All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Trump's Cabinet, Google's Quantum Chip, Apple's Flop, TikTok, State of VC with bestie Keith Rabois
Fri, 13 Dec 2024
(0:00) The Besties welcome Keith Rabois! (4:01) Keith explains why he returned to Khosla Ventures, the differences between Founders Fund and Khosla, and his husband Jacob Helberg's role in Trump Admin (13:09) Business acumen of Trump's cabinet and appointees, diversity of opinion (25:59) Google's new quantum chip: potential impact on encryption, cryptography, and more (43:50) Apple developing new server chip for AI inference, iOS flop, why its product culture is failing (54:30) TikTok panics after appeals court upholds the "divest-or-ban" law, with a January 19th deadline (1:03:55) State of Venture Capital, why Stripe is still private, thoughts on crypto Follow the besties: https://x.com/chamath https://x.com/Jason https://x.com/DavidSacks https://x.com/friedberg Follow Keith: https://x.com/rabois 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.tiktok.com/@frankielapenna/video/7010077215576575238 https://www.axios.com/2024/12/06/trump-billionaires-cabinet-elon-musk https://blog.google/technology/research/google-willow-quantum-chip https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08449-y https://research.google/blog/suppressing-quantum-errors-by-scaling-a-surface-code-logical-qubit https://quantumai.google/roadmap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hartmut_Neven https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment https://www.discovery.com/science/Double-Slit-Experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger%27s_cat https://www.theinformation.com/articles/apple-is-working-on-ai-chip-with-broadcom?rc=pxkrxo https://x.com/rabois/status/870673635375104000 https://www.amazon.com/Company-Giants-Conversations-Visionaries-Digital/dp/0070329656 https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/09/tech/bytedance-tiktok-halt-us-ban-intl/index.html https://apnews.com/article/tiktok-us-ban-sale-china-congress-de12b4d22aa8095e62cb0982a6e62235 https://apnews.com/article/tiktok-ban-congress-bill-1c48466df82f3684bd6eb21e61ebcb8d https://pitchbook.com/news/reports/q3-2024-pitchbook-nvca-venture-monitor https://www.cnbc.com/2024/12/12/servicetitan-starts-trading-on-nasdaq-after-ipo.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/11/business/dealbook/ftc-trump-ferguson-khan.html https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2021/6/15/antitrust https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-12-05/convertible-bond-arbs-are-making-microstrategy-wall-street-s-hottest-trade
All right, everybody, welcome back to the number one podcast in the world, the all-in podcast. With me again today, Chamath Palihapitiya, your chairman dictator. How are you doing, brother? How are you feeling?
Doing great. Fresh off the holiday spectacular.
Oh, good times. And then getting ready for a little ski. You and I will be doing a little skiing together with Friedberg. That'd be quite nice.
I have to say, Friedberg, I don't think you've skied with me and Jason. Jason is an excellent skier. I mean, his form is beautiful.
Have I skied with you, Jason? I don't think I have.
His brother is excellent too. Josh the Black Bomber is good, yeah. Shout out to Josh the Black Bomber.
It's going to be fun. He's got skiing hips. They kind of shift left, right, left, right. Childbearing hips. The hips are wider than the shoulders, yeah.
It reminds me of how I went to the Tom Ford out. When I went to Tom Ford to get my suit. I'll do that in just a second. But with us again, of course, your cackling sultan of science, Freeberg. How are you doing?
Have you guys seen that clip of the guy with the fake bum that runs around the city?
Yes, with security guards. It's like some sort of a crypto put on or something. It's hilarious. This guy, he's got like a big Brazilian butt and he just runs around in tight khakis.
Can you find a clip of this guy? Oh my God, it's so ridiculous.
So funny. All right, with us, the cackling with his afterglow from the holiday spectacular. Let's call it what it is. It's the Christmas spectacular. We're going to pick a side, Friedberg. How did you like our Christmas?
Why are you being anti-Semitic, bro?
How dare you? How dare you? You can have the Hanukkah special with your two specials. And now with us in the Red Throne, it's Fit Sachs. It is stylish, Sachs. It is. Goes to work every day in Venture Sachs. His name is Keith Raboy. How are you, my brother? Welcome. Great. Great, Jason.
Thanks. Happy to be here. You know, it's great being more fit and more fashionable than Sachs is a pretty low bar. Yes. So I'm really excited and thrilled to be with you all.
That's true.
You don't F with them.
Yeah, I don't really love dictators. They're not good for society. They're not good for America. But, you know, it's not always America's job to fix all of that.
All right. Well, what about running companies? Should company CEOs be dictators?
Yes, actually. So I believe in the founder mode, the Brian Chesky founder mode. I held a conference in New York recently that Brian was nice enough to speak at called hiring the art of hiring for founder mode.
So specifically for people who subscribe founders that subscribe to that view, how do you hire people and how is that different than what you would hire in a standard, you know, monstrosity of a company like Google or something?
Yeah, good founder mode in New York, by the way, just if history is if I remember correctly. Lots of good founder mode in New York.
J. Cal, do you want to give Keith's background for the audience?
Well, yeah, Keith, of course, went to Stanford with the boys. Sachs and Peter Thiel went on to do PayPal. He had a stint at Square. He started a bunch of other companies, worked at Founders Fund.
Hold on, hold on. He worked, he went to LinkedIn. That's how it all started.
Yeah, LinkedIn was pretty key. Like Reed left PayPal, started LinkedIn.
I joined him.
So yes, that's true. And then after that, I went back with back selection from PayPal days to slide, which is on the outsheep of history. We don't have to talk about that. But then I did jump into Square as the 20th employee and helped build a pretty good company.
Yeah. And then Founders Fund. Then I got lazy.
I became a VC, you know, became lazy, you know, decided to be a VC in 2013, spent six years at Coastal Ventures, five at Founders Fund last year, almost the last year now.
Before we jump in, I actually have a question for you. Starting already. How does that happen, Keith? How do you, you're at Founders, sorry, and then you get, what, like, what pulled you to go and work with Vinod? And then what pulled you back? Like, how does that process work? Because these things are typically meant to be sort of forever jobs.
That's true. So I had the benefit of having Vinod on the board of Square, which I think is typically how executives wind up turning into VCs, is you forge a relationship with board members. So like, for example, Rolof Bote, who runs Sequoia, had Mike Moritz on his board. Rolof was our CFO at PayPal, and Mike recruited him.
