SPEAKER_00: Well, Jason, it looks like you're back, back in the Bay Area.

SPEAKER_01: I am back in the Bay Area, ready to rock and roll. I am, yeah, I am feeling fabulously productive.

Chamath Palihapitiya: You know, we're, Fund 4 hit our target, so that's great. And I am investing about a million dollars a month, about 100 companies a month.

SPEAKER_04: And I've added three researchers and analysts to the team, which has just been great. Thanks for asking, David. How are you doing?

SPEAKER_00: I'm doing great. I'm at our friend, Alex Adelson, at his annual meeting, AGM. Do you go to any of your GPs, AGMs?

SPEAKER_01: I get invited to a bunch. I get invited to keynote and speak at them now, or like moderate.

SPEAKER_04: The number of things I'm saying no to, it's a great paradox, Delia, and you'll deal with this over the next 20 years, because you're so successful at what you do.

SPEAKER_01: You know, like when you're starting your career, you're like, somebody pay attention to me, and can I get a meeting? And then over time, you get the number of meetings and recognition you want, and then you drowned in opportunity. And then when you're drowning in opportunity, you have to like change your mindset, which is, you have to figure out what actually you enjoy and what moves the needle for your goals. And I, you know, I spent the last maybe five years looking at that and getting rid of anything on my

Chamath Palihapitiya: schedule that is not my kids and family, recording a podcast, meeting with founders. If it's not those three things, it should not be on my calendar. And, you know, God bless my team for helping me with that.

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SPEAKER_18: We have two legends. I'm really excited, Dalyan and Mel.

SPEAKER_00: Mel actually started one of the most successful fund of funds in the world, really in the VC space. And Dalyan, you keep busy. Congrats on the $90 million round. I think you announced last month for Varda and also you're a partner at Founders Fund. And you also have a kid, right?

SPEAKER_21: Yeah, my kid was just born five months ago now. So, you know, trying to balance all three jobs as best I can. But thankfully, Founders Fund is a place where it seems like a lot of the partners like to do a lot of jobs. Great.

SPEAKER_00: Well, we have a lot of unpacked to unpack today. Can we get started? Yeah, let's do it. Welcome back to this week's Liquidity Podcast. With me today, I have Dalyan Asparohov, partner at Founders Fund, also founder of Varda. Next, we have Mel Williams, co-founding general partner at TrueBitch Capital Partners, which tracks the Midas list and is a top venture fund of fun. Of course, we have Jason Calacanis from the Launch Fund. I'm your moderator, David Weisberg, co-founder of 10x Capital. Today, we have several great topics on the docket. Crypto funds are back in the game. Companies are ramping up their AI spending. We'll unpack. And our friend Elon, or your friend Elon, Jason, had a fascinating interview at the Milken Conference. We'll end with everyone's latest three investments. Let's get started. Crypto is officially back. Wall Street Journal is reporting that top crypto funds, Pantera Capital and Paradigm, are back in the market. Pantera is targeting $1.25 billion for their eighth fund.

SPEAKER_28: And Paradigm, a crypto fund funded by Coinbase co-founder Fred Ernstom, is discussing raising between $750 and $850 million for their next fund. In the first three months of 2024, crypto-focused VC funds closed on $2.01 billion globally, compared to just $1.9 billion in all of 2023. Dalian, founders funds reportedly made a huge bet on Bitcoin. What are your views on the crypto market today?

SPEAKER_29: One thing that I love about our crypto strategy at IFF is we allow people to run with very independent convictions. Myself, personally, crypto is not my area of expertise. It's explicitly an area that I sometimes critique extensively publicly on Twitter. But at the same time, I love the fact that we are strong, independent thinkers in this area. We don't let hype cycles really affect our investment strategy. As an example, in the true lowest part of the market when everybody was the most pessimistic in late 2022, we actually ended up deciding to hire Joey Krug, who is the former CIO at Pantera Capital, who, in our opinion, is basically the smartest investor in crypto. He joined in April 2023, when, again, most investors were fleeing the space. Bitcoin was roughly half the price that it was today. And then, again, media has reported that we've made a huge bet in Bitcoin, and it was reported to be right around the bottom tick. And I think a part of it is just we've been sort of long-term investors in this space and long-term thinkers. There's this old Peter Thiel talk that he gave in the late 90s, talking about the potential of a digital currency with cryptographic backing. Obviously, PayPal, in some ways, the original idea was sort of digital movement of currency. And then even as a fund, we actually began investing in Bitcoin in 2014. And I think we've also recognized that a part of the venture capitalist job is not just when to buy equities, but it's also when to sell and distribute them. And I think broadly across the portfolio, I think we've managed that quite well. Maybe Mel can speak to the amount that Founders Fund returned in Q421. But we took a very different approach to other top tier investors that decided to not give LPs control of those equities and instead forcibly hold on to them. And I think that was not their right call. So yeah, I think it's super exciting to have to see the resurgence of this space. And recently, we announced that we led the Series B of poly markets. And so our active investors in this space, both with tokens and crypto equities as well.

SPEAKER_00: Mel, you have an institutional practice, you have a fund to fund. How do you look at the crypto market? How do your institutional piece look at the space?

SPEAKER_33: Yeah, you know, we're, we're relatively bullish on the crypto or blockchain market as an attractive investment opportunity. A little like Founders Fund, we began taking a hard look at the blockchain or crypto markets back in 2016 or 2017, when we saw a lot of our core venture managers, including Founders Fund, investing in the sector. And we saw a lot of, you know, top technical talent building in blockchain. We made our first two dedicated manager commitments to blockchain managers in 2017. And in 2021, we raised our first dedicated blockchain fund to fund, which invests in both managers and directly in the equity of projects and or private and public tokens. And so we've been in the market for a long time. You know, clearly, the market is much larger today than it was several years ago. We believe the market has broadened and deepened over time so that while the primary focus remains on Bitcoin, there are more legitimate and attractive opportunities to invest in crypto beyond Bitcoin today than there were seven or eight years ago. I think the total market cap of crypto peaked in 2017 at just under $800 million. And I think it just peaked earlier this year at just under $3 trillion in March. So you can see the growth of the market over time. We believe the market is more institutionalized today because the investor base has broadened to include, you know, high quality institutional investors like TrueBridge and other high quality institutional investors. You can't ignore the current potential impact of the Bitcoin ETFs and opening a new retail investor base. So, you know, a much broader investor base than several years ago. And then finally, we believe there are more real revenue driven use cases being developed every day on chain. If you look at Bitcoin, it's a method of payment in the store value. If you look at, you know, contract companies like Ethereum and Solana, you know, smart contract for DeFi services or NFTs or play to earn games is having a lot of success. If you look at, you know, the staking tokens like Lido and 8th AI, I mean, these tokens are generating hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue each year. So we're seeing, you know, a lot more use cases than we did seven or eight years ago. And so we're rather excited about the investment opportunities we see in the blockchain market. And we're putting our dollars and our limited partners dollars behind those investment opportunities.

SPEAKER_00: Earlier this week, SWIP, State of Wisconsin Investment Board, disclosed a large investment in Bitcoin. Do you see that as a watershed moment?

SPEAKER_32: Or, you know, to me, it's a little bit of old news. You know, I think there are a lot of institutional investors that are already invested in Bitcoin.

