SPEAKER_00: Bill Gates published a 6,000-word essay today called The Turbulent AI Era Is Here. AI will, quote, either be the greatest equalizer ever invented or the worst source of injustice, and that right now, quote, there is no plan.

David Sacks: Some jobs are probably going to go permanently, go away.

SPEAKER_05: Humans just kind of sort of get in the way. It is probably like a real thing. I trust tech more than I trust government.

SPEAKER_10: Every time somebody really adopts these tools inside of my firm, three or four new opportunities open up for our company.

SPEAKER_12: All right, everybody, welcome back to This Week in Startup Slash, This Week in VC.

SPEAKER_00: Every Wednesday, we do a VC roundtable, 10 a.m. on the left coast, 1 p.m. on the right coast, and here in the great state of Texas, we go live at noon on Wednesdays. With me today, what a lineup, what an amazing amount of news. The docket runneth over. Shiel Monat is with us. How are you doing, Shiel?

SPEAKER_14: Great. Good to see you.

SPEAKER_00: You and I getting into it, minimum wage, jobs.

SPEAKER_10: I love it. Great debates on it. I love it. Dave McClure, founder of 500 Startups, now 500 Global. He's got a great podcast about strip mining the VC industry called Trading Places. I just came up with that. Trading Places. Yes, he's using my podcast to promote his podcast, but I give him a promo for his podcast instead of paying him the $400 minimum wage for his SAG-AFTRA appearance here.

SPEAKER_19: He's with Practical Venture Cabin.

SPEAKER_20: We launched on your show a year ago.

SPEAKER_19: Yes, and I get your shorts. Your shorts are great. TickCock shorts are great.

SPEAKER_24: He's talking about my video clips, not my pants.

SPEAKER_10: No, Dave is known for wearing shorts in completely inappropriate settings like conferences, his

SPEAKER_27: office, et cetera. And with us, I think for the first time, Hussain Kanji is here. Hussain, it's the first time you're on the program.

SPEAKER_28: Yeah, I'm dialing in from London, so making it global. Oh, great.

SPEAKER_30: And Dave, where are you dialing in from?

SPEAKER_33: I'm in Sunnyvale, which is very sunny today. Awesome. She'll, I assume, San Francisco? San Francisco.

SPEAKER_00: And I'm in Austin at the ranch. Lots to talk about today. Three great investors on the program. And I think we start out with Bill Gates. Bill Gates published a 6,000-word essay today called The Turbulent AI Era is Here. The choices we make now are critical. Obviously, you have to hit exactly 6,000 words. That's what Jensen and Zuckerberg did recently. If you don't hit 6,000 words, we don't know if you wrote it yourself. I didn't run this one through an AI checker yet, so we'll see if it's a drunken miller or not. But he argues AI will, quote, either be the greatest equalizer ever invented or the worst source of injustice, and that right now, quote, there is no plan. But Gates warns AI risks are outpacing its benefits, interesting, threatening jobs across law, medicine, and software. He's calling for a new national institution of some type and AI usage taxes and making some jobs reserve jobs that can only be done by humans.

SPEAKER_10: Dave, you read the manifesto or at least the summary of it. But your thoughts on Gates coming in at this moment now, so from a meta-commentary perspective, why is Gates commenting now? And what resonated with you as true? And what resonated to you as not true or, God forbid, a worse take?

SPEAKER_37: I don't know particularly why now, although maybe Gates had some bad press that he's trying to get past in the last six, 12 months. I like that theory. That might be some reason.

SPEAKER_40: I think the three main points I kind of agree with, some jobs are probably going to go permanently,

SPEAKER_41: go away. Bad actors get superpowers. That's probably true. Not just due to AI. I mean, drones are already seeing bad actors get superpowers with not too much money. And then kids and human connection.

SPEAKER_37: And I guess that might be topical today because Meta is just paying $16 billion in fines for, I guess, potentially getting kids addicted to social media.

SPEAKER_45: Yeah, definitely getting kids addicted. And that'll be our second story.

SPEAKER_10: Shield, when you read the missive, any thoughts on why now? Or any thoughts on what resonated as true?

SPEAKER_50: I think everything he says is broadly true. There will be a lot of job losses. I still, in my head, don't have an idea of, is this actually going to change everything? Or is it some subset of the population that gets their jobs displaced? And it starts out with the jobs he's talking about. Many of those were already displaced when we started outsourcing, whatever, 20 plus years ago. In terms of why now, I don't know why now. I think now is as good a time as any. I think he talks about the enormous potential that AI has, which is awesome. I can't say I understand enough about why, about like what we should do about it to have a strong, fully formed thought. He proposes that the AI companies should contribute and like there is a democratic participation where everyone, everyone has a say in how this goes, which I think is a reasonable, a reasonable idea. I think we've been operating as if the AI companies can just, you know, do anything. And clearly the public sentiment is very bad on that.

SPEAKER_52: So I think there probably does need to be some change. And I think his proposal makes sense.

SPEAKER_37: I think the public sentiment, I just saw something recently where it was mostly coming from environmental, you know, sort of impact, not so much the economic impact, which I think, you know, maybe is a little surprising. Probably energy and power usage are, you know, primary on people's concerns.

SPEAKER_40: I still wonder whether like, you know, whether there's jobs displacement or not, shouldn't we really like thinking about AI kind of like the new oil?

SPEAKER_37: Like, shouldn't we be creating sovereign wealth funds with our surplus coming from AI and sharing that broadly?

SPEAKER_40: I don't think Bernie Sanders taking 50% is the right story, but Sam was trying to get in front of this and offer like five to 10%, I think.

SPEAKER_10: So a tribute, as the world's jobs evaporate, Hussein, any idea of how you would get a coordinated effort? Because Gates points this out in his missive, how we get the world coordinated in either reserving certain jobs, not using robots for certain jobs, which I think would be factories, maybe, or healthcare, he brings up over and over again. And then how to tax it, like, this is a tragedy of the commons, I guess, where you would need Hussein, everybody to agree, okay, yeah, we won't give these jobs over. But if my company decides on the slide and sneakily uses AI to solve the problem, now I've got a better profit margin, right?

SPEAKER_34: So is there any way to coordinate the world if we can't get rid of nuclear bombs or can't stop global warming, can't stop burning fossil fuels to get people to stop using AI tools in some coordinated fashion? Is that possible?

SPEAKER_58: I mean, the idea of coordinating global, like, like world, different world countries since like first World War II, I mean, is there any evidence that we are good at kind of figuring out how to tackle any of the big problems?

SPEAKER_61: I mean, so like, you know, this is a human problem, not an AI problem. And maybe, you know, the key is over to the AI, maybe they might do a better job, like it might do a better job. But the general idea that, you know, automation is going to happen, AI is going to get better at the automation, human jobs are going to get deprecated. And as a result, well, like society, like the economy will be so much better run by automation that you actually humans just kind of sort of get in the way is probably like a real thing. Like, I mean, I feel like that's kind of sort of playing out. And if you really believe this idea that like a dollar of compute equals, you know, $10 of intelligence, it's I think it's only a matter of time before even the higher cognition things in society kind of get replaced. And then there is like a genuine problem. And this is not a new topic. I mean, like science fiction authors are usually like decades ahead of everybody else on this stuff. Like Kurt Vonnegut wrote about this stuff, Player Piano. It's like the first book, Cory Doctorow read about this stuff. Not in his book, it was Walk Away. Like the old idea, like in terms of coming back, but it's manifesting. And I think almost everyone who's in AI has thought about some variation of this. Like, you know, Sam had the UBI, you know, initiative like five years. It feels like an eternity ago in our industry. But like this is, I think, which notably didn't work, which did not work.

SPEAKER_40: I think that's just implementation details.

SPEAKER_37: I think, you know, not giving people money, but giving people access to capital with some amount of debt repayment is probably a better strategy.

SPEAKER_69: You think microloan was like we saw, what was the microloan site that we all lost our minds on 10 years ago? Kiva. Kiva. That actually worked, right?

SPEAKER_71: Like, do we need to double click on that again and go back to like microloans for microentrepreneurs?

SPEAKER_37: Microlending, I was on the board of a company called Unitas that basically helped solve microlending in India 20 years ago. And was successful enough that now microlending is a commercial asset class in India.

SPEAKER_75: All right, I'm here with Keith Pires.

SPEAKER_76: He is the founder of Lightfield, and they are a CRM system built natively in AI that takes all your emails, calendars, Slack messages, all the stuff you keep losing, puts it in one place, and creates organization out of chaos so you don't lose any customers.

SPEAKER_80: Keith, welcome to the program. Thanks for having me. I got to ask you, I mean, it's 2026. I've used three different CRM systems in my life. The team hates them. Everybody hates CRM. How does Lightfield help me, as the CEO founder, get people to use a CRM system?

SPEAKER_83: The first thing is your team won't have any CRM admin to do. They don't even have to log in if they don't want. It'll update itself. They'll have to occasionally approve some updates. So all of the clerical work is gone. Second, it's going to do work for your team on their behalf. So they're going to spend way less time doing follow-ups, outbound prospecting, account health scores. Lightfield will do all of that for them. And then third, for you as CEO, it'll help you better forecast because now your forecasts are based off of some real unstructured customer truth, not just pipeline numbers. And it'll uncover new opportunities for you around what product areas you should be in, what industries you should be in. It'll proactively give you feedback from your customers on where to take your business. So everybody go check out lightfield.app.

SPEAKER_84: Let's be realistic.

SPEAKER_61: I don't think anyone trusts us as techies to kind of figure this problem out. And then the problem is you look around, you look across the aisle, right? I don't think anyone in government, like I don't think any one of us would really trust any, and I don't even think you can converge on decisions in government to figure this out and then make the problem like a global problem.

SPEAKER_34: I trust tech more than I trust government.

SPEAKER_10: Well, if you trust capitalism, if we look at, if we parallel AI and intelligence, job loss, and this technical wave, and we compare that to, say, energy, capitalism and demand and supply. And innovation in the form of solar becoming cheaper and cheaper and cheaper and batteries becoming denser and denser and cheaper seem to have solved the problem. It's now more expensive to either retrofit a coal mine or build a coal mine than it is to build solar. Great state of Texas, we're the largest provider of solar in the United States. And I can tell you the people here are not precious about their oil. They're not like, we're team oil, we'll never touch solar. They're, what is the best, most profitable, you know, next energy supply I can create? And in, I think, four out of five times, it's going to be solar unless you can build the data center right on top of a NADCAS field. And so that would lead me to argue, well, maybe there's going to be a lot of displacement in jobs. I think we all know that's going to happen, displacement.

