SPEAKER_00: just balls and strikes here very simple idea trump comes out and says on friday at the white house crypto summit which i think is great that the white house is doing a crypto summit i think

SPEAKER_02: it's great they're going to do regulation trump comes out and says here's how it's going to go

SPEAKER_04: everybody in crypto pays a wonderful crypto tax crypto transaction tax not a tariff it's the crypto transaction tax it's going to be wonderful everybody pays 10 bips they pay the vig to the crypto reserve problem solved we're not spending any taxpayer money goes directly to taxpayers maybe we do a crypto dividend maybe everybody gets a little crypto wouldn't that be a nice alex a little crypto for everybody alex from this weekend startups in the first row i thought we were broke mr

SPEAKER_06: president i thought i thought we were we were flat broke okay no dollars listen one more time he's a

SPEAKER_04: low iq low iq lib okay that's true gay rights i love the gays okay gays for trump huge alex wilhelm low iq alex wilhelm it's a tax crypto people pay it not the americans so that i think this would solve the whole are you saying that crypto people are not americans have you met him alex very interesting people maybe from mars i mean maybe elon will find crypto people on the red planet i mean he's capable

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SPEAKER_16: apply all right everybody welcome back it is monday march 3rd i'm jason calacanis he's alex wilhelm a

SPEAKER_18: lot is going on we might as well get right to it yesterday our fine president did pump 2.0 trump 2.0 has his second crypto moment and uh alex i i broke and i am continuing to break my 72 hour rule what's the 72 hour rule we wait 72 hours whatever trump says something to try to interpret it now this one is directly involved with startups so there's no way not to lead with it and everybody's got an opinion on it but why don't you tee up what happened yesterday and then uh we'll talk about what's happened since and my you know as many of you are here if you're here on this week in startups you're

SPEAKER_19: here to hear my opinion as well and my take on it so i'll give you my hot take please don't aggregate

SPEAKER_21: me bro all right so going back in time a little bit the biden administration famously i would say

SPEAKER_22: critical of the crypto industry led to a lot of bad vibes between the democratic party and crypto entrepreneurs here in the united states then trump won uh partially thanks to crypto support and there was a lot of anticipation that he would be a very crypto friendly president one idea that had been floated jason was the creation of a bitcoin strategic reserve the idea put some of the national wealth into bitcoin a scarce asset and then over time it will appreciate in theory and then help us resolve some of the debt now probably not enough to make an enormous dent but it wasn't you can kind of see it then this weekend we got this instead which is a little bit different instead of what we thought trump was going to put out he instead launched in a first post over on truth social that there will be a u.s crypto reserve not a bitcoin reserve and that it would include assets such as xrp solana and cardano then everyone asking well those aren't the assets we expected he did a quote truth i believe a re-truth a re-truth thank you jason yes um that bitcoin and ethereum uh the actual best known cryptocurrencies would be included as well this led to a pump in the prices of these tokens as you can see here jason we've prepared a chart it led to a pump okay so trump likes

SPEAKER_02: to jump the gun on all announcements so we know that and remember rule number one in jason's seven rules

SPEAKER_16: of interpreting trump is trump says a lot of wacky that's rule number one trump says a lot of wacky stuff that's rule number one rule number four is always wait 72 hours by trying to interpret what he says because see rule number one and almost always his process is to you know do process journalism process pr i guess we'll call it process pr sure which is you know process journalism is you're like hey our tip line said ftx is a house of cards we don't know it's a house of cards but you kind of run fast and loose tons of criticism of process journalism because you can you know slander people or you can

SPEAKER_18: just kind of go down rabbit holes it's it feels unfair and not well thought out well trump does the same thing in terms of pr and announcements they're not well thought out they're not planned people don't know what he's gonna say and he got that from howard stern howard stern's the reason for his success made famous in a great film called private parts based on his autobiography was this famous scene where paul giamatti who is his manager uh at the station gets the results because he's trying to fire howard stern who's been forced upon him by nbc radio howard stern refers to him as pig vomit

SPEAKER_29: so you can get a sense for their relationship and he says i don't understand why are people

SPEAKER_02: listening to him for 47 minutes that's unbelievable it's like a record and it's like because they want to hear what he's going to say next right and then he says oh okay well tell me about the people who are his detractors and it's like oh they listen for 97 minutes he's like what they listen longer and they and they're they hate him these people hate him why is that and they said number one reason stated they want to hear what he's going to say next so here we are trump 2.0 says a lot of stuff the world went crazy on this because now you have to wonder why those three well they are three of i think if

SPEAKER_18: we open coin market cap coin map market cap tracks the market capitalization the total value of crypto projects in fairness to trump i believe you know it's right now bitcoin ethereum which he put in his follow-up and then xrp tether which is a stable coin so you can kind of take that out bnp solana usdc cardona so of the top eight you take out the stable coins which i think is two of them this top six

SPEAKER_41: the five he picked are five of the top six right and i don't know what bnp is but uh bnb is the binance house token oh okay so is that like a stable coin or it's just their house crypto okay so

SPEAKER_18: it's just their house crypto yeah got it okay so you know anyway in fairness to trump he did pick the top five if you're going to pick a crypto reserve the problem with all of this is after the meme coin the trump coin which then the sec we talked about this ending on friday i believe my

SPEAKER_02: interpretation of what they did was they wrote regulation around trump's behavior or i should say a different organization that the trump organization runs so there's this world liberty company and this is where everybody's mind's gonna wander world liberty financial inc i believe this is run by one of his children and i believe that person is eric trump now everybody on the left is gonna say this is a

SPEAKER_16: pump and dump this is a trump pump there was trump pump 1.0 which was trump coin and now here we are and

