SPEAKER_00: This also leads to a lot of questions about the failure of what happened in all of this, because now you have all this information, like, how did this person get on the roof? Is the Secret Service qualified? Why did they let Trump get up three or four times to pump his fist when, like, there could be a second shooter? SPEAKER_01: Like, all of this are all valid questions that will be answered in time. SPEAKER_00: But the idea that this person is the vessel of a grand conspiracy theory is kind of hard to believe. I mean, maybe it's a 1% chance or 0.1% chance, but this is the world we live in. Everybody wants to process information. Just if you're listening to this and you're wondering how to manage media, understand that you get to watch citizen journalism and conspiracy theories figure it out. SPEAKER_03: Sometimes they'll be right and split the arrow like, you know, like a miracle. And 99% of the time, they're going to just be totally jumping the fence and making, like, no sense and being complete lunatics. Other times they're going to win a Pulitzer and they're going to break the news. So just be media savvy, folks. SPEAKER_05: This Week in Startups is brought to you by Squarespace. Turn your idea into a new website. Go to squarespace.com slash twist for a free trial. When you're ready to launch, use offer code twist to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Intercom. Intercom's AI-first service is the best thing to happen to your customers since you. Twist listeners can get 90% off Intercom's platform at intercom.com slash twist. And Lemon.io. Hire pre-vetted remote developers. Get 15% off your first four weeks of developer time at Lemon.io slash twist. SPEAKER_12: All right, everybody. Welcome back to this Week in Startups. It's July 15th on a pretty consequential day. SPEAKER_13: Hi, Alex Wilhelm is with me again. Welcome back to the program, Alex. SPEAKER_14: Hey, yeah. Not much going on. SPEAKER_16: Not much happened in the last couple of days. So I don't even know how we're going to fill the show today, Jason. SPEAKER_17: I just feel like there's a real dearth of things to talk about. SPEAKER_18: I mean, there's so much to talk about. And I think maybe talking about this assassination attempt on President Trump is something we just SPEAKER_19: got to say at the top of the show here. Obviously, this is incredibly tragic, horrible day for America. I remember the assassinations of John Kennedy, the attempted assassination of Reagan. Ronald Reagan. And this is just horrific. And the rhetoric and the politics, obviously, a lot's got to change here. But we've been through this before as a country many times. I remember growing up and my parents and grandparents telling me about JFK, RFK, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and all of those horrific moments in time that they lived through. I just want to say up top, you know, incredible tragedy, this father who was killed protecting his family, and, of course, the president almost just by an inch missing, being murdered and assassinated. This is absolutely horrible. And there's no place for this kind of violence. And we live in a very fast processing media cycle. SPEAKER_00: The time between, Alex, something horrific happening and memes being spread and jokes being spread is instant now. Like, literally, when I found out about this, and I pulled up X, formerly known as Twitter, which is like the place to kind of get, you know, the pulse of what's going on instantly, at least. It was literally a third jokes, a third partisanship, and a third conspiracy theories. I mean, it's just everything. It's everything. And when you run a platform based on freedom of speech, and that has anonymous accounts like Reddit, like X now, you're going to have a lot of sorting to do. And so I have a lot of thoughts on the rhetoric and how to change this. SPEAKER_19: But I just want to say, thank God he wasn't killed. It's just so horrible that somebody was killed. And, you know, there's a lot of patience that is required in a breaking news environment that SPEAKER_00: no longer exists. We've opted as a society to just go full bore into investigation mode. I want to talk about that as well. And conspiracy theories. And then this one is just custom built for conspiracy theories. But yeah, where were you when you found out? SPEAKER_13: And how are you feeling today? And what do you want to talk about in terms of this story? SPEAKER_31: Yeah, I was logging on to play. Xbox with a friend. It's how we stay in touch. SPEAKER_17: Like we play Xbox once in a while and just chit chat. And I was on Reddit and I saw something that was like, someone just tried to kill the SPEAKER_16: President Trump, former President Trump. And I was like, huh, well, I've only seen it once on some random somebody. It can't be true. And then I put on my headset and played video games for an hour and a half, came back to everything. And you know what I did? I didn't say much. I didn't do much. What I tried to do was what I consider now to be my own emotionally mature response to whenever breaking news has happened, emotions are running hot. People are popping off a little bit, which is sit back, wait. I've been through enough live shooter Twitter moments, schools, now politicians, et cetera, to know that things tend to get a little weird before they settle down and the facts come out. So I hung back and didn't comment. I waited until I think Obama condemned political violence and he had a relatively reasonable middle of the road statement. SPEAKER_17: I'm like, good. That's good for me. Retweet that, re-act that, repost that, whatever. Uh, but I was trying to make sure that I didn't stick my foot into, um, I mean, gun policy, the SPEAKER_36: current state of, uh, democracy. It just didn't seem like the right moment for me. No one was waiting for Alex to come out and make a statement about this. SPEAKER_17: So I hung back, uh, things have calmed down a little bit, it seems I think that's kind of where we are today. SPEAKER_36: There's two ways to approach this. I think there's the social media conspiracy angle that we're going to get on first. And then everyone, we're going to talk a little bit about what this means for the election, because it's going to impact startups. We have a couple of notes about that. But Jason, I want to start with you on the conspiracy theory citizen journalism side. SPEAKER_39: Yeah. Let me just give a statement on rhetoric and get right into that. Cause it kind of dovetails on the rhetoric side, you know, both candidates now and SPEAKER_00: their parties are playing a bit of a game now of whose rhetoric was serious and an instruction manual. And then whose rhetoric was, uh, that's just a phrase in common English language. Right. And when we talk about rhetoric, you and I could have a reasonable conversation and say something like this person's in the crosshairs, you know, I don't know, uh, somebody who is, um, you know, Elizabeth Holmes is in the crosshair of prosecutors. And it's a phrase and nobody in their right mind. And that's a key word there in their right mind would say either of us, or anybody is advocating for the assassination of Elizabeth Holmes from their ends. SPEAKER_03: And if somebody says like, they want to be a dictator for a day. SPEAKER_00: And then another person says, he said, he wants to be a dictator for a day. And, you know, you, you start to have everything escalate, escalate and become weaponized because people are trying to build a case against each other for who should run the country. SPEAKER_48: There is a, another small group of people in the world who are mentally ill. And when given inputs, they don't interpret them like a normal person. SPEAKER_00: Um, the idea of comparing somebody to Hitler is such a trope on the internet that there is a law, Goodwin's law, which basically states, you can tell when an online community hits any amount of scale, when somebody refers to somebody as Hitler, literally it's a known phenomenon that eventually everybody gets referred to as Hitler in an online debate. Okay. But when it comes to sick people, um, they will interpret things. Their dog told them something, uh, celebrity told them something and they're sick, right? They're literally, at least their mind is sick. And so if we want to actually have this rhetoric come down and we want to address the fact that adults can have conversations that use language in a certain way, rhetoric, sometimes it's violent and in nature, we use it in startups all the time. It's a war, we're going to go to war, peace times, peace times, all this stuff is just, you know, they're, they're flourishes of language that, you know, nobody again, right mind would take seriously. But if we want to try to not inspire people who are suffering from acute mental illness, SPEAKER_48: which is a very small percentage of the population. SPEAKER_00: And it's a very small percentage of that population that would ever act on it. But in aggregate with 300 plus million Americans, even if it was 1% of people are sick and it's more than 1%, but let's just go with a number 1%, that's 3 million people. And if 1% of those people would actually act on it, that means we have 3000 people who might actually do something in the world now. And this is called the law of big numbers. And that's the reality we face here when we have a situation