Antonio, Elon had a moment of reflection and he was talking about 2008, he was talking about the imminent collapse as he felt it of SpaceX and Tesla at the same time in December 25th and he said there were just a handful of people who came out there and put their careers on the line for him, yourself and Steve Jurvetson specifically mentioned and Ira and it was a particularly poignant moment for him, he was getting a little choked up about it.

Tell us about that bet you made in 2008 and the potentially career-changing moment in your career. What was the career-ending bet for you to bet in an electric car company at that moment? Take us back to that decision. Yeah, well before I do that I just want to say that I left my wallet backstage because the last time I was with the four of you I lost a lot of money and I realized that I better leave all the cash somewhere where you can't get it and then and you also made me cry so I think I might cry again now.

Of joy? I mean no, no it was more like a humiliation. We were playing poker. Yeah, we're playing poker. Wait, wait, wait, you pulled a Palmer Lucky? Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, so if I cry again this time it will be from a sense of just gratitude for those moments that we got to share.

So for us in particular because you know our strategy is so operational, I was there working on supply chain in the factory and on sales in that period along with my partner Tim Watkins and three or four of our supply chain people and we had a major problem in supply chain, the cost for way to control and you know Elon was doing the engineering on the very expensive parts we were doing the I call it the B parts, the A and B parts and man it was brutal but it was very clear to us that remember it was also the middle of financial crisis right so we had a treasure portfolio we had to decide we didn't have a lot of capital at the time these are tiny funds 120, 300,000 funds where our capital go where our people go more importantly where operating people go and where I would go.

Yeah. Yeah. And we decided to focus on Tesla because first we really did believe in Elon when most people didn't and we saw in him something very special which I think you probably saw here yesterday that not only is he is a brilliant brilliant engineer you know one in a hundred year kind of engineer he's a man of deep conviction and deep passion and deep compassion.

What he is doing is really trying to bend the arc of humanity for all of us because he really cares. And that came through to us and we want to be on that mission with him and so we were privileged enough to be there in a moment time that it mattered and it was really hard man I mean we had clients I actually had a client said to me how do I know this isn't DeLorean and I said look I can tell you for a fact we are not selling cocaine out of the back of the factory in the cars.

Yeah. There's no DeLorean being the famous back to the future car. Exactly. Where the owner was trafficking cocaine to underwrite the car. Exactly. I may live in Miami but even Antonio Grossi is not a big fan of DeLorean. Yeah. Antonio Grossi is not selling cocaine for sure. Sure. That I'm sure.

Yeah but no it was a very it was a it was a career betting event for us and it turned out right it was right thing to do but yeah for me it was I'm just deeply grateful for these experiences. But I mean you really doubled down because you didn't just do Tesla you also were there in some really critical moments at SpaceX as well.

We were although I tell you you know we doubled down at the time in Tesla we put more money in Tesla than the financial crisis and then helped lead a convert round there that was really tough for us to do and then put more in Tesla. Yeah. And then put more in SpaceX but I tell you operationally like in terms of capital stack I think there were other people around and SpaceX is also running out of money and so we put money to SpaceX operation we were just basically over the years but it was never as existential in terms of the operations it was a Tesla.

I mean Tesla was truly I think truly existential and because we were operating guys and I myself had been a factory manager I worked in all the parts and all parts factory I'd run industrial facilities myself we could kind of uniquely add value there in the rocket factory you know we were just less valuable.

Yeah. Yeah. But yeah both these companies were going down at the same time and you know the amount of stress we were all under was extraordinary but you know looking back on it it's one of the greatest moments of my career. Yeah. I mean this sense of fellowship you know one of the I think the great thing about being in our business the business we are all in is that we get to back amazing people that are trying to change the world and in these dark dark dark deep moments we get to go to war for them and in those moments I call them these moments of fellowship where you just care deeply about someone and passionate about the mission.

Yeah. And you get to make a huge difference like these are the highlights of my career and if you ask my partners they tell you the same thing. These are the best moments we've had some together three of us have had some together actually we've all had some together here on the stage we had to fight for something you believed in and it's a privilege man to do it.

It's a privilege in that situation it's privilege to be with Elon it's been a privilege to be there with all of you at different moments in my career and I'm very grateful for it. How do you feel like you come off of a high after having huge successes like this.

I mean I think it's a really good thing. I mean I think it's a really good thing. Yeah. I mean I think it's a really good thing. I mean I think it's a really good thing. I mean I think it's a really good thing. like that like how do you stay grounded and motivated to try to find the next one if in the back of your mind there must be a little piece that says it's never gonna be as good as this guy or those two things I mean you know it is it's interesting question of us I think that there's a couple things in play for us one is we keep going because we believe in making a little better we invest in companies that we believe make a difference with people we respect and where values lined with and that's the that's the ethos of our firm right so whether it's large or small we may never find something that says importantest has on SpaceX again but we will find more great people we will help them you know two of our companies here I mean we invest in an rule with Palmer we have a small investment Flexport which should have been one of the biggest mistakes the last ten years my career is not putting more money in Flexport yeah I know we had it we actually it's kind of a funny story about we had you know that's a kind of a soft handshake on a term sheet at say a price of X and soft they came in like two days later and made it 2x and I had too much price memory to keep going and co-lead it so there's an error but the you had you have two people on the stage here they're extraordinary entrepreneurs are trying to make the world better both both these companies are really really great and making the world much more pretty now post COVID and in times of war making it much safer for all of us there are people like that out there there's more than they may not be long you know it was probably one Elon in our generation but there's lots of great people and I'm very optimistic about what's happening on the economy we're seeing incredible incredible innovation with tremendous entrepreneurs in our pipeline so maybe there's another one I don't know Antonio how do you think about the in the businesses you guys invest in there can sometimes be a very long capital deployment cycle before you see any real return in terms of you know business value whether it's pharma I know you've done pharma some of these hardware companies where there's a big build cycle how much do you need to kind of think about and see a customer and revenue show up before you're willing to say hey let's build the big rocket ship to go to the friggin moon and how do you judge and value that business and back a team up?