SPEAKER_33: I think your leading foundations and endowments have been invested in directly in the leading tokens for a number of years. It might be the first for a large public pension plan to invest directly on the token. But I think some of your, you know, your thought leading institutional investors have been there for a long time. I think some of the things that we're doing are.

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SPEAKER_22: And Jason, you haven't been the most bullish on crypto. Uh, have you changed your mind at all?

SPEAKER_39: Do you see any legitimate use cases or any applications?

SPEAKER_40: Um, you know, I, the way I look at the space is Bitcoin is a completely different animal than crypto.

SPEAKER_41: I think it is it sits as a store of value on a global basis like gold that has never existed before in

Chamath Palihapitiya: humanity. And the fact that it hasn't been hacked in any way, uh, except for maybe the endpoints, which anybody can put a gun to your head or hack your computer or phone and steal anything. So it is a perfect piece of technology after 15 years. And I think it's earned its right to, to have that very important global function. I met in starting in 2009, 10, 11, 12, with all of these companies.

SPEAKER_01: And what I realized were they were a combination of incompetence, criminals, grifters, um, and delusional people. Now I like investing, investing in delusional people, I just don't like investing in incompetent people. So delusional competent, great.

Chamath Palihapitiya: And I think what we're seeing right now, as you watch the sec take apart all of the grifts, all of the, you know, illegal securities, whether it's XRP or, you know, uh, or criminal activity like tether, which is, you know, a favorite for people doing human trafficking or, you know, other illegal activities. Um, I think what we're gonna see, you know, probably in the next decade is some kind of framework emerge in the United States, which has to happen. You, you can't have this regulatory environment be so, uh, murky in, or you're just gonna continue to have this very strange dynamic where the sec won't approve something. And then, you know, visionary people make stuff alongside criminals and grifters and incompetence.

SPEAKER_01: And then, you know, they're like, Hmm, we'll tell you in four years when we arrest you, if what you did was illegal. So there's a lot of blame to go on both sides here. I haven't touched it because, um, I have made a career of, you know, assessing a product and a customer base. And I have a knack for that. And I have a knack for people who are hard to get along with and extremely competent. And because I'm hard to get along with, and I like to think I'm competent. That's the, that's my signaling, great products, consumers who are over the moon and people who are difficult, but competent. And when I looked at this space, and when I looked at it through my personal lens of investing, there was no product and there was no customer. So it made it impossible for me to make an investment decision in place of that. And then when I assess the individuals, once in a while, there'd be a Brian Armstrong, but for every Brian Armstrong, there was a long tail of incompetent people. Right. And, and so I, I chose to just not spend my time on it. Now I, I probably missed a bunch of great trades, but I didn't miss any great investments. And I think we need to really, um, we, we need to hold the sec accountable for making a clear framework. And if the framework is going to be, you know, it's the existing framework. Fine. Then do that, which is kind of what they've done, but I think that's stupid because there is something here, obviously. So what I've tried to encourage, and I've been public about this is what I call the

SPEAKER_04: sophisticated investor test. We have qualified purchasers. We have accredited investors.

SPEAKER_01: We say they're sophisticated because they're rich. We, we never double click on that, right? No, we're just like you inherited money. You won the lottery. Great. You're sophisticated. What I think there should be as a test and the test should be, you know, maybe a five hour course.

Chamath Palihapitiya: It should be, you know, whatever 50 or a hundred questions. It should require two or three hours. And then we should let people gamble or invest on these things. And then on the other side, there should be safe harbor in my framework for projects that are small

SPEAKER_53: when they're under $10 million, when they're 10 million to 250 million.

Chamath Palihapitiya: And when they're 250 million above, there should be like maybe three different rules for the road. You can do whatever you want under 10 million. Have at it with sophisticated investors. So that when you're going to go work with that investor, you can say like, hey, do you have the sophisticated investor number? Yeah, put it in here. Just like if you were going to cut hair in California, you need a license to cut hair. You know, but we don't have that. You know, you can go to Vegas and you can gamble and you don't need, you can be drunk and they could be feeding you drinks for free and you can gamble your entire life savings and there's no repercussions. So now that we have draft kings and sports betting legal, I think we need to address this because I believe crypto sits between gambling and professional investing, right? Just like stonks do like these meme stocks or whatever. Just create a good framework.

SPEAKER_01: If there was a clean framework, I would feel more comfortable doing it, but I have other opportunities that are not going to get me pinched and not going to result in, you know, me

Chamath Palihapitiya: dumping my tokens on retail, right? I don't want to wake up one day in a lawsuit because I invested in a company and then that company dunked, dumped a bunch of tokens on retail.

SPEAKER_01: And then everybody's like, oh, did you dump your tokens? Well, I have to sell my shares for my LPs at some point. And if I was an investor in one of these companies, XRP or something, I'm not pointing them out, but they've had the biggest SEC battle.

SPEAKER_04: Do I want to be in that position of having to defend my investment and having SEC? I've had the SEC send me a letter or two because I invested in companies that they wanted to know about.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Not that we did anything wrong, but it's not fun because you're all of a sudden spending tens of thousands of dollars. And in the case of crypto, it would be hundreds of thousands explaining what you did and never knowing if they're going to show up at your door. So that's my feeling on it. I wish there was a clean framework and then I would engage. And I like the fact that all these grifters are getting pinched so that we can dissuade them. And the SEC drops two enforcements a month on average. I looked at their enforcement page in crypto, and then that would make all of this easier. But I'm not comfortable in it.

SPEAKER_20: I don't know, Jason, if you saw, there's a big US House bill that's going to the vote for this exact issue, which is a lot of the criticism in the crypto industry hasn't been necessarily this rule is good or this rule is bad, but the purposely vague tactics of the current chairman. And this bill is going to the House for a vote to try to really establish a framework, what is legal and what is not legal and make it in a very American way, clear laws, clear regulations. I think that's going to do a lot to it because I think a lot of people are in the same camp as you, Jason. They might see opportunity to get upside, but they don't want to deal with SEC. They don't want to get rated. They don't want to get called out by their LB. So I think some of the regulatory framework will take us a big step forward as well.

SPEAKER_60: How do you look at Mel? I'm curious, you know, when you hear my take on it.

SPEAKER_32: I agree with you that the crypto market needs to be regulated. It needs to be regulated. I think it will be regulated. It's taken too long for regulatory agencies to get their act together to figure out where they

SPEAKER_33: want to head on this, but I think it I think it needs to be regulated. I think it will be regulated. And frankly, I think when it is regulated, it'll be the best thing that ever happened to the blockchain or crypto space, because I think it'll weed out all the bad players or a lot of the bad players, and it'll simply bring in another level of institutional capital to continue fueling growth in the in the space.

SPEAKER_62: So I'm very, which is what we saw in Bitcoin, right?

Chamath Palihapitiya: Once they kind of were like, Hey, this is okay, then all of a sudden, people start trading it. And it all of a sudden, it goes from 20,000 back up to 60 or 70. And it feels like a store of value that's safe.

SPEAKER_66: Yep. Dalian, you're you're nodding your head. What are your thoughts?

SPEAKER_21: I mean, I still think, you know, we primarily spend most of our time thinking about, you know, sort of Bitcoin, if you look at your today's gold market cap, it's 16 trillion.

