Sep 17, 2022 · 1h 31m · allin
E96: Adobe acquires Figma for $20B, TPB SPAC, FedEx CEO's recession warning, macro picture & more
David Sacks · 27m spoken David Friedberg · 21m spoken Chamath Palihapitiya · 19m spoken Jason Calacanis · 13m spoken
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
In Episode 96 of the All-In Podcast, hosts Jason Calacanis, Chamath Palihapitiya, David Sacks, and David Friedberg evaluate Adobe's $20B Figma acquisition, analyze macroeconomic conditions and rising interest rates, debate geopolitical strategy surrounding the Russia-Ukraine war, and highlight growing global food security risks.
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 99.8% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
The hosts as informed peer 6.6 Guest teaching 3.6 Guest disagreement 2.2 The hosts pushing back 3.0
speaking balance: gold is the hosts, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 24:27 Sacks calls out Friedberg's contradictory market framing
Sacks forcefully accuses Friedberg of speaking out of both sides of his mouth regarding whether Figma represents an existential threat or operates in an entirely different market.
Hardest push from the hosts ▶ 1:14:36 Calacanis presses Sacks with Reuters report on rejected peace dealCalacanis explicitly introduces new reporting to challenge Sacks' core premise that the US state department uniquely botched pre-war peace negotiations.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 1:14:45 Sacks contextualizes the Reuters peace deal detailsSacks dismantles Calacanis' counterargument by explaining that the offered deal occurred post-invasion and lacked the necessary written guarantees from Washington.
The host holds their own ▶ 1:07:14 Friedberg uses market share data to reframe FedEx's warningFriedberg reframes FedEx's recession narrative by bringing specific data on Amazon's 25% delivery market share takeover to show competitive displacement.
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Adobe Acquires Figma for Twenty Billion Dollars | 8 | 3 | 3 | 4 | The hosts demonstrate deep technical expertise in SaaS valuation metrics, dilution, free cash flow impact, and go-to-market strategies surrounding the $20B Adobe/Figma acquisition. Friendly internal pushback occurs when Sacks points out Friedberg's contradictory statements on market definition and existential disruption. | |
| David Friedberg Announces Lavoro SPAC Merger | 6 | 5 | 1 | 2 | Friedberg details his SPAC transaction with Lavoro, educating the group on Latin American agricultural retail, agronomists, and FX hedging mechanics for dollar-denominated commodities. The dynamic is collaborative and informative rather than adversarial. | |
| Legal Actions, Supreme Court Rulings, and Political Strategy | 6 | 3 | 3 | 3 | Chamath and Sacks analyze recent Supreme Court decisions and legislative strategy surrounding Title VI and same-sex marriage. Sacks details the political gamesmanship behind Senate vote timing. | |
| FedEx Recession Warning & E-Commerce Delivery Competition | 7 | 4 | 2 | 4 | The hosts challenge FedEx's recession warning, with Friedberg citing market share data to demonstrate that Amazon's local delivery expansion (reaching 25% market share) is eating FedEx's core business. | |
| Macroeconomic Trajectory, Persistent Inflation, and Wage Trends | 6 | 2 | 3 | 4 | Sacks argues the economy is in stagflation based on high CPI numbers, while Chamath pushes back by citing robust retail sales, job figures, and underlying consumer demand. | |
| Ukraine Counteroffensive & Debating the Early Peace Deal | 7 | 5 | 4 | 5 | Calacanis pushes back against Sacks' framing of US involvement by bringing up Reuters reporting that Putin rejected an early peace deal. Sacks counters by breaking down the timeline and explaining why written US guarantees were required by Moscow. | |
| Global Food Security, Fertilizer Shortages, and Starvation Crisis | 8 | 6 | 2 | 2 | Friedberg delivers an expert overview on global food insecurity, quoting UN statistics on 345M acutely food insecure people and explaining European fertilizer plant shutdowns due to natural gas bottlenecks. | |
| U.S. Foreign Policy Escalation and 'David the Dove' | 6 | 2 | 2 | 3 | Sacks argues for diplomatic off-ramps to prevent escalation with a nuclear power, while Calacanis lightheartedly labels him 'David the Dove' while probing his foreign policy philosophy. | |
| Fed Rate Trajectory & Russian Domestic Public War Sentiment | 7 | 4 | 1 | 2 | Chamath projects terminal Fed rates between 4.5-5% and offers a detailed historical analysis of Russian domestic political resistance led by mothers during the Afghan and Chechen wars. | |
| Mortgage Rate Spikes, Historical Context, and Episode Sign-Off | 5 | 2 | 1 | 1 | Calacanis contextualizes rising 30-year fixed mortgage rates against historical averages, followed by Sacks presenting his DaliLand AI art exhibition at the St. Regis. |
Statements from this episode (31)
Calacanis: Adobe's Figma deal is the largest private company acquisition in history
“It's the largest private company purchase I believe in history.”
Sacks predicts Figma will reach $1.5B to $2B ARR within 3.5 years
“They're going to be, you know, at somewhere between one and a half and two billion of ARR.”
Palihapitiya: Shantanu Narayen is one of the best public company CEOs
“Shantanu is one of the best CEOs of the last few decades in the public markets.”
