The Exchanges

Q to that is, you know, put federal troops like Trump is, but what the Democrats should realize, in my view, is like, is that Why is the country letting him do that? Which we, which I don't think is constitutional or the right, uh, right solution because they're so frustrated with what's going on and just citing statistics, you know, going out there and saying, well, the statistics are down.

A Yeah. It's doesn't match people's reality. People are smart. And, you know, I think this is really a stupid strategy by the Democrats. If Trump says I'm going to send in the national guard Because you guys haven't done the job that the obvious kung fu move to redirect that energy and say, yes, here are the five places. These are hotspots where we need those troops. If you can put these troops on these five corners on Turk street on six street, that's where we need them. And, uh, how long can we get them for, uh, before you move them to the next hotspots that would totally just take away what is an obvious play by the Republican party to make the Democrats fall for the trap. Of we're pro-crime, we don't care about people's safety, which by the way is the sh, it's just so dumb.

AI assessment note: “It's doesn't match people's reality. People are smart. And, you know, I think this”

Q What's the most impactful advice you've been given and how has it shaped your careers?

A Early on, I got two good pieces of advice. One was from Mike Savino, who's here somewhere, uh, speaking tomorrow. There it is. Um, and he said, uh, the piece of advice his dad gave him was look to the left and come in an hour before that guy, and then look to the right and come in and stay an hour later than that guy. Just basically the hard work stuff. And I had gotten that from my mom as well, who worked three or four jobs to put us through school. My dad, who worked really hard. And so the hard work ethic, I think, was the key to a lot of my success because I just decided I'm just going to outwork everybody because I was coming not from Harvard or Stanford, but from Bayridge, Brooklyn, uh, and, you know, going to night school at Fordham. So I, I had to use hustle. There was no connections. There was no network. I just had to literally kill what I ate. And then after I sold my first company, I was at Ted at the billionaire's dinner with my book agent, John Brockman. And, uh, I had still had a chip on my shoulder, but I had sold my company and he, uh, said, Hey Schmuck, you made it. You don't, you stop fighting with everybody. And I was like, okay, I'll stop fighting with everybody.

AI assessment note: “the piece of advice his dad gave him was look to the left”

Q this particular place to get you that magical experience. So, you know, I, I don't think you have to pick one or the other, but architecturally, 20 trillion dollars of value on the web is built around web pages, Advertising and e-commerce, right? And sending traffic to those other places. And what we're all saying unequivocally is it's moving to knowledge extraction and intelligent agents. And I think that's tectonic.

A But I still think there'll be clicks. I, you know, I Have been using barred a whole bunch and they have made massive rapid progress just to give you, but one example here, I'll share my screen. It is pretty extraordinary how quickly they're figuring this out. And I did this just in the search while we're talking about the five best Greek restaurants, uh, in the Bay area obviously came up with Kokari and, you know, other ones. And then I asked it like, Hey, what are the top items on each of these menus? They started putting images in and linking to Yelp. And then I said, Hey, tell me the most expensive wines and. It actually got that from Kokari. They have a Chateau Margaux, 2009 for 1500, Chamath. I don't think it's good enough for you, but.

AI assessment note: “But I still think there'll be clicks.”

Q Now, are those to feed the funnel of angel investments for you, or are you making money on this?

A So, you know, we got to feed and run the program, but it's not gonna, you know, match venture investing, obviously. Um, it just kind of underwrites the cost of it, and then that creates the funnel. About five percent of the companies that come to, five to 10% of the companies that come to founding university wind up going to the accelerator, or we make a direct investment. So it's a pre-accelerator, but it lets us get to the companies before Techstars or Y Combinator or other folks even know they exist, because half of them aren't incorporated yet, right? So that's kind of the exciting part about it, is we meet them when they're just two or three people working on a prototype.

AI assessment note: “underwrites the cost of it, and then that creates the funnel”

Q specific in ways that gets moderates. And the only way to do that is to tack to the middle, because a lot of these other trial balloons were kind of nutty, and those people are not going to win them the election in the key states that matter. Again, you know, it's what we've said before, five things in five states, right? That's what it's going to come down to.