So that's a very common, same thing, Ravi at Sequoia today was the COO and CFO of Instacart. Again, same thing, Mike recruited him into Sequoia. So I think that's typically how people become VCs. I always knew I wanted to be a VC since 2003. I was a very active angel investor, as you know, even when I was concentrating on all these other jobs, I was writing a lot of checks.
And so anybody who's writing a lot of active angel checks probably has in the back of their mind, one day I might want to be a professional investor. We could talk about the merits or demerits of that, but the goal was pretty clear in my mind. And then at some point, I think you have to make a decision. What do you want to be in life? Venture has long time horizons.
It is a job for life, like 15, 20 years is pretty much what you have to commit to. So you don't really want to start venture when you get too old because 20 years, you'll be like Donald Trump age. Yeah. So I can run for president in 25 years or something.
Keith, why did you leave Founders Fund to go to COSA?
So COSA was great. I spent six years there. The truthful reason why I left, it's kind of funny given COVID and how history changes. I hated commuting to Sand Hill Road every day. We were one office period in office every single day. And I felt like the future of investing was more in San Francisco. than in Palo Alto at the time. And I just despise sitting in a car 45 minutes each direction.
Turns out, you know, COVID changed everything, how people do their work. Like we're recording this by Zoom. Before COVID, we'd probably all be in the same studio recording a podcast like this. And so, but Vinod and the team was very inflexible about it. And Founders Fund was located in the city. Obviously, I knew Peter since college, as Jason alluded to.
And I decided that, you know, it was better for me. I remember talking to Sam Altman, And I said, am I crazy for changing funds mostly on a commute basis? And Sam said, you're human. And every single study of human happiness is it's inversely correlated to your commute time. It's like, there's nothing wrong with being human. In any event, there are a lot of similarities between FF and KB.
Both are great funds that have put up incredible returns, have funded iconic founders and companies, but they're very different. KB is involved as early as possible, and FF is a momentum investor and is maybe the best on the planet at being a momentum investor. So almost every successful investment of founders fund over eight funds, was invested at $500 million or more entry valuation.
And almost every single investment at KV in eight funds was like the seed or series A investment with very few exceptions ever. And so Anduril and Ramp are the only exceptions at Founders Fund. Wow. And at KV, the only exception would be Stripe, which I led in 2013 or so, which was an order of magnitude higher valuation than any KV initial investment ever.
So KV is much more an input-driven organization. Founders Fund is much more output-driven. And there's great technology companies that are input-driven. Think Amazon, Apple. And there's great technology companies that are output-driven. So you can choose, but certain people are going to be better in some environments and other people are going to thrive in other environments.
I fit in really, really well at KV.
You enjoy the early stage. You enjoy year zero, year one, year two.
Well, A, I'm very good at it. I think I prefer to invest as early as possible on a keynote deck only. If I meet a founder and there's a keynote deck, there's no product, there's no metrics, that's my sweet spot. Because I also know nobody else in venture is good at that. Nobody else is still active in venture.
What's the secret? What's the secret from a keynote to a check?
It comes down to founder assessment. At the end of the day, the only data point is, is this founder capable of building an iconic company, period? And I prefer to compete when there's no metrics because all the metrics you're going to do is confuse you. That said, there's a lot of investors who are very good once there's product metrics, financial metrics.
And so I can compete with people who are pretty good at what they do. So I'd prefer to go as early as possible. And then secondly, I like company building. I think part of my role is to help the founder increase the amplitude or probability of success. And I enjoy that. At FF, that's very controversial.
Yeah. Ah, right. Yeah. The founder reigns supreme and everybody else is there to get out of the way. Right. Yeah.
I've had both KV and FF as investors, lead investors in both climate and at Ohalo now. So I know both firms really well. And it's really, I always, people always ask me about the difference between the two. That's always what I get to. It's like founder is fun. They have this kind of mantra. They find great founders and just get out of the way, let them run. And they don't want to be helpful.
That's not their objective. They feel like if they have to be helpful, it's not the kind of founder. I mean, keep obviously speaking- outside of yourself. And then at Coastal, as you know, Vinod has been extremely, and the whole team there, especially climate and always have always been extremely helpful.
So adding board members, introducing commercial partners, being like very traditionally proactive, participatory VCs on the board, very different, both very valuable. When I had a board issue at Founders Fund, and there were some board members that did not like my strategy, had issues with what I was doing with the company at Climate Corp at the time.
Founders Fund actually stepped up and protected me. And they got the board, the rest of the board together to protect me in a way that was like actually at a very kind of crucial moment for the business. And as a result, we had a massive exit within a year.
I saw Brian Singerman is leaving. So does anybody know which ambassadorship he's taking? I mean, the timing's a little interesting, is it not? I don't know.
He's got to compete with our friend, Kenny Howery.
Yeah, Ken Howery, where is he off to next?
Hopefully some great destination, I'm sure.
I know, so we can all crash. Yeah, something warm this time, okay? Sweden's a little bit much. Sweden was cold.
I'll send him my wish list for you.
Yeah, let's go. Like, maybe, like, is there, like, a Turks and Caicos or something? What about an embassy tour? We should do an embassy tour this year. Yeah, St.
Bart's, do they have an embassy there?
St. Bart's? Yeah, that's a great idea.
They don't, unfortunately. It's a French protectorate, but...
Well, you know what? Everything's on the table now. We could make them the 51st, 2nd, 3rd, or 4th state. I mean, we're in the game right now. Canada's coming on board. Keith, did you not want to roll in the administration yourself?
No. I love politics. If you follow my Twitter feed, I pay a lot of attention. I used to be involved in politics before I got into tech. However, what I realized about where I am in my career in tech is if I stop doing what I do, I'm never going to come back. Like technology is rapidly emerging. We're going to talk about all the latest developments this week.
Like you can't take your foot off the gas in the network building parts of venture for two to five years and come back when you're like 50 years old. And so I felt like I'm not ready to give up on venture. I'm in like the prime of my venture career. I'm only 12 years in actually Chamath. So figure five, 10 more years like is the sweet spot.
And so I'd like to see the companies that I was involved in grow up, become public companies, et cetera. And I didn't feel like I could ever come back if I quit. At some point, would I like to get involved in politics? Probably yes, but it's a decade out.
Well, the household's involved. Big announcement. Your husband, Jacob, is joining the administration. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Yes, Jacob's going to be proud of that.
Yeah, it's extremely exciting for him, obviously for the country, I think. which is he's going to be the chief economic officer really for the country. His job is to build foreign policy from the business standpoint, which if you think about it, what's the foundation of power in the world? It's economic success. Why did the United States win World War II?