SPEAKER_18: the sec had to make an announcement about um meme coins and i believe they kind of framed them around trump's behavior to kind of get him out of hot water this is not the type of country anybody wants to live in now you will not hear republicans complain about this i'm a moderate let me just state that from the beginning i'm pro crypto i'm anti-fraud that's all you need to know about me i'm pro free markets and we can put me aside for a second when you do things you have to look at the game on the field the game on the field right now alex and i'll stop on this and get your reactions because your reactions are

SPEAKER_51: also as a libertarian libert libert i would describe you as a liberal leftitarian leftitarian but you're

SPEAKER_18: also pro free market so you're like a clinton-esque democrat capitalism democracy gay rights okay

SPEAKER_41: fantastic love it check check check for me on all those boxes so the left is now going to have a field

SPEAKER_02: day with this and they will weaponize it and this is what's really really disheartening to me and the right will ignore this just like the left ignored you know the hunter situation which was pretty gnarly the left ignored biden's cognitive decline i believe that ultimately and we'll see what jake tapper's new book comes out with but i think ultimately that will wind up being one of the

SPEAKER_59: great cover-ups uh and the second time we've covered up a president in cognitive client first one of

SPEAKER_34: course reagan reagan right yeah so now this is going to result in the same chaos we had during trump's

SPEAKER_02: first term and into biden's which is lawfare you can easily weaponize this because eric trump uh i think

SPEAKER_61: works at world liberty financial and he's become effectively the the biggest crypto supporter uh amongst the

SPEAKER_62: trump family jason you actually retweeted him and he said buy the dip and had the bitcoin b symbol if i

SPEAKER_36: recall correctly and then i think today he retweeted somebody kind of questioning him giving financial

SPEAKER_18: advice and then he's like oh no now my now my advice is basically to hold so here's the challenge i think so let's just start with point one the challenge in all of this is this is going to derail or i believe it will derail what i believe is some of the good work of the trump presidency i am everybody knows a

SPEAKER_16: never trumper who was a very clearly none of the above double hater in this last election that being

SPEAKER_02: said yes whoever wins i give a hundred percent of my support to my president he's my president once he becomes president united states yeah i'm old school gen x or whatever criticize it if you like i'm not part of the resistance on either side i am hey let's steer the president towards greatness call balls and

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SPEAKER_29: now we're going to go into crazy lawfare i believe attorney generals civil suits and they're going

SPEAKER_02: to drag eric trump world liberty anybody who donated michael sailor brad garlinghouse from xrp this is going to drag all of them into lawsuits and chaos by local attorney generals because obviously the

SPEAKER_59: federal attorney general is selected um and is seems like pretty partisan so anyway i want to jump in on

SPEAKER_22: the the you won't hear about this from the right to mostly but to my surprise jason there have been some notable uh voices of dissent so i want to grab uh here's joe lonsdale 8vc i believe he's out of the pod friend of the pod and um joe says for those folks on the audio version taxation is theft it

SPEAKER_62: should be kept to a minimum it's wrong to steal my money for grift on the left it's also wrong to tax

SPEAKER_22: me for crypto bro schemes efficient defense courts national park blah blah fine cut it out with these schemes guys this led jason to another interesting bit of commentary from technology circles this is from nikita beer of course a well-known founder in the social media consumer application space and he says quote in response to joe this is getting egregious every two weeks there's a kickback to the family completely delegitimizes all the work doge is doing and so when you say specifically that this

SPEAKER_62: is you know not what you were hoping from the administration and that you wanted doge to do well and other things i agree it's it's depressing to see what seems like really unnecessary side quests

SPEAKER_22: of grift when some folks were pretty content with what the administration was doing before this

SPEAKER_69: stuff it's interesting i think people agree lonsdale is a true independent thinker you're not going to

SPEAKER_02: agree with him about everything obviously but i will give him intellectual credit points because

SPEAKER_59: once you become a partisan and you're part of a political party rule number one is never criticize

SPEAKER_02: anybody in the party carry the party line vote the party line period full stop and we see that when you have so few people break ranks when you know you ever get a vote in the senate or something like that right it's always party lines always party line this is why i choose to not be

SPEAKER_59: part of either party because i like to just be able to tell you my audience and to have discussions from first principles with you alex and other folks yeah so um i give joe lonsdale a lot of credit

SPEAKER_00: um i saw david sacks came in and i just give a little disclaimer here i was gonna say david sacks

SPEAKER_02: and i are friends for 20 years we're partners in the all-in podcast he is no longer on the all-in podcast officially he does drop in as a guest as he has himself stated so he come i think he's come

SPEAKER_16: in two or three times since he took office he's been very clear he divested all of his uh crypto that's a public tweet he did yep number two he said wait for the announcement so he is enforcing the 72-hour rule you know nothing's been said yet so he is the crypto czar yes well just for you know good hygiene here when we refer to david sacks please don't re-aggregate me please don't weaponize me against my friend and say oh sax's bestie and business partner is anti-trump he's a never trumper he said trump should go to jail whatever it's not going to work folks it's not working when you try to weaponize trump versus you know elon it's not going to work when you try to weaponize me versus my friends we can be friends and disagree on things that's called america also everyone should

SPEAKER_62: chill out with the parasocial relationships and uh you know i i don't think we need to break up

SPEAKER_77: friendships that seems to be like a bridge too far it's so lame you know like what are we doing here

SPEAKER_29: if we're going to have a great democracy and we're going to lean into what's great about america i can disagree with sax sax can think i'm an idiot and dunk on me on twitter it's all good folks we can still be friends he can dunk on me we disagree profoundly about ukraine we agree on so much when it comes to crypto and in fact i believe he is the best actor in the world and he is one of the most

SPEAKER_02: moral ethical individuals i've met in my life now he's part of an administration so the previous thing i said is rule number one when you're part of an administration is to not attack other people in the administration because they weaponize that against you in this sort of context so you're not going to hear jd vance throw trump under the bus you're not going to hear trump throw you know i