A It's also, I think you've made this point, Shamath, as well, which is when you're running for the primaries, and I think Dean Phillips, when he was on the program, talked about this. You've got one agenda, and that tends to be a bit extreme because you're trying to get those extreme people in primaries to come out. Then when you get to the general election, you kind of come towards the middle. And we said on this very podcast, and I gave a couple of disclaimers as the moderator here. Hey, we don't know these are Kamala's policies because A, she's not talking to anybody. B, she hasn't released any. So maybe, you know, she's taking feedback. I have some inside information on this. Which is, there are people in our circles who are sitting with her saying, these things are crazy, and maybe pointing to our podcast and other reactions online, and maybe we should really think, what do you want to do? Potentially, Madam President. When you're president, if you do win, and I think she's starting to think from first principles, hey, what is actually good for the countries? That would be a very honest way of looking at this.

AI assessment note: “when you get to the general election, you kind of come towards the middle.”

Q What are some of the ethical dilemmas that you faced in your careers and how have you overcome them? What about some ethical dilemmas you've seen from the startups you've invested in?

A Yeah. Uh, I've had maybe two of these situations happen where people were Let's say I'll just make this a composite, but you know, over 400 investments we've done. You had maybe two instances where people were, um, Doing things that would be illegal. And we had to, in both cases, I had to sit with the founders and said, listen, I, I can't be on the board of this company if you're going to do this kind of things. And in both cases, I gave them the option to return our money at par last valuation. Um, and yeah, I resigned from the board and took our money back. So it does happen. Sometimes you gotta be very careful because, you know, somebody does something Um, where they're not upfront or completely honest, and they sell shares in a company. It's called securities fraud. You gotta be really vigilant, especially if you found out about anyone on the board.

AI assessment note: “You had maybe two instances where people were, um, Doing things that would be illegal.”

Q Jake, are you disputing that the world is becoming more multipolar? Do you think we're still living in unipolarity?

A No, and nor do we need to live in unipolarity for America to still be the champions. We still are winning at a pace that nobody else is. Space, energy, cars, AI. We're probably gonna win chips, and we're gonna probably win material science and batteries, and we're obviously gonna win biotech. We're winning in every one of these categories. We're the clear winner. The only thing we're not the clear winner in is factories and mass producing schlocky stuff that's sold on Amazon. China's completely imploded, and the Middle East is taking their last 20 or 30 years of capital, and they're investing it in The West in space, energy, cars, AI, chips, basic materials, batteries, all the stuff that's happening here on our shores. We are in the most winning position we've probably ever been in as a country. We took a bad beat. We spent too much money. We got a dysfunctional government. We got culture wars. We got a lot of bad stuff distracting us. But the truth is, when you look at brass tacks, when you look at innovation, we're winning on almost every dimension. We're just a little caught up in the fog of culture wars and, you know, thinking that we're going to be dominant And perfect in terms of our budget. We do have to fix our budget. We all agree on that. But we are winning, and China is currently stalled out. And it's because of freedom. It's because we support entrepreneurs because …

AI assessment note: “No, and nor do we need to live in unipolarity for America to still be”

Q Oh, hey, Juan T. And Juan said, uh, Bill Gurley recently put out a piece explaining How this might be as good a time as in a decade to build a company? How are you guys seeing your own portfolio companies trying to take advantage of the situation? And I guess I'll add, do you guys agree? And how do you think about this as a moment for company building?

A I could take that one. I am seeing a lot of the companies that were, you know, had done a great job raising around seed round series, a never got product market fit. Now wrap it up, right? They're, they're shutting down. They're doing the wind down process. And then we're seeing lists of very talented people. And I've talked about this before on the show, the consolidation of talent behind the winning ideas, the, the, the experiments that actually worked products that got some traction are now having an easier time hiring talent. And so to Bill's point, he's got a lot more experience in this than the four of us put together is absolutely right when you build in this down market. Yeah, it's harder to raise money, of course. But talent is what makes great products and products that delight customers get the flywheel going. And if you survive through this, and you have that talent, you're not going to face 20 copycats. And there's not 50 new products coming out a day. People have more time to actually engage and try a product, which they've been burnt out on and the peanut butter spreading, you know, we have this thin layer of peanut butter talent. Now it's getting consolidated in the winter. So absolutely a great time for five CEOs and founders or, you know, 10 founders across five companies to consolidate down to two, do those tuck in acquisitions and get focused and build reall…

AI assessment note: “He's a hundred percent right.”

