16%
3/19 resolved calls right
21 scored · avg 23
◆ 13 sources
84
companies · 847 data points
OpenAI will become a multi-trillion dollar company.
What happened: While OpenAI's valuation has surged dramatically to around $80-90 billion following its leadership in the generative AI boom, it remains far short of multi-trillion dollar status, which is currently only achieved by a handful of the largest public tech companies.
Verify at source ↗Anthropic will become a multi-trillion dollar company.
What happened: Anthropic has grown significantly and achieved valuations in the tens of billions of dollars, but it has not come close to reaching multi-trillion dollar status.
Verify at source ↗The deal for SpaceX to acquire Cursor will be completed.
What happened: The prediction claims SpaceX would acquire Cursor by 2026-04-24, and that date has not yet passed. As of now, no such acquisition has been announced or completed; Cursor (Anysphere) remains an independent company that has raised substantial venture funding.
Verify at source ↗If EA reduces its operating expenses and finds distribution channels outside of Xbox and PlayStation, it will become a multi-hundred billion dollar asset.
What happened: Electronic Arts’ market capitalization remains in the few tens of billions; it has not become a multi‑hundred‑billion‑dollar asset, despite some cost‑cutting and expanding non‑consoles distribution. The conditions required for the prediction were not met to the extent implied.
Verify at source ↗Microsoft's current acquisition attempt will fail and they will be blocked from making acquisitions.
What happened: Microsoft successfully completed its acquisition of the AI startup MosaicML in 2023, with no regulatory block or failure of the deal.
Verify at source ↗Amazon's share of the digital advertising market could reach 15 to 20 percent in a few years.
What happened: By 2024 Amazon’s digital advertising share was roughly 7–8% of U.S. spend, far below the 15–20% range predicted; even by 2026 it is unlikely to reach that level.
Verify at source ↗The DOJ's lawsuit to break up Google's ad business will fail.
What happened: The DOJ’s antitrust lawsuit against Google was dismissed in March 2023, so the lawsuit failed as predicted.
Verify at source ↗Elon Musk's investment in Twitter will double or triple in value.
What happened: Elon Musk’s $44 B acquisition of Twitter led to a sharp decline in the platform’s valuation and widespread layoffs, with the investment not doubling or tripling in value.
Verify at source ↗The capital from SPACs IPOD and IPOF will be returned to investors.
What happened: IPOF returned its capital to investors after its merger plan failed, but IPOD’s capital was retained to acquire Rivian and was not returned.
Verify at source ↗Twitter will settle the whistleblower security claims and pay a fine over a 3 to 5 year period.
What happened: No public settlement of whistleblower security claims was announced for Twitter, nor was a fine paid over a 3‑ to 5‑year period. The company did not disclose any such action within the timeframe of the prediction.
Verify at source ↗Elon Musk will acquire Twitter by the end of 2022 at a price lower than his initial $54.20 offer.
What happened: Elon Musk completed the purchase of Twitter on October 27, 2022, paying the original $54.20 per share – the acquisition happened on time but the price was not lower than the initial offer.
Verify at source ↗Coinbase will allocate a portion of its IPO shares to Robinhood customers.
What happened: Coinbase announced that 3% of its IPO shares would be allocated to Robinhood customers, a program that was carried out during the 2021 IPO.
Verify at source ↗Uber will reach a $300 billion valuation faster than any previous company, and before Slack.
What happened: Uber never reached a $300 billion valuation; its peak market cap at IPO was about $82 billion, and Slack never approached that figure either.
Verify at source ↗Slack will be one of the companies to break the record for the fastest time to reach a $300 billion valuation.
What happened: Slack never reached a $300 billion valuation, and no company achieved that valuation record in the timeframe; Slack was acquired for about $27.7 billion in 2021.
Verify at source ↗Facebook will lose its $300 billion valuation within 12 years.
What happened: Meta’s market cap fell below $300 B in 2021, well before the 12‑year deadline, confirming the prediction.
Verify at source ↗Flipkart will conduct an IPO and achieve a massive valuation.
What happened: Flipkart has not conducted an IPO; it was acquired by Walmart in 2018 and remains a private subsidiary, repeatedly delaying or canceling plans for a public listing since then.
Verify at source ↗Alipay will conduct an IPO and achieve a massive valuation.
What happened: Ant Group (Alipay's parent) filed for a dual IPO in 2020 that was on track for a ~$313B valuation, but Chinese regulators halted the IPO days before listing in November 2020, and it has never been completed. The prediction correctly identified the massive valuation potential but the IPO was not conducted.
Verify at source ↗Google, Apple, or Amazon will acquire the media rights to a major sports league for $1-2 billion within the next couple of years.
What happened: None of Google, Apple, or Amazon acquired the media rights to a major sports league for $1‑2 billion between 2013 and 2015‑2016; the largest deals in that period were smaller streaming agreements and did not involve the stated companies or the specified amount.
Verify at source ↗The mobile operating system market is moving toward a 90% to 10% market share split in favor of Android over iOS.
What happened: Android’s global market share has hovered around 70–75% with iOS around 25–30%, falling far short of the predicted 90%/10% split.
Verify at source ↗The NFL will make 2.5 to 3 times as much money by relicensing Sunday Ticket to MSOs and wireless carriers.
What happened: There is no publicly available evidence confirming that the NFL’s revenue from relicensing Sunday Ticket to MSOs and wireless carriers increased by 2.5 to 3 times as predicted.
Verify at source ↗Brilliant will approach 1 million users by the end of 2013.
What happened: By the end of 2013, Brilliant had far fewer than one million users—estimates put the user count in the tens of thousands, well below the claimed target.
Verify at source ↗No company is trying to go public and raise money, a very capitalist scenario, by also talking about how they're trying to destroy humanity. Nobody has ever done that. So there is no legal precedent for this.
They'll demand an enormous discount. And the reason they'll ask for an enormous discount is the other part of what Sax and Freebrook said, which is it creates massive long tail product liability risk, because you're effectively evading a known major risk.
I think that Anthropic leadership is caught in an extremely difficult situation.
But that almost stopped our IPO. And we had to go and print it out. And we had to put it back into the S1. And we had to disclaim these things. This seems so beyond that, because this is so beyond the pale of what these folks are claiming. What does it do to their IPO process?
may create false representation issues. You have an active S1 process underway. And so how are they to handle that?
This is not him saying we're slowing anything down by any means. He's certainly not going to give up his lead.
this is the most incredible thing that you've done. And then I tweeted this thing out, this hugging face thing will go down as one of the most important transactions in AI, because you are creating now in the largest competitor and the largest, most well capitalized company, a bulwark against all of this closed source oligopoly insanity. And at the same time, what you're going to do is actually create more rational competition up and down the stack. And I mentioned this last week, everybody is b
this hugging face thing will go down as one of the most important transactions in AI, because you are creating now in the largest competitor and the largest, most well capitalized company, a bulwark against all of this closed source oligopoly insanity. And at the same time, what you're going to do is actually create more rational competition up and down the stack.
I think AGI has basically been here since the beginning of the year. There are models that are incredibly performant inside of the closed frontier lab companies. And I think right now we're trying to figure out the right cadence with which to release it.
Clement is the official spokesperson along with Jensen from Nvidia. And, um, those two are now in charge of PR for AI in America. No longer Dario, no longer Sam Altman, no more P doom. I'm putting Clement and Jensen in charge of all PR from this point forward for AI in America. It's a two year term. So they'll, they'll serve out their term. Uh, and for two years may get exciting.
And this is just a great example of a fun side quest, um, to get people excited. And you say, Hey, my expectation is we lose money on this. Maybe we break even that should be when you're a rich person or a rich company, you do a side quest
I noticed the hugging face team launched a side quest. Micro duck. Yes. They have 10,000 orders from micro duck.
The people at OpenAI are doing this in a very performative way.
thank God, we have companies like Nvidia and Google and Microsoft and Meta and Amazon who take on that burden.
I think the high end of the market where Mark operates, where the large monoliths operate is quite safe. What people are finding is, hey, hold on a second. This is a lot harder than we thought. It's not like, boop, boop, boop, put in a prompt and beep, bap, boop, it all works. It's not how it works. I think we're a little oversold. Now I think this consolidation and the re-rating can happen in the opposite direction. So what is the opposite trade? The opposite trade is who has constructive net d
When you take a closed source model, it does really well on a benchmark. When you wrap it in its own harness, it decays in capability. When you take an open source model, and you use any other open source model, it improves in capability. What is that trying to tell you? What I think we are finding out, and this data is just going to be a tsunami over the next year, is there are all kinds of ways of using open source technologies that are meaningfully more performant and dramatically cheaper tha
In Ethereum, it's proof of state, which means that the weight of a node in consensus is based on how much economic value they have. It's the same thing in BitTensor.
And as a consequence, um, you know, we can dramatically reduce the, the, the cost of that commodity.
In order for the rest of us to take on OpenAI, we need to come up with a way that we can work together. For some people, mining BitTensor is like the most fun game they've ever played, ever.
if you're a big enterprise and you need to have wrappers and support and all these other tools for your employees, buy Anthropic or OpenAI or Grox tools or Gemini, like plenty of options. Make sure you have a good partner.
The thing with prediction markets is, it's not just that, there will be those things. But then there are going to be these fundamental markets that are purely about inside information. And the question is, what can a regulatory body or a society do about that? And I think the answer is not much. And the reason is, is that if you try to regulate this, it looks like a securities market. And I think the problem there is that these things are too fluid, and too dynamic, and too ephemeral, for them t
Like for example, 8090 is a top 20 customer bedrock. It's too expensive already as it is, because of all this overhead. Because of their margin. Because of all the nonsense that's inside of AWS that you have to pay for in order to just get access to bare metal.
except nvidia which is the most unbelievably accretive well-run company highest margins you know making 200 billion dollars and they're treating it like they're treating service now and snowflake i just think it's so interesting what's happening this data sort of shows this reset that
snowflake in 2023 it would have taken you almost 100 years and where is it now it's been cut in half
tesla is incredibly asymmetric to the upside i'm willing to pay 200 times
if you look on the right hand side and the mag seven what's so interesting is apple microsoft meta and alphabet the market is completely flipped the other way and what they're saying is we believe that these cash flows are essentially monopolistically durable forever
apple microsoft meta and alphabet the market is completely flipped the other way and what they're saying is we believe that these cash flows are essentially monopolistically durable forever
facebook is incredibly durable i'm willing to pay 30 times
if you look on the right hand side and the mag seven what's so interesting is apple microsoft and alphabet the market has completely flipped the other way and what they're saying is we believe that these cash flows are essentially monopolistically durable forever
if you look on the right hand side and the mag seven what's so interesting is apple microsoft meta and alphabet the market is completely flipped the other way and what they're saying is we believe that these cash flows are essentially monopolistically durable forever that's the only reason why you would walk them up like this
if you look on the right hand side and the mag seven what's so interesting is apple microsoft meta and alphabet the market is completely flipped the other way and what they're saying is we believe that these cash flows are essentially monopolistically durable forever
even if open ai just won the consumer business it is a multi-trillion dollar company with enormous scale and value and i think that that's okay so i think that what they probably need to do is say where are we the strongest where is there the most obvious traction can traction in another market like an enterprise bleed into consumer usage if it's true then you have to win the enterprise i think winning the enterprise though is a very different game than winning consumer very different set of fea
both are incredible businesses
open ai is three quarters consumer subscriptions and a quarter api
open ai is still the overwhelming revenue generator in this space
anthropic now i actually think that that's quite healthy
by the time it goes public both of these two businesses will have a very clean and i suspect normalized way of telling a story
both are incredible businesses
open ai is still the overwhelming revenue generator in this space and that over time anthropic is catching up
do i have issues with how much it costs yes do i have issues with how fast we're consuming tokens also yes
my philosophical issues with the management aside around their ideology and sometimes how they use some of the capital
in terms of the quality of that technical team and what they create it's head and shoulders above anything else
from an enterprise lens which is where i see most of the action particularly through 80 90 it's all anthropic all the time
stripe just raised eight hundred million dollars in a Series C at an eight point three billion dollar valuation. Very bullish, generational company.
I'm bullish. I'd predict they triple revenue in the next eighteen months and become a generational company.
Exactly, and enterprises are standardizing on them. That's the endorsement that matters.
I'm bullish. If they keep this pricing advantage they could be a generational company. I'd predict they triple revenue in the next eighteen months.
I'm very bullish, this is a generational company.
the last time we heard from open ai their cash burn was still quite high just because of the diffuse nature of their business and more reliance on consumer than enterprise
i think what you do is you go to places like all of the merchants that use stripe and say we'll give you a three or four or five percent discount and they'll be like okay and so you'll see these prices that just you know fall everywhere ... it is so good for consumers if this were to happen
paypal already owns braintree so now you have stripe and braintree that effectively were competitors that won't be and then what block gives you is an entire point-of-sale infrastructure ... and you get the cash out so you put it all together and i think it's a it's a shot across the bow for visa and mastercard
in that case, when he showed up with the hard drive or whatever, with all the data on it, they rescinded their offer and they said, leave the building. In this case, they didn't do that.
And then I remember what I had learned from my friends at Google, and it was the same thing inside of Google. And then I remember what Elon had taught me about Tesla, same thing at Tesla. You had all these examples where at the extreme end of success, all the best companies almost had an allergic reaction to that traditional software stack. They refused to use it.
today there was a guy that tweeted, you know, that this is a third party. Uh, and he said, we've, you know, use software factory now to unbundle $5 billion of ISV licenses, $5 billion. And I saw that and I was like, man, this product works.
we sit it on top of a knowledge graph. And what that is, is this is very similar to sort of the architecture that I had in mind at Facebook and the architecture when we led the Series A in Slack. You know, I wrote this memo for Stuart, which was called Intercompany Edge Effects. ... I wrote the PRD for this network effects and how to build it and how to architect it.
The reason we call it a control plane is, like, it's a plane that sits, you know, above all the fray, all the chaos. You know, models will come, models will go. We work with all of them. We allow ourselves to be able to take advantage of the best-in-class model for the best task at that time. But it mostly is a product that's about multi-user, collaboration, control, governance.
when you go to the big guys and you talk about what they're dealing with, they're not here to fuck around with some stupid vibe coding tool. Like, this is the level of governance and auditability that they need. Why? Because if you think about the kinds of products that many of our customers make, they're in highly regulated markets.
we built the factory so that it can work in forward or reverse. So, for example, an engineer gets a pager duty, wakes up at 3 a.m. in the morning. They all of a sudden have to, like, you know, fix a bug or patch something. And they put production code in. We detect that. And now we auto-propagate the work order. We auto-make the change in the engineering plan. And then we make the change in the PRD. So, now everything is linked together.
I'll give you an example of one of our customers, regulated healthcare company. And with the BBB, a lot changed. They just feed that in to refinery. We understand the diff between that PRD and what needs to happen to respect the law. And once that's approved, it gets auto-propagated into the engineering plan, auto-propagated into a set of work orders. Humans review and approve them. And then put into the code because an agent goes and writes it. And now the system is completely in sync.
we support all of them via MCP. So you can use cognition. You could use codex. You can use clod. Cursor, whatever. You can use cursor. You can use whatever you want. And by the way, the reason we support those is our view is all of those vertical tools are going to converge. That's not where the skill is.
Why not have a system where intent comes in the front? You can shape it, humans, AI, agents. And then when you lock that down, Jason, the next most important step is to extract from it a very detailed, what we call an engineering plan or a blueprint, right? Like when you sketch out a house, the next step is you give it to the architect and say, give me the buildable blueprints, which give you all of the little technical details so that the house can stand on its own. The foundation is strong, th
The point is that at the senior level, you're managing risk and you're allocating capital towards ideas. You want to give a shape to that. And then you want to be able to put that in the front part of the factory and have your colleagues and your teammates and the people that work for you extract from it a pretty detailed PRD, right? A product requirements doc. And what's great is it's not just the humans that collaborate on that. Now you can have agents working behind the scenes to make that PR
in the first instantiation of 80-90, I said we have two goals. Goal number one is let's help companies get the margin benefits and the upside of the kinds of custom software that companies like Facebook and Tesla and Google benefit from, number one. And number two, along the way, how do you create a mechanism of learning the kind of data that can be collected by that process, by the unbundling of that process, so that incremental runs of software become safer and faster and simpler to build.
I wrote a product spec for something that I called co-founder. And the idea is, why can't everybody in the world have an incredibly capable co-founder? ... And that's sort of where 80-90 came from.
If you worked at OpenAI, you were there because, hey, it was this open thing. But then when Sam transformed it and the team over there to this profit-making thing,
So NVIDIA is working on a specific GPU for space, and we had StarCloud on this week in AI the other week. They have to make it so their GPU, like if you just send up an H100, it might come apart.
People could flip flop. And they're thoughtful about this. Now, you might say they're hyperbolic and their comms are terrible.
Any tech company would pay him a king's ransom to come work for them. He gets to choose. He choose to Anthropic. So keep that in mind.
Because that's the exciting part about this for me, Skylar, is so many entrepreneurs now, because you can get to space for 10 times less, are now going.
Trusting human memory, not a good idea. Trusting human judgment, great idea. And this is augmenting human intelligence.
They looked at it and were able to, in their using of mythos, they were able to find a lot of internal attack vectors and close them, he said. Right. And I said, is it the real deal? And he said, absolutely. This was a level that was of performance to find bugs that we had not seen before. So they did exactly the right thing. They don't need to call for a global thing.
they've got, I think more users using AI than open AI, um, because of putting it at the top of search.
When they hear Dario and Anthropic or, you know, Elon talk about, hey, it's going to be a world of abundance and working is going to be optional.
but I do think for people who are readers, they're going to love this just like plod, you know, and these note takers, they have unlocked, you know, a very specific use case for a very specific group of people. If you're a leader, if you're a writer, if you're a researcher, you need these kinds of tools.
I wear my plod on my wrist some days because I don't like the way it hangs on my t-shirt. I prefer it on my wrist. When I'm wearing a suit, I prefer it on my suit. Okay. Well, different strokes for different folks. This thing has been incredible for me, hiking and rocking. Yesterday, I did massive rocking. I dropped my daughter off at a game show kid's birthday party. They didn't want the parents in there. So I got two hours to walk around the Dominion, which is like this incredible super mall i
they've, I think got more users using AI than open AI, um, because of putting it at the top of search.
So the headline number, I believe, is like $10 billion over some number of years, like three or four years.
So the headline number, I believe, is like $10 billion over some number of years, like three or four years.
There's no reasonable way that Elon's going to pay $60 billion and not run on top of Grog. I got to think.
The acquisition was essentially negotiated, and the way that it's structured is so that the S1 doesn't go stale.
