All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg - E26: State of Venture Capital, plus fan questions on longevity, decentralization & quantum computing

Episode Date: March 20, 2021

View the State of VC deck here: https://rb.gy/wfan6j Follow the besties: https://twitter.com/chamath https://linktr.ee/calacanis https://twitter.com/DavidSacks https://twitter.com/friedberg Follow the pod: https://twitter.com/theallinpod https://linktr.ee/allinpodcast Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://twitter.com/yung_spielburg Intro Video Credit: https://twitter.com/MikeSylvan Referenced in the show: Lifespan by David Sinclair: https://rb.gy/etzzmk Prenuvo: https://www.prenuvo.com Gumroad Equity Crowdfunding: https://republic.co/gumroad Backstage Equity Crowdfunding: https://republic.co/backstage Show Notes: 0:00 Bestie intro & poker talk 5:49 Fan question: Longevity & Biohacking, Chamath's health regimen 12:54 Fan question: Decentralization, separation of currency & state, will governments fight back against crypto? 22:48 Fan question: Quantum computing's potential impact, why heavy R&D technologies should are better suited for government funding rather than the private sector 33:33 Chamath's thesis behind deep tech investing 37:25 State of VC & how it's changing in terms of demographics, new access to capital, deal size & more 48:49 Trend of founders caring more about individual investors rather than firms, who is well-positioned & who is left out? 55:00 Why growth-stage firms could become less relevant: undifferentiated capital, routing around dilution, brand matters more in the early-stage; how Pipe & Clearbanc are revolutionizing non-dilutive funding 1:04:00 Summarizing the changing landscape of venture capital, how startups can best position themselves in a full lifecycle, innovations in equity crowdfunding, opportunity for entrepreneurs

Sacks, is there something you object to here? The poker one and net worth? No, I mean, that's fine. I don't give a shit about longevity or quantum computing, but here's a good news, David. It's not all about you. There's four people. You could have two people who like the topic and then you could just ask them a pro. That's fine. That's fine. Just tell me when it's over. I'll do you know. I'll do you know. You're like your winner's ride. Bring man David's side. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,'m Jason Callacanis and with us today again,

the queen of Kinwa David Friedberg sans his dog in the background. Sorry for those of you who love his dog. He's on a walk. He'll be back in like 10 years. He'll be back and he'll be in the seat. And the rainman himself David sacks ultra focused on Sass and marketplace startups, and involved in some illegal trafficking of Redpills straight up from Honduras to Cuba, and then through Miami, making the Redpills making their way to California. And finally, Daddy's back. The SPAC master himself, Bestie C, the dictator is back. The Black Cat replenished. You mean rebillionized?

Firing on all cylinders. Oh, so, so, you know, live by the SPAC, die by the SPAC. That's what they always say in this business. But you know what, we have been absolutely inundated with I kid you not hundreds of questions from you, our loyal audience. And when this thing is over, we are going on World Tour.

We'll see you in Vegas. We'll see you in at the Royal Aberde Hall in London and Miami, all cities are on the agenda. Let's take our first question from you, the audience. To what extent are you guys, if you- Wait, wait, how's everyone doing? Ah, they'll be getting to the questions, but how's our,

I mean, I don't look at this guy. You gotta ask, kick things back. I'm doing really, really great. What about the rest of you guys? You guys played poker this week? We played poker, it was a blood bath. Well, although, you know, it's so funny, because like we played, I played a very big game the week before,

and then we step into our game, which is like, I think it's still quite big, but I could not rub two cars together to make a hand, and I went off like a rocket ship. I just lost it, someone lost it. And just, despite that, despite that, every time I, Chimoff and I were heads up at a hand,

he just smashed me. Absolutely smashed me. And then I was like, you know what, I'm not gonna be bullied anymore. And then I stand up to him and he's got the nuts each time. I was down. And I did, Jake Al, I did run you over. I mean, the number of just complete bluffs I ran on you.

Oh, the first thing. And I was just like, he's totally got my number to life. After bluff, after bluff, after bluff. And then I showed him the nuts five times in a row. It was beautiful. So I'm stuck a model Y and I come back and I win a used Prius. I'm just leaving it at that.

I lost the mid-sized home in Phoenix, Arizona. I think you lost it, Bentley. Okay, don't cancel us. Please, Zach, Zach, did you play? I wasn't there in that game, but I played in a LA game a couple of nights ago and there was- Any celebrities? Yeah, me, me, Zach, and-

Oh God, you guys don't count as my- I was your podcaster. No, there was one unnamed celebrity we can't say. What, an actor? No, we can't say, but we all won. Well, just give us a genre and an athlete. An athlete, okay. Yeah, I won in that game. I lost a I lost a different game this past week and it wasn't pretty Yeah, wait sexy sexy are you in what can you play? Yeah, I think you may be playing actually I mean beef that out would you Nick?

Beep it out, but we can all laugh it it for being so precious. Oh, I'm sorry, do you LPs think you're supposed to be in San Francisco investing in startups? No, no. They know I go wherever the deals are. Oh, really, Miami. What are you going to do? Would you go to do some croquettes and a Cuban sandwich? Two for one. That's a good piece, there.

When do you think you'll make an investment in a Miami-based company? Do you think that'll happen anytime soon? What's happened already? That's a habit? Are you in the new, are you in the new, new? Do you think that'll happen anytime? What's happened already? That's a happy? Are you in the new, are you in the new, I've invested into Miami company? I've got like six. Yeah.

Well, there's some companies that are moving to Miami that I'm already in. You know, Tremoth and I are both in pipe, right? And part, at least the CEO of the company just moved to Miami. So that's two of four, two of four besties in pipe. Thanks for sharing. Yeah, by the way, how do you miss that, J-Cal? They advertise on your show and you don't think to try and invest.

He says that the LP, beep, that we all share wanted everything and he couldn't fit me in. And I was like, how about a slice? And he's like, how is that LP me? No, there's another LP that's actually I share who got their beak significantly doused in that one. But I'm just going to get the kid to give me a 25 basis points in a advisor share. So I'm getting a slice no

matter what? Yeah, good luck with that. Good luck with that. Good luck. The trains of the station. The trains of the station, dude. That that company's worth a couple of billion dollars in less than two years of its existence. Good luck with that, Jason. Okay. Well, it's dollars in less than two years of its existence. Good luck with that, Jason. Okay. Well, we call it a make-up. I don't know what you guys are seeing,

but my God, early-stage valuations went bonkers. I had one company in that raised. Oh, don't front-run it. I have all kinds of data for you. Okay, right. So today we're going to do some audience questions and then we're going to do the state of V.C. We're running through a deck.

We're running through everything that is changing right now in venture capital and early stage investing and it is changing very quickly. Here's a question from Leonard, oh, mzx. To what extent are you guys interested in longevity? In your opinion, what technologies could help us live longer and healthier lives? Friedberg, let's got your name on it. Why don't we start with you? On this one, I would point folks to read the book Life

Span by David Sinclair, who's a researcher at Harvard. And he's done a lot of kind of leading work on basically calling aging a disease and life extension. So the book Life Span highlights, I think, a lot of his research and findings and paths forward for improving longevity. And basically, it comes down to what he defines as kind of an early switch that evolved

in evolutionary biology in every cell, in every living organism, where the cell is either in growth mode or repair mode. And the trick is, can you get the gene to switch on that puts the cell is either in growth mode or repair mode. And the trick is can you get the gene to switch on that puts the cell into repair mode. And if you do that, the cell fixes itself and the cell lasts longer and the organism lives longer. And so they've identified a number of genes

that trigger this, and a number of compounds that trigger expression of those genes. And there's a number of things you can do lifestyle-wise to trigger these genes basically to get yourself to live longer. So fasting is a good one. And then there's a number of things you can do lifestyle wise to trigger these genes basically to get yourself to live longer So fasting is a good one and then there's a bunch of compounds that you can take that mimic fasting on a cellular level like Metformin and rapa mice and I'm on metformin. I think a couple of you guys are on metformin right? Yeah, and then and then the NAD plus supplements

Which you can buy us you say mm-mm Substance. Yeah, mm-mm and N-N subsmessing? Yeah, N-M-N-N-N-N-N-N-AD plus. So there's two compounds, N-M-N, like Nancy, Mike Nancy, and then N-R, and you can buy a product called True Niantgen on Amazon, which has those compounds, and you take about a thousand milligrams a day.