SPEAKER_92: Sure.

SPEAKER_10: But what I'm seeing is the people with these tools, every time somebody really adopts these tools inside of my firm, three or four new opportunities open up for our company.

SPEAKER_00: And the ability to go faster and solve more problems happens. So this harkens back, S.H.I.E.L., to the quote that I think Jensen got right. You're not going to have your job replaced by AI. You're going to have your job replaced by somebody using AI. That's what I see in the field in white-collar work. Now, for blue-collar work, S.H.I.E.L., I think it's distinctly different. Watching what I'm watching, and I have a lot of investments in self-driving car companies, in all of them, essentially, from Zipline to Uber, you know, anything. That's public. I dipped in.

SPEAKER_10: I don't know that a person who learns AI is suddenly going to deliver more burritos or do more airport jobs.

SPEAKER_101: I think they just lose their job. Right, S.H.I.E.L.?

SPEAKER_50: I think that's probably right. Now, that also was true, like, 120 years ago in the United States, everyone was a farmer, pretty much.

SPEAKER_52: And now we're not. There have been other jobs where things have been displaced. I think the timeline, we talk about it, and even Bill Gates talks about it as if it's instant, but it's really not. Like, it actually, these things will take time. And your DoorDash driver is probably safe for the next 5, 10 years.

SPEAKER_103: And in that time, by the way, like... I don't think 10 years. I don't think 10 years. Okay, but 5, you think?

SPEAKER_105: So we're between... I said 5 to 10. You take the lower end of the range?

SPEAKER_37: Yeah, I think, you know, we're seeing job displacement in knowledge industries very fast. But, like, physical industry... Where are you?

SPEAKER_106: You're not seeing it in the data. Yeah.

SPEAKER_73: Not yet. Not yet. I think... You don't think, like, the jobs that we've been doing, knowledge-wise, are much easier now with AI?

SPEAKER_108: Definitely easier.

SPEAKER_109: But we're not seeing the job loss. Definitely, yeah. That's the... But we have data on this, and it's not happening yet.

SPEAKER_49: Yeah, I'm sure it will. I agree with you, but...

SPEAKER_61: But, S.H.I.E.L., we're still in the early innings of a lot of this stuff. Oh, absolutely. The question is not that this is... I mean, you could argue this is not going to happen and jobs will get created. Or you could argue that this stuff compounds so well that it becomes so much more competent than any of us needing the jobs. And then the question is what to do with us. Like...

SPEAKER_117: Yeah.

SPEAKER_40: I think hiring in tech industries has definitely been, like, slimmed down a little bit. It's flat. We're not hiring as fast as we are, like, increasing productivity, which is arguably a good thing.

SPEAKER_27: Well, I think that's the nuance between both of your positions.

SPEAKER_10: When S.H.I.E.L. says, we haven't seen the job loss, and you say, we're seeing massive productivity, both of those are true. And if you look at a company like Microsoft or Google or Uber or Facebook, in many cases, they have the same relative number of employees over the last five years, plus or minus, let's say, 10%. And if you were to do that, Claude search, or you did a search on, like, employee count per year, you'd probably see flat across them, and you would see earnings growing 30%, 40%, and top line growing 10% to 20%, which is extraordinary. And that actually is AI making the people working in companies more efficient.

SPEAKER_124: We're actually going to see massive net positive benefits for small business and small business creation due to AI.

SPEAKER_37: Like, I think, actually, the biggest beneficiary of AI will be a whole bunch of sole proprietors and small business all across.

SPEAKER_129: Why? Unpack it. Why will we see a lot more? I think I have a guess.

SPEAKER_37: Because they will move fastest. They can move fastest. They can be creative. You know, the benefits of AI tools to someone who's running a small business is probably, like, pretty immediate.

SPEAKER_130: Like, if you learn how to, like, get customers better, do your job better, faster, you know, You get the gains immediately.

SPEAKER_131: They accrue immediately.

SPEAKER_50: There will be AI software companies that help people run their sole props much better. So, like, if you're a therapist, you used to have to have a receptionist. You had to have somebody scheduled. Like, all this stuff, billing. Now, an AI can do all that stuff for you, which does speak to job loss, but also speaks

SPEAKER_134: to sole props being able to function much easier than they could before.

SPEAKER_130: Well, you have one person doing each of five jobs, and now they're doing, like, ten jobs with AI.

SPEAKER_137: Yeah. I mean, simplistically, if the virtual humans are better at doing the jobs than the actual

SPEAKER_61: humans, and they're a lot cheaper, and you can deploy a thousand of them, like, overnight versus having to deal with interviewing, hiring, et cetera, anyone who hires people is going to probably benefit from this thing. That's a simplistic way. The big question to me, though, going back to this, the big question, like, what happens if humans are deprecated, right? Then how do you build a market-oriented economy to figure out what the heck to do with the humans? Because you probably can't get an autocrat to figure it out. You probably can't get government institutions or global institutions to do it. So how do you build a market-oriented economy to figure out how to solve this problem? Like, this is—the problem stuff is, like, kind of trivial to me.

SPEAKER_140: Like, the solution stuff is, like, the real intellectual stuff.

SPEAKER_34: So let's pull that string.

SPEAKER_00: I'm going to agree with Dave and Shiel on sole proprietorships booming, but not just because the existing ones are going to be run better, and then they maybe make more profits.

SPEAKER_34: So, hey, the person who's the therapist is like, you know what? I just want to have an assistant to manage all the AIs and keep that train going because I'm so much more profitable. But I don't need the second and third one, right? I don't need the outsourced accounting firm. We can just do that in-house.

SPEAKER_00: So there could be less people per sole proprietorship. But if you can't get a job coming out of school at Uber, Meta, Facebook, and Microsoft, because they're not hiring, but you have been using AI to cheat your way through school,

SPEAKER_69: and you're an expert at it, and you know how to get, you know, straight A's.

SPEAKER_141: Wait, you're talking about my kids right now. I've got a software. It is what it is.

SPEAKER_69: Like, as far as I'm concerned, if you learn how to cheat on your way through Harvard, and then you're perfectly positioned to use AI to actually create a company because it's the same tools. How do I get this task? Here's the goal. Go get the goal. And you're just motivated, set the loops up, et cetera.

SPEAKER_00: So I think we'll see a Cambrian explosion in sole proprietorships because you're just not going to have four job offers.

SPEAKER_10: People graduating from college are not going to have, like, unless they happen to be a PhD in AI, but they're not going to have people competing for it. But let's talk about your question, Hussain, which is, what are practical solutions? I have one that I've been talking about a bit. People tell me I'm a libtard when I bring it up because, God forbid, we even consider humans and employment in this occasion and giving them, you know, it's just complete

SPEAKER_27: weakness to have empathy for somebody who is an Uber driver or a DoorDasher. But in China, they are now giving out licenses for self-driving vehicles.

SPEAKER_10: And they have stopped giving them out. So they have a cap, essentially, right now because in Wuhan, in Beijing, in Shanghai, and the markets where you have three or four different people flooding the zone with these young men who are not making as much as drivers or, you know, can't get a driver job are getting restless. My prediction is the socialists in the country who are rising up right now and saying, hey, we're going to defend workers. We're going to make sure you have a more affordable life. Two ways to do that, cut prices, which they can't do. That doesn't work.

SPEAKER_27: Second way, give workers protections through unions and minimum wage, et cetera. They can successfully do, in all likelihood, or it's an easier path.

SPEAKER_10: I bet you we see AOC and Mondami and Boston and D.C., L.A. just say, you know what? If you want a self-driving car license and you want to deliver burritos, and I'm talking

SPEAKER_34: against my book right now, you just need a license. The licenses are auctioned off at $30,000 starting price.

SPEAKER_10: I think that's literally what we're going to have in the next two years as people respond to it. Do you have solutions, Shiel? In the case that we had a quick job displacement occurring, a brisk one, as opposed to a manageable one.

SPEAKER_143: Okay, so you have identified a real problem, and you put together a solid solution and a

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SPEAKER_52: I think that's a reasonable solution to say, so there's a, there's a license. There's a license for a self-driving car, and there are externalities that, that develop from that.

SPEAKER_50: Now, there are huge positives that come from that. Like, you have more trust, you, you have fewer accidents. Self-driving cars are amazing. But I do think that it's totally fair to say to society that we need to tax these.

SPEAKER_150: And I, I, I don't see immediately a bad, uh, that, that, that, that's a bad plan.

SPEAKER_151: Dave, any thoughts here for if we do see any kind of acute job loss as Bill Gates is predicting,

SPEAKER_10: ways society can manage it? Do you think that we should be taxing consumption of tokens in corporations in some way? Should we be looking at the people providing the tokens and saying, Hey, you know, when

SPEAKER_34: you sell hotel rooms, we put a 12% tax on it in New York city, whatever it is. And that goes towards, you know, whatever infrastructure. Do you think there's a, there could be a time where there's a federal token tax of 5% or 10% that goes into the unemployment?

SPEAKER_40: I don't think that's a great idea because token costs are going down to zero. So you're going to be taxing a diminishing return asset.

SPEAKER_37: I do think, um, Gates is correct that right now incentives are probably, you know, because you can depreciate, uh, infrastructure and CapEx spend, you're, you're more likely to hire, you know, agents and things that you can, you know, depreciate.

