Oct 22, 2022 · 1h 41m · allin
E101: Ye acquires Parler, Snap drops 30%, macro outlook, VC metrics, valuing stocks & more
Chamath Palihapitiya · 31m spoken Brad Gerstner · 23m spoken David Friedberg · 18m spoken Jason Calacanis · 16m spoken
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In Episode 101 of the All-In Podcast, the hosts analyze Kanye West's acquisition of Parler, Snapchat's financial contraction, rising interest rates, venture capital valuation dynamics, fundamental stock analysis, and California's Proposition 30.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. The hosts hold 73.8% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
The hosts as informed peer 7.3 Guest teaching 4.8 Guest disagreement 3.4 The hosts pushing back 3.5
speaking balance: gold is the hosts, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 58:11 Brad forcefully rejects Friedberg's claim
Brad directly pushes back against Friedberg's assertion that venture returns are competed away, citing the fundamental power law distribution in VC.
Hardest push from the hosts ▶ 1:33:43 Friedberg challenges Chamath on cow ethicsFriedberg refuses to accept Chamath's complaints about default oat milk, questioning the ethical premise of exploiting cows for human dairy consumption.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 17:33 Brad educates on Apple IDFA impactBrad reframes the debate around Snap's stock collapse, demonstrating that user growth remained strong while Apple's privacy policy changes wiped out ad monetization.
The host holds their own ▶ 51:11 Chamath presents VC correlation analysisChamath demonstrates deep technical expertise by revealing pitchbook data mapping portfolio overlap and correlation coefficients across major venture firms.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | The hosts as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | The hosts pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ye Acquires Parler & Public Mental Breakdown Debate | 6 | 2 | 1 | 2 | The hosts discuss Kanye West acquiring Parler and his public manic breakdown. Chamath draws on personal experience with family mental health episodes to advocate compassion, while Friedberg and Gerstner discuss platform editorial rules. | |
| Snap Drops 30%: User Growth vs. Apple IDFA Monetization | 7 | 6 | 5 | 5 | Chamath argues Snap's stock drop is due to non-voting stock corporate misgovernance. Brad reframes the issue, explaining that daily active users continue to grow while revenue was hit by Apple's IDFA ad tracking changes. | |
| Tech Excess, Over-Hiring, and Twitter's 75% Layoff Plan | 6 | 5 | 3 | 2 | Brad highlights how tech companies doubled employee counts over a decade of zero interest rates. He cites Elon Musk's planned 75 percent workforce reduction at Twitter as a return to first-principles thinking. | |
| Zero Interest Rates & Macro Outlook: Rates, Inflation, and Earnings | 8 | 6 | 3 | 3 | Chamath outlines how zero interest rates distorted financial discipline. Brad provides a macro analysis covering treasury yields, S&P earnings expectations, and tail risk volatility. | |
| Mid-Cap Cash Generation & Silicon Valley's Skillset Deficit | 7 | 4 | 2 | 2 | Friedberg notes public markets now demand real cash generation. Chamath quotes a top investor on Silicon Valley's skillset deficit after a decade of under-training managers during low interest rates. | |
| Stability AI's $101M Funding & Early-Stage Valuation Discipline | 6 | 3 | 2 | 3 | Jason questions pre-revenue 1 billion dollar valuations like Stability AI's funding round. Chamath analyzes terminal market caps to estimate realistic potential returns for late-stage venture deals. | |
| Venture Capital Metrics: TVPI vs. DPI & Portfolio Correlation | 9 | 7 | 4 | 4 | Brad presents Cambridge Associates TVPI vs DPI data showing a massive gap between unrealized paper marks and actual cash distributions. Chamath presents a proprietary portfolio correlation matrix showing VC co-investment overlaps. | |
| Power Law Distribution in VC & Long-Term Innovation Value | 8 | 7 | 6 | 5 | Brad strongly disagrees with Friedberg's view that VC returns have been competed away, emphasizing power law dynamics where top deals generate almost all returns. Brad delivers a passionate defense of venture capital's role in American innovation. | |
| Stock Picking vs. Indexing: Active Management & Fundamental Analysis | 8 | 3 | 2 | 2 | Friedberg delivers a monologue criticizing retail investors who buy stocks based on narratives while ignoring balance sheets, income statements, and valuation metrics. | |
| Stock Picking Realities, Portfolio Strategy, and Market Alpha | 8 | 6 | 5 | 4 | Brad dismisses the novelty of Friedberg's point, noting stock picking difficulty is obvious. He outlines time arbitrage and concentrated portfolio strategies as key sources of alpha. | |
| California Proposition 30 and Lyft's Governance Controversy | 7 | 4 | 4 | 3 | Jason explains California Prop 30, which taxes high earners to fund EV infrastructure. Brad sharply criticizes Lyft's board for spending 40 million dollars lobbying for a measure that directly benefits their fleet. | |
| Macroeconomic Taxation, US Public Debt, and Federalism | 8 | 5 | 3 | 4 | Friedberg projects inevitable federal tax increases above 60 percent due to debt service and entitlement obligations. Chamath counters that high California taxes are balanced by unparalleled upside alpha opportunities. | |
| Oat Milk Default Debate, Animal Ethics, and Precision Fermentation | 7 | 5 | 4 | 6 | Chamath complains about Blue Bottle defaulting to oat milk instead of real dairy. Friedberg pushes back on animal ethics and outlines precision fermentation as the technical future of dairy proteins. |
Statements from this episode (27)
Calacanis: Kanye West is acquiring Parler to own a social network
“He is going to buy Parler, which apparently Candace Owens' husband, George Farmer, had created, so he's gonna buy his own social network.”