Q But what's the answer? What's the answer? Like how is this great for me?

A It, it'll wind up being great for you because the prices of goods and services will get much lower. You'll live much longer. And listen, I'm not saying this is mine, but this is what the industry should be saying. The price of education is going to go down 80 or 90%. You're going to have customized, adaptable education versus, you know, paying for 50,000 dollar a year degrees. You're gonna be able to learn anything in half the time at 90% less. All of these deliveries coming to your home are going to be delivered at half the price twice as fast because it's going to be in a drone or it's going to be in a self-driving car. And we're going to make breakthroughs in healthcare that will reduce suffering and you will not die of cancer. You're going to live to a 120. We will have job displacement, but we believe the lower cost of living and the greater services that are going to be available to you in healthcare and education will make up for that. And if it doesn't, We're gonna put in ways to pace out the job displacement. In China, they're doing this. In China, they're proposing, and Saxon President Trump, the amazing President Trump, will be doing an AI national edict soon, I believe, or an executive order. But in China, in Wuhan, paradoxically, they are talking about giving out licenses to self-driving cars in a paced rollout so that young men don't lose their jobs en masse Which…

AI assessment note: “It'll wind up being great for you because the prices of goods and services”

Q Jake, what do you think? We saw the media attacking Trump for even daring to hold negotiations with the Russians. Do you think this was a good idea, or do you think that somehow Trump was caving to Putin?

A I give Trump a lot of credit. He is incredibly good at foreign policy, and specifically with dictators. If you look at our past presidents, They didn't want to meet with Putin. They didn't want to meet with Kim Jong Un, Kim Jong Il. They thought isolation was the best policy. It's not. I think talking to these folks and trying to find common ground is the best policy, even if it's a five percent chance of it actually working out, which is what I think any president dealing with a dictator and a despot like, you know, Putin is going to have. I think you have a five or 10% chance. And I think Trump and Biden actually had a lot in common that worked. The lone leasing of the weapons and not costing the American taxpayer any money where a lot of partisan people said, oh my God, this is costing the Americans so much. It's actually Trump has figured out a way to make it profitable. He's selling more weapons to Ukraine and he got us the minimal rights. It turns out Trump was able to turn a cost center or a supposed cost center into a profit center in terms of this specific war and If you look at the sanctions, Trump has increased the sanctions. So Trump had my exact position that I fought for here on this podcast for the past couple of years in this conflict, which was keep the pressure up on Putin. And Trump took it over the top by going to Putin's main client for his oil now, which i…

AI assessment note: “I think talking to these folks and trying to find common ground is the best policy”

Q Well, I think, I think we knew, I think we knew Sachs would be very pro. Chamath, uh, Chamath seems really pro other than he wants like the alien conspiracy files released, which we'll get soon. What is the, what is the view from, uh, J Cal, uh, Wendy, uh, where you're the, the, the left leaning guy on the, in the room?

A Uh, I, you know, I'm kind of independent, but yeah, social liberal, you know, I, I look at what all Americans, Believe and try to build some consensus here. It's one of the things I've been trying to do on the pod is look for where we agree. Americans universally want the border secured. They don't want illegal immigration, and they don't want fentanyl. So this is the biggest win, I think, for Trump, which I think everybody on the panel pointed out. And Saks, you were dead right. Like, when we were seeing those videos, some of them were five years old, some of them were recent. Biden really covered up what was going on in the border, and it took years to figure out what was exactly going on there. So that's the biggest win possible. I give overall, just to be brief, a B for This first hundred days and I give, you know, Biden like a C minus. The second thing that everybody agrees on is they want to downsize the government. They don't want waste and fraud. So I think Doge is the other huge win. The things I think that could be improved really just three simple things. The economic uncertainty is really terrible for running a business. I'm seeing a lot of folks in my circle on my podcasts this week in startups and here telling me, oh, I don't know how to plan for the future. And we're going to get into that with this tariff stuff and the trade war. And so I think economic uncertai…

AI assessment note: “I give overall, just to be brief, a B for This first hundred days”

Q Jamal, J Cal, you guys agree or have a different point of view?