SPEAKER_41: So we, we probably got to do figure out some way to make that a little bit more level playing field, but I think what we're really trying to do is how do we recreate the new deal program in an AI era where like before, you know, Tennessee Valley authority, you know, building

SPEAKER_37: the highways, doing all that stuff, you know, back in the thirties and forties and fifties made sense. But these days I would say probably got to think about more human oriented stuff. So like, you know, maybe some kind of care economy for seniors and people, you know, human services. Maybe we have an advantage in providing emotional support and care for people over agents, at

SPEAKER_41: least for the short term. Um, probably not to sound too, you know, liberal, but Hey, arts and culture, you know, if everything

SPEAKER_37: is, you know, jobs are being taken away and productive industries, maybe we create, you know, cultural art that people actually enjoy. Um, I, I don't know. I think it's going to be hard to create, you know, hundreds of thousands, millions of jobs if those get displaced. But I do think we need to start planning for the equivalent of, you know, retraining budgets and or support budget for people who are going to be displaced. You're it's not going to go well. If those people feel like there's a small percentage of humanity, which is empowered and rich and a large percentage, which is deployed displaced and poor.

SPEAKER_154: And that's going to end up looking like France in, uh, the 1800s.

SPEAKER_58: Dave, the, the China, the China model feels like it's trying to stymie progress, right? You're trying to put a barrier. Yeah.

SPEAKER_40: China has some big problems.

SPEAKER_37: Like we're, we're taking a group of folks to China, October, about 50 people are going to go to, uh, Shenzhen and Shanghai and take a look at what's going on. But China has significant unemployment problems for the youth.

SPEAKER_58: Like, but, but, but if you let's, let's assume if this thesis is correct, you don't want to stymie it. You actually want to accelerate. I agree.

SPEAKER_61: I don't get, get the automation to be, to be as fast as possible. Because remember, since the industrial revolution, we have largely like lived to work. You know, there is a theory where we may not have to do that anymore. And we could go back to kind of purposefully, especially if, and then like, it's very star tracky, right? You know, the stuff just happens, but you want to, then there's gonna be a 20 year period, maybe a 10 year period, like a decent amount of time where it's going to be awkward as heck. Cause the jobs are going to dissipate. You won't be as offset. But once you get past that funding trap, like I don't think it'll take, you're using

SPEAKER_41: it's longer. I think the big benefits of AI, like three big benefits that I do think will happen is we will get to free energy. We will get to free food. We will cure cancer and major disease. Those things are definitely on the horizon.

SPEAKER_168: But the distribution of those benefits to all of humanity will be incredibly uneven. And that's where I have concerns. Like if we solve all those problems, but like 2 billion people on the planet are still, you know, hungry and don't have access to power.

SPEAKER_171: It's not going to be pretty.

SPEAKER_27: I agree with you on the power one. Um, I, I recently had somebody on this week at startups who has robots taking panels, driving

SPEAKER_34: them out and installing them, and then goes back to the factory, grabs another panel, installs them. And there's a human like watching it occur and just making sure, yep, that bolt's good. And I just said, wait a second, we we're going to have a 24 hour factory. Like Elon's going to pop up a solar factory in the middle of a desert. And it's just going to go out in all 360 degrees and just lay solar panels. And then we just have to obviously get the hookups to go to where it's needed. Which then would, of course, Dave, from our time in the Middle East would make for free, unlimited water if lunatics don't stop desalination because they're concerned about like the guppies. So you have free energy, you have free, so you have, um, free water, free water plus free energy and a bunch of excess optimuses. And I, Elon showed me like one of the latest optimuses.

SPEAKER_00: He's not showing them publicly anymore, but he just happened to show me on his phone.

SPEAKER_10: And I was like, whoa, that's moving faster than what he showed me six months ago when I visited the optimist lab on a Sunday and it was packed. Like he's going to make a billion of those. If a million of those were out there, you know, planting strawberries, like the price of strawberries is going to be a dollar a pound, 25 cents a pound. It's going to be nuts. Shield your thoughts on the benefits.

SPEAKER_174: I agree. I mean, I feel like we don't talk about the benefits enough and all we talk about sort

SPEAKER_50: of like what Dario says, everyone's going to lose their job or whatever. I think taxing tokens doesn't really make sense because you actually want to promote the use of tokens when it makes sense. But I think it is fair to say, Hey, if these companies have enormous excess profits that concentrates wealth, then tax the excess profits. It also makes sense to say like, Hey, if we believe that there's a particular type of harm that's happening and it creates costs, we should tax that. So like, you know, the robo taxi, maybe there's a per mile tax, totally reasonable.

SPEAKER_52: And then I think if people talk about the energy usage or water usage, I don't think is real, but people talk about energy usage, which is real.

SPEAKER_103: And I think if it's consuming a scarce resource, then we, we have the right to charge for that scarce resource. Um, so I think you're right about the water usage.

SPEAKER_37: There's more water usage by pistachio and almond farmers than there are totally. It's all bullshit.

SPEAKER_179: But people still people, I don't understand, but the power usage is real power usage is

SPEAKER_37: going to raise bills for people unless we subsidize and take care of power, which anybody

SPEAKER_101: building a data center has the brains to know that they should just go to the community and

SPEAKER_27: say, not only are we not going to increase your electricity, how does free sound free

SPEAKER_182: for five years sound good.

SPEAKER_41: But that's basically like we're doing redistribution on a piecemeal basis. And I think it's probably just better to get ahead of that and say, look, let's take 10%

SPEAKER_73: of Anthropic and OpenAI and solve our national debt problem. Well, I mean, if you took a third, it's worth $3 trillion.

David Friedberg: So you're proposing just the government takes 10% of the companies? Is that what you're proposing? Or you're proposing?

SPEAKER_189: I know that sounds anti-capitalist, but I actually think it's a reasonably good solution.

SPEAKER_190: I mean, Trump is doing that all over the place. We have, we have positions.

SPEAKER_192: Not in a very normalized way either. He's putting it in his own pocket. He's doing it with threats is what you're saying, Dave.

SPEAKER_27: Family is putting it. Literally, he just threatens people and gives them the carrot. They give their shares. I mean, look, we want to be the Norway-

SPEAKER_34: Let me ask you a question though, Dave. How is it different the way Trump uses his carrot stick method to extract shares for the American people because he likes doing it versus the socialists saying, hey, you got to give us 20% of your OpenAI and Claude to pay down the debt. How is it different? Just an open, honest question.

SPEAKER_201: I'll give you two extreme examples of how that can go right and how that can go wrong.

SPEAKER_168: So Venezuela and Norway both have extreme oil reserves. One country has done an extremely good job of providing for their citizens and their wealth and preparing for the future. And one nation has not. Rule of law? I don't know what the implementation details were that went different directions. Rule of law.

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SPEAKER_210: Rippling AI There's some really interesting historical reasons why Norway went that way that actually had to do with the shape of the country and how the timber industry developed.

SPEAKER_168: Actually, they developed hydropower in Norway before oil was discovered, and that was an actual resource. Norway is a country of four or five million people that became a timber and shipbuilding powerhouse across Europe. And I think the things that they did early to develop timber and hydropower actually went very well once they discovered oil. Rippling AI Fascinating.

SPEAKER_214: Rippling AI What do you think, Shiel, about this?

David Friedberg: Rippling AI If the government owns, let's say,

SPEAKER_50: 10 or 20% of anthropic and open AI, first of all, how do you decide which companies they own a part of?

SPEAKER_52: And then is there a regulatory challenge? Is the government going to then be easier on the regulations? And I think that's probably why Sam Altman is proposing it in part. The government would have a financial incentive to protect their valuations and go easy on them. So I'm not sure that that makes sense to me.

SPEAKER_27: Rippling AI All right. Let's pivot to another technology that caused a lot of social harm and

SPEAKER_10: a lot of hand-wringing finally coming to what it seems to be closure for parents and Americans. Meta is agreeing to a $17.1 billion settlement with 29 states over claims. It hooked kids on Instagram and Facebook. The remedies are well beyond just writing a check. This is the most intense settlement

SPEAKER_27: I have ever seen for a technology company. And I think the previous record was set by our friends at Meta. So you get this huge settlement of $17.1 billion. But in addition to this, they are going

SPEAKER_10: to put hard limits similar to what China has done and other countries are considering. Productive pauses, interrupt scrolling after 15 minutes of continuous use, then again at 60 and 90. This is a self-imposed feature that Instagram will give to kids. They will also have a nighttime block,

SPEAKER_00: no access from midnight to 6am to make sure kids get sleep. And then no push notifications during the school day, 8am to 3pm. They're adding age verification. They're redesigning the features that they believe or that studies have shown will cause harm to kids, like beauty filters. Oh my god, the fact that they even added those visible light counts. And then add stronger safeguards against bullying. And they'll obviously be as they typically are with these independent auditors. It would have been nice, Hussein, if Mark Zuckerberg, and who's our guy running Instagram? Adam Masseri. Adam Masseri, as I believe both parents looked at this data five or 10 years ago and

SPEAKER_10: said, we'll do this without 29 attorney generals bringing us to court and embarrassing us and shaming us. But here we are. It's getting done. Hussein, what do you think of this unprecedented settlement?

SPEAKER_61: Long time coming. I mean, I think the harms are pretty clear in the academic literature. And your parents definitely notice this thing if you have kids and you're starting to see other governments actually crack down. Australia was a big one. The real question is, are all of these changes really enough? Like I'm in the view, like you might actually not want like prepubescent teens and maybe teens to be using some of these things. You might really want to gate these things like this might. And this is a reason and there's a big number in terms of a fine. There's a small, small, small portion of Meta's market cap. Like this is this is a drug. It's a small portion of like Meta's free cash flow. Like it's it's not that big of a fine. Probably 10% of free cash flow. I'm guessing they

SPEAKER_19: have 200 billion. Meta stock is up and Meta stocks up probably larger than 17 billion is if I'm going

SPEAKER_179: to guess it went up more than one percent on settlement. So it paid for itself. And well, the

SPEAKER_50: problem, Jason, first of all, so my wife works at Instagram as a lawyer. But disclosure, you're wrong. Actually, Instagram instituted this stuff two years ago. OK, so they actually have teens have sleep mode from 10 p.m. to 7 a.m. There's an automatic notification if you spend 60 minutes on the app. They did a lot of this stuff. The difference in the settlement is it's now across apps. So it's Facebook and Instagram and I believe WhatsApp. But they actually self-instituted this this policy a couple of years ago. Got it. So we can give them a little bit of credit.

