Apr 9, 2022 · 1h 17m · allin
E75: Fast shuts down, board culpability, Elon buys 9% of Twitter, deplatforming's evolution & more
Jason Calacanis · 19m spoken David Sacks · 17m spoken Chamath Palihapitiya · 16m spoken David Friedberg · 15m 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 75 of the All-In Podcast, hosts Jason Calacanis, Chamath Palihapitiya, David Sacks, and David Friedberg analyze the sudden shutdown of Fast.co, rising interest rates, and the collapse of high-burn startup governance. They also discuss Elon Musk's acquisition of a major Twitter stake, the evolving debate over free speech and platform censorship, and the geopolitical fallout of the Russia-Ukraine war on global food supply chains.
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 99.4% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
The hosts as informed peer 6.9 Guest teaching 4.1 Guest disagreement 4.1 The hosts pushing back 4.4
speaking balance: gold is the hosts, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 56:00 Sacks vs Friedberg on platform rights vs speech rights
Sacks forcefully rejects Friedberg's framing that private social media platforms can do whatever they want, arguing that big tech operates as a monopoly cartel that digitally depersons citizens.
Hardest push from the hosts ▶ 30:28 Chamath challenges Sacks' view on board influenceChamath directly confronts Sacks' claim that VCs lack leverage over founders, insisting that authoritative investors like Peter Thiel or Mike Moritz command real influence when demanding burn reductions.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 1:04:15 Friedberg educates room on food supply chain technologyFriedberg corrects Jason's assumption that global calories can simply be substituted, walking through technical equipment limitations in wheat mills and hoarding dynamics in commodity markets.
The host holds their own ▶ 10:26 Chamath's breakdown of Federal Reserve quantitative tighteningChamath demonstrates deep macroeconomic expertise by laying out the step-by-step mechanics of Fed rate hikes, balance sheet runoff, and market index concentration.
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Host Introductions & Nickname Banter | 2 | 1 | 3 | 3 | Lighthearted introductory banter featuring nickname announcements and jokes about host hangovers. Friedberg playfully mocks Jason's summit party updates as irrelevant to the broader audience. | |
| TV Shows, "Elevating Consciousness", and Fancy Diets | 3 | 2 | 4 | 3 | The co-hosts joke about the TV series WeWork, elevating consciousness, and compare fancy dining diets like tempeh versus olive-fed beef. Chamath mocks Friedberg's vegan diet regime. | |
| Oat Milk Chemicals, Dairy, and Sacks' Brie Obsession | 4 | 3 | 3 | 3 | Chamath highlights additive chemicals inside commercial oat milk, leading to humor around Sacks' college obsession with eating entire wheels of brie cheese. | |
| Macro Economy, Federal Reserve, and Startup Survival | 8 | 5 | 2 | 3 | Chamath delivers an authoritative macro analysis detailing the Federal Reserve's quantitative tightening program, rate hikes, and liquidity compression across equity markets. | |
| Burn Multiples, PayPal Lessons, and Venture Governance | 8 | 5 | 4 | 5 | Sacks explains the burn multiple metric and references PayPal's 2000 survival strategy to detail how startup Fast should have cut costs. Chamath challenges the rationale behind Stripe's strategic investment. | |
| "Fucked Company" Era vs. Modern VC Incentives | 8 | 4 | 4 | 5 | The besties discuss the early internet era website FuckedCompany and contrast it with modern VC AUM growth incentives. Chamath points out how top firms like Sequoia maintain governance discipline. | |
| Startup Failure Culture, VC Pro-Founder Hysteria, and Coachability | 8 | 5 | 6 | 6 | A vigorous debate arises over pro-founder VC hysteria versus board governance. Sacks argues VCs lack power over founders, while Chamath counters that elite investors hold substantial authority. | |
| SaaS Board Meeting Decks and Blitzscaling Pitfalls | 8 | 4 | 4 | 4 | Sacks outlines standard SaaS board deck structures and blitzscaling pitfalls, while Friedberg emphasizes coachability and intellectual curiosity as key traits of scaling CEOs. | |
| Elon Musk Acquires Twitter Stake and Board Seat | 7 | 3 | 4 | 4 | The panel analyzes Elon Musk acquiring a 9% stake and board seat at Twitter. Sacks and Chamath argue that restoring free speech on major platforms is crucial for democratic culture. | |