like this. SPEAKER_14: Where, where are you going with this? Because you're walking me in a direction and I'm curious where this, where this train gets off and which depot. SPEAKER_00: Yeah. Here's the depot. Leadership. Okay. If Trump and Biden want to show leadership, they have to say, I am no longer going to use any of this rhetoric. My opponent in this race is agreed with me. And we've both agreed that we're not going to use certain rhetoric and that the people who are on our team, our surrogates, people who work for us down to the intern, if they use any rhetoric that falls into these categories, they're immediately not going to be team members anymore. I either going to be fired. SPEAKER_70: Yeah. SPEAKER_00: And that would actually be true leadership. But I have not seen that for either of these leaders or their surrogates or their teams. What I've seen is them dig in and say, you started it. You're wrong. You called him Hitler. You said you wanted to be a dictator. So do you want to be a dictator? SPEAKER_72: And they're just going back and forth and back and forth. SPEAKER_71: Okay. The internet has never been busier. SPEAKER_74: Everybody's creating new websites, new products, new services, and search is changing. Search engines want to keep visitors captive. And AI generated content is creating so much noise that you're going to have to beat. So you need to get your search engine optimization correct. And you can spend a ton of money on SEO consultants, or you can just use Squarespace's built-in SEO tools and get the best of breed in the world. You are the best person to tell the world about what you're building. So Squarespace has built a wealth of tools to help you reach your audience. Site maps, automatic content markup, and clean URLs are just the start of getting your SEO right. Squarespace also has SEO tools for e-commerce sites, right? Which are a whole different genre of website where you've got a lot of SKUs, you've got a lot of items, and you want each one of those to rank. So they're going to help you write SEO-friendly copy for your site, all thanks to their in-house AI tools that you can then tweak. No matter what you're working on, Squarespace can help you get the word out without forcing you to get a PhD in the latest tweaks to Google's algorithm. So here's what you do next. Go to squarespace.com slash twist for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, go to squarespace.com slash twist to get 10% off your first website or domain purchase at squarespace.com slash twist. SPEAKER_16: Let's stick to primeras for a minute and to focus this down because who counts as a surrogate can be a squishy thing. It's like, what's an AI startup? Well, it's people who say they're an AI startup, sending the surrogate to some degree. So when it comes to the post-shooting rhetoric, Democrats have been very, Biden gave a speech, saying this is terrible. Everyone came out and said, this is terrible. Have you been reading Trump's social posts? When it comes to both sides, to me, in the wake of this tragedy, it's not exactly a level SPEAKER_17: playing field between the two when it comes to rhetoric. Now, I'm not going to say who's right about whose surrogates were worse in the old days. SPEAKER_87: When you're the victim of the attack, I think a political operative would say, now you can use this to win the election. And a political operative, at least the ones I've heard who are willing to speak on it, a political operative would advise the people who are being accused of creating the rhetoric SPEAKER_00: to be silent because there's no upside in talking. And then the other side would leverage it to get as many votes as possible. So I think that's the, and so there we are, we're back at strategy. I don't think this is going to change if I'm being totally honest, because I don't think people are aware enough and humble enough and ethical, moral enough in politics. I think partisans are built different. They look at every tragedy, every horrible thing that happens in the world as an opportunity. SPEAKER_92: Yeah. SPEAKER_00: And so this whole expectation that this is going to change and the rhetoric will change, SPEAKER_93: I don't think it's going to, because they are going to use this to the hilt to win their election. Both sides. Both sides. SPEAKER_95: Well, I think the Democrats are seizing this moment by giving up, as far as I can tell. SPEAKER_36: But this is also showing up inside of the technology community. Yes. Owen McCabe, who we had on the show recently, I know, because I wrote that notes docket. I'm not going to share his conspiracy tweet about the shooter having handlers. I think we all know what he means by that. But I do think that as we sit here and discuss this, it's a good moment for some introspection. SPEAKER_17: And if we can't expect much from our elected leaders, current, former, or future, we can at least do it a little bit more from ourselves. Yeah. SPEAKER_98: And I got to say, we're doing poorly so far, but it's been a bit of a mess. And it's usually a mess. SPEAKER_100: Well, this takes us to the conspiracy theory. SPEAKER_00: So why does this, I'll ask you a question. Why does this situation evoke so many conspiracy theories in your mind? Take a moment to think about the question, because there's a lot of history here. Why is this one making people who are completely intelligent, thoughtful, immediately go to conspiracy theories this moment in time? SPEAKER_36: I think one thing that's different about the modern era compared to the old day is just the amount of information people have to process on their own. And we're going to get to your video here in a second. And I think that it kind of makes this point, but it's pretty easy to create conspiracy theories when you have 84 angles of every single thing that happens. And you can say, well, I think that thing. Bingo. Also, I think a lot of people feel very plugged into the world and very much not able to have an influence against it. And one of the best ways conspiracy theories were ever explained to me was it's a way for people to feel like they have control. That they can see behind the curtain and then they are in on it. And so with something like this is going to, with the amount of information we have about their images, videos, et cetera, is going to engender quite a lot of less than salubrious takes. And I don't think anyone is immune from falling prey to this type of thinking. SPEAKER_40: I think we need to be rigorous against it. But let's watch, let's watch your clip to make this point. SPEAKER_00: Well, and the Zapruder, you make, you make it look a really good point. The Zapruder tape of the JFK assassination was studied frame by frame. And now you have a hundred iPhones, a hundred media angles. So now there are, and it's in 60 frames per second, 120 frames per second. So now you have even more source material. Yes. And more platform. SPEAKER_113: Like in the old days, the cranks had to send out literal physical news letters. They had to mail people their cranks abuse. Now you can get on Twitter or TikTok and you can get paid for it. SPEAKER_17: And you're correct. SPEAKER_01: So anyway, here's a clip of people who are wondering, and this has been seen over 20 million times. SPEAKER_118: Watch. She sits down. Yep. Watch this. SPEAKER_120: If you want to put the sign up, something that said, take a look at what happened. Shots fall off. SPEAKER_122: She's completely normal. And then watch. SPEAKER_124: And then she's got her. SPEAKER_126: What the f***? SPEAKER_122: Okay. SPEAKER_126: What the f***? People are freaking out. And she's filming. And she's just like right there. SPEAKER_17: Okay. Yeah. So what they have here is nothing. And they've spun it into this woman is. A collaborator. A plant collaborator. She's like a, what? A shop. SPEAKER_131: Like why would you put a collaborator right next to the guy you're shooting? SPEAKER_130: And this is what happens in a vacuum. SPEAKER_00: I think when you don't understand what's happening and you have like a desire to resolve a situation, this is why true crime has become the like number one category in podcasting on Netflix, they can't get enough of it is because the human mind likes to solve puzzles. We're like puzzle solving primates. And here we go. Hey, this woman ducks is confused. And then immediately reacts by taking a video. By the way, that's like you have somebody in your family who's that same person who their first reaction to everything is taking their phone out and documenting it. And all you need to know to understand this phenomenon is to look at like one of these videos when some crazy person jumps the fence and goes into a lion enclosure. And then you look and there's 30 people videotaping a person being mauled by a lion. Right. SPEAKER_135: And you're like, what's wrong with you people? SPEAKER_00: It's just some natural instinct. I have to capture this. Yeah. Whether it's my kid being cute or a lion mauling a person, it's a human instinct to document this for whatever reason and become famous. So, but this also leads to a lot of questions about the failure of what happened in all of this, because now you have all this information. Like, how did this person get on the roof? Is the secret service qualified? Why did they let Trump get up three or four times to pump his fist when like there could be a second