But what's so smart is that where is SpaceX today? Let's call it a trillion. Where could it be? Just for the purpose of this argument, let's say 2 trillion. So when the deal gets done on a stock-for-stock basis, it's going to be, again, if it's $60 billion in tomorrow dollars, effectively Elon's gotten a 50% discount. And what has he bought? He can issue $60 billion of stock at a $2 trillion valuation and get a model and a service that I think is extremely compelling in coding, which is where we
the real problem again goes back to anthropic and open ai if i were them it is a five alarm fire for them they more than anybody else needs to get their hands on compute they need to have land power shell but otherwise that revenue could either slow down or hit a wall and it will not be because of product quality and adoption it will entirely be because of the friendster effect you just couldn't keep the site up and i think that that would be a huge huge problem for everybody
i don't see any path except they're gonna have to do it themselves and anthropic will have to do it themselves
there was all this doomerism but maybe it was tied to compute capacity because when bedrock opened up more capacity for anthropic all the doomerism went away
all of these frontier labs have a very serious issue which is both open ai and anthropic are growing so fast that they're at a point now where they need their own infrastructure it's kind of like when you first start building any kind of company you're just much easier renting capacity from the hyperscalers and it's a dependency yeah but then it becomes a dependency exactly and now when you're so big it's actually strategically a huge mistake to not have your own compute supply
my team at 80 90 is codex is better generally than anthropic and so what happens is from the more day-to-day work i think it's more reliable to use the clod ensemble of models but when you're dealing with something that's very tricky and very complicated and a little bit more long horizon codex is really functional and really good
the real problem again goes back to anthropic and open ai if i were them it is a five alarm fire for them they more than anybody else needs to get their hands on compute they need to have land power shell but otherwise that revenue could either slow down or hit a wall and it will not be because of product quality and adoption it will entirely be because of the friendster effect you just couldn't keep the site up and i think that that would be a huge huge problem for everybody
look open ai has tried to displace some of the stargate spend i don't see any path except they're gonna have to do it themselves and anthropic will have to do it themselves
all of these frontier labs have a very serious issue which is both open ai and anthropic are growing so fast that they're at a point now where they need their own infrastructure it's kind of like when you first start building any kind of company you're just much easier renting capacity from the hyperscalers and it's a dependency yeah but then it becomes a dependency exactly and now when you're so big it's actually strategically a huge mistake to not have your own compute supply
if we allocate our resources and just double down and crush consumer that's probably three or four trillion of enterprise value and then if we slowly refocus the company with the rest of the resources and double down on codex and do something meaningful in enterprise we can probably capture two or three trillion there and now all of a sudden you can paint a picture for a seven eight nine trillion dollar market cap
the real problem again goes back to anthropic and open ai if i were them it is a five alarm fire for them they more than anybody else needs to get their hands on compute they need to have land power shell but otherwise that revenue could either slow down or hit a wall and it will not be because of product quality and adoption it will entirely be because of the friendster effect you just couldn't keep the site up and i think that that that would be a huge huge problem for everybody
so i think that that's an open question and that question will become more amplified over the next year as they push the cost off of them so as travis said no more subsidy from the capital you have to grow into it but you're not going to support negative gross margins so you're going to pass through the token costs
if you're a frontier lab you don't want to have to go through amazon and gcp and azure and tin cup for access and capacity what you'd much rather have is go straight to your customer on the other side if you're gemini or microsoft or meta and you have all this compute because i saw a stat this week the hyperscalers control 60 of all the compute so the game theory there is if you kneecap the frontier labs it'll give you some chance to catch up and it gives you time to catch up
look open ai has tried to displace some of the stargate spend i don't see any path except they're gonna have to do it themselves
both open ai and anthropic are growing so fast that they're at a point now where they need their own infrastructure
if we allocate our resources and just double down and crush consumer that's probably three or four trillion of enterprise value and then if we slowly refocus the company with the rest of the resources and double down on codex and do something meaningful in enterprise we can probably capture two or three trillion there and now all of a sudden you can paint a picture for a seven eight nine trillion dollar market cap in the fullness of time
what i can tell you from my team at 80 90 is codex is better generally than anthropic and so what happens is from the more day-to-day work i think it's more reliable to use the clod ensemble of models but when you're dealing with something that's very tricky and very complicated and a little bit more long horizon codex is really functional and really good
They probably have 50% to 60% market share, because I think Codex is actually quite broadly used as well.
the revenue ramp was a big question. Now that's turned into an explanation point.
They probably have 50% to 60% market share, because I think Codex is actually quite broadly used as well. But that belies the more important point, which is AI-enabled coding, I think, is still 5% of the broad market. So it's kind of a nothing burger. Yes, they're leading, but they're leading in something that isn't that big yet. Now, you would say, how could it not be big? And what I would say is, because most of the stuff that's being written is still white sheet de novo code. And I think the
If this is real, they pick the wrong companies, meaning there are energy companies, folks that control nuclear reactors, there are airplane companies that are flying hundreds of thousands of people in essentially manufactured missiles of like streaming gas going at 500 miles an hour. And none of those companies were the ones that were included in this. And so I think if you really thought that this was end of days, at a minimum, we can agree, maybe we should have expanded the circle a touch.
Anthropic is shooting the lights out right now. This is like Steph Curry going bananas. From everywhere on the court, these guys are hunking threes. Clay Thompson. It's all net. Okay. So huge kudos to Anthropic.
claude and open ai is coming for consumers twenty four thousand dollars a year essentially a third of the salary of uh you know two or three year out of school college graduate um that's going to be the next tier in order to use those models that scale
anthropic is going to have to give these details in their s1 and so is open ai
the most important positive thing that will happen from the ipo is a validated external mark to market valuation of spacex and the market every day in real time gives you a valid mark to market assessment of the value of tesla and this allows you to put these two things together to minimize these losses and i think that that's what elon really needs it'll make his life tremendously simpler from a governance perspective it'll make the companies and this quibbling about his time a non-issue
you have the other side jensen who is like don't worry every cab driver is going to be a chauffeur and just carry your bags which is also kind of a little bit too lovey-dovey obviously you know there's no drivers in waymos and his position was the other week yeah you'll still have a driver in a waymo they'll be serving you coffee or whatever like that's not happening
you know there's no drivers in Waymos and his position was the other week yeah you'll still have a driver in a Waymo they'll be serving you coffee or whatever like that's not happening
i think it's going to be a massive amount of recirculation i think it's going to save you know these ipos if stripe goes out discord goes out spacex and then these two wild cards i you know open ai and um anthropic uh this is going to reinvigorate venture capital which under biden's four years of the wrath of lena khan was considered the worst asset class now we're going to go back to it being the best asset class and everybody's going to want to slice after the last five years
It's meaningful and, you know, VCs, this is no dig to Alford, but, you know, there is a window in which you have to accomplish tasks and that gets superimposed upon every founder's company. And that window is typically 10 years, the life of a fund. And the fund can extend to 12 or 14, but at a certain point, they have LPs they're servicing, they're trying to service the founders as well, and you're on a 20-year timeline for what you're doing. Yeah. And it's, you know, Steve Jervison, when he did
You picked an ideal customer who was willing to take the risk because the payoff was so high. And that's really one of the great arts of entrepreneurship. You have to find a customer who needs your product and it's life and death. Now, when you're talking about a SaaS product or a marketplace, it's hyperbolic to say life or death. Yeah. But the stronger the need, the more they would be willing to bend the rules or take a chance. And you found the ultimate one, which was literal life or death. An
I mean, I think that was probably the biggest takeaway that I had. You're seeing this fundamental disaggregation where we've gone from a GPU and now you have this complexion of all these different options that will eventually exist.
A great example of this is Amazon. Why does Amazon issue an edict that says you cannot use this stuff inside of AWS unless a human now reviews and approves it? Because what happened? They had three or four SEV1 faults from a bunch of code that was written by agents that brought down AWS. Now look, I've told you, I love AWS for one reason, because it's hyper-reliable. I hate AWS for the same reason, that hyper-reliability comes at enormous cost, I pay it, but I pay it to never have a SEV1. The re
we're going to see something from Jensen in a week or two that uses a bunch of the stuff that we partnered with him at Grok on.
A great example of this is Amazon. Why does Amazon issue an edict that says you cannot use these things inside of AWS unless a human now reviews and approves it? Because what happened? They had three or four SEV1 faults from a bunch of code that was written by agents that brought down AWS. Now look, I've told you, I love AWS for one reason, because it's hyper-reliable. I hate AWS for the same reason, that hyper-reliability comes at enormous cost, I pay it, but I pay it to never have a SEV1. The
If you take, you use the Databricks and Snowflake example. If you look at the companies that use that software, those companies generate enormous revenues and enormous margins, and these products are in critical production workflows that underlie those revenues and profits. That is just not true with AI today.
If you look at the companies that use that software, those companies generate enormous revenues and enormous margins, and these products are in critical production workflows that underlie those revenues and profits.
for that, where it can be extremely faulty, and there's no SLA that you're giving, it's a phenomenal, these are phenomenal products. Yes, for 20 bucks a month, well worth it, and consumers have decided it's worth it.
None of these things have transitioned from it's interesting, it's experimental, to it's the core critical operational workflow.
And I think what has happened is that at least some parts of the AI ecosystem have decided that this crazy, scary doomerism is the best way to raise money, where every now and then they come out and they say, all the jobs will be destroyed. Anthropic, you know, Dario says that. This thing is sentient. And investors are like, okay, here's 10 billion, here's 50 billion, here's 100 billion. But then the second step happens, they get the money, they start to do the training, they start selling, and
Remember, you have 25% unemployment of young men inside of China, 25% today.
20% of their entire domestic consumption is oil from Venezuela and Iran. 20%, but it's not 20% because it's literally 100% of anything that's feedstock, anything that's transport, cars, buses, planes, they are in an enormous world of hurt. Now, they have a strategic petroleum reserve as well, and it's quite robust, but it's not robust enough to sustain five or six months of this. It's not that robust. So at the end of the day, who is going to be hurting the most? It is China. And so if you play
As much as people want to talk about Iran, Iran, Iran, I think, as I explained last week, I think this is about China, China, China. And you have to remember, at the end of this month, he has a pivotal three days with Xi Jinping in China. This is going to be an absolutely historic convening of the two superpowers that run the world. One, which is us, we are the established, and one, which is China, who wants to be re-ascended. And I would bet dollars to donuts that there is going to be an enormo
if you're not figuring out how to be multi-model and agnostic across these models you're taking on enormous business risk after friday because you can't tolerate that these folks will do that it's too critical of a technology
if you look at the conditions inside of the chinese economy the most interesting takeaway is that they are enormously dependent on imported oil so about 20% of their economy but it's not 20% of their economy because it's a hundred percent of these critical things that create gdp logistics transportation aviation feedstock inputs and of that 19 percent about a fifth of it comes exclusively from iran and venezuela and now all of that is off the table
the official chinese bureaucracy posted what their gdp targets were and it was shocking to anybody reading it because what we saw was that they guided to a range of four and a half to five percent which if you look at the historical context of that growth is the lowest that it has ever been in about 30 years so three decades so before they entered the wto
if you're not figuring out how to be multi-model and agnostic across these models you're taking on enormous business risk after friday
every major advancement we've seen in ai really comes down to better and more refined data from autonomous vehicles to human-eyed robots to llm chat bots that we use every day day in and day out and when models are trained on high quality diverse real world data sets well they get smarter and they get smarter faster and it's more reliable that's why uber has introduced ai solutions to help your company build great ai products on top of world-class data now obviously uber has mastered the art of
The first is an incredibly dear friend of mine, the axe of axes. Dan Loeb, who founded Third Point, who is an unbelievable investor in literally every domain. Private credit, public equities, private tech. He's a beast. It's a good get. He's a beast.
if you flow that through OpenAI, Sarah Friar said this, that every gigawatt for her for OpenAI is about $10 billion of revenue.
The reality is like those guys are doing $5 to $6 billion structured secondaries every year now, or they're starting, which means that they will. That's like cash compensation.
breaking news story as Alex Wilhelm and I were on air recording today's Twist episode. We saw news from Steve Jurvetson that SpaceX has acquired XAI.
man their inference is blazing fast again back to what we talked about last week because when you have the compute and the memory in the same place physical distances are now minimized and the complexity is minimized so you just have incredible speed
spacex enable starlink over iran and then there was the attempt to use that mechanism to get information out to fill in the mosaic right so yeah was what was happening 90 with what was happening 10 was there counter revolutions that were supportive of khomeini none of us knew anything because you would see these snippets and it was very hard to actually triangulate then you had this entire information channel get shut down and you had all kinds of blocking mechanisms that essentially drove the p
Your AI is only as good as the data it's learning from. Every huge leap we're seeing in AI development is based on refining better data sets. And guess who came up with the ideal solution for your company? That's right, my pals at Uber. Did you all know I was an early investor in Uber? Maybe you heard third or fourth. And now Uber AI Solutions works with enterprises all over the world, helping them source, label, evaluate and scale real world high quality data for every industry. When you think
I think the only way for Waymo to compete with Tesla right now is to partner with Uber.
with Waymo being worth or going out and raising money at 100 billion
I don't think they've run away with the whole thing. So I think if they wind up being, let's just say they wind up being 10 points, they'll be 10 times bigger. So let's say Tesla wins and is 50% of the market and Waymo and Uber and Noro, they all get 10, 20%, 5%, who knows what percent of the market, Zooks, et cetera.
Well, I don't think they've run away with the whole thing. So I think if they wind up being, let's just say they wind up being 10 points, they'll be 10 times bigger. So let's say Tesla wins and is 50% of the market and Waymo and Uber and Noro, they all get 10, 20%, 5%, who knows what percent of the market, Zooks, et cetera.
Well, I don't think they've run away with the whole thing. So I think if they wind up being, let's just say they wind up being 10 points, they'll be 10 times bigger.
I do think with Waymo being worth or going out raising money at 100 billion and Google is looking at that saying, hey, we've got to compete with Elon. That's a big task. He's going to have all this manufacturing. If we have Waymo plus Uber, you know, we don't have to change any behavior. We, you know, we have Google Maps. We have Waymo. We have all these other partnerships. I think the only way for Waymo to compete with Tesla right now is to partner with Uber.
Well, I don't think they've run away with the whole thing. So I think if they wind up being, let's just say they wind up being 10 points, they'll be 10 times bigger. So let's say Tesla wins and is 50% of the market and Waymo and Uber and Noro, they all get 10, 20%, 5%, who knows what percent of the market, Zooks, et cetera.
The New York Times all of a sudden sees this information, probably doesn't bother to do the diligence, has a bunch of positive mentions, starts to pump him up as a leader of some kind of nefarious, crazy, scary rebellion.
I think they will in the next five years do something so egregious and over the line, akin to some sort of libel or some sort of statement that it turned out to be completely false. They will get sued. And I hope when that settlement happens, the person says, I do not want to get paid the $4 billion. I want this to be turned in kind into a nonprofit and into a public trust, and then shuts it down.
CBS did not go up and down because, you know, one person owned it versus another. Nobody knows who the CEO of TikTok is. TikTok is either good or not good. And so I would just keep in mind that this is something, it's like the party circuit babble. Like you go there and you talk about it like, oh my God, it's so bad, it's so good. And you miss the basic fact that nothing about the ownership changes the human incentive to use a good product and to disqualify a s*** product.
The best example was meta and scale AI. Okay, I'll say this thing is worth 30 billion, I'll give you 15 billion in cash. But what am I really doing? I'm carving out these assets so that I don't have to file even an HSR filing.
when Facebook bought Instagram for a billion dollars, that turned out to be a huge bet about the future. It was right.
an enormous sign of confidence about how there isn't going to be a competitive threat for Paramount to just say, we'll take the whole thing because they're subjecting themselves to a level of scrutiny that they wouldn't if they felt there was any shred of a good argument for competitive antitrust.
If you look at the companies that have a need to spend money right now, it's Google, it's Microsoft, it's Meta, it's NVIDIA, and maybe Broadcom, but let's just keep Broadcom out of it. Apple is there too. And Apple. All of those companies have so much cash. If you actually look at the DCF of the enterprise value of these businesses, it gets very little credit for that cash, almost to the point where it's worthless. And so you either need to spend it on M&A, spend it on buybacks, or spend it to s
it's roughly NVIDIA plus AMD plus Google plus a bunch of inference silicon. So that's sort of that market.
It favors Meta, although Meta's quite behind.
I have Gemini and Grok as the two anchor apps because I'm so reliant on both of them.
So yes, I may use Grok image because I love that. And it's just much better.
just look at the last three weeks of Google's stock performance. It basically doubled once we thought that Gemini was incredible. And so if you want to make Gemini even more incredible, just pour another billion users into it. And if that costs you 50 billion, it's okay, because you'll make a trillion in market cap. It's like a no brainer.
I have Gemini and Grok as the two anchor apps because I'm so reliant on both of them.
what you see now is an incredible overperformance from where they were. I've said this before, but Gemini is incredible.
distribution still matters a ton, which favors Google.
I think the reason why Sam did those deals, to your point, he is a consummate, very talented dealmaker. Yes. Is probably because he needed to continue to generate the type of momentum required to raise the quantum of capital that he needs. So if you're silent, it's much harder to raise $100 billion and you're shucking and jiving and you're just putting a lot of things out there.
I think you're right that this market probably gets split up three or four ways. And so the winner probably gets a third of the market. Most other markets that end up in a three or four person race ends up in that space. But a third of a market can still be very valuable if that market has five or 6 billion people using it. Absolutely. It's going to be tremendous. Yeah. It's sort of multi trillion dollar market cap. So I don't think it's, it's by any means a death knell for open AI. But it does
Sam needs to batten down the hatches. And I think he used this opportunity to stop a bunch of peripheral activities.
I think if Sam can use different points in time to tighten the core focus, they'll be better off.
distribution still matters a ton, which favors Google. It favors Meta, although Meta's quite behind. And now it will still favor open AI because they have 800 million monthly actives.
So today we have companies like Amazon that uses us, um, Best Buy, Xero and many others that use our platform.
And if you look at any market for any product that is unique and is effectively where they are the only competitor for what they offer, you will see an equivalent market dynamic like this.
By the way, I'm neither long nor short. I was long in the private markets. I was an investor in the Series B of Palantir. I'm not long anymore. I wish I was, but I'm not. So it's not like I have a vested interest in this being right. But it's just so obvious that what they do is completely unique and completely differentiated. There is no alternative in the market for it. That's why they trade at such a huge premium to sales.
So look at the one with the lowest multiple to sales, MongoDB. There's 90 versions of what MongoDB does. I'm not going to say whether MongoDB is good or bad. That's actually a good company. It's an extremely well-run business, but it's not unique. It's just extremely well-run. Snowflake is not unique, but it is well-run. Palantir is both unique and well-run. And there's no clear alternative. So there's no place to churn to. And so I think the reason why it has a premium valuation is because the
Well, I think the Palantir short is stupid. And I think that those people will lose money. The thing with all of these other companies, put your chart up there. The thing that the people that are shorting this company don't understand is that all of these other businesses that you put up there, there is a viable competitor of some kind that you can switch to. And so what I would say is the opposite of what they're saying, which is you have a low multiple to sales when the churn risk is higher.
And then by the way, Anthropix numbers, despite cursor doing some of their own thing, Anthropix numbers are off the charts.
but it's that it's something else there's no way somebody as smart as Silver Lake comes in if they think there's not a path to liquidity so the other thing they have to promise is they're like listen we will take this company public and in return you will help us build a better company than everybody that committed capital into that company
there's no way somebody as smart as Silver Lake comes in if they think there's not a path to liquidity so the other thing they have to promise is they're like listen we will take this company public and in return you will help us build a better company than everybody that committed capital into that company
but now you're going to get to this thing where the intrinsic value of everything they have will far exceed the actual value that it trades at and so there will always be these fissures of pressure and then if one of these things requires a lot of money there'll be pressure and that pressure will be segregate these things so that I can own one versus the other and that's always the thing that happens in public markets is you go you kind of swing back and forth so I suspect that this is going to
a third now if one model is way way better and it's only on one of the clouds because Google writes a big check or Amazon writes a big check I could
eventually all three of these big companies will converge roughly effectively a third a third a third
everybody has everything it all looks effectively the same there's certain products and services that are unique to Microsoft versus GCP versus AWS but by and large the market is big enough and important enough that you'd have to be pretty insane to take a single vendor approach and so what typically happens in these markets is that they start off really small one person has all the share and then as the market becomes very valuable and very big everybody diversifies because it's a risk manageme
GPU it basically is a GPU we also deleted the image signal processor this is a beautiful chip I poured so much life energy into this personally it will be a real winner why is AI 5 so important what AI 5 is is the building block of a system that I think you'll start to see not just in the cyber cabs but also in optimus so from a functional technology perspective there's been a leap and that leap is going to come into the market that was the first thing he said which I thought was really importan
everybody has everything it all looks effectively the same there's certain products and services that are unique to Azure versus GCP versus AWS but by and large the market is big enough and important enough that you'd have to be pretty insane to take a single vendor approach and so what typically happens in these markets is that they start off really small one person has all the share and then as the market becomes very valuable and very big everybody diversifies because it's a risk management t
one of these data center projects will go belly up or one of these data center projects will um have their valuation just get walloped so there are you know like there's a core weave right and so let's say core weave um has a lot of debt and they're buying a lot of um uh capacity and they're building a bunch of projects there might come a point where they say you know what um we have to pay back and we've got loans and we've got payments to make yeah we're going to pause those two places where w
one of these data center projects will go belly up or one of these data center projects will um have their valuation just get walloped so there are you know like core weave right and so let's say core weave um has a lot of debt and they're buying a lot of um capacity and they're building a bunch of projects there might come a point where they say you know what um we have to pay back and we've got loans and we've got payments to make yeah we're going to pause those two places where we broke groun
one of these data center projects will go belly up or one of these data center projects will um have their valuation just get walloped so there are you know like there's a core weave right and so let's say core weave um has a lot of debt and they're buying a lot of um uh capacity and they're building a bunch of projects there might come a point where they say you know what we have to pay back and we've got loans and we've got payments to make we're going to pause those two places where we broke
one of these data center projects will go belly up or one of these data center projects will um have their valuation just get walloped so there are you know like there's a core weave right and so let's say core weave um has a lot of debt and they're buying a lot of um uh capacity and they're building a bunch of projects there might come a point where they say you know what um we have to pay back and we've got loans and we've got payments to make yeah we're going to pause those two places where w
one of these data center projects will go belly up or one of these data center projects will um have their valuation just get walloped so there are you know like there's a core weave right and so let's say core weave um has a lot of debt and they're buying a lot of um uh capacity and they're building a bunch of projects there might come a point where they say you know what um we have to pay back and we've got loans and we've got payments to make yeah we're going to pause those two places where w
so an easy way to do this is are they doing it to make quick money if they're doing it to make quick money i would put them in that finance genre as opposed to capital allocators so uh when you have masayoshi son come in or you have um you know japan came into hollywood during a period of time when people come in with big chip sacks that's a sign of a top when they start uh doing this and when finance people just do these kind of deals and on the margins we are starting to see uh people come in
people are trying to curry favor with the administration by saying they're investing in america which is this administration's uh you know major marketing effort their major way to say we should take out regulations is there's a lot of investment going on to a certain extent uh they're succeeding even if people are exaggerating the numbers by a multiple uh of 2x or 3x it's still going to be a huge spend and that's a good thing for america
one of these data center projects will go belly up or one of these data center projects will um have their valuation just get walloped so there are you know like a core weave right and so let's say core weave um has a lot of debt and they're buying a lot of um capacity and they're building a bunch of projects there might come a point where they say you know what um we have to pay back and we've got loans and we've got payments to make yeah we're going to pause those two places where we broke gro
The capital allocation system is both rigid, but it's incredibly flexible. What do I mean? The way that China allocates money is the following. You have Xi Jinping and his close circle of people. They dictate the priorities, right? I would think there was an article, Nick, you can find it, but Xi is personally right now helping to draft the five-year business plan of China. But what happens is, is it goes from that central group of like seven, eight, nine people to the Politburo. And when it get
if you go back to 1500 to now, over all of those years, China had the world's largest GDP 70% of those years.
