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Fed Hesitates on Tariffs, The New Mag 7, Death of VC, Google’s Value in a Post-Search World Podcast Episode Description
(0:00) The Besties intro Philippe Laffont!
(2:12) Miami F1 Recap!
(12:10) Fed holds rates steady on tariff uncertainty
(32:47) Google drops after Apple sees fall in search queries on Safari
(56:48) Creating a new Mag 7
(1:07:00) Private markets: Is traditional VC dead? Philippe details Coatue’s new fund structure and what makes a great investor
Follow Philippe Laffont:
https://x.com/plaffont
Follow the besties:
https://x.com/chamath
https://x.com/Jason
https://x.com/DavidSacks
https://x.com/friedberg
Follow on X:
https://x.com/theallinpod
Follow on Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/theallinpod
Follow on TikTok:
@theallinpod
Follow on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/company/allinpod
Intro Music Credit:
https://rb.gy/tppkzl
https://x.com/yung_spielburg
Intro Video Credit:
https://x.com/TheZachEffect
Referenced in the show:
https://polymarket.com/event/fed-decision-in-june/fed-decreases-interest-rates-by-50-bps-after-june-2025-meeting?tid=1746821096114
https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/pressreleases/monetary20250507a.htm
https://www.mlex.com/mlex/antitrust/articles/2337168/apple-exec-testimony-on-search-volume-drop-hurts-google-stock-price
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-07/apple-working-to-move-to-ai-search-in-browser-amid-google-fallout
https://blog.google/products/search/statement-press-reports-about-search-traffic
https://x.com/EconomyApp/status/1915501252420784499
https://x.com/Similarweb/status/1920026287625658628
https://openai.com/index/leadership-expansion-with-fidji-simo
https://files.pitchbook.com/website/files/pdf/Q1_2025_PitchBook-NVCA_Venture_Monitor_19001.pdf
https://stockanalysis.com/ipos/statistics
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Fed Hesitates on Tariffs, The New Mag 7, Death of VC, Google’s Value in a Post-Search World Podcast Episode Top Keywords
Fed Hesitates on Tariffs, The New Mag 7, Death of VC, Google’s Value in a Post-Search World Podcast Episode Summary
In this podcast episode, the hosts and guests engage in a wide-ranging discussion on investment strategies, market dynamics, and the evolving landscape of technology and venture capital. Philippe Lafont, a notable guest from Coatue Management, shares insights on building a successful investment model akin to Berkshire Hathaway, emphasizing the importance of a hybrid approach that includes both public and private investments. He discusses the challenges of gaining momentum and recognition in the investment world, especially for newer entities.
The episode also features discussions on the impact of AI and technology on various sectors, with a particular focus on the competitive dynamics between major tech companies like Google and emerging players like OpenAI. The conversation touches on the importance of adaptability and strategic foresight in navigating these changes, with references to the “Meh seven” companies that have dominated attention and investment.
Actionable insights include the need for investors to remain flexible, hold cash when necessary, and be open to both public and private market opportunities. The discussion also highlights the importance of understanding market sentiment and consumer behavior, noting the disconnect between consumer sentiment and spending patterns.
Recurring themes include the significance of innovation and strategic risk management in investment, the potential of AI to disrupt traditional business models, and the need for regulatory adjustments to foster a more dynamic and competitive market environment. The episode underscores the importance of identifying future leaders in emerging sectors, such as humanoids and robotaxis, while maintaining a disciplined approach to valuation and investment decisions.
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Fed Hesitates on Tariffs, The New Mag 7, Death of VC, Google’s Value in a Post-Search World Podcast Episode Transcript (Unedited)
Speaker: 0
00:00
We went to an amazing restaurant Friday night. Shiso is the name of this restaurant. Wonderful food. The owner of this restaurant, Shamath, is a is a super fan as well of the all in boxes.
Speaker: 1
00:12
A French restaurant, Jason?
Speaker: 0
00:13
Shah said it was, more like an Asian fusion restaurant, like great sushi. We had this incredible It’s delicious. Jelly tail. Delicious.
Speaker: 1
00:20
Just just
Speaker: 0
00:20
aces all the way. The guy comes and, we go to pay. He says
Speaker: 2
00:26
Oh ai god. Philippe, listen to this story. This is the worst ai. Good here.
Speaker: 0
00:30
Your money’s no good here, Ollie.
Speaker: 2
00:32
He refuses to let us
Speaker: 0
00:33
pay after we ran up a hell of a bill. And now you see Freeberg’s running. Freeburg just ran off the show. Why did he run off the show, Jamal?
Speaker: 2
00:41
Okay. So Jason says to me, Chamath.
Speaker: 3
00:45
This is absolute this is an absolute bullshit story that you guys are gonna be laid up.
Speaker: 2
00:50
You guys make this shit up. We didn’t make entertainment
Speaker: 3
00:53
out of me.
Speaker: 2
00:53
I’ll tell you the truth. Because okay. I’ll just tell you the truth.
Speaker: 3
00:56
Tell me the truth. I’ll tell you the truth.
Speaker: 2
00:58
Goldberg. K. Ai. I’m gonna tell the truth. So Go ahead. Jason says, guys Holy shit. I’ll see
Speaker: 3
01:02
you guys later.
Speaker: 2
01:03
If they’re
Speaker: 0
01:04
Go there. Sure. He’s gonna talk for more than three minutes anyway.
Speaker: 2
01:09
Go ahead. You said if they’re if they’re gonna comp all the food, just make sure you give a great tip. Huge tip. Huge tip.
Speaker: 0
01:15
Chamoth and J count level two.
Speaker: 2
01:17
Totally makes sense. Freeberg’s like, yeah, got it. No problem. We had ai 19,000 pounds of food. And he goes, is is a hundred and $75 appropriate?
Speaker: 0
01:27
Who am I truly? Freeberg’s Ai calculated.
Speaker: 2
01:29
And so Jason says Jason
Speaker: 0
01:31
says no.
Speaker: 2
01:31
Okay. Okay. And then Freeberg sai, hold on. Oh, fine. Fine. I’ll double it to $3.50. Now he was around. He was joking.
Speaker: 3
01:37
I gave the guy a thousand bucks. It was
Speaker: 2
01:39
Gave a thousand bucks and I sai, actually, I think we should give 2 3,000. So then we tipped the woman an extra 2 k. So we gave her 3 k for a 10 person dinner, which I think is appropriate. She was ecstatic. The food was phenomenal. It was great. Go to She Sai if you’re in Miami.
Speaker: 1
01:54
Dave, are you adjusting the tips for the no tax on tips, sai you’re, like, making them a little smaller?
Speaker: 0
02:17
Hey, everybody. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the number one podcast in the world. We’re gonna have an amazing episode today. The besties are riding high. Why are we riding high? Because we went to Miami. Oh my goodness. We had so much fun at f one. Thanks to
Speaker: 2
02:36
That was fun. That was I mean, it
Speaker: 1
02:36
was fun.
Speaker: 0
02:37
I meh, gosh. Sai many great stories, so much good time. We’re laughing the whole time. We did a little stage shah. And, Tony Robbins came up. We had Nico Rosberg. He’s a formula f one champion. Our guy Saloni Gracias, who’s working on Doge, Saloni Capital, front of the pod, and mayor Francis Suarez joined us.
Speaker: 0
02:58
And, then at the end of the show, surprise guest, none other than Sergey Brin, who is punching a clock. He’s working, like, seventy hours a week over at Alphabet, and we’ll talk about that today a bit. Did you have a favorite speaker, mister sultan of science, the one and only David Freyberg? Do you have a favorite speaker ram moment?
Speaker: 3
03:18
I think Sergei Sergei Sergei did a great job. He was very casual, very chill. We had a great conversation. I think we should probably publish that as a standalone. I thought it was really good.
Speaker: 0
03:28
So drop him, like, a little midweek drop or something?
Speaker: 3
03:30
But I will say Antonio I I gave him a shout out just because I think the work Antonio is doing is so important. I am super impressed, and I was really appreciative of him taking time to come hang out with us. But, obviously, he’s working with Elon on Doge, but he’s also uncovering a lot of stuff in the government that it’s really powerful to see someone actually go in, do the digging, and present it the way they are with the transparency he is.
Speaker: 3
03:53
And he’s not doing it for any angle. There’s no money. There’s no benefit to him individually. He’s just doing it.
Speaker: 2
03:59
Probably net negative on the margins for him.
Speaker: 3
04:01
Really hard
Speaker: 1
04:01
for him.
Speaker: 3
04:02
And yeah. And it’s just amazing.
Speaker: 0
04:03
Based on Elon’s experience, it’s definitely net negative. People, maybe don’t like having their grift canceled. Shamath Palihapitiya, our chairman dictator. Do you have a favorite moment with the speakers or a favorite speaker, you know, highlight from the programming specifically?
Speaker: 2
04:20
I thought all five of them were amazing. I do I did think that Sergei did a really good job. I like Nico Rosberg a lot. I did too, for sure. I’m really excited to see what Francis does next after being the mayor of Miami.
Speaker: 0
04:34
Maybe governor. We’ll see what,
Speaker: 2
04:36
the party says. I think they’re all great. Tony Robbins, I have to say, his energy is very unique. And when you’re near it, I didn’t have many interactions with Tony up until that first ai, really. I’d met him through Peter Goober a couple of times when when I was part of the ownership team of the Warriors. Peter’s a co owner.
Speaker: 2
04:54
They’re very good friends, but I’d never really spent much time with him. He’s a special person. You can tell. There’s a there’s a big energy there.
Speaker: 0
05:01
They’re all great. Yeah. You know, I’m interested to see how the audience likes that interview because, you know, he, he is a ball of energy. I tried to get him to open up, talk about himself a little bit, but, you know, he was kind of on his own tip, but the audience loved him.
Speaker: 0
05:13
And we did a great, like, meditation exercise that everybody loved. It it was a lot of fun. Joining us this week from Coachu Management, yes, we have Philippe Lafont, who is his older brother. And, Philippe, welcome to the program for the first time.
Speaker: 1
05:31
Thanks, guys. Great to be here.
Speaker: 0
05:32
Have you heard the show before? Have you ever listened to the All In podcast, Philippe? Let me ask you that question right after that.
Speaker: 1
05:38
I’ve been listening about it for a week at speed of 1.8. So I think I’ve gone through about, like, 10 or 12 episodes.
Speaker: 0
05:44
Okay. We’re ready. Catching up. And, alright. Are you an f one fan? You’re French, so Ai don’t know. Is that, like, popular in France, the f one?
Speaker: 1
05:51
Hey. We had a good f one pilot. Right? Alain Prost.
Speaker: 2
05:54
Alain Prost.
Speaker: 1
05:55
He won a few years. You know? So
Speaker: 0
05:58
Okay.
Speaker: 1
05:59
It’s incredibly popular in Europe.
Speaker: 3
06:01
Jason, what did you think of Formula one? That was your first time. Right?
Speaker: 0
06:04
It was my first time to f one. You know, there was a lot of, pomp and circumstance. We were very lucky that the trophy house, my friend Ford, whose partner is on the trophy house, included us. He gave us a level of trophy house. Trophy house, there it is, beautiful structure, three amazing floors, tons of activations, which means free stuff.
Speaker: 0
06:28
And for those of you who are not in these, like, circles where celebrities get all kinds of free stuff, and we had a poker game. It was wonderful.
Speaker: 2
06:35
Best way to watch the f one. Play poker. By the way, when you’re live at the f one, it’s a little bit hard to get into the experience because, like, the cars just zip by you. So you get to see the car for, like, a few seconds and then kind of, like, dead time.
Speaker: 0
06:47
Yeah. It it it was, very ai, I have to say. It was a very social experience, and we made an executive decision because it was raining to pull the table and put it inside the trophy house. And then we had an incredible view of, like, the finish line. And, there’s Friedberg standing up, me next to him. We had an incredible lineup. Travis joined us.