shooter? SPEAKER_01: Like all of this is, are all valid questions that will be answered in time. SPEAKER_00: But the idea that they used a 20 year old, mentally ill, clearly loner, bullied child who is now 20 years old, who is just father tragically bought on the AR-15, apparently the fact that like this person is the vessel of a grand conspiracy theory is kind of hard to believe. I mean, maybe it's a 1% chance or 0.1% chance, but this is the world we live in. Everybody wants to process information. Just if you're listening to this and you're wondering how to manage media, understand that you get to watch citizen journalism and conspiracy theories, figure it out. SPEAKER_03: Sometimes they'll be right and split the arrow like, you know, like a miracle. And 99% of the time, they're going to just be totally off the, like totally, totally jumping the fence and making like no sense and being complete lunatics. Other times they're going to win a Pulitzer and they're going to break the news. So just be media savvy folks in a, in a breaking situation. SPEAKER_17: Be able to take a break. That's another thing. I think, uh, I think especially people, if you're listening to twist, you are a person who likes the news. Jason and I love the news. SPEAKER_16: Honestly, the first thing I do every morning is I read the news. And the last thing I'm doing before I go to bed is I read the news. I love it. I love being plugged in. I love to know what's going on. Sure. But even for me, who is someone who's so broken in that way, there are times that I'm like, honey, you need a break because right now you are feeling all the feels about a thing that you cannot impact at all. So sit down, go hug a dog, go hug your children. Yeah. Take a walk, come back, sit down. SPEAKER_40: I think it's a great time to touch grass. I think for everybody out there. SPEAKER_17: Jason, there's another angle that we're going to discuss here, which is that in the wake of the shooting and the president, um, escaping with only very minor injuries, his chance of being reelected has gone up according to the betting markets. You and I both watch Polymarket rather carefully, uh, two data points for you. First one is that the chance that Biden drops out seems to be trending down. I'm going to give you a pass on hot swap summer, given that no one saw this coming. Um, but people now definitely, definitely expect that Biden's going to stay in much more than they did before. And then the second chart we have here, it's table actually, uh, shows that Trump's chance of winning again, according to Polymarket betters has risen to 72% compared to Joe Biden's currently 18. And then the balance there is smaller and more fringe candidates. So the reason I bring all that up is that folks think that there's a much higher chance now of Trump getting a second term and kind of a good time to dig through what the policies SPEAKER_16: are. Um, and I, I tried to do some of that for us today, but one thing you have that I have less of is some friends who are big fans of the president for president Trump. Yeah. SPEAKER_17: So I'm, I'm curious when they're kibitzing over barbecue and chatting with you in, in Austin or in Cali or wherever, what are the policies that they're hoping to see come into play? Cause that's, that's kind of the positive case here, if you will. So I'm curious what they say. SPEAKER_00: Yeah. I'll just speak frankly of it and tell you what is said in the room where it happens, so to speak, um, so I won't speak for anybody else, but I'll tell you the vibes, the essential vibe is Silicon Valley is a libertarian place more than anything, less regulation. And if they, if they worship at an altar, it's the altar of innovation and entrepreneurship, capitalism, products, and services, making the world better for humanity and that science, technology, and entrepreneurships can all make the world better. And that politicians generally make it worse, generally how people feel. SPEAKER_157: Yeah, no, no, no, I think that's correct. I just, I just liked the way you phrased it, but yes, that, that is, that, that tracks. SPEAKER_00: Right. And I'm sure politicians might feel the opposite, right? And some, some politicians might feel the opposite. Yeah. You can of course make your own judgment as to what's done better for humanity, the relentless pace of new products and services available to you from everything from Mozempic and Wagovi to air conditioning, you know, to the internet and then government's role in the internet and creating it, you know, I go and have a great debate about it, but on a pragmatic level, um, most people would like a moderate who stays out of the way of business, who's pro growth, lower taxes, lower spending. Now, which party defines that depends actually on where that party is in a moment in time. If you look at Clinton and Obama, I think these two presidents were very pro capitalistic presidents. You took the two Bushes in there. I think they were also very pro capitalism and maybe even more, less regulation, less environmental controls. If you put those four in and you looked at their policies, Obama, Clinton, and the two Bushes, take those four. And I took all their policies, put them in a bag, shook it out and sort of randomly taken them out, your ability to assign who did that, a Republican or a Democrat would be pretty challenged. In other words, they had very close policies. SPEAKER_165: Hey, startups, you've probably heard the saying better, faster, cheaper, pick any two. Well, AI has changed that equation and Intercom is all in on AI. Intercom built its first AI customer service platform so that no company has to compromise when it comes to caring for their customers or saving money and controlling costs. These things are important. Intercom's AI tools are so smart that 50% of their customers have their issues resolved in just seconds. That's thanks to Finn, an AI co-pilot. Yes, Intercom has an AI co-pilot. It's called Finn. Think of it as like a personal AI assistant for each of your customer support agents so that they get really, really good at their jobs. It makes them so much more effective. Finn is a big deal. It's going to boost your agent efficiency by 31% or more. And managers of customer support teams that use Finn are reporting happier customers and very, very productive teams all while staying on budget. That means when it comes to faster, cheaper and better customer support, you can pick all three, no sacrifices. And that's all thanks to Intercom's AI first software. So if you're an early stage startup, if you're a high growth startup, you're going to get access to Intercom at a massive 90% discount. That's right. 90% off because Intercom and the team over there love startups and innovation as much as we do. So go to intercom.com slash twist to apply. Or if you prefer, you can just do an email at startups at intercom.io. SPEAKER_16: That'd be a fun game actually, because I know what you're saying and I agree with it directionally. I would quibble a little around the edges, but now I kind of want to see how well I would do. SPEAKER_12: So if we, if we were to look at that, you know, they were not extreme, right? SPEAKER_00: And I think the Silicon Valley diaspora, you know, and all the entrepreneurial enclaves in the country now, cause it's really kind of split up and gone everywhere. You know, their basic feeling is Biden is anti-capitalistic. He's pro-union, he's high taxes, he's more regulation, more spending and anti-M&A. And they're just generally look at the current situation as a John Galt, Atlas Shrugged situation. People in Silicon Valley believe what we're seeing under Biden is Atlas Shrugged. That's what they believe. And to just to refresh anybody, it means capitalists and creators of jobs are diminished and held back and the state is getting bigger and bigger and controlling and mitigating more your life. That's actually how they feel. SPEAKER_177: That's interesting. Yeah. I guess, I guess I would get that. SPEAKER_00: They see Trump as a sledgehammer and RFK. Those are the two that resonate most with people here. They see them as a sledgehammer, a cudgel, a weapon to break the system. Now, previously, Trump was untenable because of his style, abortion, Roe v. Wade, a bunch of issues, immigration, but Trump 2.0 has pandered to them, adopted their philosophies. And, you know, essentially Trump has embraced this group of people, technology, entrepreneurs, hedge fund managers, in a major way to win the second election. SPEAKER_94: So that's why they're all in on Trump. SPEAKER_16: So that's basically what I thought. That is a great summation. And I appreciate that you're pointing out that Trump's positions have catered in a certain direction. And my favorite example of this is crypto. Sure. He was very opposed to crypto, and now he's all aboard. Yeah. Amazing. Trump is, one, the election he did because he was surprisingly good at speaking to certain SPEAKER_17: audiences, and that, I think, remains an asset of his. The thing that I struggle with is when I compare what you say there, and I think it's, again, a correct summation of Silicon Valley thought, and what the party's positions are, to me, I don't see the connection. Because if you're worried about the state getting too big and taxes being too big, you have to be anti-tariff. And Trump is advocating for not only 10% tariffs around the