, which was a massive…

And before that, this is his third.

So he did Pure Storage.

He did Snowflake.

I think he did Laceworks.

Incredible.

He’s incredible.

He’s just fucking money.

And just folks that don’t know, Snowflake, it’s an enterprise software company.

They make software.

So he’s a venture capitalist.

He started this company while working as a venture capitalist.

They brought on a great CEO.

It’s an incredible guy.

Later, Frank Zlutman, who’s a legend.

And the company just went public last year, I think, or the year before and they’re worth

$82 billion today.

And so it really highlights that while this guy is still operating as a venture capitalist

and a GP, he’s been able to generate incredible returns for his fund and build amazing businesses

at the same time.

So…

I mean, Spicer is a perfect example, because I’ve known him since the early 2000s.

And at one point, Spicer started this consumer company called Bix.

And we were like an investor.

I was a small investor in Bix.

And I think it got acquired by Yahoo.

And it was always curious, because Spicer was clearly the smartest one in the room.

And it’s like, he was kind of grinding this consumer thing.

And then he left Yahoo, went to Sutter Hill.

And he basically said, you know what, fuck this.

I’m going back to my roots.

Because before that, he was a pretty traditional enterprise guy.

And he just crushed it.

It’s kind of like Michael Jordan was finally like, ah, fuck baseball.

I’m going back to basketball.

But it’s like Reid Hoffman and Neil Boosery at Greylock, right?

I mean, these guys are incredible operators, business builders, and they continue to do

that work while being partners in the venture.

We have three directions we can go moving on.

Zymergen.

Zymergen is so interesting.

I think we should do it.

Okay.

Let’s do Zymergen.

I agree.

All right.

So for people who don’t know, Zymergen went public at $31 a share in April,

traded as high as $48.

Shortly after that, I had the CEO on my podcast.

And I was confounded trying to understand the business.

You had told me I had asked you for some questions, Friedberg.

And you gave me some choice statements of what to ask.

Which can I say?

No, I don’t think so.

Anyway, you gave me some choice questions.

I didn’t ask them exactly the way you said them.

But here’s the quote of what happened on Tuesday.

Zymergen stated the following Zymergen recently became aware of issues with its commercial

product pipeline that will impact the company’s delivery timeline and revenue projections.

Accordingly, the company no longer expects product revenue in 2021

and expects product revenue to be immaterial in 2022.

They also announced that the founding CEO Josh Hoffman, who was on This Week in Startups to

maybe a month ago, stepping down as CEO will be replaced.

And Zymergen stock then dropped 70% on the news.

I don’t know if this was a SPAC or not.

SoftBank hyped them.

It was a straight IPO and the stock dropped 80% yesterday.

80% a day after going public three months ago.

Yeah.

So I think freeberg, a good way to start would be what did they say they were going to do?

And then why has this happened?

So Zymergen and a couple companies like them started around the same time, which is around

2014 2013 2012 that era 2015 even.

And the promise of these companies is truly to be everyone wants to be this platform for

synthetic biology.

And what that means is they can take cells and in a smart way, edit the cells and get

those cells to make things that humans need.

And so you can think about making materials like silk and leather and plastics.

And you can think about making food like egg proteins and milk proteins and so on.

And you can think about making industrial products, enzymes and things that might be

used in laundry detergent, other applications.

And so for years, we’ve gotten DNA sequencing cheaper.

We now have DNA writing and editing cheaper.

We’ve now got other tools to basically screen cells.

So we have these, the set of tools, where the synthetic biology platform companies popped

up and said, you know, we’re going to put all these tools together and build a platform

for editing cells and doing a better job of making things.

And we’re going to get into all these markets.

And Zymergen when they first started, were like several other companies like them a services

business.

So they would go to big partners like DuPont and say, hey, let us make a new enzyme for

you pay us $25 million upfront.

And then we’ll get a royalty on the back end when that product eventually goes to market.

And they did that for years, they went after insecticidal products, they went after plastics

and materials and all sorts of stuff.

And as is the case with a lot of deep tech, it turns out it’s really friggin hard.

You know, these tools might be there.

But like we saw with the clean tech era, where everyone thought they could make oil from

sugarcane, you know, 20 years ago, using the same sort of approach to get the unit economics,

meaning can you make the product cheap enough, it’s really, really hard.

That means you got to get these cells to be just perfect.

And you got to get the systems to be perfect.

And so at the end of the day, they went through a lot of customers at Zymergen that paid them

10s of millions of dollars.

And Zymergen didn’t have anything at the end of the projects to say, here’s something that

works that you guys are willing to pay for that you’re going to go take to market because

it really wasn’t that compelling.

The unit economics weren’t good enough.

And it didn’t really have big breakthroughs for any big industry.

And so Zymergen, like other companies in the space, pivoted and said, you know what, we’re

going to now be a products company.

So we’re going to make our own products instead of just being a services company.

And as they started to get into that, they decided that their first big product would be

this kind of, you know, plastic for cell phones, or what have you protective film.

And in the meantime, what happened is it takes so much money to do all this R&D to run all

these labs to have all these robotic arms that they have that are moving test tubes around

hundreds of people building and running these labs.

And, and so they’ve had to raise money.

And in order to raise money, as you guys know, you have to kind of hype the story, you have

to say, look, we’re going to change the world.

We’re reinventing everything.

We’re using synthetic biology to rebuild everything, yada, yada.

And the story resonates with me, because I truly do believe that the potential is there.

But the timing and the sequencing of these things is hard.

As is the case with a lot of deep tech companies, when you get too far ahead of the curve,

and you start saying, I’m going to do X, Y, and Z, but you can really only do A, B, and C today,

you raise money saying I’m worth billions of dollars, you raise hundreds of millions of

dollars, and the hype has to keep stepping up.

And they eventually got into the trap that a lot of companies got into, which is taking

money from SoftBank.

And SoftBank said, here’s $400 million at a $3 billion valuation a few years ago.

And they said, great, let’s run at it.

Let’s be a products company.

And they burnt through a lot of that money.

And suddenly, they didn’t have any products to show because deep tech is hard.

It took a lot longer than anyone thought.

And what will…

We better try and craft a narrative and get public.

And so they did that, they got public.

And a lot of what they had been telling people was coming, what’s coming, it’s going to be

here soon, didn’t really work.

So they had to pivot the business, they had to become a products company, they kept telling

folks they were going to be X, Y, and Z months away.

And they were going to be able to hit these targets on the product.

And it turns out it was always a little bit further away, a little bit further away.

And then boom, they have a big board review recently.

And they look at the product pipeline, and they look at where they are.

And they’re like, oh, this really isn’t going to work.

And the whole thing falls apart, because everyone was banking on this massive return.

And everyone missed the story, which is that they’ve been doing this for many years and

had to eventually abandon and pivot away from their business because no one was willing

to pay them for it.

So truly, they never found product market fit in their first generation of their business.

And they never found product market fit in the second generation of the business.

And it’s really worth taking a watchful eye based on this learning, which is just a fundamental

basic premise for starting a company.

