All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
The Stablecoin Future, Milei's Memecoin, DOGE for the DoD, Grok 3, Why Stripe Stays Private
Fri, 21 Feb 2025
(0:00) The Besties welcome John and Patrick Collison! (4:28) Stripe's business evolution: $1T in volume/year, stablecoins, challenging the Visa/Mastercard duopoly, publishing economic indicators (20:31) Jamie Dimon's leaked rant on remote work and bureaucracy (34:22) DOGE for Defense: Trump ordered the Pentagon to look at cutting the defense budget by 8%/year over the next five years (43:51) Crypto Corner: Milei's Memecoin embarrassment (1:00:18) John and Patrick break down the Arc Institute and its new Evo 2 AI model (1:18:04) Grok 3 takes the LLM lead, lessons learned from Elon's Colossus scale up (1:30:22) Science Corner: Asteroid update (1:35:42) Why Stripe hasn't gone public yet, despite great metrics Register for All-In at SXSW: https://allin.com/events Follow John: https://x.com/collision Follow Patrick: https://x.com/patrickc Follow the besties: https://x.com/chamath https://x.com/Jason https://x.com/DavidSacks https://x.com/friedberg Follow on X: https://x.com/theallinpod Follow on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theallinpod Follow on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@theallinpod Follow on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/allinpod Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://x.com/yung_spielburg Intro Video Credit: https://x.com/TheZachEffect Referenced in the show: https://www.cnbc.com/2024/10/23/stripes-1point1-billion-deal-for-bridge-marks-much-needed-win-for-vc.html https://x.com/Zigmanfreud/status/1890202488596492620 https://www.coworker.org/petitions/professional-dignity https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-03/shopify-ceo-tobi-lutke-tells-employees-to-just-say-no-to-meetings https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/02/19/trump-pentagon-budget-cuts https://www.amazon.com/Boyd-Fighter-Pilot-Who-Changed/dp/0316796883 https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/16/americas/argentina-milei-libra-cryptocurrency-impeachment-calls-intl-latam/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/18/americas/argentina-milei-defends-libra-crypto-tweet-intl-latam/index.html https://arcinstitute.org https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/evo-2-biomolecular-ai https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/grok-3 https://x.com/GavinSBaker/status/1891721991444447343 https://www.amazon.com/Henry-J-Kaiser-Builder-American/dp/0292742266 https://x.com/AsteroidWatch/status/1892338055354159256 https://x.com/AsteroidWatch/status/1892631907646447746
Chapter 1: Who are the guests on this episode?
All right, everybody, welcome back to the number one podcast in the world. I am your host, Jason Calacanis. And with me again, a couple of my besties, David Friedberg. You know him as our Sultan of Science. Lots to get into today, Sultan, huh? How you doing? I'm keeping busy. Thank you. Keeping busy. Jamath and I on Valentine's Day. We had a little trio.
We were on MKUltra's podcast, and it hit number four. All-in podcast, of course, number one. Chamath, reflections on our Megyn Kelly, our triumphant Megyn Kelly Valentine's spectacular. It was fine. It was good. Okay. Wow, thanks. You're such a great performer, giving me so much to work with, Chamath, as always. But it was a great, great pod.
Shout out to our friend and friend of the pod, Megyn Kelly. And awesome. We've got an incredible duo. For the first time, we've invited a duo to join us in the Red Throne. David Sachs' seat. He's busy saving the country, but we're really excited. The Coulson brothers are with us. Thank you for having us. You guys want to hear a great lost porn story?
John has one for you.
The last time we met, Chamath, was 18 years ago when we were working on our prior startup, Octomatic, with Harge and Kul Tagar. You were how old? They were 17, 18, 19. It was one of these San Francisco setups where it was like a two-bedroom apartment. There was a few of us living there, I think maybe six people working out of there. A normal number. Exactly.
Normal numbers to load up a two-bedroom apartment with. And then, Chamath, you came and visited. This is what's so brutal about this, okay?
I could have invested a dollar. One single dollar. And I would have made a billion dollars. I remember meeting these guys. And I was with Alan Morgan, who was my boss at the time. I was a junior principal at Mayfield. Shout out, Alan.
And I think we tried to, guys, I don't know if you remember Patrick or John, I think we tried to invest in the business or it didn't happen or then you ended up shutting it down. But right away, you spun back up and started Stripe. And I just watched from the sidelines the whole way. It is such a...
First of all, it's an amazing place for Silicon Valley where you can see these people just keep pushing the boundaries up and up and up, number one. Number two, the thing that is such a learning for me is like, why didn't I just pick up the phone and call them at any point in the last 17 years? What am I thinking? It's so brutal.
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Chapter 2: How has Stripe evolved in the payment industry?
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
It's actually, I think, the largest open source AI model ever.
This is Evo 2 you're talking about. Exactly. Evo, the number two. Evo 2.
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.
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.
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.
And I don't know, I find that pretty cool.
And sorry, is there a phenotypic data set that's used in training? So I think like, you know, when you're typically... Right. And so when you're building models... in typical like genotype by phenotype models, you're trying to look at the phenotype, the physical characteristics of the organism. What can it do? What does it look like? What are the features? And then you look at the genome.
And so that tells you, hey, these are the specific genes or alterations or mutations that drove this particular phenotype is kind of what the model tries to learn over time with the objective being, hey, can I ask it to define a genotype or a genome based on a phenotype, based on a physical set of characteristics I'm looking for or vice versa.
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Chapter 3: What is Stripe's involvement with stablecoins?
And I'd love Patrick and John to opine on this, but I have a thesis that AI, more than anything, unlocks deeply complicated projects for humans that would otherwise be kind of infeasible in the pre-AI era.
I think in the post AI era, we're going to be like, oh, here's all these projects that we do that are like, oh, we, you know, we, we on a daily basis, we mine to the center of the earth and we get cool, like rare earth minerals from like 500 miles down.
And we go to space and colonize the moon and all these crazy things because AI unlocks these large scale projects that would require millions of people to do things in a coordinated way. And AI can be very smart in this way. But I think AI could play a role also in these planetary defense initiative concepts, J-Cal, in the future where you can actually build a complete project model in software.
on how you would actually address this problem and then, you know, go execute it with automation. And, but yeah, there's a planetary defense function at NASA. They track these objects and they're funded to do it. So we hope that NASA continues to get funding to do this work. Very important.
And guys that just came through that NASA just dropped the probability of an impact event to about a one third of 1%. So it's gotten even smaller, which is we can all go to sleep comfortably. All right.
All right. Now, good morning. Everybody's been waiting for. Patrick, John, you founded the company in 2010. It's 15 years later. The entire LP industrial complex and venture capital is everywhere. I'm sure some employees are wondering, when will Stripe go public and under what circumstances? And what's the holdup here? Why aren't you public already?
Yeah, look, I think people sometimes pulled us out to be dogmatic or something on this topic, whereas we feel like so many other people out there in the world are dogmatic. We just try to be pragmatic on it. Keith was on the show, and he was saying he believes companies should go public as quickly as possible. I don't know, maybe that's the right thing for some companies.
But in at least Stripe's case, that hasn't been the case. I also think the environment has changed quite a bit, where it used to be the case that to do any return of capital to shareholders, or if you needed any kind of large sums of money, you needed the public markets. That's obviously not true today where the stable private markets exist.
But we look and we say, is Stripe better off at the moment as a private or a public company? And up to this point, we have determined private. That could change at some point. But it's kind of no dogma from our point. The last thing I'll just say is, I think Keith made the argument, people generally make the argument that it is critical for discipline to be public. And
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