whole nation, but 60% tariffs on everything from China. Yeah. Which is going to be expensive and difficult and lead to a lot of trade disruptions around the world and such. SPEAKER_16: And it seems to me, from where I sit, having prepped today, looking for the, what's the positive side of this? I struggle to make the connection between the expectations and then the current statements of reality. SPEAKER_00: Yeah. So what they also realize about Trump is he says bombastic things to pander to get votes. And that's, I think, part of his genius as a politician is he is incredibly good at telling you what you want to hear. Famous moment on the All In podcast when Trump was on, it was when I asked him, hey, would you promise us that we could recruit talented people? And he's like, I promise you. Like, boom. And he gave the caveat, because I happen to agree, but I promise you, we're going to get more people there. SPEAKER_193: I wouldn't say it if I didn't agree, was the quote. SPEAKER_00: I wouldn't say it if I didn't agree. And so, you know, and then crypto people, the Winklevize twins, Winklevize. Winklevize is plural for Winklevoss. The Winklevize gave him a million dollars each or attempted to. I think they over donated even. And he just realized, hey, crypto gets me, what, 3 million votes, 2 million votes. There's some number of Americans who feel passionate about this, young people, millennials. Oh, TikTok is very popular amongst young people. Okay, maybe I'll switch my position. And then I'll start using TikTok. And I'll have Vivek, who is also anti-TikTok. He started using it. So this is just a level of savvy that they happen to have. And Biden's inner circle doesn't. The tariff stuff, they look at that and they're just like, that's just him saying he's going to like, you know, blow up Russia if they invade Ukraine and he'll end that war. He's just being bombastic. That's the way he negotiates is with a crazy starting position. And then he works his way backwards. SPEAKER_02: So I think that's how Peter Thiel trained people to take Trump's statements, not literally, SPEAKER_198: but seriously. Is there any value then for startup founders to read through the GOP platform? SPEAKER_16: Yes. SPEAKER_199: Well, I guess I'm struggling then because it does mention tariffs and such. So what parts of it should founders think about? SPEAKER_03: I think they should think about the fact that he will allow more M&A. He will lower taxes. He'll make rich people richer. And if rich people feel richer, they will take their risk capital and they will bet more on startups. That's basically what's going to happen. SPEAKER_16: So I tried to find anything on the FPC and the current GOP platform that Trump's running SPEAKER_31: on, by the way, it's called make America great to get his platform. It doesn't mention. Wow. Great brand. SPEAKER_205: Yeah. Well, I've been using that for a minute. Pretty genius. SPEAKER_96: So I went ahead and I went back through project 2025, short day today. SPEAKER_17: So I didn't get to do as much research as I wanted, but it was not nearly as opposed to an active hand preventing very large companies getting larger as I thought it was going to be. SPEAKER_16: So I wonder, and this is just me thinking ahead, if there's two camps that support the president, there's the conservative social right, the people who are very opposed to abortion rights and so forth. And then there's the business lobby. Yeah. And I wonder from which camp the next Lena Kahn is going to come from. SPEAKER_209: If it's from the business community, the conservative Christians are very, very unhappy with social SPEAKER_16: media, corporate power, and they want to make the internet a place that is much less freewheeling because they want to ban pornography and whatever they think counts as that and so forth. SPEAKER_87: He'll just make those all state issues. That's his like approach to it, which is he'll just appease them and say, you make a decision in your state kind of situation and keep, so he'll just appease them, but it's all business SPEAKER_213: all the time for Trump, you know, all business all the time. It's just how to think about it. You're very confident. SPEAKER_00: Yeah. That's where the donations come from. And he's already won the primary. So in primaries, he needs evangelicals on a strategic basis. SPEAKER_48: He doesn't need to win primaries anymore. He's the incumbent. SPEAKER_00: So that's why you saw him say, I'm for all these exceptions. I did a great thing in overturning Roe v. Wade. I gave it to the states. So he can change his position now. Now, if that was during his first attempt to win the nomination, he did not say things like that. He said things like how amazing it's going to be when I stack the Supreme Court and overturned Roe v. Wade. He literally said that. He's not saying that kind of stuff anymore. So shocking. Politicians telling people what they want to hear. And he's using different constituents to solve different problems at different moments in time. This election will be determined by moderates and women in swing states. And he has flipped on all of his policies on abortion. Yeah. And he's flipped for, you know, 2.0 his business approach, which is I'm going to settle everything down. I'm going to be more presidential. I'm going to give you what you need to make things going. And everybody knows Lena Khan's not making it into the next administration. So for startups, it's going to get dramatically better. SPEAKER_94: Well, in M&A terms, yes. But I guess- SPEAKER_00: And investment. SPEAKER_39: And in risk, rich people getting richer and then rich people having more money to put in risk capital. SPEAKER_218: The thing I'm going to say is a lot of people have thought that they were going to get what they wanted out of Trump historically. SPEAKER_219: And they don't tend to. Example? SPEAKER_173: Well, I mean, we just discussed the evangelicals who have been backing him tooth and nail. And if you read coverage of the current GOP platform, there's a lot of angst, real, real anger from people who he turned on once he got their vote in the thing he needed. SPEAKER_16: And so my point is the very trend that you're saying is savvy also applies to the Silicon Valley libertarian right. Because once he gets their money, once he gets their votes, do you think he cares? I don't think so. SPEAKER_12: I think he cares about business and money and fame above all else. SPEAKER_188: Yes, but I think he cares about his business, his money and his firm. But it doesn't matter how I think about it. SPEAKER_16: I'm going to be curious to see what, if he wins, and as we said, current betting seems about a three to one chance. I'm curious to see how this plays out for people who are now backing him and if they end up SPEAKER_17: getting what they want and if the cost to other people ends up being worth it. SPEAKER_36: Because one way that people expect Trump to balance the numbers here is to dramatically curtail spending on Medicaid, right? SPEAKER_223: So it may get better for certain wealthy people, but it's going to get assuredly worse for a lot of poor people. SPEAKER_00: And by the way, everything I'm explaining here, it's not necessarily in it. I know people in the comments will say, I'm endorsing any of this. I'm just telling you the, the actual strategy I've heard from people inside the halls of power in the group chats, you know, somebody added me to like a 200 person group chat of all these people. I took myself out of it just because it was becoming so distracting. And it was all the most powerful people in Silicon Valley. SPEAKER_39: You can imagine not the all in guys, but like the other group of people who you're here very vocally on social media. SPEAKER_00: And, you know, they're looking at this saying, Hey, this is going to be great for business, great for business. And at the end of the day, entrepreneurs, capital allocators, whether private equity, venture capital, public market investors, they just want the conditions to make more money and pay less taxes right now. SPEAKER_227: Startups have to do more with less. We all know that. SPEAKER_229: And founders have to be smart with how they deploy capital. 