Do you have product market fit?

And can you make money from your product?

And if you can’t answer those two things, there isn’t a business.

And then the third thing is how valuable the company is a function of how much you can

grow.

And so they really hadn’t even gotten past phase one.

And everyone kind of wanted to believe the hype.

So it’s a bit disappointing to see, but it’s really going to impact the industry broadly.

Because now people are going to say a lot of synthetic biology companies are smoking

mirrors, and they’re really not there yet.

So a lot of folks in the industry are really concerned, right?

So to dovetail this with the previous discussion, sax, funding your own company over funding

of companies, we talked about, hey, if it goes well, like WhatsApp did, well, you’re

a genius.

But if it doesn’t go well, and you get ahead of your skis, you don’t have product market

fit, and you’ve raised a bunch of money, then somebody becomes the bag holder.

No, Jason, it’s it’s even it’s even bigger than that.

It’s, it’s not just that it happened just in the private markets.

And we then you had JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs take them public.

And then they raised, you know, another half a billion dollars in the public markets.

And then they shot the bet.

Right.

And we seen the same thing.

This is the same week that Nicola founder, who went out by SPAC and was going to compete

with Tesla and Ford.

There, he’s now under indictment for lying and selling shares, also known as security

fraud.

Probably going to go to jail.

I had him on the podcast that was underwhelming.

So sax, we look at these, which is it?

Should we on a hygiene basis, be throttling these companies and have milestone based financing?

Or is this the sign of a top in the market that people are able to go public, people

are being given large amounts of money by SoftBank.

And these things, probably people should pump the brakes.

Yeah, look, SoftBank is engaged in a style of investing that we would never engage in

is absolutely antithetical to the way that we invest, right?

They’re making $500 million seed investments in massively overvalued companies.

You know, we, we are one of the reasons why we like SaaS and marketplace that craft is

they’re very milestone based.

I mean, we, you know, if we invest before you have a functional product, it’s going

to be at a seed valuation, you know, like a 10 cap, $10 million valuation, not in the

billions, like, you know, like Zymergen.

And, you know, we’re going to, in order to do a series A, by and large, we need to see

some revenue, you know?

And then, you know, if we’re going to do a growth round, we need to see more revenue

and more customers.

And so, you know, you show incremental progress, you know, we’re engaged in milestone based

investing where the amount of money you raise and the valuation, you’re able to get scales

with the amount of proof that you have delivered, you know, to investors about the company.

And the crazy thing about these like spectacular implosions, and they’re usually around deep

tech is because these entrepreneurs can tell a story.

And people just seem to suspend belief and don’t demand any proof for years and years.

So it was Theranos, it was Nikola and now it’s Zymergen.

And I think by the way, deep tech is it’s not that we should dismiss technically difficult

problems.

We should engage and fund and build great businesses that are technically difficult.

How much are we funded for how many months or quarters?

Yeah, but or I mean, what’s important is, you know, what is the representation that’s

being made.

And I think there’s only one hype man on planet Earth that is good enough to pull this off

and actually deliver the goods at the end of the day.

It’s probably Elon, like, because, you know, he funded these businesses that were deep

tech businesses, Tesla and SpaceX for many, many years.

He was able to get investors excited.

He funded them himself.

He funded himself.

But remember, most of the capital, I mean, he put in some capital, but the vast majority

billion with Tesla, he put in 50 million and went bankrupt.

He went bankrupt.

He was living off a $200,000 loan from a billionaire friend of ours.

Yeah, yeah.

Beep that part out.

You’re not allowed to say sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry.

Elon only self funded the first couple hundred million in these companies.

He delivered revenue very early on.

You remember at Tesla, he first developed the sports car, the Roadster.

And that was $150,000.

He sold 100 in advance, not dissimilar to Virgin Galactic’s playbook.

Right.

And maybe that’s an important lesson, right?

Like in deep tech, you can’t just say I’m going from zero to one with billions of dollars

over decades.

You know, that’s a government funded program.

Well, or you can if it’s your own.

And that’s what say that’s what Branson did.

And Bezos.

When I showed up, Richard had spent 1.1 or 1.2 billion of his own money.

And I thought, I mean, at some point in the game.

That’s that’s skin in the game.

I mean, Bezos has been funding Blue Origin for 20 years, right?

I think they take Necker and Mosquito Island if he if that doesn’t work out.

There was also Quibi.

That’s another story.

Yeah.

Quibi didn’t even involve deep tech.

It didn’t require any scientific breakthrough.

It just required some marketing proof that people were interested in that format.

And they just blew a million dollars.

Well, basically, Katzenberg, along with Meg Whitman,

who was kind of a weird choice to be a co-founder because she’s more of like the

late stage CEO you bring on to take the company public once it’s already working.

She’s not really like a founder.

She’s not a product innovator.

No, she’s not a product innovator.

But Katzenberg is though, right?

Katzenberg is obviously very creative.

And so they came up with this idea.

He knows talent.

So they came up with this idea to build a studio that put a billion dollars into

creating short 10 minute videos.

The problem was, there was no proof that the market was wanted that format.

They should have spent five or 10 million proving that the format

made sense and then spent a billion dollars if it worked.

And, you know, I just I don’t understand why

founders or really investors kind of put up with these types of stories.

Look at WeWork.

Same thing.

Yeah.

There was not a shred of evidence that there was an economically viable model there.

And yet billions and billions of dollars went into that company before the bottom.

Well, it actually, in fairness,

I disagree.

I disagree on that one.

The first couple of years was economic viable.

It just wasn’t a software business.

They had great gross margins.

It just wasn’t scalable like software.

Exactly.

There was no leverage in the model.

It was just purely like go lease something for X dollars and then sublet it for X plus Y,

you know, X plus Y dollars.

And it worked.

It just like, how do you scale that?

And then they got ahead of their skis and did all sorts of crazy stuff to get the tech valuation.

Oh, hold on a second.

But it’s not like you can just go to the store and buy it off the shelf.

Like there’s a tech valuation thing you can buy.

Other people had to believe it as well.

And those other people were also pretty credible, smart people.

Were they the later stage people?

Did you read the WeWork book?

The later stage ones?

I think we’re like, we’re like evading the thing that that we’re not saying, which is that

as much as we all want to believe that we’re all doing incredibly, incredibly diligent work,

there are a lot of examples where belief trumps logic.

And even the smartest people just look past the obvious.

And we just talked about four pretty obvious examples.

In no world should a credible tech investor not be able to do a simple valuation or see

a business model and brazenly believe a real estate business is a tech business.

At the same time, there should be no world where you pitch something that is just so

incredibly grandiose from a technical perspective.

And the reason you invest is actually because you don’t understand it.

Because if you did, you’d be more critical.

That’s fucking insane.

Well, this is the thing, Chamath, people are suspending disbelief.

These examples that you just brought up are exactly that.

Yes, they’re suspending disbelief out of greed.

And they’re not doing the basic tenets of investing, which is milestones,

talking to the customer.

These are blocking and tackling.