A Looking at it, it's a, it's a big number, the headline number, but I agree with Saks that the actual number is half the number. So if it was, you know, if you look at the number of engineers they had based on LinkedIn data and pitch book data, probably 60, 70 employees, 80 employees, and then 40, 50 of them are engineers. So that puts it at thirty million dollars per engineer. And that's one way to look at these acquisitions. And I think, you know, probably three to ten million dollars per engineer for like really high end engineers is more of the going price. But if this is half that amount, because they bought it with monopoly money, in other words, their 20, 21 price for their company, it's great. And I think you nailed it, um, Freeberg. What's happening is this layer of natural language on top of Any service, whether it something as simple as Yelp or something as complicated as a giant financial company with tons of transaction data, being able to talk to it and understand it and then have your machine learning team build tools. So business owners don't have to hire data scientists. The actual business leaders can talk to the data and get back answers or just say, Hey, tell me about our customers. How have they changed over the years? And then, Hey, that's pretty interesting. Tell me more about our customers. And you know, how are they reacting to these three new products? …

AI assessment note: “I agree with Saks that the actual number is half the number.”

Q If the US didn't do it. Yeah. If the US didn't do it, like, why don't we find the real killer?

A I actually have this, I have the theory. Here's my theory. The CIA knew how to do it. Biden, uh, wants to do it. The Republicans want to do it. Obviously the, the people who are the most pro stopping Nord Stream have been the Republicans. They've led this charge, uh, even more than the Democrats. So it's, it's a bipartisan issue. Stop Nord Stream, bipartisan issue, hands down. I think the CIA probably knew how to do it, and just like we equipped the Ukraine to do it, we might have facilitated the Ukraine and a collaborator, UK, Norway, some freelancers, you know, we have those freelance, uh, former Navy SEALs that operate. Perhaps the CIA just said to the Ukraine, here's a, you know, black ops group. If you wanted to engage them, You could feel free to do so, which would then split the difference between what Cy is saying, what the CIA is saying, which is typically where the truth lies is probably between what this investigative journalist of note has said and what the CIA is denying. The CIA probably has plausible deniability. That's my prediction.

AI assessment note: “we might have facilitated the Ukraine and a collaborator, UK, Norway, some freelancers”

Q start to hear these examples, and it'll be important to see what what the true details of this Twitter situation are. I think that the pendulum starts to swing in the other direction where we say, okay, you know what? I'll eat out at Chipotle one night a week less. And instead I'm going to reallocate that money to making sure that I have, you know, some amount of privacy.

A You can do it for 25 bucks a month, you know, two or 300 bucks a year, which is a big number for, you know, maybe the average Joe, but it's, it's, it's, it's being packaged and bundled right now. So the, you're seeing the VPNs, the anonymous search engines, The browsers all starting to bundle. They're bundling a set, a suite of services. And so I, I think this is upon us now and consumers get it and they want to protect their privacy. So, and Apple has said this is going to be our reason for you to choose our cloud is that we're going to put the local settings. We're going to put your data on your phone, encrypt it. We don't have access to it. Use, use Apple for this reason. Of course, they're also building a multi-billion dollar ad business at the same time in Apple news and their app store. So There's that. I guess we should move on here. We'll, we'll see what happens with this. The other big news story that people are talking about this week and we talked about, I guess, last year was student loan debt relief. Interestingly, about 85 days before the midterms, Joe Biden has decided to unilaterally give 10 to 20 K of debt relief to people who have student loans. You have to have under a 125 K in yearly income as an individual at two 50 as a household. And the student loan pause program which happened during COVID has been extended to the end of this year. I'm not sure why.

AI assessment note: “You can do it for 25 bucks a month, you know, two or 300 bucks”

Q to think who, who can you remember everyone's name and have some sort of group affinity with them? And any too much above Dunbar's number, we try to like cap it. So it's a read only chat room, but I think these tools need to keep evolving and I hope some I know there's a couple startups you all might have funded some of them that are working on this.

A Yeah, there's an actual neat feature you can do in slack now where like that level nine person can post and everybody else can post in the thread. Like you can reply to the thread, but the opening salvos and thread have to be started by somebody in that sort of group. So, but the slack definitely needs to double down on this. I also think they put that random room in there and you put the random room. It's like basically waving the flag, like it's random, put stuff in there. I think you got to delete that. If you're running, I tell all startups, delete the random room. And tell people, do not post memes and jokes. David, you had a follow-up.