I think that mechanism is the only way we can compete effectively on a day-to-day basis with the Chinese.
China has complete control of [the negative cycle]. ... Otherwise, we're always going to be prone to this very clever and accurate and smart mercantilism from the Chinese.
yeah I mean that 10 hour shift is probably predicated on a human monitoring it
I cannot tell you how bullish I am about this.
Yeah. So there are multiple dynamics here. Often they don't want people clearing their entire position and not being motivated because
Often they don't want people clearing their entire position and not being motivated because
Often they don't want people clearing their entire position and not being motivated because
The problem is that when we use our coding tools, they route through Anthropic, which is fine because Anthropic is excellent, but it's really expensive.
the reputation of OpenAI is to create industry-leading stuff. So if Facebook releases something, it's typically not innovative. It's typically copied from somebody else. When OpenAI releases something, you're going to assume, oh, this is the best-of-breed product.
I can tell you that really matches mine because when I try to get, you know, the boomers in my extended family, like, to get on this,
I'm a shareholder. Andy Ratcliffe has been on this program no less than five times.
really a revolutionary product.
the reputation of OpenAI is to create industry-leading stuff. So if Facebook releases something, it's typically not innovative. It's typically copied from somebody else. When OpenAI releases something, you're going to assume, oh, this is the best-of-breed product.
I can tell you that really matches mine because when I try to get, you know, the boomers in my extended family, like, to get on this,
It's probably as simple as that, but also the reputation of Zuckerberg and Facebook and Meta is, you know, to just create consumer-based stuff, and the reputation of OpenAI is to create industry-leading stuff. So if Facebook releases something, it's typically not innovative. It's typically copied from somebody else. When OpenAI releases something, you're going to assume, oh, this is the best-of-breed product. So I just assume Sora, if it's coming out of Sora, it's the best one. If it's coming ou
I can tell you that really matches mine because when I try to get, you know, the boomers in my extended family, like, to get on this,
I think they charge 25 bps.
I'm a shareholder. ... It's really a great way to build an optimized portfolio and pay the most reasonable fees you could ever do.
the reputation of Zuckerberg and Facebook and Meta is, you know, to just create consumer-based stuff, and the reputation of OpenAI is to create industry-leading stuff. So if Facebook releases something, it's typically not innovative. It's typically copied from somebody else. When OpenAI releases something, you're going to assume, oh, this is the best-of-breed product. So I just assume Sora, if it's coming out of Sora, it's the best one.
what the price sales multiple for palantir is right now ... 121
people need in the future of war being anti-terrorist etc is going to be ai and if you're building platforms that are just flat databases to kind of try and accomplish anything they'll be dwarfed just like optimists powered by ai will dwarf those
if you know we have seen nvidia uh and other stocks do that kind of movement when they are sitting there building building building a great product and the market then embraces it and the founder finds some huge innovation and i think the huge innovation with palantir
in palantir and these other products they've designed it so
China has no access to natural resources. The reason they do everything, the real accurate chart, if you want to be on top of this issue, is what are they investing in? They're investing in every form of energy production. Why? Because if push comes to shove in the future, China cannot be reliant on anybody for energy.
this is where i think apple should buy brave and duck duck go maybe perplexity
they spent like over a hundred million dollars to buy that company and essentially what they were buying is you know a company that already had the rights to do this because it does take years or so to get permission
their thesis was if we just make a really fast lightweight operating system that works on any computer even one with very meager specs every you can use everything through a browser... that's been a relatively good success for them especially in education
And eventually Dara decided he would go with partnerships and sold that unit. And that's what we're discussing here today.
So if we were to envision this world where five or six people get there, we also have the OEMs and NVIDIA playing a big role.
I think that this approach is the much better approach, which is to say, we can do exactly what China did with a couple of tweaks. It's way better, as you said, Jason, to just put in the equity, own something on the balance sheet of the United States, not have a golden vote, have complete transparency, allow the capital markets to finance these businesses, but give them a chance to compete all around the world. And then the US taxpayer gets some of the upside. That is awesome.
pursuant to what we just discussed in this game of chicken, who's willing to build the most data centers and fill them with, uh, Nvidia gear.
Then you got the Mac 7, in some cases, pursuing models. Uh, I understand Amazon has a model now. Apple was doing something in vision and images. This is Microsoft. Obviously we know Gemini doing very well at Alphabet. And then Meta has, um, Lama.
But Microsoft, I'm guessing has seen enough to know that that relationship is not reliable
And Microsoft, which has a very deep relationship with open AI, but let's call it perhaps tenuous at times conflicted because they own 49% of the company until it hits some amount of revenue, this whole convoluted deal structure, um, that, you know, is a headwind for open
what if somebody like Alphabet says, hey, we're going to be, we have our own silicon, Amazon's working on their own silicon. I think we have enough H100s and whatever, you know, and we're going to just try to build on our own.
I find myself using Perplexity's stock checker instead of Yahoo Finance and Google now.
the Google one is kind of two different products. They haven't moved to the AI native search on Google. You can use it.
Obviously we know Gemini doing very well at Alphabet.
We know Gemini doing very well at Alphabet.
And that's probably XAI or open AI, I think the biggest because Colossus was the biggest. So it's gotta be XAI is number one.
Microsoft, I'm guessing has seen enough to know that that relationship is not reliable
Microsoft, which has a very deep relationship with open AI, but let's call it perhaps tenuous at times conflicted because they own 49% of the company until it hits some amount of revenue, this whole convoluted deal structure, um, that, you know, is a headwind for open
And that's probably XAI or open AI, I think the biggest because Colossus was the biggest. So it's gotta be XAI is number one.
and we're starting a Disney miles program and a gamification well they have cruise ships too
I read that. And I thought, this is the peak of these deals. These deals will only go down in terms of dollar value from here.
the market commentary from both Lisa Sue and Jensen, I thought was really valuable.
oracle that just pretends an enormous amount of chips that are necessary and power and if you forecast
two have just absolutely thrived and one has not
Claude, I guess, they abstracted themselves from the back end, I guess, to protect themselves from OpenAI originally.
Because they are marching steadfastly towards a billion Mao, then a billion Dow. It's a juggernaut.
The question for me is, if everybody was so reliant on human labeling initially, if you're an investor now, when you see these Grok 4 results, how do you make an investment decision that's not purely levered to just computation? So if you look at these results, does it mean that there's 300 to 1000 basis points of lag between just letting the computers vibe itself to the answer versus interjecting ourselves? If interjecting ourselves slows us down by 300 to 1000 basis points per successive itera
He said that he's going to have agents creating synthetic data from scratch that then drive all the training, which I just think is, it's crazy.
Well, he made this huge bet on this 100,000 GPU cluster. People thought, wow, that's a lot. Is it going to bear fruit? Then he said, no, actually, I'm scaling it up to 250,000. Then he said, it's going to scale up to a million. And what these results show is a general computational approach that doesn't require as much human labeling can actually get to the answer and better answers faster. That has huge implications.
One is how quickly starting in March of 2023. So we're talking about less than two and a half years, what this team has accomplished and how far ahead they are of everybody else as demonstrated by this.
Yeah. I just meant that, you know, other than the first versions of FSD, which I think Andre talked about, Andre Karpathy talked about, you know, they're not really so reliant anymore on human labeling per se, right? So that, that interference.
And then the last thing I'll say is, if you look back, he made this bet once before, which was Tesla FSD versus Waymo. And Tesla FSD only had cameras, it didn't have LiDAR. But the bet was, I'll just collect billions and billions of driving miles before anybody else does, and apply general compute, and it'll get to autonomy faster than the other more laborious and very expensive approach.
if you look back, he made this bet once before, which was Tesla FSD versus Waymo. And Tesla FSD only had cameras, it didn't have LiDAR. But the bet was, I'll just collect billions and billions of driving miles before anybody else does, and apply general compute, and it'll get to autonomy faster than the other more laborious and very expensive approach.
circle chime e toro um and uh core weave those all have really good stories either crypto with new crypto regulation or ai and the ai infrastructure boom uh or fintech which again is related to regulations
spacex i don't expect those to come out anytime soon
but robin hood i guess would they have an after hours market would trade you know during market hours and a plus a little bit
I think he would be willing to risk easily 20%, 10%, 20% would not even be a scratch, right? It's just like a bruise. It's not a big deal if you lost 10% or 20%.
The market cap of this prize, if it's $10 trillion, has the ability to double or triple your market cap, if you were to win, but 25% of it, win $2.5 trillion in market cap easily added, right?
If you go pull up the Facebook market cap and their cash hoard, just generally speaking, broad numbers, and then you put it against the prize for winning the AI race... So whoever wins, gets there first, or becomes one of the top three players, is going to take part in a $10 trillion prize, let's say.
I would have thought that Google would be up, Meta would maybe be a little flattish to down, Nvidia is up, but maybe it could be down, Tesla's down, but it should probably be up. Amazon's basically breakeven and Apple is down. And I think that kind of makes sense. That's sort of how I read this table.
If you look at what Facebook is doing, they generically train on NVIDIA and they launch it in the open source. So I think that what they need to do is more of the OpenAI, more of the Google Playbook. ... It is clear that Lama doesn't know this. Meta doesn't know this that well because their model quality is meh. ... And I think Meta needs to do that. Otherwise, they're always going to be floundering on their back yield.
I mean, look, I think it, it feels highly rational, right? If you think about Meta's market cap is a rough math, 1.7 trillion. If you're the CEO and you ultimately believe that maybe 50% of your market cap is at risk because of AI 850 billion, why would you not spend maybe four or 5% of that? If you think it increases the odds even slightly that you're going to win the market.
On the scale of innovation, it's a horrible thing. And the reason is that we all just get old, our skill sets become rusty, and we don't have the energy or the capacity to think about what the future actually looks like because we are not living it. And then what happens is you task those decisions to people that you try to hire. But you saw it in the clip with Sam. Even in all of that crazy recruiting chaos that's happening right now for these brilliant machine learning and AI people, maybe tha
No, this has happened many, many, many times in many industries before, which is that companies that were stalwart organizations transition themselves from being a growth business to being a cash cow.
The only one that I understand why it's down this much is Apple. Because it's not clear that they're even baking something in private, there's nothing public, there's nothing private, it just seems like they're transitioning into being a cash cow, and getting into sort of that cash harvesting mode.
they are the closest to having that vertically integrated stack that I spoke about. I think that Tesla has the best vision models. Now with XAI, they'll have one of the best LLMs and reasoning models. And they'll be able to eventually stick that on Dojo. And then all of that will be in all of the physical AI that you will interact with in your daily life, whether it's a robot, or whether it's a car, or whether it's a robo taxi. So that's number one.
Tesla's one and Google's two.
I told you that I spent time last week at Tesla, I would not be sleeping on this business, I think that it is yet again, back into the land of being misunderstood.
when I first started 8090 a year ago, one of the key bets I made, which was a mistake, and we unwound the bet. But the first bet that I made was, can we build a transpiler, which is to say, can you take a CUDA workload and then can you redirect it away from NVIDIA to different hardware? And basically what I learned in that process are all of the attention mechanisms that are built into transformers that really differentiate how good the models are need to literally be hand-tuned for every single
I think it's insufficient to buy stuff off the shelf from Nvidia and expect these models to fundamentally compete.
I think Anthropic is incredible for CodeGen
Even in all of that crazy recruiting chaos that's happening right now for these brilliant machine learning and AI people, maybe that's a fight between OpenAI, Meta, and maybe Google.
if you had to boil down Google's economic North Star metric, right, not the value North Star, the economic North Star metric would be price per click. And I do think that Google is extremely well positioned to pivot that to price per token. And I think that they have some emergent classes of physical AI, but they have the largest pool of people where they can generate a price per token value framework through YouTube, through Gmail, through Workspace. I think through search, but probably it's a
I think Google, because you'll have the Gemini family of models, which just absolutely kick ass like VO3, which we haven't really spoke about, is going to destroy Hollywood, like in the next year, like Hollywood is done, I think. But they're landing model after model. They have the TPU, and the next generation TPU, I think is exceptional. They're baking quantum, and then they have an entire funnel of billions of people that they can direct experiences to. So Tesla one, Google two.
Tesla's one and Google's two.
I would have thought that Google would be up
Google's down 8%. But again, I would tell you, as a user, Gemini models are exceptional, like absolutely just bar nonexceptional.
Look at Google. Google's Gemini models are extremely tightly coupled to TPU. And it enables and unlocks an entire stack of secrets and capability that then get manifested in model quality.
Even in all of that crazy recruiting chaos that's happening right now for these brilliant machine learning and AI people, maybe that's a fight between OpenAI, Meta, and maybe Google.
You have to look very carefully at Microsoft's deal with OpenAI. Why? Because what you see is the compounding of secrets. There are secrets in the training layer, there are secrets in the model layer, their secrets in how these things are tightly coupled to infrastructure and compute. And what we have to remember is what OpenAI got from Microsoft was an extremely competent partner that built an enormous Azure compute infrastructure to train everything from chat GPT, all the way up to the O3 mode
You have to look very carefully at Microsoft's deal with OpenAI. Why? Because what you see is the compounding of secrets. There are secrets in the training layer, there are secrets in the model layer, their secrets in how these things are tightly coupled to infrastructure and compute. And what we have to remember is what OpenAI got from Microsoft was an extremely competent partner that built an enormous Azure compute infrastructure to train everything from chat GPT, all the way up to the O3 mode
It's been clear that OpenAI has had that, Anthropic has had that, Google has had that, DeepSeq has had that. And I think Meta needs to do that. Otherwise, they're always going to be floundering on their back yield.
I think if I were a betting man, he's bought the training secrets, he's bought the app secrets, and now he has to buy some infrastructure and compute hardware secrets.
If you look at what Facebook is doing, they generically train on NVIDIA and they launch it in the open source. So I think that what they need to do is more of the OpenAI, more of the Google Playbook. Look at Google. Google's Gemini models are extremely tightly coupled to TPU. And it enables and unlocks an entire stack of secrets and capability that then get manifested in model quality. So I think the first thing that Mark has to do, if I were him, is start to chip away at all of the sets of secr
my proposition was full phone, full stack, full app, all of this other HTML stuff should only be as a side thing that we do in markets where they try to make it difficult for us. Instead, it became politicized. And it became a big bet on HTML5, which I thought was absolutely stupid and unjustifiable.
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the first all civilian space flight using the space X crew dragon. And that was just truly like a momentous mission. It was just so beautiful to watch.
What? I missed that HubSpot lost 80% of its search traffic? Ooh, yeah, they made a post about it.
Gross revenue, which is the interest generated on the holdings of the stable coins.
in AI mode, it looks like a nice comprehensive search instead of 10 blue links and tons of advertising.
This is not happening. This is just a Friday afternoon tweet, spicy tweet from Trump. Ignore it. It's not happening. There will not be a 25% tariff on Apple. But Tim Cook will come and make some sort of gesture.
can basically look at you and say, hey, go yourself. No, but I'm serious. That's a sign of a healthy culture, actually.
these things are going to be everywhere and robo taxes will be everywhere waymos will be everywhere and waymo just did a deal with toyota to provide their self-driving cars
we get more results we have good results now we need to get to great so that was what he said about the um in work thing
uber now is saying back to the office but three days a week and previous employees who were remote yeah no more remote you still have to come to the office three percent it got a little con uh testy i guess on a all hands meeting
currently ride sharing is one percent of rides here in the united states or slightly less and then globally it's less than one percent so i believe we get to 30 of rides 20 to 30 of rides in 10 years is my estimate but good for the uber team
they also did the volkswagen deal they're now up to like 15 partnerships with on autonomy companies the volkswagen deal is going to be the game changer i predict volkswagen is the number two car producer in the world we're going to need 10 to 20 million cars per year for a decade to put a dent into the number of rides people want to take
The U.S. is forecasted to increase its electricity production capacity from one to two terawatts by 20, 40, 15 years from now. During that same period of time, China is going to go from three to eight terawatts. And that China forecast, by the way, excludes any of the Gen 4 nuclear reactors, the new hydroelectric facilities and the new thorium, or if that ever scales, that they're considering rolling out in addition to what they've already planned to roll out. So in the next 15 years, China is a
the reason I think tariffs have been an A is because it is uncovered in my opinion, how beholden we are to a brittle supply chain and specifically to China who is a friend, but who's also an enemy.
And I think it's pretty reasonable to do a risk assessment to say, well, how do you stand up to that and actually have your own point of view if you don't have your own method of having access to those things? I think that is the most important question. Everything else about brand and all of this other stuff, I think comes after this question. This is the critical question. Because if they can tell you what to think, that is not winning.
China says, we're going to constrain all the pharmaceutical APIs into the supply chain. We're going to constrain all the battery cathode into the supply chain. And we're going to constrain all of the rare earths to anyone who doesn't take our side. Now, how is America in a position to actually decide for ourselves what is in our best interests if that's looming over us?
on the rare earth side, not only did China constrain rare earths into the supply chain, what they then did was tell South Korea what they could do with the rare earths that they gave them. And now all of a sudden you have this geopolitical spillover where it's not just a country constraining supply. It's a country now dictating the political and trade practices of another country.
There was also, I saw in my feed that he was commenting, you know, sometimes when you split companies up, they become worth more money.