SPEAKER_29: If you think that, you know, Bitcoin can at least get to half of that, you still have another sort of forex ride from here. I think under the regulatory, you know, sort of front, I think we're obviously a little bit more willing to, you know, sort of bleed at the edge where we feel confident that our team can assess the technical nature and competence of, you know, sort of things that, you know, regulators may not love, right. So we just led, you know, around in a poly market, poly market was obviously, you know, sort of had regulatory action against it, and it was effectively, you know, sort of banned from the United States, we still think that's a, you know, sort of platform that, you know, sort of deserves to exist, and one day should be allowed, you know, sort of back in the United States. And so I think we are a little bit more on the side of, you know, sometimes I think the, you know, sort of SEC can, you know, over, you know, regulate and overact. But obviously, you know, who would have

SPEAKER_69: guessed that the founders fund guy would be the libertarian in the crowd?

SPEAKER_04: Well, I mean, I'll be totally honest, I did 506 C for our latest fund, I had 110 million dollars in interest, I could only service and that's all accredited, I could only service 10 million and accredited investors because of SEC regulation. And so, you know, with qualified purchase, obviously, you do a lot more.

SPEAKER_01: Why can't Americans invest in a venture capital fund? Exactly. And they've, the SEC has these

Chamath Palihapitiya: mandates to evolve, but they are always slow, and they always get extensions, because they are concerned with downside protection, right? And if I were running my funds out of Europe, or Australia, or some other places I'm told, where they don't have these frameworks, or the frameworks are slightly different, you know, I could just raise a venture fund with a tweet, given my following count, and let, you know, I don't know, 10,000 people put in $10,000 and be done with it. That feels great to me to democratize access to venture capital. But you know, it's, it's, it doesn't work right now. And I would love for it to be tokenized. So if some, you know, middle class person, i.e. like my mom, put $10,000 into a venture firm that was tokenized, and she could just trade it to one of you because it was up 3x. And she says, You know what, I want to take 15k off the table and that the other 15k ride, and I could just put traded on coinbase, how great would that be? Instead, you got to do weird things like this destiny XYZ. I don't know if you saw that. I had the founder of that on this week at startup. So like, you bought a bunch of secondary created a public, uh, tradable security, and the thing has been going up and down and it's worth 20 times the book value. And that just shows how much the public wants to be involved in sophisticated alternatives. So let's let them be sophisticated and participate

SPEAKER_82: in alternatives, which we all know is where the alpha is.

SPEAKER_00: I think a lot of these issues are marked by you don't see you don't see opportunity costs, you don't see what happened to that middle class family that could have compounded their capital 12% versus 6% over a decade. From the regulatory standpoint, nobody loses no nobody is perceived as losing Jason when 110 million can invest in your fund because no one ever sees that they don't see that opportunity cost, they don't see that upside. So regular regulations in general have a bias towards,

SPEAKER_20: you know, solving problems that may not have to be solved. And so we're always having to brush up up against that when we think about public policy.

SPEAKER_21: And by the way, the unspoken like, you know, sort of side effect of this is that ultimately retail investors really only have access to these public markets, whether it's, you know, crypto tokens or public equities. And fundamentally, when you have a sort of dearth of demand relative to the supply, the cost of capital of those companies just ends up, you know, sort of being different as you end up harming the startup, you know, sort of disrupt your ecosystem where, you know, you always expect, obviously,

SPEAKER_29: a later stage company to have a lower cost of capital. But now it's even more so amplified because of the supply of capital that can come into, you know, sort of private. And so I think it does a disservice for the families. But I think it also does a disservice for the like, the true cutting edge R&D market where great meta can go spend, you know, sort of $10 billion on, um, you know, metaverse R&D, but obviously, you know, no private company can, you know,

SPEAKER_04: afford that, you know, equivalent fraction of it. Yeah, it's really interesting how this could change for the better. And I hope the SEC, you know, does some interesting things. I think if you want to win the presidency of the United States, you could win it with young people, or millennials, and you know, all this new voting group on two things, I'm going to shut the southern border, and I'm going to legalize crypto. If you just said that, independent of candidate, I think you get like, you know, single digit with the border double digit and with the crypto, you might get five 10% of the country who loves this stuff to be like, that's my candidate, I'm a single issue voter. So hopefully, as people get old enough, like we saw with cannabis, we've seen with abortion, we've seen with, you know, the right to choose however you want to frame it. A lot of these issues, once you hit 60 70 80% acceptance gay marriage, you know, all of that over the last 50 years, when it hits 60 70 80% approval, then politicians change their position, I think crypto is kind of headed towards that probably 50% of Americans want people to be able to buy alternatives and do this.

SPEAKER_91: What do they say? People don't, people don't change their opinions, they just die.

SPEAKER_32: Paradigms don't die, people do. People do. Yeah. So this argument you make about tokenizing a fund is really interesting. I was I wanted to ask Delian, do you think we will see, you know, fund

SPEAKER_33: managers tokenize their funds in the next 10 or 15 years? You have a point of view on that? Because

SPEAKER_32: I definitely think that we're going to see that at some point.

SPEAKER_29: Yeah, I mean, you understand these dynamics, a fund never wants to appear, you know, sort of, as if, you know, sort of anybody can access it. And there's some level of like exclusivity that provides, you know, branding in the LP marketplace. And so you kind of have this like chicken and egg problem where, you know, the first fund to do it will absolutely be a very, you know, sort of bold fund that feels confident that we're providing this access, not because we, you know, sort of lack, you know, capital, but because we do want to democratize this. And so I do think at some point, somebody will, you know, sort of make that leap and recognize that, you know, hey, rather than just making money, you know, sort of purely for endowments, and especially maybe educational endowments that we no longer agree with their politics on, we want to instead, you know, sort of make money, you know, for the, you know, sort of public, I can see one of the like, you know, call it top 10 firms in the next like 10 to 15 years, you know, doing that, I think the way that it starts is you're starting to see some of these like, tech enabled, like RIA or tech platforms that sell into RIAs, basically trying to act as a bit of that, you know, sort of, you know, matching, you know, sort of provider to let high net worth individuals that don't typically have access into venture, you know, get access into these alternatives. And so I'm starting to see, you know, sort of handful of those as pretty reasonably sized LPs, I think that's that first step where, you know, you kind of have these brokers that are acting as, you know, sort of retail access, it's not to, you know, sort of, you know, middle class family, but it is that first step to, you know, sort of being willing to, you know, provide, you know, sort of greater access even to top tier, you know, top tier assets.

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SPEAKER_28: Moving on. Blogger Eric Newcomer is reporting that AI spending is up in 2024 across the board. If you look at the graph, you'll see that AI spending grew almost identically across small,

SPEAKER_00: large, and middle market companies. Delian, a lot is said about how AI companies are attracting a lot of capital. How do you look at AI spending within your portfolio companies?