SPEAKER_75: don't know tulsi gabbard under the bus they're going to be thoughtful about these things 99 of the time

SPEAKER_79: what was the first rule of trump oh yeah he says a lot of stuff right so he's going to say a lot of

SPEAKER_80: stuff he pops off sometimes yeah all right so let's just read sax's tweet out loud please yes uh

SPEAKER_62: quote and this is in response by the way to the joe lonsdale tweet which is one reason why i wanted to have that up so everyone can see it please read it verbatim in response quote nobody announced a

SPEAKER_22: tax or spending program maybe you should wait to find out what's actually being proposed and this actually brings up a big question which is okay if we're going to put these assets into a trust how does it work how do we fund it yes where does the capital come from at what price are we buying in

SPEAKER_62: who's going to custody the assets there's a really a million questions to this jason yes and

SPEAKER_22: i wish that we had had the full package up front it might have cleared some of the air that has surrounded this because criticism i went out and found or tried to find criticism and compliments about this crypto reserve as john put it out very easy to find criticism even amongst the right leaning technology crowd yes hard to find any praise of it i found one tweet from sean mcguire

SPEAKER_61: of sequoia saying legendary thoughtful comment from naval i thought was pretty great yes he attacked

SPEAKER_16: it and assessed it from a technological viewpoint 23 hours from the taping of this he said the u.s

SPEAKER_02: taxpayer should not be exit liquidity for cryptocurrencies that are decentralized in name only so he's talking about everything but bitcoin and this is super important i agree with him wholeheartedly

SPEAKER_59: bitcoin is decentralized from day one now there is somebody who owns whatever i don't know 20 satoshi

SPEAKER_16: owns some large amount in a wallet so perhaps we'll argue at some point if that person cashes those in and we see that wallet become active that hey this is some grand conspiracy but it's it's decentralized right that person let go of it xrp is the opposite and in fact if you pull up the lawsuit from the sec in 2020 one part of which xrp won the recap of it i believe they couldn't prove that the xrp founders were selling to retail because the retail trading was occurring on platforms so they couldn't sort of connect those dots doesn't mean that they're not guilty of stuff it just means they couldn't make that connection and then they're still an active lawsuit i believe for the other part which is they did a billion dollar unrecognized security i believe that's obvious then i see brad girlinghouse stumping

SPEAKER_18: for trump i believe that he's a major donor to politicians i don't have the details on it but

SPEAKER_16: you know he was at the crypto ball etc and xrp supports everything and splashy cashies xrp all over the place which was the nature of the lawsuit they were talking about how much xrp is being you know

SPEAKER_59: gifted around somebody in our comments here made a joke brad should just give a billion dollars next or pre for free to become legal to the sovereign wealth fund that's actually that's actually a

SPEAKER_96: pretty good speeding ticket i kind of like it on face value as an idea the appearance though is you

SPEAKER_62: donate money to the president and then they put your asset into their reserve therefore as the kids say pumping your bags and i want to circle back to the david sachs thing because i did see people saying that david sachs's firm craft has backed a number of crypto firms true and i do think it's great that the firm and sacks divested their direct holdings but i don't think you can really unlock an lp investment firm relationship is my guess so i my presumption is that he's put his percentage in craft to the side but it still exists in some way so i think he's doing what we can expect him to do there so i have no beef with that but people were saying that bitwise one of the companies in his orbit has a number of funds that hold crypto assets and those are the ones that were being picked but i just want to say i went through their uh filings today i went through the the fun prospectuses and so forth and as far as i can tell these are just things that are investing in the top

SPEAKER_22: 10 cryptocurrencies for example much like we pointed out so when it comes to conflicts of interest you have to do the work which sachs is doing by divesting and missing out on a pump to his new defense yeah um but it is tricky when you are an investor in companies that have exposure themselves because you can only disentangle yourself so far so i don't think the criticism is fair that he is being malicious i just think that he's stuck looking bad and this is why in government we try to even avoid the appearance of conflicts of interest and that's why this is sticky founders every missed call is a lost

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SPEAKER_90: and that he's divesting if he says he's divest he's divesting that doesn't mean other people aren't

SPEAKER_16: doing tremendous on this and there was absolutely a report and this is the thing about crypto and this is where eric trump i believe is going to become like the hunter biden theme of this presidency you know

SPEAKER_02: for better or worse fair or unfair because he says a lot of stuff too so now you got eric trump saying how brilliant it was to he's blocking me by the way so i can't uh pull it up myself um which is fair

SPEAKER_16: i have been hypocritical at times uh he says how brilliant it was that they did all this on a sunday so he's kind of like almost taunting regulators he's haunting folks with his tweets here's an idea

SPEAKER_18: say less best advice for eric trump your dad's the president your dad's being the crypto president the crypto lobby i mean i i think the crypto lobby the numbers i've seen thrown around are extremely high if we read what he said i love the genius of announcing a strategic reserve on a sunday when traditional markets are closed and wall street sleeps for the first time retail investors win so he's trying to kind of save himself there like i'm on the side of retail traditional finance better

SPEAKER_16: catch up and will quickly become extinct the world no longer runs monday to friday nine to five and then

SPEAKER_75: he adds world liberty five to hashtag btc hashtag eth the gist here for folks who don't know what we're

SPEAKER_62: talking about is that the stock market opens defined and runs for defined hours jason it takes holidays off it closes early sure it's only for a set period of time crypto markets run 24 hours a day seven days a week and so if you wanted to make a trade on say coinbase after this you'd have to wait for the markets to open more or less whereas crypto is always trading doesn't matter what time of day or day

SPEAKER_69: of the week let's move to prediction so we can wrap this up okay number one this is a terrible idea