it's really a question I think it depends on this and this sector Ren yeah it depends on how we look at the world sure probabilistically and we're looking for companies that we call pro and true ever they get better the world gets worse so in in the case of pharma or something like SpaceX we'll think about like what is our problem was our probability tree here what you probably lost probably a 3x a 5x a 10x 100x and and then we'll think about when the capital goes in what is the actual return on capital I was watching the talk you guys had with with Ryan about what happens the public markets the reality is that what a business is a machine you put capital in one side and out the other side comes return the ROI see the return of invested capital really matters and if you're kind of classically trained investor the way I am we think about that a lot yeah so I know we may be putting a lot of capital in the question is what's the margin in the back end a company like SpaceX a lot of capitals going in but we know that if it works we believe it will work we're also going to have a company has tremendous margins even in the industrial sector because of the industry structure it's in it lives in an oligopoly inside the US and outside the US so it's like building Starlink same thing capital going in but we know that the the margins and the profitability that business on the back end will be very very high and so the ROIC will be very good just are you backing a lot of deep tech startups like companies a founder shows up with a PowerPoint they're like any 50 million bucks to make our prototype I mean it depends on the business so as an example you know we have passed on things that are our view going to have margins that are ultimately competed to a low a low level right and you know there are I don't give examples here but there are lots of examples of people that are doing things in you know I call it electric aircraft VTOLs etc we look at this and say this is gonna be a highly competitive market these are not an end of one SpaceX is an end of one if you compare that to someone making an electric vehicle that say electric airplane or electric VTOL that will not be an end of one it'll be an end of many and in any of many business you're ultimately going to have margin competition that's going to make it that return on capital goes down to basic industrial margins you know like it won't be that much better than Boeing's ROIC or Airbus's ROIC because those will be ultimate competitors you you said it a little too I think superficially so let me just double click and I think Antonio brings up I think one of the most important principles of investing that is so utterly poorly understood which is ROIC ROIC return on invested capital most people don't even know what it means how to calculate it no Pat over your weighted average cost of capital these are enormously fundamental principles when you're running a business especially in a moment like this because when the rubber meets the road and you need a lot of money and you run into somebody as sophisticated as him he's already worked from first principles to understand it it's really really really important to know these things because these are the core foundations of valuation you know so obviously DCFs are one framework but ROIC is incredibly incredibly important especially when you make real things and you need to spend capex and look in a world in the last 10 years where money's free nobody thinks about this very much we always have thought about it which informs our investment model but yeah Jim off's right I mean in today's world if you're an entrepreneur and you can show up and say listen I have a 50 60 70 return on capital every dollar you give me will yield a 70 80 return on the back end even though we're losing money along the way that's a very compelling case well to hey we're losing a bunch of money we're not sure what's gonna happen which is what we hear a lot this also builds on the question from yesterday which is how do you present yourself as you know a young emerging company and cut through all the noise and understanding of these things and about future value creation in a moment like this becomes really important as well even if people will debate whether it's right people will give you credit for the intellectual honesty of actually going there and understanding these things really you see it a lot where companies slip away from first principles so you know the first principles on a high margin Enterprise software business you can define ARR and assume some and then people say some multiple of ARR is your valuation comp like your you know your multiple and then another company shows up and the margins are different the growth profile is different the revenue retention is different it's a services business and they try and use a similar sort of comment all of a sudden everyone's thinking about valuation as a function of some industry standard comp as opposed to going back to understanding how did that comp get created in the first place and what's the nature of the business from which that comp arose and people are doing things like calling revenue ARR you know it's not even subscription and so on and I think that happens considerably more and then then that investing cycle just becomes you know hey well the next round will be this multiple and you know that's how we'll get our increment in valuation and everyone just misses the the core you know proposition of building a valuable business that can generate what's your look through into the economy just from your portfolio companies look we we think I think we're in a session I mean I don't know if someone's already said this but we're in a session we're in a session and this will be like my I don't know 100 cycle or something I'm pretty old I like the rest of us here we've seen it we've seen it over and over again and you know I see David's tweets about go raise two and a half years of money this is correct I mean we're gonna you need enough capital to get through the problem uh the good news about this recession and you know there are there's some good news here which is to me if you look at the the macro picture here it it looks like if you can look look at uh the amount of federal debt the the state of the consumer and kind of what's happening in this information it actually looks a little like post-world war II to me in that in the world in the world war II period we had the last massive mobilization or demobilization of our economy occurred in World War II right that happened again in covet when we change in this case it's like a mini version of remobilization that we're restarting the economy we flooded the system with money to get the to kind of buffer the problem then restart the economy and now we have inflation but we also have lots of business formation and we have new ways of doing work which is what happened after World War II so I'm I'm I'm very optimistic because most of these recessions you know to really get inflation down we're gonna have to reduce consumer demand and or change oil prices so for sure we should be pumping all this country I know it's not it's controversial but that's important to lower oil prices to get inflation down but the reality is underneath the the numbers there's a lot of innovation happening and that's what happened kind of post-world war II so I would say we're in a bit of a mini retooling it's going to be a rough year or two uh hang on it'll be a rough year or two but the consumers are in pretty good shapes they're not over levered we should come out okay and the U.S economy is so resilient man like you know we are all either one generation from being immigrants or immigrants here I think most of us right it's the best place in the world to live we're the most innovative economy in the world we should I'm super optimistic what's happening here because there's so much innovation so many smart people working so hard to make things better um I think it's going to be great I think we get the next couple years it's going to be great talk about this um pumping more oil situation obviously Russia's involved in a and we talked about earlier today had a debate about Ukraine and then you have maybe some folks in the Middle East not pumping as much oil as we might like them to and then Europe decided well we don't want to come back here we want you to do that over there and and then we stopped here uh and none of us want to see environmental damage done to the planet but we also don't want to see dictators take over the planet or the economy come to a halt what's a reasonable proposal for America yeah and American sovereignty in terms of green and renewables and maybe pumping some oil so look I we were the first institutional investors as a motor voters so I think I have enough bona fides to say this I believe in green technology okay absolutely 100 but energy and in the same fund we did Tesla we actually had fracking assets because energy Independence is well that's incredible really yes in the same fund same fund because then as it is today energy Independence is a Nash security issue this is not a partisan issue extremely important to understand this extremely important to understand this yeah it's not about all the things it's about wars in the Middle East and the reality is that the Saudis are not pumping OPEC is not pumping this is terrible for America and they know it they're squeezing their economy the way they're in the 70s and it's absolutely being done on purpose so the answer to that in my mind is twofold one we should have an we should be an industrial policy general in this country but the first thing we should have is a energy policy energy policy look like this we take all of the background subsidies literally make them equal and we give let's say 500 billion total 250 billion in in low-cost loans to the energy patch for drilling in places like Texas Louisiana and an equal amount to green energy and we Sprint to a green future at the same time we ensure that this country is safe and we have energy security in this country for all the people out there being hurt by high inflation it's a security problem what do you you guys invest heavily in manufacturing what do you see in terms of the future of manufacturing the opportunity for onshore manufacturing are there technologies that you guys are excited about that create an advantage for the United States to build manufacturing capacity um to service industry here and yeah look I think this thing about we outsource the entire our entire manufacturing base in China because it was cheaper but the reality is that the if we have been our the productivity between the kind of U.S and China right now is about eight to one so a U.S worker is eight times more productive than a Chinese worker we found in in cases like Tesla where we actually helped read in terms of GDP per worker yes we helped to in-source the supply chain of Tesla why is Tesla floating rated because I got news for you you actually can make stuff in America it's made very well shocking okay let me tell you when you put what what is the why do we have this narrative that it can't be done and then we go to Gigafactory and you see let me tell you having been done let me tell you why and boy I mean here's this I'm probably gonna get pillory for saying this but great companies are built by Engineers like Elon Musk that's a reality of it and they know they want to control their manufacturing we do it here so they can iterate faster and make the product better if the product's good enough you'll sell it for a great margin they get optimized by marketing people and destroyed by the CFO when you put the finance guy in charge and he's like oh hey we can get a lower piece part by sending it to China but he doesn't understand the iteration cycle of making that product that guy destroys the company and that's what happened in America bean counters yeah we put the CFOs in charge for God's sake don't do that these bean counters I mean can I say that let me say that more engineers let me say that if you if you if you calculate return on invested capital and you think about this carefully what happens is these long supply chains to Asia they have huge capital deployed but if capital is cheap you do that because the piece part price is cheaper but if you calculate what happened in Tesla in particular when you calculate the overall cost and capital wasn't free because you didn't get any it was actually much smarter to bring it back right so the long-term cycle you make more money the short-term cycle you make less money the short-term cycle you make more money I mean is that another way to think about it you optimize short-term outcomes you you improve the you you improve the income statement because you might improve properly in the long-term but you actually hurt the balance sheet because you sell this capital on the water over to China you're never bringing it back and your iteration cycle goes down because you you've got so what you're saying is the product's less innovative it is but he's saying something really important which is that it's the financialization of the PNL that in some ways led to the decline of American manufacturing in part meaning if you're a CEO of a business and you construct your employment agreement and it's based on a certain kind of earnings in a certain period a certain earnings per share the incentive to then drive financialization goes up now the perfect example of this is if you compare it for example and you did this the comp package that you gave Elon in 2018 versus the comp package that any other CEO in America got it was completely black and white it was it was it was it was opposite land yes and you basically completely said you get nothing now let's set these extreme goals and then if you can hit it you'll get compensated so much so that you know when you had glass Lewis and ISS all right uh the the ISS class who said no but they used in most things and we're being sued for it so gotta be careful what I say about it but um yeah we had a comp package fully votes on equity appreciation right that required creation of new products and look I'm gonna I'll pick on Apple here Apple's the first stock I ever bought I was 12 years old my mom actually went to Ocamp Bank and bought me a few shares of Apple I still have it in my account to remind me what it takes to build a company Steve was terrible and look then you know Tim Cook takes over to the supply chain guy I mean they've really optimized profitability it's unbelievable you know you know two trillion dollar market or something now but man when's the last time they need a product AirPods AirPods yeah I mean pretty great great product great product but I mean incredible free cash flow yeah they could aggressively buy back their stuff yes it's a financialization of that company has attracted I mean if you look at the company if you can look at a the largest shareholder is the most sophisticated financial asset owner in the world Berkshire yes Berkshire doesn't buy technology companies they buy incredibly well-run financial assets and it is look at how duck's getting lambasted for the VR investment some might say that strategically it's not a great investment but he's saying it I'm going to spend 10 billion dollars a year no no no he he said it for a quarter and then he had to take it back and cancel it oh yeah they took it back yeah yeah but that's what he wanted to do um and so to your point like it's very hard to get a lot of money out of it and it's very hard to get a lot of money out of it it's hard to really build things now yes but it can be done and look I think one of the I am it what is happening in the world today geopolitically is tragic the war we experience Ukraine is absolutely tragic but from all tragedies come some some good things there's always a silver lining and one of the silver lines here I think should be the acceleration of reshoring of all these products into America to rebuild our industrial base because we actually can do it I can tell you I am started my career basically as a factory manager in California it can be done there are Americans who want to make stuff between here Mexico Canada we can make Pharma we can make high-tech products yes the price might be a little higher but I gotta tell you iteration could be better and your value will be better if the product is better people will pay for it and resiliency and resilient listen for 100 100 all right we uh are setting up a couple of microphones here Antonio has been gracious enough to join us for some Q a the audience is filled with entrepreneurs capital allocators artists and builders so we're going to put a couple of microphones out there hopefully we'll be able to get some of those microphones out there hopefully some lights on the microphones if I can see them line up and remember the rule we don't need to know about your company just a tight concise question anybody does any marketing or promotion we're all going to groan let's practice a ground three two oh no guard you can say your name you can say your favorite also wait before we start yeah if Chris is Chris Malloy okay uh everybody you guys may want to just know Chris whenever you're in Vegas uh Chris is the guy at Carbone in Las Vegas which is the most you know best restaurant reservation to get but Chris bought a bottle of wine for us that we can open now and drink while we do the AMA yeah oh well bring up a bottle of wine anyways that's Chris Malloy say hi to him get his number and text him if you're ever in Las Vegas I mean only Chamath would bring the captain of Carbone to our event oh create the drink let's drink some wine yeah that's fantastic all right first question tell us your favorite bestie and then yeah we're still doing favorite besties right your bestie and then a quick tight question go all right favorite bestie J Cal uh point guard of the century to this team so hats off to you um my question is first of all we've been here all week uh in the last three days watching these cards fall from the sky yeah and we all know that you guys Center around this poker table this beautiful game my question is how is that game influence both your relationships and decision making in business and your personal lives great question Chamath start us up and you can go to the back and the next person cue up how is poker influence a friendship our lives how is the poker game itself had an impact on our lives okay I think I really do believe this but I think it's the most incredible game and training ground for business because in any given moment you are forced to deal with the spectrum of good information to moderate information to bad information good outcomes moderate outcomes bad outcomes you're taking risk you're learning information you're adjusting your style and the most important thing is you're forced to anchor to your core values or not how you behave at the table is how you behave in life you know you can take this like a new Phil Muth yeah yeah you can take these wins poorly you can take these wins well you can take the losses poorly you can take the loss as well I I would encourage all of you to learn to play the game with your friends it's it's a beautiful beautiful start a weekly game sacks well they put the game at Chamath South is how I got to be friends with Chamath right I mean I'm just saying this is what you guys tell your wives while you stay up all night playing poker because I've been there with you guys it's pretty freaking degenerate yeah we're all holding hands exactly baby it's training it's training for business no it is famous I'm kidding you but I've been there I've been there I've been there I've seen the drinking the food too it is trading for business we're not degenerates but that's actually well I was just saying Chamath I mean didn't you invest in Yammer after I started playing in your weekly poker game yeah and it was actually so degenerate what really happened after that was I was in Las Vegas in 2011.