| Corporate Governance, Employee Activism, and Censorship Pressures | 7 | 4 | 5 | 5 | Friedberg explains how broad public shareholder bases force tech executives to submit to regulatory and employee activism pressure. Sacks praises leaders like Brian Armstrong who resisted employee mobs. | |
| The Slippery Slope of Deplatforming and Reinstating Banned Voices | 8 | 6 | 7 | 7 | A sharp philosophical clash occurs over deplatforming. Friedberg defends private platforms' right to curate content, while Sacks argues social media networks operate as a cartel depriving users of digital rights. | |
| Global Food Crisis and Agricultural Supply Chain Disruptions | 9 | 7 | 3 | 4 | Friedberg delivers a detailed breakdown of global agricultural supply chain bottlenecks, explaining why crop milling equipment limits caloric substitution and threatens developing nations with famine. | |
| Geopolitical Strategy and the State of the War in Ukraine | 8 | 5 | 5 | 6 | Sacks outlines the shift in the Ukraine conflict toward a long-term Donbass proxy war, questioning US foreign policy priorities when China remains the primary peer competitor. | |
| Strategic Priorities for Western Resilience and Geopolitical Realignment | 9 | 4 | 3 | 3 | Chamath details three vital pillars for American domestic resilience: energy independence, specialty chemical production, and onshore semiconductor manufacturing. Sacks recommends regional Asian alliances. |
Statements from this episode (35)
Palihapitiya: Whole Foods almond milk is loaded with sugar and chemicals
“The almond milk at like the Whole Foods, riddled with sugar and all this other nonsensical chemicals as well.”
Calacanis: Fast burned $10M monthly on $50K in revenue
“At its peak fast was burning ten million dollars a month according to reports. I think the information got most of this information while only generating about 50 K a month in revenue.”
Calacanis: Fast raised $102M Series B led by Stripe, $124M total
“Their hundred two million dollar Series B was led by Stripe in January of 2021. Company raised one hundred twenty four million dollars in total.”
Calacanis: Better.com laid off 3,900 employees across December and March
“And they laid off 900 people December first, 3000 people on March eighth, according to TechCrunch.”
Palihapitiya: Fed will aggressively hike rates until equity markets sell off
“So I think what the Fed's going to do is get even more aggressive. You're going to probably see, you know, a lot of fifties, maybe even a 75 point hike. You probably are going to see them, you know, even ratchet up quantitative tightening until there is a bit …”
Palihapitiya: Startups face 18 months of unfavorable venture fundraising terms
“And I think the worst means that there's an 18 month period where you cannot raise money on your terms. You have to raise money on the market terms.”
Sacks: Fast could have preserved $30M by cutting burn earlier
“If they just slammed on the brakes three or four months ago, when we were talking on this pod about the coming downturn, they could still have thirty million dollars in the bank.”
Sacks: PayPal burned $10M monthly with no revenue in 2000
“PayPal had this situation back in 2000, the year 2000, right after the dot-com crash. We were burning ten million dollars a month, like fast. We had no revenue and no business model, ok?”
Sacks: High-burn, low-revenue startups must cut costs immediately
“If you're a high burn company right now, that's not generating a lot of revenue to go along with it. You better slam on the brakes and rationalize your cost structure before it's too late.”
Calacanis: Silicon Valley has lacked proper board governance for a long time
“We haven't had proper governance for a long time in Silicon Valley.”
Friedberg: VCs are incentivized to collect fees rather than govern companies
“I see that lacking heavily in Silicon Valley, because the VCs are more incentivized to raise more money, to make more investments and then pay less attention and just go raise the next fund.”
Palihapitiya: Sequoia was the sole VC to release 'RIP Good Times'
“There's a reason why in during the great financial crisis, there was only one organization that even had the courage, forget whether it was right or wrong at the time to even write the RIP Good Times deck, right? It was Sequoia.”
Palihapitiya: AUM-focused VC funds prioritize LPs over portfolio companies
“When you're trying to raise AUM, your customer is not the company. It's your customer is the LP.”