And anyway, all of this stuff is laid out in his books, and it supports a lot of the research that's being done. Obviously fasting and exercise also trigger this gene expression and enable measures of longevity to be showing up biologically. I think it's an emerging field and there's a lot of deep work going on. As people have highlighted, the process of aging is a biological process that theoretically we can stop and potentially reverse.

And there's a lot of new work that's being done in stem cell therapy that may kind of elicit some new paths forward here. So arguably, someone is alive on planet Earth today that could live past the age of 200. So it's an exciting field and lots of kind of paths forward. I'll tell you for what it's worth my regimen. Here we go, thirst trap photo coming in.

No, so I do the following. I take a statin, now, it was 10 milligrams, now I'm at 20 milligrams. I take metformin, and all of this I take sort of in a preventative posture, because my cholesterol wasn't super high, but it wasn't super low, it was like sort of like in the 160, 170, 180, but now it's sort of like 120. And then metformin, I take preventatively as well, I'm not pre-diabetic, and then a couple of vitamin D and some other stuff. But then here are these things that I do that I think could be valuable for some folks listening.

There are these places now that exist. They're popping up. One company that you can check out is called Pre-Nuvo, P-R-E-N-U-V-O. They're in Vancouver, they're in LA, they're in Redwood City, so mid peninsula for those in Silicon Valley. And what you can do is you can get a head-to-toe MRI. So, you know, there's no radiation, you know, you could do these things, you know, every other week if you wanted to. It takes about an hour. And what happens is they can basically look through your entire body, your musculature, your organs, literally from the tip of your head, all the way down to your ankles. And they can spot a lot of stuff that may not otherwise be seen. And so every three or four years to get one of these scans, you could see a lesion, you

could see the beginnings of a tumor. I did one a few weeks ago, touchwood, it was great, nothing, nothing, so much doesn't cost. There's a range of prices. And I think those prices will come down. The range of prices are from like 1500 to 2500 dollars. So it's not expense, it's not cheap, sorry. But here's what they're able to do. They're building a corpus of all these images where they're running a machine learning on it and they're getting better and better at identifying anomalies.

And so as a result of that, they're able to actually take the MRI images and they can do fewer and fewer scans to get the equivalent resolution. So two things will happen. One is the scan time will come down, right? So it was an hour and a half. Now it's sort of right under an hour.

It can probably be as low as 40 minutes, which is relatively tolerable for most people. And then the cost will come down into the hundreds of dollars because you'll be able to very rapidly assess. So I do that. And then the second thing is for anybody with heart disease in their family, I really implore you, one of my friends actually is flying down from Toronto. I'm taking him to my cardiologist in LA. And there's a thing called heart flow. And what heart flow is is a contrast CT, which basically means they inject a dye. And then they put you under a CT and they they map out your heart. And you can literally see the calcium build up. You can see the state of your arteries. And you know, what probably people don't know is when you have a calcium score you know most of us it's zero but when it starts to be non-zero it doubles

every year and by the time it gets into the thousands you're basically guaranteed to get some form of cardiac issue and so it doesn't seem like anything if your cardiac score is 20 except it goes to 40, 80, 160 and all of a sudden within, six years, you're really in the red zone for a heart attack or something. I've done it twice now. Every five years I do it. And touch would, you know, my calcium score is still zero. But in any event, that's what I do for longevity. I kind of preventatively at the cellular level with some drugs and then just trying to catch

cancer and heart disease on the front end. Otherwise, eat three balanced meals and exercise and sleep a lot. Saks, you obviously don't care about longevity. And he thoughts here, I mean. Saks has looked like he's a thousand years old since he was seven. No, he was when he was in 12th grade,

he looked like he was a vice president of the United States. Yeah, guys, just let me know when this conversation is over. I've been doing my email. So great. All right. We got to end my life now. I fucking hate it.

You guys are like, I just lost two years right now. Saks has got an early spot both on the rocket ship to Mars and he's got an inside VIP to Peter Tiel's blood boy project. And so either way, he's getting off the planet or he's going to refresh his blood or both. So he's good. All right, action bias asks, please debate decentralization of monetary value, ultimate threat for insider's power erosion. I interpret this as a Bitcoin question. Yeah. I think one of the most interesting things happening in the world today is what's happening

with Bitcoin, right? And you're seeing the price go up because a bunch of institutional investors on Wall Street are all getting into it now. It's gone from retail to institutional. And the narrative, basically, it's a really profound narrative, which is it's the separation of money and state. So if you think about like one of the most important events in human history was the separation of church and state,

where we no longer look to the state to determine, you know, what religion everyone's gonna be. Well, what crypto is introducing is this idea that the government cannot control the money supply. I think that's what he's talking about with the decentralization is that you could have a currency that everybody in the world believes in that no government can control. That's the separation of money and state. Now, this is just really a narrative right now. I mean, and who knows if it will actually come true, but the interesting thing is that if everybody does believe in it, it will come true. And so Bitcoin has been sort of described as

the bubble that never ends, because if everyone kind of buys into this bubble, it actually comes true. So I think it's very interesting, and you're seeing because Bitcoin is kind of perceived as the antidote to inflation and money printing by the government, I think you're seeing it take on new urgency now because the government is keeps printing trillions and trillions of dollars of new money. Doesn't this threaten government? So government doesn't have control over monitoring financial transactions and have control over the accounts in which the financial assets sit, which is effectively the notion of decentralized and optimized wallets. Then how does the government secure taxation, which is requisite for their ability to fund?

The good, the fund estate, right? And so what happens to the state? Well, so there's an enormous amount of leakage that happens today in assets that actually get financialized, but in the gray market. And I think the beautiful thing is on the one hand, we've become less focused on the M1 and the M2 money supply, like the physical, printable, distributable money that we can see and touch.

And it gets replaced with virtual currencies that are tied to other things. I think what the person who wrote the question is asking really is more about DeFi and what's happening on the Ethereum 2.0, ERC 20 contracts, all that stuff, which is much more next-gen, I think, than Bitcoin. And I think at some point we should deep-dive into it. But what I would say, Friedberg, is all the leakage you have today goes away in a world of DeFi because you will financialize every single asset possible. You'll financialize your homes, you'll financialize your

cars, your watches, your jewelry, your art, you'll financialize every random thing, and how people will trade it absolutely your career. And the thing is by monetizing it and financializing it, you can borrow against it, you can trade it, you can pull forward value into the future against it, but it'll all be tracked. And so as long as a government then says, listen, we're gonna enable it all,

but there needs to be an off-framed taxation. And that's pretty simple because a physical house exists in the world. You can't hide the existence of a physical house. But it's not anonymized, right, Timoth? And so, you know, if you want to track it, I mean, that's the challenge of this. No, I'm saying if it isn't anonymized, then the government can't track it and the government can't actually.

These are these are two separate things. Some assets will live anonymously. And those are the assets that don't need to exist in the real world. But I think what this will create is a world where all of these assets that actually really exist in the real world It'll be fine that it exists and that people get taxed on it But it'll be much more legitimate and I think it'll be simpler And so I think people will trade off incremental taxation for incremental monetizability. I'll give you an example Let's use real estate. There is no reason why every single piece of land There is no reason why every single piece of land everywhere around the world isn't written into a ledger with knowledge of who owns it, such that the person that owns it could trade

it, could borrow against it, could sell it, could buy it, could fractionalize it. Even if you can't fractionalize in the real world because your neighbors won't let you set it up into four lots You could do that online online and so today What what'll happen is that you know that person has a level of wealth and what they do instead take the United States is they Lobby lobby lobby to create all this convoluted real estate tax law to make their life simpler But if you actually unlocked the ability to focus on revenue versus expenses You just wouldn't focus as much on the taxation because you'd say,

well, it can make so much more money. If you judge, just to sort of answer the question here from the reader, from the listener, I think that you can really judge this based upon how much it's being pumped by the people who own it. And they are absolutely dogged, religious about this. It's like talking to, and you to a person who's met Jesus and now everybody has to be a Christian. And you can also look at the people who are opposing it. I don't know if you saw a Yellen and then Prissy in the Guard. She came out against it.

