Patrick Collison
Appearances
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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We would like to share that openly because I think it's a public good for there to be better and more reliable economic data.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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Two things. One, to your point about just all these different networks and so forth, I think stablecoins are going to be a big part of the solution. I actually don't think that's going to supplant all the consumer facing networks. I think we're going to see consumer facing networks built upon and substantially leverage these things. But I think stablecoins will probably be the common male.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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And then just secondly, I think part of what you're hearing is most businesses lose more money to fraud than they do to the kind of pure transaction costs themselves. And you know, you're hearing us talk a lot about fraud here. And that's because one, it's just it's a huge economic cost for these businesses today.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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And there's even indirect costs where you make the consumer experience more hostile because you have to protect against possible fraud. Like, you know, why do you have to type in all these numbers when you transact? How am I going to get locked out of my bank account?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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All this stuff, exactly. But then secondly, I think we can just see it in the data. These fraud problems are actually getting worse and harder because, you know, ML, AI, globalization, everything. Yeah. Exactly. And so like, you know, various fraud metrics across the industry and the ecosystem are way up over the last couple of years.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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And Stripe's actually down by 80%, but it's really becoming an acute issue.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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I think one of the theories for declining dynamism in the US and declining TFP is that allocative efficiency of people declined as women enter the workforce, because now you have what John describes as this two-body problem where both people have to make coordinated switches. And remote work is halted. Remote work is halted, exactly.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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It's so brutal. Two things. One, first, you probably don't remember this, but I remember that meeting that we offered you, do you want something to drink? We did not have a broad selection. I think we had water or milk in the fridge. And you asked for a glass of water. And so I went over to the sink and I realized that we hadn't really been on top of the washing up.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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So I had to sort of gingerly wash a glass for you. to get your glass of water, which I can't remember if you touched it over the course of that meeting. But then secondly, when we started out with Stripe, the fintech sector basically didn't exist. I mean, the word hardly existed. Didn't exist, yeah.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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No, the median employee at Stripe is awesome. The median employee at Stripe is not the median person in the population at large, although I think the median... person in the countries we employ people in.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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Well, look, you need to have an aggressive performance management culture and to stay on top of that. And look, it's not... It's not good for anyone to keep those people around because nobody likes feeling that they aren't succeeding.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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And so if those people are, you know, their careers aren't advancing, they're not getting positive feedback from their manager, from their peers, they aren't shipping things like whatever. This is just like not a good equilibrium for anyone. So we really try to stay on top of that. We track it closely. The thing just on this discussion broadly to say is,
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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I think people very readily fall into a kind of normative, moralizing perspective on this stuff of people should be in the office, they shouldn't be in the office, but there's a lot of should here. I think it's helpful to just, one, kind of as John referenced with some of the analysis, just be quite empirical and objective and just look at what the data says.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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And then second, just recognize there's a lot of heterogeneity, as in people have different preferences, people have different abilities to work effectively when they're by themselves, and some don't. Organizations are doing different kinds of work. NVIDIA, last I checked, is doing pretty damn well. And Jensen is on the record as saying he doesn't give a shit about where you work.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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Coinbase, Shopify, they're all these remote first companies. And then I was recently chatting with the folks at Jane Street, and they really believe that being co-located and being able to share ideas on the trading floor and so forth is really important. But I don't think these pictures or these worldviews are necessarily contradictory.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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They probably hire different kinds of people that are in different kinds of businesses and so on. And so, I don't know, I guess I'm just skeptical of flat shoulds in this space. There's many paths to heaven. Yeah.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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We should just keep in mind, labor productivity in the US is up like 20% in the last 10 years. And so just like, again, you just look at the data, just the median person in the economy or the average person is producing 20% on an inflation adjusted basis more than they were 10 years ago.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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Yeah, people just didn't think that... I mean, teenagers weren't actually teenagers at the time, but people in their early 20s, college kids, taking on PayPal or the incumbents or regulated financial services or whatever, people just didn't think it was a good idea. So I don't know. You certainly were...