I had just left Facebook I moved to Vegas and I was on the phone with Sax in between playing tournaments and he like let me in invest in Yammer literally like and you know you did me an incredible solid because I put money in and you know what this is like nine months later he sells to Microsoft and I returned a third of my first fund oh yum yum and it really solidified my reputation so I mean I owe you a big one for that well but anyway I got to tell you about this though so David says I've known David for 25 years he did Yammer I want to put money in he said no because if this is a true story it's true story he said no he said he said no because if this fails you are my backup plan oh for a job yes well you know for me for me a job I wanted David to come join me I was so afraid of losing everyone's money when I founded a company you know he took a little time for me I wanted to have like one friend who's my head and I wanted to lose but you know that was the wrong way of thinking about it we should have we should have free Burke I mean how is the game well I'll look before Chamath are you leaving no I'm great no no wait come come back for a sec okay he'll get glasses he's getting one I'll tell you guys one thing Chamath is one of the most generous people you will ever meet it's unbelievable he's unbelievable and for all of his for all of his bluster about his friggin mink coats and like chinchilla uh he has brought together a group and he largely is the reason that I think the game grows and goes on and you saw some of the amazing people that we've had on stage here some of our friends are here that we play in our game with that um really that that Network has been built and solidified because of Chamath and his generosity and friendship that's it's it's really um something I've I've learned to appreciate in my life and you know thank you thanks yeah yeah I mean it's yeah it's a tremendous group and uh yeah amazing people like amazing people and yeah um the consistency of it has been amazing um from the degenerate Chamath had this like little tiny two million dollar house with like a one and a half car garage when he was at Facebook and we we would play in the garage that little tiny place you had remember yeah yeah um you know before you bought the two houses next door and knocked them down and you know gentrified but uh true story um Saks uh uh said hey you know you're doing these conferences you should invest in the companies and this is why I put the fix in for him to win TechCrunch 50 at Yammer with Yammer he said I have to win and then he his wife told my wife he has to win so then I basically got the whole jury to vote for him with Yammer he wins and he goes hey schmuck all of my success is due to J Cal you guys understand but he said listen I want to thank you for this and you should start a fund instead of doing all this work at the conference why don't you just invest in the companies I'll put 250k into your fund I'll be the anchor I said that's incredible really and he said yeah and then I went to the poker table I told the story and then Dave Goldberg rest in peace one of our great friends um and and certainly the the best amongst us thank you um he uh he said I'll put money into it thank you and uh he put money in and then Billy said I'll put money in and everybody said they put money in freeberg said I'll take a pass um but you know we'll put that aside anyway um I was all locked up in other stuff yeah he's like I got a kinwa farm I've got to take care of it cheers cheers cheers cheers cheers okay okay all right let me see fellowship and this is a true this is a true story uh Bill Lee's there uh he couldn't make it to here but he's one of our great friends and and one of Elon's best friends in the world and um he said of course I'm in um would you mind if I tell our billionaire friend um the the co-founder of um eBay Jeff Skoll and uh he tells him uh Jake how's doing a lot and you should do it I meet Jeff Skoll's money manager uh and uh Jan and I I said hey here's what I'm doing I'm a first-time fund manager I don't know what the I'm doing I'm a former journalist and he said how much is the fun I said 10 million he said I'll take half and I said I'm sorry and he said I'll take five million and that was the biggest check I ever got and it was because of Billy and literally that first fund uh was raised around the poker table in one night and uh that changed the trajectory of my career and that really is the Fellowship and it started with David and you hosting and I remember it's like yesterday and I I think maybe also a good moment to uh just maybe cheers to to Goldie oh yeah Dave Goldberg um no longer with and Tony Shag who played in the game as well two incredible men next question hey um my name is bovin favorite bestie is trimoth great to uh thank you last night um Antonio is also our people too so he's a passion all right listen we got your match invested quick with the question let's go yeah my main question is like when you guys actually decided to manage capital for people like what really was the scariest step in taking that leap and taking that risk I know a lot of you are GPs solo GP so I mean Zach you made a big leap what's the scariest step well I mean even as a founder like I mentioned before I was like so worried about losing people's money I mean that was like I mean I don't know if like founders today you know I don't know if like founders today you know you're they even care that much that just seems but uh it just seems like oh company didn't work move on to the next one um I mean maybe that'll change now that the environment's not gonna be as free flowing but I was always like really worried I was gonna lose people's money yeah and you know it was something I remember when I started social capital I think I was playing I'd be right I was either playing golf or I had dinner with Chase Coleman in New York and Chase says to me I'll tell you the one piece of advice Julian gave me when I started Tiger Robo I said what was that this is 2009 and he said this is a death sentence and I was like well what does that mean and he said you are the only person that's going to live with this because you're responsible especially based on who your LPs are for folks that if you really think about who they are it's just going to create this thing there and it's like you know and I was I was lucky in that moment because we were we were able to get like the Knight Foundation and Mayo Clinic and these folks that are doing these good works but then you're representing their capital it's heavy it's heavy because you make this decision yeah and if it's wrong you just feel literally like you're derelict and you're taking money away from sick children or you know free speech I mean it's it was a that's a brutally stressful thing to lose money on behalf of people by the way I'll recommend if any as a founder if you raise money raise money from your friends too and it'll really change how you operate yeah I mean I I raised the first fund from my friends and I tell you I took every single deal very seriously and I did my diligence and I was very thoughtful about it how about you Antonio oh man our first fund there are two fears I had the first one was raised from I live in Chicago from my friends in Chicago and I literally said to one of my partners at the time if this doesn't work I have to move I'll have to really do Chicago because in Chicago you might get killed if he's not looking back this is not like I thought you mean the weather no no no I mean these guys lose your money witness protection exactly these guys lose your money people kind of like oh I'm sad about it Chicago would like break your legs they burn your house down man it's a whole different a whole different thing all right let's take another question oh sorry no keep going no the second thing I mean honestly the worst thing for me the most scary thing for me was just the people I had I had three or four guys that worked with building companies before that and I knew if I just felt if I disappointed them if we failed um I would have felt terrible yeah yeah yeah it certainly makes you uh focus on the game it's like being staked in poker you play better uh sir I have a question for the 17th most important person from PayPal okay I'm just kidding obviously Friedberg is my favorite bestie um all right let's go out we've been let's go nerd unbelievable the free bird love all right free bird soak it in uh you've been talking about uh how all this increased money supply has been sending the asset prices up and now it's unwinding I don't think we've heard you talked about crypto specifically Bitcoin has obviously come down but it's still over three times uh where it was pre pandemic curious what you think will happen in that world as this unwinds you want me to dress up for you most important guy so the the thing the thing about the crypto market to understand is that it's like a liquidity sponge the more liquidity there is out there the more people feel empowered to make speculative investments and crypto is like the most speculative now that's not to say um you know it's not real I actually do believe in Bitcoin I think uh there'll be a number of other um sort of alt currencies that work but probably the vast majority will not and there's been a tremendous amount of speculation and inflation there and so that space is in the process of correcting you know I've never been able to say like what the right price levels for any of this stuff are um let's say you believe in Bitcoin long term let's say you believe it's going to be the first non-fiat currency what price should that be today you know it's it's there's no like discounted cash flow analysis you can apply to it so it's always been very hard to know what the prices of these things should be and so in practice the price is a function of how much liquidity is in the system and when you go through a period of liquidity getting destroyed it's no surprise that crypto goes first with it Antonio have you touched I mean you you were so into physical assets and building real things like spaceships and rocket ships when you watch this crypto bubble you know grow and burst and grow and burst and now it's burst again what's your take well first I want to I bought my first crypto scheme because David Sachs and Bill Lee were pushing the Ponzi scheme on me so they were like they were I was at a birthday party I think you probably were there too yeah they were like they were they were hawking Bitcoin so I bought something nobody had heard of it at that point I know I bought something I think it was like 800 bucks so here's my general view I actually think I think that Bitcoin in particular is a bet on a rising political risk and on political freedom economic freedom is uh is closer to political freedom and last time I looked Ukrainians are the third largest holders of Bitcoin and if I were to look at the rest of the world I would say that if I were staying in Taiwan today I would have 10 50 assets Bitcoin so this this removes um the ability to control currency capital controls from governments I think this is very important and it should survive price levels I don't know I do have a you know a reasonable amount of Bitcoin as a hedge to political risk globally and that's how we think about it we have invested in infrastructure assets in and around a blockchain with Dave we have a couple assets because we believe that blockchain itself is a platform shift in the technology of tracking assets this is a real thing and it's going to happen it's going to change the way we do finance so we invest in infrastructure got it let's take another question Ted is right Mike over there oh I'm sorry we're going to take one from here we'll alternate so um tight is right yeah hi uh car mantra CEO of credo um I have to say I'm a science nerd Friedberg but J Cal it's been awesome today um I and I want to say you guys like your courage and bravery to do what you've done with the pod and watching this today like thank you thank you yeah um you've talked a lot about later stage I'm wondering if you could like tune in a little bit more on on pre-seed and seed and kind of what you're seeing in terms of valuations and metrics that that you've got to hit in in the earlier stages it's very simple you know uh I invested in um uber thumbtack and calm for 15 million dollars combined that was their combined valuation post money post money and those all three companies had products in the market and then what we saw over the last five years is people wanting credit for a white paper a prototype an MVP to the tune of 15 to 50 million dollars and we did sit out some of those and said listen when the product is ready let's take a look at the product and talk to the first two or three customers to David's point