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A couple of launch founders have worked with lemon.io and they've had great experiences. So here's your call to action. Go to lemon.io slash twist to find your perfect developer or tech team in 48 hours or less. And twist listeners get 15% off their first four weeks. Stop burning money. Hire developers smarter. Visit lemon.io slash twist. SPEAKER_231: The stock market's at an all-time high. Inflation is down. The U.S. economy is growing faster than any other developed nations. And they just want to keep it that way. SPEAKER_45: Add some M&A to that. SPEAKER_234: So that, I think really this entire election is going to boil down to Lena Kahn won't let us buy stuff or sell our stuff to bigger companies. And I wonder- SPEAKER_235: I hate to have pointed this out so explicitly so many times. No, but I think it's true. SPEAKER_16: I think it's incredible to me that even what I would consider to be a halfway mark towards how aggressive you could be on antitrust. Like, we're not saying we're going to break apart these companies. We're just saying you can't buy things that are quite large. Also, that is enough to swing, I mean, a combined net worth of several trillion dollars in one direction. That's very interesting to me. SPEAKER_17: And I think it says a lot about humans. But I think we can leave it there for now. There's a lot more to talk about. SPEAKER_237: Yeah, I think that's a pretty good half hour on what's happening politically and how it affects startups and venture capitalists. SPEAKER_17: And we do this because it matters. And this is what's going on. And these are the conversations. And now we're going to go back into just full tech mode. But the background of all this stuff is the rules of the road. SPEAKER_16: And this is how they're set. SPEAKER_17: So, Jason, Google might buy Wiz for $23 billion. And I got to say, that is an enormous amount of money. And I knew about this much about Wiz. SPEAKER_96: So, I'm curious. Have you ever seen a deck from Wiz? Have you ever seen anything from the company itself? SPEAKER_39: I didn't know the company Wiz existed before I saw this headline. SPEAKER_238: Got it. Okay. I feel a little bit less behind this. SPEAKER_245: Which tells you something about the scale of venture capital and startups. You know, 10,000 startups get funded every year. SPEAKER_00: You know, like serious funding from, you know, serious people. Like some level of funding and maybe 1,000 to 2,000 of them are like really, you know, Silicon Valley type companies. So, you know, start compounding that over time. SPEAKER_03: There's tens of thousands of viable startups in the world, in the United States specifically, at any given point in time. And here's one that I wasn't even aware of. SPEAKER_16: So, Wiz is an Israeli-American cybersecurity company. Now headquartered in New York, but with Israeli talent. It was founded in 2020, and it scaled to $100 million in ARR in 18 months. And then as most recently, yeah, yeah, I was looking forward to that. And it crossed the 350 million ARR mark, I think some quarters ago. So this is one of the fastest growing software companies of all time, period. And that's why people bid this up really, really fast. So December 2020, Series A, $100 million, Sequoia Insight Index. Then 2021, a two-part Series B, $4 billion, same names at Green Oaks and Salesforce. SPEAKER_17: October 2021, $6 billion valuation, more capital. February of last year, $10 billion. Then this year, $1 billion at a $12 billion valuation, Thrive, Lightspeed, and Dresden. And this is a company that has raised $1.9 billion in the cloud and cybersecurity space, scaled super fast. And Google might drop roughly 64X ARR for this company, which I think says growth can still be profitable if you're the fastest growing company of all time. And also, well, Google has a lot of money and needs to do better in cybersecurity. So I can see why this deal makes a lot of sense. SPEAKER_16: I'm just shocked that you can go from a $12 billion valuation earlier this year to 23 now. It just doesn't seem like sign of the time. SPEAKER_39: The investment, the IRR, the internal rate of return, is 100%, right? SPEAKER_00: So the stock market makes 7%, 10% a year. So this is why people do love venture capital. That last billion-dollar bet, although it's only a 2X, it's a 2X in 12 months, which is 100% IRR. It's pretty juicy when you think about it, right? And venture capital firms tend to do 15%, 20% IRR over the life of a fund, which is really juicy as well in terms of compounding. But this is really great. Sometimes the last bet is the best bet in terms of IRR because of the time horizon, right? So you shorten the time horizon. So it doesn't look like an angel bet where you do 50X, 100X, 200 times your money. It's only 1X, but it's 1X in one year. Pretty amazing. You know, cybersecurity is like one of these very boring but essential and growing areas. When you see the AT&T hack that happened the other day or other hacks that have occurred, the fallout from those hacks is measured in hundreds of millions of dollars, typically. Some of them can be existential, could really damage a company. And so, yeah, I think it's an easy purchase for somebody with a cloud business like Google Cloud, I think is the group that's buying it internally, or Amazon Web Services. There was probably many suitors for this company. And in order to get a company growing that has plenty of cash in the bank to sell, you have to make an offer above market. So this is the wonderful thing about, you know, having a high-growth company is great companies are bought, not sold. Google wanted this before it IPO'd. I'm sure there were other suitors like Amazon Web Services or Oracle Cloud, SPEAKER_12: you know, which is coming on pretty strong, or Azure and Microsoft. And this is the perfect example of a tuck-in acquisition. You know, a mere $20 billion acquisition. SPEAKER_255: Put that under your arm, yes, and carry it along. SPEAKER_00: I mean, the fact that $20 billion is considered like a medium-sized acquisition now, it just tells us something about the market. And let's see if some agency tries to stop it. I don't know why they would. Who cares? There's a $20 billion acquisition for a security company. If this company gets out to more users, more cloud computing providers, that's arguably good for everybody. It's not like somebody can't compete against this product if it's bought. You know, it's going to be included in the Google Cloud package, probably. Yeah. And be better for everybody. So M&A can be great for consumers. And that, back to our previous discussion, do you view the lens as, like, now all competition is going to end because of this acquisition? No, of course not. And do our consumers harmed? Of course not. So this one is not going to harm consumers. It's not going to be a big deal. There's nothing to worry about. Boom. It's not like, gosh, you know, Facebook buying the two largest footprints of a social network at the time, Instagram and WhatsApp, you know, or, you know, an attempt to buy Twitter. SPEAKER_260: It's not Adobe buying Figma. Come on. SPEAKER_00: And even in that case, like, is Figma such, all due respect, such a unique product in the world that it can't be duplicated for free or very quickly by AI? And the features that are in Figma, could they not be done by an AI in this next paradigm shift? Of course it can. SPEAKER_93: So, you know, this is where blocking, let's say, transactions under a hundred billion doesn't make much sense. SPEAKER_17: Under a hundy. Oh, I like that, Franny. On the price point, well, actually, I'm going to double click on that. SPEAKER_16: I agree with you in this case. I think this is a fine acquisition and should be allowed through because Google's third place in cloud. And Microsoft announced last year that they had reached $20 billion in cybersecurity revenue in their last 12 months. SPEAKER_173: So Google is fighting for relevancy here. SPEAKER_17: And that's actually a place where acquisitions can make some sense. Now, they might limit downstream competition in cybersecurity, but they'll increase competition in the cloud, making Google more competitive. SPEAKER_16: Fine. I'm fine with that. The price point, though, I just pulled up some data, um, of all the public software companies today in the market, the, uh, in the top 10, at least three are cybersecurity as measured by the most expensive forward revenue multiples. And so right now, if you're buying a company and you're buying a cybersecurity company, you have to pay top of market plus. It isn't like you're buying a SaaS company that wouldn't sell at five X. Now you're going to buy it for eight. You're going to have to pay up quite a lot for this. I think this is just tremendous. Yeah. SPEAKER_19: Good sign for the economy. Good sign for venture capital. SPEAKER_00: Good sign for the ecosystem that people don't want to just buy H-100s with the cash they have sitting on the sidelines. And so this is a very large acquisition. I mean, it's a different moment in time. The economy is much bigger, but, you know, it has a lot of revenue. If you look at that bubble chart that shows, um, you know, the size of acquisitions. And so if you're not watching, go to YouTube and type in this weekend startups, but you can see like the nest acquisition and looker Fitbit for 2 billion YouTube for 1.75 billion 20 years ago. Oh my God, that was 20 years ago. I know. Um, so, you know, today, you know, we've been three times as much, it would've been a 6 billion YouTube, you know, this is a pretty, um, it's a pretty juicy one. Very juicy one and the Motorola one was for buying a patent library that they subsequently sold. SPEAKER_19: So just keep that in mind that that was like a collection of assets that got broken apart. So you probably would make, you probably look at that as like maybe half the size. SPEAKER_269: Um, but you know, uh, Google used to do a lot of these, Google used to do a lot. SPEAKER_19: They used to be very acquisitive and they just, I think the last couple of years because of the EU specifically. SPEAKER_173: And then Lena Khan, that one, two punches made them less acquisitive, but their last acquisition was Mandiant, which was cybersecurity. So this is a, this is a theme now from, from the alphabet empire. SPEAKER_16: Uh, I want to go ahead and, uh, move to a tweet that we have pulled up from, uh, my friend, my friend, Anshu. He says that, uh, cloud security is probably the biggest, the single largest TAM in software