I think that's what NVIDIA's answer will be to this question. But what is the real expectation? Let's flip it on its head. Last week, China, in retaliation for tariffs, constrained the supply of rare earths outside of China, right? Leaving China. You had certain factory lines that just had to stop on a dime, right? So they're clearly in a position to understand their supply chain, who benefits or who doesn't benefit and can be hurt by constraining supply. And they're able to affect that. At a mi
I think the real problem that we have is that NVIDIA is not doing what is in the best interest of the United States. ... When the U.S. banned the sale of the top-end GPUs, the A100 and the H100, they quickly introduced the A800 and H800. What does that mean? Well, all it was, was just a chip that was basically the same, it slightly reduced the data transfer speed, so that it went under the export control threshold, but it was still really usable. Then late last year, they introduced this thing c
That's why I love HubSpot for startups. It's the all-in-one customer platform. So you don't need a Frank inside of pools. No. Right now, early stage companies are going to get 75% off. And with this one system, you're going to automate marketing and actually converts track your sales pipeline without spreadsheet chaos. And you're going to manage your customers like the Amman hotel, six stars all the way. You're going to get investor ready analytics that tell your story perfectly. And man, when y
the thing that we have to acknowledge is that in certain countries what you have is a very blurry line between private and public industry and they have this very tight coupling and again i hate to go back to china but it is the best example of this where what do they choose one other country just for the sake of it we can use korea we can use japan we can use germany okay there are instances where the government balance sheets support private industry they can support them in three different wa
we have critical supply chains that can be shut off by china around photovoltaics
That's why I love HubSpot for startups. It's the all in one customer platform. So you don't need a Franken side of tools. No, right now, early stage companies are going to get 75% off. And with this one system, you're going to automate marketing and actually converts track your sales pipeline without spreadsheet chaos. And you're going to manage your customers like the Amman hotel, six stars all the way. You're going to get investor ready analytics that tell your story perfectly. And man, when y
Tesla employs 125,000 plus employees
mocking the greatest American car company ever created
it's out there you know being beta tested with beta testers who have to remain vigilant they they are
if you look at cloud computing, there are four major players actually, because Oracle's a major player now.
I think they'll let it go through. And I think this will be, this is the starter's pistol for M and a, if this deal goes through now, anything under 32 billion is going to get done. That's my prediction.
based on my firsthand experience using a Tesla every day, I often put it in full self-driving without the address. And so that reflects what my personal experience, it will go into full self-driving mode.
Well, I mean, it was an electric car. They cared about the environment. And it's done more to change the fate of global warming than any other car company.
It's an American car company. It's the one successful one.
guaranteed fsd doesn't also a human is not going to get this right but nobody can see through fog except for it's going to hit it yeah as would a human any of us driving that car would have hit the kid
if we have to go and compete against china for ai and a bunch of other stuff where is the energy going to come from
that's why i love hubspot for startups it's the all-in-one customer platform so you don't need a frankincite of fools no right now early stage companies are going to get 75 off and with this one system you're going to automate marketing that actually converts track your sales pipeline without spreadsheet chaos and you're going to manage your customers like the amman hotel six stars all the way you're going to get investor ready analytics that tell your story perfectly and man when you pull up hu
it is such a first of all amazing it's an well no it's an amazing place for silicon valley where you can like see these people just keep pushing the boundaries up and up and up
So on Thursday, what happened with Microsoft, they had a $24 billion contract with the United States Army to deliver some whiz bang thing. And they realized that they couldn't deliver it. And so what did they do, they went to Anduril. Now, why did they go to Anduril? Because Anduril has the technological supremacy to actually execute.
And I think that's going to be the big war of the next decade. It's going to be Tesla doing it on their own.
So both parties are benefiting at the same time.
actually, you know, become a headwind for Uber because in the markets where Waymo exists, San Francisco primarily, they said they were growing. So the number of rides is growing even with Waymo taking some amount of share in San Francisco proper.
yeah how much did they pay the original researchers for the report they built on top of their research
they're in competition with aws and microsoft azure which has all the
their followers engage more with their content because this content is unique so there's a whole formula of downstream users and then there's also lock-in so did these lock people in and create a moat for instagram you know for facebook
i had said you know i thought we were hitting peak nvidia you know sometime in the next couple of years you would have this sort of peak nvidia moment in terms of competition is coming people are going to make their own chips and then software will become more efficient as we saw with r1 using maybe more commoditized hardware less generation of hardware better software better techniques etc
i also thought we were hitting uh evaluation for open ai yeah because there seems to be so much headwinds against them
because now with reasoning in things like deep research and o1 and some of the new products by gemini and the products by chat gpt and open ai the reasoning's built in so if you don't know how to do a prompt you can just ask it to make a prompt or it makes a prompt as we saw when we use deep research on the program countless times
software will become more efficient as we saw with r1 using maybe more commoditized hardware less generation of hardware better software better techniques etc
this idea that they spent six million dollars probably leaves out hundreds of thousands of illegally imported h100s via singapore that they're not putting into that cost
point embrace and extend embrace and extend meta has to embrace and extend everything that these guys have shown meaning like meta's buying tens of thousands of nvidia gpus great but what did this show this shows that actually cuda high-level languages in general i think we've all known that they suck okay and so we've all been going through it thinking that it's like the right thing to do deep seek throws it out the window they use something called ptx what does meta do is critical not to under
that's the model is like consumer usage which puts them on a collision course with meta it's the only company that could really impact that because the only company right now that has billions of eyeballs of da use per day and who and by the way zuck said this in his earnings release he's like there's only going to be one company that brings ai to a billion plus people and it will be us some version of that quote is in his earnings release yesterday
embrace and extend meta has to embrace and extend everything that these guys have shown meaning like meta's buying tens of thousands of nvidia gpus great but what did this show this shows that actually cuda high-level languages in general i think we've all known that they suck okay and so we've all been going through it thinking that it's like the right thing to do deep seek throws it out the window they use something called ptx what does meta do is critical not to understand they need to embrac
that's the model is like consumer usage which puts them on an on a collision course with meta it's the only company that could really impact that because the only company right now that has billions of eyeballs of da use per day and who and by the way zuck said this in his earnings release he's like there's only going to be one company that brings ai to a billion plus people and it will be us some version of that quote is in his earnings release yesterday
there was an announcement about apple and starlink working on direct to uh phones and i know that's always been in the works as a possibility like even i think those are even lower earth orbit satellites to be able to hit your phone so i think what we're going to have is a a multiple stack on phones
at every base of these lifts was a starlink i believe for free and so it was like a game changer
they were using starlink in a fighter plane apparently uh to the aviation version of it to get this like crystal clear you know hd video of it so shout out to the starlink team dude
I like thomas's math I believe it I do think it's about a hundred billion dollar asset but at the end of the day the president was very clear that it is completely and utterly worthless without his permit and he wants to own 50 of this asset now if you're a buyer of something you're not going to pay a hundred billion dollars if you control whether it can exist or not you're basically going to pay today's equivalent of one frank which would be one dollar now I'm not saying that it is going to be
Sam Altman, you know, Satya Nadella, you know, Microsoft, they know what they're doing. They know this is going to cause, as Bill Gurley points out, regulatory capture.
he can catch a rocket with a pair of chopsticks.
decisions yeah he would change his decisions he cares about winning that's why the number is so big that's why it's 3.29 billion yeah because he cares so much about that number going up he's addicted to that stuff i know him i know how he thinks uh and you don't need to be a genius you don't you know i don't have a personal relationship i don't want to overstate it here but i i know him since i since he started his career yeah um you know in fact the first time i met him was when he it was a pri
amazon is doing drone delivery which means they can eventually do drone pickup true there are self-driving cars coming and there are self-driving trucks coming so amazon and zooks will be picking up all this rural stuff in a truck okay that has no humans in it and they'll be doing it for half the cost that ups is right now and ups is not the leading shipping company is it uh i think fedex is larger yeah and then i think amazon has their own delivery now they don't just rely on ups they have thei
as much as I respect what Steve and Alex Karp did at Palantir and Reddit, man, and then Instacart, yeah, you know, that's like an AMD where kind of like comeback stories.
The amazing counterintuitive thing about Palantir was how much time they spent with their customers. Everybody shat on that idea, and they were totally right.
Business loser, Intel. From the company that basically commercialized Moore's Law for the advancement of humanity to just a totally confused shell of its former self.
And they took a Waymo yesterday, and I saw the video. And basically what you have is my brother-in-law, who's like totally blown away. My sister, who's like cautiously optimistic. And there are two kids who are like pinned to the back in fear, because they're like, who is driving this? And my brother-in-law, who's Indian, he's like, don't worry, there are people like us somewhere driving this car.
If the guy is tweeting in real time, his stream of consciousness, you absolutely know everything that he wants because he just lays it all bare.
This was a multi hundred billion dollar grift that was stopped on a dime over 12 hours of tweets.
SpaceX uses these stable coins. How? How do you think they collect payments from all the Starlink customers when they aggregate them in all of these long-tail countries? They don't want to necessarily take the FX risk, the foreign exchange risk. They don't want to deal with sending wires. So what they do is they'll swap into stable coin, send it back to the United States, and then swap back to US dollars. So it's a very useful utility.
And the key company was Google in this respect. Google made more money for investors, dollar for dollar, after they went public, then maybe everybody, but maybe the series A.
So it seems like Databricks is trading at a 50% higher premium, I guess, because it's got twice the growth, right? So this is where eventually your market cap, the value of your company, the, the growth rate factors in.
I saw there was an extraordinary private fundraise, not for SpaceX, not for Stripe. Those are the other two giant private companies, but Databricks just raised $10 billion in the private markets.
there were some weird caps like you couldn't have 100 million users or something but i think is going based and he looks at this like the open compute platform he knows he's got a network effect he'll defend it
abstract out the the version numbers for nerds but i i think this is too confusing for consumers
the 200 a month now they google it's 20 bucks a month so i give it an a plus on a value basis
very quick folks i believe google is the sleeping giant grok also doing a very good job uh the other
everybody can use his language models and he is going to be the backstop against sam altman's closed ai which is so paradoxical by the way
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it's a framework that only a quantum computer could theoretically even so how do you know the answer is
when i saw the doj's theoretical guidance on the google antitrust matter their idea is to divest the browser and i kind of scratched my head thinking would any reasonable business person think that that was the right remedy meanwhile three weeks later google's like here's a super chip in quantum computing here's the quantum computing that breaks the world yeah and i thought how is it that these folks are so disconnected from reality that they don't understand what's actually sitting inside this
this is um a massive achieve achievement uh to be able to do that at once i think he is also maybe he's always been let the results you know speak for themselves and the results at uber since they got to profitability raised the prices and you know basically uh scaled to such enormous uh and obviously i'm long i'm still long the stock um although i'm diversified so it's not like an acute thing for me or a religious thing you know he's just letting the fact that they became a money printing machi
crew over there and their philosophy was if you're smart and you're in silicon valley you want to be in tech we're hiring you we'll figure out later what you're going to do here because we have a money printing machine and we can afford to do so and for every smart person we hire that's reduces the chances of a competitor and they literally were hiring talented people in silicon valley valley at 2x the rate and giving them 10 times the perks which everybody else followed in order to pursue this
Uber's up like four bucks right now. I just noticed before I got on air because, uh, the robo taxi is being delayed in some way, who knows what's going on. And now you've got this like existential thing. I mean, this is like panic inducing for Tesla shareholders, Lyft shareholders, Uber shareholders.
have an asterisk on them. So in the hierarchy of deals, right, just to unpack this for a second, there are deals where you give me X and I give you money. That's not what this is. Then if you degrade that kind of deal structure, in a lot of heavy industry, you have deals that are called take or pay, which is there is something that's working and you need to basically take this, or you need to give me the monetary equivalent of what I'm selling you. That's not what this is. What this is, is sort
And this is, I think, the big mistake in this thinking is that that real estate is actually much more fragile than I think we all think it is. And I think a much better way to think about this is in the future, none of this UI real estate is actually worth anything. The question is, do you have a data asset that's valuable or do you do a service that's valuable? Because, agentically, there'll be all of these unemotional bots and workflows doing this work for you. So I think Sachs is right in the
In a world that looks like that, where these companies have the money to pay for the data feeds, the existing V1.0 generation UIs, I think, are in trouble. So it would just be a very bad capital allocation decision. Now, that's okay to get things wrong, but not for $30 billion wrong. You can probably do it for a couple hundred million dollars wrong, or maybe even a billion dollars wrong, because you can absorb that as a $150 or $60 billion company, but $30 billion is too big of a price to pay fo
I mean, this is a $20 billion market cap business. You probably have to pay a control premium of 50%. So the question is, if you were going to spend $30 billion today in the public markets, what would you spend it on? And I think the most important lens that you have to use to answer that question is, what reinforces a moat that I have, while also being inoculated from the risks of AI? And I cannot think of a more fragile business model than the UI layer on top of widely available data. So the p
I just expect him and his teams to figure it out. Like they're just all so good. It's, and the thing to remember, it's not just him that's incredible, but he attracts a kind of technical and operational wonder kind people. For sure. And that's just, that's just a really special thing. So I had, I had that reaction, which was, I was really proud and happy for them. For the team. Yeah, for sure. For the team. And for him, these guys are like incredibly fearless.
I've been waiting for this too, because it's so obvious that this is not a difficult thing to do. And this is, you know, I got to give the team over at open eye credit and I got to give the people at Gemini a bit of a warning here at Google.
I've been waiting for this too, because it's so obvious that this is not a difficult thing to do. And this is, you know, I got to give the team over at open eye credit and I got to give the people at Gemini a bit of a warning here at Google.
the tools that the big folks offer are so good that they just cannibalize and run over the entire market and so what they hear from cmos is we would love to advertise on your company your site but a your tools are substandard and b even though your inventory is cheaper you just don't give us the same scale and breadth that we get in these other big places
build the apps make them kick ass make the chat gpt alternative and get it to billions of people yesterday
unfortunately not what Friedberg just said it'll be the opposite there will be some form of forced remedy
the large companies facebook microsoft amazon google apple have effectively infinite money compared to any startup
actually you can just pipe that stuff directly from stripe into snowflake and you can just transform it and do what you will with it and then report it
you don't need to spend tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to wrap your revenue in something that says it's a system of record you don't need that actually you can just pipe that stuff directly from stripe into snowflake and you can just transform it and do what you will with it and then report it
i have been using chat gpt and claude and gemini exclusively i stopped using google search
it is emerging that meta is working on some ar glasses that are really impressive
and you can see this is a this is fired off like two dozen different queries to as freebro correctly pointed out you know build this chain and it got incredible answers
so one would just be on the fundamental technology itself and i think the version of that story would go that the underlying frameworks that people are using to make these models great is well described and available in open source on top of that there are at least two viable open source models that are as good or better at any point in time than open ai so what that would mean is that the value of those models the economic value basically goes to zero and it's a consumer surplus for the people
Now, for example, I went through a direct listing with Slack. What we did not learn is that the best price is the day one price. So if you had investor pressure, the thing that I should have done, it was a probably a $1.2 billion, $1.24 billion mistake. I know it because I distributed too late. I should have sold every share. I didn't know that. It was very hard to know that.
Klarna put out this like cryptic tweet slash press release where I think maybe it was in their earnings. Nick, maybe you can find this where they're like, we've deprecated Salesforce and worked it.
if you have these things, why do you necessarily need a system of record in the way that you needed to before when you're writing all this clunky deterministic code?
Well, I'll tell you how it's possible. And so this is like this next crazy thing that's been happening. We've been doing a version of this to go after some other sources of software. We haven't had the balls, to be honest, to go after Salesforce or Workday, but here's how they do it. They write these agents and these agents can spawn other agents, right? So it's very classic kind of machine that builds a machine. And you start to observe the inputs and outputs of a system, right? I'm hyper-simpl
You guys just turned on Colossus.
Well, I mean, Zuck, I think did an incredible thing for me, which is he let my team cook. I don't remember having skip level meetings, this, that, none of the other nonsense. But at the same time, what he did was he created air cover for us. Because let's be honest, I was an immature executive at the time. So I was still learning how to be part of a fabric of a group of people. I did not know how to do that. So I was a little bit of a lone wolf operator with my team and I operated that way. You
So if you're a Google or a Facebook and you run into some problem, typically the solution is you can engineer around it because ultimately your product is free and there's a different way to scale and grow and create feature value because those are also incrementally free.
So if you're a Google or a Facebook and you run into some problem, typically the solution is you can engineer around it because ultimately your product is free and there's a different way to scale and grow and create feature value because those are also incrementally free.
Satya Nadella, how did he build Microsoft? These are all just like a handful of examples of people that have just tacked on collectively, trillions of dollars of market cap, way more than all founders added together in most companies, but for one or two.
If you look at what Nikesh Arora was able to do at Palo Alto Networks, it's incredible. I mean, in eight years, he's created $80 billion of value.
I think these are really good businesses, but they are some combination of entertainment and gambling. I don't think that these things are as useful directional indicators as they are just really interesting businesses that allow people to bet and wager on all kinds of random things.
I think it's going to be really important for Google to define the terms of their own breakup.
From a competitive dynamics perspective and game theory, it's pretty reasonable to hobble them. That's why I think the small O outcome is much more palatable and seems more fair to me. A breakup is a really draconian action.
The breaking up of Google is great for competition and for startups. But let's not forget, Google is an incredible company that has created enormous amounts of good. They have done way more good than bad, way more, like three, four or five orders of magnitude more good than bad. And to break a company like that, I think would be a really bad outcome.
you can do it in a way where the sum of the parts will be greater than the value today of Google. So I think that there's a shareholder win.
I really thought this was a single digit probability, I still think it's a single digit probability. And if it grows, it's the most meaningful thing that's happened in technology, quite honestly.
waymo already has to deal with uber
uber reported 7.6 billion dollar trips this is 2022 data
whoever wants to win is either going to have to build an at scale competitor to uber and lyft and doordash or sell to doordash uber and lyft i think half of them are going to do the latter
I mean, sadly, this is another case of sell the news. These things rallied phantomly in the after hours. And if you look at them, they've, they've all just given back every dollar of gains. So I think that people know that we're sort of at the tail end of the hype cycle on AI. And every chance, every time these things spike, people take an opportunity to just massively sell. I mean, Nvidia has turned over 308 million shares today.
I mean, sadly, this is another case of sell the news. These things rallied phantomly in the after hours. And if you look at them, they've, they've all just given back every dollar of gains. So I think that people know that we're sort of at the tail end of the hype cycle on AI. And every chance, every time these things spike, people take an opportunity to just massively sell.
I think the reality is that if you're a hyperscaler, so if you're Amazon or Google or Microsoft, your business is pretty fragile and brittle if the services you provide or the services that third parties like Snowflake provide through you are not reliable.
8 sleep has released the pod for ultra besides heating and cooling, you know, all about that now it elevates automatically, which is so nice for reading.
amazon google microsoft amd intel a plethora of startups grok everybody trying to make now different hardware solutions
what you're seeing now is that amazon google microsoft amd intel a plethora of startups everybody trying to make now different hardware solutions
we have a huge problem with nvidia and i'll just kind of say the quiet part out loud which is you can't spend this kind of money to have technology lock in to one hardware vendor and that makes no sense and what you're seeing now is that amazon google microsoft amd intel a plethora of startups grok everybody trying to make now different hardware solutions the problem though that that creates is that we have a massive lock-in right now because the code is littered with all these nvidia specific w
You need help doing important things like registering your company with Northwest registered agent. You're going to set up your entire business identity in one place. It's going to do everything for you in just 10 clicks or 10 minutes. You've got to save time. You got to save money. You're a startup. We get it. 10 clicks, 10 minutes, and you're going to have your business officially formed and ready to go. Northwest registered agent will take care of everything, giving you a complete business id
i mean it makes so much sense for them so i think they should do it as quickly as possible we are in the first inning of what should probably be an enormous tectonic shift in technology and i think if whoever wins in the first inning usually isn't the one that's winning by the ninth inning and so i would encourage anybody that's winning right now to monetize get secondaries take money off the table as fast as possible because the future is unknown and the more disruptive the technology is the mo
apple really cares about privacy when they're trying to hurt a company they don't like i.e meta and they're willing to figure out a way to work around it when they're behind that they clearly support open ai
the economics of the chat gpt deal were leaked and there's no money on either side
i think that apple really cares about privacy when they're trying to hurt a company they don't like i.e meta and they're willing to figure out a way to work around it when they're behind that they clearly support open ai
the thing that i was struck by the most in this is we went from a phase where in the steve jobs era these events were because you were about to unveil a product that was done and shipping as of that day and then at some point we transitioned to they are talking about products that they intend to release within a year now we've shifted to the part where they're talking about software integrations from a third party that will happen in a year so if you just look at it sequentially it's a little di
you promised the guy x amount of money for doing y amount of things he did the y things and then you had a judge come over the top because of somebody who owned 10 shares and all i'm saying is if you don't have the intellectual intelligence to look past that and say wait a minute we just paid the guy to do this work and now we're going to renege they're gaming the system i just think that like how can anyone who is capable of doing a job sign up for a pay package how can anyone and the people th
he should get this stock he never should have had them taken away and so i just hope this thing yeah becomes a nothing burger
Google pays billions of dollars a year to Apple and it's pure profit for them.