Yellen's come out against it. India might ban it and then you have obviously China is coming out. They're digital ones. So I think there's going to be there's going to be a dogfight here where governments are not going to easily give up their control of this and there's many ways they can make a bunch of red tape to slow this down and in countries that are authoritarian, they cannot write ban it. Let's take another question here. By the way, there's like three outcomes here, right? I mean, you can either see Bitcoin, for example, being banned, and that's gonna be ugly.

And obviously, there would be significant financial loss at this point. To SACs is point, at some point, there's so much asset value tied up in Bitcoin. It's too big to fail. So David, ban by who? Oh, that's from Chinese government. This is what they're trying to do on some of the same.

India, right? And they're trying to make it illegal for citizens to transfer money in and out of the asset class. I think it's a bigger threat to countries that want to impose export or currency controls and export and export and in India. That would be China and India. But frankly, if you're a country that's not afraid of currency movements because you're not trying to do something oppressive to your people, I don't think you have that much

to fear here. I mean, there are other ways of trying to do something oppressive to your people. I don't think you have that much to fear here. I mean, there are other ways of trying to hide assets or hide money besides Bitcoin. And every transaction, every Bitcoin transaction is written into the ledger. I think you have to be pretty dumb to try and commit a crime with Bitcoin because there's

going to be a permanent record in the blockchain forever of that transfer. And then there's companies that do kind of slew thing and try to unravel. You think tax evasion in the United States is going to be difficult with Bitcoin. If I accrue a bunch of value in Bitcoin, am I going to be able to evade paying taxes on those gains and convert that Bitcoin into physical assets by purchasing it from another Bitcoin wallet holder? I mean, how realistic is tax evasion gonna be and how much would,

because that's ultimately what the US government would mostly. Well, so you would convert cash into Bitcoin and then you wanna sell your Bitcoin at some point, you're gonna have to sell it. I mean, there would be a realization of it. Or not, I'm saying transfer to a seller of an asset, of another asset that's willing to accept Bitcoin in receipt. And so to anonymize wallets.

I don't know. I mean, that transaction is going to live on the blockchain forever, and it's going to live in the books of whoever the seller is. What are they selling you? A car, a house, whatever. I mean, that transit watch. I mean, look, if it's a personal item, maybe, but if we're talking about a substantial asset, like a house or a company or something, they're gonna need to, the other side of the transaction is gonna need to report the realization event. So you're gonna have to have two people collude to engage in tax evasion. You know, it seems like a really stupid thing to do. Legally incorporated businesses are gonna be mandated

to do effectively identity verification, much like we have to do under the Patriot Act with all the natural law. Totally, totally. On your buyer, yeah. It's ultimately how the compromise the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the out at me about all the critics of Bitcoin, and I'm not like a pump or whatever, but I do, I do own some, is the thing that like all these like critics don't seem to understand is the technology. That's a common denominator whether it's like Howard Marx or Warren Buffett or Charlie Munger, whoever, they're all like great investors or whatever, but they're not technologists.

It's a blind spot. It's a blind spot. And the thing they don't understand about the technology is that Bitcoin is the first digital asset to ever be created that you can't create infinite copies of. So think about a song or a photo or a video or anything that's digital. You've always been able to make an infinite number of copies.

Isn't that what the word digital means? That it's infinitely copyable. So how do you have digital money that can't just be infinitely copied? Obviously, that would destroy the value. And that was the genius of Bitcoin is that every transaction is written into this ledger, the blockchain, is decentralized, and nobody over the last decade or so has figured out how to counterfeit Bitcoin, how to make a duplicate, how to double spend Bitcoin. As long as that remains true, then Bitcoin can serve as money if everyone believes in it.

The day that someone figures out how to counterfeit a Bitcoin, how to double spend it, it's all worthless. But a lot of people have been trying over the last 10 years, they've never figured out how to crack it. By the way, it's a great transition to the next question. Sorry, I'm not there up here, but... No, it's a perfect transition, and next up, Adil says, can one of the besties explain the power of quantum computing and how it can change industries like medical, pharmaceuticals, any good companies that are leaders in quantum computing?

I'll take a cut at this one. The reason I pointed it out is because a lot of people do talk about quantum computing potentially being a path to cracking the hashing functions in Bitcoin mining and potentially overwhelming the network and effectively counterfeiting the Bitcoin ledger. And so technically a quantum computer is a computer that uses qubits, which is a storage of a quantum state versus a storage of a binary state, which is a binary digit, which is called a bit in traditional computing, classical computing, a 1 and a 0. A 1 and a 0. And a quantum or qubit, a quantum state can be a much more dynamic function.

And so it's a state that is a very analog and very representative of kind of a much more kind of broader condition than just a 1 or a zero. It could be a 1 or a zero or neither, right? It can have neither state as well. It's about it as a wave function. And so a qubit can only exist in a piece of matter where you can hold the fidelity of a quantum state, meaning it can't be disturbed. So right now, all quantum computing

gets disturbed. It all has some error-prone context to it. And so in order to use qubits to do calculations, we use what's called quantum error correction on those qubits. And so we adjust the qubits and the output to try and resolve it. A qubit with no errors is called a logical qubit. And a logical qubit has not been built. It would require very, very, very low error rates. And there's a bunch of theories around when this is going to happen. When are we going to have truly logical qubits? When does the error rate get low enough that these qubits are truly kind of useful? Now, there is an estimate

that the number of logical qubits needed to crack RSA 2048, which is the big kind of encryption standard, which could kind of break the whole cryptocurrency model, it would require about 4,011 logical qubits. Today, the largest quantum computer has about 100 qubits that are very noisy. It's less than one logical qubit. We would need somewhere between 100,000 and a million qubit computer to be able to have enough quantum supremacy to be able to tackle a project like cracking RSA 2048. And by some people have tried to estimate when this would happen. And the estimate currently by some researchers is that there's a less than 5% chance this happens before the year 2040. So we're talking somewhere between the year 2040 and the 2060

when we get a quantum computer that has enough logical qubits to be able to crack a problem like RSA 2048 and basically make all crypto fail. And between now and then, a lot of people are working on quantum cryptography, which is new methods of encryption that are kind of built for the quantum era and the quantum frontier. Now, what's more interesting is that over the next 10 years

or so, the current super noisy, super low fidelity quantum computers can be used to simulate quantum states, which is the condition of atoms and molecules, and use that to do better modeling of physiological chemical properties of material. That's where the breakthroughs will happen in the next decade. So all the hard discrete problems that we kind of theorize about cryptography and other stuff, that's decades away. This decade, we are already going to start to see quantum computers have breakthroughs in how material, how atoms and molecules interact with each other. For example, finding proteins that can do a better job of having an enzymatic reaction in the physical world, where we can now potentially pull nitrogen out of the atmosphere to make fertilizer or drugs or

pull nitrogen out of the atmosphere to make fertilizer or drugs or specific protein targets that can go in the human body and have specific functions by modeling what we can't do with traditional computers. Today modeling the quantum properties of those molecules and how they interact with other molecules and then building really cool predictive models that we can then turn into products. That's going to be chased really hard this decade. Everyone's going to be going after it. We already have enough compute power.

I don't think that there's any leader in quantum computing today. These are all still science experiments. They're all breadboards, IBM, Google, Microsoft, a bunch of research labs, a bunch of startups, are all kind of basically doing the same thing with different types of qubit technology, but they all have very high errors. They all have very low qubit computers. And so it's still unresolved. Who's going to come out with something? Two companies to follow are D-Wave, which was started in 99.