Because we had an economic engine that could out-compete Germany plus Russia plus Japan. We could build more tanks, blah, blah, blah, blah, etc., And so the economic engine is critical to this administration. Obviously, Trump understands that. We had a great three years under his first administration, as he likes to say, best economy ever before COVID, which may be true.
And we need to rebuild American strength. And Jacob's job is to export that philosophy. And sometimes you can build economic strength through working through foreign affairs. And so that's his main job is to be the primary point person, undersecretary of economics. of economic affairs, and then they've got a bunch ... The Democrats and the woke people added a bunch of other things to the title.
It used to be just Undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs, and they added environment and all these politically correct things, so hopefully they'll subtract all that stuff and just go back to Undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs.
Interestingly, what's turning out to be interesting as Trump assembles this group, I want to get the panel's thoughts on it, is not everybody thinks the same. Jacob's position on TikTok, which we'll get to in this show, very different than some other people in the administration, even Trump himself flip flopped a little bit on that.
So what are your thoughts as we get started here just on that assembly of people, you know, including Sachs, obviously, who couldn't be here this week, but will be on future episodes? There's your announcement, folks. What are your thoughts on that, the sort of diversity in opinion in the administration and how that all sorts out? I think it's extremely exciting.
I think it's very obvious watching from afar that the way Trump makes decisions is he likes to ask a lot of people a lot of different questions, and then he makes the decision. That's why he's, to some people, the media...
enemies very unpredictable is he doesn't just take one source of input and so you can never totally predict the output but he arrays an interesting cast of characters and listens to them like so for example i haven't spent that much time with him but insofar as i have he would go around the room and ask every single person a dinner what's your view on x and literally go around a room of 28 people and listen to every single person so i think that's how he makes decisions
X being a topic, not the website X. Not X. Yeah, everybody knows what it's about. I think he likes X. Chamath, any thoughts on this, the wider team as we see it get assembled? We obviously don't have Sax here. He joined the team. But just your thoughts on the collection of characters and executives.
Here's an interesting tweet that I saw, Nick. Can you just share it with the guys?
Oh, net worth of each one. Now,
The reason why it was interesting to me was not the net worth per se, but I think this is the first time that I can remember in modern history, at least, that I've been in the United States and following US politics where such an enormous number of business people have been motivated to come and work inside of the administration.
And I think that it creates this very interesting contrast and compare. I think that the Democrats would never have assembled a group of people like this, even though the Democratic Party has a version of this chart that they could have made. There's a lot of extremely talented business people that support the Democratic Party. The problem is that they believe it's deeply unfashionable
to get strong, competent business people to take a pause in their business career and come work in government. And you almost look down on people that are successful. Whereas the Republican alternative here, if it creates... a movement, so to speak, so that subsequent presidents tap folks on the shoulder, I think we'll be much better off. And the reason is pretty simple.
I think that the United States economy is too complicated to be managed by theoreticians, by folks with random PhDs and absolutely no working experience in the real world. And when you bring those people in to oversee those PhDs, I think you probably get better outcomes.
So I hope this becomes a standard, which is ask these very talented, clearly demonstrated, successful people with judgment to hit the pause for a year or three or five, whatever it is, step into government, help the country, and then go back.
And this was what the founding fathers, Dave, actually prescribed. This is what they wanted. They wanted people who were in business to do a tour of duty, to serve their country, and then to get out. They were not interested in career politicians, correct?
I've said this a number of times, but all of the founding fathers had jobs, had professions, and they stepped in to serve their country as a civic duty, participated in the process of executing the the responsibilities of government and then stepped out and went back to their private lives.
I think it is such a more powerful model for government than people who choose to be politicians, to represent people as a living, because it creates extraordinarily nasty incentive structures, if that's the model, which is, for example, to curry favor with private industry participants and then go cash that favor in after you leave.
And I think that this alternative where you have people who are, everyone looks at them and, oh, they're all billionaires and so on, they're actually, because they're independently wealthy and they have enough money than they'll ever spend, I think Larry Page once said, you can never spend more than a billion dollars in your life no matter how hard you try. It's literally impossible.
People think like, oh, you could spend all that money. Actually, when you buy stuff, most of the stuff you buy are capital assets that you end up selling later. It's very hard to spend at that level. So when you have people that are truly independently wealthy,
their motivation is actually quite different than someone who's trying to make it from 100K to 500K of net worth or 50K to a million of net worth. And I think it actually creates a higher degree of freedom and it aligns the people much more in the long-term outcome of government rather than their own personal interests.
No, and, and, They're just smarter. So I'll give you a simple example. Maybe we'll talk about this later, J. Cal, I'm not sure. But when I saw the DOJ's theoretical guidance on the Google antitrust matter, their idea is to divest the browser. And I kind of scratched my head thinking, would any reasonable business person think that that was the right remedy?
Meanwhile, three weeks later, Google's like, here's a super chip in quantum computing that breaks the world. And I thought, how is it that these folks are so disconnected from reality that they don't understand what's actually sitting inside this company? And I think it's in part because they don't know the right questions to ask.
And the reason they don't know what the right questions to ask is they've never worked in the real working world.
We have a professional class of politicians and their understanding is 10 years old. But it's not just politicians.
This is also bureaucrats. So my point is these folks need to get off the sideline and work in a company for a while, know the bowels. They'll be much better able to guide these regulatory agencies if they actually just know what's going on.
So if the right answer is some antitrust issue with a company where you need to divest, wouldn't it be great where like 100 smart businessmen looked at that and said, that makes sense.
But let me give you the counter to that, Chamath. Because the counter to that, which comes up a lot, just so you can frame the response, is why are all these people coming out of pharma companies to regulate pharma? Why are all these people coming out of big ag companies to regulate big ag? Why are all these people that come from energy companies coming to regulate energy?
The common refrain is business people are basically bringing business interests into the government by transporting themselves into these regulatory bodies versus having career politicians or what you call bureaucrats be kind of independent regulatory authorities. So what's the response in that context to that, that refrain?
They're absolutely right, and that's how it should work. The United States can no longer afford to be a bleeding piggy bank for bad ideas. So yeah, if a bureaucrat thinks the right thing to do is to divest a random browser to fix Google's monopolistic tendencies,
That's not a remedy. Or spend tens of billions of dollars on a high-speed rail, like you were talking about earlier this week.
This is not logical. It's not meaningful. It's misguided. So if what we want is kindergarten soccer, where everybody gets to touch the ball, that's what we are getting right now, which is it's not useful. So I would rather have a business person with a direct point of view.