Speaker: 0
07:08
You can see there Phil Hellmuth haranguing poor Travis from Uber, sitting next to
Speaker: 2
07:12
me. I
Speaker: 0
07:13
mean, this is
Speaker: 3
07:13
Phil always has to have his hand on a billionaire.
Speaker: 0
07:16
He has to have his
Speaker: 2
07:16
hand on a billionaire. He has to have his hand on a billionaire. Within five
Speaker: 0
07:19
feet of a billionaire. He has a panic attack. So and there’s Hellmuth poor Hellmuth. My friend, Timothy Chalamet, came by to say hi to meh. And, of course, they’re speak to him. Trusted. Ai him.
Speaker: 2
07:33
Look at those meat hooks just going through
Speaker: 3
07:34
the color of shit. Giant panda bear, and Chalamet is the bamboo. I
Speaker: 0
07:38
felt so bad for Timothy. You know? He’s he’s
Speaker: 3
07:41
done such amazing work.
Speaker: 0
07:44
He’s done such amazing work, and you can see how engaged he is in Phil Hellmuth. He’s like, who is that person? Why is he grabbing me? Right. But, you know, then again, Phil Hellmuth is presenting him. And now here’s a proper way
Speaker: 1
07:55
Can I say something? Is that dealer is is that dealer Larry Summers? He sort of looks like It is Larry Summers after his appearance. You’re actually interesting. By Larry?
Speaker: 0
08:04
You you guys are After he was here, he he lost so much sponsorship and and and so so many, you know, sai many deals that he, now is working Yeah. Moonlighting as a dealer.
Speaker: 3
08:15
To continue the great debate.
Speaker: 0
08:17
Yeah. But can Ai just point out here the proper way to embrace an a list celebrity who you’re friends with is just let them come up to you and just gonna okay? So Timothy comes. Timothy and I are just made just a background.
Speaker: 1
08:30
I’m not your friends.
Speaker: 3
08:31
You’re good friends. Timothy Chalamet. Right?
Speaker: 0
08:32
I will not say you’re friends. We you’ve met a couple of times, like, a handful of times because we’re both Knicks fans. And I’m friends with Ben Stiller. Ben Stiller, myself, Timothy, and my brother, Josh, went to the Pistons game, you know, versus the Knicks when we crushed them and crushed their souls.
Speaker: 0
08:46
So Timothy came over just to say hi to me and his friend. Yeah. Frankie and his other friend, Cody Block, Frankie Bones. He’s got a great crew. And, you know, he came over to say hi to me and he was thanking me for the tickets I I was able to get because it was hard to get tickets for that.
Speaker: 0
08:59
Anyway, for Hellmuth, don’t tackle people at all in events. This is why Jamuk banned you. Just complete inappropriateness. And then Hellmuth was going around. I don’t know if you knew this. He was telling everybody that he created All In and that he was like the executive producer for life.
Speaker: 0
09:17
Just so much inappropriateness from Phil Hellmuth. It was brutal.
Speaker: 1
09:21
Oh, man.
Speaker: 0
09:22
If I may, let me also thank We had a partner, OKX, the new money app. And they they’re a big major sponsor of the McLaren f one team.
Speaker: 3
09:31
They’re the main sponsor on McLaren.
Speaker: 0
09:33
Oh, they’re the main. And they won the race. So we were there with Ai, the c CMO, very cool guy and his team.
Speaker: 2
09:38
Super guy and his wife.
Speaker: 0
09:40
Ai guy. We had dinner with him.
Speaker: 2
09:41
Shout out to those guys.
Speaker: 0
09:42
And they just launched their crypto exchange here in The US. So if you love all in, do me a favor. Go check out OKX. And, thanks to some of our other partners, Solana, Google Cloud, BVNK, Circle. Shout out my ai, Jeremy Lair. And my brother in Knicks fandom, Shane from Polymarket, who I got to hang out with a whole bunch. He’s a really great guy. Wonderful event.
Speaker: 0
10:06
We’re gonna do it again. We’re gonna run it back, I think, for maybe f one Austin.
Speaker: 3
10:10
Vegas.
Speaker: 0
10:11
And we’re gonna and maybe Vegas. Who knows? Maybe the Super Bowl, maybe NBA finals. We’re we’re gonna do some more of these 200 to 500 person events.
Speaker: 3
10:18
I gotta say it was so fun to hang out also with the the fans that came in for the show, the sponsors. It it was just so great to, like, go to these events and hang out
Speaker: 0
10:27
with people. So hey. I did
Speaker: 1
10:27
want ask you guys a question. What was the most fun? The Friday, the Saturday, or the day of the race?
Speaker: 2
10:34
Saturday for me.
Speaker: 0
10:36
So you ai the content best. Okay.
Speaker: 2
10:38
Saturday was Ai woke up. I went straight to Jeff Gross’s house. Me, Travis, Elm Youth, and a couple others, we played poker until four. I ran to the hotel, took a shower, went on stage at five.
Speaker: 0
10:51
At that point, Ai spent four hours at the club. Ai hours prepping
Speaker: 2
10:55
to make
Speaker: 1
10:55
sure it was time. Pockets.
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10:57
It was great.
Speaker: 0
10:57
Yeah. He’s been in the ai tyler 5AM. That’s a true story.
Speaker: 2
11:01
Ai. Start the show. Let’s get the show on the show.
Speaker: 3
11:03
I’m gonna start
Speaker: 0
11:03
the show once I remind people that September will be in Los Angeles if you wanna come hang with us ai we did in F one for the all in summit, the fourth year. And ai lord, I got a preview from Friedberg of the content it is going to be. Another peak all in event. You know, and our goal is to have the world’s most important conversations, yada yada yada.
Speaker: 3
11:23
I see the experience at the summit this year is what’s gonna be awesome. It’s gonna in addition to the content being great, we’ve got some really awesome Well, you told me
Speaker: 0
11:31
the party location, which I would say here, but Yeah. You also told me that your I did 900 k was the peak two years ago, then you spent 1,200,000.0 on the party last year. And And now you told me you’re spending 2,000,000 on this year’s party.
Speaker: 3
11:43
Forget it.
Speaker: 0
11:44
Is that true? The two the 2,000,000 was It’s
Speaker: 3
11:45
gonna be more than that.
Speaker: 0
11:46
Oh ai lord. Anyway, if you wanna apply for tickets, allin.com/summit. And, yeah, Chamath and I were on Megyn Kelly. Let’s get ai. I love when
Speaker: 2
11:57
Jay Cal and Megyn Kelly, like, have their it’s the best.
Speaker: 3
12:00
It’s the best.
Speaker: 0
12:01
Well, she likes it. She understands. It’s broadcaster on broadcaster action. We like to mix it up. We know how to do ratings. She’s a ratings genius.
Speaker: 3
12:09
Show. Come on.
Speaker: 0
12:10
Alright. The Meh held their rates steady again this week. If you remember last year, the Fed cut 50 bps in September, then 25 bps in November and December. But so far in 2025, the Fed has kept rates in a steady range, 4.25 to 4.5%. They said they sana wait and see. They’re in wait and see mode because they don’t know what Trump’s doing with these tariffs and how that’s gonna impact the economy. Here’s the quote from the Fed.
Speaker: 0
12:35
Economic activity has continued to expand at a solid pace. But they warned about potential stagflation, risks of higher unemployment and higher inflation arya their concerns. And I talked about that last week. I’m hearing a lot of hand wringing about layoffs coming soon. So what do you think, Philippe, about the Fed not taking any action? And what’s your general take on the markets?
Speaker: 0
13:01
You know, the the markets have seemed to recover largely from the Trump, Independence Day, tariff meh. But it’s, feels a lot pretty shaky out there. A lot of m and a on hold, a lot of hiring on hold. What what are you seeing on the streets?
Speaker: 1
13:15
Yeah. Well, it hasn’t been a boring year, has it?
Speaker: 2
13:20
So
Speaker: 1
13:20
I would say on the Meh, right, a lot of people are saying, oh, you know, the Fed should cut and this and that. I actually think that there’s also the scenario that what if the Fed is cutting because things are not so great? Maybe that’s actually not a good message. And what if the Fed is not cutting because actually the economy is really strong?
Speaker: 1
13:41
And so I think that the Fed not cutting is actually not that bad of a message. And I’m surprised just in general at how bad sentiment is, but how good the hard data is. And we have this ratio at go to where we sort of divide hard news as a numerator and sentiment as a denominator.
Speaker: 1
14:03
And it’s the first time where the news is so good and the sentiment is so bad. And I don’t know if the sentiment is bad because just the market went down a lot or for other reasons. But I actually think the economy is doing really well. And we also learned two really important things.
Speaker: 1
14:22
One is when the market did go down a lot, the government did budge and said, hey, we need to step in here. And the second part is the Meh did something that I thought was very clever. They basically sai, we’re not sana cut just to bail out the equity arya. But if the market’s liquidity is no longer functioning, emphasis on liquidity, then we’ll step in to restore liquidity.
Speaker: 1
14:46
And I think those two things really brought the market back up. And I think it’s more a little bit the case of a tariff correction or a tariff tantrum, but not a tariff crisis.
Speaker: 2
15:00
Mhmm.
Speaker: 0
15:01
So you said there was a lot of good fundamental news. What would you put at the top of that list? And you said there were things in terms of sentiment that were making people quite negative. The the, economy as viewed by consumers is really shaky. So what is the sentiment news that you were most tuned into, and what are the hard data that you’re most tuned into?
Speaker: 1
15:23
So on the on the hard data, the part that’s most surprising is that consumers have very very weak sentiment. But in the meantime, consumer spending is remarkably resilient. And you can see this in a number of ways. You can look at the Visa and Mastercard earnings. But I also like just to listen to, like, little quotes, little tidbits that you pick up in the transcripts of of of companies reporting earnings and stuff.
Speaker: 1
15:50
And people will say, like, even in the month of April, consumer spending is very strong. And even in the last week when we adjust for the front loading, some people are pre ai ahead of the tariffs. Even when we strip that out, consumer is really good. So I think the part that to me is most surprising, consumer is great.
Speaker: 1
16:10
With respect to sentiment, it’s really bad. But one thing that’s funny is whenever the market goes down, sentiment is bad. And so I don’t think sentiment is necessarily a good leading indicator. I almost think it’s ai a lagging indicator. I bet you that now that the market’s gone up, we look at sentiment in a month from now, and they’ll be like, oh, sentiment’s getting better.
Speaker: 2
16:31
Ai I
Speaker: 1
16:32
think that’s what’s going
Speaker: 0
16:33
on. Chamath, our friends at Polymarket are showing in, June, ’80 ‘4 percent chance of no change. July, ’50 ‘1 percent chance of no change. And then September, ’40 ‘8 percent chance of a cut. And then, ai, obviously, Trump’s been mixing it up with him, saying he’s gonna fire ai.
Speaker: 0
16:52
He’s not gonna fire him. What’s your take on the Fed and what they should be doing here at this moment in ai? And then maybe you could respond to Philippe’s sort of insight there that I think was pretty good, that there is a juxtaposition between what people are saying they’re gonna do consumers, and how they feel about the economy, sana then what they’re actually doing.
Speaker: 2
17:11
I agree with Philippe’s diagnosis that the Meh will really be focused on liquidity. I agree with that. In fact, Nick, I just sent you something on signal, if you could just throw it up here, which is a really interesting view on subprime. And what it shows you is the spread between where credit acceptance is versus capital ones.
Speaker: 2
17:34
And the point in bringing this up is that when you look back historically around these subprime lenders, whenever these guys start to see price to books just start to escalate and get to ai, it tends to portend a liquidity crisis. It tends to show that things are about to roll over.
Speaker: 2
17:54
And from that perspective, I think that there are some blinking yellow lights that the Meh needs to take seriously. But then where I deviate from Philippe’s perspective is I think that the Fed is getting increasingly political in how they want to react to the conditions on the ground.