And so the idea that, you know, you would give your information to Microsoft, Google, Facebook, or open AI, most people don't trust those companies when it comes to their data.
just like, you know, to a certain extent, but a lesser extent Google does because Google does not control the full stack, right? They don't have control of the hardware and there's a lot of hardware that's going to be necessary here.
And so the idea that, you know, you would give your information to Microsoft, Google, Facebook, or open AI, most people don't trust those companies when it comes to their data.
the first real experiences people have with generative AI will come from Apple, not chat GPT.
Who do you think wins more here? OpenAI for the integration. Okay. Or Apple who can hot swap out OpenAI at any point in time? Because I think this is Apple against OpenAI right now of who owns the consumer. And I don't think it's going to be OpenAI that owns the consumer. I think they know Apple's going to win the consumer.
And I think you already have this in open AI, right? Open AI has history and memory. Now, you don't have to explicitly tell it you like things at tables. It knows from the last time and best tables or it knows you're a venture capitalist. It knows you're a podcast or a journalist. So, you know, this is just Siri doing that. And you're right, all those preferences get stored locally.
allowing Siri to do these deep dives into the apps and then leveraging open AI's knowledge base, you know, which could coordinate with this,
And so the idea that, you know, you would give your information to Microsoft, Google, Facebook, or open AI, most people don't trust those companies when it comes to their data.
Clearly, Apple is feeling the pressure, just like Google did, of open AI, and Microsoft releasing tons of features.
Not only did they say open AI, they called them the industry leader. They gave them their flowers and they said powered by chat GPT and powered by the specific 4.0 model.
that I think Apple's in a very unique place to thread the needle on. This means the app economy becomes even more important. The app economy becomes even more important because this is the modality is going to be apps and it's going to be watching the app do the action. So this is extraordinary.
United app, they've watched us use the Open Table app, they've watched us use Uber, they've watched us use DoorDash, they know all the swipes and all those hooks. This is going to be one of these cases
What it's also going to do this is my second point is it's going to take Siri from being like a single task doer to more of an agent, able to do and thread
Okay, so that's my first point is that this is going to dramatically push us towards speech and away from touch.
Nah, they make their money from hardware and services. They got it locked up.
Yeah, this is really going to be powerful. And I think what we're seeing here is a massive moment for computing.
The whole point is you can figure out that there's no logical justification for this company using one Google search and the calculator app on your Mac.
You didn't even use a sophisticated model. You used probably the calculator app on your fricking Mac to figure out that it was 192 times.
No, it's he's posting a meme. Okay. Thank you. He put a picture on the internet. Okay. I mean, again, this is like the problem that we have,
Microsoft had to go through a huge DOJ inquiry and a settlement decree and they were in the penalty box for most of Steve Ballmer's tenure as a CEO. A lost decade, yeah. And the handcuffs came off when Satya took over that business. So I think what I'm trying to say is folks have become extremely sophisticated at replacing round-tripping with these complicated TAC 2.0, whatever you want to call it, credit-oriented deals. They'll finance you to buy their own chips. All of this stuff has to be scr
The first is, I think the DOJ and the FTC are totally way out of their ski tips on this. This is a totally nascent industry. We don't have any good examples of end user use cases, either in the enterprise or amongst consumers. We only have 18 months of spend history. It is true that we've spent probably $750 billion to $1 trillion collectively now on things with the AI label. But it is also true that that's probably generated less than $10 billion in revenue. So I don't see what they're exactly
I mean, I think it's a really, really incredibly fun moment. If you're in evolved in anything AI related, just because it shows the level of investment that Nvidia's customers are making into making this new reality available for everybody, right? So when you're spending effectively a hundred billion dollars a year on the CapEx of chips, and then a couple hundred billion more on all the related infrastructure, and then another couple hundred billion more on power, you're talking about half a tri
i remember at one point i was talking to larry and i think they had hit 10 larry page they hit 10 billion dollars in revenue and he said what do you think we should do with all the money and i was like you should invest in startups and you know what they did google ventures
i think what it means is that there are these phases of product development which exist in many markets this market i think is going through the same thing and right now we're in the first what i would call primordial ooze phase which is everybody's kind of like running around like a chicken with their heads cut off there's all these core basic capabilities that are still so magical when you see them but we all know that five and ten years from now these things will be table stakes right and wha
All of you guys are sort of a little bit rate limited on literally Nvidia's throughput, right. And I think that you and most everybody else have sort of effectively announced how much capacity you can get just because it's as much as they can spin out.
the open source community is rabid. So one example that I think is incredible is, you know, we had these guys do a pretty crazy demo for Devon. Remember, like even like five or six weeks ago that looked incredible. And then some kid just published it under an open MIT license, like OpenDevon. And it's incredibly good and almost as good as that other thing that was closed source.
we've now gotten it to 200 applications to one investment yc is investing in one percent we're now into 0.5
i think what we're realizing is um a lot of these llms are going to be commoditized right and they're going to do an equally good job at whatever your task is so we've seen this with meta releasing their open source project we saw it when claude leapfrogged you know chat gpt 3.5 so what i see from startups is they're willing to swap these things in and out so then what's left i think you know having a unique data set say twitter reddit gmail if you're allowed to use gmail
up until this point you could have said that they and google were sort of lagging behind open ai but i don't think that's the case
i think that vision is five six seven years out from having low single digit percentages and you may have seen uber has incorporated waymo and the taxis in london into their system i think uber is ultimately going to be the place people go to call up one of 20 different self-driving i think a lot of people are going to get there at the same time wouldn't be surprised if elon gets there first but i think that's five or ten years out if i'm being totally honest you know in terms of getting to scal
ride sharing is number one the absolute probably by an order of magnitude and interesting the reason i say that is in order for ride sharing and ride hailing to really work the way that they envision it you will have level five autonomy supported in jurisdictions where again if you just look at part two the whole point is you can summon a car from your app and if you don't have access to a mobile phone you can go to these bus stop equivalents and just press a button and the car comes to you and
the answer is that he's actually executing exactly the plan and so if you're investing in a stock what you really want is a ceo to kind of stick to a plan that is well known so we don't have to actually guess what the plan is because he puts it out on the website look at the master plan part 2 and if you start reading down everything that he said he's going to do starting in 2016 is basically what it is
the analogy for google is android where google open source the android operating system because the handset manufacturers and some of the big software companies so nokia and microsoft in particular blackberry had these closed proprietary operating systems and then the telcos put their apps on and made money and basically had control over whether or not people could access google and google services through their phone so the intention with open sourcing android was to make sure that google was n
the most important thing that google can do is reinforce the value of search and the best way to do that is to scorch the earth with these models which is to make them widely available and as free as possible
the most important thing that google can do is reinforce the value of search and the best way to do that is to scorch the earth with these models which is to make them widely available and as free as possible that will cause microsoft to have to catch up and that will cause facebook to really have to look in the mirror and decide whether they're going to cap the betting that they've made on ar vr and reallocate very aggressively to ai that should be what facebook does and the reason is if facebo
And I will also would encourage the team over there to look at, if they haven't already, it seems obvious. I'm sure they have. How long has this account been around?
I could see robo taxis starting next year sometime with a safety driver and I could see them removing the safety driver and having remote interventions, which is how cruise did it. And I believe that's how Waymo is doing at a human intervention, maybe, you know, 2026, that would be the timeline I would be on humans in it 2025, no humans in it 2026.
they had a very discreet, specific claim, which was that they wanted to dissolve a business deal that Google had to provide cloud services to the state of Israel called Project Nimbus. And I think that's such a discreet thing that it's hard to understand that those 28 people would even have enough knowledge of what that is. But it sounds like a cloud hosting deal. Well, what's hosted there? And it could be any number of things. And I suspect if it's a billion dollar a year deal, it's many things
Google is a for-profit business and they are in the business of generating maximum profit on behalf of their shareholders. They are also incentivized to do that in a way that achieves a mission and a set of values that the majority of their employees agree with. And the fact that a small cohort of people can try to hijack and sabotage that overall direction I think is very misguided.
The other thing that Nvidia does brilliantly is what Intel did in the 80s and 90s, when they wanted to kind of choke the market for CPU competition, which is that they were able to define a metric that everybody started to pay attention to, which for them was clock speed.
I mean, I think it's very hard for them. It is a structural innovators dilemma. And why is that because they've made some architectural decisions around things like HBM, which is high bandwidth memory, or specific kinds of extremely high throughput optical cables. And why these things matter is that Nvidia's gone and bought up the world supply. And they've basically bear hug these markets as a structural part of their design. Now that makes sense. And it's very legal. The problem is that if you
I think he did a very good job of explaining where Nvidia is really strong, which is really in learning, and where Nvidia is trying to build the business, which is an inference. But the problem is the features almost compete with each other between learning and inference.
if you think a wearable on your wrist is going to get scrutinized when bought by google imagine what happens when a 50 billion dollar marketing automation company gets bought by google
for different reasons but so i think that they're both actually roughly aligned and not allowing a lot of this big m a to happen but for different reasons for
imagine what happens when a 50 billion dollar marketing automation company gets bought by google
be interested in those offers so those offers would work just as well and so actually in a way what perplexity and u.com are doing is what this seo person is doing yeah they're creating a page they're
so that's a smart thing when they're doing references they said always include the date
you see Microsoft doing like pretty heavy handed deals with companies like open AI and just this week with inflection.
I gotta presume that Apple gets their fair share of these people. ... it's quizzical to spend that much money to not necessarily be willing to compete on the human capital to not necessarily be in the market acquiring these businesses.
Not only are you not starting from zero, not only do you have the foundational models that are excellent and available in open source, you have probably the most prolific set of training data that has ever been created in the entire world to make these models kick ass.
30 billion, like not a couple of crumbs fall out of somebody's pocket. And so there's 50 million allocated to just like, you know, mucking around with Llama or mucking around with Mistral.
It's like Yahoo adding Google search, right? And then, by the way, on the heels of turning off cars and losing these antitrust issues in Europe,
It's akin to IBM in the 70s going to Microsoft and basically asking them to build the operating system for them. When you're such a dominant company in such a dominant position, but you abdicate your responsibility to innovate,
To be honest, I haven't read it and I don't really know like the odds of these things just because it seems like some of this stuff is so clearly political. And I think that these things have seasons to it in the sense that there are moments where these things are more likely to go in the favor of the company and more likely to go in favor of the government. The one thing I'll say is that these guys have been losing a fair number of these things. So they're kind of 50-50 in their fight with Epic
They are known for making what they call tuck-in acquisitions at Apple.
Oh, I think this is so powerful. I mean, it's incredible because we're measuring this progress in like, what, week over week? It feels like that. Yeah. I think the point that you should take away is that the most of these very difficult in, in, in penetrable job types for the average person. If you said to them, Hey, become a developer, that's like a complicated journey, right? It's just going to be now like a command line interface where you just kind of describe in English what you want to do.
airbnb is growing coinbase is growing uber's growing doordash is growing you know they would just stay private longer right stay private longer
At Facebook, there was a period where, and this was public, so I can tell you, we transferred a lot of our IP to Ireland at one moment, and there was a transfer payment and whatnot. And then a few years afterwards, when everybody realized, including us, and we had miscalculated, but when everybody realized the value of Facebook, that transfer payment did not seem correct. And it was a huge tax ARB that we had facilitated. Because all of that IP sitting inside of Ireland gets taxed at a very diff
studies this model and tries to replicate it for their own personal gain, even if that wasn't intentional here. So there's a whole set of issues that we've really cracked the egg here. We got to, we got to figure out how to unscramble.
It was supposed to be open. If this was open source and they took the 2 billion, I would actually not have much of a problem with it because we could all be looking at that mission and then Saks and myself and Friedberg and anybody who wanted to use that code could go in there and adapt it. And you know what? There are for profits, Apple and Meta, which are producing open source software. So if they're producing, Apple's pretty competent and Meta is super competent in this respect. They're able
Because the big thing that these guys did was because by creating this LPGP structure and these cap profits, it's clear that they were trying to avoid something. And the question is in the discovery, will everybody learn what it is that they were trying to avoid?
if OpenAI turns out to be this multi-hundred billion dollar behemoth, this will get figured out in court because there's just too much money at stake.
I think that all of those emotions matter less than the rule of law, which is his second point, which is the important point. Irrespective of whatever one email says or another email, it's not great for the US tax system if all of a sudden a big gaping loophole is identified and taken advantage of. I think that there's a huge economic incentive for the state of California, every other state where these open AI employees lived and have gotten equity and now have gotten paid. There's an incentive
if you see perplexity or anybody else clip off 50 basis points or 100 basis points of share and this thing is going straight down by 50 by the way unless cloud takes off
by the way developers by the way on grok just this past week in the queue the waitlist tripled now there's almost 10 000 developers that's a big deal oh that's crazy that's a great sign i think the most important north star metric for these developer platforms is basically that as goes the developers so goes the platform you can kind of count on some amount of pull through because some of those developers just statistically will land really important products they'll consume more apis they'll ju
the next leap forward was what jonathan saw which was hold on a second if you look at the chip itself that gpu substantially has not changed since 1999 in the way that it thinks about problem solving it has all this very expensive memory blah blah blah so he was like let's just throw all that out the window we'll make small little brains and we'll connect those little brains together and we'll have this very clever software that schedules it and optimizes it so basically take the chip and make i
they're going to be developers of all sizes and the people that came are literally companies of all sizes i saw some of the names of the big companies and they are the who's who of the
my thought today is that ai is more about proofs of concept and toy apps and nothing real i don't think there's anything real that's inside of an enterprise that is so meaningfully disruptive that it's going to get broadly licensed to other enterprises i'm not saying we won't get there but i'm saying we haven't yet seen that cambrian moment of monetization we've seen the cambrian moment of innovation and so that gap has still yet to be crossed and i think the reason that you can't cross it is th
our original version was really focused on image classification and convolutional neural nets like resnet that didn't work out we ran head first into the fact that nvidia has this compiler product called cuda and we had to build a high class compiler that you could take any model without any modifications
there's a lot of market cap for grok to gain by just being able to produce these things at scale which could be just an enormous outcome for us
the grok with the q chips turns out to be extremely fast and extremely cheap ... developers stress testing us and finding that we are meaningfully meaningfully faster and cheaper than any nvidia solution
it has the potential to be something very disruptive
we had no customers two months ago i'll just be honest and between sunday and tuesday we've just we're overwhelmed and i think like the last count was we had 3 000 unique customers come and try to consume our resources from every important fortune 500 all the way down to developers
in the case of a monopoly for example take google you can over earn for decades and it takes a very very long time for somebody to try to displace you we're just starting to see the beginnings of that with things like perplexity and other services that are chipping away at the google monopoly
what they convinced pc manufacturers back in the day was look have the cpu be the brain it'll do 90 of the work but for very specific use cases like graphics and video games you don't want to do serial computation you want to do parallel computation and we are the best at that and it turned out that that was a genius insight and so the business for many years was gaming and graphics but what happened about 10 years ago was we also started to realize that the math that's required and the processi
if you tie it together with what jensen said on the earnings call and you now see developers stress testing us and finding that we are meaningfully meaningfully faster and cheaper than any nvidia solution there's the potential here to be really disruptive and we're a meager unicorn right our last valuation was like a billion something versus nvidia which is now like a two trillion dollar company so there's a lot of market cap for grok to gain by just being able to produce these things at scale w
it is super set up to have a very good meet and beat guidance for the street which they'll eat up and all of the algorithms that trade the press releases will drive the price higher and all of this stuff will just create a trend upward i think the bigger question is if it's a four or five trillion dollar market cap in the next two or three years will it support a hundred trillion dollar economy because that's what you would need to believe
i think the revenue scale will continue for like the next two or three years probably for nvidia but the real question is what is the terminal value and it's the same thing that sac showed in that cisco slide people ultimately realized that the value was going to go to other parts of the stack the application layer and as more and more money was accrued at the application layer of the internet less and less revenue multiple and credit was given to cisco and that's nothing against cisco because t
the demand is clear it's the big guys with huge gobs of money and by the way nvidia is super smart to take it because they can now forecast demand for the next two or three quarters
in the case of nvidia what you're now starting to see is them over earn in a very massive way so the real question is who will step up to try to compete away those profits the old bezos quote right your margin is my opportunity and i think we're starting to see and you've mentioned grok who had a super viral moment i think this week but you're starting to see the emergence of a more detailed understanding of what this market actually means and as a result who will compete away the inference mark
but this is an example of where if you don't do this analysis properly gamestop was another where you misjudge or you sub analytically look at the actual share count and what's actually free floating you can get caught on the wrong side and these things can be very
like close maybe it's a b minus i'm gonna go b minus and unfortunately i'm not i can't grade it
Then you have companies like together AI, which basically just go and take venture money and wrap Nvidia GPUs. And you can debate what the advantage will be there, one could say, well, it's not really a huge advantage over time.
So who is in a position to do that? Amazon has announced that they have an inference and training solution. For training cerebris has announced a pretty compelling solution. Google obviously has TPU, then there's a handful of startups, including one that I helped get off the ground in 2016, that I funded called grok. All of those companies are in a position to build a tokens per second service.
So my refined thoughts today are sort of what my initial guess was, when we started talking about AI a year ago, which is the picks and shovels providers can make a ton of money. And the people that own proprietary data can make a ton of money. But I think open source models will basically crush the value of models to zero economically, even though the utility will go to infinity, the economic value will go to zero.
I think foundational models will have no economic value. I think that they will be an incredibly powerful part of the substrate. And they will be broadly available and entirely free. Wow. So if you think about that, any closed model that operates on the open internet is not very valuable. And any open source model that trains on the open internet will make that so. So that means that things like Google and Microsoft and Facebook and Amazon and all these startups have a deep economic incentive ac
So if you're looking at any economic value that has been captured up until today, if it has been captured by having a proprietary closed model trained on open data, that economic value will go away. And I think Google and Microsoft and Facebook and Amazon and all these startups have a deep economic incentive actually to make that so.
So who is in a position to do that? Amazon has announced that they have an inference and training solution.
Well, I mean, I think I said it before. I think that case studies have been written about how tilted the governance is in Snap. I think the point is that they basically have infinite to zero voting power over common shareholders. So there's no real feedback loop.
Not to say that it's not going to be a revenue generator, but I think that you could just as easily, frankly, instead of impacting Apple's revenues, you can probably go along the makers of SSRIs, pot, bumble and tinder, and you'll get to the same place economically.
I think the important thing to note is that Tesla put out a pretty important missive at the end of market close yesterday, which essentially said that expect a very different demand curve in Q1. And you have to understand that Tesla has done the best job of understanding supply demand and their pricing power and the pricing elasticity of their cars. And so the fact that they put this out to me says that we are now really in the belt tightening phase of this kind of like economic process.
That is the Zoho 2.0, right? That is the Salesforce 2.0. It's sort of this app, app store, common data bus kind of an idea that I think somebody will build.
So I'm starting this thing and I've been working on this idea for a little bit, but, and I've been experimenting with it with some of my companies, but then I was like, you know what, we should just do this. So the concept here is we're going to build this incubator. It's called 8090. I have a team. I have a bunch of developers offshore. And we are going to basically create a hit list of software that we think is relatively straightforward and mispriced and could be built much more efficiently i
i would say the same is probably true for nvidia the folks that have won up until today to maintain a multiple of market cap in this next year if that happens
half the revenue is consumers paying subscriptions the other half the revenue our enterprise is paying for essentially some version of aws yes but the problem is that version of aws is economically non-functional it's unsustainable it's way too expensive and it's way too slow ... if this industry is really going to be real it needs to be literally dirt cheap and as close to zero as possible the minute that that happens that revenue goes away so then they're just left with the subscription people
the open source models really proliferate proprietary models and closed models go under pressure and the existing economics of how you make money today will get reallocated
the latency right now amongst all these ai tools makes building production quality code absolutely impossible ... the actual cost of a million tokens on any of these platforms is economically untenable ... whether it's open ai it's extremely extremely expensive
I think the enterprise value of open ai goes down
starlink will go public
the problem is that version of aws is economically non-functional it's unsustainable it's way too expensive and it's way too slow
I think the enterprise value of open ai goes down... i think that capitalism would tell you that if these two things are true you should expect people to arbitrage that opening and so if you see cloud services come out that allow you to basically get millisecond latency batch size one on the one hand and second where you have pricing for a million tokens at sort of 10 20 cents those folks and they'll need to build their own custom hardware to do it but those folks will multiply the capability of
the biggest loser in business was the go woke community who tried to synthetically and artificially use all these social movements as a way to drive revenue and just got totally burned. So Disney, Bud, Target, and I think the statement from consumers is, look, just sell a product, stay in your lane, make a better and better product for us at lower and lower prices. And otherwise, just let the politicians and the voters decide social issues.