SPEAKER_00: number two uh it's just a terrible idea uh and the reason it's a terrible idea is because it's going to launch just so many legal issues and it works against what i think are the three most important

SPEAKER_02: things trump is really mandated with doing if we look at why trump won i think number one was immigration in the border i think he's done a reasonably great job on that he's deporting 500 to a thousand hard

SPEAKER_59: criminals per day we haven't heard much about it for two weeks i'm sure it will pop up again but that was actually something the overwhelming majority of americans wanted to see eighty

SPEAKER_02: ninety percent of people want to see you know legal thoughtful immigration number two doge people want

SPEAKER_16: to see the end of wastewater abuse he's doing that so you might not agree with how it's being done but that's like the second part of the mandate and the third part is again and you might not like how

SPEAKER_59: he's going about it but we won't get into ukraine situation but stopping foreign wars and diplomacy

SPEAKER_00: i believe actually he's very good at that i think he will end the ukraine war where biden didn't gonna be very hard for people to give him credit for that because of the stylistic way this is going down uh but i think he will come to a great agreement a grand bargain if you will with china

SPEAKER_18: i think people don't like the stylistic points on on what's going on in gaza and trump gaza's you know like pure lunacy with the ai video pure lunacy in reality television with what happened in the overall office i actually think kind of crazy like a fox i've talked about it before crazies on your side i think he will on those three fronts we'll be sitting here in two or three years i think he could accomplish those three mandates in the first half before the midterms okay this is the kind

SPEAKER_22: of stuff that will derail everything so can i just say totally off topic but i was waiting for you to say inflation because to me if i was to pick the number one thing that won trump the last election it was inflation partially due to spending in the trump administration one partially due to biden one

SPEAKER_62: the inflation went up during fighting you're correct yeah yeah but spending in the front 1.0 impacted that correct so that's what i thought was the number one issue i i ever the other things i

SPEAKER_22: think kind of nest into that in my view but that's off topic i was just no no no i think actually

SPEAKER_02: that's a really good punch up i do think the american public was fed up with the inflation issue while at the same time the stock market was at record highs and unemployment's at record lows and

SPEAKER_116: wage growth was reasonable putting that aside i don't think the president actually has too much of

SPEAKER_16: an impact on i mean i think they can screw it up like the fed did but i don't think the president

Chamath Palihapitiya: actually has too much impact on that so uh but you are right that is part of the mandate and i think we saw the inflation handle looked pretty good right just last week the inflation handle looked pretty

SPEAKER_62: good yeah um so there's some conflicting data there i'm worried about gdp but i just want to pull up

SPEAKER_22: something regarding the trump family crypto and the situation producer court found a telegraph article that said that trump's truth social company which is tmtd trump media and technology group says it'll

SPEAKER_62: put up to a quarter billion dollars into assets including cryptocurrencies i just chased that down via their ir website and that does appear to be correct and they may put it into bitcoin and similar

SPEAKER_22: cryptocurrencies so you could very much argue that if tmtg which trump owns a big chunk in followed

SPEAKER_62: through on its public announcement trump just pumped his own bags to an absurd degree right so if

SPEAKER_123: that's all true we're going to put all the ifs and caveats there allegedly caveats and so forth what

SPEAKER_62: a disappointment though jason that that this is what we're doing because all he had to do trump

SPEAKER_22: was say we're going to do a thing that's going to yield bitcoin for the government we're going to put it into a special reserve and he would have gotten such a big pr win from the cryptic community from a lot of folks on the internet and it would have been kind of a slam dunk would it have been a policy that changed the world probably not but it would have been a nice pat on the head for his fans instead we're here and this is like the thing about trumpism that i don't always i don't get it seems that there's a way to do things that his audience would like and then he does something

SPEAKER_00: else and i'm always like perplexing to me yeah uh another name i'll just put it out there to track

SPEAKER_02: that people have been whispering to me over and over again is justin's son yes so he is a businessman this is cnn if you trust it or not a businessman who pumped 75 million into the trump family-backed

SPEAKER_59: crypto token finds himself in a fortunate position this week as federal security regulators are hitting pause on their civil fraud cases against him again we're going to just see this over and over again

SPEAKER_16: whether these things are the normal course of action or not everything is going to be assumed to

SPEAKER_127: be a corrupt grift going forward well i just pulled up some some reporting and some tweets from son and

SPEAKER_62: it does appear that he put another 45 million into world liberty financial after previously put it in 30. so that is a 75 million dollar purchase into an asset controlled by the trump family more or less and then you'll note that he's i think his suit was dropped so okay you want me to clean the whole

SPEAKER_91: thing up for you hit me i've talked about this 20 times a crypto tax ah yes the old crypto tax

SPEAKER_16: now sax retweeted joe and said hey wait for the details okay perfect i don't advise any of my friends on what's going on i stay out of it so i'm arm's length the same way sax sold his crypto

SPEAKER_02: sax sold his j coin i am not collaborating with elon on doge sax on whatever robert kennedy i know some of these people i am not collaborating on anything because i want to call balls and

SPEAKER_59: strikes here and on all in again independent i voted republican one-third of the time democratic

SPEAKER_41: two-thirds of the time i'm not part of either party i'm a doublehead i'll keep repeating that

SPEAKER_59: because people keep trying to frame me as some libtard like crazy like kamala biden supporter i i said

SPEAKER_36: very clearly i wasn't going to vote for them so i have been saying this for many years here's a tweet

SPEAKER_16: from december 14th 2024 if the government wants to build a strategic reserve in bitcoin crypto they should place a tax on it that being crypto every time you buy or sell it you pay a small percentage in actual cryptocurrency to the government's wallet just 50 basis points or even five basis points

SPEAKER_29: would result in massive holdings and most crypto folks would gladly pay it in order to have a legal