SPEAKER_230: Give them some credit. I think I think that they have and like the AI world, I think social media

SPEAKER_50: has totally bungled the PR. I actually think there are so many benefits from social media that are never talked about during covid. I was depressed. I'm an extrovert. I love talking to people who are social media cured me. I think like from depression. I I there's so many outlets for creativity that teens have that they did not have before. So I think I think there's a huge positive that we never talk about. The studies show some negatives, which I think are serious.

SPEAKER_56: Do you have kids? I don't got it. OK, Dave, you have kids. I have kids. Our kids grew up on this.

SPEAKER_10: What's your take as somebody with kids and watching up close and personal what that generation

SPEAKER_40: experienced with these tools? I have a really funny story about this because one time I was in Palo

SPEAKER_37: Alto having brunch with some friends and my kids were there. I think they were probably like three and five at the time. And one of them was playing with an iPhone. One of them playing with an iPad and looked over at the table next to us. And Steve Jobs was sitting at the fucking table right next to us. And at the time I went over and said, hey, you know, these are actually really fun tools. My kids

SPEAKER_41: are learning how to like, you know, draw and read and do some other stuff. Thanks. And he sort of said, you know, you know, you're welcome. Whatever. Later, I found out he didn't allow his own kids. Nope. To have that kids at that age. I would say we've had a mixed experience, I think. Unpack it. At least with one of my kids.

SPEAKER_151: Well, yeah, sure, sure. Tell me about average kids, you know, that you in Silicon Valley.

SPEAKER_210: I live in Silicon Valley. I don't know what average means here because it's like completely weird and

SPEAKER_37: different. But, you know, I think there are some great things about Silicon Valley. We live in a very diverse community. Like my kids went, you know, to school with people from all over the world. They got to experience a lot of other cultures, but, you know, everybody had technology all over them. Everybody had very high expectations. You know, one of my kids went to a pretty high pressure, you know, private school where, you know, a lot of negative things happened to kids. Some kids actually committed suicide. Many of them had stress related from tests and things. So like, it's a mixed bag living in Silicon Valley. I kind of agree with Sheila. I think there are both pluses and minuses, but there are definitely some minuses. And particularly, I think when kids are, let's say, between 12 and 17, there's a lot of social pressures and challenges. I mean, without technology, kids can be assholes to each other. And, you know, sometimes that's amplified,

SPEAKER_41: not because of the technology, but because of the people who are on the technology. Uh, and so bullying and shaming and like social pressure, body issues. Yeah. It's all contained

SPEAKER_73: in that window that exists in a real life. It's not like the technology is what's causing it.

SPEAKER_10: Well, it amplifies it, I think, to a level that is superhuman. So the same way, you know, you could become famous and go viral and help your business, um, or, you know, get people to read your novel, whatever it is, all those positive things. Or if you're feeling melancholy, I can't believe you would be depressed. You know, I'll just go with melancholy. If she'll hit a level of melancholy and, you know, talking to people online and, you know, having never ending threads, uh, debating social

SPEAKER_34: topics, got you to be less melancholy. I'm, I'm for it. You know, I just had a hard rule. You know, the kids were allowed to have a certain number of hours with the controls Apple belt, but no social

SPEAKER_10: media, uh, until 17. Uh, and my oldest daughter is 16 and we're just, you know, she'll be 17 shortly.

SPEAKER_00: And we're just doing read only accounts, read only accounts because she's really giving me the full core press. I'm the, Oh, she's literally saying I'm the only one, dad. I'm the only one without this now. And I look at, what are her friends posting? Um, most of her friends are great kids. Um, and they're posting pictures of their outfits and their friends goofing off and nature and food and, you know, anything that we would all post, but it does start you down a, how many followers do I have? How many likes do I have? And already kids are coming back to the phones and back to the iPads. And this creates the same addiction you and I have shield with Twitter. You and I get pulled into it.

SPEAKER_210: It's not just kids. It's us. Like we have these problems too. It doesn't, it doesn't stop at 18 or 21. Yeah. But the kids are, I bet you median time in the bathroom has doubled or tripled.

SPEAKER_255: A hundred percent. A hundred percent. Yes. Hussein, go ahead. You, you want to add

SPEAKER_61: do you have kids who say, do you have a, do I have a 40 year old, uh, so much younger, but these kids are just so much more sensitive to it. Right. And they're in like these growth, the development cycles where the number of likes, and if someone leaves a mean comment, we're more resilient than they are. Like we've lived through more and we've had to deal with this stuff. And maybe the argument is kids have to go through this stuff, but I think shielding kids from this stuff is actually a good thing versus a bad thing. I would, despite the, I would love to

SPEAKER_10: see Apple and Google put this into the hardware level of the products in America. So if you're a parent and you buy an Apple or an Android based phone, you're kind of bought into the same, you know, both of those ecosystems allow protection of kids at a very root level. And the controls in Apple's products were extremely confusing and complicated. And after hours and hours

SPEAKER_00: of managing them, I, after like a year and I'm a technologist, you know, I've kind of got a grip on what I want to do as an example, I'm into audio books. I like to listen to them. I'm an audio listener. I like to hike around the ranch. I got the girls into audible. They're addicted to audible. I put audible. You can listen to audible 10 hours a day. Now we were having like the sleeping thing. I let them put a sleep timer on. They can listen to an audio book. They put a 30 minute sleep timer on, you know, of course we'll read them stories, but they're kind of getting to the age where that's not cool anymore. 10 years old. Like they're like, I don't want you to read me, you know, a story, which is sad, but they do want to listen to something when they go to bed. And I'm like, hey, if I can get them addicted to audio books, that would be fantastic. And so, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm starting to have the controls work in my favor. And if you want a child to behave well, if they've got a device and you can say after, after these chores are done, go to the, clean the chicken coop, take the dogs for a walk, yada, yada, then you can earn more time on the device. You you'll be amazed, shield when you have your kids, how quickly chores get done when the iPad does not work because you remotely turned it off. Oh my God, this, they just have to come to dad. And I'm like,

SPEAKER_76: okay, you were arguing with mom. Oh yeah. You were disrespectful to your mother. And you didn't, oh, she asked you three times to empty the dishwasher. Okay, great. Let me know when

SPEAKER_101: the dishwasher is free off. I'll turn on your iPhone again. Problem solved or let's get into venture capital. Uh, unless anybody wants to add anything there, but I think we beat it to death.

SPEAKER_50: Um, one, one funny thing I saw, uh, Taylor Lorenz posted a thread of all of the past moral panics. Hmm. And there were studies done around novels that said they were bad for teens. There were studies done around jazz music saying they were bad for teens, radios, television, of course,

SPEAKER_103: bad for teens and actually Dungeons and Dragons. They're all remarkably similar to the, the, the stuff that we talked about social media today.

SPEAKER_124: D and D is definitely detrimental to your dating life for sure.

SPEAKER_10: Yeah. Dating life, but it's also good for your creativity. You're definitely not going to get a lot of dates, uh, for that. Yeah. She's, she's got a point except, you know, I, I don't think

SPEAKER_105: we've ever seen anything in humanity as addicting as social media. I am trying to think of, uh, like

SPEAKER_10: cigarettes and social media seem to be the two and I guess sugar and fatty foods. Right. And so if you

SPEAKER_34: were to think of those three that just came off the top of my head, the damage they've done, the damage that, you know, uh, processed foods have done to America, tobacco, alcohol, and carbs,

SPEAKER_10: tobacco, alcohol, and carbs. And then you add to it, the mental health issues with screen addiction. That's a pretty big, uh, those are the four horses of the apocalypse for humanity. Um,

SPEAKER_69: Hey question for you guys. Uh, is there anything left to fund outside of AI right now for us? Has anybody looking through your last couple of investments was the company? Cause there's two things, a company that uses AI to build a company, you would be foolish not to, that would be a sure

SPEAKER_10: sign that your company is going to fail, but then a company based on AI providing services that are AI

SPEAKER_00: related and or powered by AI. Is there anything outside of AI that anybody is funding?

SPEAKER_37: Uh, I think that's an extreme statement, but it is probably at least half of the VC brain, if not two thirds. Um, but you know, let's, let's say there's all these new sexy categories, space tech,

SPEAKER_210: defense tech, robotics, AI are probably like the hot, hot and sexy categories. Um, I still think fintech is like a big category. Um, and it's not, you know, overfunded. Um, particularly if you get

SPEAKER_41: outside the U S and a lot of emerging markets, I would say fintech and e-commerce are still big categories and are still growing. They're, they're not sexy in the venture world, at least not in the

SPEAKER_10: U S I wasn't an investor in a fund and I got a distribution for this new bank and new bank.

SPEAKER_105: And I'm like, what's a new bank. And it was like this tiny little amount of stock. And I'm like,

SPEAKER_10: well, if this legendary venture firm found this company and I'll just hold on to the stock and see what happens. And then all of a sudden it became a very large amount of stock over a period of time. Um, yeah, for sure. Still much room to grow. What do we think Hussein of Stripe buying open

SPEAKER_279: router? Those are two different things, tokens and web hosting. And.

SPEAKER_61: So it's more than web posting. It's like the, it's the information layer. You kind of know exactly how the token spends kind of going through the economy. And I mean, I think these are these,

SPEAKER_137: it's an interesting strategic purchase. We all kind of scratch our heads with YouTube.

SPEAKER_283: Well, we all scratch our heads when YouTube got bought, we all scratch our head when WhatsApp got

SPEAKER_61: bought, like maybe a little bit less so for Instagram. I think if you're, if you're leaning into AI and you're the plumbing system for the payments being leaning into AI and knowing where the spend is actually happening, how these models, like it's actually strategic, the why I think we're going to figure out probably five years from now, we're going to kick our, like, look at it and be like, there's such an obvious big purchase. Like, I think you give a lot of credit to founder led businesses who can kind of think one or two steps ahead.

SPEAKER_105: I like how you're framing is like Stripe's infrastructure, open routers, infrastructure, infrastructure respects infrastructure. That, that could be the big, I never thought of that.

SPEAKER_279: Um, that makes sense to me. They, what do you think,

SPEAKER_52: shield when you saw that purchase? I mean, yeah. Stripe routes, money, payment methods, banks, et cetera, open router routes, inference basically. And, um, I think broadly it makes sense. I think the price is wild. Um, and what did it go for 12 billion?