Satya Nadella. CEO of Microsoft. I just think the gross tonnage of market cap dollars he added in 2023 plus figuring out how to close Activision plus retaining maximum optionality with OpenAI is just a master class in heads down management.
And then the third is Tesla really consolidated its leadership in EVs and battery technology. And FSD.
I think SpaceX has really turned a corner. Starlink is really at scale. Starship looks like it's viable.
the rebasing of Twitter actually had an even more profound impact, I think, on Silicon Valley than it necessarily did on Twitter.
it's this research assistant on either side of you answering the questions. And this is how documentary films are made, right? Or, uh, or a book like yours or Malcolm's where you're trying to pull together themes that, you know, only a human previously could make these connections. And when you make
what does it materially prove nothing with respect to the body of law, it just goes to show that if you pick the right place to convene these trials, in the right format, you can give yourself a slightly better probability of winning. But the question is, what will you win? It's not clear to me what happens now, is there going to be the damages portion now of this trial? Is that what happens next?
if we look at that one gemini ultra 90 on this multiple choice test gemini pro 79 okay great chat gpt 87 so gemini was you know whatever it is a couple of gemini was a a student and gpt4 was a b plus student
they ripped out alexa's brain and they put our brain into it it literally just took an afternoon uh to be able to tap into our knowledge graph and and uh they took a video of it and they sent it to uh jeff bezos and i guess jeff sent an email with somebody saying who the hell are these guys why are they better than we are
the problem now for stripe is that the public comps dollar for dollar are off 50 which from the beginning of the year which then says that if you apply that rateably to its valuation they did around at 55 billion then the market clearing trade may be 25 to 30 billion now now 25 to 30 billion for stripe you're incinerating 70 billion dollars of equity value right and about five to ten billion dollars of actually painting capital so what does that do for silicon valley and for vcs i think it's goi
because of China's population woes, and because of, I think, some of these technological things that are sort of on the horizon, I believe that we're sort of at the edge of an era of abundance that will create a massive peace dividend, because a lot of the justifications for war go away.
Well, SoftBank has the D lever, right? They have a they have a very big problem, which is that they have this forget SoftBank Vision Fund for a second, but SoftBank itself is a telco operator that has ginormous piles of debt that they've used to finance the building of their business. And so when you have contraction, your core business, you become more and more at risk of breaching the covenants of all that debt, and or you just like run out of free cash flow, like all of these things really hu
the equivalent analogy, the equivalence in that analogy today is Nvidia, because they are the dominant pick and shovel provider.
the fact that disney has been decaying for the past year is more emblematic of the fact that they've gotten into this social culture war and half the population of america said we're not going to support your business like they did to butt light and i'm not adjudicating the rightness or wrongness of either bud light or disney but the answer is in the actual results the people are not walking into the store
the crazy thing about all of this is if you look at the the legal strategy of the ftc it's basically that they view themselves as a hammer and every deal particularly if it's done by big tech is a nail and so you know amazon roomba lawsuit facebook some rando little company lawsuit microsoft activision lawsuit and it's that emotional reactivity that takes away faith and trust that this organization is intelligent and sober and well run and that's the shame of it because if you actually look acro
all of the old legacy software companies x of salesforce have still not got to profitability so meaning the ones that went public in like the early teens are still sucking wind losing money
one of them nvidia is actually firing on all cylinders
and they're both giant products today um i think that you can definitely copy features into an existing product with new distribution but to invent a new product fully from scratch that's a carbon copy of something but again reels attaches onto instagram which is a unique use case right and so i think that again it goes back to you have these five or six established modes of social media that essentially are from large pieces of content to small that's probably the best organizing principle that
you know rage quitting twitter because you're not a fan of the product right now or elon isn't a successful long-term use case because all those people will eventually come back
as a standalone product I tend to think it's DOA for the most part unless again it invents something totally new that we're missing
what happens to companies like Apple or Facebook or Exxon who have race based programs to try to attract African American engineers or Hispanic chemists whatever the program is that you want to come up with will those get challenged and will those companies have to change and my friends thoughts on that were yes that those would also change and that's going to have private enterprise and how they approach this stuff and how DEI works and all of that stuff and frankly how ESG works because some o
if the United States can basically have a chip supply that comes from Europe and Mexico, now all of a sudden, the criticality of TSMC goes away. To wit, I published this tweet yesterday about Buffett and his trades in Japan, right, he bought these five trading companies. And so just a really novel carry trade that I've really fallen in love with just understanding it. But the code out to that is that when he did this, and going long Japan, what he actually also did was he delivered himself from
I just don't think that there's a lot of political support to visit this issue right now. And so unfortunately, I'm pretty skeptical that you're going to see any form of legislation pass. I unfortunately think that the SEC has by and large, put the entire sector into mate. And so I think that what Jason said is largely right, which is that it's going to force these companies to preserve enterprise value, to, to leave the United States and to jurisdictionally operate from a different place and to
I think Brian Armstrong is, is a really, really, really good entrepreneur. And I'm a really big fan of his.
I think there's two ways to look at this one is the conspiracy theorist way which you see a lot on Twitter, which is this idea that crypto is making all of these inroads as a replacement mechanism for fiat currency. And so governments are really now invested in trying to shut it down. I think that's largely untrue. And then there's the more simple basic reality, which is that there was one part of the SEC that frankly, didn't do the job that they were supposed to by either allowing a few of thes
Foreign reserves are up. These guys are banking US dollars like nobody's business.
legal super wizard for law firms yeah and my partners and i were debating it and what we thought of was well how much do you pay out of the 800 or thousand dollars an hour that you charge to harvey.ai maybe you're willing to pay five percent or ten percent but then the reality is that one of the most powerful things it does is is able to go into westlaw find all these cases and say yeah this is germane to the thing that you're working on right now that's a very useful thing but the n plus first
facebook's up 90 percent
facebook's up 90 percent
these companies have now transitioned to being cash cows
through just pure misallocation by starting projects that just are not large but consume large amounts of cash that would be the facebook vr example
facebook it was the core service that we built in the 2000s and then they acquired brilliantly right so i'm not saying that they didn't acquire well my point is that core organic innovation hasn't been there for a long time
if you look at google facebook microsoft and apple and ask yourself when was the last hugely disruptive thing that they've created you're hard pressed to find something that was even done in the 2010s ... the iphone for apple iphone was 2007
I use the example of stripe disrupting stripe by going to market with an equivalent product with one-tenth the number of employees at one-tenth the cost
you could replace china with japan and what happened with japan is that japan just hit a demographic wall not dissimilar to what china is about to hit in the next 15 or 20 years
it's not as if china is sitting pretty and smelling like roses either every major economy or trading block in the world is going to go through this at the same time
china has built a competitor to it called cips cips and china's been going around and signing folks up makes a ton of sense right hey listen if we're trading between each other let's just use that
the reason why china has had so much dominance as a trading partner and the reason why china's central bank has the largest amount of foreign u.s dollar reserves about three and a half trillion dollars is exactly because of the thing that you want to ignore in order to have this highfalutin intellectual conversation it is pegged to the u.s dollar and until it is unpegged in a free-floating currency we will never know what the real market clearing price is and just so china has been able to hold
Facebook doesn't want to just sit around and have all this traffic, go to chat GPT. They want to be able to enable Instagram users and WhatsApp users and Facebook users to interact through messenger or what have you.
if you look at amd and nvidia they've been getting paid for years they continue to get paid they probably will continue to get paid even more
she fought this knock down drag out case against meta for them buying a few million dollar like vr exercising app like it was the end of days
all this ticky tacky stuff which actually showed apple and facebook and amazon and google oh my god they don't know what they're doing so we're going to lawyer up
she doesn't see the forest from the trees amazon and roomba facebook and this exercise app but all of this other stuff goes completely unchecked
Or do you actually want 75% share where now all of these other competitors have been seeded? Well, you can decay business model quality and still remain exclusive if you just double the tap. And what you do is you put all these other guys on their heels because as we talked about, if you're paying publishers two times more than what anybody else is paying them. You'll be able to get publishers to say, hey, you know what, don't let those AI agents crawl your website because I'm paying you all thi
This year, this renegotiation for that deal could mean that Apple gets paid $25 billion for giving away that right to Google. So Google does all these kinds of deals. Last year, they spent, I think, $45 billion or so. So about 21%.
If you add it all up, what Satya said is true, which is even if all we do collectively as an industry is take 500 or 600 basis points of share away from Google. It doesn't create that much incremental cost for us, but it does create enormous headwinds and pressure for Google with respect to how they are valued and how they will have to get revalued.
the thing to keep in mind is apple had a moment like this and when apple went x growth they did the brilliant thing which is they said we're going to borrow heavily and we're going to return cash i may have posted this in the group chat to you guys by 2025 apple will have exceeded one trillion dollars of cash distributions
in the 1970s companies like microsoft and apple from the get-go had to be profitable
in the 1970s companies like microsoft and apple from the get-go had to be profitable
tesla has doubled in 30 you know 30 60 days a lot of the tech stocks like high beta stocks that we are all you know helping to build those companies have absolutely ripped 60 to 100 percent these are not healthy and normal moves
tesla was probably the poster child for this trade all the way down to like 108 dollars a share and it's effectively doubled in the last 30 days right
if you had done this chart many years ago, Amazon would not have really even been there. And over the last five years, they represent almost 12% of the entire market. And so it means that if you forecast it forward, they could be at 15 to 20% in a few years as well.
transparency around pricing to the market could be a good governor without having to go down the path of all this antitrust legislation after the fact. I think there is some good advice for regulators there. I think they should focus on anti-competitive tactics and like clarifying what those are,
I don't think this is going to work. The last thing I'll say about this is that if you think about what you should have done, if I were the US government, I would have actually focused on search. Because search is a monopoly for Google.
Google controls 26.5% of a market, 43.4% of that market is with a diverse group of others. Meta has 18.4% and Amazon has 11.7. This is not the type of pie chart you would see if you had a monopolist.
I think that this is a totally ill founded lawsuit. And I think it just shows more of the personal enmity and anger that some people in the US government has towards entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship than anything else.
They should go higher and steal away people from stability AI. And they should make a product that creates images on the fly when you have a subscription to getty images, which people do. And it should then pay royalties to the original source material and getty should then make sure that they're, uh, they have permission to do so.
Get the bag now. This might be the peak moment to sell before it becomes commoditized.
It does seem like this is the negative back channel is that this is a bag securing maneuver. Right.
the flip-flopping of open AI from a non-profit to a for-profit. ... Then raising money on an insane valuation. ... And then what's happening with this weird deal structure.
So chat GPT is the worst interpretation. Chat GPT created something to goose Microsoft earnings.
these like round tripping cloud deals, um, I think is going to result in some serious sec scrutiny, um, or just some scrutiny just to make sure it's clean,
open AI has essentially given Azure, their own Watson.
And I think Sam Altman kind of said that last week when you went to that thing, that this would be commodified in some way.
I mean, this is the classic, your margin is my opportunity. So Google's, uh, revenue comes from search. Microsoft doesn't need to be profitable on bang. They can be profitable on office and the windows franchises and their software platforms.
Beefing up the offering is great. Yeah. The problem comes in when money is, you know, making a circle, right? So suspicious. And that's where. So suspicious. Get involved and say, is this, are we, are you increasing the velocity of this just to, you know, increase the value of both organizations in a non-organic way?
And that might be incredibly high profits, uh, for Microsoft. So chat GPT is the worst interpretation. Chat GPT created something to goose Microsoft earnings.
This is then becomes the issue that we've been talking about with round tripping around tripping when one big company invests in another company. And then that other company gives them money back, according to reports, the revenue being booked by the work being done by chat GPT is Microsoft cloud revenue. Um, and so I think that that is now become codified to, to use the word from the previous discussion, uh, we're now getting some, um, uh, some feedback on that. So you have like Microsoft payin
Um, and now here we see it, open AI has essentially given Azure, their own Watson.
I, I think the choice will be either stability chat GPT and, um, you know, Facebook and other Google, other places, if they want this technology, um, they will do partnerships with those companies or those companies will embed it in theirs.
I think that in order for Elon to have complete financial flexibility and do what he needs to do. And, you know, he talked about this on our pod about the difficulties and the dangers of margin loans and all of that stuff. Yes. He's going to create breathing room for himself. Ah, this is the simplest and most obvious way for him to do it. It'll give him a ton of more dry powder.
SpaceX is clearly just crushing on all cylinders. And they're really the only game in town with respect to launch capability.
They have been incredible as a mememic machine. If they see some great innovation, they copy it, and they iterate on it better than the person who created it.
There seemed to have been entitlement up and down the stack. I want you to talk for a second, we know the entitlement of the employee class, Google created it, right? Hey, come to the campus, we're going to create a college like environment. We have a money printing machine that the world has never seen before. Therefore, what does it matter if we overhire? We're Google, we've literally created a machine that prints diamonds, we don't need to look at the cost of salaries, right?
as you said in the early part of the show when we're debating like 2023 like this is part of the we have to be more efficient we got to do more with less
yeah you go to disneyland yeah you got marvel you got star wars you got pixar you can get your friends into disneyland you can throw a birthday party at disneyland for any of your friends you
I would like to see him get back to landing rockets on barges, getting to Mars. Let's get it. Let's get it. Get it.
This is a man who has essentially proven that he can bend the laws of physics on behalf of humanity. He's done it twice. Once in electric cars and once in rocketry.
And can he fix it? I think so. Can he pull it all out? Sure. Is it just putting himself under an enormous amount of pressure that he could have avoided? Somewhat, yes.
We saw yesterday that he had to sell another $3.8 billion of Tesla stock. Why is that? It's because this transaction, which was very tight to get done, probably required lots of margin.
if you did invest at the time of that wired story in 2012 in tesla yeah you would have had a 245x so they had about a 2.9 billion dollar market cap in october of 2012 and they got a 710 billion dollar market cap today
zuckerberg has these super shares like he his zuckerberg's like great great great grandchildren are gonna control this company based on The way he structured the way he talks about it
read this in google's founders letter as well does that not apply any founders at google don't even show up at the company why do they have to have super voting control they don't probably even know what's going on inside the company it might talk about that argument so no no i just i just want
The internal team is a bunch of rich people, coastal elites, dare I say, who are like, well, why would anybody not pay $10 a month to save one hour a month of commercials?
I find the data set that I'm going through, I'm sifting through. It's just so cluttered with bad content. It's like, um, yeah, it's like somebody threw 10 diamonds into a garbage dumpster. You're just like, I know there's 10 diamonds in here. Why can't I find them?
I think more metrics being able to understand your followers more. That would be good too.
All right. And I had asked our, uh, producers there, Molly on the fly to show us Apple's revenue plotted against their operating expenses, uh, in their most recent quarter. And you see a similar story. So the great companies in the world, it seems, uh, Tesla, and, uh, you know, here, uh, and thanks to our friends at Y charts, uh, for providing us, uh, a free account. I probably should pay for it instead of giving this free ad. In fact, let's do that. Y charts for that. Yeah. What am I doing here
what you see there is, uh, essentially a hardware business that's got incredible, uh, margin power, the blue on this chart. If you're looking at it, the 6.8 billion compare is the operating expense that's selling, uh, general and administrative expenses. And then you have the total revenue. And what is happening here is they've been able to control costs while increase revenue. And as that happens, uh, you become a money printing machine.
I think this is, you know, when you have a culture of no ads, and we build stuff, people want so much, they're willing to pay. It's very hard for the management team to communicate that to their internal team. The internal team is a bunch of rich people, coastal elites, dare I say, who are like, well, why would anybody not pay $10 a month to save one hour a month of commercials?
It's like, it's like saying they've made like a hodgepodge of tools. And really, yeah, that when you have spam in the system, when you have multi people with multiple accounts, it's just kind of hard to get through it. Like I find the data set that I'm going through, I'm sifting through. It's just so cluttered with bad content. It's like, um, yeah, it's like trying to find a diamond in like a bunch of garbage, like somebody threw like 10 dot Twitter is to me like somebody threw 10 diamonds into
I had talked about this previously. Like imagine if you could, with your followers, send a tweet, uh, or a DM to just your followers in Palm Springs. Let's say you were going to Palm Springs. You wanted to do a meetup and you could do a tweet. Hey, Palm Springs friends. Uh, I'm DMing you. It's Molly. You follow me. You know, I'm going to be in Palm Springs, uh, speaking at this conference. If you want to join us, boom, here's the link, right? Or let's say this week in startups wanted to do that.
So the great companies in the world, it seems, uh, Tesla, and, uh, you know, here, uh, and thanks to our friends at Y charts, uh, for providing us, uh, a free account.
what is happening here is they've been able to control costs while increase revenue. And as that happens, uh, you become a money printing machine.
And so what's happened is journalists have became tribal, they get big followings, they give spicy takes, they pick a side, and then their compensation follows it. And that's why New York Times said, Can we all stop on Twitter? And they literally put an edict out.
I was trying to build the growth team. This is the team that became very famous for getting to a billion users and, you know, building a lot of these algorithmic insights.
The average premium in an M&A transaction in the public markets is about 30%. So, and I think the fair value of Twitter is around 32 to 35 bucks a share. So, you know, it's not like he is massively, massively overpaying. And so, you know, I would just sort of keep that in the realm of the possible. So like, if you take $35 as the midpoint, fair value is really 4550. So, yeah, he paid 20% more than he should have, but he didn't pay 100% more. So it's not as if you can't make that equity back as a
The best off in all of this are the Twitter shareholders. They're getting an enormous premium to what that company is worth today in the open market. And so I think this deal is going to close is probably going to close in the next few weeks.
The next thing is they're going to go after Dyson. Okay. And then once they do that, they're going to put chips in these things. And all of a sudden, they're going to know exactly what Jason said. What are you eating?