Speaker: 2
18:15
I’ll give you two perspectives. The first is if you actually read the press release, either the word wait, waiting, or some synonym of that word was littered in there 22 times. It just seemed like an incredible amount of verbal gymnastics to try to justify why they weren’t cutting.
Speaker: 2
18:37
And if I had to just take that at its face value, I would at least put some percentage of probability that you have to assign to this case where Powell views that if this lever is the only thing that he has going into the midterms, it’s almost as if he’s holding it back. Because I think that if you look at some of these leading indicators, particularly on the liquidity side, I agree with Philippe about how important that specific metric is.
Speaker: 2
19:10
I don’t believe in the Meh put. We’ve talked about this. But I think the liquidity measures are starting to blink yellow. And I think that if the Fed really wanted to get ahead of it, they could cut, but the political overlay is cutting helps Ram. And I think there’s this tension between these two people, and I think that the Fed is saying we’re not gonna cut.
Speaker: 0
19:28
So your position is or what you’re hypothesizing here is that the Fed is saying, hey. We have to wait for Trump to clean up the tariff stuff, the trade war stuff, and that that’s a political act by Powell in retaliation for Trump saying he wanted to fire him. Is that what you’re insinuating?
Speaker: 2
19:47
No. No. No. It’s not what I’m insinuating. What I’m saying very directly is that the Meh is acting in in a manner that is as much politically motivated as financially metric motivated because the financial metrics, some of the most critical leading indicators, particularly around liquidity and the credit health of the American consumer arya blinking yellow.
Speaker: 2
20:10
So right now, they are choosing to ignore these historically useful leading indicators. And the only reason that I can come up with to ignore it are political reasons.
Speaker: 0
20:21
Sai, Freyberg, do you think there’s a political beef going on here between the two parties? And what do you think about subprime, and maybe this being a lead indicator that maybe it’s time for a cut? Maybe we’re sana see people miss mortgage payments, car loans, etcetera.
Speaker: 3
20:40
I was just looking at the mortgage delinquency rates. They’re pretty, flat right now, and that’s, I think, because so many people did refinance when rates were low, and there’s a meh amount of mortgage balance with a with a low rate outstanding. But remember, I think the Fed has a whole bunch of data that they’re still gonna need to wait on. The CPI data for March was 2.4%.
Speaker: 3
21:04
Their target is 2%. The next CPI report comes out, I think next Tuesday. And so that’s gonna be an important indicator. But I do think one other data point that is now going to be part of the calculus is what do these trade deals look like? So this morning, it was announced that there’s a trade deal with The UK.
Speaker: 3
21:26
And in that trade deal, there are lots of provisions that relate to parity and what is expected to provide better market access for American businesses into The UK. But there’s also a really important piece of data there, which is that there is a 10% tariff rate for imports from The UK into The US.
Speaker: 3
21:47
So this is the first time we’re seeing a trade deal that actually gets announced and finalized through this whole tariff trade negotiation process that’s been underway now for several weeks with all the hoopla and all the drama attached to it. And what we’re seeing is that for one of our friendliest allies, for one of our best trade partners, we are keeping in place a 10% tariff rate.
Speaker: 3
22:09
So if that holds with other trade deals and that becomes kind of a standard across the board as they get more of these trade deals done, perhaps with countries that are less friendly, with more onerous, with less regulatory parity in the trade relationship between The US and that country, maybe there’s higher tariff rates.
Speaker: 3
22:26
What that means ultimately is that there is now maybe a pretty sizable long term revenue stream for the federal government that didn’t exist before, which means that there’s room to cut taxes, which means that this is all going to be part of the calculus of the Fed’s decision on whether or not and why they would need to cut rates because this is gonna drive inflation.
Speaker: 3
22:49
It’s gonna drive GDP growth. It’s gonna drive employment. And so I think that there is a pretty dynamic situation at play right now. It’s not just that there’s a static tax revenue base and a static federal spending model and then CPI and employment data that is gonna follow them.
Speaker: 2
23:06
Do you think Powell thinks that this Trump thing is gonna work, so he’s holding bullets in the chamber because he’s worried about inflation?
Speaker: 3
23:12
I think they’re gonna wait for data.
Speaker: 0
23:14
I would agree with that.
Speaker: 1
23:16
Yeah. Dave, in fact, a couple ai I was wondering your opinion on is one, I was with this retailer, gigantic retailer in The US, and there’s this sort of false narrative that when you have tariffs, like a % of tariffs are sana get passed through in pricing and therefore tariff is like a sai, right?
Speaker: 1
23:37
That retailer told us that they think only about 50% of the tariff gets passed in pricing. So I I sort of agree with you. There is going to be a net net positive and that retailers have way to, work things around and stuff like that. I would also say today, post this announcement, the market’s very strong.
Speaker: 1
23:58
And initially, I was a little bit surprised because, we’re taxing 10%, not only the most, friendly country, but one where we actually have a surplus.
Speaker: 2
24:10
So I
Speaker: 1
24:10
was like, shit. If it’s 10% when we have a surplus,
Speaker: 2
24:13
what
Speaker: 1
24:13
is it when we have a deficit? But on the other hand, the market is speaking as we speak. And I also think that, there were a lot of announcements that seemed to make it ai, hey. We’re sana make a deal with China. We want China to do well, but we need to do well too. It seems to me that at some point, maybe there’ll be a bit more of a win win versus such a acrimonious, and maybe that’s why the market’s reacting a little bit more positively.
Speaker: 2
24:40
By the way, that trade deal, we also eliminated the 2% surtax on big tech companies. And then Howard just said today that they’re gonna announce a $10,000,000,000 order from Boeing on top of that as well.
Speaker: 3
24:56
So these are gonna drive GDP. They’re gonna drive employment. It’s really hard to cut rates into a market where there is not yet priced in or not yet well understood, but an expectation of a driver for GDP, driver for employment, and potentially an impact on inflation. It’s really hard to go into that sort of an environment cut.
Speaker: 2
25:16
I mean, if we’re in a sustained period of four to 5% rates, I mean, we should talk about that at some point. But there’s huge implications to the economy if this thing stays where it is. Huge.
Speaker: 0
25:27
Philippe, are you in the ram of four d chess with these, tariffs and these negotiations or, you know, throw some stuff against the wall, react to it in real ai, you know, he’s shaking the snow globe, it’s it’s chaos, etcetera. Where where where do you sit between those two opinions we’ve heard on this podcast over and over?
Speaker: 1
25:46
You know, when you ask a tech investor for, like, his opinion on macro
Speaker: 0
25:50
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
25:51
This is the beginning of the end. Right? I think I’ve, like, predict I think I’ve, like, predicted, like, seven of the last three recessions. You know? So I my track record is pretty weak.
Speaker: 0
26:02
Well, let me ask you a different then question. How is this impacting the tech market, private companies that are thinking about going public, m and a. We started DoorDash by two companies this week. We’ve seen a bunch of companies ai to go public. We’ve seen them pausing. Does this kind of uncertainty, which it seems like is causing the disconnect. Right? You you explained this disconnect, how people feel about the economy and then their behavior.
Speaker: 0
26:27
Is that disconnect caused by the sort of communication that Chamath and I and other folks were saying, hey. Needs to be improved here. And it seems to be with this UK. If this had been the process from the start where we’re like, hey, we’re we’re gonna do one of these a week for fifty weeks, and, you’re gonna get this good news each week as as we sort this out.
Speaker: 0
26:45
That seems to me like something that would build confidence as opposed to, hey, everybody’s gonna go back and forth. You say 50, we’re gonna go to a 50 tit for tat. So maybe talk about the impact this has for founders, startups, executive teams.
Speaker: 1
26:58
I think for tech guys, by and large, you know, a lot of the tech is in services. So that’s out of the picture for now. But there’s obviously going to be a lot of tariffs for semis and then for the assembling of the motherboards into computers. So those are the two key areas.
Speaker: 1
27:15
And one of the difficulties we have these sort of base tariffs, but we also have these sector tariffs. And we’ve had sector tariffs in cars, 25%. There’s rumored to be sector tariffs in pharma that could come out next week. And there’s also been potential, sector tariffs, you know, in semis.
Speaker: 1
27:34
So it’s been pretty disruptive, and I don’t really know how to think about it. And I think nobody knew, which is why the market just took a 25% peak to trough down. And then after that, we learned, well, the government is smarter. They’re sana one of the things that I love to see is all these executives that get to come to also plead their case in Washington, and maybe that was never the case, you know, a few months ago.
Speaker: 1
28:01
And there seems to at least be a feed a feedback loop. Okay. We do something. We see what breaks. We listen. We readjust and stuff like that.
Speaker: 1
28:09
But to be honest, I don’t really know how it’s sana play out. And I sort of was very conservative for a period of time just waiting. And then to me, what happened last week with, Microsoft saying that, like, AI had really picked up, that was, like, a really big deal. And I almost, like, coined it in my own mind, like, tokens greater greater than tariffs.
Speaker: 1
28:33
And I think, like, one of the reason why the market’s moving up
Speaker: 2
28:36
to right now Just hold on. Just explain that just a little bit. Torture means that tariffs. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
28:41
Tokens, I don’t know. I put the greater greater ai. You know? Tokens are much greater than tariffs.
Speaker: 2
28:45
Tokens, you mean AI tokens?
Speaker: 1
28:47
AI tokens. Yeah. Yeah. So I I sort of view tokens. You know, I I don’t really understand the as as well as, Dave for sure, you know, all the AI models and stuff like that. But I sort of view tokens to an AI model is like fuel to a car or electricity to a computer. Right? Sana Microsoft said that in their Q1, they processed 100,000,000,000,000, 50 trillion alone in March.
Speaker: 1
29:12
And so the tokens are really going basically vertical, which is probably because of these reasoning engines, which are much more sophisticated and require more compute power. And I think the market, it didn’t to to to it’s a bit unfair for Trump, but the market did not just go down because of tariffs.
Speaker: 1
29:30
If you remember, it went down because people freaked out. We’re in an AI bubble. AI is not really working. What’s the ROI on AI? That was maybe, I don’t know, half, a third to a half of the problem.
Speaker: 1
29:42
And I think what Microsoft said is ai, CapEx is going up and everybody has a gigantic shortage of chips right now. That I know for sure ram all of our private companies, public companies, there’s a shortage of chip, a shortage of compute power. And so I think that’s also maybe why the market’s going up.
Speaker: 1
30:00
And so for me, it was sort of a way emotionally Ai got so drained with the tariffs and thinking about tariffs and having to think about something I don’t really understand. And I feel now there’s a chance when you look at the next year or two, at some point tariffs goes away. Trump makes this big deal with, deregulation.
Speaker: 1
30:18
The tax breaks sort of cancel out the tariffs. We move on and what are we left with? We’re left with tokens. And I think the world of tokens ram me, I’ve been doing this for thirty five years. It’s maybe the most exciting trend and thing that I’ve seen.
Speaker: 1
30:33
And all these people that say, oh, this is the end of American exceptionalism. I almost wanted to say, no, you guys are wrong. This is the beginning of American exceptionalism because we’ve got Wall Street, we’ve got Silicon Valley, and we still got a pretty good government that at least tries to get stuff done.
Speaker: 1
30:50
So I’m pretty excited by that.
Speaker: 3
30:54
I’ve been talking with my management team a lot about AI first principles, and we’re actually doing an off-site in two weeks on this because I’ve been following a lot of what the other CEOs have been doing and, hearing stories. We had a great conversation with Sergei. He gave us two anecdotes of how he personally has used some of these tools to make management decisions, and his observation was managers are the first to go.
Speaker: 3
31:20
And if you zoom out from that statement and you zoom out from the comments you’re making, Philippe, there’s, I would say, like, a once in a generational opportunity to select companies that are going to accelerate growth because of the leverage they’re gonna create by adoption of these tools.