SPEAKER_143: framework i mean hey and this is my little cheeky at the end gets me in a little bit of trouble uh i

SPEAKER_144: mean it would be a shakedown and a protection racket or probably worth it all right we all know if

SPEAKER_147: you're a founder or even if you're on a small business you're thinking about your company 24 7 365 days

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SPEAKER_00: simple idea trump comes out and says on friday at the white house crypto summit which i think is great

SPEAKER_02: that the white house is doing a crypto summit i think it's great they're going to do regulation because again we talked about too hot before gary gensler too cold with gary gensler let's try to get to just right because we're in a just too hot time period right now obviously those trump comes out and

SPEAKER_04: says here's how it's going to go everybody in crypto pays a wonderful crypto tax crypto transaction tax not a tariff it's the crypto transaction tax it's going to be wonderful everybody pays 10 bips may have heard of bips bips is a little word b-i-p-s 10 bips they pay the vig to the crypto reserve problem solved we're not spending any taxpayer money goes directly to taxpayers maybe we do a crypto dividend maybe everybody gets a little crypto uh would not be a nice alex a little crypto for everybody alex right this week in startups in the first row of the uh i thought i thought we were

SPEAKER_06: broke mr president i thought i thought we were we were flat broke okay no dollars listen one more time

SPEAKER_04: he's a low iq low iq lib okay that's true gay rights i love the gays okay gays for trump huge alex wilhelm low iq alex wilhelm it's a tax okay crypto people pay it not the americans so that i think this would solve are you saying that crypto people are not americans have you met him alex very interesting people maybe from mars i mean maybe you know we'll find crypto people on the red planet i mean he's

SPEAKER_18: capable of doing it okay anything's possible here i gotta go at humor here but what do you think of my idea just say everybody knows trump reads my tweets everybody knows that that's definitely true people

SPEAKER_44: are sending his tweets to him because he did the golden visa based on my 500k just added a zero so i said do 50 bips or five bips he's going to add a zero five percent or 50 bips will be his range

SPEAKER_62: what's the average rate on like i don't know a 10 20 no limit hold'em table at a casino i think you're

SPEAKER_02: it'll wind up being like 10 bucks an hour per person so 100 bucks an hour you play 20 hands

SPEAKER_16: that means five bucks a hand that's my guess is like because that's what they charge in in big games yeah when you play a big game they don't take it out of the pot because the pots get really big so instead of taking a percentage of the pot at 30 minutes they have a timer yeah and at 30 minutes whoever has the button pays the entire thing or at 30 minutes everybody throws in six or twelve dollars so at a big game you're paying like 100 to 250 an hour to the casino so you play a 10-hour session

SPEAKER_59: they make two thousand dollars the dealer's getting paid probably 10 bucks an hour 20 bucks and how they get minimum wage plus tips yeah but tips tips fly to dealers when things are going well

SPEAKER_62: so that's that's my analogy here is this is fine let's go do it fine we'll just we'll just do it a

SPEAKER_22: little a little 10 bits 15 bits i'll take 20. um i can see how that would make a lot of sense i just think you run into people who couldn't see the good for the oh my god it's tax and would therefore kind of lose their their mind about it but i think jason we can close with this when we have all the details we will bring this back up but in the meantime after crypto prices went down and people began to lose some of their crypto enthusiasm here is a shot in the arm which is good for startups in the sector that are building stable coin tech like stably from the twist 500 and i just i'm going to

SPEAKER_62: close have we been on the pod yet they have not been on the pod yet they are on our list to invite and also get them on okay can we close with a joke though on this sector on this sector on this story i mean

SPEAKER_02: i mean yes we can crypto people want to have the government out of your wallet unless they can have

Chamath Palihapitiya: the government in their wallet they want the government out of their bag but holding their bags up i mean that's basically i mean it's so ironic the crypto people were like we're the anti-government

SPEAKER_02: money system we are outside of government we don't want anything to do with government unless

SPEAKER_16: we can get a quick pump out of this and that's really the problem and consumers could be hurt

SPEAKER_22: jacqueline melanic uh previously of tech wrench now she runs a company that does essentially uh investor relations for tokens it's kind of a cool company anyways uh she had a great tweet and it

SPEAKER_62: shows a guy covering his eyes throwing a dart towards a dartboard says headed to the local dive bar to help the white house pick more cryptocurrencies for the crypto strategic reserve and i think this summarizes people's views pretty pretty good pretty good jackie okay let's talk about ramp jason this is

SPEAKER_22: a big round that's coming to place yeah i mean okay let's go back in time let's talk about what ramp is ramp when it launched back in 2019 was considered to be effectively a brex me too a brex also ran a brex clone and that means that it was working on corporate cards and it had this early idea of what if we helped our customers save money so it had this we'll go through your expenses we'll find duplicates we'll help you save a couple of bucks and honestly i talked to eric gliman back in the day when it was smaller and i was a little bit perplexed by the bet because to me brex was doing well it raised a bunch of money seemed to have a lot of brand cachet jason at the time but ramp has grown from strength to strength to strength adding new products raising new capital it did have a valuation dip after the boom but now the news is that ramp is now worth 13 billion dollars after a 150 million dollar secondary transaction a lot of money moving around here big numbers uh my first impression is twofold one big secondaries mean later ipos and isn't it great to see fintech back in the sun you know fintech

SPEAKER_02: is just such a great space we had vlad on on wednesday i don't know if you caught that episode he's just tremendous and the the thing that's great about fintech and technology is fintech has just traditionally had so much friction and it's been so slow and arduous and painful to do anything when i'm working with companies like mercury with ramp with robinhood with wealthfront any of those platforms coinbase and we are i own shares in wealthfront and robinhood i think out of that cohort