SPEAKER_290: Seven to eight, seven to eight, something. And it was making a hundred or 200 million at the time.

SPEAKER_93: I think that's, that was rumored. I don't know. I don't, I don't know.

SPEAKER_292: I think it was more than that. I thought it was a little, it was still 50 times revenue,

SPEAKER_93: a hundred times revenue. It's something crazy. Yeah.

SPEAKER_50: Because they had just raised at 1.3 billion earlier in the year.

SPEAKER_295: Got it. 70 times revenue. 70 times revenue. There it is. Okay. Well, sorry. That was based on the $10 billion number. So I guess less than that, if it was seven. Something in that range.

SPEAKER_298: Okay. So between 50 and a hundred times, it's unbelievable.

SPEAKER_50: It's clearly a bet that neutrality ends up like that. You need to, to route, which I think I see no evidence that that isn't true, but people are building their own ramp, launched their own

SPEAKER_54: router.com the same day that the deal was announced. It's just crazy.

SPEAKER_124: Yeah. I mean, Hey, it's been a great week for Martin Casato at, uh, Andreessen, man,

SPEAKER_306: between Cursor and Cursor. Uh, well, I mean, a $60 billion Cursor deal. I mean, explain how unprecedented that is, Dave, in terms of the last 20 years, you've been a venture capital in 12,

SPEAKER_309: I've been one. Uh, I think Cursor was the biggest M and a, uh, ever $60 billion. Um, Andreessen and

SPEAKER_37: Thrive, I think both invested roughly 60 million, 50 million. Uh, they both made, Andreessen got 6.6 billion back on 44 million and 150 X return in a couple of years and a big cash on cash number.

SPEAKER_101: So 150 times multiple might be small compared to some angel deals, but it's on a big number,

SPEAKER_314: right? Exactly. Um, some of the angel investors even better. Like I think Neo, uh, Ali Partovi,

SPEAKER_40: I think put in a million and a half and is getting, I don't know, billions back, something

SPEAKER_316: like- Yeah. Nobody could ever challenge Y Combinator, could ever compete with them. And the Y Combinator

SPEAKER_318: people attacked him savagely. And I wondered why they did that. Because he was a legit threat,

SPEAKER_134: probably. He's good at what he does. But notably Cursor didn't go through the accelerator. It was an investment outside. Right. But I agree with your point though. I mean, what did you think when you

SPEAKER_322: saw that? But there were also investors at Replit and I think they did go through the accelerator.

SPEAKER_263: What did you think, Sheila, about that? Like the Y Combinator trying to put him out of business.

SPEAKER_52: I thought that was, that whole thing was weird. Why come out with this personal stuff and you,

SPEAKER_50: you make claims that like, oh, he's a bad person. We know the story, but we're not going to tell you.

SPEAKER_263: I don't like all that stuff. That's the YC playbook. They did it to me too.

SPEAKER_73: At one point. I can tell you from experience, it's a very different thing when you are not competing with YC and are competing with YC. They did it to you too, Dave. They went after you. Yeah.

SPEAKER_37: I was pretty close with a lot of people before I started 500. I even emailed PG and Jessica before

SPEAKER_168: I started 500. And then as soon as I left 500, things got very warm again. It was an interesting

SPEAKER_10: experience. They're circled away. I mean, they don't, it's so lame though to be, you know, swinging your elbow like that and trying to, you know, it's like there's plenty of, if you only, if you accept less than 1% of startups, then you should be happy that the other, let's say 9% in the top 10% have a place to go because I can tell you, Dave, you and I both know the business pretty well. Do we know the difference between top 1% or 2% or 3% and does YC? Obviously not. Not until seven years later. Correct. So what are we talking about here? Like you can be kind to each other and supportive.

SPEAKER_40: I'm super happy for him. I think, you know, entrepreneurs of all kinds are competitive and you know, you're probably very familiar with, you know, how Elon looks at people. How about before

SPEAKER_191: a year ago, how Elon thought about Dario and this year, now that Dario is a big customer.

SPEAKER_27: I think he re-underwrote his position on them after talking to him. Chamath re-underwrote his position on Trump. It's a lot of re-underwriting that occurs in our industry. All right, let me just take a

SPEAKER_10: pause for the cause right now. I love using AI. Obviously we all do. And then I found out about this great product called Harmonic. What is Harmonic? It's a database of every transaction, every investment in venture capital, every profile of every company. And I've been getting into robotics because when I was in Japan, I started seeing these robots fighting each other. And I was like, tell me about these. And then very quickly, as you can see on my screen here, told me who, which ones are the ones being used at all these different fighting competitions. But then I was like, you know what? I want to, um, have this type of search going on, like an associate or a researcher at my firm might do. And so I've empowered my team to create scouts, just like the Sequoia Scouts program. I was the first Sequoia Scouts. Uh, and they named it Scouts. So I said, Hey, find me any robotics companies that are pre-series A. And if they went to Carnegie Mellon, MIT, Harvard, Stanford, uh, get me that list as well. And now it runs it every Monday for me. That's the power of Harmonic AI. If you are in our business and you don't have Harmonic AI, you might miss the next Uber, the next Micro One, the next cursor. Give it a shot folks. Harmonic.ai. Lots more to get to here, but let's talk about physical AI, robotics, defense industry. Uh, Hussein, have you jumped into it yet? Are you monitoring it? Because it feels like frontier models, obviously that investment opportunity, uh, seems to have

SPEAKER_27: manifested itself fully. There might be less opportunities in backing a frontier model,

SPEAKER_10: but it feels like we're in that moment for robotics and still for the, for military tech still seems pretty nascent to me, especially on the, uh, implementation side. These things aren't in our homes yet. It aren't really in the factories. And if they are, they're kind of kludgy. So your thoughts on physical AI and just physical real world stuff being the moat now, that's what we're hearing from a lot of investors. Hey, there's no moat, but hardware used to be hard. So we didn't do it now. Hardware is still hard. So we do it. So we have some kind of defensibility.

SPEAKER_342: It's amazing how this industry has transformed from being anti-hardware five years ago to very,

SPEAKER_61: very, very pro hardware across the board. You know, I am convinced that the future is like, like it's the everything language related is done. Like in every derivative of the language stuff, it's the frontier models that we all kind of know, open AI and tropic, and then, you know, people building on top of the stuff. I think it is still up for grabs. Who's going to win Transformers AI for physical and Transformers AI for biology. And it's no surprise that due to spaces have kind of gotten hot. Um, and there's a bunch of that stuff in Europe, which is kind of good news for us. Cause that's where we kind of invest. And we've done one stealth one that came out of Imperial college. Uh, and a bunch of people are citing their papers. I can't talk about it yet. Cause they're going to launch in about like two or three months, but it's super exciting. It's like a new frontier model for, for robotics that kind of upends the, the figures and the generalists, et cetera, of the world, uh, with a different technique that requires a lot less training, um, and makes it much more efficient. So big believers in this stuff, though.

SPEAKER_347: Steve McLaughlin

SPEAKER_00: Sheil, any, um, investments in the area so far? Are you double clicking on it? What are your thoughts? I mean, you're early stage, so it's a little bit scary to put, I'm assuming your average check size,

SPEAKER_10: two 50 to a million. Am I correct? Or do I have all the, we're, um, we're probably like 2 million

SPEAKER_151: average to two and a half. Okay. So that would burn through like the prototype in nine months.

SPEAKER_50: Yeah. It is hard in general. These AI companies take so much money. Um, we have not invested in anything in physical AI. I am super excited about what I've seen. I don't know if you saw the demo yesterday from skilled AI. They announced something. They have a robot that like you show it flipping a pancake and it'll just flip, it'll flip pancakes perfectly every time. Um, they did a really cool thing where the demo had, or the, they cut off a dog's leg and like a robot, a robot dog's leg. Oh,

SPEAKER_180: sorry. Um, and this is a robotic dog. No dog have been harmed in the creation. No dogs have been

SPEAKER_52: hard. So we're clear. They cut off a robot dog's leg and show that it just learns how to walk on fewer legs or they cut off part of its leg and it shows learning how to walk it. The demos are amazing. And I can't freaking wait to have a robot in my house doing my chores.

SPEAKER_27: Uh, and this is from skilled AI, um, skilled AI. Yeah. Here is the cardigan melon spinoff. Yeah. I mean, I, that's why I put that into my search. Here it is folks. Uh, let's take a look.

SPEAKER_10: Skilled AI person has, um, some gloves or a harness, I guess a physical harness. Here's the pancake being made. Here's a, uh, plant being planted and they, you can see here, the human has devices cameras on each wrist and it's studying the human doing planting, uh, you know, moving things from pots and flipping pancakes. And lo and behold, uh, this is like the scene from planet of the apes. Dave, you remember that famous scene where it was like, do, and they were like putting the forks and the knives into the, into the proper trays. And, uh, it does look like this is going to be the end of

SPEAKER_361: chores and human or your daughter is never always, is always going to have her iPad.

SPEAKER_10: I mean, basically she's going to be like, she's going to be doing to the optimist or the skilled robot. What I do to her. She's going to be like, I'm turning off your internet access until that

SPEAKER_363: dishwasher is empty. And the robot's going to be like, okay, I'll empty the dishwasher. But this

SPEAKER_175: feels like it's getting close. Yeah. It's getting close. Yeah. It's compounding at a rate, which is

SPEAKER_283: like exponential. And like, I, I think this is, I mean, I think if you're, you can take the long view and be like, it's 10 years away, but I think it's a lot sooner. I mean, watching this,

SPEAKER_00: I think the training data is happening at such a fast rate. So she'll your thoughts on the compounding nature of what we're seeing right now. And when I mean, as these things get better and better,

SPEAKER_52: it's, I just can't wait to have a robot in my house and I would easily pay way more than it costs

SPEAKER_50: to make one of these things. Like is a robot worth a hundred thousand dollars to me easily. Like if it's cleaning and cooking, it's worth a hundred thousand dollars. And what are these

SPEAKER_279: things going to cost to make? Not that 30,000 is, uh, I think what the first. Yeah. What do they

SPEAKER_10: say? Build of materials or, um, bomb. Bill of materials. Bill, bill of materials. I always say build, bill of materials, bomb. The bomb, I think it's like probably 15, 20, you put in some extra pricing. I think they gotta be 20 to 30. So I think they're the cost of a Toyota Prius.