AI assessment note: “there's an actual neat feature you can do in slack now”

Q things that's happening over there. But it's also a kind of instructive about how we could recenter ourselves because there's, they're actually enacting the laws that we all talk about we've been talking about for seven months, but they're actually willing to do it and they and so if American policy makers would actually pivot to what's going on over there with the China or should we go to robotics?

A Let's let's finish China and then we can and then and then we can talk about China is continuing their crackdown of tech companies and has proposed a ban on foreign IPOs. Uh, the Wall Street Journal had some exclusive reporting today. I'll just read a quote and then hand it over to Chamath. China plans to propose new rules that would ban companies with large amounts of sensitive consumer data from going public in the US people familiar with the matter said. And in addition to that, uh, under these new rules, they are looking at the algorithms that are being run, uh, and different services and making them transparent. And the Chinese government will basically control the algorithms. That have caused so much chaos here in the United States with Facebook and Twitter and YouTube. And then finally, they're going to close the loophole on VI ease. Chamath, you want to explain what this means from a market perspective?

AI assessment note: “Let's let's finish China and then we can and then and then we can talk”

Q The five or six, but it made no sense because it's like, how do you know that those are the five most cited places that resulted in this?

A Well, by PageRank technology, Or the authority of the website or the author, but let's pause for a second here. There is a company Called neva.com. I'm not an investor. None of us are. Uh, it's a former Googler. They have 78 employees. I think according to LinkedIn, I just typed in one of the best flat panel TVs. Here's the result. And as you see, sentence by sentence, as it rewrites another person's content, it links with a citation, just like the Wikipedia does. And when you scroll to the bottom of it, it tells you, Hey, this is from Rolling Stone. This is from Best Buy. This is from ratings. And if that answer is good for you and you trust those sources, those people should get a commission. Every time there's a thousand searches and you come up, you should get a dollar every time your data was used. And if not, these sites should sue the daylights out of Google. And for Google to say they can't do it is hogwash. Why isn't it fair use? It's not fair use because in fair use, you have the ability to create derivative works on future platforms. Uh, and you are taking this person, the original content owner's ability to exploit that And you are co-opting it and you're doing it at scale. And that is against fair use. You're not allowed to interfere with my ability to make future products. David, you know, this is an attorney.

AI assessment note: “Well, by PageRank technology, Or the authority of the website or the author”

Q Jason, what was the name of that vigilante group that used to walk the streets, the something angels?

A That was the, um, guardian angels. So it was so bad in the eighties. And I actually, Almost signed up for the guardian angels. I went to their headquarters because I was practicing martial arts and I thought I would check it out. And, um, they had their office in Hell's Kitchen. I didn't wind up joining, but what they would do is they would just ride the subway. They would wear a certain type of hat and wear a guardian angel shirt. And all they did was just ride the subways, a red beret, and they would just ride the subways. And you felt safe. What kind of martial arts were you taking? Taekwondo. I was in Taekwondo. Yeah. This is before mixed martial arts, but they just rode the subways. And honestly, I've been on the subways with them many times. You felt safe. And it wasn't vigilantes. They were garden angels. They used that term. And many times they would do exactly what this Marine did, which is try to subdue somebody who was committing crime. I was, I had two distinct instances where people tried to mug me, you know, riding the subways in New York in the eighties. Two distinct times. And one was a group of people and one was one person. Like it was pretty scary. Both times I navigated it, but it was, yeah, not pleasant in the eighties in New York.

AI assessment note: “That was the, um, guardian angels.”

Q What could you have done better? What would you change for the next time?

A Um, you know, I, That's a great question. You know, we, we always do a document with lessons learned right after the event, so I went through my team, and I had 26 people from my team, uh, 21 from launch, and I think five from Insight came and, uh, you know, helped staff the event. A, a little more time to, to work on the speakers and the agenda. Um, if we had a little more time, I would have teased out of each bestie, you know, maybe five or 10 speakers or topics they wanted and worked backwards, so just a little more time to, To to to experiment with the format. But I took an experimental approach to it. We did have people who did solo dolo like Ted style talks. We then had people come on stage with the besties and do discussions but having all besties on stage all the time is a little hard for for everybody. I know David likes to focus on maybe a couple of things. Other people like Chamath and I like to be on stage for everything, I think. But the format was experimental. And there was a couple of great moments, I think when we overlapped So I think Nate Silver overlapped with Keith Raboi. Uh, you and Bill Gurley together. Tim Rubin, I'm sorry, overlapped with Keith Raboi. Um, those were magical moments, I think, and so I have a, um, something in my brain about weaving individual talks and data points with the besties, and then having the next speaker on the stage, the next …

AI assessment note: “A little more time to, to work on the speakers and the agenda.”