Just to give you an idea of how long people have been working on it. I said, 22-year-old company. I know Steve Jervitson's been backing it for now in its third decade. Then, Ionic, is that the other one? I-O-N-Q? I think quantum computing is like fusion. Yes. It's like it's like a technical problem that is attracted people who've had more money than common sense. And it just basically a way to burn an enormous amount of money over 20 or 30 years. And the problem with that is that you start to build in technical craft anything Anything that is still in R&D phase 20 years in

needs to get scrapped and rebuilt from scratch because everything has changed including the people. Even the 20 year olds that started are now in their 40s and have kids and just have a competitive risk. It's a great point, Samat. And so like you got to just scrap these projects and start all over again because the problem is you need somebody completely naive to look at this problem

in 2021 and say, well, okay, how are we actually going to really solve like the coherence problem? I don't know. How are we going to build a Gatorade? I don't know. And you have these very formulaic ways that we knew based on what technologies were available in 99 or 2000 to start with. And I think that's probably part of why we've framed the problem as largely sort of this thing of like, okay, maybe there's like a integer factorization thing you can do. And it's like, I don't know, I'm deeply skeptical. Yeah, well, I agree. And I think this is why, so I can I just say one last thing, this is why alpha fold beat quantum computers to the solution of protein folding. The reason was they were just like, we'll just take a different run at it,

completely different people, a completely different technical framework and modality, and a completely different risk profile and age as well. Company to keep an eye on in the fusion space, Commonwealth fusion systems. I just thought mom guard. What exactly, what were you gonna say? Well, what I was gonna say is that the main thing I was thinking about while you were giving that dissertation on qubits or God knows what is,

I would never invest in this. That's all I was thinking is I would never invest in this. Yes, exactly what's that. It's exactly what you're talking about. Yeah, it's definitely what you're talking about. It's not a sad, it's not a sad, it's exactly what you're talking about. Yeah, it's definitely what you're talking about. Definitely seven queens. No, look, because in kings and five aces in deck. Look, these are science fair experiments,

you know, with indefinite time frames. This is basic R&D that should be done at universities. These concepts are not ready for commercialization. Exactly what they said about AI, and then now it's infected every company. No, that's not true, Jason. No, that's not true. They were saying this about AI.

I know Jason couldn't get funded. I completely disagree with you. Deep mind could not get funded in the beginning. No, completely disagree with you. Because there was a practical commercial revenue generating opportunity for AI and machine learning literally from the start of computing. It took several iterations. There's no use case for fusion energy.

I mean, of course there is. No, I'm not saying that. No, but it's still at the basic R&D stage. It's still basic R&D. I will, yeah, I will partially agree with you, Jason, in the sense that I was not investing in AI 10 years ago, because I thought at that stage it was still in the realm of science fiction, but we just announced two deals the last two days. Two C deals viable, which is basically an AI voice

to the customer. It slurps in all of your customer feedback and then gives you answers. And then the other one is a copywriting one. It's a copywriting AI called copy.ai, which literally writes your site copy free. Try to get a site right now. Yeah, yeah, we might give you a site, Jason,

stop being so Yeah, yeah. We might give you a slice, Jason. Stop being so skeptical. But. I'll end. Yeah. But here's what's changed, right? Is these are C companies with just a handful of employees. They're built on GPT-3. So you had this like basic like R&D done.

It creates this platform called GPT-3. It's like, now you can build. Yeah, you can now build companies on top of that. So, I mean, look, when I invest in the commercialization of new technology waves, those technology waves happen because of deeper R&D. What do you think about VR&AR? There's the same conversation with VR&AR.

Are these worthy investments or not? I think Sachs' point is such a good one, because what he's saying is, um, is what I think has happened over the last century. The government, the best role the government can provide is to take on that technology risk, that large capital-intensive technology risk. This was the case with the Manhattan Project and we got nuclear energy out of it. It was the case with Apollo Project. We have the space industry as a result now. And it's what happened with the human genome project and now got nuclear energy out of it. It was the case with Apollo project. We have the space industry as a result now.

And it's what happened with the human genome project and now we have an incredible genomics revolution and ARPANET and that extensive early stage D risking requires an incredible amount of capital that's very low returning. It doesn't return anything. It's what SACS is saying is later is the commercialization where.

Do we have a heuristic theory, a best practice around when something goes from a research project to being commercially viable? There are signals, I mean, platformification seems one that you pointed out, David. If it's a platform and you can use it easily. Yeah, I think you can tell when the amount of capital required to get it off the ground

goes to something reasonable, like a few million dollars as opposed to hundreds of millions of dollars. Whenever and Jason, you've talked about this that any company that's trying to raise hundreds of millions of dollars or has a billion dollar plus like evaluation before shipping a product is presumptively fraud. There's still too much R&D involved. I mean, look, venture capital is a milestone-based investing model. You take a little bit of seed money, you create a prototype, you get some proof, then you raise a series A, you get 10 million, you get some customers, then you raise 25 million, and you scale the company, and it's based on milestones. It's actually a very efficient way of investing. And when somebody wants to skip over all those milestones,

they say, no, we need hundreds of millions of dollars to launch this thing. You have to ask why is this idea really ready for commercialization? What's Shema's response to that? Because Shema, you've done deep tech investing and you've done conversion galactic would fall into that or no, yeah.

So like, how do you think about deep tech investing Shema, then like where there's a role for venture capital, private market, you know, dollars? Yeah, I've done a lot of deep tech investing, and my whole thing was I've always looked at at the point where something is completely de-risk technically, and it's about then the exploitation of a market. Otherwise, it's exactly what David said. So I'll give you an example. A company called Relativity Space is now the second most valuable private space flight company after SpaceX. Okay. Why see company? I let the series A. What were they trying to do? They're stated goal at the time was we want a 3D print, the entire rocket, and the entire engine.

And I said, wow, okay, well, when we did the math and we tried to figure this out and have the same launch capability as SpaceX, all of it comes down to, okay, well, how do you want to de-risk this? And what Tim and Jordan's first idea was, well, first we want to basically prove that we can actually get a certain printing capability done

because you're talking about these extremely, you know, energy intensive, extremely technical printers and effectively writing printer drivers, right? And to be doing it at a scale where you can hand that off to NASA and they can take that engine, literally strap it down with chains, call the whole down test, fire the engine and say it works.

Doesn't blow up. Doesn't blow up. And I said to Tim, how much does that take? And Tim was like, I can probably do that on 10 million bucks. I said, you're done on 10 million dollars. Yeah. And so it was a hundred million hundred. The only person that would have written a hundred million dollar check to do risk that doesn't understand what they're trying to prove at that point in time. Because what he was trying to prove was the ability to use the printer. He wasn't saying, I'm trying to build a next generation rocket motor, right?

So similarly with Virgin, you know, Virgin got to a point where it's like, it had flown demonstrably in the air. So what did it prove? It proved the flight profile worked. It proved the engine work. It proved all the navigational componentry work, and it proved the safety envelope work, which means that it could basically act as a glider under all kinds of boundary conditions.

That's an enormous amount of technical progress. And then, at that point, there, I'm willing to invest billions of dollars. And so today, it's a point you have to have in your model earlier, too. Like that's one of the things about being an entrepreneur is figuring out how you stay alive while you answer these questions. And you came up with a brilliant one or whoever was doing Virgin Galactic, which is people will overpay. But Virgin was a 14 year process where Richard Branson to his credit did exactly what David said. Here's $10 million get to milestone one. Here's $25 million get to milestone one.

Here's $25 million get to milestone two. He did the exact venture capital model. It's just that he did it by himself. I think what David is saying, which I agree with is, you should never short circuit that and say, here's $500 million pre-series A, just go over that. I mean, I'm actually leap. You'll be working at something for 20 years

with nothing to fucking show for it, as infusion, as in quantum compute All right, you're in with let you on with a magic leap or Theranos Theranos or You know, there are no so afraid me. It looks like it's a fraud But magic leap just looks like it's technically incompetent or it's too hard of a technical problem to solve in the amount of time and the amount Technical incompetence. Well, I time and the amount of technical incompetence. Well, I don't know if it's incompetence.

It might be a 20-year problem as opposed to a five. No, but why are you taking this emotionally? Technical incompetence is the opposite of technical competence. Competence means you can do it. Technical incompetence. I thought you were saying that that group of people is incompetent. I'm saying the word technical incompetence. I'm saying the window to solve the problem.

Technical incompetence. Okay. When you're saying it, I think you're describing the person, not the problem. It could have been too hard to lift for them. So, you know, okay. Well, the last question is about access to private equity, but let's just go into this deck here. Now, one of the things we wanted to talk to today, which month had a good idea. Venture capital is changing rapidly. The last decade has seen more change in venture capital than I would argue the four decades

or five decades that venture capital has existed. In other words, more change. And we're going to go through some of those changes. How it affects the entrepreneur, how it affects the investor. Chimoff was nice enough to put a deck together. And then I guess Jason will figure out a way to post this into the YouTube or something like that. Yeah, you know what?