SPEAKER_59: and i've yeah that's it i think that's it and i think mercury and ramp have both advertised on this weekend startup so i guess on a disclosures yeah well anyway when i have to deal with a

SPEAKER_16: traditional bank which i have to do because i can't use these new services i wish i could for venture funds right and for audits and for accounting all that stuff i literally have

Chamath Palihapitiya: people coming to me for wet signatures you know what a wet signature is is that literally like

SPEAKER_02: involving ink yes and i'm like what planet are we on like how about if this is so important you have me state my name into a video and take a picture with my ip address and a time stamp to validate it's me like i just did for my twitter subscribers in order to collect money on a platform like twitter they make you verify your identity how do they do it you take a picture of your driver's license front and back you take a picture of yourself when you do remote health they have you do something similar right i don't know if it's a video or a picture this is how the world has moved what if i'm opening up an account that you know some bank why don't you turn on my camera let me take a picture of my driver's license take a picture of myself you have the ip address you got my phone number then you call me back with a live person make sure it was me did you just take your picture then send me an email you can do like a triple authentication with a person with technology you send a link to my email

SPEAKER_16: address on file you call me on the phone with a human being you ask me my test questions you have a second phone number from somebody at my company and you check them as well which by the way is going to become the practice with ai because everything i just described you could use ai to try to fake

SPEAKER_68: right you can make a deep fake that was literally that i was thinking like ip addresses are spoofable

SPEAKER_02: blah blah blah but yeah in order to like download somebody's bitcoin or every dollar out of their account you want to get them on the zoom you want to get them on the phone you want to do two or three of these things live you know see what shirt i'm wearing on a facetime call see what you're working on a regular phone call you get the idea so be be cautious out there but you know this is why these companies are so great as you remove friction from a product consumption goes up as you make a product faster consumption goes up as you offer a wider array of services that delight customers and solve problems for them engagement goes up revenue goes up i think that's the story of this cohort of you know i i think they call them neo banks new bank actually i have equity in new bank through a

SPEAKER_59: venture firm that invested in it and i never sold a share i actually have some exposure to square which is now called block block uh again i didn't directly invest in those two i don't want to take

SPEAKER_189: credit as an investor i was in a fund so i get credit for investing in my fund still good to hold stuff

SPEAKER_190: that's done well and blocks historically done pretty darn good oh did you see that um i'm right behind

SPEAKER_59: pelosi and uh inverse kramer on the rankings i had a tweet somebody has took my j trading portfolio and they benchmarked it i'm up 35 apparently in the last year so i'm like two points behind i'm two points

SPEAKER_62: behind policy tracker god damn it so here is uh here is jason's tweet but sadly he is losing to the opposite of kramer uh bury famously uh the man who bet on the right side of the subprime meltdown

Chamath Palihapitiya: plus 44 43 and then there's our boy jason right there 35 somebody emailed me about doing an etf

SPEAKER_02: speaking of like fintech so i could put you know etfs are like you can set them up for a couple hundred grand or something and then people can invest in your etf and you can get fees on it or something

David Friedberg: so i could create etf dump my robin hood into it yeah this is a feature vlad should do like if you have over a million dollars in holdings you should be able to press a button and create etf there was a

SPEAKER_22: startup that lets you essentially track your friends portfolios and you can buy the same stuff as them so this idea is not uh novel but with technology back to your point making things easier and faster in finance why couldn't you spin up an etf for a couple hundred k charge back to bips

SPEAKER_18: 50 bips or 100 bips yeah i mean people might want to follow it i mean this is my vision for twist 500 by the way is to create a twist 500 like a 10 million dollar spv or something and then put one of my people on buying secondary in the top twist 500 companies and then you're like hey here's twist 500 one twist 500 is 10 million you can go to twist 500.com by the way and see this project we're working on top 500 private companies as it's good fun yeah i think it's good fun and you know we we're going to kind of track them here and then as they become public we take them out and there'll be a bit of a competition for them over time you know my idea would be hey you set up a twist 500 and then you say to the fund manager myself and like maybe have a collaborator on it see what the

SPEAKER_44: current secondary price is on the secondary markets let's build an index of them so then i like if i

SPEAKER_02: wanted access to those companies and i wasn't directly investing in them i could put and i would i put like a million of the 10 million in sure and then somebody goes and says okay we looked at the price of superhuman and calm on the secondary market here's the last valuation current valuation we know management we asked you know uh raul and alex and michael over at com and superhuman would they mind if we buy secondary directly from their folks or we bought them on the secondary

SPEAKER_16: market and then you get exposure yeah it'd be kind of interesting right because there's the destiny 100 or something the publicly traded one that has spacex and it kind of flies all over the place i talked a

SPEAKER_59: lot about it anyway yeah lots of interesting ideas congratulations on the huge valuation to the team over there i know we used ramp cards i don't know if we currently used them but i remember during a conference or we had a getaway and it was really cool maybe i don't know if they gave you one but we gave ramp cards to everybody who was traveling i think they might be using mercury for this now or another company but anyway i remember specifically a couple years ago we used ramp cards

SPEAKER_18: 25 people working on a conference i think it was actually for the all-in summit one we just issued them ramp cards for their expenses and we just said use this for your expenses we see the expenses coming in and then you know for ubers we can do an uber account because they have uber for business but for everything else here's your ramp card and then we can turn them off or take them from you know a thousand dollar limit per card down to zero so if somebody goes you know a wall and takes you know their ramp card and wants to go to 11 or whatever the club in miami is and and hit the strip club or the you know erotic review at 11 they you know they the most

SPEAKER_41: damage they can do is a thousand uh in funny money i don't know how far that will get you at a strip

SPEAKER_62: club in miami i have no personal experience but i don't think we go very far um really briefly on on the ramp story just to kind of add a couple of quick notes here for folks yeah the company is now on an annualized revenue run rate of 700 million up from 300 million before i thought that