Calacanis: Parler raised $56M despite being a 'steaming pile of garbage'
“Miraculously, this steaming pile of garbage had raised fifty-six million in funding”
Friedberg: Social networks are vulnerable application layers, not true digital monopolies
“I think it's a really clear supporting fact that there are going to be alternatives. And that these, what we thought were monopolies and what kind of became digital town squares and almost infrastructure are really just application layers. They're editorialize…”
Friedberg: Snap's market capitalization collapsed from a $160B peak to $12B
“There were a hundred sixty billion market cap, and today they're trading at 12.”
Palihapitiya: Snap's active user growth remains extremely steady around 350M
“If you look at the MAU growth of snap, it's actually been extremely steady and they've had an incredible March forward. And I think that they're roughly around 300 and fifty million.”
Palihapitiya: Snap is the internet's most glaring example of corporate misgovernance
“But it is the most glaring example of corporate misgovernance that has ever happened on the internet.”
Gerstner: Apple's IDFA changes 'pickpocketed' $2B from the advertising industry
“Apple's changes with IDFA literally pickpocketed the industry two billion dollars this year under the auspices of privacy.”
Palihapitiya: Meta will inevitably adopt the operational cost discipline of its peers
“The only big four horsemen that hasn't really gotten the script yet is meta, but they will, it's just, we're just debating when.”
Gerstner: A 20% Meta layoff merely resets headcount expenses to 2021 levels
“A 20% RIF At Meta would literally only take them back to where their personnel expense was in 2021.”
Palihapitiya: Investors will abandon Snap due to its lack of corporate governance
“Snap will be an example of where investors are going to abandon that company. Because it's just, there's no point. There's no governance. There's no ability to have a conversation. It's in the too hard bucket. So people will just leave it. It'll be stranded an…”
Gerstner: Tech faces two years of financial tightening without a V-shaped recovery
“We're gonna have two years of ringing out, right? Because there's no bailout here by the Fed. There's no V-shaped recovery for these companies.”
Gerstner: Stock market downside risk is largely priced in
“As I sit here today, yes, we're going to have harder times ahead economically, but it feels to me like a lot of it is priced in. I don't think we have huge asymmetry and skew to the downside.”
Palihapitiya: Silicon Valley under-trained an entire generation of tech leaders
“We've gone through an entire decade of under training an entire generation of people in Silicon Valley. You know, we have under under trained and under mentored the product managers, the engineers, the senior executive management, the CEOs, many of these peopl…”
Stability AI raised $101M at a $1B valuation with no commercial product
“A hundred and one million dollar funding led by KOTU Lightspeed Venture Partners. At a one billion dollar valuation for stability AI this is a for-profit company built off the backs of the open source project, stable diffusion. They have no revenue. They have …”
Palihapitiya: Unicorn venture deals overwhelmingly yield 3x to 4x exit multiples
“So if you do a deal at a billion, The overwhelming odds is that the terminal exit multiple is going to be somewhere between a three X and a four X X of dilution and X of all of the other capital that comes in and all of those features that may be attached.”
Gerstner: Hundreds of billions of dollars in venture portfolio markdowns are coming
“My hunch is that by the time the cash is actually distributed, the returns are going to revert to that orange line mean which means there are hundreds of billions of dollars in markdowns sitting in LPs and GPs portfolios that are likely to come because nobody …”
Friedberg: Total capital managed in venture funds has peaked and will decline
“We're probably at peak capital being managed in venture funds right now, and will likely decline for the next decade.”
Gerstner: 90% of venture returns go to the top 10% of deals
“The huge difference between the venture market and the private equity market or the public market is that the venture market is unquestionably a power law market, okay? 90% of the gross profits and the returns go to 10% of the deals and 10% of the investors, r…”
Gerstner: 99% of recently funded venture capital startups are garbage
“Certainly if you look at the hundreds of startups in VC land over the course of the last several years 99% of them are probably garbage and will fail and won't work.”
Palihapitiya predicts up to $750B in venture capital value destruction
“Over these next 10 years, when maybe you have 500 to three quarters of a trillion dollars of value destruction, And it's because you didn't think about portfolio construction properly.”
Gerstner: Altimeter Capital holds 90% of its portfolio in 5-10 companies
“We've got 90% of our portfolio in our top five or 10 companies.”
Calacanis: Lyft provided nearly all $48M in funding for California Prop 30
“Lyft has provided almost all of the 40, almost forty eight million in funding for this prop 30.”
Gerstner: Lyft's management lost the script spending $48M on California Prop 30
“Spending 40 to fifty million dollars on this, it just seems that they've totally lost the script. The company has way bigger problems to focus on, right, than, you know, this measure.”
Friedberg: US federal tax rates on the wealthiest will exceed 60%
“I don't see a world where we don't have over 60% tax rates on the wealthiest people in this country at a federal level.”
Palihapitiya: US national debt-to-GDP ratio will eventually surpass 300%
“We'll eventually go past 200. Somebody will clamor and, you know, be anxiety riddled, but they'll take some SSRIs. They'll be okay. We'll keep moving forward. Then we'll get to 300%.”