today. SPEAKER_17: And that just got me thinking about where the biggest problems are in software, because I I'm shocked that this company grew as fast as it did our cybersecurity deals. SPEAKER_16: Like the, the, the dark horse of venture capital investing today. Cause, oh my gosh, I'm blown away by it. SPEAKER_94: You know, I think you're gonna see a rush of venture capitalists taking meetings in cybersecurity, um, away from this. SPEAKER_00: It's like, huh, these things sell people buy them. You don't have to go through an IPO or a SPAC and have the stock collapse. Uh, people pay a premium for it. It's kind of like doing an off market real estate transaction for a high end home. Like it doesn't make any sense. Like how did this home go for so much in Malibu? It's like, they're not making any more beachfront right properties in California. There's a limited number of them. And this has to do really with two things that you have to keep in mind. One, our reliance and trust in online services to put so much of our trust in them. Um, and so you look at something like that, AT&T hat, imagine if everybody's text messages were released, the damage that could cause, I mean, explosive. There could be, uh, you know, a hundred thousand lawsuits that would emerge from that. Um, and so, you know, and the fact that AT&T is keeping text messages, like, should you trust AT&T? Absolutely not. You should be using some more secure, you know, messaging platform than AT&T is apparently. And then the second piece is the coordination of state sponsored, uh, hackers specifically from certain states. And that is why this industry is doing so well, because our government is not bombing the countries who perpetrate these. It's a kind of hard to imagine, you know, us sending bombs into a country that has nuclear weapons because they sponsored some terrorists to do something, essentially hackers, terrorists to go do something like this. These things are arguably more damaging, not psychologically than a terrorist attack, but they're more damaging in terms of cost than, uh, an attack. So it's hard to frame a physical response to a virtual attack. The only way to deal with it is with software and companies. SPEAKER_173: We're not too far from that. I can't find the exact quote right now, but I was watching the Danish prime minister recently discussed this exact thing. She just says, you know, well, right now we're under cyber attack every single day from Russia. SPEAKER_17: Yes, and China has been very active in this way as well. North Korea is famous for its hacking prowess. And just to be clear, democracy's hacked too. I'm not trying to say that, you know, where our hands are clean here. SPEAKER_93: Yeah. We have God on our side. Remember that famous Bob Dylan song with God on our side. SPEAKER_144: We have God on our side. No, they're doing it for money or they're doing it to disrupt power systems and so forth. SPEAKER_146: There's that too. Would you be in favor of asymmetric responses to state-sponsored hacking? SPEAKER_227: Yeah, that's a, this is a question that nobody's been able to answer yet. SPEAKER_03: Because what if you do a physical real world response, an asymmetrical one, and the other party says, oh, great. We'll respond too. We'll go kill some American soldiers. So my gut tells me no, if I was president, would I do it? But I would invest deeply in cybersecurity and I would do counter measures where we hacked the phones of their generals, et cetera, which I'm sure we're doing in real time. Um, I mean, we were doing it, uh, I remember we got busted, having spied on other leaders. So Germany, we had Merkel's phone, the Americans had, it came out in the Snowden papers that SPEAKER_01: we hacked Merkel's phone. SPEAKER_173: And I think Obama had to have a very awkward conversation with his, uh, German peer. SPEAKER_90: Yeah. It's like, yeah, sorry. We looked at your text, if I got, if I've got it right. But yeah, that was super awkward. That was an awkward state dinner. SPEAKER_16: Can you imagine, how do you prep for that? Sorry about hacking your phone and cheating this entire time. SPEAKER_219: I know we're supposed to be friends, but can we just let it go? No, we've got your nudes. SPEAKER_209: Oh no. I like, I like how we got through the whole Trump section, I think in good shape. SPEAKER_290: And then when it came to Angela Merkel, right off the, I mean, it's literally, I think SPEAKER_00: what a lot of the, uh, compromise concept is, is to try to get, you know, uh, folks and I, you know, to, to bring up Trump, the documents case, I think was overturned today or something. I just saw the news go by. SPEAKER_94: There's going to be quite a lot more coming there. I mean, there's going to be appeals over there. SPEAKER_00: But even in that case, one of the things that they were saying was a certain French politician has a file and Trump has that file and likes it to show it to people. That's one of the acquisition accusations. And that the file is about personal behavior of a certain state leader or something, so SPEAKER_293: a French politician who's yeah. Maybe having a good time on the weekends. SPEAKER_144: Yeah. I mean, that, that would be the first time in the history of the, the Grand Republic. There might be a couple of Italian politicians also known for having a good time on the weekends SPEAKER_297: in their personal life. SPEAKER_16: Like, I think that this reminds me of that famous Buffett Munger quote when, uh, they're SPEAKER_209: on stage at the, at the, the Berger Hathaway yearly, they're Statler and whatever from the Muppets. I love that. And, um, great shtick Munger's like, well, what do you think? SPEAKER_17: Well, then there was that, there was that country in Europe where they just threw all the mail away to get the mail, you know, delivery times down and, um, Buffett's like, oh, let's not go there. And then Munger goes, Hey, it was Haley, just shouts over the top. Oh gosh. Yeah. SPEAKER_157: Pretty great. Pretty great. Buffett's like, mm. Okay. Um, let's move on. SPEAKER_00: Anyway, this is a very important moment in terms of explaining the importance of mid market acquisitions in the ecosystem, because venture capital right now is so, uh, what's the word SPEAKER_19: when you have, uh, it's so constipated, it's got so much backed up here that I saw a headline SPEAKER_00: that Sequoia was offering early investors in Stripe, I think a $70 billion valuation to buy out their LPs in secondary. And these are called like, um, these funds exist in private equity. There's a name for them, a strip funds where they'll go in and buy a strip of assets from a venture fund that's 10 years old. And then, you know, basically push the can down the road, let another set investors take that off their hands. SPEAKER_173: Oh, absolutely. I want to talk about this next, because I think it's such a great dovetail to what we're discussing. Stripe has not gotten public. It is not sold. It is just sitting there, this, this diamond on the, on the private markets. SPEAKER_16: And so what Sequoia did this morning was they emailed their LPs from funds from 2009 to 2011, and they're going to buy up to $861 million of Stripe shares with more recent funds. And the reason for this is if you've been sitting on your paper markup since 2009, and it's 2024, you probably want to see some liquidity. So Sequoia is saying, Hey, we'll pay you $27.50 you want to share that's from SPEAKER_17: Stripe's most recent 409A valuation, according to Axios. So their 409A is now at 70, up from 50 last year, down from 95 at the peak. And then Stripe gets to stay private. Sequoia gets to keep its LPs happy-ish. And this deals with only about 10% of Sequoia's overall stake in the company. SPEAKER_36: So Sequoia still has, by my math, about $7.8, $7.7 billion left of, of Stripe stock to deal with. But Jason, this to me seems like a financial engineering to a problem we didn't used to have. SPEAKER_48: Correct. It's a solution to a problem that didn't exist because we had a more fluid IPO market. SPEAKER_00: And we had a more fluid M&A market. And so this is, um, uh, what is it? Nature finds a way. What did, uh, Malcolm, uh, say in Jurassic park? Life finds a way. Life finds a way. So venture finds a way. Capital markets find a way. SPEAKER_309: It's one thing that you were so busy, uh, figuring out if you could do it. You never asked if you should say, but if you should do it. SPEAKER_310: Okay. So here we are. SPEAKER_00: So the, if you should do it in this case, I gotta work on my, uh, what's that guy's name? David Friedberg: Goldblum, Jeff Goldblum, your Jeff Goldblum accent might need a little bit of work. It needs work. I'm just workshopping it here on air. SPEAKER_94: Um, we're just gonna workshop it live. Why not working on live. SPEAKER_00: Did you ever think maybe you should have done it? Anyway, here's the, here's the problem. Set of LPs who are getting liquidity, new LPs, uh, getting to buy Stripe. You just have to make sure everybody's copacetic with this. That's the key. So now let's say it's a new growth fund. They would love to get their hands on some pre IPO Stripe, right? Late stage investors. We talked about the one X in one year, or maybe, uh, maybe they get, um, a 50% pop. Cause is that a 70 billion valuation? If it goes out at a hundred or it hits a hundred or 125 in a year, those people would be pretty happy