Speaker: 3
31:40
Not tech companies in the traditional sense, but across the entire economy. And some of what we’re seeing right now in the reformation of venture capitalists and and I know you’re gonna talk a little bit about COTU here in a bit. But so much of the thesis is around traditional businesses being reinvented using AI.
Speaker: 3
32:01
And as a result, it’s not just of the few tech companies that are providing the fuel, but there are these fires that are gonna take off in all these different markets that we could sit and spend it probably hours kind of, you know, extrapolating and theorizing on that creates a real opportunity for incredible market value creation.
Speaker: 3
32:20
And traditionally, it’s like the market grows and the differentiation among the competitors is minimized once the market has matured. But for the first time ever, every mature market can be completely disrupted. And so so if you’re smart about selecting management teams and selecting companies, it seems to be an incredible opportunity to realize investment returns
Speaker: 2
32:38
Okay.
Speaker: 3
32:39
Even in a mature equity market.
Speaker: 0
32:40
Let’s move on to our next topic, which is obviously super related. Google was down 8% on Wednesday after some bad search data came out because the Justice Department, as everybody probably knows, is doing this antitrust lawsuit with Google. And the key part of that lawsuit is Google paying Apple twenty billion a year to be the default search engine on ai.
Speaker: 0
33:00
Obviously, we all know iPhones have elite customers. Those are very, precious searches from people with a lot of money because iPhones are expensive. Anyway, Eddie Q, who’s been with Apple for thirty five years. He said, quote, for the first time ever last month, our search volume actually went down, quote, that has never happened in twenty years.
Speaker: 0
33:20
If you ask what’s happening, it’s because people are using ChatGPT. They’re using perplexity. I use it at times. He believes that AI search is gonna replace classic search like Google. Quote again, there’s enough money now, enough large players that I don’t see how it doesn’t happen.
Speaker: 0
33:36
Bloomberg reported on Q’s comments at 11AM. An hour later, Google was down a hundred billion dollars in market cap. It bounced back a little bit today when we’re taping this, on Thursday. Here’s the statement from Google responding to Q’s comments. We continue to see overall query growth in search. That includes an increase in total queries coming from Apple’s devices and platforms, Freeburg.
Speaker: 0
33:59
Is it time for Google to panic, Google shareholders to panic? We talked last week about making bold decisions about what is the default and how might Google get out of this classic innovators dilemma? What do you think?
Speaker: 3
34:14
We keep coming back to a search dead conversation. Everyone knows that the search click repeat paradigm is over. And there’s a new model in what I would zoom out a little bit and say is kind of the difference in human computer interaction for knowledge, information, and services.
Speaker: 3
34:35
It may not be that I type something into a search box. It may be that I’m having a chat. That chat may happen in a chat window. It may happen via voice. It may happen on a screen. It may happen in an AirPod.
Speaker: 3
34:48
We don’t yet know where the consumer is going to go with this, but there’s a lot of paradigm shifts underway. I will say Google has models that are, if not the best, competitive. So the underlying models, the underlying technology exists. They are certainly aware of the shift in the paradigm.
Speaker: 3
35:09
And so the transition for Google doesn’t need to happen overnight to a chat interface that looks like chat g p t. It may be a standalone app. They have a standalone app. As Chamath has pointed out in the past, they don’t do a great job promoting it. They don’t do a great job integrating the chat interface into search or replacing search of the chat interface.
Speaker: 3
35:28
Because meh, search ad revenue today is $200,000,000,000 And the cost to serve an AI query is order of magnitude higher than the cost to serve a search query. So flipping the search interface over to a chat interface overnight doesn’t make sense, and they don’t need to. They have the users. They have the models.
Speaker: 3
35:48
They already have the product. So it’s gonna be a slow kind of process of finding the optimal course for them to make the transition would be my guess on what they’re doing. It’s a question of at what point do you change the default on Google? Do you make it a slow one box, which is that answer section at the top of the search page, and you slowly get people used to that and you lead them over to the chat interface?
Speaker: 3
36:12
Or do you do it all at once? Or do you tell people, hey. Go use the app instead of the search box? So there’s a lot that I think they’re gonna discover. And if anything, this is an organization that is used to doing testing and then making incremental changes and then making big changes once they’re, you know, kind of tested and proven.
Speaker: 3
36:28
So I’m pretty positive on their ability to respond to the shift if there is one underway.
Speaker: 0
36:33
I guess two important data points, Tramath, that I’d like you to respond to. Search is only, like, 56% of Google’s revenue right now. People forget they have cloud, so they have diversified. It’s not a one revenue stream company anymore. And then also these Google search results at the top of the page, they’re dropping precipitously the number of clicks below it.
Speaker: 0
36:52
So different studies, 15 to 35% of the clicks below the box are not meh you know, are dropping. So this is significant, but it seems manageable. Where do you stand on it right now? Time to panic? Or as Freeberg was saying before, hey, maybe it’s a great opportunity for Google to add yet another product line, yet another revenue ram.
Speaker: 2
37:15
They definitely have the best models in many domains. I would say that the cogen models from Anthropic are really good, but in many other domains, including general information and chat, I think Gemini is exceptional. So what is the problem? The problem is that they were effectively at 99% shah, and now we were always just waiting for that shoe to drop, which is where they started to go from 99 to something less than 99.
Speaker: 2
37:45
And the point is now that it has happened, it is very easy for anybody to build a model that precisely calculates the economic value of every single basis point of share shift that happens. And what you saw was an initiation of that process this week. So what do you do? The problem is that this is not Google’s problem.
Speaker: 2
38:11
This is a consumer choice issue, and they have chosen something different. And whether we like it or not, and whether they like it or not, the reality is that ChatGPT is running away with it. And if you look at the growth and the share that OpenAI is seeing, it’s quite an incredible thing. So what does one do?
Speaker: 2
38:36
I think that instead of waiting for data, I think that you have to assume that you’re gonna go from 99% share to 75% in the next two years as an example. And you need to start asking yourself what will go wrong. And if you can ask yourself that question honestly and red team that, then I think the conclusion you get to is you need to start very aggressively integrating Gemini as the front facing window to Google Inc.
Speaker: 2
39:07
But again, as I sort of said last week, that requires a combination of taste and courage. Otherwise, what’ll happen is if you’re waiting for the data, you’re just sana get caught off guard because Apple will do things and then make a press release months after the fact. OpenAI will announce a press release. Facebook will do something.
Speaker: 2
39:28
And what that does is it destroys the morale of the company, of the brilliant product managers of which there are many and the brilliant engineers of which there are many inside of Google. If you’re sitting around waiting to react to some sandwich served up by your competitors, that is a terrible approach.
Speaker: 0
39:46
Philippe, what are your thoughts here on Google? You obviously participate in public markets. Is it a buy right now? I mean, I don’t wanna give investment advice, but do you think the company has the talent, the temperament to make these hard decisions, and to turn this around or avoid the iceberg, if the iceberg being chat GPT and people getting answers instead of links?
Speaker: 1
40:08
Well, I think you guys have summarized the situation pretty well. I would just add add just a couple small things. One is the market cap of Google is, like, 1,800,000,000,000.0 and that of ChatGPT is, let’s say, 300. So Google is worth 6 ChatGPT, and is that the correct ratio into the future or not?
Speaker: 1
40:28
The second one is Ai was around, sadly, in, the times of the yellow pages. And I remember when the yellow pages is where you go somewhere to bounce and go somewhere else. And basically these yellow links got replaced by the blue link and the yellow page companies went away.
Speaker: 1
40:46
Now part of the reason they went away is they were very levered. Google has no leverage, sits on a lot of cash, and imagine what, someone like Elon would do, if he had to re engineer Google. I think they have, you know, it’s it’s a much larger company, let’s say, than Twitter.
Speaker: 1
41:03
So, like, the part that I’m wondering about, I haven’t made an opinion on Google, is ai, hey, is this the next IBM? You’re sana stick around for a really, really long time, but you’re just not going to be ai a company growing as fast as you used to and maybe there’ll be little growth and you just sort of struggle ahead.
Speaker: 1
41:21
Or can they completely re engineer their business? And they do have two great businesses, Waymo and YouTube, and really cloud and all the cloud apps. So they have three great businesses. And then they have this one search business. Like you said, maybe it’s 60% of the revenue.
Speaker: 1
41:38
It’s probably 85% of the profits because it’s just so profitable.
Speaker: 2
41:43
No. I I would say it’s a 10% of the profits.
Speaker: 1
41:45
A 10. Right? So you’re right because some of these others lose money. That’s actually a good point. So, if you put that together, it’s just a classic innovator’s dilemma and imagine that they create a Gemini app and we start downloading the Gemini app. I would love to be the fly on the wall between the head of the Gemini app and then the head of ai the search box.
Speaker: 1
42:08
And they’re both fighting because one guy is stealing the business from the other and stuff like that. Personally, me, I found that these stocks, they’re like a little bit too complicated for meh. And I think that sometimes in life you just gotta say, hey, this is just tricky. There’s ai a lot of forces at work.
Speaker: 1
42:25
But the one thing stepping up that I would think about is there was this concept of the meh seven. And for the last two or three years, everybody is like, oh, you just need to own the max seven. It’s really easy. I can do it on my own. And I think what AI is showing is that at a time of great change, and like you guys said on the shah, a couple of you, AI is sort of precipitating so many fast changes.
Speaker: 1
42:50
To me, it’s a little bit like the end of the Sai seven. And what we should do is almost think ai, hey, what is the next? Remember when the MAX seven used to be FAANG and then FAANG plus plus and nobody talks about FAANG anymore? And now, I don’t know, like with the Sai seven, the sexy six, the fabulous five, there’s sana be a new index that comes up.
Speaker: 1
43:11
And I think we should think about, like, who’s gonna be on the new index, which private companies, which public companies. And I think Google for sure has some struggles, but it’s got a lot of advantages and a lot of cash.
Speaker: 2
43:24
You know, to your to your to your point though, to just to add one thing, which I I love this framing. Here’s another data point. If you were going to make the case that we need to go into harvest mode, right, and sai, we don’t know the rate of change of the search business, so let’s just have as much money on hand so that we have as much optionality.
Speaker: 2
43:48
That’s a very reasonable and fair strategy. You would probably not spend $75,000,000,000 a year of CapEx on making these models. The opposite is also true. If you’re going to drain your cash at a rate of change that’s greater than it needs to be to the tune of an extra $75,000,000,000 a year, there’s probably a case to be made, well, if we’ve made the cake, let’s sell the cake.
Speaker: 2
44:13
You know, we’ve made the dog food, let’s have the dogs eat the dog food. It’s the in the middle strategy of both spending the money but then stage gating the product that is the worst outcome, in my opinion.
Speaker: 1
44:24
I think they’re right to invest. I find these companies that decide to harvest, you know, the cash cow and, buy all their shares back. You know, it never really works. I think that the only chance that Google has to create an amazing company is you gotta take some risks. At the end of the day, the man in the arena. He who takes the risk usually gets the speak, and they’ve got to invest in the future.
Speaker: 1
44:49
It’ll be interesting to see if their shareholders, you know, agree with that or not.
Speaker: 2
44:53
What do you do, Jayco? What do you think?
Speaker: 0
44:56
Great question. You guys teed it up perfectly. I think they’re going to cut a large number of employees, get people to return back to office, and take this a little more seriously on a corporate level because you got that sense from Sergei, who’s in the office every day. And I use Gemini, and I have a sort of AI first company where everybody’s required to do their work on Ai, two or three different Claude, Gemini, Grok, etcetera.
Speaker: 0
45:19
And what I’ve been noticing inside these products is they’re very deeply integrated. I got surprised just the other day. I was asking it about a travel question, and it referenced my g calendar. I didn’t know they could do that. Then, obviously, you can use you can use Gemini inside of Google Docs then. They have four or five products right now that are one or 2,000,000,000 users per month.