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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The vast majority of investors we spoke with in the first year or two of Stripe turned us down. So you were not anomalous.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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Well, obviously, what, you know, Anduril and others are doing is pretty amazing. But, you know, we're obviously not defense experts, but sort of just bring the credit card merchant perspective to bear here. You know, we naturally just go and look at the time series and sort of the data around it. And I guess I'm struck by, and again, maybe I'm getting some of the details wrong here.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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This is outside of our zone. But as far as I can tell, the cuts proposed over the next couple of years for the Defense Department are of approximately the same magnitude as the reduction in the defense budget that occurred between 2010 and today. And so it's not like this is some unprecedented transformation in DoD budget. We've done this.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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And then secondly, you know, as far as I can tell, one of the most ecumenical, uniformly shared bipartisan issues in Washington is the inefficiency and the profligacy of defense procurement. You had James Fallows writing a book about this in the late 80s. You had, you know, Augustine's laws and their whole book about this.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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Just everyone seems to, you know, fervently believe that defense procurement is monstrously inefficient. Now, It's possible to make budgetary changes without fixing that, but obviously the prospect of meaningful improvement there seems like it would be really beneficial.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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I'm basically with Dave. I mean, well, they seem to me to be maybe analogous to... to gambling um which you know i don't know that we want to ban gambling uh like if you're able to do it responsibly and you understand what you're getting into and so forth like i guess that's fine but as you say judging by the tweets that i see there are also a lot of
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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ticker symbols and charts and prognostications about future price trajectories and so forth that lead me to think that people are placing somewhat more weight on the asset and security value of these as compared to the, I don't know, some numinous intrinsic aesthetic value. So, yeah, it seems...
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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It's all so shady. I was going to say some there where I feel like the specific thing within meme coins that's probably most pernicious is like the rugging dynamic. And if you could have meme coins, but without the, without the hump and rug, if it was like, I don't know, just some mimetic tracker of some sentiment or something, like maybe that'd be okay.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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But the, the, the, like the particular way in which they seem to be, you know, employed is like, yeah, some, some sort of discontinuous run up and then, well, the rug.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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Which works out to, you know, global GDP is around 100 trillion a year. So it works out to around 1% of global GDP. Incredible. And you could say, well, you know, GDP is final goods and, you know, Stripe processes more than only final goods.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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But Dave, isn't the West Wing kind of the opposite of what you just said you want the all-in to represent? Because I see... I see the West Wing as being sort of fully immersed in and representing, you know, one sort of particular worldview.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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There was, you know, there was in some sense, we look back on the 90s at the Clinton years or something as, you know, this period of great harmony in the country. And, you know, that harmony might have been great and the economy was doing well and, you know, all the things. But it wasn't exactly a period.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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I mean, I wasn't here in the 90s, but, you know, from afar, it did not feel to me when I was eight or whatever. as a period of tremendous ideological debate and fervor and schisms and all the rest.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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Yeah. Yeah. And I think, I mean, maybe I'm wrong, but I think of the West Wing as, you know, a kind of recapitulation of the Clinton years.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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Only you say that. Okay, well, look, you could say it's not exactly the right or a fair comparison or something, but Stripe mostly is used to sell final goods. So I think it's reasonable.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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Again, I'm not any grand expert on the Clinton years, but I think it is interesting where one of the first acts of the Clinton presidency was the Deficit Reduction Act. Dave, to your point, when's the last time that a Democratic president really cared about the deficit?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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I think federal spending fell by five points of GDP over the course of the Clinton presidency, which is really not a small amount. So obviously there were some kind of structural tailwinds from, you know, technology and the internet and all the rest. So yeah, a bunch of that was defense, but like nonetheless.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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And then there were two scientists.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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And just the other thing I'd say is, you know, people, I think, reasonably think of Stripe as a payments company because, you know, that is certainly what we started out doing and it's certainly the largest line of our business. But the thing we kind of realized a couple of years in is that, you know, what business...