SPEAKER_52: So think about what that unlocks for humans. And it's just incredible. Like at that price point,

SPEAKER_50: it's incredible. Yeah. It's, it's going to be like everyone, not, you know, unfortunately not everyone's going to be able to have one immediately, but like, even for the average person at 20, $30,000, it actually pays for itself pretty quickly. We have Rosie the robot.

SPEAKER_27: Unbelievable. Unbelievable. All right. Listen, while we wrap up here, Sheil is a beast on Twitter and we're going to play a new segment. It's a new segment. We're saying

SPEAKER_10: it's called Sheil's Hottest Takes. Take number one. Let's see. Um, you disagreed with Chamats all in that Silicon Valley has lost the idealism that made it great. And that people only

SPEAKER_69: care about money. Now you suggest quote, most likely a function of who Jamal surrounds him with.

SPEAKER_10: Am I supposed to take this personal? Um, what do you, what do you think of this take, uh, Dave?

SPEAKER_27: And then what we all ended up, we'll end it with you, Sheil, uh, defending your take.

SPEAKER_378: All right. That is below my line. It's below your line. Okay. Just saying your take on the, uh,

SPEAKER_10: I mean, is it too much about money right now and a little less Steve jobs and, you know, idealistic, we're going to index the web, Larry page, you know, it did feel value is always about the money,

SPEAKER_40: but it's also always about the innovation. Uh, Jason, you were probably around. Well,

SPEAKER_41: I mean, you may not have been, were you here in the valley in the late nineties?

SPEAKER_34: You can, I was in New York still. Yeah. But I mean, it would come out two or three times a year,

SPEAKER_210: but, um, yeah, I mean, it did get, I know a lot of people who thought in the late nineties, it was just people here for the money. And a lot of them were just here for the money. And then it blew up in 2001 and a lot of them left town. And then again,

SPEAKER_40: that happened probably two or three times. So like, I don't, I don't know that it's wrong. It's just not the whole story. Um, the true believers versus the get rich,

SPEAKER_316: quick people is, I think a trend who are correctly identifying Dave. And we are,

SPEAKER_10: I think, tipping into the get rich quick kind of like, Hey, can I get in here? Go ahead or say,

SPEAKER_283: and I was going to say, I mean, like in the nineties, there were a bunch of tourists who came

SPEAKER_61: in there were definitely there to make a buck and they left, but like, we did not see seed rounds and series a rounds of secondaries where founders were taking a ton of money off the table, pretty much like life alter, like not life altering money by today's like trillion dollar company standards, but life altering money. And it's like, like, like millions of dollars.

SPEAKER_391: I mean, if you break tennis life altering, yes, five or 10, it starts to become much more

SPEAKER_61: coin operated than, than, than it used to be in the past. Like there, there's a, and I think there's a, there's a bit of a negative halo around some of this stuff, because I think that, that voice has become much more amplified, even among the most technical of founders and the most innovative of founders. There's like a, it's become a business in a way where it wasn't as much of a business 20 years ago, 30 years ago, I felt more clubby. That's

SPEAKER_00: for sure. 10 or 20 years ago. So she'll, um, you defend your take, you still defend your take? I'll defend my take. Yes.

SPEAKER_393: Or were you S posting? Be honest. Were you S posting?

SPEAKER_52: No, no, no, no, no, no, absolutely not. I think, I think that, so Chamath said,

SPEAKER_50: Silicon Valley lost the idealism that made it great and it only cares about money. Are there people that only care about money? Absolutely. Has always been the case and it ebbs and flows. On the whole,

SPEAKER_52: the people doing the great work, like my friends at Anthropic and opening, I could give two shits about the money. Like they're doing it for the mission. I think like, easy to say when you pass

SPEAKER_103: a hundred billion valuation, you're yeah, that's right. But, but also like their lives haven't changed. Like they haven't changed the way they live their lives. And what are they, they could,

SPEAKER_50: they could easily just say, Hey, I'm done, I'm retiring. But if you look at the, the number of people that continue to do stuff there, it's not in strictly money motivated, it's because they're excited about the mission. And I think I've actually, I didn't see that idealism five years ago that I do see now. It is a peculiar group of people.

SPEAKER_10: I will say Anthropic because of the leadership, having all self-selected out of the Sam Altman experience, which is the cutthroat experience in their minds and the, like the money people are

SPEAKER_27: going to make the decisions, you know, code monkeys, code monkey, but leave it to Sam to, you know, uh, take the credit. This is not my interpretation. This is what people say, like Sam's taking the credit, Sam's doing the deal. Sam's the front man that got a little tired. I think for that group of people, Anthropic is like, Oh, we're a bunch of monks.

SPEAKER_10: We're a bunch of pious, like we're doing this and we're giving all our money to the Anthropic foundation and we're going to cure cancer. And, but you're going to lose your job. They seem like head cases to me a bit on the margins, like really delusionally, uh, committed to being the last company on earth. It is a little weird. All right.

SPEAKER_401: What about Sam not having any equity in open AI? I don't know if it's true.

SPEAKER_73: I mean, I think we're missing the, we're missing the point. He's got a lot of money,

SPEAKER_37: probably in nonprofits and philanthropic entities that he controls. And like, who's to say whether that's, you know, money in his personal pocket versus money in his philanthropic pocket. It's fuzzy. People need liquidity and, you know, obviously talking my own book here, but I just

SPEAKER_168: wanted to share a few interesting, uh, charts that might be relevant. Um, I've been doing this presentation for another talk. This is like comparing a hundred million dollar private rounds versus a hundred million dollar IPOs. Uh, that crossed over around 2017 when

SPEAKER_369: SoftBank Vision Fund came out, got a little nuts in 2016 is when the flip happened. The blue line is a hundred million dollar private rounds. The red line is a hundred million dollar IPOs and we see

SPEAKER_10: them bifurcate in 2016, just so people listening understand. And now it's 10 to one last couple of

SPEAKER_168: years, the number of private hundred million dollar rounds 400 per year, looks like we're going to continue on that track. Number of IPOs of a hundred million dollars, only like 40 or 50. Right. And I

SPEAKER_37: think that's what we've seen is the IPO market now is requiring half a billion to a billion

SPEAKER_168: dollars to go public. Uh, it's not that it's closed. You just have to be a lot bigger. That results in companies being private a lot longer. Um, the other graph I will show is this one, which is the tender offer. And this is corporate tenders or internal secondary offers for their employees. That is a booming business somewhere between 30 to $40 billion a year now. And, you know,

SPEAKER_216: growing probably north of 50%, at least north of 30, 40, 50% per year. Yeah. And here we're seeing

SPEAKER_94: 2023, there were 6.5, 20, 24, 12 major jump from 24 to 25, 12 to 27 billion. So just over two X and

SPEAKER_10: then 27 billion to 37 billion into the estimated 20, 26 tender offers, which for people who don't know, that's, uh, some investors coming in and buying common shares from employees that it's, it's corporate

SPEAKER_411: organized secondaries, primarily for the employees, sometimes also for their investors, early investors who have been patient for a lot of companies, for a lot of companies like Databricks and Stripe and

SPEAKER_168: Canada and others, these are happening on almost an annual basis. Now, those numbers are probably distorted a little bit. OpenAI did their own $7 billion secondary, uh, earlier this year,

SPEAKER_239: but still the majority. Who was the buy side on that 7 billion? Was that Kushner?

SPEAKER_168: Uh, it's secondary firms. It's the primary round VCs who, you know, want more equity when they're oversubscribed rounds. Uh, it's retail market and family offices, you know, at least for the popular names. Um, but it's kind of interesting because outside the top 50 companies, there's not as much awareness of those companies. And I think this is what's going to start to happen is these companies are staying private for five years longer than they used to. Employees there want to buy a house, want to put their kids to college. They want liquidity and they're sitting on a ton of, you

SPEAKER_41: know, unrealized equity, but they can't buy a house in Silicon Valley. They can't, you know, pay for schools and everything. Well, and their concentration,

SPEAKER_105: Dave, is the real issue, right? Like you're basically 99.99% of Shields friends at Anthropic, their wealth is in one stock. Well, okay. One more, one more graph and I'll quit here.

SPEAKER_168: Um, but we love your graphs. Keep them coming. Here's my segmentation of that market. In that top

SPEAKER_210: category used to be SpaceX still is Anthropic, OpenAI. Now it's like a trillion. Stripe. Well, but as soon as OpenAI and Anthropic go out, then the remaining ones will be like Stripe, Databricks, maybe Revolut, Anderol, a few others. I guess ByteDance if you consider.

SPEAKER_343: Right around a hundred. Yeah. Some of them just below, some just above. So that will-

SPEAKER_41: Huge amount of dollars there. But like, look at the rhinos and stallions and maybe the donkeys.

SPEAKER_168: These are like where the majority of the number of tenders are. They're not like huge numbers. These are like 10 to $50 million tenders. Um, amount of market cap that's being sold here is probably

SPEAKER_216: somewhere between two to 5% for most of these companies. Got it.

SPEAKER_424: Yeah. So they're trimming very little of their cap table for very large numbers.

SPEAKER_168: Right. And you know, let's just assume these companies are probably growing, you know, north of 20, 30, 40% per year. It's not at all unreasonable to say you would, you know,

SPEAKER_130: do 5% every year in sort of secondaries. Yeah.

SPEAKER_168: Back to employees. Uh, this is really the new IPO market. This is like where liquidity is coming from for employees. It's why real estate agents in San Francisco make a ton of money and car dealerships and, you know, private schools. But, but the challenge here is it's still a pretty concentrated story. And, and I think we're just going to see more and more of these corporate tenders happening on a regular basis. If nothing else, just to be competitive, you know, if you, if you have the choice to go work for a company that has an annual tender offer and one that doesn't, which one you're going to choose.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah. And who's the loser here? Uh, who's saying who, who loses in this new private marker tender

SPEAKER_61: offer in your mind? And retail, retail, retail investors, right? Retail investors have to wait until these things are super expensive and you're, and in the old days, Dave, like in like the nineties, like you take these companies out, like really, really early, like at market caps of a hundred and employees would have liquidity just immediately, like after lockup.