We'll put in the show notes, a link to this Google presentation and Nick can pull up the slides when we're talking about them. I think if folks can give us feedback, this is kind of a new thing for us. We're trying to experiment, which is sort of, this is like a half-teach-in, half-discussion on something we all wanted to talk about. And hopefully you guys get some value from it, but tell us if it's not. So I want to thank Carmen Collins on my team who helped put this together. But let me just go through this state adventure capital.

So a couple of high level points. There's like some really important trends at play. The first is that there really is now underneath a massive change in the players in this game. Founder demographics are changing slowly but surely we're going to go into that in a second. Traditional VC investors are getting disrupted, we're going to go that, we're going to go into that. And then this model, which I love of let me know how I can be helpful, quote unquote, basically eroding and seeding ground to what we call solo capitalists. And we'll talk about that, which is probably the most disruptive trend adventure.

Second, we'll talk about the inflation in the amount of money that's going into these companies, which really means more money at higher prices. And why that's good in some ways and actually bad in some other ways. This goes back to David's point of, you know, not being forced to generate milestone sooner. And then the third is that it's really now a founders market.

And I think this is really important because you've seen an enormous amount of delusion in lack of control for founders and employee teams and companies. And I think that there are some really disruptive new ways that completely usurp traditional venture, non-deluda forms of financing. We'll talk about that. So, let me just level set for you guys. I asked the following question, what are the demographics of the United States? And here's what they are.

In the United States today, 59.7% of people are white, non-Hispanic. 12.5% are black, 5.8% are Asian, 18.7% are Hispanic, and 2.3% are multi-race. If you map that to VC founders, 77% of VC founders are white, 1% are black, 17.7% are Asian, 1.8% are Hispanic, 2.5% are multirase. So amongst multirase, Asian and white, you either are at or over indexing your representative population and blacks and Hispanics. This is not anything new, but massively underrepresented. If you take it from a gender, females have lower representation among founders, but it's

growing. So the US is basically 50, 50 male, female founded companies were 23% of all deal activity in 2019. That's pretty good. Up from 12% in 2010, although racial diversity is still pretty lacking, which we know. And then the young tech bro stereotype is cracking, which is this is incredible. 2019 study in the times showed that the average age of a tech founder is David Sacks. What do you think it is? The average age of a tech founder median or average average average average average. Well, I saw your deck. So isn't it something like it was surprisingly?

35 40 42. 42. No, I'm saying a lot. I think I don don't know, just to pause here for a moment, what do we think? I can still found a company. You can. What do we think is, given you had the long-jeviti question earlier, and then you have people, you know, generating wealth

and starting companies in their 40s, 50s, and 60s, who then underwrite it themselves, right? Until they get to product market fit and then raise money. What do we think is the best zone for an entrepreneur in terms of having a great outcome? I've always thought that the look, when I, how old was I? I was 31, 32 when I started social capital. I mean, this is a multi-billion dollar enterprise. I feel like I'm reasonably successful at it. But I was preparing for the first 13 or 14 years of my professional career. I learned some good things, I learned some bad things, I learned tactics that worked, I learned strategies that didn't work.

So 30s or 40s or 30s and 50s? In my experience, for me, and I think it's for personal for everybody, in my experience for me and I think it's for personal for everybody, I was best positioned to know what to do and at least iterate in my 30s and I think in the absence of an idea that has some network effect or something that's sort of like supernatural outside of your own control, I think the older you are generally probably the better prepared you'd be. Yeah, I agree. I mean, I did paypal when I was still in my 20s, but I wasn't the founder of the company.

I was recruited to it at a very early stage. I didn't really start Yammer until, well, I guess I started the predecessor company, Jeannie, when I was 34, and then Yammer pivoted into Yammer, but I was 35. I mean, that's like a good level of preparation, you know. Unless you have a spectacular idea for a startup,

you should probably get some experience first. 100% freeberg any thoughts there? On what's the kill zone, best time to launch companies in your mind or investing companies or where founders are? I mean, look, everyone's got their own path, you know, I mean, Zuck and Sergey and Larry and Bill Gates, they started right out of college without any experience. But I mean, I worked it, I had two jobs in tech

before I started my first company in 2006. Yeah. And so I had a lot to draw from and that really informed me. But I think everyone's different. I mean, some people... If you have the idea, if you have the idea, by all means do it in your 20s, you know? Absolutely. But, I mean, by far the greatest kind of, like, measure of whether and when you're kind

of prepared for this is your ability to continue learning. You know, continuous learning to me is one of the greatest predictors of entrepreneurial success. And all the guys that have lasted for decades from Bezos to Zuck to Larry and Sergey, they were continuously evolving themselves because they were continuous learners. Bill Gates is the penultimate example of this, right? I mean, this guy's reinvented himself a thousand times. That what you said is so important.

I'm going to change my answer. I think I started social capital when I was actually the most able to get out of my own way and learn continuously. Yeah. Yeah. You know, what, what, what, what's the other add to this is it's so much easier to be a founder now today that I mean, look, I, I, I remember I joined PayPal in 1999. That was my first startup. It was like really hard to get into an entrepreneurship in the 1990s. You know, the VCs had tremendous power and control. They would routinely replace founder CEOs. You know, everyone had to go to Sandhill Road to get capital. It was hard to even know how to network your way to Sandhill Road.

It was just much, much harder to be a founder. It was much harder to raise money. It was hard to know what to do. And then I think actually one of the things that really changed things was with blogging, emerging in the mid-2000s, it led to a proliferation of information where now other founders started blogging, investors started blogging, and there became a wealth of information out there so you could learn how to do it. Then of course you had incubators and so on like YC. There became became more of like a playbook for just like how you actually get a company off the ground. When I graduated in law school, which was 1998, I knew I wanted to get into business and entrepreneurship. I really had no idea how to do it. And if it wasn't for a phone call from Peter

Teal, I'm not sure I would have gotten into it. You know, but now everybody knows what to do. Can I ask your question then? So let me let me give you a stat and I'll ask a question. What do you think that story would be David for somebody that wasn't a white man? So here's the data. The percentage of female VC decision makers has grown by more than 2x. What that means is about firms over a billion dollars. About a quarter of them have at least two plus female decision makers, but 61% of them have zero, and 80% of venture firms still have no black investors. How do you correlate or intersect that idea of ease of starting a company with the pattern recognition of those folks and the inability to maybe map to people with

black skin or women. I think that what Silicon Valley and what venture capital represents is opportunity. We have to extend that opportunity to as many people as possible. That's really the key here is we do need to make it as widely available as possible. By the way, Timoth, one way to slice things is the percentage of diverse representation within the ranks of venture and private equity. But there is a equivalent scaling

in the number of venture firms and the amount of venture capital since, you know, SACS and you and I and all of us kind of entered the technology industry kind of early 2000. And the number of firms that exist today that are kind of micro firms and scaled firms, I think presents a much larger set of opportunity. You're right. There are still standards and there are still challenges in diversity and kind of having access. But there is so much more access than there has ever been.

And that's really changed the landscape. I mean, folks coming out of college can get a million dollars that was kind of unheard of back in 1999 or not. Or, or, or, or, or the reality is like there's so many incubators. I mean, it's not as if Jason or YC or any of these folks give millions of dollars, right? Jason, like these checks are still really small.

So the point is, you can build something if you have the skills to build something. The gap right now is that there's a lot of people who have ideas about what they want to do, but they have no skills. And I think what we found in a vibrant market like today, I mean, this is the most vibrant I've ever seen it. There's at least three or four times as many startups

to choose from at the earliest stages. And what we're seeing is The number of VCs has not grown at that level. It has grown the number of players has grown But not at that level. Therefore the average quality of a deal has gone up The average quality of a funded deal has gone up But the average quality of a startup has gone down. Does that make sense? Yeah. So the ones that get funded are better than ever, but the one the average is lower because there's so many doing it. And then just the best piece of advice I have is when we talked about

continuous learning is if you are not building the product in some way or selling the product in some way, then what are you doing at this startup? Like you either build it or you sell it. Like it really isn't much more there. And a lot of people just have ideas and no ability to execute. You really have to be a developer designer UX person market or something in terms of getting this product out to the world. What do you guys think about this other trend which I think is really important which is the atomization of these firms so you know we're moving from a world where people used to care about, name the brand, Sequoia, Excel, and then now they name the person, right? And they'll probably follow that person wherever they are. So what do we think about that?