I think it’s more than greed, Jason.

It’s greed.

There’s fraud too.

It’s criminal, it’s fraud.

Let’s be honest, it’s fraud.

Some of it’s fraud.

So read the quote, read the quote from the US Attorney of Manhattan, who said Milton,

with respect to Nikola, lied about nearly every aspect of the business.

People like that need to go to jail.

Okay.

Jail, big time.

Jail, big time.

The startup world, the investing world only works if investors can trust the information

and the financial statements that are being given by operators, because we have to make

decisions quickly.

And if they give us bogus numbers, how are we supposed to make educated decisions?

Well, people don’t want to do diligence, Sax.

People don’t want to do diligence anymore.

We look at metrics.

We always look at metrics, okay?

We look at, look, we can do the metrics in one day.

Churn.

Look, we look at ARR.

We look at net revenue retention.

We look at churn.

We look at CAC.

And we look at your financials.

We can do it in one day.

Okay.

It’s not an invasive process.

We can decide very, very quickly because we know what numbers we’re looking for and how

to read the statements we’re given.

But question for you.

When the founders say, I have a competitive process.

We don’t want to do all that.

Has that been happening in today’s crazy market where people say, the train’s leaving the

station and we can’t do diligence.

We don’t have time for this.

Are you, has that happened to you?

Has that happened to you in the last six months?

In a sense, but we say to them, listen, here’s what we need.

And if you give us these numbers today, we can make a decision within 24 hours.

So, and there’s no reason we can’t.

And by the way, they have those numbers.

And if they say they don’t have those numbers, they’re too incompetent to be funded because

these are all the core SAS metrics that you should have to be tracking your business.

So we would never make an investment without seeing the SAS metrics for a SAS business.

Yeah.

Let me just step in for a second, because I think there’s two camps.

One is businesses, companies that are operate a business.

And what you’re talking about, it makes a lot of sense.

You could have looked at the business metrics of WeWork and made an assessment

of the quality of that business.

Or Nikola.

Or Nikola.

Well, on the other hand, you have this.

On the other hand, you have companies, I’m saying not Theranos and not Nikola,

because those are not businesses yet.

Those are still in technology development.

They’re deep tech.

So what happens is the founder, the CEO, the management team, they put together their own

representation of the metrics that they believe should matter.

And then they try and show how those metrics translate into value over time.

So there’s no revenue, there’s no customers, there’s no profits.

What they’re saying is we can, in the case of Zymergen,

we’ve got X number of experiments we can run per day.

And as a result, those experiments should translate into Y discoveries per year.

And those discoveries should translate into Z dollars of revenue per year.

And that’s where the pyramid gets built.

And the same was true of Nikola.

The same was true of a lot of these companies where they say,

we can do X, therefore, we’re worth Y.

And it’s that sort of narrative that investors then say, my God,

the story is so compelling.

If you’re right, I want to believe it.

I want to put the money in.

And I want this thing to work.

And therefore, I’ll fund this thing.

And I think and I think that’s what we’ve seen continuously.

It started with the clean tech industry.

And now we’re seeing it increasingly with all these companies.

Very nice.

Magically.

And in a lot of these cases, by the way, I will also say Nikola,

it’s, you know, it’s easy to do that.

But it shouldn’t be a representation that the entire set of

opportunities is a false narrative.

Absolutely.

There are many great businesses in biotech that actually do deliver the goods.

And they turn into incredible companies.

There’s a synthetic biology competitor design margin, who I spent a bunch of time with,

I’m not gonna say the name of the company.

And they and I and I asked them, what gross revenue?

Simple question.

What’s your gross margin?

What’s your revenue?

What are your cogs?

What’s gross margin?

And I got an asterisk laden answer.

What does it mean?

Asterisk laden answer.

It’s kind of like adjusted EBITDA adjusted for what?

Speak English.

That’s what you got to tell them speak English.

This is like when I would come home, my dad say, where’s your report card?

I say, you know, it’s interesting.

My report card.

Yeah, I don’t have it.

So where is it?

I passed.

And then I, you know, again, it’s still shocking to see the number of people that will still do

these deals.

And look, maybe it all works out in the end.

But I tend to think like, if you can’t present things simply, and you can’t explain things

simply, that’s on you.

However, if then you still do that, and you still have good intentions, maybe you don’t.

But then investors toe the line.

The problem is there’s this momentum thing that happens among investors, as Friedberg

said, where the FOMO kicks in, and some of the smartest people become some of the dumbest

fucking people.

No, they are suspending disbelief, like you would not believe in the industry, right?

Well, because it’s not their money.

I mean, look, at the end of the day, why does it happen?

Meaning, how can a Zymergen IPO happen like this for Nikola?

Like, meaning, if you look under the hood in the s1, I was trying to find it in the

s1.

Was there somebody that actually did like, some due diligence into Highline?

Clearly not.

Was there was there a synthetic chemist or a synthetic biologist that basically helped

clearly not?

Did everybody say that that was okay?

Clearly, yes.

You know, did I don’t know anybody get under the hood of Nikola?

And actually, like, look at the engine, make sure the thing worked.

I don’t know.

By the way, people did there just were enough people that didn’t that they were able to

get a financing done.

Right.

And I think that that’s the important point is there’s enough in the private market.

I’m talking about two public market examples.

You’re not allowed to have sequestered diligence when you’re going through an IPO.

Yeah.

So how it works.

By the way, I like, do you guys know the difference between humans and animals?

There’s one, there’s one distinguishing characteristic that I think making

tools, making narratives, narratives, stories, all come down to narratives.

Like there are dolphins that can communicate with one another.

There are monkeys that sit in a tree and they can warn each other about approaching predators,

meaning that there are other species that can communicate.

What humans can do that no other species can do is create a narrative

to create an ethereal belief in something that does not exist and get others to believe

in that story, religion, democracy, the financial institutions, the monetary system,

a business like this.

They’re all the same.

It’s all about someone saying

High Alliance Nikla.

Yes, exactly.

And I think in all these cases, by the way, this is the cliff notes version of sapiens,

everybody.

Yes.

Yes.

It’s a version of sapiens.

I have a funny Theranos story.

If you guys want to hear it, let me just finish this one point.

Like there’s a fundamental premise, which is humans want to believe.

And so when you have a Barnum type person show up when you have a, you know, a compelling

narrative and a compelling deliverer of that narrative, whether it’s a religious leader

or a presidential or a government leader or a business leader, and you want to see what

they’re selling come to reality.

You want to write a check and you want to put your time or your money into seeing that

thing come reality.

No, no.

I fundamentally look at you’re you’re missing a key point.

It’s not their money.

So stop saying that.

Go ahead.

They would not put their children’s fucking education account into these companies.

They’re putting other people’s money.

They’re putting other people’s money.

This is the key thing.

Not enough skin in the game.

Employees put their time into these companies for the same reason.

People join.

It is not their money.

People trade off money and time all the time.

My point is people will take their time.

They’re giving up the opportunity cost of working somewhere else to go work at these

companies.