SPEAKER_105: And retail could buy those shares. More importantly, a civilian could own Microsoft at a hundred, 200, 300 million.

SPEAKER_216: Well, they can still do that, but the difference is now it's a fuzzy story because when those

SPEAKER_168: companies go public, they report their numbers, there's quarterly transparency of what's going on. You have a two, three, $4 trillion, you know, middle ground market where these companies,

SPEAKER_210: you know, exist before they go public, but their financials are not disclosed to anybody. It's not an insider or a primary investor. And so all of this secondary

SPEAKER_168: trades that are happening on markets, you know, Hive, Forge, EquiZen, Augment, all these other brokers, there's no underlying corporate financial data on most of them. Everybody's flying blind and

SPEAKER_170: buying that on vibes. Yeah, it's vibes. Yeah. Totally vibes.

SPEAKER_10: Uh, and the bot, yeah, the buyers who are buying it, um, are hearing people talk about these names.

SPEAKER_27: And when something gets a certain amount of PR, then it looks great while SpaceX and Anthropic

SPEAKER_201: are going through the roof, but I guarantee you, as soon as that market turns around,

SPEAKER_27: it could be like the sasspocalypse, right? Like late stage VCs, they suspended disbelief. They bought air table, no, no dig to air table at 10 billion and it didn't get there. They got their money back.

SPEAKER_443: We could have a lot of, we could have a lot of those. Like we, I mean, I don't know how many

SPEAKER_256: unicorns there were back in 21, like, you know, 600 plus, like how many of them are real, right?

SPEAKER_210: Like we were just talking about headspace just got bought for 200, 300 million dollars, but the last private mark was $3 billion. Headspace got bought. Down 90%.

SPEAKER_00: Who bought them? I'm still a large shareholder in, uh, com. I did take advantage of secondary

SPEAKER_306: twice during that opportunity on the way up for my LPs, but who bought sword health plans to acquire headspace and cash transaction. Wow.

SPEAKER_201: And by the way, this same issue exists for a lot of seed funds. I think this is the big challenge for a whole bunch of fund managers is they're sitting on unrealized marks. They may have a

SPEAKER_210: fund that's at three, four, five X, you know, TVPI, but DPI is zero or, you know, barely, you know, 0.5. These funds are getting to 10 years and there hasn't been, you know, one X return back to investors yet. And I think we need to start figuring out how we're going to get liquidity for these funds.

SPEAKER_306: I really, if I wasn't doing what I'm doing right now and so busy, I would do a roll up vehicle. I would raise 500 million and then just go straight down like, um,

SPEAKER_10: bending spoons is doing bending spoons, but I would do a private bending spoons and then just hire a bunch of AI kids, developers, give them like really crazy bonuses for hitting crazy profitability. And just buy every headspace slash whatever is out there with maybe headspace has 50 million in revenue and they get sold for a hundred or 200 million. And then you can get rid of 80% of the staff. You

SPEAKER_00: can do what Elon did at Twitter, you know, get rid of 80, 90% of the cost. And now you've got a wonderful business. Um, I remember meetup.com. My friends got high from it. I started that company. Kevin Ryan wound up buying it and then it went to bending spoons. And I had heard a whisper that it was making 15 million a year and then it got bought for 20 million. And I was like, wait, how's that possible? It doesn't make any sense to me. And I don't know if that's true or not. That was just a whisper I heard. But I think if it's not growing, VCs just don't want to waste their time, but what an incredible opportunity.

SPEAKER_456: Well, there's some stuff that's growing just not fast enough for venture return.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah. That was Airtable, right? Airtable is still growing 20%. And people are like, well, this is a waste of my time. It's like, really? But okay. Uh, I guess we'll see.

SPEAKER_459: It all depends on price, right? And at the end of the day.

SPEAKER_10: Well, it's price. And, but I think more importantly, see, this is what I thought that too, Hussein. Then I realized it's not price. It's, it's opportunity plus price. You have a certain number of

SPEAKER_27: things mentally you can keep in your brain as an investor, probably 10, uh, you know, like as in board seats and you're like, well, if I have, I would say three. Okay. But you know, I'm being

SPEAKER_182: generous here. Let's say it's eight. Let's say seven. So you got seven and you're like, Hey, these three are filling my space with a 20% growth company and it's hard. And every conversation is hard and a bummer and we can't get out of the mud for four years. And I could give those three seats to, I don't know,

SPEAKER_10: this robotic company making pancakes, you know, it's just, you only have so many, um,

SPEAKER_151: spots on your dance card. I think that's. She'll you're nodding. I think. Yeah.

SPEAKER_149: No, I agree. I think there's a, there's a question of like, are these companies ever

SPEAKER_50: going to go public? Like why would Stripe go public ever? Like they have their unlimited

SPEAKER_406: capital, sell their capital. You know, why not? They don't have to, they have liquidity.

SPEAKER_52: If they want to acquire PayPal, it seems like they can, uh, because somebody else will give

SPEAKER_50: them money to do it. So why would they ever go? Mike Bloomberg never took Bloomberg public. Different. He owned it almost entirely. Sure. Uh, 80, 90%. Like, cause he didn't have to solve for like Stripe gets this tender thing that Dave's talking about. Solves for the liquidity question and the private markets have grown so much

SPEAKER_93: that they don't need to go public to grow. Bloomberg was a technology company. You know what he did in New York? He was famous for just paying 50% more than everybody else. If you worked at the New York

SPEAKER_10: Times, you made a hundred, you were making 200 working for him. You know, if you worked at the

SPEAKER_279: Washington post and you went to Bloomberg, you got a 50 K 75 K raise and you didn't get any equity,

SPEAKER_40: but right now. I think there's an arbitrage opportunity here where these companies have been priced on sort of venture scale projections. And now some of them are profitable, but not growing

SPEAKER_210: that fast and they're going to be priced on free cashflow projections, you know, not just multiples

SPEAKER_168: of revenue or growth. And that's going to be a different number, very different. I mean,

SPEAKER_462: if you have a currency like Elon did, I think cursor might wind up being, you know, this generation's YouTube acquisition. You've got it. That's a great buy. That was a trillion dollars. And they brought

SPEAKER_477: in 3 billion and what was their runway? 3 billion, 4 billion at the time. It's, it's at 4 billion now,

SPEAKER_40: and it's on its way to 10 by the end of the year. But like that, that's not even like the total value. It's like, you know, to be, to be kind, I would say XAI was a shell of a company that was mostly

SPEAKER_210: valuable because of the infrastructure and CapEx that Elon bought. It wasn't because of the tech or, or even the people who largely walked out the door after that acquisition. But, you know, turns out that all that infrastructure was very useful to rent out to, you know, Anthropic and Google. And then cursor was really the value that came in. And I think that combination, like, you got to give Elon credit, the massive pivot that he's done in the last six, nine months

SPEAKER_41: with that company. Incredible. He's going to have a line of business that is the majority of their revenue that did not exist. Elon web services.

SPEAKER_182: Yes. That is just mind-bombing. All right, let's end on agents. I have been obsessed

SPEAKER_105: with GrokBot just does what you tell it to do. Sheil, you have been obsessed with another agent, which has a landing page that looks like it was built in seven minutes by a Python developer.

SPEAKER_279: And I signed up for it and people are losing their minds over it and the terms of service. Tell us about this new open claw abstracted into just iMessage that people are losing their minds over. Tell us

SPEAKER_52: everything. Yeah. So I, I've been using GrokBot too. I, this, this company is called Instinct.

SPEAKER_50: It was funded at seed by conviction and a, I believe by Kleiner Perkins, not announced, but that's what I've heard. Um, also I've also heard crazy valuation numbers, like seed at a hundred, uh, a at 500. And I heard they have offers, uh, at the billion plus range. Um, what it does

SPEAKER_52: is it's basically like your assistant. You can, that's the website. Yeah. This is worth a billion

SPEAKER_380: dollars folks. Here's your, I mean, could we even just put it in a no background? No. Okay. Sounds good.

SPEAKER_50: Um, you can text it and it just does stuff for you. Um, what's cool. And I think valuable about it

SPEAKER_52: is it actually like goes the next step beyond what you would think to do. You would think a bot would

SPEAKER_50: do. So, um, I, if you ask, uh, chat DPT work to book a flight for you, it will take you to the landing page, Google flights. Here's the flight to take instinct. We'll actually go through and book it for you. Um, and they're able to do that because they have a vault where they store your credit card

SPEAKER_52: information. Um, and they're probably violating all sorts of terms of service. Um, but Hey, the thing

SPEAKER_10: works. Um, I signed up for it. I saw the terms of service debate. I paused. I was like, I'm not sending anything until I find out what's going on here. Um, grok bot has been amazing for me. A bunch of the things I wanted to do with open claw, but an Hermes, uh, I call it Hermes cause I think it's funny. Um, that it's a harness and they make bags, but anyway, um, a lot of those agents and claw code just, they had too many restrictions on what they would do and not do. I took a clip of a YouTube file and I said, analyze this into the five most important clips and, um, make me five clips. And it took this Mearsheimer, John Mearsheimer video about tactical nukes, whatever he's been on the Olin pod. It made me five clips. I was like, Whoa. And it's like, would you like one of these vertical with captions? And I was like, sure. And then I shared it on my Twitter and I was like,

SPEAKER_27: well, that's a $50 an hour video editor, you know, freelancer that I would have done that back and

SPEAKER_10: forth with instead of taking three hours, it took three minutes and was essentially close to free. And then I asked it to do some things on LinkedIn and it just did it because it has a computer window that abstracts into cursor and it kind of works all the time. I think that product, if it goes multiplayer mode, we'll go parabolic. And by multiplayer mode, I mean, can I just add three team members to it as comment only? Can I add five team members to it as read only, you know, like the Google doc suite. If they add multiplayer mode to that, I'm going to, I would have taken the docket creator for today and shared it with you guys. And we would have all been there talking with the docket. Really interesting product. Have you used, anybody used GrokBot yet? And any impressions?

SPEAKER_496: I'm using it too. I use them all. Like, I mean,

SPEAKER_221: Which one sticks? Which one is sticking most? Which one do you go to first?