There's a really interesting tweet from Eric Torenberg. He said, founders don't want to raise money from institutions as much anymore. They want to raise money from individuals. And then if you marry that with what's happening with Angelist and all this other stuff, isn't that the trail of breadcrumbs for how like VC just kind of, in some ways just kind of gets blown up the way that it's normally been done? I remember as a founder, when I started my company 2006, there was a lot of this conversation in, as SACs pointed out, in theger community and with like various websites that rated VCs. And there was generally a trend in the support network among CEOs, adventure firms, um, of talking a lot about make sure

you pick your partner, don't pick the firm. Um, and so this, I don't know if this is necessarily a new trench, a moth. It's certainly something that I remember being top of mind 15 years ago when I started my first company. And so much of it was about, make sure you have the right partner because that's who's going to be on your board. That's who you're going to spend time with. That's who's going to recruit executives with you.

That's who's going to be helpful in finding your next round of funding for you. And I feel like that's always been the case, but you're right. The brand value of a firm has certainly become less useful and folks have struggled to kind of figure out, I think, a solution here. I mean, you see what Andrews and Horowitz did. They launched in 2009 and really focused on kind of being this kind of full service provider to startups.

I don't know how much that matters as much anymore as much as making sure you've got a great partner from the firm that's helping you with your business. I don't know. It's actually, you're right, Freeberg that's a continuing trend. What I'll say is the top firms are still as attractive or more attractive to founders. The loser in this, I believe, is the mid-tier firm or the lower-tier firms that actually, none of the partners there are all that great. The performance is not that great.

Their value-add is not that great. But when you do get a Sequoia or an injury son, or now put craft in this as well, when you get one of those all-star VC firms to join your board specifically, that is the key. When they join the board and they own over 10%, you are anointed in a way that is transcendent. You will get pounded with inbound from the second, third-tier firms

who wanna triple your evaluation and give you 20 million bucks. It happens like clockwork. In fact, there are a couple of firms like, was it DAG, the one, SACS, that would always follow on Sequoia deals? And so there were firms that were built around this concept. That was their LP pitch, DAG's LP pitch is we

just, we will mark up every Sequoia deal. Exactly. And so, I mean, one page, it was one page. So it's like, if you can't get into Sequoia and you're willing to wait an extra round, do a investment tag. Well, and then now, I think the big trend here is, those firms in Dresan and Sequoia are now full stage where they have the late stage growth,

they have a scout program, they have a seed program, they have a series A program, but they still like cycle. It's not those guys also, it's all these other big crossover guys that have come down, Tiger, Co2, Durable. I think that's the biggest trend of the last 15 years, Chimath. I think it is what has enabled the proliferation of early stage startups and enabled the valuation increment in the capital that's floating in the early stage, is the scale down

from the big guys. I just want to kind of do a quick walk down memory lane because when you guys said you wanted to talk about this, I kind of remembered. I got my series B Term Sheet in 2008, I guess it was. And, or 2009, and I had three venture firms. And Dresden was one of them that gave me a term sheet. And the interesting thing about at that time with Andresden was they gave me a term sheet. I was trying to raise $30 million and they said, we want to give you $ 40 million and they up the valuation significantly. And there was a, I ultimately went with Coastal event shares, but there was this trend that in recent was kind of imparting, and I heard about it a lot from other entrepreneurs, was that they were going out and offering more money than the founder was asking for, seeking at higher valuations. And it was this trend towards saying, like, go grab the market. Because the interesting thing about web scale economics and, you know, web scale businesses

is you get so much leverage. And you can get extraordinarily rapid growth. I mean, the rate of growth could be infinite. And the leverage could be infinite. And so if you do it, if you do it at the right round, I think that's... But so much of this was... And then, obviously, that... So that was a huge step up. And I remember, in recent, Horowitz that's. But so much of this was, and then obviously, so that was a huge step up.

And I remember in recent Horowitz, beginning 2009, kind of started to build a reputation for doing this of kind of, you know, putting larger checks out and saying, go scale. And then the big crazy thing was the crossover guy started coming in and offering bigger checks in kind of this proven stage, growth stage, kind of funding. And then obviously the big step up was Softbank,

and Softbank with a hundred billion dollar vision fund. And ultimately, what exactly did that disrupt, freeberg? Just hang on, so when all these things happened, those large chunks of capital became available on the valuation step ups were so significant for these later stage startups that the money flowed down and more money was raised in earlier stage venture

that enabled this proliferation of capital and this proliferation of new startups and enablement of startups raised in earlier stage venture that enabled this proliferation of capital, this proliferation of new startups and enablement of startups at the earlier stage because of all the crossover money that started to come in and the blitz scaling of proposals and lots of money that was being thrown at the later stage. That to me felt like the reason all of the earlier stage stuff proliferated

was because of the amount of capital of the later stage. You're absolutely right. And now 10 years later, here's where we are. In early spacks are the next step, Chimalt. Because like, totally. I think what you did, you know, we pre 2009, there was $10 billion a year in SPACs. Then when you started this in 2009, stepped up to 2019,

it stepped up to 13 billion. Last year, 80 billion was raised in SPACs. This quarter, 100 billion in SPACs. In SPACs are that you cross over investing. It's taking, you know, growth stage, private equity style risk in the public markets with this proliferation of capital and we're seeing the benefit in the early stage and founders and entrepreneurs are seeing the benefit

because there's so much access to capital on the back end. You can take more risk on the early end and you can make more bets. And I think it's the next step up and we just keep seeing these step ups. Yeah, I tend to think that the growth stage is the most troubled and challenged, because at the early stage,

you can get a guy like SACs or J-Kell on your board, and you can grind. And I think that that's really important to get to product market fit. And at the public stage, you can get somebody like me, and we can help transact and actually help optimize and run the business for scale and value. But in the middle, you have all these weird dynamics

that no longer maybe don't make as much sense. So just to give you a sense of it, the average deal size, okay? So the typical round is up 3x over the last 10 years. 3x, that is absolutely anecdotally my experience. In late stage, investors are doubling and tripling down on these mega deals so that that average round size is up 5x in the last decade.

The typical pre-money on a growth stage deal in 2010 was 100 pre. This is for the top quarter. And it's now, sorry, this is for the average. It's now, this is for a growth stage. Yeah, growth stage. 100 pre is now 570 pre Wow Yeah, that's getting crazy. It's really it's really it's really getting crazy tiger

It says here in the notes tiger global has announced a deal according to pitch book every 48 hours in 2021 That's fucking fantastic. What Tiger, I think, has figured out is they started as public-market investors and worked their way down the stack, right? So they're very familiar with the public-market valuations. They're seeing that these SaaS companies are, you know, I remember 10 years ago when I was doing Yammer,

we thought that the best outcome that you could have as a SaaS company was like a $1 to $2 billion exit. That's why when Microsoft offered us 1.2 billion in 2012, we took it, right? We're like, we could work five more years, maybe get to a two billion dollar outcome. Well, now you're seeing what Slack

just got acquired by Salesforce for close to 30 billion. It's pretty routine to see SaaS companies IPOing it now 10, 20, 30 billion and up. And so the exits are just so much bigger than anybody thought 10 years ago. And we were the optimists by the way. There was a good tweet on this by, it was Jay Malik.

Basically he gave some stats. He said that if you're wondering why everyone wants to invest or be a VC today, the stats from pitch book provide an answer. We had 43 billion in exists in 2010. We had 290 billion in exists in 2020. So we had about 7x roughly greater exits over the course of a decade. Now, the average deal size has grown 3x and there's a lot more money going into venture capital. But the reason why you're having all this money go in and all these new players is because the outcomes are so much bigger and then he said and I agree with this wouldn't be surprised if he hits one trillion by 2030.