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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Yeah, so the ARC Institute is a non-profit. It does basic biology research. It's in Palo Alto, next to Stanford. It's about 230 people today. And yeah, John and I are among the funders of it, but there's a bunch of other very generous donors. Can you explain the curiosity-driven research that's on the website? Yeah, there's kind of two things behind it.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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So the first is the vast majority of biology scientists today receive NIH grants during basic research. And the NIH grants are one, just hard to get and annoying to get. Scientists spend 40% of their time working on grant overhead and so forth. But worse, like even more perniciously, The grants are very restrictive in terms of the kind of science they can do.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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And so we ran a survey of scientists back a couple of years ago of top scientists. And four out of five, like 79% of them told us that if they could just spend money however they wanted, if they weren't kind of limited by what they're prescribed by these NIH grants, four out of five told us they would change the research agenda a lot.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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And so I think the analogy here is imagine if there was only one VC firm and it was run by the government. And that VC firm had strong opinions on what kind of companies people should build. Exactly. Literally, the grant panels at the NIH are consensus-based, explicitly. They have consensus-based scoring mechanisms, and they penalize you if you're doing work outside of your field and so forth.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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So hey, we go to all this work to train these amazing scientists, and then we don't let them pursue their best ideas. That's problem one. And the ARC investigators, they're fun to do whatever they want, curiosity-driven research. And then the second thing behind ARC is this idea that you can kind of divide diseases into three categories.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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You have infectious diseases, and we, broadly speaking, know how to generate cures for and treatments for infectious diseases. We have monogenic diseases, like one genetic mutation or something, and we don't know how to cure those in most cases, but we can at least screen for them and so on.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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And then we have what the biologists call complex diseases, where there's some kind of gene environment interaction. That's most cancers, most autoimmune diseases, most neurodegenerative diseases, and so forth. Alzheimer's, things like that. Exactly. And we've never cured a complex disease.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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And many of these diseases are very tragic, precisely because not only have we not cured them, we don't even have treatments, as John says, in the case of Alzheimer's, for example. And so the question is, can we do something about this? And what would a research agenda and program that can help shine some light on these complex diseases look like?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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And our hypothesis, we'll see how much it's borne out, but our hypothesis is that we've gotten a couple of new technologies over the last couple of years, single cell sequencing. We can sequence the DNA or the RNA just like in one cell. We've fancied new functional genomics and CRISPR technologies. So you can make these fine edits and perturbations, again, even just in a single cell.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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The structural, secular thing that's happening is that every kind of money movement is going from being manually orchestrated to being orchestrated by software. And there's some programs somewhere making the thing happen. And so because of that, just because of what we hear from customers and the pull there, we're now helping with lending. We're helping with card issuance.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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And then obviously you have transformers and AI and ML and all this stuff. And this is kind of a new read think-write loop in biology that just didn't exist a decade ago. And again, the question is, is this powerful enough now to solve some of these previously intractable diseases? And so yesterday, ARC released this new foundation model for biology. It's the largest biology ML model ever. It's
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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It's actually, I think, the largest open source AI model ever.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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Yeah. And so it's not just open weights like the DeepSeek model or Lama or something. It's actually, it's open source since the training code is public. Mm-hmm. And, you know, people can go read the blog post or the paper or whatever. The thing I find amazing about Evo and that just really surprised me is, so it's trained on 9 trillion base pair gene tokens.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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So, you know, Chet-GBT, LLMs are normally trained on human language. This is a language model, but it's trained on DNA, the language of life. And there's only one human genome in the training set. It's mostly other species. And even though it's only seen one human genome, it's state of the art at predicting the pathogenicity of human genome mutations.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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And so, you know, a famous mutation is the BRCA mutation for breast cancer. Like it's state of the art at predicting the pathogenicity, the harmfulness of BRCA mutations. Again, it only- Despite never having seen one in humans. It's only seen one human genome and that human, you know, did not have these pathogenic mutations. And so it's kind of learning something deep across the tree of life.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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And I don't know, I find that pretty cool.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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Great question. So it's totally unsupervised. That is to say, you know, you're just showing us lots of genomes and any kind of latent structure that it learns is just based on trying to figure out how to kind of organize that knowledge. But we're not showing it any labeled data or phenotypic, you know, kind of outcome data or, you know, what have you.