Sacks: Offsheet customer references are the single most important diligence signal
“Probably offsheet customer references. So the first thing we do is focus on the metrics, right? And the financials, the SaaS metrics, all that kind of stuff. But then you want to talk to customers, and you want to understand the value they're getting out of th…”
Friedberg: Most venture capitalists add negative value to startups
“There are most VCs, as Vinod has said publicly, add negative value. And I totally agree with him on this. Because they, many VCs, particularly the ones who aren't, you know, valuable and don't really have much to add, try to add stuff, try to say stuff, and th…”
Palihapitiya requires standard cash burn reporting for every board role
“In every board that I take, the first thing that I say is, here's a template I want. I'm not going to ask you a bunch of stuff, but I just want some transparent reporting. And the first page is always, how much money at the beginning of the month? How much mon…”
Sacks: Craft calculates runway using trailing burn, not projections
“We don't like looking at projections for runway. We just look at how much you burned last month and how much money you got in the bank.”
Friedberg: Curiosity and coachability define founders scaling past $100B
“If you look across the range of successful founders, CEOs that scale to a hundred billion dollar plus valuations for their businesses, that to me is one of the more common threads is this kind of intellectual curiosity, which translates into a coachability, wh…”
Calacanis: Running regular board meetings differentiates seed-stage startups
“It actually turns out doing a one hour board meeting, four times a year, six times a year, even as a seed stage company, it's it does differentiate you to the venture community, I find.”
Palihapitiya: Twitter free speech impact could exceed Tesla and SpaceX
“I think that if he is able to make free speech cool again, he'll, he'll actually do more doing that than potentially through SpaceX and Tesla, and that's already saying a lot.”
Palihapitiya: Twitter's structure uniquely allows Musk to enforce free speech
“You know that none of the other big tech companies will ever even do that. And the capital structures of those companies will never allow a single strong voice like his to enforce that idea. So this is the only company where that could happen.”
Friedberg: Jack Dorsey was Twitter's largest single shareholder at 2.3%
“The largest single shareholder in Twitter to date has been Jack Dorsey at 2.3%.”
Sacks: Online activist culture is a paper tiger lacking majority public support
“The fact of the matter is that this whole woke mob thing, it's a paper tiger. They don't have the support of most of the population.”
Friedberg: Elon Musk will ignore complaints from Twitter employees, regulators, and shareholders
“I don't think he'll care what employees kind of gripe about. I don't think he'll care what regulators gripe about. And I don't think he'll care what other shareholders gripe about. He'll talk about the long-term opportunity, the philosophical alignment with mi…”
Friedberg: Social media platforms censoring topics will lose users over time
“They're going to lose users over time. They're going to end up looking like idiots when they're wrong by banning certain topics that we should be having conversations about over time.”
Sacks: Congress is pushing six bills to regulate big tech as monopolies
“Meanwhile, in Congress, they're pushing six bills forward to regulate these companies as monopolies.”
Palihapitiya: Trump will likely be allowed back on Twitter after three years
“I think all roads will probably lead to a conclusion that after three years, it's probably okay to let this guy back and be able to tweet.”
USDA downgraded US corn planting forecast from 93M to 89M acres
“The USDA farm report comes out, they survey farmers and figure out how much they're going to plant every year. And they just downgraded the number of corn acres that are going to get planted this year, which is happening starting this month from ninety three m…”
Friedberg: Global food crisis will hit Sri Lanka and Africa hard
“The United States is going to be fine. Western Europe will be fine. China will be fine. Sri Lanka is gonna be a mess. Northern and Eastern Africa is gonna be a mess.”
Sacks: Russia-Ukraine war will be a permanent feature of Biden presidency
“I think it's gonna become a sort of permanent feature in the background of Biden's presidency.”
Sacks: US economy is 15x Russia's and equal to China's
“Our economy is 15 times bigger than Russia's. China's economy is about the same size as ours.”
Sacks: US State Department could have easily avoided Ukraine war
“This war was easily avoidable. I mean, the State Department could have avoided this war very easily.”
Sacks: US regime change interventions always yield equal or worse outcomes
“In every case where we push for regime change, we've actually gotten the same or worse.”