So we're seeing just the, I mean, I remember 20 years ago when I first got into the business, you know, like looking at value with this small little concentric circle around Stanford. And now it's spread to San Francisco and the entire Bay Area and to other cities. And it just keeps getting bigger and bigger. It's the digitization of every market, right? I mean, every traditional business, every traditional industry is being digitized in some way or another. And so it's no longer a tech-enabler of other industries, it is the industry itself. We know that the brand really matters in the early stage because they annoy and

they bring so much value in terms of working with you to solve problems. We know with SPACs, whoever and IPOs, whoever is anointing that really matters, right? The sponsor. But in the middle is all that cash now moved to a game of who will pay the most for the least rights. In other words, series B to, you know,

when you get involved, Chamath, is that just? It's such a good point. You're so what you're now team up, Jason, is this next big category, which is if it's undifferentiated capital, at some point, you're going to go to the logical conclusion, which is, I don't want any delusion from this. I'm happy to take delusion in the series A when I get, you know, craft or Sequoia or benchmark. I'm happy to take dilution in the IPO because that's sort of the necessary process of diversifying the stock ownership, getting my users and my customers to be able to own the stock, etc., etc. But in the middle, now you have these companies like Pype and ClearBank, where now all of

a sudden you can grow Jason in your BCD rounds and you have zero delusion. So if you're a founder, you know, the best formula is going to be take Series A and seed capital from an expert, single, you know, GP brand person who knows that business category so well. Right. If you're starting a SaaS company, you should probably get your seed from SACS. You know, raise your A from some expert or what, let me say it differently. Seed from J-Cal, A from SACS, raise your A from some expert, or what, let me say it differently, seed from J-Cal, A from SACS, and then go to pipe and clear bank and fund it all based on your recurring revenue growth, and then go public via SPACS. So just to give you some data that I got from pipe and clear bank.

Which means you would just take it people an idea of what the cap table would look like there. You would dilute 10% in your seed round, 20% in your A. Now, you still have 70% of the company and you just sell your yearly contracts ahead of time to pipe. And you're done. By the way, can I tell the story about pipes of pipe? Yeah, it's kind of painful. Thanks for including Fleetburn and I.

David, David, can I give the stat from pipe and then tell the story? Yeah, go ahead. Sorry, you guys are all investors in this company? No, not me and you, David, they let us, our beaks are going to say my beaks. In shaping beaks, my beak is so wet. Can we get a profile that beak? Let's not know why it is. It is. Oh my lord. It is. It really is. Hold on. Do it one more time and let me compare it to this. Okay. Is it beautiful? Let me tell the pipe beak wedding story because Harry Harry the founders told the story. He came in to meet

with me in my office at Kraft. This is pre-COVID when people actually met in person. Our principal, who's based in LA, Michael Tam, knew Harry from his previous startup and brought him in. I heard the pitch, which is basically to advance the full value of these contracts for SaaS companies and others, but it was so obvious, right? Because if you're a SaaS company, you spend roughly about a year of revenue on CAC, a customer acquisition cost, but the customer only wants to pay you monthly, and so you have this huge negative cash flow cycle. So what if you could just take that contract and monetize it right away, get the full value of the contract advance, then you can plow it into the next,

the next customer acquisition cost. And you don't need to dilute yourself with venture capital. I said yes to Harry in like 15 minutes. I think it's the quickest I've ever given a term sheet. We invested two million in the company in a 12th cap, and we did the deal that day. So within nine months of launch, pipe is connected. be in a 12th cap and we did the deal that day.

So within nine months of launch, pipe is connected, 3,500 customers and over a billion plus of ARR to investors willing to purchase that revenue. Clear, clear. It's a marketplace. So they're not buying the debt. Anybody can go on the marketplace and say, I will buy Slack's revenue for 91 cents on the dollar, but something more speculative, they might pay 85 cents. This is a brilliant thing,

is that they're not providing the lending off their own balance. I suppose a clear bank, which does, in charge of six percent, we should be talking about your book unless you guys share it. I'm gonna go to the last. I mean, I was fucking surprised. I was like, I was like,

I'm gonna go watch your fucking shares. I'm gonna go ahead and do my email now. Yeah, I'm gonna, let's do it free, Mark. Hey, free, Mark, let's launch a bio company together and we'll block out these beaks. Go work on your life extension. We're working on our monetary extension right here. Yeah, you need more money, you need more money.

So ClearBank works with e-commerce companies. So what you do is you stitch in your connections to Shopify and Stripe, et cetera. They're able to monitor how well you do and then they'll basically help finance you, again, non-dilutively. So, ClearBank companies captured 55% more growth in 2020 than the prior year. So, even in the midst of COVID, these companies did really well. They have revenue-based financing.

They've invested $1.6 billion to date, and it turns out that their investor composition, eight times more women funded than traditional VC. By the way, I want to be clear, I was also a series A investor in Clearbank. I mean, I am such a believer in this middle section of venture disappearing. Like when you have these growth rounds, they're undifferentiated, and they shouldn't be deluded in any way, shape, or form. The founder should figure out how to grow non-delutively, the minute that they have some semblance of product market fit.

So then the deluded points are the bookends. Yeah, this was kind of the idea with IndieGoGo and some of the GoFundMe types, or not GoFund me, the other things where you could basically pre-sell consumer products too, right, where you could get funded in a similar way. And you could see the same transitioning into kind of hardware businesses and other consumer businesses, right? Where there's an even bigger trend that happened

that I can talk to, which is equity crowdfunding CF. But I don't want to take you off your deck. So do you want to keep going on the deck? Or do you want to shop? The only last thing I say is that the other big thing as Friedberg says is like, so let me just summarize. So it's kind of like, I think where we're all going to is we see the venture capitalist changing.

The financial stack. It's going from organizations and these amorphous financial orgs down to individuals. As that happens, I think what we're all kind of stating is it's incredibly valuable at the earliest stages to align yourself with a person that knows your business or your market. Right? And that's worth some amount of delusion. It's almost like getting a quasi-co-founder, right? So in the seed, in the series A, but I think so that's one really important point of what's

happening in the market. The second thing that I think we're all saying is why are we deluding ourselves to grow in these middle rounds? If you don't have to, it's unnecessary, and there should be really clever ways of non-delutively financing yourself. And as the market becomes more and more sophisticated, there will be more companies beyond piping clear bank to be clear, but the point is that every kind of company

that has product market fit, should be able to finance themselves non-delutively in the B all the way to the D and the E. And then the third thing, which is sort of what Friedberg says is this last book end is, then you have sort of the path to going public. And this is where the SPAC makes its own a sense because you have a very certain cost of capital. You can now architect a cap table where the founder remains in control, where they and the employees are still more than 50% and you pull in the time of the IPO, why is that important? Typically today, these companies were taking 12 plus years to go public. Now with SPACs, they've come back in and they're closer to 7 and 8 years.

The reason is back to that argument of like, if you want to be a winner-take-most outcome, the most important thing you need at scale is money. And the way that you get money is by opening the kimono on your finances and showing people who have lots of money, why they should give it to you and not something else. And so by going public in your 6, 7, and 8, that's where you pull in the billions of dollars so you can dominate. What we're seeing is massive competition in the financing of massively competitive startup scenes. In other words, the entrepreneurial ecosystem has never been this vibrant. And I want to point out one thing that the SEC has done that is going to change things dramatically. I believe when syndicates first came out,

everybody said they were stupid, nobody would ever do it. First one we ever did, famously was calm.com, we put in $328,000 became worth over 100 million. We're on track this year to do five deals a month, 60 deals, and we'll put 50 million to work this year at the syndicate.com. Think about that, my fund is 44 million,

that's over three years. So now the syndicate's got in so big that we- Just run the syndicate.com. Think about that. My fund is 44 million. That's over three years. So now the syndicate's got in so big that we- Just run the syndicate. Exactly. So I'm going to tell my LPs the next time around. Let's have a discussion about this. But anyway, I want to point out what Republic.co happened this week. Republic.co is equity crowdfunding. This means civilians can invest. There used to be a cap on an equity crowdfunding of $1 million every year. And there's a lot of auditing and financial review you have to do. You pay 6% to whoever raised the money.