David, David, I honestly I really fucking disagree with you here.

The reason why somebody goes and works at this company because they believe there’s

positive signaling from a soft bank.

Okay, so these people are smart.

They think this money must mean it’s real.

They think I’m now going to commit my reputation and my time to get options because obviously

these folks must have done their work.

I’m not making the mistake.

And that’s the lie.

Because those folks are not doing the work.

There’s a group of people.

No, there’s a group of people placing bets who are placing bets of other people’s money.

It’s other people’s money.

I agree.

You would do different diligence.

Let’s be honest.

The Zymergen IPO, the traditional IPO would have been entirely different if they had to

write if the underwriters were at risk for their own net worth.

It would be.

And if their stock was locked up of the management teams for five years or 10 years.

I do agree with that point.

I do agree with the point you’re making.

Okay, Saks, go.

Saks, go.

Saks from a boat.

Go.

Yeah, I’m not.

I’m not disagreeing with Chamath.

But the point that resonates with me that Freeburg said is actually the book Sapiens

really did impact my thinking as a VC, which is, you know, Yuval Harari makes this point

that it’s narratives that kind of define, you know, humans.

And that’s what binds us together in societies.

And frankly, the vast majority of narratives throughout human history have just been wrong.

But they still worked as-

Good stories.

Binding people together.

And I kind of applied that to VC, which is the VC process revolves around a pitch.

It’s a narrative session where the entrepreneur goes up there.

Yeah, and presents a narrative.

And then everyone debates the narrative and decides whether they buy into it.

And, you know, after reading Sapiens, I’m like, this whole process, like, is stupid.

How do I get out of a narrative-driven investing philosophy?

And that’s where I went back to, look, I understand SaaS.

I know what the metrics are supposed to be.

I’ll still listen to the pitch.

I want to hear it.

But just show me the numbers first.

And at least I can get to a decision that’s somewhat grounded in reality, because I think

most of what the VC process does is just measure a founder’s ability to tell narratives.

And that may be correlated with their ability to do marketing, but it’s not correlated with

whether their idea is fundamentally correct or not.

It’s fine in the seed stage, I think, yeah.

I think there will be the least amount of fraud when you either have irrefutable metrics,

or the investor has to invest their own money.

Yep.

That’s the gold standard.

Everything else is just, you know, catch as catch can, and you’re just gonna have a bunch

of trash.

Yeah, here’s how I’m handling at the early stage.

Saks, you because you get to meet my companies.

I have told them to craft their narratives around their traction now, because I know

that all this performative stuff is nonsense.

So when you meet those companies, they do a three minute pitch.

It’s the majority of it is, here’s the product, here’s the traction, and I accept people based

on traction.

And then I give them more money as the traction goes up.

And we bet four or five times on the same company based on metrics.

And I tell them all, you’re coming to the accelerator, here’s 100k.

If you want more money from us, we’ll keep giving you money if you can grow 10% or more

per month on real metrics, period.

And we will keep giving you money forever.

Right.

And I like these launch, like demo sessions that you do with us, because now you force

them to base their presentation around a chart.

So at least I can see some metrics.

And the other thing we do similar to you is I always start with a product demo.

Our motto is show me the product, not a PowerPoint, because the same PowerPoint can describe 10

or 100 different products.

It can describe a product that might be great.

It can describe a product that sucks.

Totally.

So show me the product.

And now at least I’m grounded in what you’re doing.

And I’m not just listening to some story.

By the way, I go back to this.

I still think that funding narratives makes a ton of sense in the early stage.

See, I rip, I rip in 50k to $5 million checks all the time.

I could care less if it sounds reasonable.

I take a punt at it.

Right.

But the minute that I’m writing 100 or 200 or $500 million check, I pay fucking attention.

Yes, because it’s my money.

It’s my money.

And I go back to this when it’s not their money, you’re going to see this thing riddled

with fraud.

You’re going to see cases like this stuff constantly.

And the person that pays the price, where I do agree with Freeberg, is the employee

because they mistakenly think that these folks must know what they’re doing.

But the reality is, it’s not.

It’s somebody else’s money.

They don’t really care.

They’re just doing a job.

They want to get paid themselves.

And so this is how these things happen.

You guys, let me just give you some specifics on the Zymergen scenario.

So they’re going to go public, right?

Leading up to their IPO, the stock’s at 31 bucks in the IPO.

So if you’re an employee, and you have stock options in Zymergen,

you have the option to exercise your stock options anytime,

which means you buy the stock at your strike price.

And then you can sell the stock later when the IPO is over.

So a lot of employees exercise their stock options,

meaning they put their own money up to buy the stock at $10, $5, $4, whatever it is.

And they actually owe taxes on the difference between their exercise price

and the fair market value at the time that they exercised.

So if the stock goes public at $30, and they exercise,

they got to pay taxes as if the stock was at $30.

And then they end up in a situation where they can’t actually get liquid.

And so there was a lot of employees that got really screwed on this transaction

when Zymergen went public,

because they thought the company was going to be worth $10, $20, $30, $40, $50.

And now the stock’s at $8.

And they’re going to actually owe money to the IRS and they paid for their stock option.

So it’s a it’s a it’s a brutal scenario when it plays out for employees.

And I just feel really bad for a lot of really, really great,

you know, smart people that work there that take a massive hit on this thing.

I hired two more researchers on my team just to do diligence at the syndicate.

And I would say between 20 and 30% of deals that look great.

When we get under the covers and look at the diligence, we look at the cap table,

we look at the revenue, we look at the accounting,

we asked them who’s doing their accounting, we asked them for bank statements,

we asked them for incorporation docs, we asked them for IP assignments.

This is like the basic blocking tackling 20 to 30% do not pass diligence.

And we find stuff that is crazy.

I had one founder give themselves a loan.

And then we didn’t know about it.

And then we find out about it later.

They did a loan, the company owes them hundreds of 1000s of dollars had another one

where they were presented their revenue as reoccurring.

And it was a it was a cruel based account.

It wasn’t a cruel based accounting was a cash based accounting.

And I’m like, yeah, what is going on here?

You’re basically lying.

And you’re misrepresenting your company.

Don’t do that.

It’s called securities fraud.

When you make a representation, don’t ever bend it or exaggerate it.

Just tell the truth.

Period.

What’s the Theranos story?

Chamath, I need the Theranos story.

And then I’ll give you a follow up story.

The Theranos story.

So I had I had a couple I had a very famous investor.

Tell me this is like 2015 2016.

And I said, guys, you know, we were just talking, I said,

What do you like?

What do you like?

Like, you know, we all kind of talk like that.

At some point, whenever we interact, you know, and he said,

this company Theranos, you have maybe it was 2014.

Anyways, 2015.

Theranos, Theranos, Theranos.

And I said, Are you an investor?

And he said, No, but I wish I was.

It’s incredible.

And I tried to get an introduction.

I thought, okay, this is this is going to be really interesting.

I couldn’t get an introduction.

But then I find out who the board is.

And instantly I get turned off.