Speaker: 0
45:44
Obviously, Chrome might get spun out, but you have YouTube, you have Google Docs, you have Android. They have such a data advantage and such a deep integration into people’s lives because they use three or four services. I use YouTube TV. I use YouTube, and I have a subscription to that, YouTube Music. They have such integration. I think Google’s gonna figure this out.
Speaker: 0
46:04
And if they cut their team size down, the earnings are gonna go massively, up, and they’re spending $75,000,000,000 on infrastructure. I think it’s gonna be
Speaker: 2
46:16
Would you integrate these models more aggressively into in front of the consumer, or would you is this the rate that makes the most sense in your mind?
Speaker: 0
46:23
I think you mentioned, like, maybe go all in on certain other services. I think YouTube search is the place to go all in. Right now, when you do a YouTube search, it just gives you 10 links. Right? It just gives you that rolling bang. You should be able to ask a question to YouTube and you should be able to ask questions to your calendar.
Speaker: 0
46:37
You should be able to say, who have I met with over the last ten years, who I’m no longer in touch with and what are they up to? And it should do a Gemini search inside of Google Calendar. It’s very light right now. And then if you did that on YouTube, hey, tell me everybody’s opinion on Kotu and their strategy over the years and how it’s changed.
Speaker: 0
46:55
And you ask that on YouTube with all their transcripts, they can make a supercut of all of that. This would train people, you know, at the point of pain in a very deep way without sacrificing Google search queries, you know, too aggressively. So there there’s YouTube’s such a secret weapon.
Speaker: 2
47:12
I hear you. I would just remind the Google management team that very, very, very smart people like Philippe and others who control trillions of dollars
Speaker: 1
47:23
I wish.
Speaker: 2
47:25
Well, collectively, are not making the decisions about today, but are taking the trail of breadcrumbs of what they see today and guesstimating what eighteen to twenty four months in the future looks like. And all I’m encouraging them to do is Ai think that that data point from Eddie is the beginning of a stream of such data points.
Speaker: 2
47:47
And Ai just encouraged them to inoculate them from the morale hit that will come if they don’t have an explicit aggressive strategy. And instead, if they become reactive to external data, it’s really demoralizing.
Speaker: 3
48:04
But what if what if they’re actually tracking the data and they’re seeing their own sense of search queries driving clicks and then driving positive response to the AI driven OneBox results that they show at the top.
Speaker: 2
48:21
Oh, I think that’s exactly what they’re seeing.
Speaker: 3
48:23
But then they’re just not And they’re just making ram requisite kind of ai decisions. Right? No.
Speaker: 2
48:27
No. No. What I’m saying is that’s absolutely what they’re seeing. That the demonstrated strategy is emblematic of exactly that. It’s the rationalization. My point is there’s something that you can’t rationalize because you don’t know until it’s presented to you, which is what is the other company doing?
Speaker: 2
48:42
They don’t have spies inside of OpenAI. They don’t know what the OpenAI product strategy looks like. They only hear secondhand what the OpenAI growth looks like. And all I’m saying is it’s a bit of a sword of Damocles. At some point, the sword drops. You’re not in control of it.
Speaker: 2
48:58
And once you start to see a trend, that’s the rationalization that I think puts companies in a very difficult and tricky strategic situation. It takes a lot of courage to say, oh ai God. Like it’s like ai Buffett said this. Like Buffett has this very famous thing of just putting his CEOs on the spot and saying, stop telling me all these things that can go right.
Speaker: 2
49:19
Let’s go paint the death case. What can absolutely go wrong and bread team me the solution and then justify for me why you haven’t done it. And all I’m saying is, if you start to think about, ai, for example, you saw OpenAI today, Fiji Simo, she’s leaving Instacart. Right? She’s gonna go and be the CEO of apps inside of OpenAI. You’re seeing a level of talent concentrate that I have not seen since I was at Facebook.
Speaker: 2
49:42
There was nobody we couldn’t get when we thought we were building a model that was totally orthogonal to Google. Now it did not mean that Google diminished in any way, but it creates a different use case. In that example though, the social use case was very much non cannibalistic to the blue links.
Speaker: 2
50:02
And to your point David, if it turns out that question asking is not cannibalistic to search, Google will be fine. Right. All I’m encouraging them to do is play the scenario where it is cannibalistic and figure out what to do.
Speaker: 0
50:16
I think there’s a chance that we’re underestimating the power of Google’s ad network right now. It’s quite possible that knowing your queries in Gemini, knowing what you’re doing in calendar, knowing what you’re watching on YouTube could lead to a stream of more target ads that do better and are more valuable.
Speaker: 0
50:32
And so we’ve been seeing a number of companies, startups, you know, in the early stages and year one startups that are figuring out how to use your queries and what you’re doing in AI to present to you search results. So imagine you’re doing a Gemini search, Chamath, sana or Philippe.
Speaker: 0
50:48
And on the side of it, it’s giving you a rolling list of ads or offers that you might be more interested in. That could be a better advertising product than even search itself. Hubert, your thoughts?
Speaker: 3
50:59
Well, let me ask all three of you a question, which is since ChatGPT has come out and Gemini and other tools like it, do you find that you’re doing generally more stuff or less stuff?
Speaker: 2
51:14
I find that I am using search a lot less.
Speaker: 0
51:19
Ai ask
Speaker: 3
51:19
But but the aggregate, is your aggregate, like, usage of the Internet to do things for yourself, for work, kind of, are you getting more
Speaker: 2
51:29
ai? Yeah. I’ve learned how to ask things that I’ve always wanted to know but didn’t even know were possible. Right. But all of that to me goes to OpenAI and to x. I use lock.
Speaker: 3
51:39
That that’s fine. But I’m just saying, like, like, if you were to because I’m I’m what I’m trying to do is paint the picture of where the denominator of, quote, search queries is going. Because if search queries
Speaker: 2
51:48
is no longer the wrong way to think about this. No. I
Speaker: 0
51:51
like your Sai like your thing. I’m doing five times as many queries. And- Right. I would say they’re spread across a number of different platforms because instead of asking humans to do work, I’m now doing it myself. You used to ask a human, hey, can you do this research for me? And they will come back to it. Right.
Speaker: 2
52:05
You
Speaker: 0
52:05
would hire somebody or use a consultant. Now I’m doing it myself. So you’re onto something that the total volume, the total pie could be five, ten times where it’s think ai person.
Speaker: 3
52:14
Yeah. If if the old paradigm is like measuring search queries and quote arya share as a function of search queries, I don’t know if I care about having 99% of that or if I’m actually better off having 80% of something that’s now three times bigger. Yes. Where there’s so much more usage.
Speaker: 1
52:31
Imagine you get you lose 99% of one bucket, but you’re only getting 10 or 20% of the new bucket.
Speaker: 3
52:38
That’s the bad scenario. That’s exactly right. That is the bad scenario.
Speaker: 1
52:41
That’s the issue. That’s right.
Speaker: 2
52:42
Ai, that bucket is getting built right now and there are Nowheresville in that bucket. How are you gonna show up in eighteen months and say, oh, that new bucket that’s so ai, pick me, pick me. This is why it’s a strategic error.
Speaker: 3
52:54
Well, think about the let’s say you’re running growth at Facebook, Jamap, and you guys have a new product you wanna launch. You’ve got a billion users. How do you get them to use that new product? Because Google has a a chat GPT competitor. How do you get them to use that product? Yeah.
Speaker: 3
53:08
I walked through this last week, but I’ll
Speaker: 2
53:12
do it again, which is Ai think that today, the part that I agree with you is this whole view on search is antiquated and it makes no sense. I think instead, what you need to think about is where are the inbound actions into the house that is Google. Right? Google Inc. And you have to have a very simple way of deducing what is the value of that inbound action.
Speaker: 2
53:34
And if you rank them, the inbound actions to the Google search bar are obviously way more valuable than the inbound actions in all these other apps. I would start in those places that are more bottom of the list on the money side, but high on the list in terms of intention and behavior.
Speaker: 2
53:50
And I would redo the experience around Ai. But that requires taste.
Speaker: 3
53:57
And cannibalization that you’re that you have to be willing to take the hit on. Which service you
Speaker: 0
54:00
think is number one, YouTube?
Speaker: 2
54:02
I think your idea, Jason, around YouTube is a very smart one because it’s a juggernaut business. I also think Workspace, we use Workspace here every day, Gmail, calendar. I think Workspace could be really interesting as well.
Speaker: 0
54:16
Gmail is a great one, yeah.
Speaker: 2
54:17
Inside of Gmail. And it is gonna get better. Like there are smart people thinking about this. All I’m saying is that the market will now start to price this decay in. I’m long.
Speaker: 3
54:27
Well, Philippe, I wanna know your bucket of what are the most important companies that matter the most.
Speaker: 1
54:32
Okay. I I’ll try, but I have to ask you guys a question before. Do you guys think that the two founders come back in a very forceful way into the company? I don’t know exactly ai. But one thing that I was wondering, Shamath, is you you bring up a very important word, taste.
Speaker: 1
54:49
Do you have to be a founder to be able to impose this sort of new taste? And do you need sort of founder credibility at the junction at which Google is at? It seems like this is a big junction. Right? This is the first time in their twenty, twenty five year history where I feel like, woah, there’s a real threat. How do you do that without the founders?
Speaker: 2
55:15
Yes.
Speaker: 0
55:15
And on
Speaker: 1
55:15
top of that, they’re ai. You know? It’s just they may not be able
Speaker: 0
55:18
to Sergei asked Larry, no. Sergei’s gonna do it. I think he’s building up. The reason we’re seeing at the all in events, the reason he’s going to work every day is that he’s building up his knowledge base here. And I don’t wanna speak for him, but I’ve seen him really engaged on this stuff. And the Gemini app is kick ass.
Speaker: 0
55:34
And I’ve had long conversations with him about, like, little details in the Gemini app. He is super engaged. Like, I’ve had conversations with him about granular details of Google local and YouTube searches and how they should be presented in the results in the Gemini app. He’s into it.
Speaker: 3
55:49
He’s into it.
Speaker: 2
55:50
But you’re bringing up
Speaker: 0
55:50
into it.
Speaker: 2
55:51
You’re bringing up something which I think is very important. When you’re at a junction this important, who has the gravitas to come in and actually make a difficult change like this? I think in general, it’s the founders. And, you know, in fairness to Larry and Sergey, these are two brilliant, brilliant guys. They’ve done it once.
Speaker: 2
56:10
And in fairness, they probably did it kind of a second time when they created Alphabet because now you have these other businesses that are pretty impressive. Now they’re just gonna have to do it a third ai, but they’re going to have to impose their will and they’re going to have to develop some very specific taste.
Speaker: 2
56:24
This is nothing against Sundar and the team ai the way. This is just to say that the only people that can come in and say, ai, we’re sana make a change that could have this negative impact to a $1,800,000,000,000 company arya people that are gonna feel it the most. They will feel it more than anybody else. And so if they say that it should happen, they’ll have the moral credibility to make it so.
Speaker: 0
56:44
I love this question that you were just asked, Philippe. Go through your top 10 companies, why you love them.
Speaker: 3
56:50
The number? What’s not top 10. What’s the number, Sully? What are the companies that matter the most?
Speaker: 1
56:55
Yeah. So I have a I’ve thought about that a lot. I’m not sure Sai have, you know, great answers. But the first one is Ai keep defaulting to the number 25. I can explain you why, but they’re not a hundred companies. But if you think there’s only five and all these money managers, you know, they have ai five stocks that represent 80%.
Speaker: 1
57:18
I feel the level of risk that you’re taking is too high and that one has to be you know, I start with a hump with the public markets. I would say most French people are not known to be particularly humble, but at least if you’ve been in the stock market as a French guy, you’ve been beaten up so bad.