And by the way, with the level of transparency, the big issue, I guess, Freebrook, that that would create is could these people advantage themselves somehow to make more wealth? But the reality is, That would be so obvious and laid bare. What happens today is they burrow at this mid-level of an organization and they do exactly this, but it's not laid bare.
So I'd rather be a transparent where some guy tries to take the government for $500 million and we castigate that person than what's happening today, which is you slip in the back door, you get paid four or 500 grand from a company, then you come back to the government, then you go back. Nobody knows who these people are. Nobody knows the decisions they're making.
And they're altogether misguided because they're not grounded in an understanding of the real economy.
Keith, where do you fall?
Yeah.
Well, I share, actually, you're both right in some ways. If you look at who's Trump's pick, these successful people, they're not typically being assigned to industries they came from. So it's not like he's taking drugging. He's actually taking the opposite, like you think of RFK, for example. So actually, I think you can take successful people who have proven themselves through merit.
I think that's one of the other benefits of the real world is the only way you get ahead is you're in a Darwinistic experiment with other people that are comparable. And to be successful, you have to outthink, outwork, et cetera. And that shows up ultimately in promotions and net worths and various other metrics.
So Trump has taken a lot of successful people, and I think we want a society where we aspire for our kids to be successful. We want to emulate successful people. That only yields more success. Having Elon involved in the government will yield more success than if you penalize successful people. You stigmatize it, you get less of it.
So I think if you transplant successful people into industries that they're not from and that they have no interest in going to after the government, you might get the best of both worlds. Because I can see some of the critiques of, you know, you're regulating your friends' companies and you're going to make money later. That said, most of Trump's people are not going to do that.
You can also pass laws like, you know, you can't lobby, you can't work for X years after. Yeah. There's also this great data point. I think it's in the last 60 years. Trump is the only president whose net worth went down after office. Every other president took a relatively modest net worth or mediocre net worth and turned it into a stratosphere.
So you think about the president as the signature example. It's great that Trump is setting the opposite illustration.
Well, I mean, we've discussed this on the other pod, Keith, a couple of times, which is domain expertise can be an ankle for a founder. You know, you've got a founding team that works in the hotel business. They're going to look at something like Airbnb and say, this will never work. You've got somebody who worked in transportation. They're going to look at Uber and say, that'll never work.
They'll look at PayPal if they worked in finance. And they did say to you and the team, that's never going to work.
Yeah, I mean, I think it's critical in venture to not really fall for that trap. I always mention that I don't like people with expertise, typically, as founders. I think in what I call due diligence or call experts, I only ask one question, which is, what is metaphysically impossible about this working? Like, is there a law of physics that I don't understand that makes this actually impossible?
And if they can't isolate a very specific principle that makes it or fact that makes it actually impossible, then I just ignore everything they're saying, you know, write a check.
Yeah, because then it's just all vibes and opinions, et cetera.
Well, they're experts in a prior world, right? They've learned why not. And this is actually like to combine a couple of topics here. The reason why Trump is so effective. So the most interesting question to me over the last year was, how is this guy who everybody in the media and everybody in the legal groups of various things is trying to attack and hate and all these people publish these books.
Why is he on the precipice of being elected president of the United States twice? You must have a superpower or two. Most people do not get elected president of the United States twice. And most of the people who are attacked by everybody who has power in the establishment definitely do not get elected president twice.
So what it came down to, and I interviewed a lot of people who are critics of him, but knew him well, like ex-cabinet people that don't like him. Comes down to, he just asks a lot of why. Like, why do we do this? Why do we have to do it this way? Why have we done it this way?
And it turns out in politics and in DC, most of the answers are pretty mediocre or weak or poor or haven't been rethought for 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70 years. And so he just constantly dives in and says, why, why, why, why? And that's actually what predicts success for founders is in a domain they don't know anything about. They're just like, why?
Why do we take these hotel things for granted in the Airbnb case? Why should they be so expensive? Why should scarcity prevail in New York for four months of the year, et cetera, et cetera?
All right, let's get to our docket. We've got a ton of stuff to get to. Google's new quantum chip is super impressive, Freeberg, and we're talking about that on the group chat. On Monday, Google announced its latest quantum chip. It's called Willow. Here's the chip if you haven't seen it. It's beautiful. It was fabricated in Google's new chip plant in Santa Barbara.
They started this project back in 2012, their quantum computing project, and... The headline basically is Willow performed a standard benchmark computation in under five minutes. That would have taken today's fastest supercomputers 10 septillion years, or 10 to the 25th power, which is billions of times older than the universe.
If you don't know what quantum computing is, Freeberg will expand on it. But basically, computers are binary. You've heard this before, one and zeros. Quantums use qubits. You know, those are zero, one, or both at the same time. And Google got a 5% pop. They're up 13% in the last five days. Probably on the other news that Gemini 2.0 is out as well, which is unbelievable. I've been playing with it.
What do you think, Friedberg, of this big announcement?
Google's announcement is a paper published in Nature that follows a preprint they actually put out in August. So this news has been out for a little bit. There's obviously a press cycle this week around it to kind of make a big thing about it. But it is a very kind of important milestone in the evolution of quantum computing. So do you want me to kind of talk about quantum computing again?
I think we've talked about this in the past.
I mean, maybe a brief primer for people, but like, what does this mean practically? I think what people want to know is when did these things actually have an impact in the way, say, NVIDIA's GPUs have had?
The big breakthrough here is that the whole basis of a quantum computer is called a qubit or a quantum bit. It's radically different than a bit, a binary digit, which we use in traditional computers. digital computing, which is a one or a zero. A quantum bit, you can kind of think about it as a wave function. It's sort of a quantum state of a molecule.
And if we can contain that quantum state and get it to interact with other molecules based on their quantum state, you can start to gather information as an output that can be the result of what we would call quantum computation.
And that sounds complicated, but what it really means is that instead of doing kind of binary computation where we're adding numbers together or doing kind of other traditional arithmetic, there are really interesting functions you can do with qubits. Qubits can, for example, be entangled. So two of these molecules can actually relate to one another at a distance.
They can also interfere with each other, so canceling out the wave function. And then when you read it out, you get a result that is basically a very, very complex problem that is solved through this quantum interpretation. it's really hard to kind of highlight how different this is from traditional computing.
So quantum computing creates entirely new opportunities for algorithms that can do really incredible things that really don't even make sense on a traditional computer. They're not possible to kind of resolve on a traditional computer. And sorry, let me just state one thing. The quantum bit needs to hold its state for a period of time in order for a computation to be done.
And so the big challenge in quantum computing is how do you build a quantum computer that has multiple qubits that hold their state for a long enough period of time, that they don't make enough errors that you can actually do a computation with them. So what Google was able to demonstrate here is they created these call it logical qubits. So they put several qubits together.