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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And so then you're able to, you can give it a genetic sequence and ask relative to its understanding of the genetic universe, how likely is this particular sequence? And so then you can do things like predict anomalousness or pathogenicity or whatever.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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You can also then, kind of using the embeddings of the upper layers, we don't need to get too technical here, but you can train another model on top of the model. And even if you showed maybe only a couple of examples, it learns very quickly, okay, kind of here's how the weights of Evo 2 correspond to this particular task. And those sort of models trained on top turn out to be really accurate.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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We're helping with treasury and money storage. We're helping with cross-border money movement.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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We open source the base model, but there's no kind of proprietary reason that we didn't open source the fine-tunes. It's really easy to produce them. And yeah, if anyone wanted one of them, we'd happily share it.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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This kind of landscape of foundation models in biology, it's obviously very new, so it's a bit of an open question, sort of how exactly people are going to find ways to use it and applications for it. Part of what I think is cool is that proteins and RNA and I mean, phenotypic expression and everything, you know, all these things sit on top of the DNA.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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Like in some sense, the DNA encodes everything because, you know, the whole organism comes from the DNA. And so I guess the question would be, and you know, we don't really know yet, is DNA all you need? And with Evo 1, we saw some, you know, encouraging suggestions that
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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that, for example, you can build really good protein structure prediction models out of a DNA foundation model, even if you don't train on a lot of protein structure data. But I'd say it's a really exciting time and it's kind of an open question. And I don't know if you analogize Evo 2 to, I don't know whether it's GPT-2 or 3 or something, but
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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I think we're going to see a similar Cambrian explosion of applications over the next couple of years. The thing we're really excited about at Arc is training cell state models and trying to better understand what causes them to change states. And so we're thinking a lot about Dash, but the reason that the weights are on Hugging Face and hopefully we'll be surprised.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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John and I are, you know, we are ourselves very committed to us and we're kind of underwriting us in that regard. But one, we're just lucky where there's a growing donor pool of other people supporting us. I think it's just better for an institution if it's not kind of beholden to the whims of, you know, one donor or one group of donors or something.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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So I think that's just a much healthier structure for us. I think there's also a large group of people who are just becoming interested in science and realizing, I mean, Jason was on his moral pulpit. My pulpit is that all is not well in basic research in the US today. And again, the way to see this, it's just talk to the scientists themselves and they tell you how kind of inhibited
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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they are and the problems caused by the strictures and structures around them. We don't see ARK as the answer. Hopefully, it can be one point in the space, but then there's other people doing cool stuff. Brian Armstrong, of course, started a company in the longevity space and Yuri Milner and others started Altos and the Chan Zuckerberg Institute. People are trying different things.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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But no, our arc is, you know, we're very happy to support it. And then if, you know, it's possible that arc over the long term becomes self-sustaining, but, you know, that's... Well, that was my next question is... It takes a while to get things into the clinic. So, you know, we're not holding out for that tomorrow.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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So ARK spends around $100 million a year. Oh, okay. And it started about three years ago. Oh, okay.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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And again, I want to emphasize there are other donors. Yes. It's not just us. But... I mean, it's a nonprofit. There have been spin outs and there will continue to be.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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And so if one of those, you know, really, if one of those becomes Moderna or, you know, the next Ozempic or something, then that could be really good for ARK and ARK might have an endowment and be able to kind of self-sustain and so forth. There's no prospect for us to make money on it in the sense that, you know, it's a nonprofit. Yeah.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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I think that's right. There's a certain amount you can probably derive from first principles just by looking at genomes. But I think the really powerful models are going to need to do exactly what you say and to feed in a lot of ancillary phenotypic and just kind of other data, how they fare in different environments.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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And the sequencing data is really nicely digital, whereas the phenotypic stuff, it's like, well, what exactly is the data?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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The bark beetle in California and the various conifers that we're losing. So we got to solve this.