SPEAKER_21: Well, I want to sort of first give a shout out to one of the best AI companies in our portfolio

SPEAKER_29: that generated that report, which is RAMP. And so I will say at Founders Fund, we generally don't believe in telling our companies how they should run themselves, what tools they should use, what makes it most effective. The one thing that we do tell them is we do tell them to all use RAMP. But I do want to double click on a couple of points in that report that I think the newcomer didn't necessarily talk about. The first is the number of net new RAMP customers that are choosing to begin investing in AI rather than currently expanding in it has actually roughly leveled off. And so to me, that's a signal to the current, let's say, you know, incumbent and disruptor sort of AI startups, that they've sort of clearly hit some level of plateau of interest from the, you know, sort of broader, you know, SMB mid market community. There's not, you know, sort of ton of, you know, net new people continuing to, you know, sort of try and chat GPT clearly went on this super viral loop that triggered some level people to explore, they explored some found tools, those that didn't clearly aren't sort of, you know, sort of reassessing. I think the second point that's really interesting from that report is that the usage in Spain is actually fastest growing in non tech sectors. And so that means to me is, you know, for companies that are already deeply embedded in tech, they have software engineers had a built internal tools that already automate some level of the work that these companies are going out and basically like, you know, finding solutions for and are using AI for that. And so we see it a lot more in like, you know, consulting and professional services, financial services, healthcare, etc, more so than like, you know, I, yeah, software, you know, sort of dev shop that is sort of, you know, significantly spending on AI. And then I think that the other thing is interesting is it's less, you know, usage of these, you know, sort of very broad tools like chat GPT, it's now actually largely dominated by these, like, you know, narrowly specific tools that are for their very particular industry and use case. And so, you know, it's gonna be interesting to see where basically value accrual happens in the, you know, sort of AI, you know, landscape, I think it's very clear that obviously Jensen Huang and Nvidia make lots of money, I think that will continue to be the case, probably for some period of time, you could maybe make the analogy that, hey, is this potentially like fiber in the mid 90s, where we think that there's semi infinite amounts of demand, but then actually once everybody puts in their capex, and there's, you know, diminishing marginal returns to increase scale, then everybody actually flattens out. And so you're projecting this exponential growth of, you know, you know, basically, you know, GPU purchases, and it turns out it's going to be exponential, and then, you know, plateau. And so, you know, Nvidia's future DCF looks, you know, sort of very different.

SPEAKER_21: The second is, I do think you're just going to see whether it's in, you know, sort of, you know, non tech companies, or, you know, tech companies, you're just going to see, you know, decrease and

SPEAKER_29: more efficient headcount, you know, I think Sam talked about this at one point, where obviously, you know, Instagram back in the day showed that you can build a billion dollar company with 13 people, I think what you're going to see over the course of the next decade is somebody is going to build the 10 billion $100 billion company, you know, with 13 people, because you're gonna have such increased productivity. And then maybe the last question is, you know, outside of Nvidia, who does end up accruing value? You know, I can't claim that I spend infinite amounts of time, you know, on AI, but it's been interesting to see that obviously, you know, the models were obviously, you know, decent, you know, investors in open AI, but I think it's been clear to see that they're, you know, sort of, you know, gap between them and some of the open source providers and the other competitive user providers, it's clearly narrowed over the past, you know, sort of two years, I'd say, you know, when we, you know, first invested or when GPT chat GPT first came out, it was very clear that they had like a two year, you know, sort of, you know, gap between them and the rest of market, I would argue that gap is now shortened to, you call it 14 months, and seems like it's continuing to shorten itself. I see that as, you know, a question of, you know, what is the durability of those margins, even if you have significantly scaled revenue. And then on the application side, you know, I think there's like 15 AI for lawyer companies at this point. And so how much adoption is there going to be? Or is it actually going to be maybe some of the pre existing legal tech tools that you know, put in a little bit of AI, you know, maybe a quip on another company, one of the I think broadest rollouts, in my opinion, of, you know, AI and healthcare is one of our pre-existing portfolio companies sword health, it's a, you know, multi billion dollar company. Now, you know, serves 10s of 1000s, maybe even hundreds of 1000s of patients every single month, they basically do like, you know, tech enabled physical therapy to send you home with a bunch of sensors. They've been doing AI since like 2017, they had like, you know, more of a rules based engine. And now they're getting to amplify a lot of that work with a lot of these like new models. But in some ways, I think like the best AI companies in our portfolio are the ones that are not, you know, branding themselves AI companies, they were, you know, companies that in some ways were already, you know, sort of using an AI and just becoming even more efficient, you know, maybe ramping the same thing, you know, ramp is never really been branding or tried to make itself an AI company. I think, you know, part of it is other competitors in that space have tried to brand themselves AI companies as a way to fundraise because their metrics stock rip has never really had to do that. And so, you know, they do use AI genuinely, because it improves their business, not as a marketing, you know, sort of stick.

SPEAKER_00: Like, Mel, you founded TrueBridge in 2007. So you've seen a couple market cycles. Do you get nervous when so many of your GPs are in AI? How do you look in terms of diversification in terms of portfolio construction?

SPEAKER_31: Yeah, you know, it's an interesting question. And Delian's opening comment is indicative of

SPEAKER_33: AI across our portfolio. And he may have said this a little bit tongue in cheek, but, you know, he defined or called ramp an AI company. And I would say 100% of our portfolio is AI today, because that's, that's how, you know, 100% of the software companies are branding themselves. And so we have a lot of what I would call, you know, direct AI exposure, and then just fundamentally indirect AI exposure. The question of trends and hype cycles and venture and when you see a lot of excitement around specific trends and ventures are really, it's a really interesting question. And when we think about a lot, you know, we, we typically try not to make sector specific bets within our portfolio. And what that means is, if you look at the fund managers in our portfolio, they're primarily generalists, and we give them the decision right, with regards to which sectors to invest in, we don't we try not to make the sector decision. But if I look back at our history, you know, our first sector specific fund investment was an investment in emergence capital partners, when they were focused exclusively on enterprise SaaS investment opportunities. And, you know, that one turned out pretty well, as they've had back to back 15x funds, driven by investments in Viva Systems and Zoom and other companies. And so it's very clear that, you know, the SaaS enterprise software trend had or has staying power. Our second sector specific fund investments were in crypto in 2017. And those are played out pretty well to date. But if you take a longer view of a venture and and technology trends and venture, you know, we can all look back at prior trends and the technology and the venture space that didn't pan out, you know, nanotechnology in 20 2003 and 2004 and clean tech in 2006 2007, which john door proclaimed was going to be bigger than the internet. And neither of those turned out too well for investors. And so you know, what we're looking at is, are there more similarities between AI and let's say clean tech or SaaS software. And right now one could argue that AI has characteristics of both. And so when you look back at, you know, why did clean tech fail? You know, high capital requirements, long time required to build a scale, genuine scientific and technical risks that weren't well understood by the venture industry. You know, low margin businesses, regulatory risks, competition from substitute products. You know, that a lot of that sounds familiar when you think about AI today. And then you look at, you know, why is enterprise SaaS succeeded over a very long period of time? It's because you have inherently scalable companies, you have recurring revenue models, you have extremely high gross margins. And a lot of that sounds familiar when you think about AI. So, you know, we do think that AI has attributes of both, it's unclear which direction it's going to head. But we're excited about what we see in the marketplace today, and the exposure that we have.