And by putting several qubits together, they were able to kind of have an algorithm that sits on top of it that figures out, hey, this, this group of physical qubits is now one logical qubit may balance the results of each one of them. So each one of them has some error. And as they put more of these together, what they were able to demonstrate for the first time ever is that the error went down.
So when they did a three by three qubit structure, the error was higher than when they went to five by five, and then they went to seven by seven, and the error rate kept going down and down and down.
So this is an important milestone because now it means that they have the technical architecture to build a chip or a computer using multiple qubits that can all kind of interact with each other with a low enough fault tolerance or a low enough error rate that they can start to do these quantum calculations. This is a big area of opportunity.
One of the very interesting areas that a lot of people are talking about is in cryptography. So there's an algorithm by a professor who was at MIT for many years named Shore. It's called Shore's algorithm. And in 1994, 1995, I think around that time, he basically came up with this idea that you could use a quantum computer to factor numbers almost instantly.
And all modern encryption standards, so all of the RSA standards, everything that Bitcoin's blockchain is built on, all of our browsers, all server technology, all computer technology, security technology is built on algorithms that are based on number factorization. So if you can factor a very large number, a number that's 256 digits long, theoretically, you could break a code.
And it's really impossible to do that with traditional computers at the scale that we operate our encryption standards at today. But a quantum computer can do it in seconds or minutes. And that's based on Shor's algorithm. And if you want, there's some great YouTube videos that describe Shor's algorithm and how it works. But it's like mind blowing when you look at it.
It's like this really like non-intuitive, but simple set of steps that when you put them together on a quantum computer, it's like this thing can instantly figure out all the factors and then you can break a code.
One of the things that this highlights is that in a couple of years, theoretically, if Google continues on this track and now they build a large scale computer, they theoretically would be in a position to start to run some of these quantum algorithms like Shor's algorithm.
And so we're now kind of spitting distance or a couple of years, it's not really clear, is it three years, five years, seven years, but a couple of years away from having computers that theoretically could crack all encryption standards. And there are a set of encryption standards that are called post quantum encryption.
And all of computing and all software is going to need to move to post quantum encryption in the next couple of years. So there's like this big kind of push now to like, how do we do that? How do we accelerate it?
I saw Sundar post it. I saw it in my feed. I ended up missing my next meeting because I had to figure out how long will it take for us to crack the encryption standards that we use for Bitcoin. Nick, here's the answer because I was so tilted by this idea. So if you think of Willow as essentially like one stable logical qubit equivalent in a chip, We need about 4,000 to break RSA 2048.
And we need about 8,000 to break SHA-256, which is the underlying encryption framework for Bitcoin. So I think you're right. I think we're in the sort of like- The endgame? Two to five year shot clock. No, I mean, I think what will have to happen is some of these chains will need to obviously re-implement something at a pretty foundational level.
The weird thing, as Freebrook says, is like the Willowchips error correction gets better the more of these things you start to use together. Now, there are some really big problems inside these chips, like logical interconnects are very complicated. If you put two chips on a board, like the C2C communication is complicated.
All this stuff that we haven't figured out how to do, but this is a big deal. I was really like, my God, what's going on here?
Other projects at Google are finally landing. You have Waymo.
It's really incredible.
And you have this now. I mean, Project Loon might be gone, but, you know, I think those projects, we're going to see a couple of them change the world, yeah?
Just to give you a sense on the numbers, like Google's target for fault tolerance on a quantum chip to make it logically useful is 1 times 10 to the negative 6. Right now, this Willow chip is kind of running at 99.7%. So it's still a few orders of magnitude away.
They have a long way to go in getting the fault tolerance low enough to actually build logical gates using qubits that can resolve kind of computational output. And so there's still a build cycle ahead. And that pathway is a little bit unclear. But what they've shown is this almost feels like the Shockley transistor moment. It's like, here's this transistor. Now everyone's like,
You have a lossy transistor and then you'll figure out PN junctions. You'll figure out all of these ways of just like getting the error correction down. But by the way, this reinforces what you said before, which is it's hard for an outsider like us to comprehend what's really happening inside of Google because the business they built was able to fund this.
I mean, and I went down a rabbit hole because I'd never heard of who this guy was that runs his helmet, Nevin. He's in Santa Barbara.
They have a whole team in Santa Barbara. They've been running for like 10 years.
He has his own law, Nevin's law. And then I went down the rabbit hole of that. But what's amazing is, so valuable for humanity, Google had the money to fund him for the last 12 years. Exactly. The greatest money printing machine of all time is paying dividends. Yeah. But isn't it great to know that Google takes these resources from search and
And sure, maybe there's waste or maybe they could have done better with the black George Washington or maybe they could have done better with YouTube. But the other side is they've been able to incubate and germinate these brilliant people that can toil away and create these important step function advances for humanity. It's really awesome. DeepMind is on that list as well.
Keith, what are your thoughts about it? DeepMind, yeah.
Yeah, so I think... First of all, I think there's a long time before this becomes a commercial product or application of any sort. So, you know, it's great that they're taking money, but think about it as like almost like Stanford takes money or the US government funds basic research in some ways. This is at least a decade out kind of thing.
There's another, I mean, this area way beyond my expertise, but I've been talking to a lot of smart people because I do do financial services innovation. And obviously encryption is pretty critical, whether it's Bitcoin or other places. And there's a couple of concerns. One is it's not even clear that you can verify that this is true, by the way.
Like standard computing, to explain sort of the magnitude of difference, standard computing would take 10 to the 25th years to verify that Google analysis is accurate. So there's a chance that it's not even true.
For the sampling test they ran.
Yeah. 10 to the 25th number of years. That's the big, I think, hole in the whole RCS benchmark that they use, that it only is, it's a framework that only a quantum computer could theoretically even provide a solution.
So how do you know the answer is correct is, I guess, the question if it takes that long to solve.
And then to be practical, like, so assuming you solve all this and it's accurate and blah, blah, blah, you make it fast and all that. Second, then, there is the post-quantum computing encryption, which, you know, a lot of people, a lot of things, a lot of important things have switched over to. So you have historical communications, right?
that were encrypted under an old paradigm that would be vulnerable. And every year that goes by, the embarrassment level or the threatening level of old historical communications will probably have some decay function or some half-life. So if it takes another 10 years, communications that were drafted 20 years ago, yeah, there'll be some embarrassing things and blah, blah, blah, blah.