So in my mind, I had a very negative impression because the

board was literally not all 90 year olds.

And I thought, what do 90 year olds know about, you know,

blood testing, and, you know, basically building a tricorder.

And at that time, you know, I think I told this story before,

but I had burned about maybe 50 75 million bucks on six

different startups trying to do this, like, you know, in situ,

kind of like, you know, finger prick blood testing, blah,

blah, blah.

So I was really fascinated with the space.

A year and a half later, a guy that I work with at Facebook,

a very senior guy says to me, I’m thinking and I was trying

to recruit him to come work at one of my companies as CEO.

I’m thinking of going to Theranos.

And I said, just go to the interview and tell me what

happens.

Before I, you know, try to convince you to not go.

He goes into the, to the interview to be CEO of this

fucking company.

They don’t let him pass reception.

They interview him in a makeshift room outside of the

meeting.

And he said, well, can I, you know, go inside?

And you know, when do we have a follow up interview?

You know, I’d like to meet some of the team.

I want to see what it is.

And they said, no, no, no, we’re good.

Here’s your offer letter.

Do you want to join?

Well, can I see the device?

Can I try it?

I don’t know.

No, we’re good.

Let’s go.

And I said to this guy, I said, how can you fucking join this

company?

I mean, it’s not like you’re, you’re coming in as a good

junior flunky.

You know, you’re coming in as the second or third most

important person in this business.

You haven’t been past reception.

You don’t even know what’s past reception.

You don’t even know what your office will look like.

You don’t even know if you like the office furniture at that

basic level.

Think about everything else that comes after that.

And then, you know, what happened happened.

So what a disaster.

William Perry, former head of Secretary of Defense, Henry

Kissinger.

I mean, it’s just, it was like, it was a bunch of grandpa

types.

That’s how you knew.

It was a red flag.

If you got one of those guys, you got one guy like Kissinger

on your board.

It’s okay.

If they’re all like that, it’s a problem.

Problem.

Huge.

I go on CNBC.

I just had John Kerry Rue from the Wall Street Journal who

broke this thing wide open on my podcast.

And I start getting all these inside tips about

Theranos.

And one of them was that Elizabeth Holmes and Balwani,

who is the COO, were in a relationship together.

They lived at the same address, all this nonsense.

And I check with Kerry Rue.

And I’m like, Hey, is this true?

And he’s like, yeah, that’s true.

Yeah.

I was like, why didn’t you report?

It’s like, I’m just chasing it down.

Whatever.

It’ll be in the next story.

So I go on CNBC.

And I was like, listen, when they’re smoked as fire, if

they had the device, my game theory is if you have the

device, you show it.

If you don’t have the goods, you don’t show it.

Period.

End of story.

I think my gut tells me this is a total fraud.

It’ll be zero.

And they’re like, oh, and I was like, yeah.

And you know, when the COO and the CEO are in a

relationship, that’s bad.

And they’re like, what?

And they didn’t know this.

And I like, they’re like, are you sure?

And I’m like, yeah, that’s what people are telling me.

I don’t know if it’s true or not.

I don’t know firsthand knowledge, but that’s what I

think is going on.

So this whole thing blows up.

Calacanis says this, blah, blah, blah, CNBC.

That night, I got invited to Beep’s house in the valley

for movie night.

We’ve all been to that.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I walk in.

There’s Zuck.

There’s this famous person.

There’s this Googler, that person.

It’s, you know, it’s 50 people.

And the celebrities who are in the blockbuster movie

are there.

I think it was the movie Arrival, but I’m not going to

make any I don’t want to give away whose house it was.

I go to this secret movie night.

I walk in, I get greeted.

And I kid you not 15 feet in front of me looking directly

at me is Elizabeth Holmes.

And I get with like 10 feet or and she just looks at me

snarls and walks away.

It’s like the most uncomfortable moment of my life.

Clearly a giant scam and fraud.

And she’s going to go to jail, too, by the way.

She’s going on trial this month, August, I believe she’ll

be on trial.

It’s taking way too long.

I hope she goes.

Yeah.

I mean, the justice system is a little bit screwed.

Okay, we got to wrap up.

I got a pretty good.

You have a pretty good track record of calling out these

frauds.

I think it’s a service to the community.

Yeah, I agree.

You’re one of the few who actually does it.

You got any other budding frauds?

Well, Ripple, you called out Ripple, right?

Oh, let’s not go.

Let’s go easy on the Ripple to some people who are friends

with people.

Well, I think right now you’re backing off.

I’m not backing off.

I just don’t want to lose a member of our little quartet

here.

But I will say that my fraud of the moment, the one that’s

making my Spidey sense go crazy is Tether.

USDT, these these guys are I mean, this feels like it is

going to be a billion of the crypto thing.

There’s a crypto stablecoin.

The idea is, they said it’s $1 in US currency, $1 per

tether, always.

And then over time, we find out maybe they don’t have a

dollar in their bank account for each one.

The New York Attorney General finds them $18 million says

you can’t work with anybody in New York.

They say we’re not a fraud.

And I’m like, well, what about the Attorney General who

said you were a fucking fraud?

And they’re like, yeah, yeah, no, no, that was a

misunderstanding.

Yada yada.

I’m like, there’s no misunderstanding.

You know, we should do you know, we should do we should

get all the fans the all in pod, we’re going to declare a

certain time and date where and we encourage everyone who’s

in tether to pull out a tether to stress the system and see

what stress test.

Well, the problem is, you don’t actually own your tethers.

That’s the other scam.

It’s like eight or nine of these offshore, unregulated

crypto exchanges, not the ones in the United States that are

highly regulated like Coinbase.

This is offshore.

And there are white.

What I’ve been told is you can create an exchange yourself

with white label software and pop up your own casino.

You’re like a bloodhound.

I mean, like, you just gotta sniff this shit out.

When I find this out, I cut it.

I like it.

I love it.

It’s like one of my favorite things.

He’s a Bronx brawler.

He’s roaming the streets looking for a fight.

Brooklyn, Brooklyn.

I mean, exactly.

I love a good fight.

I love a good fight.

He’s got nothing going on right now.

Yeah.

There’s some other people I want to call out.

There’s some other people I want to call out.

So let’s go.

Let’s move on to it.

Oh, Scott Galloway.

Dipshit.

Oh, no, no, he’s small potatoes.

But he’s a small potato.

Irrelevant.

Doesn’t look like Thurston Howell, the third on his.

He does on a yacht.

All right.

So Jason’s in Florence.

Chamath is at his estate.

I’ll tell you where I am.

Actually, Jake, I appreciate this.

I’m on a boat outside Elba, which is the.

He’s in Elba.

He’s in Elba.

It’s where Napoleon was in prison.

I’ll actually I’ll show you the prison where he was.

Where he was kept.

I think you can see it.

If I get to the right spot.

You know what?

We put the Nicola founder in there and we’ll put Elizabeth Holmes in there.

Same place.

Can you see the.

Just see your fucking ugly face.

And your beautiful yacht.

How much are people going to hate us?