Q saw the poll back in July is Kimi Scared people into thinking, oh my gosh, they're gonna undercut the Frontier's revenues. And if they undercut the Frontier Labs revenues, who the hell is gonna pay for all this compute? That's why you saw a 40% trade down in the core weaves of the world and, you know, the, the, all of the, the semiconductor stocks and semiconductor related AI stocks.

A Well, and in some ways, the fact that there's a discussion going on that this next 10 in some gigawatts is gonna cost You know, Saks, five hundred billion dollars, and you ask the question, where does that come from? A secondary offering? Does Nvidia put it on their books? Do they create SPVs off their books like some people are doing? You know, the fact that we're having this conversation, everybody's aware of it, the market has been educated on it means I think people will be able to change in real time if it doesn't come to pass or if it slows down, which I suspect This cannot keep up at this pace, you know, more than another two years or so.

AI assessment note: “you ask the question, where does that come from? A secondary offering?”

Q all of this, and so I'm not sure how much of it I'm going to participate in until it starts to get to a steady state and you kind of can understand What's next? Because the, the rate of acceleration is just so great. That it's just kind of unclear to me sometimes, you know, especially when it comes to these consumer applications, consumer-facing things. It's just, uh, really hard.

A Well, when we were picking, famously, Uber, you had to pick between Sidecar, Lyft, and Uber. There were three people doing it, and it was pretty clear who was the most qualified, you know, amongst those three. Now, to your point, if you want to be involved in tax plus AI or legal plus AI, you might be looking at 50 companies, a hundred. And it was tradition in Silicon Valley to not bet on competitors. There were some notable exceptions. When you run an accelerator, like I do, Techstars, or Y Combinator, you aren't bound by that because 50% of the companies pivot almost by design. So I think you just have to, I think, precede, because people pivot, you just have to tell people, like, listen, we have a lot of pivoting going on. People are going to run into each other. I can't just bet on one thing, right, in a space. But I think that's a reasonable compromise. If all the founders are going to keep pivoting, To each other's businesses. How can the investors even keep track of that? It's like being aircraft traffic control of 10 airports at once. It's just not feasible. Uh, let's go ahead.

AI assessment note: “Now, to your point, if you want to be involved in tax plus AI”

Q J. Cal, you've, you've interviewed thousands of founders, CEOs, you've seen successful, unsuccessful. Do you have a point of view on whether this concept applies and what, if you have a general kind of heuristic for the difference between success and not success?

A It's very different in the, the place where Paul Graham and I invest, year zero, year one of a company, and, uh, Chamaf, you alluded to this. In that time period, Going from zero to one from no customers to one customer. It's about, you know, really having a team of builders, people who can actually build a product and have what's called product velocity in the industry, the ability to iterate, and then how much time do they spend with customers understanding what those customers problems are. And so what we'll see is when the professional managers try to do that, they try to get a product to market and achieve what's called product market fit, and then eventually maybe get product Or get market pull as Andy Ratcliffe defines it, which is the market is seeking your product out because of word of mouth and because they need it, which Airbnb and Uber would fall into now. The difference between those two moments in time and who's good at it is, is pretty different to your point, Chamath. So to be able to win both those bets is hard. That's like a parlay in a way. Getting the product market fit requires this sort of relentlessness in innovation and trying things. If you have experience in that vertical, it works against you. So we were looking at a company today in our, in our firm that has a really good idea and it's people who are from the industry, but they have an okay idea. It…

AI assessment note: “having a team of builders, people who can actually build a product”

Q But you just said it has no connection to TrueSocial. So why are we even talking?