But the more time it takes, the more safe private communications and exchanges will be. So I think that's positive. Third, is there's a question of order of magnitude here. You mentioned you need like three orders of magnitude sort of improvement. Is each step function, you know, incrementally easier and faster or is each step function, you know, 10 years?
And I don't know that anybody knows the answer to that.
That's right. That's right. Yeah, a lot more work here to be done.
So Keith, you're not buying any quantum computing stock yet?
Not yet. We have looked at KB, talking about technology forward VCs. Over the years, I've sat through partner presentations, and we've never really pulled the trigger. There's other reasons, including even if you have quantum computing, you have to rewrite software on top of it. It's a completely different world.
Nothing maps. Nothing maps at all.
So you're starting from scratch. So you have an application layer, which might be actually an interesting business opportunity.
Yeah. How are these things actually going to be coded and how are developers going to interact with them? If at all, maybe by that time it'll just be AI.
How do you build a compiler? Who the hell knows? How do you build language properly? These are all complicated.
Yeah. Who's going to write the basic? Who's going to write like the Microsoft basic?
Yeah.
interesting thing is there's a lot of work that's been done in this space like thinking about quantum computing and quantum algorithms is like an entire branch people do spend a lot of time thinking about this and working on this and there are ways you can kind of simulate and test and start to build out models for how you could utilize quantum computers but obviously we just don't have you know industrial scale systems at this point there was one
interstellar marvel easter egg in their announcement that i wanted to get your thoughts on freeberg google said that this massive jump in performance quote lends credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs in many parallel universes in line with the idea that we live in a multiverse so is that somebody in pr is high af or reads too much science fiction.
You know, you know, the crazy thing for us. So the crazy thing about quantum physics is such a mind. Have you guys taken quantum mechanics? I have not.
I have. Yeah.
I remember the summer I took it like the quantum, the first quantum mechanics class. And I was like, glad it was a summer course because you really have to like think pretty deeply. about what you've learned in quantum mechanics, there's just nothing about it that's intuitive. Like the way we kind of think about the world is not the way the quantum world operates.
In the case of a qubit, as soon as you measure the qubit, it collapses to a value. If you try and measure it, if you try and look at it, it goes to zero or one. The probability by which it goes to zero or one is defined by, you know, the quantum state right at the moment you observe it. It's just such a mind.
So effectively, this thing is existing in a superposition in multiple states at the same time, until you try to observe it. And that's the case of quantum mechanics. So what's kind of happening, I think, in that language, J Cal is nothing novel was kind of discovered or represented. That's just quantum mechanics. It's a mind.
And you could go watch hours of YouTube videos if you want to like, get taken down the mind rabbit hole of quantum mechanics and realize like, I think one thing I've always found fascinating about this discipline is that looking at a qubit changes it. Like it understands it's true for any article, there's a slit experiment. And if you try and observe
a light as a particle versus a wave, it actually changes what happens, what the outcome is of it being a particle or a wave. Same with electrons. The thing about quantum mechanics is the observation of a particle changes what happens. Serious question.
Here it comes.
Here it comes. Buckle in, free bird.
When you look at the quantum bit, can you get a better idea of the scale of Uranus? Let's move on.
Or no?
Let's move on.
Let's move on.
Okay. It's like Schumacher's doing a joke. He was queuing up a joke at the same time.
No, I was thinking about Schrodinger's cat. That's like another ridiculous thought experiment that when you go down there. It's the same concept. It's the same concept.
The quantum state of the cat is it's both in the box and not in the box.
You don't know whether it's in the box or not until you open the box. Until you open the box.
And then you open the box and there's an X probability that it's in the box, X probability it's not in the box. But when you don't see it, it's both. It's both.
And if you're a cat lady, you have three of those boxes and I'm a dog person.
Well, we got more engagement from Keith on that science corner than we have from David Sachs in four years.
He's more open to science. More stylish, better BMI. I need to defend Sachs. They both said, this is stupid and I'll never touch it. Except Keith was kinder and more articulate in getting there. He did. Sachs would have just been snoring.
Yeah, he would have said, He would have done this. He would have done his move where he goes stupid and then like... Next topic.
There's an advantage of Monday partner meetings is I get to watch the science fiction stuff every week, even if I don't really understand it. But like a decade of watching science fiction, you pick up some tricks.
Do you play chess with Peter Thiel while that discussion is going on? I don't play chess.
Actually, so I don't play chess at all. Okay. The reason why is if I do something, I want to be really proficient at it. I don't have the time.
Got it. Got it. Also, you have a life. You have a life. Yeah, I like to do other things.
There's things in the real world. Big shout out to Gukesh D, my Indian friend, 18 years old, new world champion. I saw that. You know chess world champion. Wow.
Yeah, new world champion. Was he playing Magnus?
Is that who he played? Listen, bro, listen. Every Brown guy that's done any random useful thing in the world, we all know each other. We're in a huge group chat. Oh, is it really? Yeah, it's just how it is.
What's the name of the group chat?
Is it like the top 10 tech companies? The group chat's name is What Can Brown Do For You?
What Can Brown Do For You? Okay, there it is. Also UPS. filing a trademark infringement case. Hey, speaking of chip news, Apple is making its own AI server chips for internal use. A report just came out that Broadcom and TSMC are helping them develop AI inference chips, you know, inference chips like Rock, and there are obviously GPUs like NVIDIA.
GPUs are like the giant dump trucks that help you build large language models. These inference chips are kind of like speeder bikes, you know, motorcycles quickly getting you the results from the same ones. It's called Baltra. Baltra. I don't know what that's in reference to. Mass production in 2026. They don't plan on selling the chips. They don't plan on cloud computing.
The reason they're doing this, obviously, is because they really want the iPhone to be the interface. And they have planted their flag that they want to have privacy and have AI working off of your local device and not having access to your data, but having a compelling AI experience.
My iPhone does not work. I'm sorry. I'm just going to say it. Okay.
I don't know what happened in... You upgraded your software. What happened? You're on iOS 18. It doesn't work.
I... After three years, I upgraded to the newest phone. I upgraded to the newest OS. The phone doesn't work, meaning like to call people, I can't call my wife anymore. I can't call my kids anymore. The phone bricks constantly. My photos app doesn't work. It is just really bad.
And I think for a company of this scale, I don't understand how it does not go through a more complicated test harness that catches all of this. I'm sorry, I'm not trying to complain, but because I know it's hard for them and I know it's complicated, but it's really bad.
you're not the only person people are freaking out about the interface changes on photos crashing is a major thing and apple intelligence just doesn't work so it does seem keith that apple has gotten off their game of making polished stuff to race to try and i guess catch up to their perception of you know, AI being a disruptive force at the interface level, i.e. your phone or desktop.