SPEAKER_21: I think from the founder perspective, in terms of actual investments that we've made that are, you know, not tongue in cheek AI companies, but truly AI, I think, you know, part of our focus has

SPEAKER_29: been when there is a hype cycle still maintain that same quality bar that we do across the portfolio. And so, you know, pretty, you're proud of the fact that, you know, the only two AI investments that we've made is open AI, which is, you know, probably the sort of best called, you know, the late stage incumbent. And then, you know, the second investment after that is cognition labs with, you know, Devon, the, you know, basically only, you know, sort of truly functional AI agent, you know, to, you know, replace software engineers. And so, you know, it's not like we have 15 different investments across the category, it's, you know, where do you actually see, you know, true generational, you know, sort of, you know, founder with an incredible team, you know, building something that stands out from the rest of the market, where it's not like, you know,

SPEAKER_21: there's 15 other devins on the market, if there were, there'd be a lot more people doing the types

SPEAKER_00: of demos that, you know, Devon's been able to do. Is it overly simplistic to say, when it comes to AI, the use cases that require hundreds of millions of dollars, those are the ones that are going to be accrues some value, and the ones that have no barriers to entry are going to be commoditized away.

SPEAKER_20: How do you look at just as a general level, like what you predict to be a commodity and what you can

SPEAKER_113: predict will accrue value?

SPEAKER_29: Yeah, I think, you know, I'll rely on, you know, sort of Peter's actually AGM presentation, which, you know, Mel Wright, remember from, you know, November of last year, which was, you know, ultimately, it's the same thing that's been true across all technologies, which is you ultimately need a moat. It's rare that, you know, there are moats basically beyond distribution, brand, network effects, and, you know, basically, you know, you know, capex, and cost of capital. And, you know, that last one being by far, by far the toughest ever, you're sort of prove it. So I think that's something that we really avoided. If you look at, you know, so for example, with something like Devon, that, you know, sort of moat in the subways, there has been the sort of team and, you know, product they've been able to build before they'd really raised anything, right? Like, you know, that is just a fundamentally different group of, you know, sort of thinkers, you know, I know Scott Neil Wu, you know, sort of decently, you know, well, I was, you know, in audience when they were in seventh and eighth grade, you know, you know, winning math counts in front of everybody. And

SPEAKER_21: at the time, I was like, I'm gonna be a brilliant mathematician, and then you watch them, and you're like, that's a brilliant mathematician, I'm gonna do something else in my life. And, you know, that that is, I think, what is, you know, sort of very, you know, sort of necessary for solving that type of

SPEAKER_29: problem. Because it's good enough, if you look at it in the history of most of the like, sort of IMO,

SPEAKER_21: IMO and IOI, which is like the top, you know, sort of high school, you know, Olympiad, you know, both mathematics and informatics competitions, typically, those actually haven't always turned out to be great entrepreneurs, because in some ways, they think so academically in a structured way about computer science, math problems, that isn't necessarily applied to business. But if you think about the problem of like an AI agent to, you know, do computer science, and actually require relies on that exact type of thinking, which is somebody that is world class of being able to rapidly look at a, you know, sort of problem, break it down into a very structured framework, and then, you know, sort of go do that repeatedly, and have a

SPEAKER_29: superhuman ability of doing that. And so that team, in some ways, has managed to find the one

SPEAKER_21: idea that in some ways, they are best suited for, you know, in the in the entire world. And so I think for us, it really comes down to either teams like that, or fundamentally distribution, I think a lot of our, you know, sort of conviction around the open AI investment was the fact that they stepped into this distribution hack of chat GPT, it was totally unexpected. But to have the basically fastest growing, you know, consumer app in human history, to us, it was less of a bet on, you know, how much capital is this company raised, what is the scale of their models, etc, is that this is one of the few companies that actually has achieved distribution. And so, anytime we've analyzed these companies, it's analyzing them across the same, you know, sort of exact categories of, you know, sort of moats that we would analyze any other, you know, sort of non AI company. And again, that last category of, you know, sort of, you know, cost of capital or CapEx being the moat. Yeah, as Mel said, in green tech, that did not, you know, particularly play out, you know, sort of be the case. And, you know, maybe last comment is, in green tech, there was actually one company that you could have invested in, and you would have made money, even if the rest of the category lost company lost money. And, you know, that company was, you know, Tesla Motors run by Elon Musk. And so you just, you know, even in these, you know, sort of hyped up, you know, sort of sectors where, you know, there's mass capital

SPEAKER_29: destruction, there typically is one generational entrepreneur that still makes a lot of, you know,

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SPEAKER_22: registered agent.com slash twist today. Jason, I don't know if you caught any of the GPT 4.0

SPEAKER_00: demos. Yeah, I watched all of it and we had to play around with it. Thoughts on the thoughts on the

SPEAKER_04: release? You know, I think that this is going to be the quickest commoditization of a technology we've ever seen. Um, to Delian's point, and we've been having this discussion on all in as well. Uh, and on this week in startups, you have this, uh, open source movement that's going really fast

Chamath Palihapitiya: that suck is backing and he put on the top and he's in wartime mode right now with the gold chain. He just put a search box at the top of every app. Like this is a shot across the bow of Google, open AI and everybody that he's just going to commoditize this. He made it open source, you can use his models. Anybody can search anytime. And so then what's left is what you have to ask yourself, right? And what's left is the user experience and the extreme focus and understanding of a particular consumer base by a particularly passionate and competent group of founders. And so will you be able to do anything with chat GPT or will you be able to do anything with Zox version? Of course you can ask it, Hey, write a screenplay, but there'll be a screenplay writing piece of software where that team focuses only on that experience and they will delight

SPEAKER_01: screenplay writers and producers to make a product that is just, you know, 10 to 20% better at 50 different aspects of writing a screenplay and producing a movie then chat GPT is right. And you can use the Microsoft office collection to do many different SAS things, right? In fact, if you look at

SPEAKER_82: CRM 95% of the CRM market is what we call spreadsheet CRM. People open a spreadsheet, the most flexible tool ever created in software, I think people use it for CRM, they use it for trip planning, they use it

SPEAKER_04: for spreadsheets. But then you'll have somebody create a CRM system, whether it's HubSpot or Salesforce

SPEAKER_01: that does a lot more than Excel does, right? So I kind of look at this model as we're just overbuilding at an absurd pace. It's one of the great things about capitalism in America and why we still remain dominant in American exceptionalism remains unchallenged, right? Even by China. I think

SPEAKER_04: that they're in like a really bizarre moment where they're just not even competing. Where do all those great big companies that were going to crush ours go? I mean, where are they? Where's Baidu? Where's Alibaba? Weren't these going to crush Google and Apple? And nope, because democracy plus capitalism

Chamath Palihapitiya: plus capital markets being efficient for our crypto discussion, equal just massive amounts of innovation. And you know, I think this is going to be the greatest vintage of venture capital in you know, our lifetimes. I really believe that because I've seen this movie now three cycles.com.