Three of us are in Italy in August.

It is like the stereotypical.

Work hard and you’ll be on an Island level too.

Of course.

Of course.

I’m staying in an Airbnb.

It’s costing me 350 euros a night for four bedrooms.

I feel pretty good about myself.

I’m the center of Florence.

I think it’s you.

You’re spending about the same amount on your boat, right?

350, 400 euros a night per room.

Yeah, I got it.

I got the Airbnb deal.

Talk to us about after pay sacks.

OK, so well, first, I mean, if we’re going to call somebody out first, I want to call out PayPal.

OK, what’s going on there?

I actually wrote a blog post about it called the no buy list.

Basically, PayPal is creating the equivalent of a no fly list with respect to their service.

Well, for anybody who they put, they deem as deplorable or undesirable.

Basically, they’re working with the ADL, the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern

Poverty Law Center, SPLC, to create lists of people and groups who they are going to

ban their accounts.

Now, I got to say this.

The ADL and the SPLC are storied institutions that did great work combating both anti-Semitism

and racism.

But they are now under new management and new leadership, and they have greatly expanded

their missions.

The ADL was originally about stopping anti-Semitism.

Now it’s about basically opposing extremism or white supremacy in any of the places they

find it.

For example, they’ve taken positions on US Supreme Court nominations.

They’ve gone very, very far afield of their original mission.

The SPLC has gotten sued a number of times for putting people on these lists.

They put Sam Harris at some point on the list.

They put another human rights person on the list.

Anybody who challenges any or has any guest on their podcast that the Southern Poverty

Law Center doesn’t like, they basically blacklist them.

Right, right.

And the lists have become very expansive.

They’ve become very expansive.

So here’s the problem is you now have…

Look, before this was just some ivory tower, you know, 501 type thing where they would

basically…

It was hyperbolic rhetoric.

They would basically call these people and groups names.

But now PayPal is operationalizing these ban lists.

They’re turning it into a no-buy list.

They’re saying, we’re going to cut off your account.

And that’s very dangerous because we’ve already seen the precedent with speech online that

we had a bunch of social media companies banning people from participating in online

speech.

Now, what PayPal is potentially doing is banning people from financial access.

And losing your right to speech is bad, but losing your right to make a livelihood is

even worse.

And I think Republicans in Congress need to say to Dan Shulman, first of all, it’d be

great for them to haul him up there in front of Congress to a hearing like they did with

Jack and Zuck and Sundar.

Haul him up there and say to him in no uncertain terms, we see what you’re doing.

We don’t like it.

We oppose it.

We’re going to get on our hind legs and fight this.

If you try to deny Americans their right to access the new economy, we see no reason for

your company to get any bigger.

We’re going to oppose every acquisition you ever do.

And we may not be in power today, but one day the tide will turn.

We will get control of Congress.

And at that point, you know, elephants have long memories.

So, you know, we’re watching you.

And, you know, it’s been a long time since Republicans thought of their role this way.

For the last few decades, they’ve been very lazy or fair with respect to the economy.

But there’s a very successful Republican president on Mount Rushmore, Teddy Roosevelt.

And he’s on Mount Rushmore because he busted up the cartels and the oligarchs of his era,

and he fought for the rights of the common American to make a living.

That is the playbook that Republicans need to follow right now.

Okay, Henry Belcaster, you got that clip right here.

Let’s get some animations on top of it.

Let’s go.

All right.

Square has bought Afterpay for $30 billion,

which represents a large portion of their outstanding equity.

It’s an equity-based deal.

What do we think, Freeberg?

They issued a third of their stock to buy this company.

So basically, Square is a public company.

They issued shares to Afterpay shareholders.

And Afterpay only represents about 4% of Square’s revenue.

So they gave away a third of their company to increase their revenue by 4%.

That’s the pessimist’s view of the business.

Now, if you think about Square, they’ve got 2 businesses that are equally sized.

One is like a consumer business, this cash app.

And then cash app.

Yep.

Yeah.

And they do a bunch of stuff, including crypto in there.

And then they have another app, another set of tools for merchants,

which is businesses on the other side.

So it’s becoming more of a marketplace business.

And the idea is that this Afterpay deal can solidify their ability to basically be a lender

to their consumers and provide a tool to merchants to increase sales.

Because the way Afterpay works, it’s a buy now, pay later product.

These have been around for a long time.

And you can basically make a purchase online without having to put down a credit card or

to pay for it.

And they instantly run a credit check on you and instantly offer you credit to buy that thing.

And then you pay in installments over time.

And so it allows people… It allows websites and businesses to get more consumers to buy stuff

because it’s really easy for them to buy stuff if they don’t have the money to buy today.

Right.

And by the way, this business concept has been around for a long time.

There’s a company called Bill Me Later that was bought by PayPal in 2008 for $1 billion.

And it was a similar thesis.

So the thesis… What’s old is new again.

The thesis is, if you can provide these tools to merchants, they will get more sales and PayPal

on the other side would make more money because consumers would spend more through the system.

And I think that’s the same model with Square.

But most important… So we’re seeing Square consolidate the marketplace dynamics of their

business.

They’re also effectively stepping up and competing and making sure they’re locking

in the competitive advantage they have with having this two sided marketplace

against emerging competitors like a firm.

And so far…

The public capital markets will always reward great growth strategies.

The minute that they announced this deal, the market cap of Square went up by almost 25%.

The deal is free.

Free.

I repeat, they just acquired a $30 billion company for fucking free.

Which is what happened with Whole Foods and Amazon.

Here is the secret hiding in plain sight that not enough CEOs understand about the public

markets.

And so for the CEOs out there listening, there are two ways for you to get constantly

rewarded by the public markets.

Number one is what Square did, which is to incrementally acquire feature after feature

after feature.

The thing with Buy Now Pay Later is that it is not a company.

It has always been a feature.

And it’s a feature of a much larger financial services platform.

And I think Square is proving that.

And everybody else over time will realize that Goldman Sachs and Apple are about to

do something there with Buy Now Pay Later as well for themselves.

Apple already does it for the phones.

So the idea is that this is just a credit feature that should be on every single major

network.

I wouldn’t be surprised if WhatsApp and Facebook had a Buy Now Pay Later feature.

Amazon.

Over time.

Everybody needs to have this feature.

You can’t build a company around it.

And so if Square can basically continue to acquire or build adjacent features that consolidates

the financial services stack for their consumers, the stock market will reward these guys, they’ll

be able to grow and buy things for free for the next five or 10 years.

The second way that corporate that companies can get rewarded in the public markets is

if you look at your costs, and you flip them from a cost or an expense into revenue, and

the gold standard is Amazon.

So if you guys look back, I’ll just give you a very quick example, because it’s incredible.

In 2005, year end 2005, Amazon, they had eight and a half billion of sales, 2 billion of

net profit.

Their two biggest costs there was product and shipping.

So what did they do?

They started Amazon Kindle, they started Amazon Basics, they started Amazon

Fire, they started Amazon Echo.

And all of a sudden, that whole thing shrank, their gross margins went up.