SPEAKER_443: Oh, open club is the least durable. Like, like I switched over to Hermes. And then,

SPEAKER_499: then GrokBot became the next one. Then instinct. I just got, I was, it has a signup list and I'm not cool enough. Like you guys to get, I put my name in. It was instantly. It was like, okay,

SPEAKER_502: you're on the list, but you're in. I was like, okay. Okay. So I'm not working on that one, but it's also

SPEAKER_61: amazing. Like a year ago, none of these things existed. Like, like open close like a year ago.

SPEAKER_342: It was like, yeah, yeah. Like the, the pace is like super fast again. These things are compounding.

SPEAKER_10: I got to say what Sam Altman, I mean, listen, I don't, I don't want to beat up on Sam here, but

SPEAKER_00: what he did to open claw was so sinister and cynical in my mind. He, he like buys the guy, brings him internal. And then, you know, Dave Morin, like is trying to keep this foundation going and literally the second, the, um, his name is Peter. I believe I've never met him. The second Peter went to open AI open claw, just lost its voice, lost its momentum. Everybody was like, well, this is over whether it's true or not. I've never seen a project go from everybody embracing it, talking about it to completely toxic and people being like, yeah, you know, I gotta, I gotta go find something else. I gotta find something else. And I don't know if that's because they thought it was part of open AI and they didn't want to, you know, they were open source

SPEAKER_76: people or better options came out. I don't know. What do you think, Sheil?

SPEAKER_52: Yeah. I'm not sure what happened there. I, I think to your point about Grokbot being like a, we've talked about this, having a hundred million users. I think that relies on the other guys not catching up and they actually already have like chat GPT work already yesterday announced new stuff. That's doing a closer version of this. I'll show you guys one more graph.

SPEAKER_27: And by the way, Sheil is open AI work. Basically what Peter is probably working on there. And it's probably basically open claw inside of open AI. Totally.

SPEAKER_513: Yeah. I mean, what did he get? I think he got 300 million shield.

SPEAKER_517: Yeah, I think I, what is he worth? You heard that? I don't know. I thought it was somewhere between two to 300. That sounds right.

SPEAKER_268: Oh man, maybe 300 million valuation or 400 million. That might be triple. It might be a billion dollars right now. What do you think was saying? It was just one guy, just one guy.

SPEAKER_502: It was never disclosed. I mean, the rumors were like a crazy number.

SPEAKER_249: Sorry. You know what? That wasn't, uh, that was the other company that was acquired. Um, the, uh, podcasting bros was two experiments.

SPEAKER_524: No, remember the, oh, there was a social media experiment that they bought. Oh yeah. What was that?

SPEAKER_10: No, no, but I think Peter got the, the whisper number on Peter was two or 300 million in equity. Yeah. And that was when it was a three or $400 million company. If it goes out at 2 trillion,

SPEAKER_279: that could be five acts, six acts. Anyway, I just want to put this out.

SPEAKER_52: Remember how crazy it was, the open claw hype. The open claw hype was so crazy that there was a, there was this mold book, a face. That was the one that I was talking about.

SPEAKER_191: What got acquired. I think that got acquired for like 200 million by meta. By meta. Right. Yeah.

SPEAKER_443: And there was like the open claw religion. Like if someone planted that seed, like it was like, there was a euphoria around this thing. And then it just like died. Like it was about one month,

SPEAKER_201: the whole thing start to finish. Well, I think the, the hype was maybe overplayed, but the story was sort of for real. I think that was like original agentic sort of adoption,

SPEAKER_41: but wow. I just want to point out this graph. This is kind of like crazy. Explain the chart.

SPEAKER_539: You got to explain the chart Dave. Cause people listen.

SPEAKER_210: So there's a little story here in that CFO, uh, Sarah Fryer at open AI four months ago, she was like, Sam's like, we're going to IPO. And she's like, we're not ready to IPO.

SPEAKER_41: And then just recently, this was leaked from their internal conversation. She's like, we're definitely going to IPO in 2027. And maybe sooner if our growth keeps inflecting. And I was like, what's she talking about inflecting? And I was like, this graph is what she was talking about. Look at those numbers sort of like go through the

SPEAKER_316: goddamn roof. Yeah. And what we're seeing here is, uh, open a active agent users, uh, in

SPEAKER_10: back in January, 200,000 breaks a million. Just, just a month ago. Like that growth went through, but it hits, it hits 5 million in May and then 6 million in July, 10 million later in July, 15 million in the beginning of August, 20 million towards the end of August. So you're talking about four axing in two months. Right. Unbelievable. And I don't have the grass in front of me,

SPEAKER_544: but I know that, uh, it was reported that open AI revenue was going faster than Anthropic this month.

SPEAKER_10: This is after they had quarter over quarter slow down. Hmm. Interesting. All right. Listen, another amazing episode this week in venture capital, a special edition of this week in startups and offshoot, whatever. Uh, Hey guys, best investment. What's your port? What's, what's, uh, what's your biggest portfolio, uh, win these days. She'll tell us when'd you get in, what is it, which one is just

SPEAKER_86: going to sprinkle all that beautiful DPI on your LPs? Tell us, tell us, tell us where hope,

SPEAKER_548: where is your hope tied to? It's a hard job being, I would say a real DPI or hope.

SPEAKER_550: Those are two. Yeah. Selling hope baby. Yes. Hopium. Tell us about you.

SPEAKER_52: I would, I would say recently one is called basis. It's a, um, AI for accounting really automates the work of a junior accountant. If you think about Harvey or Lagora for law, um, and you've seen the growth in those companies, this is that for accounting. Um, we led a seed, uh, Keith at Kosla led the A and Excel led a B recently. And the growth that I've seen is amazing. And companies, these, these accounting firms are really using the product and it's just, it's, it's been amazing.

SPEAKER_10: Fantastic. And you got in at seed. We, I think we are investors in the, uh, the Uber to your Lyft or your DoorDash, uh, whatever the analogy is, uh, tax GPT, um, that we incubated. So yeah,

SPEAKER_279: I agree. This is going to be a fantastic space for both companies. What do you got, Dave? What's,

SPEAKER_557: um, what's making you, uh, we talk about what we're going to get DPI and what we hope to get.

SPEAKER_560: Yes. Yes. Which one do you, when you talk about it, put an eggplant emoji at the end of the sentence?

SPEAKER_40: Which one? Uh, well, I guess because I worked at Founders Fund 16 years ago, I have Kerry in Founders

SPEAKER_210: Fund too. And we, when we started our, our second secondary fund, I, I rolled in about a million dollars in GP commit in that fund thinking, oh, this will perform pretty well. Oh, yum, yum. Turns out that was all SpaceX. Fantastic. Well done. It was our best investment. So that, that's a career maker. But, but the things I'm actually excited about probably are not generally on people's radar. We, we spend about 10% of our capital in Latin America and one of our best performing investments, I may have mentioned

SPEAKER_168: this on the show before, was a company called Motu. And they are a motorcycle manufacturing and small business lending company for delivery drivers in Sao Paulo, Brazil. And that business is on fire.

SPEAKER_210: Uh, it's doing over 300 million in revenue, profitable, growing 60, 70% per year. Uh, and it's very, very reasonably priced. A lot of Latim is actually on sale. I'd like to meet them. I'd like to meet them. Yeah. And as Sheil knows, you know, we used to do a lot of investments all over the world in 500 startups. Now that I'm doing secondaries, most of it's in the US. Um, but at least some of it,

SPEAKER_168: we're doing emerging markets. Um, a different deal that's not a typical secondary for us is in a company called Equity B. Uh, and we recently put money into that because they are a platform sort of similar to secondary marketplaces like Forge Equities then, but they do employee stock option forward contracts. Uh, and so again, getting back to those employees who are sort of locked up and, and want or need liquidity before the shares are actually available to them. Uh, they can finance and exercise

SPEAKER_138: and hold those shares and get some liquidity and really helpful for people who are leaving companies who might otherwise lose those options. Equity B.com, B-E-E. Amazing. Well done.

SPEAKER_567: Hussein, who do you got? Who's making you feel optimistic these days in the port?

SPEAKER_361: This year, this month, uh, we did one in the AI space for material science called Cusp AI. We were

SPEAKER_61: the inception check. We wrote him a $10 million check, uh, create what at the time felt like a crazy number. Uh, it's not a crazy number in hindsight. It's worth 2.6 billion. Kleiner just marked it up. 2 years in like almost a fun returner for our fun three, like in, in 2 years. Absolutely. Feels pretty good.

SPEAKER_571: Congratulations.

SPEAKER_137: Not our most, like our sister company said that in many ways is like the same type of thing,

SPEAKER_61: but a drug discovery company. So AI, um, AI for biology called peptone.com, which like the AI, this stuff really works. And like, we have a, we have a drug against prostate cancer that might actually stop prostate cancer almost entirely generated by the computer. And like, we're going into clinical trials. So like that, that to me is like the one that's where I can generate the ton of DPI for us,

SPEAKER_306: but both are very, like, absolutely fantastic. Congratulations. I'll just give you two quick ones myself. Uh, we love all of our startups equally, but you know, sometimes we see, um, things get marked up and this is this week in VC. So, um, just on the markup trail on prem,

SPEAKER_279: uh, and sovereign AI became like a big deal, but we had incubated this company, Apicus 18 months ago. Um, and so for banking and healthcare, et cetera, they take this go one server, put it into your facility and, uh, they help you build your own, uh, large language models, harnesses, et cetera, and keep you from having to give, uh, all that data to a frontier or risk leaking it. And they have a wait list for their product. And that is always a great sign. Second one, micro one, I met this crazy founder, just high energy, you know, reminded me a bit of Travis. And, uh, he was using AI to figure out who the top developer was top developers were. It's a pretty interesting product. I think we invested when it was 10 or $15 million. And, uh, then he pivoted into AI training this week. He announced he had $500 million in training revenue, everything from legal,

SPEAKER_306: et cetera. Um, and that they also, uh, hit a $4 billion valuation. So that is a, uh, fund returner

SPEAKER_10: times four, three or four, I guess. Um, but of course, long way to go. Still more work to be done. Dave, Sheil, Hussain. Great job on the show and we'll see you all next time. Bye bye.