about zero to one customers is a really hard hurdle and um now it's a little bit more complicated but I think it's a little bit more complicated than the current one so I think it's a little bit more complicated than the current one so I think it's a little bit more complicated than the current one so I think it's a little bit more complicated than the current one so I think it's back down to six to 15 million for a company that has a product in market and maybe 50 to 100 times yearly revenue for evaluation so to the extent you can get to 200k in yearly revenue you can get you know a 10 to 20 million dollar valuation so I'd say halfway back to normal and perhaps a permanent uh you know livable reset because the outcomes have been pretty fantastic so the early stage should go up the only thing you really need to raise money is to build a world-class product and just get a couple of customers who are absolutely blown away by what you've built that's all you need but everybody gets concerned with the Beatrix and the performative stuff and their Network and nonsense and who you are where you came from none of it matters build a world-class product that two or three people are obsessed with and you'll get the C check focus I think right if Brad Gerstner had uh sorry to interrupt your applause J Cal I know that's important to you um I'll take one little I can get so I think Brad Gerstner made a really important point on this which is the new normal is going to look like the old normal meaning the pre-covet normal we had the the the abnormal period was this two-year covet period where 10 trillion of liquidity is pumped into the system things are going back to what they look like before all of that happened and maybe before the fed started with this zero interest rate policy so we're actually getting back to normal understand that the the environment we're entering now is is the normality the abnormal period was the inflation we saw in assets over the past couple of years that's the like reset that everyone's gonna have to like wrap their heads around Sachs you're my boy finally finally one percent I I I think there may be some preference false falsification around this because people don't want to admit they're conservative all the polling all the polling shows this so but anyway thank you sir and your second favorite bestie is Tucker go uh for early stage SAS investors which most of you are in an increasingly digital world where are there are large SAS solutions for nearly everything how do you think about selecting companies and founders in the early stage that are coming to market with a small amount of utility and how do you think about they compete with companies with already established customer distribution yeah so I think you know one of the things I really like about SAS which is your software as a service basically B2B software it's business software okay that's sold as a subscription is that the world's never going to run out of new ideas for business software business keeps changing so therefore the software that businesses need will keep changing and there will always be an opportunity there for new companies new verticals new new niches they'll always be um you know new new ideas and so I'm never worried about running out in terms of how we evaluate the actual idea you know uh we've actually been super transparent around the metrics that we need to see it really does start with a company hitting the metrics hurdle that we need to see for for example a series A um you know it's a call it you're roughly more or less a million dollars of ARR you want to be growing 15 month over month certain net dollar retention certain capital efficiency we've all we've published it you know on our website on our blog so um it's it starts with that and then once we know that like our thresholds have been hit then we get into more qualitative or subjective factors like you know what do we think about this founder in this market um but one thing I like about it is just it's uh it's very well defined like what we're looking for and so you know just go to our blog you'll see we'll tell you exactly there's no mystery outside of productivity tools though there's not a single company that can stay in one category and become really big what does that mean um there's not a single public company that doesn't have now an entire strategy that says we sell it SMB mid-market and Enterprise and so the thing for SAS businesses unless you're like a really powerful productivity tool like a slack or an Atlassian your valuation capped in the mid to high single digit billions as as it currently stands today that's just the law of the math in the public markets on how you're rewarded though how do you grow out of it you have to embrace a strategy that actually does more where you become a system of record so it's a good example is like a zen desk they hit an upper bound you know there are many of these examples and so if you're building a SAS business or you're investing in this aspect is the other thing to think about is in the absence of being a productivity tool of which again there are a few um everything else has to find a way of being applicable to larger bodies over time in order to maintain valuation we're going to try and move faster so we can get more people another question here hi there guys uh favorite besties probably four-way tie but maybe chamath edges out just a bit okay um quick question tight is right so um you know you guys have done incredibly well so what what would you do if you're dropped in the middle of say Kansas take away the resource take away the network and take you back to age 25 what would you do and why Antonio take it I'm actually from Michigan I got dropped in the middle there with no resources and not a lot to do uh and I wasn't 25 I was in my early 20s um I would I would find a way to make it work man you should get you should actually whatever scale you want to start at whatever job you have I would try and start a little company there's always people and listen a place that grabs Michigan man you could cut grass I had a little computer company while I was 12 years old doing like networking for people in the old days I mean there's always something you can do if you had a valuable skill build a skill start a company and just get started start making money and you're gonna get a lot of money and you're gonna start moving and make good decisions along the way one good decision compounds on top of the other and all four of these guys what they have done in their careers is made very good decisions and they've kept moving when they've had problems you start early yeah you gotta start early they may I just want to tell you this they may look like super successful guys now and they are but it wasn't easy and it wasn't linear they've all had ups and downs they've all had problems and they all and they also do what they what they do and I have great respect for all four of them I know them all well they keep making good decisions they're highly resilient and they just keep going and I would tell you to the same thing yeah you got the only thing I'd add to that is to keep is to keep learning I'm getting some closer oh yeah you're good I haven't had any man I just got here um but I would just say keep learning as well like one of the biggest advantages I've had in my career is that I try to always learn as new stuff as often as I can and whenever I find an area of interest I pursue it in terms of deepening my understanding of it and and that's what I'm trying to do and I'm trying to do it in a way that's always created opportunities for me that I wouldn't have just stumbled across or walked my way it's such a great opportunity to have you here and Tony when I asked you to do this you had never been on a podcast before have you never done this kind of thing I've never done this kind of thing and um no it's awesome thanks I'm only doing it because it's a four of you and I am usually very private but I'm enjoying it incredible voice you know it's like very like very NPR it's like hey everybody you're listening to the politics and culture I'm Antonio gracias people tell me I have a voice for radio and pornography yeah yeah it works pretty well go hey guys I'm Samantha favorite bestie is Friedberg um I run the factory automation team for a large semiconductor manufacturer in the United States um really unimpressed with the innovation in industrial automation and so I'm really interested to hear your thoughts on where you see the next disruptions in automation um also maybe a question for Antonio where do you see uh the disruptor specifically in how we get not only the technology but the economies of scale uh for these really capital intensive businesses in the U.S this is your guy cancer yeah for sure and by the way you should talk about uh automation at I don't know if you want to but sure yeah yeah I mean we we know a lot of automation one of my partners is like a genius engineer in this area and you're particularly in the chip business you said right yeah so you know TSMC basically took the this idea of outsourcing manufacturing assets that Intel did with TSMC the beginning that created that business and moved most of our high technology and chips often offshore into Taiwan this is like a terrible idea and we I think as I said earlier in industrial policies country I think we need industrial policy to bring cheap manufacturing back it's very important and the problem you have in automation chip manufacturer particular is you know when you think about where all the great Engineers go today they're good automation they're not going there because they're competing TSMC so you have a you have a couple of info fabs still in the U.S but we have to have some Paul I think actually it's going to require industrial policy to force people like Intel AMD to want to bring stuff back into the U.S and to really get great talent to want to do it do you think there's opportunities outside of Greenfield models to kind of reinvigorate and unlock the capacity that we have in some of our older manufacturing here in the U.S yes I do I I look I the we at Tesla took over the free this Fremont factory was a former GM Toyota factory and you know we retooled it it was look we would have been we had to do it because we had any money and it was free basically um but if you if you took that approach and you got the you you got really great entrepreneurs to focus on this problem through an industrial policy they need money to do it I think you'd get great innovation look Nvidia is actually here in the U.S this is a rally this is a great chip company uh and the fabs they use are spread all over the world but if you gave Nvidia fab or two who knows what happens it was the right price yeah Jensen's a great CEO did you go to that site favorite bestie Jason you keep uh the ship together you're the glue that keeps it together uh my name is Chris my friend and I started all in talk nine months ago uh the fan page for the thank you cheers to you yeah it's uh it's really uh obviously I was I was at the outdoor mall near my house and my dog attacked another dog and the guy was like it's okay I saw you on TikTok so that was because of you but that wasn't your channel that was for his kin watch channel it wasn't your channel that was so my question is in the 22 2022 predictions uh episode Chamath you talk about uh all-in media idea and starting an all-in media channel maybe and I wonder if you guys have talked about that anymore your your goals for the future on that because I'm pretty sure everyone would agree here that if you did start one it would do a whole of a lot better than CNN plus so well that that may not be a very high bar yeah it's a very low bar uh I think we actually we actually did get together the four of us we sat in freeberg's office what a show people started yelling two people walked out the sacks sacks just started to do this at the table yeah I'm definitely a good driver my dad that's driving the driveway it wasn't a productive conversation it was completely unproductive it was completely that was our first and only meeting but no but we did take one key step which is that freeberg said I'm gonna get my team to draft the LLC agreement for the four of us which we refused to sign and but now no one signed it but it's in our trust free but it's in our inbox so we're one step closer to starting it but joking aside I still think that uh it'll become inevitable and I think the reason is the two people the robots non-humans that were uh uncomfortable with human interaction David's David's work uh once once we do the the recap of this I think it'll be they'll I think these two are probably the most shocked at that no I'll tell you by the way my observation I used to go to Ted I went to Ted from 2008 till 2019.