A No, no, it's the, these are the people who traded the stock before TrueSocial merged with it. This is the SPAC that TrueSocial, and they traded when they found out that Trump was going to be the SPAC that was merged with. So I'm just following and closing the loop on that. Breaking news. Google is reportedly considering making an offer to hire, acquire HubSpot, trading a thirty four billion dollar market cap. This just came out reported by Reuters. We cited anonymous sources, shares up seven percent on the news. If you don't know HubSpot, it's awesome tool. We use it, uh, CRM that blends marketing, sales, customer service, all that kind of good stuff. And so here's their quarterly revenue since IPO. They've been public for 10 years, as you pointed out in the group chat, uh, Friedberg, and this has just been slow and steady. Revenue, power of SaaS, I guess, and a great product. I'm not a shareholder. Here's the quarterly revenue growth on a year over year basis. Stock chart, yada, yada. Chamath , I guess this is something we've been talking about here, which is M&A and M&A being pushed into the cold plunge. And being frozen. And now we see something like this. What is, what do you take from this if it's in fact a true report?

AI assessment note: “So I'm just following and closing the loop on that.”

Q But sorry, they did this when they were worth three hundred billion?

A Eleven billion. And it was reported that at the same time in a new industry publication that Breslow was selling his shares in secondary. Breslow confirmed with that newsletter that he Had sold ten million. And, uh, sources, uh, anonymous sources, yada, yada. I take that forward. It's where it said he didn't tell the team he was doing that. Two investors also accused the company of misleading shareholders and raising capital on inflated metrics. SEC investigated, but did not recommend any action. Sachs, Jamath, I don't know if either want to take this. This is really mechanical, but it does speak to what happens when things implode. Should employees be taking loans to buy these kinds of stocks? Yeah.

AI assessment note: “Eleven billion.”

Q Jake, are you doing Founder University? Are you trying to raise money? What are you doing over there?

A So we did a deal with Sanabl to bring Founder University to Riyadh, and we were going to have 25 companies, and mostly Saudi nationals, and then teach them how to build companies and like the best practices from America. We had so many applications, it went to 50. Then it was like all these people we know trying to get people into the program, so we wound up with 60 companies, and I spent three days working with them. Really great, like fintech, construction technology, real estate stuff. It was really inspiring, um, and I saw all of our friends from Saudi there, and then, uh, I saw that, I think, did you have Tariq from Humane actually talk to the founders? Yeah, Tariq came, yeah, and he made an offer to them to give them, he matched the Google offer for cloud computing with all of them, so just giving them a bunch of credits, and, um, yeah, Tariq came by, and it was, you know, it was really nice of him to come by, he's got like, he was going to his board meeting, and he came to speak to, you know, 60 founders, 70, well, there were probably, like, there were 60 teams, but maybe, like, 90 founders in the room. Like, it's a tiny little thing, and a lot of people came out to support it, um, because they're trying to get more domestic, you know, startups going..

AI assessment note: “we did a deal with Sanabl to bring Founder University to Riyadh”

Q No, I believe- You never believed in Russiagate?

A Putting words aside and claims like this, and you're telling me what I think, you can ask me what I think, and I can tell you very clearly, again, That I think their plan is to find simple-minded people to give them money and to cause chaos and division in our country. I don't think that they got to Trump. I think they got to almost everybody around him. And if you look at those people who show up at Putin dinners and you look at who takes money, it's all around Trump. And the Russians are experts at this and they did it to the Green Party. They just sprinkle money around people to cause this type of chaos. That's the goal. So how many times do I got to say this to you clearly? I don't have a horse in this race. I think all Americans, I'll say it again so that you can understand it and the audience can understand my position very clearly. Their goal is to get us to fight with each other so we don't look at their invasion of Ukraine or what's happening with the suffering of the Russian people, and we as Americans should not be partisan on this issue. We as Americans should all come together, you, Sachs, me, and everybody else, and say, we don't want the Russians Interfering in our elections or causing division, and we're not going to make this political.

AI assessment note: “I don't think that they got to Trump. I think they got to almost everybody around him.”

Q So legacy, who cares about legacy? What does that mean? Other people's judgment of you, like some article or book or like your Wikipedia link? Who cares?