Speaker: 1
57:37
I started 01/01/2000. So imagine what my first three years looked at. I got reduced to ashes, just beaten up by the market. We did reasonably well, because, thank God being a hedge fund, you have different tools that you can do. And so I think you need to have a certain number of stocks.
Speaker: 1
57:58
You need to know that some stuff you get lucky, some stuff you get unlucky, some stuff you get right, and some stuff you get wrong. And then Ai think that there’s a second phenomenon. Once you agree to the 25, you say, wait a minute. Why are there no IPOs? Why are these private companies, amazing private companies, some of the best in the world, SpaceX, Stripe.
Speaker: 0
58:24
Answer that question. Why?
Speaker: 1
58:25
OpenAI. Ai? In your mind. I think that the cost of being public is, too difficult. One
Speaker: 0
58:35
What Ai, like, actual
Speaker: 1
58:38
The the the reputation, the regulatory, like, you get busted, like, left and right by, agencies. And, like, when’s the last time that a public company I think that, you know, during the last administration, something like someone told meh, I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I love the I love the quote so much that I’m using it without checking if it’s a % true or not.
Speaker: 1
59:04
Something like 35% of the Sai and P had an issue with a government agency in the last few years. Right? When’s the last time that you guys remember a private company that has an issue with a government agency? Like, I’m sure it happens, but, like, off the top of my mind, it seems like a fraction of that. Right?
Speaker: 1
59:22
And then Ai also think that the private markets have become so sophisticated that in essence, like our private markets, public markets that just trade three times a year. Like, you know, these companies, they do these rounds, you know, once or twice. They’re becoming pretty sophisticated. They match buyers and sellers, and I think that’s okay.
Speaker: 1
59:44
And then the last piece, which I think that’s a very bad piece for the four of us and all of us on this call and many of your, listeners, is that there’s such a view that, like, large companies are bad and we gotta bust them and we’re not gonna let them do any Meh and A. And as a result of that, small companies no longer get bought by big ones.
Speaker: 1
01:00:07
And for me it’s a disaster because if I fund small companies, but now you take away one of the best ways that I have to monetize my investment. Why should I invest in risky private companies? I can just buy the public one. And so I’m really hoping that as part of this de deregulatory move and you guys and Sachs will have way more influence than we.
Speaker: 1
01:00:27
But to convince people that in my mind, the best way to create competition is to allow these large companies to fight against each other. And the battle between OpenAI and Google is the best way to do that, but not by telling Google not to buy something or
Speaker: 3
01:00:43
The greatest.
Speaker: 1
01:00:43
Telling OpenAI not
Speaker: 0
01:00:44
to buy something. To click on that, Philippe. I think it’s a super important point, the singles, the doubles in the industry. I’ve been harping about this on this program as well, so we’re simpatico. What about a proposal where maybe the non Meh seven let’s let’s pick a number under a trillion market cap, under 750,000,000,000.
Speaker: 0
01:01:01
We let those companies buy and sell each other at a very vibrant pace. We saw ChatChippity buy a $3,000,000,000 company, I ai, this past week in the, kind of, coding space. Like I mentioned earlier in the program, DoorDash bought two companies. What if we said, hey, okay. We understand Google getting bigger, Apple getting bigger, Apple getting bigger, Microsoft getting bigger. Why?
Speaker: 0
01:01:21
What’s the
Speaker: 3
01:01:21
rationale for that? Why? What’s the rationale
Speaker: 0
01:01:22
for that? Ai does size would be But
Speaker: 3
01:01:24
how does size make a difference to whether or not someone should buy a company?
Speaker: 0
01:01:27
Very simple. Because they have such a market dominant position.
Speaker: 3
01:01:30
That’s different just size.
Speaker: 0
01:01:31
Hold on. Let me finish my sentence. They have such a market dominant position when a company like, Apple has, you know, half of the mobile phones or Google has Chrome, Android plus all these things that they could shove that product for free down the throats of users, price dump it, which is illegal, and create less competition in the future.
Speaker: 0
01:01:53
But if you said DoorDash and Lyft or, you know, Coinbase plus a stablecoin company, This would build the Meh seven to the Mag 70, and then you would have many more larger companies. What do you what do you think of this, Philippe?
Speaker: 3
01:02:09
I’ll respond to that because I don’t think that that makes any sense. And I think shah the the comments you’re making about size shouldn’t drive these decisions. The fact that Apple, for example, has a minority market share in operating systems on mobile phones. Remember, Android is the majority and it’s a ai
Speaker: 0
01:02:28
that It’s no longer true in The US, by the way.
Speaker: 3
01:02:29
Right. Not in The US globally. Ai? And Apple comes along and says, hey. I wanna buy a car company or I wanna buy something else. Why should that affect consumers in any way whatsoever? It the the ultimate objective of antitrust authority is to prevent monopolistic practices that hurt consumers and hurt the market and take away options and choice and freedom in the market.
Speaker: 3
01:02:52
But if companies wanna make, orthogonal acquisitions, if companies wanna continue to grow and become a, you know, a large holding company, why should we step in and say, oh, you’re too big now. Ultimately, Jason, you’re you could see that threshold very quickly becoming a slippery slope that leads to a general, like, anti capitalist concept where people say, well, let’s stop all companies from getting bigger than a billion or let’s stop them all getting bigger than a hundred million now.
Speaker: 3
01:03:18
And that that is a very slippery slope. Scale shouldn’t matter. At the end of the day, protecting consumers from, monopolistic or antitrust practices should be the objective of these antitrust authorities.
Speaker: 0
01:03:30
Yeah. I think my response to that would be, except in the case where the bundling, as we talked about in previous episodes, makes it so any of the large companies can just hold on. Let me finish my sentence again. In the case that a large company could kill all the competitors instantly by price dumping.
Speaker: 0
01:03:48
So you take something that people are paying for, you know, ai, say, Robinhood or Coinbase. You you know, Google buys Robinhood or Apple buys Coinbase and they just sai, everything’s free. We’re gonna make our money from our main business. Meh, it’s better for consumers, but it’s not as good for a competition.
Speaker: 0
01:04:03
And in the long term, then you would kill all the competitors and then they can do unnatural acts. That would be the argument. I’m not saying it’s appropriate for the market.
Speaker: 3
01:04:11
That’s a great argument for what you’re talking about. It is not a great argument for stopping companies above a threshold of of market cap from doing stuff and companies also breaking because a company below a threshold in market cap could have the same effect as what you’re describing in a smaller arya.
Speaker: 3
01:04:25
And they could have You
Speaker: 0
01:04:26
have to be thoughtful about it. You’re a % correct if they’re in the same arena. So Coinbase, Robinhood, and E Bryden merging could cause the same effect. You’re right. Philippe, what what are your thoughts on just how to get the country out of this debate? Because big companies bad. No.
Speaker: 0
01:04:43
We shouldn’t let them do m any m and a. The wrath of Linacon, is there a is there an off ramp here? Can can Trump just unilaterally kinda make this happen? What what are your thoughts? Or should he?
Speaker: 1
01:04:55
Oh, I think that to me, one of the best part, being an investor of venture capital is when you have a really big idea and it works out, it takes care of a lot of sana. You know, there’s a little aspect ai, would you like to play the lottery? If the lottery was capped, like, hey, if you win the lottery, you can’t win more than $30,000,000 30 million’s insane amount of money, but Sai read that there’s some lottery guys who make 1,000,000,000 and 2,000,000,000.
Speaker: 1
01:05:23
And the reason why people are willing to bet so much and most people are willing to lose is they all think that they’re going to have this one ticket that’s worth a billion. And I think when you reduce the incentive, the financial incentive of, and I agree with Dave, like success should be rewarded as much as possible.
Speaker: 1
01:05:42
But if you’ve done something wrong, then use these, you know, the existing, laws to define what success is. I don’t think you can cap because once you start capping and then what happens if the stock market goes down? Do you then have to just recap? So but I I agree with you. You bring up an interesting point which is in these bundles ai Amazon Prime bundle, Apple bryden. There’s a Costco bryden. Right?
Speaker: 1
01:06:07
We seem to be living in this world of bundles where the stock market is willing to pay forty, fifty times earnings just for the, you know, the membership fee as long as whatever you do on the side,
Speaker: 2
01:06:19
you basically make no money. Like Costco, I think, makes a %
Speaker: 1
01:06:19
of its ai ai no money. Like, Costco, I think, makes sai % of its money, more or less, on a membership fee and trades for $50.60 times earnings. There is a limit to, like, how big the bundle is before you start, dumping. So I don’t think I’m saying anything super interesting.
Speaker: 1
01:06:37
I just hope that you don’t cap the upside because that’s what enables all of us to fund these new companies. The reason why all of you guys and me were willing to fund these companies knowing that meh of them are sana fail is the hope that you get the next OpenAI. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
01:06:54
It’s well sai. The power law. Chamath, I think maybe a good time to maybe talk about private markets and liquidity and VC. Yeah?
Speaker: 2
01:07:01
I mean, it’s just so hard. It’s hard to make money. And if you view making money as some derogatory thing and you put a bunch of impediments in the way, the downstream impact is interesting ways to make money will be out of fashion and simple ways of making money will be the only things that people do.
Speaker: 2
01:07:28
The problem is that society doesn’t move forward. If all you do are simple things. You need people who are willing to put risk capital to buy these lottery tickets. And if you marginalize the upside, you’re just sana have exactly that, a stagnant society of marginal things that doesn’t move along.
Speaker: 2
01:07:47
And unless people fundamentally embrace that idea, we’re sana lose.
Speaker: 0
01:07:52
We being America.
Speaker: 2
01:07:53
Yeah. If you look for example in the last five year period in China or Canada, where both of them, two totally different political regimes, but they all both had the same thing happen, which is the the the amount of investment capital that went into both of those countries fell off of a cliff for two totally separate reasons.
Speaker: 2
01:08:13
What is interesting is going to be what is the downstream impact of that in ten and fifteen and twenty years? And you can look historically back and we know what this looks like, which is countries stagnate in the absence of investment and risk capital. So you will become a marginalized also ram country and, you know, not to slag Europe, but part of what Europe got wrong was that compact didn’t exist.
Speaker: 2
01:08:42
Too many administrators, too many hall monitors, not enough ability to put risk capital to work and actually get gigantic outcomes. So the most important thing we can do on that dimension is to figure out how to have less regulation, have these companies fight it out and create the incentives for these smaller businesses to be bought and or to go public.
Speaker: 0
01:09:05
So let’s back this up with some data here. Nick, pull up the chart on exits. This is an important one for people to see. We’ve had since the wrath of LunaCon last four years under Ai, you know, you had this 2021 spike of IPOs, speak Zirp, a lot of inventory, a lot of risk capital have been put to work for ten years.
Speaker: 0
01:09:23
And after that 2021 spike, things have been flatlined and companies are preferring to stay private. And now we have venture capital constricting in terms of new funds being done and people are making larger funds to do later and later stage investments and
Speaker: 2
01:09:39
Jason, it’s constricting at the absolute worst time because what Philippe said before is we’re in the midst, in the early phases of an entirely new economy that’s going absolutely parabolic, but the people that are supposed to accelerate that innovation and make these companies come to life are gonna run out of gas because if they don’t return money to their limited partners, where are they gonna get the incremental capital from?
Speaker: 0
01:10:04
Ai. It’s the retail investors and sovereign wealth funds outside The US seem to have an answer to that question.
Speaker: 3
01:10:09
Lead to a normalized market, Philippe and Chamath? So ultimately, shouldn’t the exit volume define the amount of capital that LPs should invest in this asset class to get an out a return that compensates them for the illiquidity relative to public markets with the same kind of risk levels?
Speaker: 3
01:10:28
At the end of the day, it is what it is. And you’re sana see a reduction in venture dollars. And that’s just the market normalizing. The economy only grows and only innovates at a certain pace, maybe is what the data shows.
Speaker: 2
01:10:41
I think the way that I think about this as an LP, and maybe Philippe can talk about this as a GP. But as an LP, when I think about putting capital into different funds, I have a base return in my mind, which is I want after taxes meh of everything to generate about 10% a year.