SPEAKER_129: I was a journalist building publications, then I was building myself as an entrepreneur during great financial crisis. And then I became an investor after that during the Zurb era. And now I'm looking at

Chamath Palihapitiya: this going Wow, what a setup. Cloud computing, chips, sensors, storage, bandwidth, it's all set up. And then AI for reusable rockets, reusable rockets. I mean, it's nuts. Like the setup is so complete that, you know, a 10 person team focused on a deep vertical who understands their customers do fine. So I see all day long, people taking some, you know, vertical and taking these either open source products, or, you know, paid hosted products. And the great thing is, these tools are so um, malleable that I've seen people start on chat GPT, move to Claude, move to an open source one. And then

SPEAKER_01: they're like, yeah, I'm using three right now. And whichever one gets cheaper, you know, where I saw that as well. People started on Amazon, Azure game free credits, they moved to Azure, then Google Google Cloud was like, wow, we're far behind, we need to give some startups 100,000. Now Oracle's got incredible hosting. Now they're getting in the mix. If you're a startup, you could use Oracle, you could

Chamath Palihapitiya: use Google, Azure or rack space, everything in between. And that's what's going to happen in this space. I think, you know, Delia and I had used that fiber thing, we had a discussion on all in about it, I think that that's going to turn out to be pressing. I think a lot of the jobs being given to AI can be done with, you know, this year's and next year's and the year after is technology. And that's what I'm seeing entrepreneurs do, they're like, you know what, I'm going to just go

SPEAKER_04: use check 3.5. It's cheaper than four. I don't know if you're seeing that as well, Delia, where the developers are like, Yeah, we don't need that. We're just putting tags like we had a discussion with a developer who was tagging content like saying who's in this new story, the who, what, when, where, who are the principles in it, whatever. And they're like, Yeah, we can do this cheaper with this open source, we don't need to pay for it anymore. We're just going to run our own instance, just for that one function. That's going to be this long tail of it just like with storage, like, do you need the fastest storage or the cheapest or something in between? So um, this is going to be amazing. And for what I think it means for what we all do in terms of investing for a living, is that if you're a late stage investor, founders may not need your money. They may be so capital efficient, you know, that last round of funding that, you know, the way Uber and Airbnb use capital as a weapon, like, is it going to be necessary? I don't know. I don't know that there's going to be founders coming to market for seed extension, series A, A plus B, B plus, maybe they'll just be more capital efficient. That's a thesis I'm watching

SPEAKER_133: right now, because that was certainly buck the historical trend, wouldn't it? It would? Yeah,

SPEAKER_33: yeah, in terms of just the way the cycles work over time in venture, or have worked historically.

SPEAKER_29: Yeah, as you say, it's a part of why my like, you know, at least personal investment thesis,

SPEAKER_21: obviously, what I like about founder responders, we can all kind of run with our own user theses. You talked about that with Brian on invest with the best. And at least on a personal level, part of what I'm really excited about is I think, as you start to see that capital efficiency, and some of these like AI companies, you got these, you know, sort of first handful of outcomes, I think a lot of these will actually look more like, you know, sort of lifestyle businesses, because there's gonna be so many AI for lawyers, AI for plumbers, they might get to 30, 50, you know, 70 million in revenue, they're not necessarily going to generate massive venture returns. And so as capital starts to seek out, you know, sort of where is the, you know, sort of next place to generate returns, I think it's going to be reindustrialization of the United States, it's things that happen actually in the physical world that AI cannot do, right? AI is not going to be sort of making drugs in space and reentering spacecraft anytime soon. It's not going to be,

SPEAKER_29: you know, operating robot arms up there, it's not going to be, you know, sort of moving your satellites around with next generation propulsion, we're operating CNC machines down here.

SPEAKER_00: And so I think one of the things that we all take for granted on this panel is how difficult it actually is to raise a seed round to go out and convince somebody to give you a million dollars on your idea. If you think about, you know, you meet 1000 people on the street, maybe one is capable of that probably one out of 10,000. So second order effects of having AI be able to do something and being able to start a company for 50,000 versus 500,000 can really transform the economy to your point and really could lead not only to more shots on goal, but also more businesses. Because if you don't need venture capital, not every company has to return a billion dollars or even 100 million dollars, you can have a bunch of smaller, smaller companies. And ultimately, that'll be great for everybody because smaller niches and smaller customer bases will have more problem solved.

Chamath Palihapitiya: So I have no idea. I literally ran a test. I ran a test a year ago. So we about half the applications to our accelerator were people who were in the ideation phase, they hadn't yet incorporated,

SPEAKER_97: but they had a, you know, like they were had a side hustle, they built a website, they built an app,

Chamath Palihapitiya: whatever. And so we started a program called founder university, we're on our eighth cohort, I just kicked it off on Monday in person at Goodwin's offices in Redwood City. And we accept 250 people into it 12 week course, we teach them all about starting. And the the key device of the course is every week you give us your progress on Monday, we fill out a form. Hey, what what did you do? What'd you get done? What are you gonna get done next week, like an accountability thing. So I said, put on the form, I would like Jason and the launch fund to be my first investor friends and family $25,000

SPEAKER_146: at a $1 million valuation. So 2.5% for 25k. So like, think about like, even before Y Combinator and

SPEAKER_78: Techstars, my team told me this isn't worth the legal issues, it isn't worth how do we manage all these companies, all this stuff. And I said, Well, let's just put in the document that we get to

Chamath Palihapitiya: invest in the next two rounds 250k. Right? So we get a little option. And now, you know, we'll figure

SPEAKER_01: it out. Let's see if 10 people do it. We've made 80 of these investments, 80 in just over a year. And about 60 70% of people each week check off that box. And so you're exactly right, like the to start a company. And these are people with two or three developers who you think would be able to

SPEAKER_04: get 25k around, and then about a third of those wind up going to our accelerator, where we put in the classic 125. So I think there are some new models here in venture,

SPEAKER_01: where, you know, we might even get into companies at inception and give them the 25k. And we have one

SPEAKER_04: company podcast AI that has done extraordinary been oversubscribed, we gave them the 25k check, they came to the accelerator and 125k check. And then we gave made our third bet like a seed investment, which is our the funnel of our firm. And it was the first one where we did all three investments. And we did it all in a year and they have massive outside investors and we hit our ownership targets. And they're so appreciative that we supported them each step along the way. Now that's a lot of work, I can tell you that 22 people in this firm, which for a $50 million fund

Chamath Palihapitiya: doesn't make a lot of sense to people. But it takes a lot of support. And I think this is the

SPEAKER_00: future smaller amounts of money earlier, I think it's great for the economy great for society, I went undergrad to Indiana University, I went for master's for Harvard University. And when you look at the construction of people, it's not a 10x different and talent, some of my smartest friends at Indiana, or smarter than some of my less intelligent friends at Harvard. So I think expanding that opportunity and making sure that more people are included in capitalism is really important. I think one of the things that we're seeing in society is this disillusionment, right, of the younger generations, and they're they're turning to things like radical political ideology. So I think if we could use AI, and bring more people along in our economy, I think it's going

SPEAKER_20: to have orders of magnitude effects across the entire ecosystem. Jason, I think, I think where AI

SPEAKER_32: is going to have the biggest effect on on capital formation and ventures, not at the not the growth

SPEAKER_33: stage, but it is at the seed stage. And, and just as web service web hosting services really is dramatically lowered the cost of starting a new company. And we saw, we saw, frankly, an explosion of new companies formed and the rate of new company formation when you just look at the slope went way up when that happened, you can see the same effect happening now with AI and it's just low, it lowers, it makes individuals more productive, it makes it much, much, you know, more cost effective than for them to get to a minimum efficient product. And we could see, likewise, another change in the slope of the rate of company for new company formation in the US. I think that's where it's gonna have the biggest impact.