A Yeah. I, I mean, I get it as a young person. Maybe you're, you'd think you might project into older people, like they're thinking about their legacy. Um, I think about like having great experiences and optimizing great experiences with my family, my friends, uh, and then business partners who I love that kind of optimize for family and friends. And I, I had two great experiences this past week. I, uh, I went to Disney on Saturday with, uh, our friend Jason Chang and, uh, went to club. Which was like a wonderful, fun experience to go in that, like, private club, and then I pinched myself, because I could afford to have a VIP tour guide. I don't know if you've ever done that, guys, um, where you just get taken around the park, and they, you jump on the rides, and man, that was like, I've been to, I've been to Disney once.

AI assessment note: “I think about like having great experiences and optimizing great experiences with my family”

Q So. So what, you know, what, what, what do you think about this? What about like, instead of like, don't hire American kids saying, look for signs that this person can be a team player and work with other people. So especially go for anybody who's ex-military, anybody who was major team sports.

A Yeah. No, people do hire based on that. They always did in sales, like the sales department, you wanted military people, you wanted discipline because it's a numbers game. You have to just grind it out. But I do think like, even for what, what people don't realize is when everybody went home for COVID, managers learned how to manage remote workers. Once they figured out I can manage a remote worker, dealing with somebody who has too much anxiety to come to work today or be in a meeting and told they did a job. And like, you need to buck up and do a better job. Like people will quit on the spot. People will start crying. People will drop off the zoom because there's too much anxiety to be told you did a bad job. Now you tell that to somebody who's working in India or South America or Portugal or Manila. Hey, this is not the standard at which we operate. They're like, can you tell me how to do better? Is there a, is, let me go look online. I'll go find some way to do my job better. Thank you for letting me know that I could do better on my job. This generation can't handle even the modest amount of, I shouldn't say all of them, but a large percentage of them have so much anxiety, they cannot operate in the workplace.

AI assessment note: “people do hire based on that. They always did in sales”

Q Honestly, this is just emblematic of the whole institutional rot and the distrust in the country, right? They're part of the cabal. It's part of the institutions that people are losing faith in. You know, Epstein was a scumbag. And the fact of the matter is we're not seeing equal play on both sides.

A All right. Let's keep moving. SAS companies are crashing out. Three hundred billion dollars of value was wiped from the S&P. Tuesday in the software and data stocks category. Uh, people are calling this the Claude crash. I don't know if I buy that, but on Monday, Anthropic, which has been on a bit of a heater, as we talked about, announced that they added a legal tool to Claude Cowork. If you don't know what Claude Cowork is called, this is different than the Claude bot that we talked about last week. This is a, essentially what, uh, Claude code or a coding agent is. This is for knowledge workers to automate work and do multi-step. Instead of just asking a query to a large language model, it would do a number of actual actions on your behalf that you can automate and run as cron jobs, as regular jobs every day, every hour, every week, whatever it happens to be. This one specifically is kind of like a plugin that allows you to do tasks, uh, related to legal drafts and research. What that meant to, I guess, retail investors, and we'll get into this, Brad, since this is your speciality, is that a lot of legal tech startups and, uh, public companies were Hit hard. Thomson Reuters down 20%. LexisNexis, which is a database of case law, uh, was down 15%. LegalZoom, which gives legal advice, um, and documents down 15%. At the same time, SAS, uh, has continued to be negatively impacted …

AI assessment note: “All right. Let's keep moving. SAS companies are crashing out.”

Q Is there an issue right now with we don't have a good harness for open source? I mean, the way that like Claude is a harness for it.

A It is part of it. Yeah. There's people making open source versions of this or building companies around harnessing and building the integrations into it. But open source is always like the last to build the fit and finish around the product. They focus on the core of the product, right? So like Linux for your desktop never really took off because the interface was never polished. The UI was never like perfect, but there are companies building that, and I'll just, I'll show you one company that we invested in. This is a company called Abacus, and they had a very simple idea. They came up with their own hardware stack. They came up with their own Uh, platform. And now they are sold out of these boxes that they're building for insurance, healthcare, and everybody wants to run AI inside their organization and then start building their own models. We actually incubated this in our incubator and you can check it out. Go abacus.co. They're just basically saying it and organizations cannot get enough of this product. It is crazy how Savvy. These organizations are getting, and Chamath, you're doing it with ADD, ADD as well, I think, where they're just like, we have to build headless products so that we don't get locked into any one provider.

AI assessment note: “I'll show you one company that we invested in.”