SPEAKER_68: was very impressive times 20 is 14 billion and you said the valuation was 13 and we don't know their growth rate though do we we don't know the growth rate recently and we also do another gross margins

Chamath Palihapitiya: because we're talking about payments to some degrees do we have any number of revenue from

SPEAKER_02: 2010 2012 a whisper number 2013 that would be interesting because then we could do the two-year growth on average which wouldn't be perfect but we should assume this company is growing greater than 30 year over year yeah in order to get a 20 times top line revenue remember that's price to sales not

SPEAKER_16: price to earnings so on a price to sales basis this is 20 times palantir kind of broke all records with like whatever it peaked at 60 70 80 times their top line revenue with i think 30 or 40 growth you know companies like airbnb and uber might be trading at two three four times growth and those are incredible businesses so just to give people some context your private companies do get uh great price to sales ratios meme stocks that have great leadership and great products can get a great you know an other worldly price to sales ratio but eventually these are going to come down to the price to earnings which

SPEAKER_62: is their profits as you pointed out found some stuff for us here before it turned three so in march of 2022 the company had reached 100 million in annualized revenue okay and summer of 2023 that was

SPEAKER_224: 300 now with 700 doubling uh yes 50 to doubling probably very impressive and then i just want to

SPEAKER_22: throw in one more thing secondary jason 150 million dollars with secondary takes a lot of pressure off

SPEAKER_62: the company to go public even by current standards of 500 million in revenue before you go public it's

SPEAKER_22: above that we're not going to see an ipo for a while i was trying to sort out why i was reading some stuff from charles hudson precursor ventures love that guy yeah and he's had a blog post about this and a couple of things that i want to just say one was he's not sure that these companies leadership teams really see the benefit of going public and the emergence of secondary liquidity

SPEAKER_62: for founders and early employees means you no longer need ipos and i think those things combined with the fact that companies are going faster and therefore they're creating value more quickly and therefore why would you want to let your amazing business go public and lose control over it so i think there's a lot of things that are coming together to allow companies like ramp to do this even

SPEAKER_228: if you and i would love to see an s1 i don't think the people with money and ramp are in a hurry

SPEAKER_16: there are reasons to go public even with this vibrant private uh market we can stay private forever liquidity to do bigger transactions m a but because m a was taken off the table you took that public currency as a weapon off the table better hygiene and a more fluid uh liquidity market would be the other reasons but again as you point out the private markets reward this the question is can the

SPEAKER_29: lps you know who are early investors liquidate to somebody else and we saw this with stripe

SPEAKER_02: i think was it stripe that uh sequoia famously had in the earliest funds i believe it was even in the scouts fund that i did uber in and i think sam waltman did it they offered their later stage funds to buy that 12 year old position or whatever it was and so that was like really interesting because now you've got the same firm selling to their a different lp base under the same moniker sequoia and uh you just have to sign off on that you have a little more paperwork uh back to wet signatures so people understand like hey and and this happened i think with uh also spacex folks earliest stage fund in there

SPEAKER_16: and then they offer their other lps who might want access to it so now you're going to have funds buying and selling in the same round this would be the equivalent of me selling to masa personally

SPEAKER_18: as a scout as a sequoia scout and then buying from let's say launch fund in the secondary before it goes public i didn't do that but that's what we're going to see which is then andreessen horowitz launch even other folks are going to look more like a market maker in some ways selling their early stage investments to the same lp base or maybe a deeper pocketed lp base but still part of their network

SPEAKER_16: that's actually going to lock in for the top six percent of the country qualified purchasers and

SPEAKER_02: accredited investors all these wins and what does it do it locks out everybody in america who's not an accredited investor profoundly unfair well this is where the trump and you know administration could do something with an accredited investor test and solve a lot of problems before you get on that soapbox i

SPEAKER_22: think that what's important to say is it's not just accredited investors it's accredited investors

SPEAKER_68: with access to the funds that have access to the deals and even an even tighter subset yeah oh i mean

SPEAKER_21: six percent to zero point zero zero six percent i mean there's not that many vcs out there

SPEAKER_22: uh all that's to me a little bit disappointing because i would love to see more public market appreciation for companies but i'll just say that there is one company jason that people say is going to list lots of news from bloomberg and the information that core weave is finally going to go public um this is a twist factor company raised 13.4 billion dollars in total capital inclusive of secondaries but jason we talked about neoclouds these gpu based data centers that people rent to run their ai compute and we've had a lot of questions about the economics because chips are expensive right okay yep the information got some data or as people in the industry call it the disinformation

SPEAKER_109: that's what the c's and ceos call it in the uh in the private chat they don't call us that they do

SPEAKER_62: why is that because they're salty at its success or salty that they might get things wrong occasionally

SPEAKER_02: i think it has to do with the general standoffishness of the people who are building stuff in the world and the people reporting on them oh yeah the intersection of you know the dunning-kruger

SPEAKER_182: effect and ah they wrote about my company half the stuff is correct half is wrong obviously it is journalists are just have half the information yeah well people want to tell us more stuff we could

SPEAKER_62: do a better job well i mean so i think any any framing that i disagree with is is click bait you know i mean people have hey this is everyone yeah where was i oh yeah so the information uh they reported

SPEAKER_22: that uh corley's revenue in 2024 was about 1.9 billion okay 8x year over year super impressive but here's the kicker jason uh oh let's play a fun game i love putting you on the spot okay guess

SPEAKER_69: what core weaves capex costs were last year all right core weave has raised 13 billion to date they

SPEAKER_18: are going to go public at 30 40 billion they are one of the top purchasers of gpus they got ahead of the line and they did this a long time ago but you said last year so in 2024 which would be at peak year but they had to put those orders in previously i'm gonna guess maybe 5 billion you know my guess was