I stopped going to Ted because I thought the content went to and it basically got overtaken with like social justice talks and like you started like tech and interesting ideas about where the world's headed and like I listened to our speakers this week the last few days and I'm like man like really fantastic content I'm like this could be the new Ted so I got really invigorated by that like I really thought I felt like that was really messy and I think and by the way I think I think it's conversations people don't really seem to want to have right like and that and those are well make them really and let's just say you are not the earliest believer in this was going to get pulled off to I cannot tell you how many times I've considered quitting the pod and not even showing up for this event and I give Jason props publicly for doing a great job pulling this thing off so go go hey guys my name is Sarah and I really love all of you you got me through a very tough challenging time when I started listening to you I came here over a 16 hour flight from Abu Dhabi so thank you wow that's a long flight we love you we love you I have a comment and a question the comment um and maybe David um I have a lot of relatives in Sweden and um when the Ukraine war started this is uh very amiable innovative beautiful people um haven't had a war over 150 years and they were putting gas in their car and supplying cans of goods and got really really nervous about what's happening and we're watching closely to see what would be the next step I think if the U.S did not step in um so there's a lot of reality out there um for the U.S to stay I don't know like the Savior of the world in a certain way or another um Finnish people felt the same way um so this is a real big reality out in the Western European world not just Eastern Europe so um that's on my comment so thank you uh for the question and this comes from my husband uh if you're sitting on excess liquidity right now and want to invest for a long time was that a transition from World War III to investment advice stock tips stock tips in the market we want to say that is dynamic range right there yeah well done well done you want you've gone from two poles you know the ups and downs of my life so yes it is like that why don't we just take the first part because I think it'd be good so so on Ukraine you know I thought it was important to have this debate today where we got both sides of the issue and we got two people who are very passionate on both sides and um I tend to agree more with Glenn on it but um but that doesn't mean I I don't want to help Ukraine at all I just think we have to keep a close eye on preventing this thing from escalating into World War III because the Russians have six thousand nuclear weapons and their military doctrine says they can use them if they feel that they're existentially threatened and so you know if our objective here is to help the Ukrainians expel the Russians from an invasion that's one thing but if our objective if we have mission creep into destabilizing the Russian regime into basically trying to take back Crimea which they see as theirs um if our we're trying to weaken them to the point where they're no longer a great power we're really playing with fire there so we have to be really careful yeah about our objectives there and make sure that we don't let this thing spiral out of control Antonio what are you what do you have thoughts on Ukraine and are we being too dovish or hawkish or doing it just right so I think we are there's a lot more going on here than maybe to the eye and this question was about Sweden Finland and here's what I would say because I want to focus on that that if uh our our friends in particularly Northwestern Europe um should actually be arming themselves and if they arm themselves we won't have a problem with that because we're not going to be able to do anything we're going to have this problem that's the reality of it the reason Ukraine yes that's the reality obviously the time the time for sitting on the sidelines in Central Europe is over if you care about your country care about your children care about your families then you should arm yourselves period full stop an American we are happy to sell you weapons no problem with it without NATO I think that's true the reason Ukrainians are able to uh defend themselves is because they are they have actually been buying weapons and they bought they built their own weapons with the Turks that the the drones that are being used to destroy the Russian supply lines are not coming from America coming from a joint venture with the Turks this is the reality so should we be drawn into a war into Europe no I think it could start World War III should we help these folks defend themselves yes I should and in your particular part of the world yeah for sure start buying some weapons one question over here yeah tough to follow but my name is Ioana favorite bestie I think Friedberg I think you do a good job of being heard and hearing others equally so I think that's an important skill I'm trying to work on it myself Friedberg in terms of my question it's a little more qualitative but some of us were having an interesting discussion about first impressions last night and I'm curious to think one in terms of your own first impressions how has your the way that you introduce yourself to others changed as you've grown and what have you learned about that and on the other end what are some of the most notable first impressions others have made on you and why have those stood out to you it's an interesting question well seeing as only two of us have emotions maybe we can yeah we're gonna chop it out sure I'm gonna go to the bathroom you won't find any emotions there turn the mic off please the quinoa oh my God oh my Lord well that Baba ganush goes right through you continue Baba gonna I think that when I was younger um I was more insecure so I had to wear what few labels I had on my sleeve and use them as a weapon before others could use their labels on me I honestly felt that way you know and in Silicon Valley at the time you know it really there is a very monocultural aspect of you know folks from a few schools you know folks having worked at a few companies um and I had neither you know I worked I went to Waterloo which is in Canada and I worked at AOL so I didn't go to Stanford and I didn't work at Google um or Yahoo and there was a there's a great lineage and of of where you know the really credentialed credible folks came from and so you do what any insecure person does you kind of throw what few things you have out there very quickly yeah you know trying to one up the person in front of you yeah and that's calmed down a lot so that's probably the biggest thing that's changed it has and I think it's a I have a similar observation I when I was taking that R train into Manhattan I used to say to myself Jason calacanis editor-in-chief Jason calacanis millionaire and I was like literally had a 16-page photocopy magazine called Silicon High reporter and I was trying to convince myself that someday I would be somebody and I think that narrative was important for me and people when I would give them the 16-page photocopy I'd say here's my magazine they'd say there's a photocopy I'd say no it's a magazine it's got a picture on the cover because for me that was that why it was a magazine and it eventually became a very large magazine in fact of 300 pages and today thank you um so I think there is something about manifesting stuff and just you know believing that you're going to get there but today I I define myself by um the things I love to do so when people do ask me now hey what do you do I say I'm a writer and I have a podcast and I angel invest and I don't say it's the number one podcast or I'm one of the top Angel investor all the time I just I just think about what I don't say that and I don't say you know like it's the you know the book is in 11 languages or whatever I got a million dollar Advance I just there's no ego about it I just say writer podcaster Angel okay how did it go in there okay David you okay what sort of advance are you getting a million dollars dollars he said a million dollar Advance I mean the book's in 12 languages now thank you I'll sign it if you have one I'll sign it next question sometimes I think Jason's just pimping out all of us to fuel his media career yeah you think sometimes hey David all honesty how is the deal flow gone since you got this podcast I think it's down 50 percent that was the intent that was the intent of more deal flow coming this way definitely definitely definitely definitely 100 that's since you went on Tucker go hi today the crypto world is focused on decentralization speculation and stores of value who here is excited about micro payments and whoever is most excited which Industries do you think will be most impacted by the newfound ability to send payments in as little as 100th of a penny go ahead oh favorite bestie they want to take it yeah good sex um so you know this question of micro payments has come up all the way since you were back to when I was working on PayPal and one of the problems with micro payments is as the name suggests the amounts are very very small so you have to do a lot of them to create enough volume for them to be meaningful and so there's always sort of this market size problem now for crypto there may be more of an opportunity there because um the way that the old credit card Rails Network works is there's like a 25 cent charge per transaction and so like a PayPal it just didn't make sense to facilitate micro payments and so I think that's a really good question and I think that's a really good question and I think that's a really good question and I think that's a really good question because the cost of that transaction always exceeded the fee that we could get so you're right that or I think what you're suggesting with your question is that there is sort of a crypto opportunity to do this in a different way because you can basically do a costless instantaneous transfer using a blockchain based currency so I'm sure someone's going to do something interesting with that and then the question is just how like what does that aggregate into is it is it going to be big enough to be by the way there's a there's an interim step which is also pretty obvious at least to me which is this idea that you know for example like if stripe actually took the time to embrace one of these stable coins there's no reason why stripe needs to actually run on interchange as well because like you can just basically swap that dollar in a ledger into USDC let's just pick that as an example not tether not to tilt you um running on those rails for free and then you can just swap that dollar in a ledger into USDC let's just pick that as an example not tether not to tilt you running on those rails for free and that's the way it works and then basically transfer it back and it's it's not it's not obvious why people you need the gas cost to come down so you know like you're running a transaction on ethereum or certainly Bitcoin other chains yeah yeah you need you need like a chain like a salon or something like something that's like super cheap and the the cognitive load of the transaction just the person deciding do they want to pay a tenth of a penny a penny is sometimes greater than the actual value of the money which then creates um almost like friction to them wanting to read the article let's take another question hi my name is Kate and my favorite bestie right now is Friedberg who often plays devil's advocate and so forces a stepwise conversation how many people did you pay off go ahead so that we all admire your successes but we've also been hearing from Mar for instance that we need to be comfortable with failure and we need to become resilient so when you look back on your careers thus far what have been the toughest moments the moments when you've made a mistake that have taught you a lot I mean I had two huge and Antonio must have some too yeah you want mistakes my mistakes that you'll learn the most from man um my biggest mistakes in life have been about people and I have uh over the years um made errors in in judging people and how honest they were and how good they were and as I look back on that it's because I have a weakness for ideas that are great and sometimes those come with great people and sometimes they don't the reality is there are some bad people out there who are acting really great and doing interesting things and we have um we've suffered from that I mean I know David and I were to deal together that suffered from that and it happens so I I would be I've learned a lot about that I've gone deep into neuroscience actually have a stat we have a woman who's got a PhD in the neuroscience of emotion Caltech now on staff that helps us uh learn as you said always learning about how to assess people and how to assess their emotional states that's the most important thing I think we've updated in our process and in my own thinking so you love the idea so much that you ignore other you ignored the other data that this person was not honorable truthful no I mean so there are times when uh there are two kinds of of this errors here one type of error is we just didn't see it because the person was so good at being bad they are you know one of the things a neuroscientist taught us is that about five percent of the human population has a brain anomaly that make them actual psychopaths defined as the the big doesn't fire properly when they do something bad guilt fear Etc and in our particular industry it's probably like 10 so we raised our base rate forecast at 10 and it's gotten better but there's something that's so good at it you just can't see it I mean Theranos Elizabeth Holmes okay like lots of smart people pointing that company didn't but it was it wasn't obvious to them obviously then there are then there are moments earlier on when we had yellow flags we overrode because we were so emotionally committed to the idea that we want we had a business we did was in the dental space was it was Medicaid dental cleanse for kids that were black and Hispanic and I'm you know I'm from that demographic and I wanted to make that great and the reality is we overrode yellow lights because we wanted to make it great and we failed you were going to add some of your I had two huge filters but they were they were more personal moments of learning for me one was you know we were in the midst of building a phone and it didn't come to pass and if I really think about what I thought the problem was this was when I was at Facebook what the problem then versus now then you know I would have said oh zuck and I had a huge kind of you know thing and blah blah now what I would have said is you know I didn't really understand my own limitations and what I was really asking of him in the board in that moment and then the second is there were all these moments that were people decisions um at social capital that ultimately manifested in sub quality financial and investment decisions and had I had it to do over again I would not have ignored some of the red flags because I was so desirous to be in the game to you know be in it that uh I probably you know look the other way a little bit on folks that you know just give you the practical example I remember in a 300 million dollar fund I put 25 or 30 million dollars into