with that. Especially if they're public market investors who are used to getting 7% or 10% or 12% a year in an actively managed fund. So you gotta find LPs who understand the trade they're making here. And then you have to make sure that these folks don't feel like you gave their last double up or their last 50% increase to somebody else. So I think, you know, I don't have any inside information on this, even though I'm associated with Sequoia and, you know, I have a relationship with them on a business level. I'm not involved in this in any way. I have no data on it. I do know when you have a transaction that has the potential to be conflicted, there's a very simple solution. Everybody's got to sign off. Everybody has to be fully informed. That's why the price is released in this. That's why this story is being released. It's because they want everybody to know they're doing this, why they're doing it, and those people understand the bet they're making. So if the people selling it think there's a double up here, they're not going to sell unless they need the money. And the people who are buying it, if they don't think there's a double up here, they're not going to buy it unless they think they've got a good opportunity here. So that's what you need to understand. If you are a neophyte and you're not inside the venture or the capital allocation community, you would think, oh, they're just moving like a shell game. No, a shell game would be you don't know which shell the P is under. This is literally the P is on the table. We're weighing it on a scale. We're moving it. We're going to take your P and we're going to move it over here if you want to. So you can move your P from this cup that's upside down. The cup's now not turned over. Would you like to move your P? We're not going to move it. You have to move it. But you have this opportunity to sell the P if you want to. That's what's actually going on here. It's not a shell game. It's a trade with the cups up, everything fully documented. And I've been through this before myself, which is could the same venture fund want to invest in a late stage deal and having done the seat? Well, if you have a full lifecycle company, when I had done the Uber investment as the Sequoia Scout, there were late stage investment opportunities for Sequoia for Uber as well. So now you have to be thinking about like, how does the Scouts program deal with the heritage, Sequoia heritage, which was their family offices, business, their growth fund. And Andreessen Horowitz has the same set of issues easily solved when you have full transparency SPEAKER_03: and full optionality and people have to make their own decision. SPEAKER_173: Yes. And I think that's a great point to make. We have a tweet here from, uh, from John Collison, uh, one of the great Collison brothers SPEAKER_16: discussing this. Co-founders. Yeah. And he says here, lots of firms say that they're long-term oriented, but Sequoia actually is 14 years after their first check in Stripe, they're making their largest investment yet SPEAKER_17: because Stripe's going to buy those shares with their other funds. Um, but you know that if someone drops, if a co-founder quote tweets, Bloomberg or Axios SPEAKER_16: who broke a story and endorses it, that's a pretty clear point that they really wanted this information out there to your point about transparency. But the question I have for you, Jason, is let's say you are a LB back in that 2009 Sequoia fund. You're sitting on enormous returns, uh, off your managed investment into Stripe. You're offered this liquidity chance. Do you take it? SPEAKER_00: Yeah. So this is a personal question of how much it represents of your net worth. If it was 90% of your net worth, you would certainly want to sell 20% of it, 30% of it. This happened to me very specifically in the Uber transaction where Uber's acceleration started to, you know, which I, which I had a net worth there before having sold Weblogs Inc. and done pretty well in some other investments. And then, you know, as it accelerated, I'm just sitting there with my partner, my wife, and we're like, okay, as a percentage of our net worth, this is getting a little scary. Yeah. And you got to remember, it was not, I mean, I knew it was going to work, but there were other people saying Uber's toast because it's, it's illegal. It's going to get banned. You know, all this stuff, uh, all the hand-wringing, Travis is too aggressive, you know? Well, and I was like, no, that's why it's going to succeed. Yeah. Putting it all aside. You know, I did make secondary transactions along the way, 10%, 20% here or there, just to be fully transparent. I bought real estate that my family could enjoy ski houses, primary residence, all this kind of great stuff. So then I kept trying to rebalance my portfolio to be a certain risk asset that doubles every year, every 10 years, as opposed to one that might double in three years or four years when it hits scale or not. Yeah. I'm still, I'm sitting on a large amount of Uber shares, but my philosophy has always been to sell as you go. Yeah. If you were a $50 billion endowment like Harvard and you had access to this and you're looking SPEAKER_03: at it and you're like, okay, it's a difference between getting a hundred million dollars now and $200 million. Yeah. Just let it ride. SPEAKER_00: We know Stripe stable. So it really is like becomes the most personal decision to make. Two factors go into it. Percentage of your overall net worth or fund holdings, percentage of your overall holdings, let's say. Yeah. And then the second piece is how confident are you in management in the business? SPEAKER_03: In this case, an endowment, a sovereign wealth fund, a high net worth individual, probably not selling at this price. Because I think they believe this will be a, you know, someday a trillion dollar company. And if you could have bought Google at the IPO or Uber at the IPO and held it or Tesla, you know, pick the company. I think the best is yet to come for Stripe. I know not all people think that. SPEAKER_219: So Google's valuation, I just literally Googled this. SPEAKER_16: So I haven't fact checked it, but about 23 billion at its IPO. So the value of whiz companies used to be cheap. Things used to be like for sale. That's amazing. SPEAKER_336: They used to go public earlier. SPEAKER_16: Yeah. Yeah. And so here we are. Well, that's my question, because what if all of this conversation has been predicated on the idea that Stripe will eventually go public? 14 years. I mean, what are they waiting for? SPEAKER_341: What if they just don't? SPEAKER_343: What if they just say, we're going to do 20 years as a private account? SPEAKER_00: Yeah. SPEAKER_344: They're not going to do 20 as a private account, but I don't think. SPEAKER_00: I mean, in the secondary market that does exist today, it is possible. Well, I'm saying if it's a money printing business, they could create their own secondary market and just keep buying. So if it was truly a money printing business where they threw off massive cashflow, they could just do a tender every six months and just keep buying shares back and retiring them and lowering the number of shares. It is possible. It's just not probable because I think the founders and everybody would like to have the tool of being a public company to do other acquisitions and to reward employees. But, you know, Hey, maybe it's an interesting point you bring up, like maybe the founders, a pair of iconoclastic founders could say, you know what, this thing is a money printing machine. We're going to just buy back our shares over time. And we're not going to tip people off to how good this business is. Other people think this business is easily disrupted. I'm not one of those people, but other people think it's a commodity business, a low margin SPEAKER_90: business that will get, the profits will be abstracted away over time. SPEAKER_173: I mean, if you want to go back to IPOs that gave away too much information, Google, I mean, SPEAKER_16: I don't think people were fully aware of how great of a business search was until Google said, look at all of our numbers. And then everyone went, excuse me. It was cool. That's one of the best. SPEAKER_349: Well, and then Facebook stole Sheryl Sandberg and other executives. SPEAKER_234: So yes, they have, well, I would love to see Stripe's numbers. And then I have one more question on this that I want to get to before we wrap, which SPEAKER_16: is, are there any other companies of sufficient scale putting space X to one side? Cause I kind of put it in a different category now that could have a similar SPEAKER_17: amount of market pull to put off their IPO demand that their earlier investors do complex transactions to create liquidity. SPEAKER_00: Is this a one-off or a sign of things to come to this is like one of two, I think there's only two companies that are in, you know, getting close to, you know, at SpaceX, I think the last was 200 billion. SPEAKER_19: I heard, I think so yeah, 200 billion. Then this is a, you know, 75 billion or whatever the secondary market is that. SPEAKER_351: So yeah, it's really just those two. I don't think there's anything even close to this. SPEAKER_173: That tells us that then no other company can avoid an IPO by going this route. And this means that this is a Stripe story, very interesting, but not one that other