Apple, Facebook, Google, maybe a little bit Microsoft, are the most sensitive to valuation, because they are the most widely held, right? These are the, these are the, you know, the equivalent of US treasuries, in the equity markets, the safest, most predictable, safe haven in times of stress, if you want to own big, chunky cash flow generating businesses that, you know, are relatively unassailable, you couldn't pick four better businesses than those. And so the fact that they see enough in the
the investments that one makes in this period will probably be the best for many, many years to come, because they'll have the most asymmetric upside. And that was true in 2008, nine and 10. It was true in, you know, 2002, three and four, you I mean, you're talking incredible companies, just in those two periods, think about this Atlassian, Tesla, Uber, Google, Airbnb, Uber, Instagram, WhatsApp, incredible businesses that have created tremendous value.
these companies, Apple, Facebook, Google, maybe a little bit Microsoft, are the most sensitive to valuation, because they are the most widely held, right? These are the, you know, the equivalent of US treasuries, in the equity markets, the safest, most predictable, safe haven in times of stress, if you want to own big, chunky cash flow generating businesses that, you know, are relatively unassailable, you couldn't pick four better businesses than those. And so the fact that they see enough in th
these companies, Apple, Facebook, Google, maybe a little bit Microsoft, are the most sensitive to valuation, because they are the most widely held, right? These are the, these are the, you know, the equivalent of US treasuries, in the equity markets, the safest, most predictable, safe haven in times of stress, if you want to own big, chunky cash flow generating businesses that, you know, are relatively unassailable, you couldn't pick four better businesses than those. And so the fact that they s
when companies like Facebook really do this, and you know, like, if you think about it one way, the financial markets have always had this thing that we have called a fed put, what does that mean? A put is essentially the right to sell something. And what market participants have always known for the last decade is that if things got very hairy, if there was uncertainty in the market, the Federal Reserve would, and they have consistently stepped in to create a buyer of last resort. And so it alw
Well, it definitely is the end of an era. I think it is sort of like the, the end of this phase of big tech, where you had this, you know, unfettered growth, where these business models were largely unassailable, and they, you know, we're really just fighting to grow into their valuation and generate more revenue to justify where they, where they traded at. And now it's this next phase where they have to operate more like a cash cow business. And so, you know, it's an acknowledgement that the gr
and then what did google do that youtube would have never been able to do to sax's point they built an engine that could automatically recognize copyright content and pull it down before it was made publicly available
they made billions and billions of dollars of investments into that business for years before it started to make money
i think youtube's probably worth what 300 400 500 billion dollars at this point
if you look at all of the stories around figma one of the most powerful things they did was basically allow people to use this for free effectively forever yeah bottom-up sass yeah and the problem with adobe is like that's a business model disruption that they could not afford in the public markets because if you condition a set of institutional investors to be expecting seven to eight billion dollars of annual free cash flow and all of a sudden you're willing to torch it to take a quarter of th
he basically the profile basically said that he was spending months and months going from office to office all around the world meeting customers sitting with customers reading trouble tickets that's what he would do you know reading help desk tickets about the product on vacation whenever you see a a ceo that is so customer obsessed typically there's good outcomes
huge kudos to the ceo and the team and the investors what an enormous win for all those folks that's awesome it keeps silicon valley kind of going right and that's just awesome to see these kind of big wins
make sure that version of x is going after a company like adobe versus a company like microsoft because it's much much much easier to build value
i think at some point it would be absolutely fantastic when dar is done doing his great work and dar has been doing a great job if at some point dar wanted to move on for uber and cloud kitchens to merge and for the king to return the return of the king and i would be there for it uh that would be an absolutely glorious moment if it became uber cloud kitchens and travis was ceo again in a couple years uh that would be absolutely fantastic as an outcome
dar has been doing a great job
now when you look at those businesses yes they did lose money but when if i say the word to you get a uh cab ride you say uber and i say get a desk share you say we work i say ride you say uber i say desk you know shared office you say we work the amount of money that was put into these brands uh has paid off massively and it will continue to pay off i believe that we work will continue to be like the gold standard in office sharing and i bet you all the money put in will be taken out at some po
so yes absolutely they could have uh they could have and not only could they have they did it was a really bummer of a time from 2008 to 2012 and people were not throwing tons of money and the tons of money came in that 2012 to 2022 period maybe 2015 is uh to 2020 is when it was kind of peaking so uh you absolutely could do it
i think it's fair to say that the the senate intelligence committee is going to haul twitter and have like a closed door meeting
it's like you had a government come to a company that's based in america and it's not the united states government that did it and basically said we need you to place an agent of our intelligence services inside of your company and it seems like they were like okay where do you want them to sit
the lawsuit really boils down to one very specific clause which is the pinnacle question at hand which is there is a specific performance clause that elon signed up to... and that specific performance clause says that twitter can't force him to close at 54 20 a share and i think the the issue at hand at the delaware business court is going to be that because twitter is going to point to all of these you know gotchas and disclaimers that they have around this bot issue as their cover story and i
the most problematic thing that he points out is the following and this is a quote from his complaint he said twitter quote already doing a decent job excluding spam bots and other worthless accounts from its calculation of mdow at best he's alleging that twitter omitted details not that it lied directly
only want to run this fund over three years instead of two they're not thinking that they're like i want to keep going out because i think their business model works by taking as much oxygen in the room as possible which means to be actively fundraising always that's it's tied it's true of blackstone it's true of apollo it's true of carlisle it's true of kkr any of these publicly traded investment managers they live and die by their ability to constantly be raising funds which implicitly means y
while every other fund has a five-year investment cycle too including ahs
you have to understand the Andreessen business model and recent horowitz business model is to become blackstone but for technology you have like 30 billion aum now right which is still you know a drop in the bucket and something like that so if you look at blackstone right trillion blackstone is a hundred plus billion dollar market cap company right built on three pillars credit private equity and real estate you can make the argument that technology is near is as important as those three catego
It's like the lazy man's layoff is what it really is. That's kind of what gentleman's means.
every time i say something it's like every other comment is about a stock it's about a crypto thing that they want you to click on and so you know this last month i've started to experiment with turning comments off and it's been the best because i can still communicate out it gets the same reach millions of people will see what i have to say but i don't have to deal and all of the other people that follow me theoretically for useful information don't have to deal with all of the
the bot issue is really real like how many accounts are there which have like 20 or 30 followers that just spew vitriol either positive
you buy it you're like oh my this is incredible and then it's goodbye this thing is sitting in the garage
if you just give them a capex subsidy that's a one-time effect that helps you in a moment it doesn't help your business
the rational capitalist decision is to offshore manufacturing for intel yes it is irrational for them from a business perspective
I make a ton of money yeah this is where it all comes from right I make a ton of money I have no better ideas of how to do it including theoretically building a chip factory so I'm going to go to the government for a handout
By some estimates over 90% of startups will go out of business in year one. That's why Microsoft created the Microsoft for startups founders hub. This program provides founders at any stage with up to six figures in resources, I kid you not, you're gonna get up to $150,000 in Azure credits, based on your stage and size, you can get free access to get hubs enterprise tier. And you're gonna get technical advice from experts at Azure and the Microsoft cloud, you get one to one mentorship from their
I went there and I offered to bring Google Loon, myself and Google, we offered to bring internet access to the entire country, like guaranteed internet access. This was like five years ago. And we set up an entity and the government tried to do the right thing and grant some spectrum. And instead of sort of like fast tracking this and allowing this project to become a reality, there was an enormous amount of infighting that essentially said that we were trying to steal the license or we stole th
i don't think circle is part of that and circle is one of the the good actors but even the good actors need to make every edge case very clear
microsoft created the microsoft for startups founders hub this program provides founders at any stage with up to six figures in resources i kid you not you're gonna get up to 150 000 in azure credits based on your stage and size you can get free access to github's enterprise tier and you're gonna get technical advice from experts at azure and the microsoft cloud you get one-to-one mentorship from their mentor network and exclusive benefits and discounts from companies like open ai and the best p
What same day delivery or next day delivery has done this. The whole concept of two day delivery is like two days. I'm outraged when I'm in Tahoe and it takes two days or three days. I'm like, what I need a new pair of socks. And you're saying I have to wait two days.
I mean, when did Obi-Wan actually take out his lightsaber, right? It's like, we want to see Obi-Wan and where's, where's Hayden? You know, like he's supposed to be here. Like they cast him. They made a big deal of sending him on the tour. Like we still haven't seen him.
you can't be green and then have a billion extra cables produced, you know, like just do the right thing independent of all of the earlier cables,
Incredible. Yeah, it's just pure profit profit.
this really is a law specifically designed for Apple.
this is why I always felt like, you know, Google, Amazon, and Apple, were the eventual buyers of Uber, Lyft, and DoorDash, and Postmates. At some point, one of those companies would say, you know what, they get a little frisky, like, Amazon's the obvious one. But Google and Apple are the non obvious ones, but pretty sticky. You know, these delivery apps are pretty darn sticky.
PayPal obviously had that as well.
terrible because what they said was our e right our earnings right are not modeled accurately right and so that's the risk that you now have to take to every company
but these are disastrous calls you know facebook's had a couple in its lifetime but snap consistently probably once every 18 months will do this anyways the thing just completely implodes the stock implodes by 48 or something and then it you know rolls over to companies like facebook and google who then are off eight or ten percent
my point in telling you this story is that if you think facebook and google just as an example again are cheap at 10 times well you better hope that the earnings are right because if the earnings are actually wrong that's actually 27 times and 19 times you know i'm making these numbers up to give you the example because the earnings are fundamentally wrong so that's the risk now that's left in the market in my opinion that could take it much much lower is if that you know all of this slowdown re
but these are disastrous calls you know facebook's had a couple in its lifetime but snap consistently probably once every 18 months will do this anyways the thing just completely implodes the stock implodes by 48 or something and then it you know rolls over to companies like facebook and google who are then off eight or ten percent
No, and it came from his dad. And they have a super complicated relationship. And so it was like the one person where you couldn't have necessarily guaranteed what would come out of Errol's mouth. And it was still so supportive of Elon.
Um, it is like, you know, uh, that is the idea that you build, um, basically the ability to do orbital cargo, take all those profits.
I think Sundar has now got that moment where I think he should just ignore the markets and ignore the stock price, and maybe lose 10 billion a year, instead of 4 billion on the cloud computing.
that actually is direction correct i mean uber uh airbnb and others collected investors and it was very clear if you invested in uber you weren't going to invest in lyft and vice versa if you had invested in lyft you were never going to be on team uber
Well, they did set this thing up with out founder authority.
The good thing with Netflix and Disney, though, is that they're going to be very clear examples of the business impact of getting distracted.
In all of this fighting now, internally inside of Disney, not only are they going to lose essentially a fiefdom inside of Florida, but it's going to have repercussions with respect to taxes, with respect to debt, with respect to the quality of the service they can deploy. And that'll eventually flow through the business, and that'll be measurable by investors.
well you it there's an option it has enough traction that spammers are drawn to it so i put it on
I guarantee you if Elon controlled Twitter, it would be 100 times more sustainable, delightful, less toxic for people who are currently being brigaded.
They literally in a weekend could solve the bot problem. They could solve the brigading problem.
A fantastic change because as you just astutely pointed out Molly, the algorithm is not designed with, um, society, freedom of speech, uh, or anything in that realm benefit of society.
And that's why Microsoft created the Microsoft for Startups Founders Hub. This hub provides founders at any stage with up to six figures in resources. Wait until you hear about this ridiculous list of perks. You're going to get up to 150,000 in Azure credits based on your stage and size. You're going to get technology benefits like free access to GitHub's enterprise tier technical advice from experts at Azure and Microsoft Cloud super helpful one to one mentorship from their mentor network, plus
I think it's worth looking at why Twitter might be dying. Like, I still use Twitter a fair amount. But my usage has certainly declined.
businesses you know they do arguably better in chaos and google certainly is that like whatever
when you think in the public tech markets what is a reliable must own company well i would put snowflake in the list of these must own um high growth software businesses
I think this is a good wake up call for Apple. ... So if you want to beat Spotify, I am dead serious, podcasting, camera, podcasting, microphone, lighting kit, and then all podcasting hosting and, uh, storage of the files free.
You want me to log in a second time to something else?
I remember when Netflix first started, they were buzzing around and Amazon, when they started video, they were buzzing around the web show podcast community. Like you'd see them at events, they were talking to people, but I think they just wanted to do the Oscar high end stuff.
And I do think that those two places, Netflix and HBO max are going to be like the new stuff. And then Disney will be the mining for gold.
there's no doubt in my mind that they could get this average revenue per user up at least 50%, probably double.
Disney Plus customers are getting a heck of a deal.
Disney Plus, which is an extraordinary product that if you have kids, you basically are going to have this until they are no longer kids, at a very minimum.
I believe Netflix and Disney, all destined to have a half a billion paid subscribers globally at some point.
I think they're getting more audacious and I think it has to do with globalization as well.
Disney announced their earnings for Q1 2022 after the bell yesterday and the stock popped as much as 5% in the early window after a 34% increase in revenue and a 37% increase in Disney Plus subscribers.
Amazon last night basically said, Yeah, there's some, you know, toughness in the system, but we think it's sort of like, you know, reasonably achievable. And they're past it. And so it seems like the bigger companies who have influence were able to manage through it
Apple and Tesla basically said, it's kind of reasonably well managed, particularly on the chip side, and we see the whole thing easing q4 q1 of next year
everybody who's in the venture community who's jealous of them getting 7% of a company for 100 grand.
I will come out in the coming months, and I'll announce, we have a better deal than Y Combinator.
with Y Combinator, with them doing like this $375,000 blind bet, like we had done that previously, I think we influenced them. And now I'm looking at it going wait a second. Okay, now they're making that guaranteed.
competitors of people they've already invested in. They do it on the regular. So the evidence is different. Now, if you look at Hacker News, if you consider Hacker News, the YC alumni social news site, it's like a subreddit of YC founders. That's what it is. It's 70, 80, 90% YC founders, they all know each other. It doesn't say Y Combinator on the site, really, except for the URL. But you can be sure the mods, it's run by YC, it's controlled by YC. So yes, anything with Stripe. Now, is it coordi
Now why Combinator? Actually, it's kind of false why Combinator wanted to accept in the second time why Combinator bets on all kinds of conflicting people. In fact, that's created a little bit of controversy. So if you're Airbnb or Stripe, and 20 different people come in who want to compete with Airbnb, Stripe that why Combinator is going to accept you. And if you create the why the companies in outside the US that compete with Airbnb and Stripe, they'll bet on you as well. And that has been a p
YouTube, you used to reach all your followers and subscribers all the time, then they decide, you know, how many of your subscribers you show up on their main feed, right.
Stripe has the inside line, they come speak at YC, they offer them probably special deals. And YC partners encourage them because they own 6% of the companies where the 100 billion, it's a $6 billion position for Y Combinator. It's probably one of their biggest, if not the biggest most meaningful position along with Airbnb. Therefore, everything in that world is going to lean towards it.
They want to own more shares of Stripe. They got to buy a tiny taste in the series B. Now they want to put more in the C and D with their late stage fund. They don't want to piss off the brothers. Therefore, they don't do that.
If you invested in Stripe, you're picking them over other competitors. This is a pretty pragmatic, non controversial strategy, but it does, in fact, act like a blocker.
I can set up a stripe and do it on my website.
Yeah, and for me, it seems very likely if you look at the success of FaceTime and iMessage, you know, they may not be comfortable with running a social network at scale and all the chaos that that would bring to the Apple ecosystem. But small groups of people, it could be quite delightful. I think about, you know, my iMessage groups, I think about my FaceTime groups, right? And then you think about photo groups, they're all kind of melding into private social networks. Imagine you're in your iMe
In 2019, I wrote in my annual letter, there's a section called the tightening of the regulatory noose and meaning it was a framework for how to basically dismantle big tech. And element number one of that was a changing regulatory landscape. And it's really incredible to see it in front of our eyes.
maybe Google shouldn't have 45% EBITDA margins. Maybe in a really competitive society, they would only have 18% and that's actually better net net for the system.
I still think this Microsoft Activision deal on balance gets done, because if you take the absolute values away from it, the reality is that it's an adjacent part of Microsoft's core business.
Or the counterfactual is maybe you YouTube would have gone out of business because of the lawsuits and the bandwidth bills. From the inside, my friend rule off was the person who did that deal. And so, you know, just based on the best deal memo ever, best deal memo ever. Yeah, pretty good one. If you look at, you know, the YouTube deal, you know, they were in such a huge lawsuit at the time, the money, the smart money predicted it was going under, because of the bandwidth bills, which were signi
If you look at, you know, the YouTube deal, you know, they were in such a huge lawsuit at the time, the money, the smart money predicted it was going under, because of the bandwidth bills, which were significant.
But one of the also things that I thought was crazy, Molly, is when you have big companies come in, Walmart and Amazon and Kroger, their entire business model is to drive prices down. That is the business model, whether it's Amazon basics or their house brands.
I just did a basic chart. I just did a search and hit Google images of like grocery store market share. Sam's Club Walmart has 21%. And this is a little bit old. I think it's a 2019 chart. Kroger, 10%. Costco, 5%. Albertsons, 4.9%. Yada, yada, yada.
Apple's market cap, almost 3 trillion. Disney market cap, 287 billion. I think Apple has 200 billion in cash.
Apple could just buy Disney at any point in time if they were allowed to.
Apple could just buy Disney at any point in time if they were allowed to.
I mean, the thing is with the amount of cash they have, they could buy another company. There's always been this idea that Apple and Disney would merge. Mm hmm. If we didn't have, you know, the issues around antitrust, an Apple Disney merger at this point in time would be extraordinary.
and let's say they go to $10, they will have price of power. They'll probably go up a little bit. Then they'll be making 3 billion a month, 36 billion a year.
if you were watching the Mandalorian and they said, here's one of a hundred thousand first Brogu's, uh, the baby Yoda's. Oh my God.
I think Disney is the best thing that'll ever happen to Disney is going direct because they'll have everybody's credit card. And for the first time, they'll have a direct relationship with their actual audience.
Disney's way over a hundred million.
Disney for 10 or $15 a month, I think people would pay three times that for the product.
New York Times is doing this to hit their goal of 10 million subs by 2025. If they had 10 million subs in 2025 paying, you know, 100 bucks a year, you know, it's a billion dollars a year in revenue. Pretty great.
But the New York Times looks at it and goes, well, we can reduce our churn. We already have subscribers.
both that stripe will have an incredible ipo and that a lot of these kami crypto projects will go to zero
i'm also fading implicitly friedberg's pick of stripe but my biggest business loser for 2022 is visa and mastercard and traditional payment rails and the entire ecosystem around it
amazon earlier this year nick maybe you can post this decided to just shut visa off in the uk oh yeah now amazon is not going to do something like that in my opinion unless it's a test of what they can do all around the world
let's take a you know an example like a shopify 100 billion dollar market cap but by no means is it a trillion dollar market cap their success comes from enabling you know arming the rebels and so i'm a huge fan of these enabling this enabling layer for small businesses both offline and online
we're looking for the digital wallet, Coinbase, Square's Cash App, PayPal's Venmo, less so.