What are your thoughts on this new story about them doing more chips? They've obviously had great success with the processors and phones and now the M4. Incredible if you haven't tried the Mac Mini, best computer for the dollar in the world right now. But what are your thoughts on Apple?
So the most important thing about Apple is to remember it's vertically integrated. And vertically integrated companies, when you construct them properly, have a competitive advantage that really cannot be assaulted for a decade, 20, 30, 40, 50 years. And so chips, classic illustration, go all the way down to the metal.
and build a chip that's perfect for your desired interface, your desired use cases, your desired UI, and nobody's going to be able to compete with you. And if you have the resources, because you need balance sheet resources to go in the chip direction, it just gives you another five-inch hang your sort of competitive advantage. And so I love vertically integrated companies.
I posted a pinned tweet, I think it's still my pinned tweet, about vertically integrate is the solution to the best possible companies. But it's very difficult. You need different teams with different skill sets, and you need probably more money, truthfully, more capital. But Apple is just going to keep going down the vertical integration, software, hardware, all day long.
And there's nobody else who does hardware and software together in the planet, which is kind of shocking in some ways. Is there a world-class company, a company that's world-class in both software and hardware other than Apple?
Tesla.
Yeah, maybe. NVIDIA? Google? Well, not really. Could they do a world-class UI? Maybe. Maybe there's a foundation, but you have to have a different vision, maybe a different team. Not clear. Tesla's close, I guess. I'd say the software's good.
If you define software as it touches a consumer, Tesla, Apple, in some ways, Google, maybe Meta with the Meta glasses. Trying. Attempting. You can't say NVIDIA because I think NVIDIA touches the consumer through an app that then sits on top of CUDA, which I think that's a brilliant strategy for them, but
It would be Apple, then Tesla, and then a long tail of people experimenting. Right. So anyway, this is the point.
Apple has a lot of competitive advantages that they've been actually leveraging for about 15 years now. And even back then, Steve, there's some old great Steve videos. I'll see if I can find you a clip where he talks about this very intentionally from the 1990s. He came back to Apple.
He said, we're doing vertical integration, basically using those words of software and hardware, and there's going to be nobody else that can compete with us. I think it's in an interview he did, and it's published in the company of giants, I believe. And he's perfect on point. He just followed that strategy for the next 25 years.
Now, you're seeing some of the manifestations, though, of a competitive strategy that gives you incredible advantages is you get very sloppy in other places, especially over time. Because you have such great competitive modes that you don't have to compete at the cutting edge of this. The Photos app is completely unusable. I'm the biggest Apple fanboy in the world.
I remember interviewing once with a job for Tim Cook. And I walked in and he's like, why are you interested? And I said, well, you know, I own every SKU of every product you've ever produced, except I don't have every color of each iPod. And he was like blown away. And but now like my photos app is completely unusable. So I totally understand, you know, the frustration.
And they are showing like the decay function, you know, culturally and otherwise, that eventually somebody will figure out an angle to rip them out.
I'll tell you, we talked about dictators at the beginning of this, Chamath, and obviously this is your real house as a dictator yourself, is, you know, there has to be a constant fear that some a-hole is going to come to your office and be like, what did you do to the photos app? And that fear does not exist inside of Apple. It's not like the mobile me. He brought the MobileMe team in.
He said, how is MobileMe supposed to work? They said, well, it's supposed to back up everything. When you buy your new phone, you get everything. You never have to worry about losing the file. He slammed his hand down and said, well, why the F doesn't work that way? Fired the person, brought the next person in and said, now make it the way he said it's supposed to be. Game over.
I don't think Tim Cook's doing that. Johnny Ives not there. And obviously Steve Jobs not there to terrorize people.
Well, I don't think, look, you don't need to necessarily terrorize people, but I do think you have to go through UAT. So I think it's pretty reasonable when you have a large footprint of consumers using an app to go through user acceptance. Testing is like first base. And typically what happens is you can do a process of a few months where several hundred thousand people get it all over the world.
And as long as you do an okay job of getting a decent distribution of people, this would have come out. But I want to just talk about what Keith said as well. It's literally not just photos. It's like the phone doesn't work. So there are just core structural issues with this operating system now that makes the iPhone maybe 10 to 30% less usable. And that's really frustrating.
The command center, you know, when you pull up your little command center to change the brightness and your AirPods, it's just like, what are they doing here? I mean, by the way, so do you need a chip?
Do you need a machine learning chip to do inference to figure out that when you constantly run your phone at a certain level of brightness, you should just allow the phone to be at a certain level of brightness? Yeah, stop changing the damn brightness. Why does it read? This is not complicated software engineering, guys. No.
But this is my point. There's no arbiter of taste anymore. Taste. Who is the backstop who says no.
Yeah. Let me pause, double click on that for a second. So I think taste is great if you have it, but there's only so many people on the planet that are going to have cutting edge taste and be right. If you don't have taste, what most tech companies do is they use data.
data is something that's approachable and leverageable because Apple has like the antibodies to using data to measure success with the user experience to measure whatever success. If you subtract taste even by a bit, you don't have the scaffolding that every other company would use. And so you see the worst of both worlds.
That's a great take. That's a great take. I mean, you just go off the rails, right? You go off the rails. So Keith, you think that what happened is like when Steve Jobs isn't there and Johnny Ive isn't there, There's still a bunch of folks that probably think they have taste, but the real taste folks left, and there's really no scaffolding left to be more methodical.
The scaffolding you had at Facebook Meta, obviously, or that Google uses, would catch some of the stuff, without a doubt, no doubt about it. You'd know that users are less thrilled, and they'd use things less, and you'd fix it. And maybe even you take that to an extreme, you never develop taste. I could argue that about Google or Meta. They don't really have taste.
But you could argue the paradigms. But fundamentally, if you don't have that backstop, if the taste subtracts even 10%, not all the way down, you're just not going to catch this stuff. And I think there's only... How many people in the world really have cutting edge technology user experience taste? I don't know too many. I would fund them right away.
It's an incredible... Brian Chesky might have it.
It's an incredible point because I... If I'm being really insecure, I would want to say, oh yeah, I know we had a lot of taste at Facebook back in the day, but actually we had so much scaffolding around data, probably because intuitively we knew that that was way more reliable for us.
It's more predictable scale. It's certainly more scalable, right? Like you take Steve out, you don't need a dictator, but you do need a taste and taste is artistic. The same thing with venture, like, you know, like scaling venture funds is really, really challenging because early stage investing is more like taste than data driven. And later stage, you can use data and scale it and scaffolding.