SPEAKER_17: founders should kind of expect to lean on, which means that the IPO pressure should still be on for everyone else though, you know, election years that one thing that I think SPEAKER_00: has changed things is the companies that are pre IPO or could IPO at any point in time, the liquidity of secondary markets and the ability for legal teams, accounting teams, operating teams to manage an orderly transfer of sales on a regular cadence like SpaceX has done and Stripe has done. I think that's like a new art member. Second market bought by NASDAQ, other people, Uber did it, you know, before the IPO with Masayoshi-san and so like those kinds of things didn't exist as a discipline 10 years ago. And now they are like, people have invested in the infrastructure for those things. So I know this sounds banal and tedious, but I do think the fact that there is an infrastructure to keep your company chugging and keeping shareholders liquid is an interesting turn of SPEAKER_12: events. And private equity has this private equity is constantly flipping assets, you SPEAKER_00: know, for one private equity firm to another, they kind of just throw these hot potatoes back and forth and trade them like trading cards. Um, and maybe in venture, we'll get to that point where people will just trade their stakes. There's a, there's a fund of funds called industry ventures, they're not RLPs, but I know them. And they were, I think Chris Sock is original LP and Zach Colias is LP. So they are doing the strip funds and they had reached out to me about it. And they're reaching out to all venture firms, uh, Dave McClure of 500 startups. Now he has a strip fund. So they'll look at, let's say launch fund one and two, and they'll say, Oh, super humans in there. That's but one example, SPEAKER_03: or calm. Okay. And you bought it, you know, at a $5 million valuation or $10 million valuation. We like these five assets that's in that fund. That's 10 years old. We'll buy them for you at a SPEAKER_00: 30% discount. Kind of like this thing is occurring. You get your LPs, get their DPI, you get to raise more funds. And then one was pitched to me as we will put money in your new fund. So we'll put money into launch fund four, and we'll buy some of launch fund one. So we'll solve two problems for you. SPEAKER_03: You're illiquid, your LPs need DPI. Great. We'll get those people from launch fund one. It's going to look good. You're going to turn TVPI to DPI. You're going to get actual, not paper returns. SPEAKER_00: And you know what, we'll put a little bit, we'll spice it up. We'll put a little bit into your most recent fund. So these are the kinds of things that are trying to keep, you know, nature finds a way. Is that what it is? Nature finds a way. SPEAKER_94: I think it was, I think it was life, but I have not. Life finds a way. SPEAKER_365: So capital finds a way. Life finds a way and capital finds a way. SPEAKER_16: Well, that's literally, I mean, that, that could be the summation of why I'm a capitalist, like right there, because capitalism, capitalism demands finding solutions versus tamping down problems. I keep comparing the US system versus the Chinese system right now, as we look at the two economies in, in contrast, though, I will say we don't have to do all this extra work. Stripping a fund is, is timing intensive. There's lawyers involved. If everyone just went public, imagine Jason, how great it would be to have all this information on the public. No one has to do all the extra work, but it's, you're starting to sound like Bill Gurley. It's not a banal point that we built that framework. Cause if we built it, we're going to use it. And so I think you're right that some companies are going to get very good at this. I I'm just, I'm by the way, thank you. I'll echo Bill Gurley all day. Um, I like that. SPEAKER_356: That's great. If you're sounding like Bill Gurley, he's a very thoughtful guy. Chamath Palihapitiya: His podcast is. One of my best friends. His podcast BG2 is wonderful. SPEAKER_356: He talks at this speed and Brad Gerson talks at this speed. It's like listening to a 45 and a 33 on your record player, you skip back and forth without ever looking at the size of the disc, SPEAKER_16: but you know, Hey, I guess that's your option. I love that show because they are, uh, always like 10% more casual than I expect they're going to be. And it just, it converts very well to camera. SPEAKER_17: Um, yeah, they should go public. I'm tired of this. And, uh, just to close off one last thing, SPEAKER_16: one stream, a corporate financial software company, KKR bought a majority stake in 2019 going public. And I do think that there's some interesting numbers there. We'll get to that on the next news roundup, but it's a note for everyone. IPOs are mostly dead. Not entirely dead. SPEAKER_256: Do we have a question from our amazing, uh, live audience? We have one question from YouTube. SPEAKER_16: That's not a political one. Hopefully it'd be great if we had one, someone from YouTube, uh, HBOU or Haboo, I believe you pronounce that, uh, made the point that the Figma and LinkedIn acquisitions were SPEAKER_219: larger than some of the deals that we have seen go through. How much was the LinkedIn deal for Microsoft? SPEAKER_16: 20. That's a great question. I think it was in the 20 area. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that's, that's another example. Like, so if you think about what LinkedIn was worth in your mind, that's what Google is saying. Wiz is worth now. Now there's some time difference there. I understand, but they're in the same ballpark financially. And, uh, Google's about to pay 23 X what Facebook paid SPEAKER_19: for Instagram. Wow. Yeah. I mean, Instagram was a small company at that time. I think they only had a couple dozen employees and a hundred million users. You know, the question always is if Facebook SPEAKER_03: hadn't acquired Instagram and Google hadn't bought YouTube with those things have become multi-billion user franchises. It's impossible to tell. That's why Lena Khan's future competition, you know, precog concept is kind of, I don't know, I don't want to say DOA, but it's a, it's a mental exercise that I think is impossible to, it's like trying to guess, like, you know, oh, if we both go all in and we only know one of our cards and two of the flat cards in the flop, like, are we going to be able to guess the outcome here? It's like so many possible things can happen. It's so situational. You know, I don't know. Instagram could be bigger than Facebook right now as a public company. And it's the worst sale ever in the history of technology, potentially YouTube probably would have gone out of business. So, you know, if you were asking me what I thought at the time and what I think now, I actually think YouTube would have gone out of business. I think they would have gotten crushed under the legal bills because that was a time when startups didn't have the ability to do a five-year, 10-year lawsuit. And I think Instagram, the opposite. I think Instagram selling for a billion was the worst transaction in the history of venture. Yeah. I think that big mistake. But at the time, SPEAKER_40: don't forget that the era was billion dollar deals didn't happen. I remember when that deal, it was a bombshell. It was back to that, back to our war references from earlier in the show. It was a massive splash. There you go. People couldn't get over how much money was being spent SPEAKER_16: on this little social app. Now we know better. And think of this, it was a situation where there SPEAKER_12: wasn't a big secondary market to dovetail our last story. There wasn't this ability for the founders of SPEAKER_00: Instagram to, you know, sell, you know, 300 million or let's just say a hundred million of their shares and take 50 million each off the table, get a jet card, buy a ski house, you know, SPEAKER_19: pave down their mortgage, whatever on their primary and put some money into their kids, SPEAKER_00: 529s, whatever. Now that exists, you know, it's founders can go along. The Colson brothers SPEAKER_19: have no problem with liquidity. I can tell you that for certain. If they want to sell some shares, SPEAKER_00: if they want to do what, you know, the guy from WeWork did and Adam Neumann and just, you know, have a big credit line against their shares, they can do that as well. There's no bank that wouldn't give them each a billion dollar, you know, credit line against SPEAKER_198: their Stripe shares. Right. And that's how you avoid paying taxes for as long as you can. Well, SPEAKER_16: Jason, we're going to have more shows this week. Lots coming up here on twist. In the meantime, don't forget to like us on YouTube, subscribe on your podcast app. We are also going live on LinkedIn X and YouTube whenever we do news. Well, one idea for you do like three 20 minute interviews SPEAKER_00: and it's just Alex interviews, you know, the Alex interviews, and then pick the favorites from the 500 twist 500 and you just do a solo interview or at least it like as a little one off for the SPEAKER_17: channel. What do you think of that idea? I love that idea. I'll do that. And pick your favorites from twist 500.com. Yes. And we're going to be adding more companies to be at a bunch yesterday. Sorry, last Friday and more today in the newsletter. So lots to get through everybody. See you soon. Bye bye.