SPEAKER_60: You're 100% right. It literally is the same as hosting. It's is, we see it all the time, like,

Chamath Palihapitiya: people who we used to remember like the tail end in 2004 or five, when companies would buy servers and rack them and the first portion of your funding, the first million and a half 500,000 of it went to finding a knock assist admin, putting up one rack, then you got your series a and it was like, yeah, we're gonna get two more racks. And we're gonna go from a t1 to this and we're gonna have redundancy and more storage. And now that's all abstracted away. So it's it's working really well. It confuses the hell out of LPs when we tell them this $50 million funds gonna have 200 names in it. They're

SPEAKER_04: just like, what? And I'm like, 200 names. Historically, I hit, you know, you know, corn this met this often, and you can look at it in these funds. And if we hit one to four unicorns out of those 200, and then we own 10% of it, this is going to be a five x plus fund. I, you know, that's how I pencil out the math for a seed stage fund. And we just had one of our companies that went through

SPEAKER_01: Founder University get accepted to Y Combinator. So exactly as I predicted, you know, we'll get to these companies in year zero, help them get formed, help them finish their product, get the

Chamath Palihapitiya: first five customers. And then Gary Tan met with the company, he loved it. And I'm like, wow, great. You know, I think the Y Combinator, friends and family space seed precede these micro funds are

SPEAKER_129: going to do amazing. And I my family office, which is a fancy way of just saying me.

Chamath Palihapitiya: I've done 20 firms, and I'm doing five 10 $20 million funds. And I put in, you know, whatever 1% is. So it was a $20 million fund, I put in 210 minute, put in 100. And I'm watching them. And then I watched Sophia Amorosa or whoever's company, you know, investment of 2550 K then result in a seed round result into a series A. And, um, yeah, it's just confused. It's confusing, right? Mel to LPs when they see this, like at scale, large investments, small amounts of money.

SPEAKER_33: It is, it is. And it's just, it's, uh, it becomes overwhelming for

SPEAKER_159: administration limit partners to track. Yeah. Yeah. So what do you suggest I do? I just keep doing what you're doing. Yeah. Ignore the fact that they can't

SPEAKER_160: understand it. Yeah, absolutely. Keep doing what you're doing. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: Literally. I had this conversation with my team. They're like, this LP doesn't understand that we're doing the data. And I was like, just give them only the companies that pull through. So like some LPs get the list of the 200 companies in real time. And then another group will just show

SPEAKER_04: them the, you know, one in four, as they close their seed rounds, we'll just show them the pull throughs. And then we'll show them the ones that we're doubling down on. And that seems to have helped, but yeah. Yeah. I mean, LPs are not, you know, I think LPs, my perception now after having

SPEAKER_129: many of them, um, who it's their first time in a fund and then many who have many funds

Chamath Palihapitiya: is like, it's up to us as GPs to figure out the future and explain it to them. That's why we're

SPEAKER_00: here. Right? Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. I think it's, it's overfitting pattern matching, right? They've seen a hundreds of funds, somebody like a male might see 500 funds per year. So he has to create some kind of patterns. And then once trends and merge, once funds like Jason, like your phone starts to produce with different portfolio constructions, people start focusing on that. But you have to kind of create, create your own luck sometimes in different industries. Moving on. Elon Musk was just interviewed at the Milken conference by Michael Milken himself. Elon mentioned many interesting topics, including low birth rates, Starlink's ambition to increase worldwide GDP, legal versus illegal immigration, and many other interesting topics. Jason, I want to give you your red

SPEAKER_28: meat. You briefly touched on illegal immigration versus legal immigration. What are your thoughts on

SPEAKER_129: this? Yeah, and I've had many conversations with Elon about this over the years. Just to be clear, he is a strong proponent of legalized immigration, and believes, like I do, that we should be doing

Chamath Palihapitiya: global recruitment. And 80% of Americans think that having an open border is a problem. So back to, you know, the getting to Denmark, um, which is a fancy way of saying that our elected officials are doing the work that the people want them to do, and they're in sync. 80% of Americans don't want the border open. They consider it a problem or a major problem for obvious reasons. It's unfair. And who do we want in the country? Random people who are willing to break the law,

SPEAKER_01: or people who have a business idea, or have a skill or a trade that matches where we need people. So I think we've got this all backwards, the border needs to be shut. And then we need to increase legal immigration, we need to increase it, we should have two teams. One team is doing external recruitment, like an NBA scout, like an NFL scout. Where are the smartest people on the planet? Who's scoring highest on these standardized tests? Who are the mutants? Like in the X-Men, we need to put on Cerebro, like Professor X, find the mutants in Pakistan, in India, in Philippines, in South America, Ecuador, wherever they are, and then tell them actively, we have a visa for you. And if you hit these notes, um, you know, we're going to give you, um, your passport and citizenship, which by the way, is what they're doing in Doha, in Abu Dhabi, and in Riyadh. When I visited those places, I literally had them say, we'd like to give you a golden visa. Have you ever thought about having a passport in this country? They're trying to recruit me to be a national, like,

Chamath Palihapitiya: think about that. And that is one solution. I think. And then there's, when the unemployment rate lowers to a certain percent, like we're with historical unemployment, low unemployment here. Look at what trades what we don't have, we don't have plumbers, we don't have electricians, and we don't have, um, people to work in restaurants and we don't have, um, uh, people to work in healthcare and to work with the elderly. Very simple solution. If you want to work with the elderly and you want to work in healthcare, we can take 450,000 each year for the next three years, based upon our population and apply and apply on a website that says, here's what America's looking for. Computer scientists, unlimited, PhDs, unlimited, uh, people who work in nursing, 450,000 people who are doctors, this amount people who work in restaurants and hospitality, this amount, and let's have those two things be the focus, not this insanity of an open border and not knowing who's coming across it. And then, you know,

SPEAKER_01: having to fund people who don't speak English in the country to learn English, like that's not sustainable. And the Nordics went through this and I I've spent time there, man, they're very sensitive about it because they don't want to be perceived as xenophobes. But the fact is you can only incorporate into the great American melting pot, a certain amount of people who don't speak the language. And you, you don't want people who are criminals or who are uneducated to flood a city. That's a recipe for chaos and Finland, Sweden, Norway, they all have dealt with us. You can just look up the

Chamath Palihapitiya: stories about how they're dealing with immigration right now. Um, and so I believe in it. I know he believes in it. I think people are misinterpreting and politicizing this issue in a, in a way that is not helpful. We need independent of party, a very thoughtful approach, recruitment, needs-based, compassionate, but not illegal. Very simple. I'll get off my soapbox.

SPEAKER_174: Thank you for my red meat. It's delicious.

SPEAKER_120: Yeah, I think you're, you're welcome. Uh, hopefully you didn't ship a tooth there.

SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, one of the, one of the interesting things about immigration, especially legal immigration is it's seen as a zero sum, you know, this person's not getting let in. If you haven't looked around, you know, if you fly over, fly over states, you see, we have a lot of space in the United States. So it's about bringing in the right people. And one of the most no brainer policies, foreign policies, we could possibly have is just increasing H1B. It's one of those things that I've never heard anybody with a brain or, or with data ever argue against it, but yet we're capping it. Uh, and I think it's, it's really a shame and it is in many ways, a bipartisan shame that's, you know, driven by very far left, far right forces in the country. And I think Silicon Valley is really abdicating its role here and really needs to push if we want as a, as a community for an issue to call less around it is H1B immigration. We don't have to create a new framework and it's, you know, you, you don't have to look further than the top 10 companies in Silicon Valley realize 50% are foreign board. I was a refugee from Russia. I know Delhi and you're from Bulgaria. You know, we typically have on this podcast, three foreign board today. We're less diverse, but I think it's one of those things that no one's really talking about it. Although it's, it's almost so obvious. No one

SPEAKER_177: brings it up. Mel and I are seventh generation, by the way, we've been here forever. I found out I'm seventh generation Irish. We were like immigrated into Brooklyn and then into the five

SPEAKER_180: points. We all hold it against you guys. Well, my Greek grandfather was, yeah. So I guess I'm

SPEAKER_129: second generation on that side, but yeah. What do you think Mel about this? You know, I think, um,

SPEAKER_33: I agree with you 100%. I think it's hard to have a strong country without strong borders and, um, and where we are right now. It's just, it's just a mess, an absolute mess and it's over politicized. Um, I think, you know, David to answer a little bit, your, your question, I think the reason why it's hard for, um, Silicon Valley and others to get involved is, is, um, is the fact that it is highly over politicized and the cost of, you know, the cost of being on one side of, uh, of a political argument in today's society, if it ends up being the wrong side of the political argument can be dramatic. Um, and I think that's why you don't have people out front on this issue.

SPEAKER_29: Yeah. I mean, I was a product of, you know, the, you know, sniping of, you know, sort of top tier ability and, you know, allowing those people to come into the United States. Um, you know, my dad was a, uh, you know, gold medalist at the international mathematical Olympiad, um, did incredibly well at, you know, sort of undergraduate at the university of Sophia, and then ultimately went off to Caltech, uh, and was, you know, accepted there and was able to, you know, live in the United States on a student visa. And then ultimately, you know, uh, became, uh, a citizen when I was about 12 years old. And I think, you know, we, we are, you know, far better off as a country for my family being here. My family is far better off for, you know, sort of being here, but there, you know, so many examples that I can point to of, you know, sort of people who'd equivalently contribute to our country that, you know, we're not allowing here. And so, uh, it feels like a, you know, sort of complete no brainer to increase the legal immigration. And on the Southern border, you know, it almost is, you know, certain that there is a lot of, you know, military age men from our adversaries that are, you know, sort of forming splinter cell, you know, sort of units of the United States, uh, based off the fact that they know that they can

SPEAKER_21: get those types of militants in, you know, as a piece of cake on our Southern border.

SPEAKER_129: Canada has really dialed this in. They have a point space system, New Zealand, Australia point space system. And every time I meet with people, you know, from Canada and

SPEAKER_01: including people in the government, they're like, yeah, if any of your companies have a problem, this is literally somebody in Vancouver said, anytime you have a problem, getting somebody into America, email me, this is somebody in Vancouver, I will get them a visa into Vancouver,

SPEAKER_04: we'll hold house them and hold them here until they can get into America. And I'm like, I see what you're doing there. Like, yeah, we're getting your developers to live in our country and pay taxes. I'm like, well played, we're idiots. But here we are in this political cycle, which is so dumb. Um, and so polarized that we're taking issues that we have consensus on, and then we're turning them

SPEAKER_194: into a distraction. We have consensus on issues. It is not a conversation. Not at all. Not at all.

SPEAKER_04: And I don't understand it. And I don't know who's advising each side on this issue. But, um, you know, this is why we need a different type of political class that that's working in Washington, not these geriatric lunatics, who are polarizing the country to get to foment anger between people

SPEAKER_01: who are not actually in disagreement. I don't know how everybody here affiliates, but we all agree on

SPEAKER_04: these issues. 80% of people agree on immigration, they agree on cannabis, they agree on gay marriage,

SPEAKER_01: they agree on abortion, everybody agrees that we're made to feel like we don't agree. It's a recipe for distraction. And we don't need distraction when we've got this much deficit, we need

SPEAKER_04: entrepreneurship, we need talent. I'm Jason Calacanis. I'm voting for president 20.

SPEAKER_200: I mean, I don't know why it's like so simple to think the most voting for you.

David Friedberg: I mean, if you literally just said the most logical thing, people be like, I'm sorry, what you said makes complete sense. Why aren't you running? And it's like, I think it's interesting

SPEAKER_00: that you have to have in this country $100 billion to speak your mind. I think that's, that's the new standard for, you know, in order to say, many common sense things. I think I think it's a sad state of affairs.

SPEAKER_21: In some ways, I think it's why I'm so grateful that Elon bought acts like I think, you know, we should generally always be expanding the origin window, you know, I do my best part to do that on

SPEAKER_29: a regular basis, even if, you know, sometimes upsets, you know, you know, various, you know, folks, but I think since he purchased it, it's clearly shifted, like people are so much less scared to, you know, share unpopular opinion, right? Like that, you know, the information just did a whole piece on like Sean McGuire and his, you know, sort of pro Israel anti Palestine stance, I think in a, you know, sort of pre Elon Musk, you know, owning x world, I think Sean would have been silenced,

SPEAKER_86: or he would have been fired, like, there would have been a different outcome, you know, in the

David Friedberg: world. Yeah. And it only costs 44 billion to open the origin window. Now we actually know how much it

SPEAKER_206: costs. I was joking with him about that recently. He's like, you're welcome. I was like,

SPEAKER_01: like, gosh, you're 44 billion. But it's true, you can talk about things, you can challenge this stuff. And I had a couple of examples, I won't talk about them here. But just, you know, I had a couple of examples of things I were talking about that I was willing to tweet now, that I wouldn't have tweeted during that like crazy period where they would have deleted my account. Because I needed my Twitter account. It's like an important part of my business to have a Twitter account with a, you know, half million followers, like, I can't risk having it deleted. So I wouldn't say things there,

SPEAKER_04: right. And I can't have my podcast delisted from YouTube, because I didn't agree with like, the Wuhan virus. And I got a bunch of warnings about that. So anyway, I think it's, it's great that

SPEAKER_00: the Overton windows open, I was born communist Russia, and my parents think they're still alive, telling me stories. And, you know, there's so many different tactics that people with control have on their population. And it's not always these large demonstrations, not always war, sometimes it's a knock on the door. It's an intimidation out at your work. It's it's a dalliance point, somebody getting canceled for political view, that has nothing to do with their work. So it's, it's scary. And, and, you know, the further we go towards a free society, it helps everything, because what happens in free society is that the best idea went. And, you know, the marketplace of ideas is, is positive for everybody, even for people that you disagree with.

SPEAKER_187: It's been a great episode. I like how you reformatted it, David, you got us to like,

SPEAKER_182: talk about really important issues of investing, technology company formation, and then a little bit of like political, you know, global issues. Well done. Great job, David.

SPEAKER_00: Well, thank you, Jason. Great panel leads to great discussion. For Jason Calacanis, Dalian Asparahov, Mel Williams, this is your host, David Weisberg. Thanks for listening.