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But how do you do delivery of that? Like this airborne sprays or what's the, how do you, how do you treat the tree?
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Okay. But then like we have to replant all the trees. We have to replant the trees.
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I think you should be selling a skew to the people in Tahoe. The Tahoe Basin has been so worse than decimation. Decimation is only 1 in 10, which is like half the trees in Tahoe have been hit by bark beetle.
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No matter what the administration says, you think we need more diversity.
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I was literally, as Jonathan was saying, pulling up my notes from the book. He was just a complete phenom, and he just kept finding new industries.
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And San Francisco now kind of, at least in the physical domain, stands for a kind of stasis. You know, it takes you 10 years to build anything. But when he had the ship... The shipbuilding yards here, he went from zero to 100,000 people in Richmond in one year. He basically built the city of Richmond, California.
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I'm going to read you a few quotes in this book. I'm just going to see if they remind you of anyone. Kaiser's managers challenged convention from the start. As builders, they were expert at coordinating workers and materials. Kaiser was almost contemptuous of traditional methods. His partners had long since despaired of getting him to follow customary procedures.
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In preparing his bids for each new job, Kaiser would try to conceive every possible technique that might justify making a bid low enough to win the job. Once the construction was underway, he was forever trying to come up with ideas that would expedite the work. Perhaps more than any other builder, he believed that the faster a job gets done, the lower the costs can be. That's incredible.
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Incredible.
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Yeah, it's top of the LMS leaderboard.
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Yes. So with respect to Visa and MasterCard, I think an important thing to keep in mind is that most of the interchange fees that are charged to merchants, and you mentioned what we charge the All In podcast, the vast majority of that flows right back to the issuing banks in the form of interchange.
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And almost all of that flows right back to the consumers in the form of the lending that the cards themselves represent, but then also in card rewards. Card programs are not actually big profit pools for most of the major banks. And so I think any substitute for Visa and MasterCard in that sense, there's sort of a question of, well, are the consumer rewards going to go down?
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Are the consumer protections going to go down? Will we be extending less consumer credit? And maybe other points in that space are viable, but it is a set of trade-offs, and it's not as simple as this enormous rent extraction happening. John's totally right. I think the interesting use of stablecoins is cross-border, is outside the US.
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I mean, the big use case that's taking off right now is consumers in other countries seeking to hold dollars. We in the US here today, we obviously benefit from being able to do that. The vast majority of people in the world are subject to a worse currency, worse in the sense that it's less stable, it's more inflationary, storing savings is much less favorable.
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We're not even that negative. We're not even that negative. I was going to say, but there's no spiritual status associated with being public. Like, why be public? It is a cheaper source of deeper and more liquid capital. And so if you want cheaper and more liquid capital, then, you know, by all means, go with it, but it's not more moral.
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And I think, again, it's just helpful to sort of get away from that kind of framing. I also think it's noteworthy that if you look at financial services in particular, and we're kind of a company at the intersection of financial services and technology, being private for a long time is the norm.
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So Bloomberg is a private company, Fidelity is a private company, Vanguard is a private company, Jane Street is a private company, Goldman Sachs, Citadel. Yeah. Goldman waited 130 years to go public. JP Morgan waited 70 years to go public. Visa waited 50 years to go public. And, you know, again, those are all different times in history.
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So I'm not saying you can draw a definitive conclusion from them. But I think it's a thing of financial services where there's always a tendency uniquely here to be kind of pro-cyclical. And I think you need to be kind of particularly careful as a public financial services company to avoid some of those temptations and some of those tendencies.
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I think that's a unique dynamic that applies in our space and then financial services generally.