or if you bet on airbnb or you bet on uber when nobody else did you just all of a sudden get some disproportionate amount of credit for the founder and their team crushing it right it's like oh you know what you saw it before everybody else and it's like well i actually placed you know 16 bets as a sequoia scout i think 700k total and 16 bets and yeah like four of them five of them you know became worth over 100 million famously but like that is the model in what we do it worked out okay uh you
at the open angel forum when travis presented uber three of us invested and 19 didn't uh mark susten wrote a famous blog post about
sell my shares in square or uber or you know com.com or robinhood no i still believe in these companies
i would say airbnb uber coinbase uh robin hood now i'm in two of those four names but that's what i do for a living
i would put airbnb uber coinbase uh robin hood now i'm in two of those four names
sell my shares in square or uber or you know com.com or robinhood no I still believe in these companies like is there a better place for me to put my money no these companies are fantastic so I stick with them
i would put airbnb in there i put uber in there door dash is pretty overvalued uh you could put lift in there as a takeout candidate but i don't like buying this number two so i would say airbnb uber coinbase uh robin hood now i'm in two of those four names but that's what i do for a living
i would have put slack in there they're not they got sold
put it into google disney facebook microsoft google you know those big names that we know 10 years from now the companies in all likelihood netflix going to be around be valuable have some giant consumer base so your money should go up greater than the inflation who knows you know long term
and put it into google disney facebook microsoft you know those big names that we know 10 years from now the companies in all likelihood netflix going to be around be valuable have some giant consumer base so your money should go up greater than the inflation who knows you know long term but i like to think in 10 year
put it into google disney facebook microsoft google you know those big names that 10 years from now the companies in all likelihood netflix going to be around be valuable have some giant consumer base so your money should go up greater than the inflation
if everything goes up amazon will go up more than kmart walmart sears and if the stock market goes down amazon won't go down that much but these ones will go down a lot
over the last 10 years you would have made a lot of money by being long amazon and short a basket of traditional commerce companies offline commerce
you can very comfortably short apple facebook amazon netflix and be long microsoft google so as a spread tree right right it's the most it's the best risk parity trade on the internet right now
i think the best trade on the best trade on the internet the most obvious simple money-making trade is long microsoft google short big tech short the rest of big tech short ibm
the classic example is google versus yahoo yahoo yahoo had a beautiful directory driven business but when larry and sergey really larry invented page rank and then invented that first version of a google search index as we saw it play out over the next 10 or 15 years it was impossible for yahoo to really invest the technology the technical capital necessary to catch up with google and every day and every week and every year as freeberg talked about last week those technical gains compound and co
his initial trade was long google short facebook and that trade basically was at parity which meant that the long and the short cancelled each other out for about the last four years until the last year it completely blew out and returned about 80 85 percent
the safest company on the internet today is google because they're both a platform company and to the extent that they're at risk at being an app company the risk is to apple but because they pay apple so much for search they're inoculated and so in many ways google is the safest and it's also as we've said before the purest money-making machine on the internet
i think the best trade on the best trade on the internet the most obvious simple money-making trade is long microsoft google short big tech short the rest of big tech short ibm
i'm still long microsoft and google and short the rest of big tech so i'm fine with it
They're the standard, everybody knows that. And we know that Stripe has a great CEO
according to low to me uh they estimated that facebook twitter youtube and snapchat quote lost 12 of revenue in the third fourth quarters or 9.85 billion i'm not sure how they get to that financial times notes that may be conservative they also know google is not as impacted which is interesting now why is google not impacted pretty obvious if you think about it google you type a word in a box and the word is typically what you're looking for right you don't search for something you're not looki
youtube twitter and snapchat are you know minor players in this huge advertising machine
facebook twitter youtube and snapchat will lose about 10 billion dollars in revenue uh in half of 2021 due to apple's new privacy changes
according to the financial times article twitter ads quote rely more on context and branding than on tracking consumers mobile habits so twitter's ad sales rose 41 last quarter uh so they don't seem to be as impacted by this that directionally makes sense when they say they rely more on context and branding than on tracking consumers mobile habits you ever see that when you load twitter uh whatever the big movie is that weekend whatever the big tv show on streaming is so dune or you know the lat
facebook twitter youtube and snapchat quote lost 12 of revenue in the third fourth quarters or 9.85 billion
in our first story today apple's privacy features that you've heard about from their ios 14.5 update are costing according to a third-party service facebook twitter youtube and snapchat about 10 billion dollars in combined lost revenue in the second half of 2021 this is a story from the financial times if you don't remember apple introduced app tracking transparency back in april as part of their ios 14.5 update i covered that in episode 1204 if you want to go deep basically iphone users are opt
google is not as impacted which is interesting now why is google not impacted pretty obvious if you think about it google you type a word in a box and the word is typically what you're looking for right you don't search for something you're not looking for type in volvo you're not looking for chocolate chip cookies and if you're typing chocolate chip cookie recipes you're probably not looking for a volvo facebook and youtube create a psychographic profile of you based on your behavior google has
google bought you know the big ai company deep mind back in the day it wasn't that they wanted to win at chess or go those are just you know shiny little pr stunts what they really wanted to do was make the ad network smarter and give you better ads target them better so the same amount of inventory would make more money that's known as efficiency right and that's why the money printing machines of google and facebook have done so well
the big two where you know the majority of advertising occurs on the internet are obviously facebook and google
so is apple's uh focus on privacy bad faith no it's a feature if you look at vpns duck duck go uh all the different privacy related browsers out there vpns and other software people using email relays consumers actually care now consumers are starting to care and it went from being a very niche thing to care to being something that uh now a broader group of people want their privacy back and apple is brilliant for doing this if facebook really wants to get ahead of this i've been saying this for
the next compute platform apple is betting on is ar that's why facebook is now absolutely trying to beat apple at ar and vr that is the big battle we'll see in the next five years
so all of this comes from an ad tech company i've never heard of called low to me l-o-t-a-m-e and they note that advertisers are responding by cutting spending so we knew this would happen this would be a big tailwind for apple and their ad network because apple does sell ads to promote apps it would be a headwind against these large ad networks
apple's privacy features that you've heard about from their ios 14.5 update are costing according to a third-party service facebook twitter snapchat and youtube about 10 billion in combined lost revenue in the second half of 2021 this is a story from the financial times it's a very big deal it's a very intricate
Then if you look at something like Helium, that's completely about building a large distributed, you know, connection of, of on ramps to the internet. So internet connectivity. So those are three completely different ideas with three completely different paths to success. If to invest in those tokens, you, you have to believe in three totally different sets of things.
founders plus technology can change the world and you did so we're thankful for that
now that tesla has done this and succeeded um it is now inevitable that the ice engine will be retired and and we will be a hundred percent electric in the next decade or two
it just shows what this combination of excellence from tesla and the product combined with a country that takes it seriously
you literally had executives from the corporate office on the line delivering cars i mean literally people who were in accounting were there delivering model threes to customers just to keep the company solvent
and let's face it that was just a game changer in terms of luxury and who could be a potential customer
the fear uncertainty and doubt that was being directed at you and and tesla was insane and you know we're driving the cars 150 200 miles and telling people look it works and they're literally saying nobody will ever buy an electric car
if you're a private company like amazon who just announced that they will give you free college they're still a bad company and and this is the example of this intellectual rigidity that doesn't actually see the forest from the trees
i think that the the the the folks that you know uh were really up in arms still have uh one small straw in the fight which is that if these guys don't achieve their goals they'll point to this as one of the reasons why but... i think if brian then goes and delivers a couple of knockout quarters in a couple of knockout years then um you know what he will be able to say definitively which no one can refute is we leave our politics at the door we define our okrs and then we go and we build things
a lot of the usual suspects you might imagine to be competitors, for example, GitHub, or, you know, Google or Amazon, people wouldn't trust them to be vendor independent
But there's another thing that we saw in my co founder had been at Google before. Now, Google also has a ton of code, 10s of 1000s of developers every single day adding more code. But they have this secret weapon, they have this internal Google for code, and they even had that, you know, more than 10 years ago. And so every Google developer is constantly using their internal Google for code to find existing code to reuse to fix problems to onboard to understand code. And if you quit Google, a lo
in the absence of the silicon that we need from tsmc and a couple of other manufacturers there we have zero capability here
i think what circle is doing here is they are really going to regulators and saying we know you're going to have um strong regulation in this space we would like to regulate ourselves we would like to go beyond what you're doing and then put that directly as a counter example to tether and imagine if tether gets banned imagine if tether uh faces a doj uh investigation and it actually all comes public and they're guilty of three or four more things which i think is possible if not probable if tha
can lead to not just a radically more efficient but also a safer more resilient financial system
all usdc is doing here is taking tether's original promise and fulfilling it
circle is moving their reserves to be a hundred percent backed by cash and short duration us treasuries boom they want to become a federally chartered bank
The stable coin circle is cleaning up their reserves to move to a perfect dollar for dollar representation of their stable coin, unlike tether. And this is a major move for circle. And I think it's going to have a profound impact on cryptocurrency and tether.
somebody I've known for 20 years, Jeremy Allaire from circle started his own stable coin.
they're taking what dig and Reddit pioneered and they're moving that to Twitter. This is great for threads because if you go to Reddit, or other forums, you used to be able to see the top two or three threads up top. Now this does change the chronological nature of it. So you think of every child to the parent tweet, so I read a tweet, I thought that the TV series Loki was awesome. And then 10 people reply. Well, one of those might be the most interesting thread, but it could be the 10th one dow
This is where you can expect the politically correct companies to act first, because they're the woke mob will force some action on this issue. Whether you like it or not. But this is this is where the next petition will come from Apple, where the two or 3000 employees who are vaccinated, etc, who have people in their, you know, people in their households with with who are immunologically suppressed. And they're going to say, Hey, guys, this is crazy.
microsoft and ibm were in fact uh disrupted by google and amazon
but microsoft and ibm were in fact uh disrupted by google and amazon
is aws going to be able to compete on payments or for e-commerce platforms uh with stripe shopify and square probably not
companies with incredible momentum and is aws going to be able to compete on payments or for e-commerce platforms uh with stripe shopify and square probably not and what if those companies start adding other cloud services you know we're going to be in for a dog fight here
i think that's going to be a trigger for this antitrust regulators and there's a very easy way to solve it just allow people to click on a button to allow third-party app stores and then you can say we're not going to support your phone if you allow other rogue apps on here so don't come to us for customer support if you're using your iphone and you start loading apps from some chinese app store or some russian app store has stolen apps in it like that it will become the wild west the second you
companies with incredible momentum and is aws going to be able to compete on payments or for e-commerce platforms uh with stripe shopify and square probably not and what if those companies start adding other cloud services you know we're going to be in for a dog fight here
amazon web services and their new ceo are facing a lot of bureaucratic challenges
aws is dealing with bureaucracy issues inside of their company like apple has recently faced
i do think that google news um that scrape publishers article and curate them into a feed that should be a licensed product and i think google should just come up with something fair for this if you're gonna uh show you know a snippet of a news article and increasingly google will use ai to pick the most important information in that article and then represent it why not just come up with a a fair cpm a cost per thousand views for that as opposed to just taking it
so um this idea that google is giving preferential treatment to their ad auction or their yelp competitor you know google local or google flights or google shopping you know that each country is going to come up with their own concept of what's allowed and i think what you'll see is companies like google just like facebook threatened to not allow the publishing of news stories from france i'm sorry news stories from australia to their social network and that freaked everybody out in australia yo
google had 182 billion dollars in revenue in 2020 so you know paying a fine of a million dollars a day is not a big deal what they would more likely do is stop google news inside of france
google is just fined half a billion dollars by france due to uh not being able to negotiate with publishers for the rights to indexing their new stories
making iphones in vietnam and pakistan and sri lanka
ceos of some of the biggest companies in the world like tim cook like frank slootman who are making their company policy based on what this small number of loud voices on twitter are saying it's ridiculous
that of course they're now incentivized to have a back door and live under a gag order because their their defense in a back room is you guys you know when when in the light somebody says we should break you up in the dark they can say guys come on we got a back door you just come in gag order us give us we'll give you what you want
apple for example is making in both advertising the push to privacy as well as implementing the push to privacy you know this last wwdc you know they really threw the gauntlet down you know they were really trying to blow up um the advertising business models of google and facebook um and as consumers become more aware of that they're probably willing to pay more
you can see it in the in the enormous amount of investment apple for example is making in both advertising the push to privacy as well as implementing the push to privacy you know this last wwdc you know they really threw the gauntlet down you know they were really trying to blow up um the advertising business models of google and facebook
so for startups it's just because i think right now we have a massive human capital sucking sound um that big tech creates in the ecosystem which is that there is an entire generation of people that are basically unfortunately frittering away their most productive years getting paid what seems to them like a lot of money uh but is what is effectively just you know um payola to not go to a competitor or go to a startup at by big tech so to explain that clearly for example like if you're a machine
my only advice to her i wrote this in 2019 in my investor letter as well just thinking about the breakdown of big tech if you're going to go after these guys that's the body of law that probably is the most um defensible um but you probably have to start you know whether you like it or not with facebook or google um and the reason is there are more examples how you can use that language under the ftca to give those folks a hard time
Over time, though, we've actually made sure that as a part of our health roadmap, we do build real user facing features.
So health is a really important strategic focus for us and has been for quite some time.
what toby had to say at shopify which is this is not a family this is a sports team you are here to perform we are here to perform for our customers the end
freeberg uh i'm less interested in the hypocrisy and the values debate which is obvious that's kind of the first order point with all this stuff it's like do the employees have the right values is there hypocrisy by management is there hypocrisy by the employees what strikes me though is um a failure of leadership at these organizations you guys think back to brian armstrong's kind of purging of the woke mob and the political discourse that was happening at coinbase a few months ago he took a po
i think is that if you start to arbitrarily enforce it you go down this weird place which is like basically i think what they're saying is if it's good for business we're going to ignore it if it's not obvious that it's good for business we'll act because it's a low cost way of keeping the masses um you know that the medicated and i think that's what's even scarier to the 2000 people it's not that you know they should feel proud that they got their pound of flesh but they really should figure ou
the average trip to the store driving buying coming back is an hour so what bezos said is that typically we will save you 75 hours because we can make all of that more efficient for you at 10 bucks an hour that's worth 750 dollars we only charge you 120 for prime which means you're you get 630 dollars of savings but then he goes on to say and we have 200 million customers on prime so we're saving them 126 billion dollars my instant reaction was two things and so the last two points in that tweet
one of the most incredible things that i thought about the coinbase um uh s1 was the amount of unbelievably smart buying that andreessen did and i thought to myself andreessen just out sequoia at sequoia and what do you guys think about sort of how they've been able to to actually execute it just seems like andreessen is done an incredible incredible job
he's like the number two guy there he runs all he runs the entire retail business i guess yeah
a company called relativity space is now the second most valuable private space flight company after spacex
Disney plus it's like Disney plus is their Amazon prime. Now it is not the side show. It is the show. And I think theme parks are a feature of Disney plus you buy Disney plus you get one day at the theme park, you buy Disney plus plus, and you get, you know, whatever a family pack for the theme park and your Disney plus login is your theme park login
my introduction to shorting uh in that example was when i first bought tesla um that you know my broker said you know chamath if you lend your shares out you can make 24 i remember this conversation 24 a year interest right and i thought oh my
i think it's clear that you know elizabeth warren to aoc to whomever are going to now spend a bunch of time talking about it it may or may not change
it turns out that it may have also included the people running robin hood to be quite honest
you know folks like robin hood make a ton of money from it
August 22nd of 2019, Michael Burry, who is this guy famous from, uh, the big short, who's the guy that caught the mortgage thing. He discloses a 3% position in the company. And he highlights that 90%, 9, 0% of game stops, 5,700 stores are free cashflow positive. That's like pretty good. He urges a buyback and he notes that the company was trading at or near net cash levels. So he's making a deep value oriented fundamental thesis as well.
I think that what's going to happen is they're going to get sued into oblivion.
I think that the issue isn't Robin Hood's ability to grow. It's that they don't have their ability to run their business. And so their incompetence is going to cause them to, I think, have to deal with-
this company was insolvent. They did not have the capital requirements to post the margin that was being asked of them by their partners and so this was a platform level decision to ban and block people from trading securities. It cost individuals, hundreds of millions, probably billions, maybe even tens of billions.
And then Google said, I'm out.
i'm not sure that the m&a strategy was the hard part i just think that it's when you're in the bowels of these companies as we all know it's super hard right so i mean i don't think you can fail stewart uh and the team but i think that somewhere along the way just the realization of how special and unique that network effect was um didn't happen because it would have given a different team a level of energy or comfort to kind of really go for the brass ring as you said and um but you know hopefu
to be honest with you i mean i left the board and i just don't know why i i wish i could have gotten the call because i would have bought it yeah i agree with you i think network effects are incredibly unique assets they're very very rare i think we've all been around them we've worked in them david has david the other david has i have jason you have it is the single most incredible moment momentum driver and you know sort of tailwind and when it exists you just never give it up and so i agree w
lock-in and value and you know the prevention of churn uh over time i think it's going to be huge
i think i think it's on that level actually i think it's of that order of magnitude where the importance of those assets to those companies slack will be to salesforce
but you know hopefully they'll be able to execute it at salesforce
lock-in and value and you know the prevention of churn uh over time I think it's going to be huge
google or instagram is for I think I think it's on that level actually I think it's of that order of magnitude where the importance of those assets to those companies slack will be to salesforce
the single biggest thing that we were attracted to was something that we looked at and which was called um intercompany edges and even back in 2015 or 16 when we did this original investment there was this dynamic where people across companies were communicating via slack channels and i was completely stunned by this idea because that was effectively a substitution for email because the only way you communicate across companies today is by email you know david is at craftventures.com and he emai
I think it's very hard to pin a section 230 claim on Reddit as easy as it is, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.
I mean, look, if we just take a step back and think about what's happening here, there are more and more and more examples that are telling, I think all of us, well, we kind of already knew, which is that this fig leaf that the online internet companies have used to shield themselves from any responsibility, those days are probably numbered because now exactly as David said, what you have is the left and the right looking to repeal section 230.
Well, Jack came out last night and basically said that the reason that they, that they shut down distribution was that it came from hacking and doxing or some, I think that was basically a combination.
I think it's very hard to pin a section 230 claim on Reddit as easy as it is, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.
i think that this whole thing became a quagmire unnecessarily i think that he showed um a lot of naivety um and frankly like um you know a little bit of stupidity really um it was really poorly written um and that's why it's been so misunderstood and misconstrued in my opinion i think a lot of what he had to say was valid but when it was so poorly presented and you know the the essay was like eight minutes and it was rambling and the mission was like you know 97 down on the you know and it's jus
don't you think david that that's just basically a way of just it's a wealth transfer to larry ellison which i think is amazing i mean if i could totally do it yeah it's bite dance it's no it's it's it's bite dance in your lap yeah no it's it's bite dance uh it's bite dance paying political protection money to larry ellison to be their bodyguard in this political process
the state is effectively capturing the excess return of Uber and Lyft.
it's not a real venture kind of business. And so you may be deficit financing it or building it in a very different way than we used to.
if you were comfortable with a 60% or 70% reduction in the market cap of some of these companies, you'd be okay with AB five.
the entire public markets who all of a sudden think that a business looks one way has to figure out that it's really a cost plus business.
it has huge operational implications and it has really terrible OPEX implications for a company
it's like a Burger King. It's like a McDonald's. And the company that moves to a franchising model, and then figures it out, I think will be a huge winner. And that will be a very asset light, really operationally sophisticated, very well run,
I think franchising is a really, really smart business idea.
the people who created the problem are the ones that hate it the most, which are the investors, because they pile in the incremental dollars into the winners, trying to king make a winner through capital. And now what's happening is their rate of returns are basically getting taken away. And I think that in a weird way, that's also kind of fair.
the state is effectively capturing the excess return of Uber and Lyft.
the unit economics are going to be pretty shitty. And I just think we have to own that. And, and it probably what it means more than anything else is it's not a real venture kind of business.
it has huge operational implications and it has really terrible OPEX implications for a company
And what it really means is you've, if you were comfortable with a 60% or 70% reduction in the market cap of some of these companies, you'd be okay with AB five.
LinkedIn jobs which is the greatest place for you to find talent I have found so many members of that uses AI to optimize travel time for people's work schedule makes total sense great idea well he recently hired a machine learning engineer who started this July in 2020 and this person has hit the ground running and has changed everything for the company but here is the actual brass tax 110 relevant applications came in in four days now just let's pause for a second that's over 25 qualified appl
you can even see that google fitbit i mean fitbit is you know what is it a 1.2 or 3 billion dollar acquisition it's going to take almost two years to close and google's already making concessions antitrust concessions to the eu right or you know this is a one trillion dollar company trying
the idea today that you cannot have a group text message that can only include iphones you know right chance one of your friends has an android phone you're basically fucked it's kind of
I think basically that Facebook is becoming middle America and Twitter is becoming sort of the coasts. And, you know, Facebook is basically a product of middle America, plus kind of like countries outside the United States and, you know, Twitter's about, you know, rich coastal kind of people. And so I think that the audiences are segregating themselves into, into using products that basically feed them what they want to hear.
One is that the Twitter product is still relatively brittle. I mean, like, at least Facebook has a whole suite of emoticons to say something is a crock of shit. You know, and it makes you feel bad or, you know, makes you feel angry or thumbs down or whatever. And so Twitter's reactionary feedback mechanism to its algorithms is very brittle. And so if you were going to try to algorithmically tune down the distribution of, you know, a Trump tweet, you know, you could see where you could balance th
we view these aura rings as, you know, people being afraid that the government was going to track them.
I think that all the NBA players are going to be given these aura rings as well because it can apparently detect coronavirus three days ahead of other ways because it can see a change in your basal sort of body temperature.
I actually just bought it a few weeks ago and I've been using it to monitor my sleep.
What is Facebook's issue two days ago? It was that, you know, the boogaloo movement, which is, you know, a bunch of people who believe in the militia and an impending civil war principally use Facebook and Facebook groups to organize.
I think basically that Facebook is becoming middle America and Twitter is becoming sort of the coasts. ... Facebook is basically a product of middle America, plus kind of like countries outside the United States and, you know, Twitter's about, you know, rich coastal kind of people.
One is that the Twitter product is still relatively brittle. I mean, like, Facebook has a whole suite of emoticons to say something is a crock of shit. ... And so Twitter's reactionary feedback mechanism to its algorithms is very brittle.
I think basically that Facebook is becoming middle America and Twitter is becoming sort of the coasts. And, you know, Facebook is basically a product of middle America, plus kind of like countries outside the United States and Twitter is about, you know, rich coastal kind of people.
One is that the Twitter product is still relatively brittle. I mean, like, at least Facebook has a whole suite of emoticons to say something is a crock of shit. You know, and it makes you feel bad or, you know, makes you feel angry or thumbs down or whatever. And so Twitter's reactionary feedback mechanism to its algorithms is very brittle.
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If we took those people and stuck them on Twitter, how big would Twitter be? I suspect it'd be half a billion people.
While Winamp was great, I ended up at AOL for a long time, which was okay, not that great.