Then on the operating expense side, Amazon was spending 6% of revenue on fulfillment,

they started a fulfillment business.

They were spending 5% of revenue on technology, they started AWS.

They were spending 2% of revenue on marketing, they started Amazon Prime.

They were spending 2% on payment processing, they started Amazon Payments.

So if you look at any company like this, Square, I think Stripe is another part of me,

Shopify is another great example where you can see the path to growth.

If you can see folks acquiring adjacent features, or if you can see folks taking expense lines

and turning them into revenue lines.

These are, in my opinion, sure bet, companies that compound forever in the public.

There’s great network effects.

If you think about financial services for consumers, I would argue there’s 5 general

categories.

There’s banking, lending, trading, crypto, and insurance.

And I think in order of retention, meaning how long a customer is likely to stick with

a service provider, it’s banking, then lending, then trading, then crypto, then insurance.

And in terms of profit generation per customer per year, it’s trading, then crypto, then

lending, then insurance, and then banking.

And so what we’re seeing is a lot of these financial services providers to consumers

in the digital world, replacing the old school world by starting to consolidate these categories

in a smarter way than the old school offline companies have been able to do.

Banks need to make money through overdraft fees.

They make $30 billion a year in overdraft fees.

So if you make banking entirely online and make it free, you retain a customer and then

you can make money by offering them lending, trading, crypto, some of these other services.

And that’s certainly the trend.

I have a big thesis and a big belief that over the next decade, we’re going to see those

five categories start to merge.

And you’re going to have three to five superpowers that are going to offer a consolidated stack

of services and the unit economics are going to change because they’re going to focus on

getting the high retention products to be cheap and free.

And then they’re going to make money on the high margin products.

The canary I completely agree with you and the canary in the coal mine is who will be

given a federal banking license because that is the only gate that the authorities have

to King make who those consolidators will be.

And that’s an easy thing that can be unemotionally assess or Amazon just buy one.

No, you have to.

This is an incredibly arduous process to get a federal banking license to be cleared by

the Federal Reserve.

What if Amazon bought a bank?

You have to get it approved.

You’re not listening to me.

These are regulatory.

That’s why I’m asking a question for the audience.

You cannot just go and buy these things.

Okay, so even if you want to, you can’t just buy a company like you bought Whole Foods.

So for example, I think Square now is a federally licensed bank.

And I believe that at the Federal Reserve recognizes these guys, they can borrow when

they can borrow money at the discount window at the discount rate.

As startups get more successful and can get there, those will be the ones that will do

what David said, because it doesn’t matter how many users or how much momentum you have.

If you cannot get a federal license to operate, you can’t consolidate.

So you can be a vertically specific great business.

But eventually, you have to sell.

E-Trade, Morgan Stanley is a great example, where, you know, in the absence and an inability

to expand, you have to sell yourself because the cost of capital eats you up.

The comment on this, by the way, the most obvious one here, which I think is interesting,

is the Shopify Stripe debate.

Because if you look inside the P&L of Shopify, an enormous line item now about 350 million

bucks a year is what they’re paying to Stripe.

And, you know, there’s going to be a lot of pressure over time to figure out what these

big businesses want to do with respect to their payment strategies and do it themselves,

because they may be able to save a lot of money.

Unclear.

Can I be like the lone voice of dissent on this afterpay thing?

Oh, go ahead.

Yeah.

Well, look, it’s clear the market loved it.

Chamath is right about that.

It’s sending a signal to everybody in the industry, in the finance industry, that

consolidation is going to be rewarded.

It seems like finance is going to go the same way that media did, where you start to

see studios in Hollywood all get gobbled up by big tech players, sort of the final convergence

of digital analog.

You’re clearly going to see that in banking now, too.

So as a business person and as an entrepreneur, I respect and admire what Jack Dorsey has

done with Square.

But as an American, I’m definitely concerned about this accumulation of power.

And we now see Jack as the first person.

There’s never been anyone in American history who holds in his hands the right to deny people’s

speech on a major speech platform and the ability to deny them access to a major consumer

payments platform.

Now, he doesn’t have dominant market share in either one of those things.

In either.

No, he’s got less than 10% in each.

But he’s an influencer.

And we saw that Twitter was the first site to kick off Trump.

And then in the wake of that, every other tech platform did it.

And Square, after January 6th, cut off the accounts of everybody who was involved or

connected to it, whatever that means.

And a bunch of other players in the fintech stack did it.

So we now have this issue of financial de-platforming.

PayPal is already well down that road.

What will Jack Dorsey do?

I don’t know.

I mean, on the one hand, he’s-

Why don’t you start up?

Why don’t you buy or start or incubate your own?

That’s protection freeze.

You’re not going to ban people from calling.

So you win.

Just fucking start your own Square competitor, Sachs, and stop complaining.

Jason, look, these companies have gigantic network effects.

PayPal is over a $300 billion markup company.

If all of the-

If they back those 10%, if they knock 10% of people off, you get them.

Now you got your beachhead.

Stop complaining and build it.

It is not.

It is a non-argument to claim that a cartel of gigantic fintech companies that have monopoly

scale, monopoly network effects, acting together, that is not a threat to people’s rights to have-

I’m not saying it’s not.

I’m talking about how you can make money from it.

I’m just talking your book.

Like, you can just start these competitors-

This is not about making money for me.

It’s not about making money for me.

This is-

No, I know.

But it is an opportunity.

Like, who’s to stop somebody from creating-

Isn’t Parler back?

And isn’t there some other, like, right wing or more conservative Twitter that’s booming right

now?

I heard there’s another one.

Kara Swisher was talking about-

I’m predicting right now that financial de-platforming is going to be the big

hot potato, political hot potato over the next year.

This is the next wave of censorship.

And what-

I agree with David.

Republicans on the FTC-

I agree with all that.

What the Republicans on the FTC, on that board, need to ask Jack Dorsey right now is,

will you import the Twitter block list over to Square?

Or will you keep these things separate?

Let’s have Jack on the program.

Bestie, guestie, Jack.

Can I just say something sexy?

I think you’re right.

But if you just want to make a lot of money, and you have to have some financial stock

ownership over the next few years, I think the way to do it is just to kind of, like,

figure out which of these emerging companies have or are about to get or have disclosed

in their earnings that they’re filing for licensure.

And I think you want to own those things.

Because the key thing is, like, when you get these licenses, you just get a cheaper cost

of capital.

It just allows you to out-compete and out-maneuver.

And then all of a sudden, you’re competing with these big, lumbering incumbents, who

just don’t have the access to the same flexible technology, and they’re running code that’s,

you know, 40, 50 years old.

Then the policy decision becomes much more complicated, because I do agree with you that

there’s going to be platforming or de-platforming issues that happen.

The good thing about this is that it is highly fragmented, and that there is no clear path,

at least that I see, for two or three folks to have 25% to 30% to 35% ownership.

That already happened, sort of in credit cards, and I think we’ve learned our lesson

from that.

It hasn’t happened since.

I hope it remains that decentralized.