There is no sponsor involved in this. As an investor, you don't get me as a lead or Chamath as your sponsor or SACs on your cap table. But you can go on to a public now, which has 100,000 investors on it. And Gumroad, which is doing $10 million a year, just raised $5 million in one day, Sahil, who was also running a rolling fund with Angelist. And he has 8,656 investors, which means people are putting in under $1,000 each.

Amazing. And it's capped at $5 million now. Then, Arlen Hamilton, who runs backstage capital, did a very nontraditional, I'll say, raise. She's not raising for her fund. She sold 10% ownership, or in the process of selling 10% ownership in her venture capital, Fund Startup Studio,

at $50 million valuation. She's selling 10% of it. If you buy shares in that, you don't get carry, but you get 10% of her carry and management fees forever. So it would be like buying 10% of craft or whatever. The point is, the VC is get a box out of this. And this, imagine if Airbnb or Uber decided, fuck it, we're gonna let our drivers buy shares through this. And they it, we're going to let our drivers buy shares

through this. And they said, we're starting this crowdfunding for 5 million and they did it every year because you can do the 5 million every single year. So every year you just allow folks who are in your stakeholder pool, you email them and then they buy in. It's just absolutely extraordinary. Can you explain the Arlen thing? So she sold 10% of the book. It's a little complicated if Can you explain the Arlen thing? So she's sorry. She sold 10% of it if you're

Paged down to the future earnings. Yes So if you go to the flow of funds and that link I sent for public.co slash backstage She is took all of her different funds and said you can buy 10% for $5 million you own 10% of essentially sequai capital or Why combination or whatever you want to refer to her You know company as her holding company then every time she gets managed Muffees every time she has distributions from her Carry she's gonna give 10% of that to these folks forever. I don't know if that's a great idea, but it's a new idea And I don't know if the investors in that are going to get a massive return, or they're doing it because they want to support the cost.

That's incredible. My gosh. It's so disruptive. It's so disruptive. It's so disruptive. Wow. It's incredible. Well, because it lets anybody really spin up a new venture firm, basically, because there

are some startup costs to spinning up a new venture firm. Remember, she's been doing this for 10 years and really has gotten good firm. I will have to say, not a lot of traction, you know, from the classic LPs of the is spinning up a new venture from. Remember she's been doing this for 10 years and really has gotten good from her. To say, not a lot of traction from the classic LPs of the world, but now, just like we saw a game stop, just like we see with Bitcoin, just like we see with NFTs and Robin Hood day traders, there are new entrants here.

And I think there's gonna be a world where I will be able to fire up a syndicate and say I would like to raise 10 million, but I'm limiting it to $1,000 per person and 10,000 people invest. Or I'm limiting it to $500. So instead of going away for the weekend or going to Vegas and blowing $1,000, somebody could say, you know what? I'll go to Vegas and blow 500, but I'm gonna put 500 in the next startup, I see. And this is a democratization that could change everything

and make America so much more competitive with what we're seeing in China with Jack Ma disappearing. And I've said this before, like what's crazy is like, if you talk about like systemic inequality and poverty, it's like the government loves to give poor people casinos, sports betting, and lottery tickets. Yep. But the idea that they could invest $100 into a startup is illegal, even though startups generate 15% of your caker. So even if what you did was you invested in the

market beta of startups, let's just say that degrades. It would still probably be close to 10%. Let's just say that degrades, it would still probably be close to 10%. That's the markets. You'd be at the S&P returns, you know, over many, many years, 8%. So I mean, 24% better. It's, it would be incredible. But with, by the way, 25% better, Jamoth, with the outside chance of hitting a home run, a grand slam. And that's why I love this.

All right. So do we want to wrap here when you're having any closing thoughts? Well, I just think it's like, if you think of that thing of like all the money flows changing, the other thing is like all the people are changing. And then what SAC said before, it's much, much easier because the technologies

are changing. You put these three things in a soup and it just seems like our best days are ahead of us. I think it's gonna be amazing for entrepreneurship. All the answers are out there if you want to start a company. All the skills are freely available to you. You can learn anything online. I think the message I really want people to understand is, you may believe that the world

is filled with inequality and racism and bad actors. And you would be right. But what's also right is that every skill could be learned. Capital is available now more than ever. And there is a clear path for you if you just stop watching television and learn to be a UX designer, a sales executive, a marketing or growth executive or a developer, you can change the world and change your lot in life and be really fucking rich. Don't buy into this victim mentality.

It's complete utter nonsense that crazy lefties are saying everybody's stupid and nobody can learn. And I got a bag of red pills here and I have been pounding them. The world is a giant opportunity for all of you. Go get it. I think it's time to announce. Freebrick and I would like to announce that we've started a combination incubator

and early stage venture firm. We call it punch draft and it's play on the words launch and craft. I think the punch is more just a homage to you. When we're gonna launch our first syndicate, we gotta get a deal here. Somebody's gotta fuck it. I just, I never get the millie calls.

You guys are doing deals left and right. Jason, Jason, you need to assign somebody to figure this the fuck out, because I think there's, there are people down. There are folks listening to this podcast who have great businesses. What we should commit to them is, we will help you be the least deluded and we will try to

share the beak wedding amongst all the other folks listening to this. So if you have a great company and you're thinking of raising capital, come to the one of the four of us and we will hand roll a solution for you. Yes. Okay. Let's just do it. It doesn't just do some editing. Hand roll.

We will handroll a solution that will allow the four of us plus everybody else in this into to invest. And then we will help you non-dilutively grow your business for as long as possible and then take it public. Okay, I am setting up wetyourbeak.com, which is currently redirecting to the oil and podcast. It's gonna be a type form.

And the type form is gonna let you... I will dilute your business, but the rest of you guys can do it on your own. Anyway, go to wetyourbeak.com and fill out the form, tell us a little bit about your business and it will go to all four besties in the database. We'll share it. Wet your beak is the new database.

I bought the domain WetYourBeak.com from one of the fans of the pond. Yes, you just said it now. This is the 10th time you've said it. I get it. Collectively we own it. I, I, I, this podcast is rapidly turning into a commercial for, uh, for downflow. For downflow.

No, this is, this is Jekyll's attempt to divert and steal my deal flow. Yeah. So it's talking about where partners you're a fucking a, ooh, we're partners. So we are. How, who did I just bring six six seven companies to the other day? Craftventures.com.

Do not. That's the website. That's the website. All right, yeah, okay. Don't email me. Give me a break, man. Come on, man. How many deals are we in?

Back at you. All right, listen, we love all of the audience and we love our besties. Love you, bestie, Chamoth. Love you guys. Love you, free bird. Back atcha. Love you, Saxie, poo.

When are we playing cards? Come on, let's play cards. Let's play Monday. Monday, done. Done. I'm sending the invitation. All right, everybody, it's another all-in podcast. If you want to rate and subscribe or do anything like that, sure.

Why not? And shout out Young Spielberg. Thank you for making all of our or do anything like that, sure. Why not end? Shout out Young Spielberg. Thank you for making all of our great tracks. Do a search for Young, why you and G Spielberg in your spotify by his songs, like his songs, and he's the greatest. If you want series A funding or seed funding, David Sacks, if you want to spack, Chimoff, and if you want to fold some proteins and... Cubits. Yeah, you want to do some Cubits. Email Friedberg.

Somebody told me that the quality of the show, he calls it the Friedberg index. The Friedberg talks a lot. It's a great episode. When Friedberg demurs and doesn't talk a lot, it's a shit episode. Say it, say the word again. Say the, demur. Demur.

It's French for sleep. It means you went, took a nap. It's French for sleep. You're just such a, demur. More. As in more day, day, as in sleep,

you can say demur. You can say demur. Yeah, demur. Okay, everybody will see you next time by the only vodka. Love you guys. As in sleep, they more you could say demure. Yeah, demured Okay, everybody will see you next time on the only podcast love you guys Rainman David and they've just gone crazy with her. Lumpy West, I swear. Queen of King Wild. I'm going on a leash. What? What? What?

What? What? Besties are gone. I'm going through that. That's my dog taking a wish to drive away. So, what? Get it off. Oh, man.

My hamlet has your room. We should all just get a room and just have one big hug. Because they're all good. It's like this like sexual tension that we just need to release that out What you're that beat? What you're here for? Beat? What? We need to get merch these aren't that bad

I'm going on lilin' I'm going on lilin' I'm going on with it!