Bitcoin at 50 bucks a coin and when the thing went to like 150 or something just the pressure to distribute was so high and I had conviction I had all of these things I had all the voting control I had everything to just say no and I didn't have the courage to understand my role as a leader versus something you know my job as a investment partner um and so you learn you know you learn what you're good at you learn where your strengths are and uh you try to just get better try to fix those weaknesses I mean at the end of the day what we're both saying is the same thing which is ultimately it has nothing to do with anybody else it still comes back to you and what your skill set is in your toolbox and whether you're upgrading your toolbox everything free bird sacks any mistakes that you're able to access through your CPUs in your long-term storage well I think as you get older you learn how to pick your battles better and you just have to decide like what are the occasions that are really worth fighting for which aren't you know and sometimes you just let it go and others you have to fight so and just knowing when you should choose which path I think is really important when you were by the way the guy you really want behind you in a battle is this guy so phenomenal uh investor back when I was on the founder side of the table so good brawler yeah for sure that's why I got him a samurai sword for me a sword for his birthday he did yes a samurai the collection of Samurai Surgeon saw my apartment started with David Sachs and Samurai Sword ah yeah thank you David too what's your kids trying to play with it or something it was not a toy yes not a toy Friedberg uh anything in that long-term storage tape drives of uh I've made a lot of mistakes um it's really hard I I'm very hard on myself um when I was young I always said there's no limit and I always believe that and when I hit walls in my life it was very um very difficult because it totally countered what I what I felt was possible I always thought everything was going to be a success there's no way I'm gonna let anything fail there's no way I'm gonna let anything not work my voice is cracking not because I'm crying because I'm losing my voice so um we know it's all you need if you cry now there that everybody's gonna be please now it's all for the vote it's all for the vote he actually does have emotions see but I would say um he's smart and kind yeah and a vegan yeah he's perfect the biggest mistake I made he's my dream boyfriend maybe coming on the stage was the biggest mistake I've made joining the pop oh man but I think Antonio's point is right uh you know um you just have to be willing to to learn and um and evolve it's uh you know I I now know that my life isn't about everything I do has to work 100 of the time um and being so hard on myself caused a lot of like emotional challenges for me over time but getting um getting to this point where I can now be much more calculated um and just move forward quickly and learn from it um has been a big evolution for me um that's just a general statement yeah and I would oh sorry well no it's okay I just uh I would I was thinking about it while these guys were being so candid and I was immediately going to punt and go to the next question but I thought that would be unfair um you know I think two things one I think a lot of my decision making early on was out of fear uh fear of losing whatever I had gained up until that point so although I was a risk taker and I was being bold in one way I was also throttling myself because I was just so scared that I would lose whatever gains that I had gained as I had and it it made me an imperfect manager of people an imperfect person maybe on edge a little too much and maybe not picking my battles to David's point ever I saw everything as a battle because those wins were so important to me because they were so hard fought and then I think later in my life I realized I never actually thought about what I enjoyed I just thought about winning to an extent that was not healthy and then after Dave Goldberg died and Tony Shea died I really took a self-assessment of what I enjoyed doing and I mentioned this yesterday you know hanging out with these gentlemen and and to Antonio's way of phrasing it which is just beautiful the fellowship I thought that's the joy you know my family my kids my wife and this Fellowship with my friends that I wanted to invest in and I made a deliberate effort to be a better friend a better parent a better husband uh and because of all the gains I got from that and the joy that I got from it and and I just thought a little bit God I do like those conversations I do like writing the book do like throwing the events I'm just going to do things I enjoy which took me 30 years in my career to actually assess what is it that I like and maybe I should enjoy the journey a little bit more so I think it's a great question I appreciate it let's take one more thank you enjoy the journey hi besties my name is Aria I was the third or fourth employee at DoorDash and my question is regarding oh sorry my favorite bestie yeah that was a joke by the way my favorite besties Chamath and Saks although it's honestly Sophie's choice um my questions regarding the positive impact that Silicon Valley could have on the political discourse and politics which I know you know there's typically an aversion to in tech um you know you all have done a fantastic job outlining what those problems are as well as your guests what I'm wondering is what a viable path forward looks like you know Chamath you mentioned that people in DC pay close attention to the podcast Saks has recently endorsed Michael Schellenberger which I really hope can save our home state and I'm wondering is is the solution something akin to a third party like what Andrew Yang is trying to do or some new I don't know Silicon Valley techno party or you know is there is you know what does that look like I'm curious well I don't think it's set up to actually have a third party structurally in America so what you have to do practically speaking is field more centrist normal people on both sides whether they're Republicans or Democrats that's a practical thing that we can all do and then we can all show up and vote for those people so that the the majority voice is much clearer than it is today because right now the fringes a little bit get to hijack the process and so we take things that are that should be common sense and we pervert them in a way that just makes no progress possible um I really do think that we have that impact uh I'm not sure how much can be of that can be quantified but when I spend time in DC I think it's true what I was told and what I've heard from people it's basically required listening or viewing it helps shapes people's opinions it doesn't mean they follow it but I think it helps people think about things in a more normal way I think what happened today is like a perfect example like the way that Glenn Greenwald and Antonio Garcia Martinez debate like that's probably for some of you was really unsettling maybe raise your hand if you were just like you felt awkward honestly just be honest with you okay well you shouldn't because that's normal my point is it helps you make it seem more normal because those guys were not saying to each other that you're worthless and you're not they were just debating by the way we went out for a beer after that yeah this is my point so the three of us I was like okay we need to like go out and get a drink and cool down so I'm not chastising you for feeling that way I'm just saying this is what the culture does to folks it makes you even afraid to hear people debate things and still have respect for each other the way that he and Palmer kind of dealt with that wasn't that's incredible the courage that Palmer had to say what he did and then for him to be the first guy to walk out and then to own that that's a I think those are really important moments and you have you you have 700 more people capable of being that way because of what just happened so yeah I think it's a slow March but I think we're we're doing we're right we're riding a small dent in a small way 20 years ago every political show on TV was a debate format like going all the way back to Willie Buckley versus Gore Vidal or Pat Buchanan versus Michael Kinsey on Crossfire I mean they were all debates now like none of them are debates it's all just their own little echo chambers I think it's one of the reasons why this pod is successful is we actually can have debates and there is a divergence of views what do you think Antonio is there is there some you ever listen to this pod um I I was on one once dancing in the background oh that's right yes thank you dancing up here yeah he did dance behind him I recorded an episode from his house yeah um well I mean you look at politics any interest there any any any um you know behind the scenes work you've done and how do you think about it just as we get into as Gen Xers boomers are going away I mean we're going to kind of inherit this whether we like it or not yes I would say a couple things first um whenever you have times you look historically I think it's important contextualize this when you have moments of of large technological change you always have political struggles political disruption because the means of communication have changed this the Gutenberg press the tall ship and you just go back and look it always leads to a lot of disruption and often to war and so the question of are those of us who are technologists at the top of the system do have a responsibility to steward this technology responsibly we absolutely do I believe we do and I think that has been forgotten that's number one number two I have been involved in campaigns um and it's interesting right now what I'm doing is supporting any centrist candidate that I think is good on either side of the aisle I'm a registered Democrat I support Democrats for most of my life but the reality is now all I care about is sensible people that I think are really good and I'm engaging in micro targeting efforts across the spectrum in in primary races I would encourage all of you and anyone up here who cares about the American book system to engage in the primaries because the primaries are what determines the quality of the candidates that actually are up for election and they're actually decided by very few people yeah like how many of us actually voted in the primary like very few of you very few of you okay so rather than us just complain about the divisiveness of American politics next time please go vote in a primary and go vote for the center's candidate but by the way did I hear a lot of support for Michael schellenberger out there let's have him on the pod maybe yeah hi favorite bus is chamath I I heard you speak with Vinod Khosla at Hackton North at the University of Waterloo so my question is Amar talked about these like startup journey systems like Stanford or PayPal do you see like over the pandemic do you see any like remote or distributed systems that have like appeared or do you see any like building that are not just centered in one geographical location really honest I'm not a huge believer in this whole decentralized work movement I don't think any high quality work can get done um on on on difficult problems so I think that there are types of products and types of problems that can be solved in a remote way certain forms of software for certain kinds of products but for example let's just say you're trying to engineer you know a a pharma drug I don't believe that unless you're sitting there collaborating talking debating you can do that necessarily over a over a zoom if you're trying to build something physical you know we have a business that 3D Prince rockets those guys can't do that by just you know zooming around and having a couple calls that doesn't happen so I I think it's too premature to kind of say working together has no value I also think there's a huge cultural divide that will get created in America between these companies that come together and the companies that don't and I think that the ones that come together have a chance of having more empathy in the end because there are moments where you can actually get to know the people you're working with every day and I think that that gives you margin for error because everybody sometimes is a little you know dealing with their own things in their lives sometimes can be a little rude and we all have tolerances those tolerances are higher when you spend time with people and they're much much lower when you're just in a zoom so I'm you know I I'd love to believe that everybody's gonna be Airbnb-ing in a castle and a tent in a tree house but I'm just not sure that that's realistic to really solve the big problems that America has you believe in the work from home Antonio or you have a strong feeling one way or the other um I I'm more on Chivas Camp than not but I will say we have some great companies are fully remote um we've become a coalition example in cyber security it's fully remote run by wonderful CEOs under the age of 35 and he's found a way to make it work and I've learned a lot from him and so I'm trying to be very open algorithm about this and I think there are people who make it work who can't work I can't make it work I want my people in the office we invest in Pharma we invest in biotech and we have some biotech companies that have made it work remotely and some that insist on bringing back people back if you're in a lab obviously you have feedback but it I think there'll be a mixed environment and I also think there's an interesting retooling going on in productivity I think the productivity numbers in American that we're seeing today are wrong because they're not capturing what's happening underneath the technology because these remote environments so I don't know yet I think it's gonna depend on the CEO and how good people are and the type of industry you're in yeah I'm keeping an open mind towards it I know that for investing it was so much more efficient you know people could do 20 minute zooms instead of two hour meetings but I mean think of the problem that that created look at the overhang when you could raise tens of billions of dollars over Zoom that turned out to not be a good thing well and but also if you're a capital allocator being able to meet with three times as many people you could find more companies my point so I talked to a friend who raised billions of dollars over the last couple year cycle and he said I was able to raise 50 million dollar checks in 30 minute meetings now spending five hours for a 10 million dollar check and my reaction to him in the back of my mind was that's probably how it should be well part of that's the quarter that makes the entire system a little bit healthier yeah I mean we we raised 1.7 of our fund during covet and it was all done doing Zoom raising new fun now and I'm flying around the world taking meetings but part of that just because people are coming back the opposite and liquidity cycle has gotten is reversed on us now right so the denominator has gotten it's got a hard to get capital but for sure I think I agree with you Matthew you're like being able to allocate 10 million dollars in a venture fund in two years over Zoom and and think that's on just the metrics and not see people I think that's a bad idea yeah I'm talking about 250k 500.