Speaker: 2
01:10:59
That’s where my risk of ruin is basically zero. It compounds to infinity. I like the profile of my return and my assets. How do I get to 10%? Well, sometimes when I’m holding short term stuff, I’m only generating four or 5% in paper. So then I have to go out on the risk curve.
Speaker: 2
01:11:14
So I talk to a hedge fund. They’re sana give me 12 or 13% meh, maybe in some cases. I try to understand their risk, but I can only get so much working. So then I have to go further out on the risk curve. Then I talk to some private credit and private equity guys who tell me, yes, I can give you mid teens returns.
Speaker: 2
01:11:30
Then I do the analysis on that and I think, okay, I’ll give you some money, but they are gonna lock me up for five or six years. It’s still not enough to get to a blended rate of return of 10%. So then I go yet further out on the risk curve. I call my friends at Sequoia and all these other places.
Speaker: 2
01:11:44
And when you talk to the venture investors, the problem is you are so illiquid for so long that the rates of return need to be in the mid to high twenties net to me. But when you look at the data of what’s possible, they actually look like a three and four year hedge fund. And part of the reason is because of this strangulation of illiquidity that’s caused artificially by administrations, by regulations, and by agencies like the FTC.
Speaker: 2
01:12:20
The question is if they didn’t exist or if the regulations were a lot smaller, what would the upside return be? It’s probably 500 to a thousand basis points higher.
Speaker: 0
01:12:33
Much higher. %. Yeah.
Speaker: 2
01:12:35
But I think at current course and speak, with the lack of IPOs and with the lack of M and A, you can’t justify that asset class on its own, in my opinion, unless you think about it as ai something that you’re doing almost philanthropically.
Speaker: 3
01:12:51
Unless capital comes out and then prices come down and then re return multiples go.
Speaker: 0
01:12:56
Let me put some numbers on this. Here’s the second chart, annual IPOs, and just give you some, you know, broad strokes here of how amazing 2021 was for a lot of firms. Rivian went out at 66,000,000,000, Affirm at 24 billions, Qualtrics, 20 5 billion, Robinhood, which I was involved in with the first investors, thirty billion, Duolingo, five billion, Toast, etcetera, Roblox, forty two billion, Squarespace.
Speaker: 0
01:13:18
And then you had all this meh and a. Square bought Afterpay for 29,000,000,000, Zoom acquired Ai for 15,000,000,000, Mailchimp, remember that $112,000,000,000, Microsoft and Nuance, the, spoken, the, license ai, 20,000,000,000. Do
Speaker: 2
01:13:33
you know what the distribution? Do you know what the distribution of these IPOs were by method? SPAC versus direct listing versus traditional IPO?
Speaker: 0
01:13:42
I don’t have that here. We’d have to do it not just on the names, but also on the amount, distributed. Yeah. That’s a good question.
Speaker: 2
01:13:48
But you
Speaker: 1
01:13:48
know, when I look at that data, what what what I look at if if you just bring it back for one second is ever since, you know, the ’20 ’20 ‘1, which were very ai. Yeah. If you look at ’22, ’20 ‘3, ’20 ‘4, and now the ’25, I’m like, how is this that it’s worse than o four, o ‘5, o ‘6 that were normal years?
Speaker: 1
01:14:12
How is this worse than thirteen and fourteen ai fifteen? Yeah. And that’s exactly correct.
Speaker: 0
01:14:17
Ai of people. She scared people.
Speaker: 1
01:14:19
Correct.
Speaker: 0
01:14:19
Meh and a I’ve talked to M and a people, Philippe, and they have said it’s not even worth bringing it to the board. Correct. And she doesn’t the discussion.
Speaker: 1
01:14:28
She can’t connect the dots. You know, she’s like, I want people to not, you know, play the lottery anymore. I don’t care for them. She doesn’t understand that our system is based on this risk taking. And so listen.
Speaker: 2
01:14:43
I think it’s almost I think it’s
Speaker: 1
01:14:45
also ai change.
Speaker: 2
01:14:46
It’s also worse than that. I think that they probably look at, like, Adobe Figma and they look at the cap table and they probably just make a judgment that, hey, I don’t want these people to be billionaires. Yuck. I hate these people. But they don’t understand to your point, the waterfall effect of not returning capital to all kinds of other investors who are in the business of taking risk.
Speaker: 1
01:15:06
It’s this like collateral damage. You know, one of the things I feel none of these people understand so well is ai all the collateral damage. You think you’re moving in one direction, and all these dominoes sort of fall around you. Exactly.
Speaker: 0
01:15:21
Well, the second and third order impacts this cascade. You know, it’s Ford Foundation. It’s Harvard. It’s California Ai. Those are the people who are the gonna be the beneficiaries. And the third thing, because I’ve been talking to a lot of geographies in The Middle East, Japan, Australia, Singapore, etcetera, Asia, they all sana recreate what we have here.
Speaker: 0
01:15:42
Well, what we’ve created here in Silicon Valley and in America is these diasporas that start when a company like Google goes public and then those people go create Facebook or go work at Facebook like Sheryl Sandberg did and they accelerate the growth there. And then those people become angel investors. They become LPs. This incredible flywheel was cooking.
Speaker: 0
01:16:01
I mean, it was so smooth and now we’ve literally stuck a stick in it
Speaker: 1
01:16:07
and the car looks over.
Speaker: 0
01:16:08
And you you don’t have the downtrodden effect of Canva in Australia ai you I don’t know if you know that company. It’s done incredibly well. Phenomenal. They were oh, you are involved. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:16:18
We’re we’re we’re involved. But, sorry, just one thing I would add because it makes what you said so much more powerful. On top of that, when these people die, most of them gave all their money away to foundation, which is something very different between The US and Europe.
Speaker: 1
01:16:32
In Europe, a lot of the wealth and in many other countries outside of the Europe, the wealth basically continues for generations. In America, these people build companies, create new companies, invest in new companies, coach new companies, mentor new companies. And when they die, all that money goes to foundation that continue to promote and do some of the work that governments would do.
Speaker: 1
01:16:55
And finally, how great is it that some foundations are competing with the government to decide what needs to be done?
Speaker: 0
01:17:01
As opposed to a larger government. Right? And and Exactly. So that ultimately serves the Doge mission. Atlassian and those incredible founders who did Jira, etcetera, bought other companies, they wound up being the seed investors in Blackbird, the the venture firm in Australia that did Canva, and they were the investors in Canva.
Speaker: 0
01:17:19
Both of those companies are creating this incredible flood of entrepreneurship in Australia, And we’re breaking that in America. Australia copied that playbook. I sana know about the new fund you’re doing, Philippe, and ai? Maybe you could explain to people, I guess this is one of these, what do they call it?
Speaker: 0
01:17:37
Closed or open end funds and they operate differently than venture ones.
Speaker: 2
01:17:40
And also the seating. You you seeded it in a very unique way with a couple of very unique family offices. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:17:46
Well, you guys are nice to ask and a couple of you have tweeted some nice things about it, so I I really appreciate it.
Speaker: 2
01:17:53
I loved it. I loved it.
Speaker: 1
01:17:55
Let me tell you the the a bit the story behind it. Right? So I was ai, on one hand, you’ve got private funds. They’re only available for the super, super rich. Like you gotta be, ai, you know, a super duper accredited investor. You put your money in there and you might not see anything for ten years.
Speaker: 1
01:18:15
And then for me as a GP, every three years Ai need to raise a new one of these funds. So God forbid, we have one fund that doesn’t work and we raise the next one or not. Right? So that was on one side of it. And then on the public side, what basically is going on in the public is very strange.
Speaker: 1
01:18:32
But in essence, the BlackRocks of the world and the Vanguards of the world make it that almost everybody wants to invest in an index. And as a result of that, the people who are still active managers, they’re all basically closet indexers because the risk of being wrong, you’re you do better for ten years and then you do worse for one year, you’re out.
Speaker: 1
01:18:53
So basically the public market, everybody wants to index, which is Ai think why the Sai seven, you know, is so big and stuff like that. And, the other part that’s weird with the public markets is since everybody needs to be indexed, everybody needs to be fully invested at all times. I’m like, why?
Speaker: 1
01:19:11
Why is it that you need to be fully invested in 1999 if the Speak multiple of the market is 60? Why is it that you want to be fully invested when you’re already down 10%, things are not working? Why not raise cash a lot? Sort of, you know, freshen up your ideas a little bit.
Speaker: 1
01:19:28
Go take a long walk on the beach and try to, understand maybe you’ve made some mistakes and stuff like that. So I’ve always wanted to do two things, which is one on the public side, have the ability to be different in the stocks that I own, but also that if I’m nervous, then what’s wrong with holding cash?
Speaker: 1
01:19:46
And I hate to put this in the same word, but you look at Berkshire Hathaway today and everybody wants to compare themselves to Berkshire a little bit. But Berkshire today is a trillion dollar company, a third in cash, a third in public equities, a third in private equities. Right?
Speaker: 1
01:20:01
And so I was like, okay, well what if we have a system where we can be in public stocks, we can be in private companies, but we also can be in lots of cash. And where investors know on day one, please do not compare me to an index. If you come in, you gotta give me sort of five or seven years to do my work.
Speaker: 1
01:20:22
And I’m also gonna let you take a little bit of money every year. So in essence, I’m willing to work at much lower fees because you give me capital for longer. But you don’t give me the capital forever and you’re not stuck forever. And so these interval funds are really interesting, because, I think the minimum investment is ai $50,000 or something like that.
Speaker: 1
01:20:49
And the conditions to qualify for such a fund are much smaller. So there’s many more investors that can come. And I look at it a little bit. I’m like, this is the democratizations of tech investing. And I really believe in it. I’ve been doing my thing for thirty years for institutional investors.
Speaker: 1
01:21:05
Why can’t I do it for, like, people who don’t have access to
Speaker: 2
01:21:10
Let me ask you a question. You have, what, 53,000,000,000 under management?
Speaker: 1
01:21:14
Something like that.
Speaker: 2
01:21:15
Something in that zone. Sai, I mean, obviously, you’ve been phenomenally successful. Talk about the fees and the carry and how you decided how to set that. And then tell us how your competitors reacted when you announced this fund. I’m very curious about that. Both of those two things.
Speaker: 1
01:21:34
Yeah. So we got a little bit lucky in that we studied the fees of other funds. These are things called interval funds. And it seems like the fees were more ai, 1.2512. And so we’re like, well, can we live at 1.25 And 12? And I was like, yeah. You know, it’s a really good deal for other people, but I get something for it, which is I get near permanent capital.
Speaker: 1
01:22:02
And in exchange for that near permanent capital, I’m willing to lay at lower fees because I think I’m going to be able to compound it for longer. So in essence, it’s not like I’m being altruistic. I’m not claiming, oh, I just want to do a good deal for people. It’s I’m being selfish.
Speaker: 1
01:22:17
If I can compound capital at 12 and a half percent incentive fee for ram very long time, it’s better than 20% for a short period of time. And for the investor, I love the fact that I’m sort of investing. Like if you told me, Philippe, start from scratch, write on a little blank piece of paper, what would you do?
Speaker: 1
01:22:35
I think all of us on the show would say, well, it would have to be something that looks like Berkshire Hathaway. Right? Berkshire is the model. And you want to do cash, you want to do publics, you want to do private, you want it to be a good deal for people, you want it to be permanent capital for you, and you want to try to be able to do that for a long time.
Speaker: 1
01:22:52
And I think that’s sort of what those things do. And then I was like, okay, but then the problem is ai you have a snowball at the top of the mountain. How do you get it to roll and to be big? And I was like, you know, we’re not very well known. I have to admit this is sort of one of my first podcasts, you know, ever.