But what I think the reaction of the stock market to Square buying Afterpay is now everyone’s

going to be looking at that and going, wait a second, I can spend, you know, a quarter

of the market cap of my company and have the acquisition be free?

No, but David, my point, that’s not what they’re saying.

What they’re saying is, hold on a second.

These companies are features, and we want to have folks who are licensed and capable

to consolidate what Friedberg said, these five categories.

And if you look inside of Square, they have an incredible lending business.

They have incredible merchant services business.

They have a pretty decent and emerging crypto and trading business.

So they’re putting all the pieces together.

That’s what they saw, and they’re licensed.

Right.

But who are the big winners in this wave of consolidation going to be at the end of the

day?

It’s going to be Square.

It’s going to be Stripe.

It’s going to be PayPal.

It’s going to be the big online companies, not the offline legacy banks.

It’s the same thing that happened in Hollywood.

The only studio that didn’t get gobbled up by a tech company is Disney, right?

So it’s gone 80% big tech.

And they became a tech company.

And they become a tech company.

They became a tech company.

So their whole business, they’re going to catch up to Netflix, and then they’re going

to roll Netflix.

They’re going to roll right over Netflix.

The reality is that there is something about big tech that wants to deplatform people.

The legacy analog offline companies were never this moralistic towards their customer

base.

They never deplatformed and banned people the way that these companies are doing.

They limited their moralizations and their high horse to the Oscar Awards and the Emmys.

You’re correct.

J Cal, J Cal, I’m going to do a I’m going to do a crazy wine dinner tomorrow night.

And it’s about 45 minutes from you.

You should take a car, have them wait, eat dinner, and then drive back.

All right, I’ll try.

I got I’m doing I’m going to see David, which, you know, for me is a lifelong dream.

Of course you are.

Every time I I’m going to go see David because not David Sachs, David, you know, the statue

of David, which to me is like looking in a mirror my whole life.

I looked at that, you know, that body small stubby schlong.

I get it.

But why don’t you?

But why don’t I have so many hours I’m doing in Florence?

Maybe I’ll zip out.

Let’s see.

Maybe I’ll zip out, but I’m going to see you next week.

It’s 45.

The question is, Friedberg, what are you fucking doing?

Get on a plane and come see your besties.

You’re the only person not in Italy.

You come for three or four days.

I know you got a pregnant wife.

I know you got a lot.

You’re moving all this stuff.

You gave up on San Francisco.

Let me go talk to her.

Just come for three days.

Three days.

Get her some present and maybe get some extra help at the house.

What are all your pilots doing?

They’re all just sitting there in Italy, hanging out.

Mine are literally having the best time, but they’re living their best lives right now.

They’re like, oh, we’re going to take a tour of Venice.

Do they want to get some hours in?

I mean, no.

Okay, I’ll send my plane.

It’s United.

I’ll send United for you.

J. Cal, why don’t you come visit me tomorrow?

You don’t need to see a museum.

You know, you don’t want to spend time museum.

Hey, Saks, why am I having a great time with my girls in Florence?

I’ll see you all next week.

Relax.

It’s going to be fine.

J. Cal, I’m only going for a day.

I’m coming to drop.

Uh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I’m not, I’m my, my mom’s here.

You know, like I have a lot of people here for two days and hang out for two days with us.

What are you doing?

48 hours.

It’s not a big deal.

Bring everybody.

Love you guys.

I love you besties.

All right.

Yeah.

Oh, congratulations, J. Cal on Rob.

Congratulations on Robin Hood, J. Cal.

Okay.

Yeah.

Thanks, guys.

All I’m going to say is, is my first fund, my little $11 million fund right now,

you know, we’ll see what happens a long way to go.

Once again, I’ll have a top 5%, 1% fund.

The first fund I did with Sequoia with the scouts was like 150 cash on cash.

Who knows this first fund I did with you guys backing me.

Uh, thank you for supporting me.

That $11 million fund could be 5, 6, 5, 6, 7 X could be, who knows?

We’ll see.

Go big boy.

Cash on cash.

Yeah.

You know, it’s a good feeling.

It’s a good feeling.

Yeah.

Thank you for the support, David.

You pushed me.

Proud of you, Saxy Poo.

Proud of you.

Nice week for everybody.

Wait, did you have any wins this week?

Aside from spending a lot of money on wine, is there any spectacular news that we need to know?

Well, I think David can confirm, but I think I probably made a billion dollars this week.

All right.

There you go.

Oh, something’s going on.

There must be a SPAC coming.

Brace, brace, IPO.

No, no, no, no, no SPAC.

No SPACs.

No, oh, oh, something’s getting sold.

All right.

We’ll find out next week.

We’ll see you all next week.

All right.

Bye bye.

Love you guys.

Love you guys.

Love you, Bastis.

Love you, Italy.

Of course, everybody’s favorite.

The queen of quinoa.

The science conductor himself, David Friedman.

All the data, all the science says, go do whatever you want to do.

Go into a nightclub, sweaty, throbbing beef.

Go into a throbbing rave.

Go into a…

Nothing else matters.

Go into a throbbing rave.

But I think understanding what the other counterpoints and counterarguments might be

is critical to get people to actually get to that opinion themselves,

as opposed to just telling them, this is a single point that you should believe.

Go into a throbbing rave.

Nothing else matters.

Go into a throbbing rave.

Nothing else matters.

Go into a throbbing rave.

So much is all about like the good and the evil, them and us.

And we don’t recognize that in moments where there are shared values,

we’re just sitting on both sides of the same coin.

Or recognizing that sometimes having different values

doesn’t necessarily make someone evil.

Go into a throbbing rave.

Nothing else matters.

Go into a throbbing rave.

Nothing else matters.

Go into a throbbing rave.

And at this point, I’m like seven tequila, watermelon tequilas in.

So I’m like, oh my god, he’s got some actual flavor though.

I’m on the dance floor, you know, jamming out to Coolio.

And I’m like, what’s up Coolio?

I’m like, god, this is like a dream come true.

He’s like hugging me, his face is right next to my face.

I didn’t know what to say.

And I’m like, I’ve had a little bit of tequila.

And I whisper in Coolio’s ear, I appreciate you.

I appreciate you.

I appreciate you.

I appreciate you.

I appreciate you.

I try and kind of elevate the conversation a little bit.

And why I care so much about this point.

Go into a throbbing rave.

Of course, everybody’s favorite, the queen of quinoa,

the science conductor himself, David Friedberg.

The quality of the show, he calls it the Friedberg Index.

If Friedberg talks a lot, it’s a great episode.

Go into a throbbing rave.

All the data, all the science, just do whatever you want to do.

Go into a throbbing rave.

Go into a nightclub.

Go into a throbbing rave.

Sweaty necks and people.

Nothing else matters.

Go into a throbbing rave.

Nothing else matters.

Go into a throbbing rave.

Nothing else matters.

Go into a throbbing rave.

Nothing else matters.

Go into a throbbing rave.

Nothing else matters.

Go into a throbbing rave.