yeah that's probably okay might be okay take another question here my name is Kenneth Brown III and my favorite bestie is J Cal the charisma is legendary um he's my favorite bestie too by the way don't be offended my question is what advice would you give to non-technical people trying to fit into the tech oriented startup Venture World I'm an econ major but this just seems exciting like how do I become a part of it and Tony have thoughts and I I think that the um the best way to do this is to find a company you think is great and get a job that's a reality I mean I would just I would associate myself with the business that I really respect you'll respect and if the job is in the classroom the Bob is the job as a janitor whatever just figure it out because what happens to high growth companies is they need good people and you'll be surprised how much being the first person in and the last person to leave if there's an office and doing the work that he will ask you do with a smile and a great attitude like those people they move up fast so I would just find a way in man wherever it is however it is make it happen and start moving up I can't by the way you're you're not you're not non-technical you're not yet technical and I think that's the opportunity that sits in front of everyone that you can become technical I had a my fam a cousin who was a music major UCLA worked in music and then he came back from covid and he started learning how to program online taught himself spent six months in his parents basement teaching himself how to retool his life and got some contract jobs on Reddit and boards and other stuff and he got this amazing full-time job offer a few weeks ago and it was really amazing that I got to watch him transform himself in his life over the last year and a half just by taking that on himself and he became technical it wasn't that he had a non-technical degree it said he just wasn't yet technical and I think everyone has that opportunity I'll tell you I'll tell you a great quick story he's a minority guy grew up in Houston um really wanted to work at Tesla couldn't get a job couldn't get a job couldn't get a job finally got a job on the line he was making 16 20 bucks an hour worked there did well transferred worked there did well transferred effort ends up in the supply chain group ends up working in battery supply chain ends up basically being two layers between him and Elon gets into an MBA goes there for a few years uh works on the side uh and he ended up raising a bunch of money to start a battery business recently and this is an example of what he just said which is you know there are these jobs available and then it's just you know is your chutzpah and your hustle and he's an example but it's a very motivating example to me because it just shows it's so possible you know and these there are phenomenal organizations that identify talent and will move you up really quickly and knowledge is literally free and experience is up to you yeah the the overriding I think advice you're getting here is that skills are acquirable and my Lord getting to 50 60 proficiency on a skill just given what's on YouTube or MIT open course where any number of websites you can do it in a couple of weeks and now of course going from 60 70 70 to 80 that might take months and then eventually years but startups are looking for generalists they're looking for people who can say I I need somebody who's going to do the accounting and figure out how to do an email merge and build a mailing list and then I need somebody to help with recruiting if you can just become 30 40 50 percent as you know good at each of those things at a startup you know before people get specialized eventually you'll have 10 people doing recruiting but in the beginning it's one third of somebody's job so I love startups for the sign of a great culture of a company is how little the obvious labels matter once you're inside of it and the best companies like a Tesla can become a trillion dollar market cap because they find the kid working on the line and then four years later is running the battery supply chain how does that happen it happens because you're looking at the quality of the individual and their potential where they went to school doesn't matter their gender doesn't matter their ethnicity doesn't matter none of it matters because the people don't see it they see work ethic they see results yeah they see effort they see integrity so that's another litmus test for you is like in the companies even if you're a CEO and if you're building if every other day you're reminding everybody else of like where people need to have gone to school and where they should have been that's a road to nowhere let's give Antonio a big round of applause very nice okay thank you thank you so much thank you very much I appreciate it thank you next question thank you guys over here yeah um Sunny we kept it Tony here for like two hours I know I feel bad he's like I've never been on a show before meeting he's like all right we're gonna just take 14 to 20 more questions go Sunny Lama here um Chamath's my favorite bestie yeah there you go huh because of him I hope you there a little dry spell huh because of him I shop at Laura Piana only so thank you so I just got a question um for Friedberg I know that you wanted to talk about this yesterday about this sort of uh consumer credit crisis on the Horizon that you see as potentially like the next shoe to drop so um I think you wanted to mention something yesterday about it but because of time and stuff I don't have anything more to add than what I said on the pot I'm not like I'm not gonna be able to answer that question but I'm gonna be able to answer that question but I'm not like I don't think this is like a high certainty I'm just concerned there's a lot of loans out there a lot of buy now pay later a lot of stuff that has floating rates attached to it if we're gonna have a recession we're gonna see job loss you're gonna see these um and by the way these auto loan portfolios have like crazy outperformed over the last few years and now that these and a lot of those auto loans are floating rate um those asset values are inflated people are losing jobs you could see a bunch of these things start to create a bit of a cascading effect over the next couple of quarters depending on how this all goes um so I I'm not I'm not going to put my foot down on the ground and say oh my God consumer credit bubble we're totally it's going to lead to the great next great recession um but I do think it's going to be pretty kind of surprising buy now pay later I saw stat I don't know if you guys saw this this week on how a lot of the people that are going on buy now pay later sites are actually maxed out on their credit cards and so they're actually fully credited out and then all the smart algorithms are like oh yeah you're a good credit risk like here's $1,800 lightning round five questions and we're done one bestie will answer its question go cool uh Dave free burger my favorite bestie uh what problem do you most want to solve right now oh binary lifters actually uh edible quinoa actually I've been working on the so look I I've spoken about this publicly I think it's a big problem I was going to talk about it in the talk that we scrapped but I'll do it another time um which is really the opportunity for biomanufacturing as a way to replace a lot of traditional food systems including all of AG all of animal agriculture and a lot of the systems that we use to basically make our food um it's a it's a big infrastructure play you know a couple square miles you know using Elon's analogy you could basically recreate all the food on Earth you could distribute those systems um and and so I I think that it can be extremely carbon negative it sucks carbon out of the atmosphere um it would create incredible jobs it's an incredible infrastructure opportunity it would return billions of acres of land back to kind of you know whatever form natural form we want them to be so that's an area that I'm spending a lot of time in and that I'm particularly uh excited about awesome thank you okay number two hi there I'm Katie Croft nice to meet you all imagine a parallel timeline where I say you're all my favorite because it's all true so I'm curious kind of an extension of the media question have you given much thought to forming a consortium community um with the all-in podcast and kind of what further applications of that because if you think about the force multiplicity of like any number of these minds in the same room working towards the problems we've talked about from education to on-shoring energy it could probably be pretty considerable the impact there because we have such respect for what you guys do and how you're doing it and the discourse you're having that you know we're clearly all diehards here so I'm just curious if you thought about it I'm kind of trying to inception you here you want to take a look at it yeah I think so I mean this is a ton of work um but I think it is and we all have day jobs um you know step one was to try to just see and I told I told the best is let's just see if we can each make uh um getting to the pot each week a priority and a habit and and that took the first year or so so now it is a habit we all value doing this it has had tremendous impact on our lives personally professionally it's been very inspiring for each of us so we had to lock into that first doing this you know uh was a ton of work and we'll see if it's sustainable and we have some other ideas we wanted to do a college tour was the other thing we were considering which would be like 3 000 seats or 4 000 seats and just an episode of the pot in Q a so I think that could be the next card to fall um and then maybe hiring Tim Urban and uh Nate Silver and then having them build a media company to take on CNN um but you know we haven't really given it much thought but you never know they were here totally randomly they were here totally we're not recruiting or anything but um you know anything's possible hi besties again I'm rejoice