Palihapitiya: Startups should target monolithic vendors, not bundled platforms
“It's much, much, much easier to build value when you're competing against a monolithic product company versus an entangled platform company.”
Sacks: Microsoft bundling cloned software into enterprise packages is anti-competitive dumping
“I think it's very anti-competitive, actually. I think it's akin to dumping.”
Friedberg: Google acquiring YouTube is the best managed acquisition ever
“It's been the greatest managed acquisition of all time, I should say.”
Palihapitiya: Canva should pursue an IPO rather than sell
“I think Canva should absolutely go public versus sell because it seems like they'll have a much easier time competing against whomever that they compete with.”
Chamath predicts Adobe's $20B acquisition of Figma will close
“If you asked me, if I was a betting man, I think this thing is going to close.”
Sacks: Pricing is the core driver of go-to-market strategy
“You have to think of pricing as not an element by itself, but as sort of the most important element of a go to market strategy. And there's no way that you can basically reprice Figma completely as part of some other bundle and expect not to create massive dis…”
Sacks: Acquisition promises of founder independence usually last two years
“When they promise the founder that you'll be left alone, that usually lasts two years. That's coincidentally, usually the length of the earn out or the golden handcuffs.”
Friedberg: Salar Kamengar had one of tech's best under-discussed CEO runs
“Probably one of the best CEO runs that's never talked about in the history of tech.”
Sacks: Five years of zero revenue does not mean startups are dead
“And for anyone who's doing a SAS company and you're in it five years and you still have zero revenue And like, that doesn't mean you're dead. I mean, they basically were a zero for five years. Absolutely nothing. And now it's a twenty billion dollar exit five …”
Friedberg: Global undernourished population spiked from 600M to 800M in three years
“For about 30 years, you know, we've reduced the number of people globally that have been undernourished down to about six hundred million as of about three or four years ago. And in the last three years, we've seen that number spike back up to eight hundred mi…”
Friedberg: New agricultural technology must go through ag retailers to get adopted
“When new technology, when new ag technology comes to market, It's the retailer that can influence the farmer to make a decision on making a switch or using a new tool or using some software you know, to drive that decision. And so that's why ag retail is so im…”
Friedberg: Brazilian corn farmers achieve half the per-acre yield of US farmers
“Corn farmers in Brazil, for example, are only getting half the yield of corn farmers in America, or a little more than half per acre, yield per acre.”
Palihapitiya: Supreme Court consensus is repealing affirmative action within a month
“The consensus opinion is that we're going to repeal affirmative action in the next month or the Supreme Court is going to do that.”
Sacks: Same-sex marriage is not at risk of Supreme Court reversal
“I don't think gay marriage is in at any risk of being Overturned by the Supreme Court.”
Friedberg: Amazon reached 25% delivery share in 2020, surpassing FedEx and UPS
“At the end of 2020, Amazon was already up to 25% market share which put them ahead of both FedEx and UPS.”
Friedberg: FedEx delivery market share declined for eight or nine consecutive years
“And FedEx has seen their market share decline for the past eight or nine years now.”
Sacks: The US economy is currently in stagflation
“And we're in a, we're in stagflation. The Fed has to keep raising interest rates at the same time that we have persistent high Chronic inflation.”
Chamath: US economy will enter a recession as Fed hikes break things
“So I think Saks you are right that we will be there. Because you can only bring rates up so high until you break things.”
Sacks: US military rewrote battle plans and directs Ukraine's counteroffensive
“America is now giving Ukraine more and more advanced weapons. Okay. This sort of the long range artillery. They're telling them where to point the weapons. They're giving them the intelligence for it. They're training them on how to use it. They've got command…”
Sacks: US State Department failed to avoid war by refusing NATO guarantees
“The question is, did the US State Department do everything they could to avoid this war? And my point is, absolutely not. They should have taken this Ukraine issue off the table in writing before the invasion.”
Friedberg: 345M people face acute food insecurity in 82 UN countries
“Three hundred and forty five million people are now facing acute food insecurity in 82 countries where the UN operates, which is two and a half times the number of acutely food insecure people that existed before the pandemic hit.”
Friedberg: Tens or hundreds of millions will starve due to supply crisis
“There's some number of people, some number of tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions of people who are going to starve between here and there that otherwise weren't going to be starving.”
Sacks: Backing Russia into a corner risks escalation and unconventional weapons
“I think there's an equal and opposite chance that that doesn't happen. That certainly could happen, okay? But I think there's an equal... An opposite chance that instead what happens is that we climb the escalatory ladder that Putin, I think we are backing him…”
Sacks: U.S. has lost sight of independent American interests in Ukraine
“We're so interested in helping and identifying with the Ukrainians that we've lost sight of an American interest that's separate and independent of Ukraine's desire for self-determination. I can understand and respect Their nationalism and their patriotism, bu…”
Sacks: U.S. should only risk war with nuclear powers over vital interests
“Listen, I believe that if America is going to risk war with a nuclear armed power, there better be a vital interest at stake. Otherwise, we should find every diplomatic off ramp we can.”
Chamath Palihapitiya predicts interest rates will reach 4.5% to 5.0%
“I think that rates are going to go somewhere between four and a half to five percent.”