Speaker: 1
01:23:11
So I really appreciate
Speaker: 0
01:23:12
You’re doing
Speaker: 1
01:23:13
great. Being here with you guys. So I was like, I gotta get the ball rolling at the top. And so I thought, okay, maybe I can get some tech entrepreneurs to help me out who believe in this concept of democratizing, tech investing and stuff like that. So I went to see the family offices. I didn’t quite see the founders directly, but the family offices for both the Bezos family and then the Dell family.
Speaker: 1
01:23:36
And I sort of pitched them the idea. They liked the idea. Then we pitched it, to the founders. And then we got to some agreement and they gave us a combined billion dollars to get going. And then we’re also sana put a lot of personal money in it. And I was like, great.
Speaker: 1
01:23:51
And I had read, I don’t know if it’s true, that the largest fund that was ever launched was the one of the first Blackstone song was one point three. So then I said, okay, I need to launch the fund that’s 1.301. Like that, I can claim that it’s the largest launch ever. So I don’t know if I’ll get there or not, but that was the ai. And I think it’s nice to have the backing of these guys.
Speaker: 2
01:24:13
So typically what happens is people come to see me in my sai. I’ll ask some folks to due diligence, and then I sign up to an LPA. Is that how this works? Like, if I’m interested, what is that what I do now? I or is this totally different?
Speaker: 1
01:24:27
You mean you as an LPA now?
Speaker: 2
01:24:29
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Me as just a normal person.
Speaker: 1
01:24:31
So, this fund in particular starts to be marketed by, one of the Wall Street firms. It’s in in this one. We picked UBS. They were the first ones who believed in us, but many other firms will work with others. And we have great relationships with JPMorgan and others. So in time, you’ll be available on all these different platforms. And then most of the people that we target usually have a relationship with a wealth management firm.
Speaker: 1
01:25:00
And our hope in time is to work with a bit the leading, wealth management firms. And, you can invest. And frankly, I’m like, hey, just start giving me a little bit of money. See if you like what I do.
Speaker: 0
01:25:12
On that. How many people can be involved? Because when you do venture, obviously, there are caps. You can only sell to accredited and qualified purchasers. That’s about 6% of the country. And you can only have 99 accredited investors in a in a venture fund. And then it’s, I think, uncapped, and then you could have 200 Yeah. You can have up to 10,000,000 and they could be 250.
Speaker: 0
01:25:36
I did this when I did our fourth fund, and I had a hundred and 20,000,000 in interest. I ai only take 10,000,000 of the accredits. So it it really is capped in the venture space, but you’re doing a different type of vehicle. Is there a cap on the number of LPs you can have?
Speaker: 1
01:25:50
Of course, I knew I should be more prepared doing this. I don’t remember exactly all the gaps arya, but the point is, is that the number of people that can join the fund is much greater and the number and the amount of money they can put in is also much smaller. And as a result of that, you’re reaching a wider audience.
Speaker: 1
01:26:09
And that particular audience, they’re happy because if you think about that fund, right, one thing that’s a pain in the ass. How do you manage all the capital calls? They drive me crazy. How do you manage all the distributions? Oh, I just got some stock in a public IPO. Should I keep it? Should I not keep it?
Speaker: 1
01:26:26
Is it a good company ai Google that’s sana to 20 x post IPO, or is it another company that I should just sell immediately? Right? You basically have one structure. It manages everything, and then you get a ten ninety nine instead of, like, a bunch of k ones which are
Speaker: 2
01:26:42
So do you think, like, Sequoia, Andreessen, Khosla, Founders Fund, how do they respond? That’s question one. And then two, does it change the behavior of the fundraising cycle or process for you and your partners when you’re evaluating companies or for the entrepreneurs? Like, does any of that change? So how do how does how does competition react and then how do companies and CEOs react?
Speaker: 1
01:27:09
Listen. When you start worrying about your competitors, in my mind, it’s a bit of a version of the grass is greener elsewhere and you have to focus on ourselves. It’s such a hard business. There’s so many smart people and this and that. We ai to design something that plays to our strength.
Speaker: 1
01:27:28
And our strength was we got the public markets, we got the private arya, and then we’ve got risk management with the cash and knowing when to be in and out. I would suspect that other people will do the same. Hopefully, it’ll be different because they have different strengths and stuff like that.
Speaker: 1
01:27:47
And I thought that what was nice for us is to sort of, do this a bit of a hybrid, public private. And frankly, in private, you guys think there’s venture, there’s the growth capital, there’s private equity. This vehicle could own a % of a company. You could do debt. You could go up and down the
Speaker: 3
01:28:06
capsule. Sure.
Speaker: 0
01:28:06
Plan then to do with private companies specifically? Do you see yourself, you know, leading a series a or participating in one of those or buying secondary in SpaceX on the open market from former employees, maybe buying out strips of other venture firms that are looking to wind down or get early liquidity and you come into some, you know, meh sized, $300,000,000 fund and buy out 20% of it.
Speaker: 0
01:28:29
What what what’s the strategy here with private specifically?
Speaker: 1
01:28:33
This is a good point. It’s a bit ai, hey. So what’s your north star? Don’t tell me you can’t do everything. Like, what are you gonna really do? Right? And to me, the north star is, Jason, I gotta build for you in ten years, the new Meh seven. That’s my job.
Speaker: 0
01:28:48
So Find the best of
Speaker: 1
01:28:49
the best. We know who are the 10 largest companies in the S and P or the Nasdaq today. What are they going to be in ten years? Some are already public. They’re just gonna get bryden. And some are private. So to that extent, I don’t believe that necessarily venture is the right model for this particular because it’s ai, it’s a thousand to one to go from a 0 to 1,000,000 in revenue, then it’s a hundred to one to go to 10,000,000.
Speaker: 2
01:29:19
That’s the insight that and you mentioned this on our call earlier today that I actually think is really, really, really powerful. The Meh seven was this set of correlated seven companies that sucked up all the attention, all the money, they moved in unison dollar for dollar.
Speaker: 2
01:29:37
Now that that correlation has broken down, it allows you to ask this question, which is what is the real MagX companies? And to your point, if it’s a 25 company basket, you’re absolutely right. Like, SpaceX would be in the basket. It’s private. Sai so Stripe would be in the basket.
Speaker: 2
01:29:58
Like, so to be long some ram public company because it’s public and ignore SpaceX and Stripe would just be stupid. So to your point, that is really that’s really powerful. The the the optimal basket of the companies you’d wanna own for the future because of these rules and regulatory burdens are partially public, partially ai, and so you need a vehicle that can straddle both if you wanna own it.
Speaker: 0
01:30:24
Yes. You’re right.
Speaker: 2
01:30:25
Sai think that that makes a ton of sense.
Speaker: 1
01:30:27
To me, that’s the ai. And, also, like, the people who choose who the Meh seven are, it’s like some employee at the MSCI World or
Speaker: 2
01:30:36
Will you
Speaker: 1
01:30:36
something like that.
Speaker: 2
01:30:37
Will you actually go out on a limb and try to publish what you think the version of that index is as you construct it inside of that fund? Or
Speaker: 1
01:30:45
We have some public requirements which will force us to do that.
Speaker: 0
01:30:50
The private markets are overheated. There’s a lot of secondary offerings. So if you try to get into Stripe, SpaceX, Androl, or, like, there was recently one of these, you know, robotic companies that has zero revenue and wanted a $40,000,000,000, you know, valuation. And there’s all these civilians, retail investors who are investing in your fund, but also who have direct access to these secondary arya.
Speaker: 0
01:31:11
I mean, you also have to buy at the right price. And these, I know firsthand, for the for those top companies arya massively inflated. You have $3,040,000,000,000 dollar valuations on companies that are pre revenue sometimes. How do you think about that?
Speaker: 1
01:31:24
I have no idea of the company you just referred to. I have no idea which one it is.
Speaker: 0
01:31:29
I don’t sana sai. But yes. Maybe they did a maybe they did a trial with BMW that was in the factory or not in the factory. I don’t know.
Speaker: 1
01:31:36
Listen. Humanoids is a pretty exciting area. I don’t know what companies are, but there is like, let me in in my top 25, I don’t I think it’s a bit early. I would have a humanoid company. Ai have a robotaxi company. You know, I try to find some whoever is the leader. And I think the point that you make that’s really good, Jason, is we also have to wait to me, there’s two key things.
Speaker: 1
01:32:02
Can I establish with 75% chance that this is the leader? I don’t sana do it if it’s ai a 1% chance that it’s the leader. I gotta pay more later. That’s one. But two, there’s one advantage that the public markets have over the ai, that we know how to value things because we have comps and we know about revenues and profits and earnings and p multiples and stuff like that.
Speaker: 1
01:32:26
Sometimes private investors, they just value a private company like, hey, if the last round was a hundred, well, this round’s 200. And I’m like, but why? You know, why is the CEO
Speaker: 0
01:32:36
CEO is really good on camera and funny on Twitter.
Speaker: 1
01:32:39
Ai doubles. Right? And so I think that in the growth business, ai, being a public investor is important because it lets you at least say, if this company were already public, would it be worse? And then when you own public company, the one thing that the private company gives you, if you want the public comp the public business, it gives you discipline.
Speaker: 1
01:33:01
But what the private business gives you, which is really cool, it gives you the telescope into the future. And I think that to be a good investor, you need to have one side of your brain, which is imagination, creation, believing in the future. And you need to have another side that says, hey, slow down PIMO. This is ai 80 times earnings, and it’s twice as expensive, and be patient.
Speaker: 1
01:33:29
And for me, the best investors are the ones where you sort of have the telescope in the future, but you also have the day to day discipline of the public markets. And as I said before today, man, you get beat up in the public arya so bad all the ai. Because you buy something, it goes down by half.
Speaker: 1
01:33:47
Even in the private markets, it goes up, goes up, goes up, and then one day it just goes boom. To zero. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
01:33:54
Yeah. It’s like we’re out of business. Take the loss. Exactly. Hey, guys. Some breaking news. Breaking news. The pope has been selected, and I thought, you know, since you guys haven’t been here, let’s go through it. Here it is. The smoke has come out, and Phil Hellmuth is his pope.
Speaker: 2
01:34:11
Phil Hellmuth.
Speaker: 0
01:34:12
A little work to be done on these language models. Oh, look. Here’s another one coming out. Chamath, congratulations. The first
Speaker: 1
01:34:21
No. That was the black show.
Speaker: 3
01:34:22
That was the black show.
Speaker: 2
01:34:23
That’s black smoke. That’s black smoke.
Speaker: 0
01:34:24
It’s black smoke. Oh, no. Maybe Chamath didn’t win it. Oh, no. Who do we got next? Shah was trading. She did better than you, Philippe. You didn’t beat the Pelosi index, so you don’t become phobic.
Speaker: 1
01:34:36
Ai intervention.
Speaker: 0
01:34:37
Divine intervention on her portfolio. Maybe a little insider information. Okay? Wonderful episode, Philippe. You’re amazing.
Speaker: 2
01:34:43
Yeah. That was great.
Speaker: 0
01:34:45
Thomas, you got competition. Your big brother, he did pretty well. So now, you know, we don’t have two. We have one or the other. So we’ll let the audience ai. For Chamath Palihapitiya, your ai dictator, for our czar, who couldn’t make it today, and your sultan of science. I am the world’s undisputed greatest moderator. Jake Hamilton. We’ll see you next time. Bye bye.
Speaker: 1
01:35:07
Bye bye.
Speaker: 2
01:35:10
We’ll let your winners ride.
Speaker: 0
01:35:12
Rain Meh David Sacks out. I’m doing it.
Speaker: 2
01:35:17
And it said, we open sourced it to the fans, and they’ve just gone crazy with it. Love you, sis. Queen of quinoa. Winters ride.
Speaker: 0
01:35:40
We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they’re all just useless. It’s like this, like, sexual tension that they just need to release somehow. Let your feet be. Let your feet be. Feet. We need to get mercy’s arm back.