I run a talent Marketplace for early entry workers we use gamification to accelerate remember just yes I just the question is about the great resignation which we believe is a half-told narrative so how can small businesses which are most sole proprietors democratize their own labor supply and demand wow um I think that's a very difficult problem to solve um I think again if as a supporter of capitalism I think one of the biggest things that we don't get right is how money gets to the right problems I've said this roughly before but like money is really just a voting way of deciding what you think is important in the world and that's why the accumulation of money as just a practical matter forget moral or physical philosophical is so important because you can vote what you want the thing is that aggregation happens easily distribution is terribly broken and so the ability for folks to solve practical problems is very hard because the ROI isn't obvious and getting money from capital pools like us to individuals and sole proprietors is a basic I think it is a very broken problem a because the system zone exists B because the laws don't allow it and until that gets solved it's not going to be a problem it's going to be a problem because the system zone exists B because the laws don't allow it and until that gets solved it's not going to be a problem because the system zone exists B because the laws don't allow it and until that gets solved it's not going to be a problem because the system zone exists B because the laws don't allow it and until that gets solved it's not going to be a problem and until that gets solved I'm not exactly sure how a business who can actually like build for the future well or solve their supply forecast or demand forecast can actually get the capital you need because the lubricant that allows you to solve that problem is money has always been will always be but getting it to those people is legally hard and it's organizationally impractical um I don't know if you saw the last spot I mentioned this thing we tried this thing called capital as a service it doesn't get to the sole proprietor level but it gets to like small five to ten percent companies we would send fifty hundred thousand dollar checks here's how hard it is the cost of getting a fifty thousand dollar check we did this uh fishery in Indonesia it cost us a hundred and twenty five thousand to give them fifty thousand we still did it because I just wanted to prove the point they ended up tripling our money so we barely kind of like broke even um but it just goes to show you how really complicated in the system okay fourth question and then one more question and then one more after that hey I'm Prem as a Waterloo poker player favorite besties Chamath uh I'm very in into next-gen manufacturing but as a pre-seed investor my concern is follow-on financing how do we get more investors interested in investing in the physical world because at least in Canada it seems like most investors only want to invest in software no I think I think this is what I'm saying I think there's a very broken part of the capitalism right now which is that technology investors by and large and I don't mean to disparage anyone here are not well rooted in the principles of math and Finance and I think that that's a real problem because in a moment like this that is where you can actually make safe investments of capital you can structure the money in so that you are capital protected you have assets to back these things and the reason why folks don't do it is they don't understand how to put together a model to demonstrate it and then the person that is then receiving that information is unfortunately not as well instructed as they should be to understand how to make a decision from that that's what we have today so it's a it's a little bit of a miseducation problem and it's going to affect the non-sexy areas rockets will always get money but like 3D manufacturing at sale at scale may not because of this exact issue because people don't know what roik means sir you have the final question favorite bestie is uh Friedberg and hate in on a recession question fucking Christ oh but never asking that question again why do you guys why let me ask why do you guys think it upsets you so much like well because you're the biggest pain in the ass you are the most fucking neurotic person every time we post an episode we should cancel the episode we fucked everything up again why do we keep screwing up we're gonna destroy the I read this first comments and the down vote rate I was on YouTube somebody sent the the volume keep going but go ahead the amount of noise we deal with from this one they're not gonna stop it's like literally he does not reward him it's like his inner monologue is crazy you know if you had a two-year-old child who you've given too much candy to is okay can you shut him up please yeah unbelievable this is right it's Phil Deutsch everyone yeah yeah all right so it seems like a common theme on the stage these last couple days is you all feel like we're in a recession or heading towards a recession but I get the feeling that you have the confidence that this is gonna be a quick recession like a year so my question would be why do you feel after 13 years of Market manipulation by the Fed that is going to be cured in under a year no I think you're right the average recession has measured like if you look back historically is two quarters um the problem is that we've never really figured out what it's going to take with the distortion of money that never should have been in the system because if you think of a supply demand imbalance as being a naturally self-balancing phenomenon if you perturb one side of it by an enormous amount exactly to your point I think the open question that the world has right now is is that really a two-quarter problem well the Fed has told you that they're going to take three years to get three trillion you've heard from David that 10 trillion was put in probably another three or four trillion was productively used but that still leaves another three trillion of sloshing around in money that we don't know so I think it's an open question I don't know what you guys think how many months how many quarters sacks how many quarters if you had to guess again I just hate this definition of recession where it's about GDP decline when we had a lot of the underlyings in those numbers for GDP that I feel were like artificially inflated for a couple of quarters because of a bunch of the structural stuff we've talked about so I don't know like if you look deeper at economic growth companies signing up more customers so like a lot of technology companies are about increasing productivity with their tools with their products and so I think that's what they're with what they're selling and um those businesses are are going to continue to to do well and to grow and to increase customers increase revenue um and I don't think that there is necessarily a lot of the structural stuff that we saw with the GFC the one thing I am concerned about which I've highlighted is this consumer credit risk and besides that it seems like you know things are um you know on good footing so I don't know like the the technical recession definition probably a couple quarters yeah um I I you never know and I I think the best way to to look at the future is by doing scenario planning so we basically we could say this could be a you know short medium or long recession short would be six months medium might be 18 months and you know long might be two years plus and we just say I don't know say one third one third one third probability and that kind of gives you some picture exactly um so now what we're telling our portfolio companies is you want to have two and a half years of runway right now because you got to go raise six months before you run out of cash and you really want to have two years of cushion because things could be choppy for two years I'm not saying they're gonna be but they could be you don't want your company to run out of money and die just because of macroeconomic conditions that are no fault of your own so if you can try to engineer that amount of runway that's better I also think that here's the thing about a quick recession is or the prospect for one we don't know what other shoes are going to drop consumer credit is still a shoe that we don't know if it's going to drop look six months ago did we think we be talking about Tiger Global or softbank for that matter potentially teetering on the verge of being white town yeah redempted out of or coinbase and peloton just so things are right things can change fast we don't know what systemic risk is in the system that hasn't been flushed out yet and I we won't be out of this until it feels like everything's been flushed out and then the market's back and things are sort of an upward trajectory again clearly we're not there or real estate crypto it doesn't feel like that's rushed out yet either so do we have a clip to play as an outro I don't know is this uh was this the clip of the the cut clip before before we go can we please say thanks to the yeah we're gonna have that works here yeah and the team Jason your team at all incredible thanks to everybody all of you guys have worked so hard and they really put a lot of effort into this pretty incredible I guess this is a lost clip of us uh from last week you did not have like uh Dungeons and Dragons sleepovers in grade seven and grade eight I was actually programming Pascal and we made a water moisturizer and it was a binary lifter much like the ones you have on Tatooine a complete replica of Uncle Owen's water vaporizers on Tatooine and that took six years but it was great and then I went hilariously as c-3po I went to see three P.O to our science fair you should have seen the look on our teachers faces okay you guys have your cold open let's go let your winners ride brain man David and it said we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy Queen of Kinwa foreign Thanks for watching!

Thank you. Thanks for watching.