SPEAKER_62: four so you're closer than i was it was actually 8.5 wow okay a lot of gpus you know whatever these

SPEAKER_205: gpus are going for a quarter million 150 i guess depending on how they're spec'd that's a lot of gpus

SPEAKER_199: and as we've seen people keep vacillating between we don't have a use for these gpus and we don't have

SPEAKER_18: enough gpus to use we don't know how to use them we don't have we can't get this job done unless we get more so both things can be true concurrently and we can vacillate back and forth because human beings are innovative little buggers you know like we're gonna figure out oh i know how to do this with 90 less technology and less hardware congratulations and then you're gonna hit another roadblock where

SPEAKER_29: you're gonna be like oh you know what we could have indexed every frame of every hd video in the world and yes you know then made training data based on this and if we make synthetic data or we do deep research and we do 200 web page analyses concurrently then have you know 10 threads put those deep research

SPEAKER_02: analyses together and then we do another 10 to check the facts on those like that's what's happening with these deep research things is they figured out with the inference side hey how do we put all this inference to use i know we'll just have a fact check or by the way now we're gonna have agents running here's an idea you did these 500 queries last year we're gonna do those 500 every day twice a day a

SPEAKER_29: thousand a day on your behalf 365 and when you wake up every morning we're gonna say hey by the way here's the interesting things that changed since you last did these searches just like superhuman now is going through and pre-populating and doing the summaries of your emails raul disclosed on wednesday

SPEAKER_18: uh check that episode out go to this week in startups and follow along he disclosed that they

SPEAKER_29: do those summaries even if you never see them so they have them there this is like pre-caching stuff you know very interesting they're gonna do your replies in advance they're gonna do the sorts in advance in other words things are getting so cheap that they're like oh there's extra inference here

SPEAKER_205: let's just do your entire mailbox and since they charge a buck a day or 30 bucks a month whatever it is they can do that whereas gmail cannot yeah but here's the thing it's already so cheap you can do

SPEAKER_269: that for a buck a day oh my gosh that's absolutely astounding that's what they charge that's what they

SPEAKER_44: charge which means they're probably spending five cents a day on this that's insanely cheap and very

SPEAKER_62: exciting as a little addendum before we jump into uh kind of what we call founder corner i think uh why is core weave going public and why is it happening after we just said that no one's gonna go public the answer is the capex number everybody if you're not building software you have to buy a lot of stuff you need more money you go public you raise a lot of money tesla did this when it was public and raised bajillions of dollars very effectively and worked great so i think they're going public to have a liquid currency to raise more money and so forth let's bring our dear friend lawn hairs on is going to talk to us about a founder hack and this lawn uh is one that i adore it's from matt turk

SPEAKER_273: and is kind of one of those what if he took the world and turned it upside down ideas okay he tweeted

SPEAKER_275: this the other day i thought it was interesting uh a few quotes and how they would apply to a few uh of our biggest sort of most successful startup companies companies at the moment don't do services well but what about founder hardware is hard what about media apple tesla spacex selling to the government is awful what about and real uh so generic startup advice is often terribly wrong is his conclusion based on all these sort of conventional wisdom gone wrong uh ideas well you got to parse

SPEAKER_109: each one of them two of them or three of them actually overlap or two of the three kind of

SPEAKER_02: overlap hardware is hard selling to the government is awful if you look at you know uh spacex and andro they're both doing both of those things hardware is incredibly hard tesla and spacex showed

SPEAKER_16: and nvidia apple of course did it a long time ago but that startups could actually do hardware

SPEAKER_02: hardware is hard is a warning it's not necessarily don't do it it's just going to be super capital intensive and selling to the government is awful the way i would say it instead of awful which is you know kind of a nebulous word is it's slow it's slow it's time consuming so you put those two together what that means is if you do succeed you have a great moat so incredibly hard to displace a company like spacex and those contracts because gosh you know look at how much has been invested

SPEAKER_16: over 15 years in that company and their technology so it is good advice for founders to know that hardware is hard it's great advice to know selling to the government is difficult i can tell you in education a perfect example the companies and the startups that tried to sell to the government for education had a really hard time yep the cycle was incredibly long incredibly slow the people who then

SPEAKER_18: sold directly to consumers duolingo for language brilliant.org one of our startups for math and programming etc or in the healthcare space fitbod and uh nutrisense com from our portfolio did wonderfully and you can actually hybrid this lawn sell to consumers first perfect it and then upsell to the government so if you know i think com.com and some of those other folks in the wellness space now they are going to sell not just to consumers but maybe they get covered by healthcare in their second decade so you can kind of thread the needle which is get that immediate feedback from customers make it work with them and then the low slow methodical larger purchase orders from corporations can come in after that tone base another one selling directly you know to sell people how to play musical instruments i'd love to see tone base at some point you know a college uh or a high school could offer tone base and brilliant to their entire student population and then if the students use it they pay uh or the school pays or the school pays for you know whatever ten thousand a year to have brilliant available to all thousand students ten bucks a year is a lot less than ten bucks a month you know you get the idea so angel university i started doing this like where i teach people based on my book angel how to become angel investors and you know if i don't charge for it nobody shows up so i charge for it 500 bucks for

SPEAKER_16: the virtual a thousand dollars for the one in person i'm doing it april 23rd new york city it's going to be at a dim sum restaurant and then i i this has to be updated but any profits from angel university so like if i hosted a dim sum restaurant we take the cost of the dim sum out what's left over we donate

SPEAKER_192: all right for lon harris and alex wilhelm he's at lawns a at l o n s four letter club at alex also for a

SPEAKER_235: ladder club a-l e-x and me coming in dead last dead last five letters in my hand i'm at jason we'll see

SPEAKER_290: you all next time in this week in stars bye bye