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The framework, you know, if I'm trying to predict our actions, like the framework we use is kind of two things. One, I think, you know, what matters is less kind of the returns in a given year and more duration. And so the question is, you know, what enables the best compounding on sort of a 10-year time horizon?
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And, you know, what's best for shareholders as you really take kind of the longer-term perspective? And then just what's best for customers? And, you know, what helps you build the best products? And, you know, Chamath, you kind of said it where, you know, at least at this juncture, with the business growing at this rate, we want to spend the marginal hour with some customers.
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If you look at the Naira, for example, there are a lot of people in Nigeria and the currency there has devalued by a factor of three or four over the last couple of years. And so that use case of consumers being able to store dollars is really exploding.
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And we think about this really as kind of an analogy to the euro dollar system, where the euro dollar system in the 70s and 80s, this was a way for companies to store dollars and to have something more stable and reliable and so forth. But it was only, I mean, I think the minimum transaction size was like a million dollars. And so there's kind of a very high barrier to entry.
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Whereas with stable coins now, you can be a consumer in Ecuador and you can have like a 10 US dollar balance. And that was just not a product that was accessible to you before. And so I think it's a really big deal, certainly for people in those countries.
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And in some sense, also for the US, because the dollar status is the world's reserve currency, I think, is in the process of becoming much more deeply established.
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Bridge is the company, it's the platform. Okay, so they're not a stable coin.
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Bridge actually has one already. Yeah, Bridge has a small stable coin, but we don't need to get into the details. But Bridge is primarily a set of software APIs. Got it. But you'll obviously have a Stripe stable coin. The point is, if you turn on stable coin acceptance for all in, today that'll use USDC.
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It'll come later. I think you're answering narrowly to stablecoins. I think everything you just said is right. But I will say, I think, Jason, your intuition that, man, it's really inefficient and annoying to engage in B2B transactions and to get these invoices paid and just like the whole system. And if you look at most companies, they're losing 1%, 2%, 3% of revenue to AP and AR.
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Now, some of that might be because of the transaction rails themselves. A lot of it's just because of, you know, Baroque inefficient processes where you have humans sending invoices, humans reconciling them. You're trying to line up transfers in your bank account statement and figure out, you know, what corresponds to what and so on. And that's super inefficient.
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And so we're separately, I mean, simple cones would be part of the solution here, but there's more to it. Separately, we're trying to solve that with a product called Stripe Billing, which we actually just announced last week has passed half a billion in ARR.
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The thing we really want to solve is all the calculation, the ID verification, the risk. Those are the things that are actually expensive. If you look at this flow, it's where companies lose their money today. Having said that, you're right. The fraction of money movement on Stripe where the two counterparties are both part of the Stripe network is obviously growing.
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And so I think that'll be another way we can reduce fees over time. Although again, I actually think the biggest part of that is it's going to be because we reduce fraud. Like both counterparts are known.
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And like I talked to a company, a payroll company recently, and they were describing, you know, how big a deal it is for them that, you know, people sign up, you know, fraudulent companies, whatever. And, you know, they can lose millions of dollars in a single attack.
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And so having some kind of trusted node rather than just like a routing and an account number, that would be a really big deal for them.
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We have. And I feel a bit rueful, you know, with you asking the question, because I feel like on some level we should have done it. And the thing that makes it kind of tricky is because two things. One, Stripe is not like a full cross section of the economy. You know, we're more biased towards online. We're more biased towards innovative companies, you know, whatever.
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It's kind of net that out somehow. And there can be these stories where, I mean, during COVID, the online economy was doing great. The offline economy is sort of a different story. So the interpretation can be a bit tricky. But then just the second thing is the Stripe business is growing so quickly and changing so fast that, again, it's not necessarily representative of the economy.
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And even if Stripe is way up year over year, you have to be a bit hesitant in drawing conclusions from that. Having said that, I think, in principle, you could draw some conclusions. And one thing we did look at was just inflationary data over the last couple of years and the I think you can construct, and the team did construct, a pretty reliable leading indicator for inflation.