So I think there's just fields. It's a little bit also, you see like these sports teams, like this happened at Stanford when Jim Harbaugh left and, It took years for the decay function for the next coaching regime to show they were completely incompetent. The next year, they were pretty good. The next year, they lost one more game than they should have.
The next year, they lost two more games than they should have, blah, blah, blah. And then eventually, they became horrible. And there's a decay function with an organization when you take out the person who is the original thinker or the leader or the dictator or whatever. And so I think some of this is showing up now.
And then playing on a field that's not favorable to them, which is there are advantages Apple has in AI. But there's some significant organizational structural disadvantages. And that's the field that people are going to be competing on for the next five years from a consumer perspective. And they're playing on a field where they don't have all the advantages in their favor.
Yeah.
Yeah, true. Let's go to the app level here. TikTok is scrambling right now after an appeals court upheld the January 19th deadline for a divestment. Here we go. Back in April.
Here we go. I refer you to my Twitter feed, my ex-feedback.
I mean, you and Jacob must sit. I mean, what do you do? You just sit at dinner and feed the kids and then talk about TikTok in China. Well, I think TikTok is pretty obvious.
You don't even have to have a conversation, in my view. TikTok is a threat. to the national security of the United States.
And that's why- Why? Explain to people who are like, it's just an app. It's just an app. Why?
Why? So I think there's different dimensions. One of the problems is there's so many things wrong with TikTok that actually sometimes people get confused because there's not just one. It'd be easier sometimes if there's just one. So they are definitely using the app to track data about Americans. And there's evidence that regardless of what alleged protections exist,
There are people in China monitoring what certain people in the United States are doing. And the CEO lied under oath to congressional committees about this. And the evidence is now in the public domain. Hopefully, this Justice Department will prosecute him for lying under oath. I think setting a really good example that you cannot just perjure yourself before Congress.
Sorry, Keith, can you double click into that? So how did it come into the open source that what he said was a lie? Yeah.
So there are people in China who on the record have said they had access and had access to American user data, which he swore under oath to the Congress that they were storing the data in Texas somewhere. and that there's no possibility that Chinese nationals in China could access the data. There is now several instantiations of this in the public record, let alone what's privately available.
Yeah. I mean, the case specifically too, back in 2022, ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, had used an app to track locations, had used their app to track the location of journalists because they were trying to track leaks outside of TikTok.
Then secondly, let me keep going here because it's worse. So there's a law. The fundamental problem is in China, there's a law that says if you're a Chinese company, upon request of the CCP, you must provide all user data. So any Chinese company is subject to that law, period. There's no court intervention. You don't need a subpoena, blah, blah, blah.
And so any Chinese, any executive at that company is subject to significant penalties. on the record for not providing any user data at the request of the CCP. So as long as that law exists, there's a real structural threat to the United States.
Now, then there's the, is the app being used, manipulated on a content basis to influence policy in the United States to disadvantage this or that or create hostilities? I don't really know the answer. I think there's been studies that suggest that and pretty rigorous methodologies, but that's a second level. And then third is there's the, why the hell are we allowing
Chinese companies to compete with us when no American content-based organization is allowed into the Chinese market, whether it's Meta, Google, X. There's a strong argument there that Reddit, if you don't allow our content or non-Chinese content into your market, why should we be enabling Chinese companies to be successful in quotes in the US market? And that's more of a fair trade, free trade
Keith, do you think that the Pegasus spyware that can infiltrate WhatsApp so that you can turn on the mic and listen remotely, and it has no fingerprints, it's very difficult to detect, do you think an equivalent, let's call it a backdoor, exists inside of TikTok?
Yes. So my evidence for this that I believe is an interpolation of what's in the public domain is if you looked at that vote to ban TikTok, it was extremely bipartisan, despite controversy. And what happened was that vote was taken a week after there was an intelligence briefing to both the House and Senate intelligence committees. That's confidential.
And the votes, you know, all of a sudden flowed through. I think there's things that are not in the public domain about TikTok that spooked a lot of elected officials and led to this bipartisan consensus. How many bipartisan votes do we see on an allegedly controversial issue that, you know, basically the vote was like, you know, like not even close in either house. 360 to 58. Yeah.
When do you see a vote like that on something meaningful? Never.
They definitely got spooked. And I mean, if you just think,
about navy seals special forces they're not allowed to use a lot of these apps government officials aren't to use these apps because they know that all you have to do is if you track somebody's child and their tick tock usage now you know what the parent is you start thinking about the security and safety of individuals it's crazy so 352 votes for an incredibly popular product think about how bad something has to be to get a consensus of 352 votes
On an app that's used by, you know, huge traction of the American public.
Passed the Senate 79 to 18. And you are right. If you say you're going to ban TikTok, Vivek was against TikTok, but then he opened one because that's where voters are. You're going to lose that generation of voters.
Arguably. Arguably. In theory, there's some risk. I can see that.
Okay. Biden can, if he's awake, extend this window by 90 days. I don't know if grandpa is up for it, but he could extend it a bit. And obviously, this with the Trump campaign, you know, he says a lot of different things. Trump has flip-flopped a couple of times during his first term. He tried to ban it. Wait till he gets the readout that the rest of these guys got.
Yeah, well, and then he had a mega donor and TikTok investor, Jeff Yoss, gave PAX $50 million and he owns 15% of it.
When I had dinner with him, one of the things that I pointed out to him was this specific thing. I said, you have to look at the Pegasus-like equivalent infiltration of WhatsApp having been done on TikTok. Because the reality is if TikTok has 200 million users, it is true that 199,999,000 just don't matter. So you could turn on the microphone, you're not going to hear anything.
But there's probably 1,000 to 10,000 to 15,000 people, and I do suspect that state actors are smart enough to figure out how to triangulate who. You would want to be able to turn it on when that phone is in your pocket or when that phone is on a desk. And I'm sure you will hear all kinds of random things. And many of those things could be quite sensitive in nature.
So I think that this is something that the government's going to have to look at really intensely.
There's such a simple test here. what are they doing with their own people in China? They are in a police state there. They make the Stasi jealous how much they're tracking individuals in China. So if they'll do it to their own people, they would have no problem doing it to an adversary. And ask yourself, if the shareholders care about money, they would be willing to divest, right? No problem.
They want to take the company public. So if you won't divest and get off the board as a CCP, it's because you see this as a valuable tool, right? I mean, just work through the basic logic, folks.
Right. At some price point, right? What I would do if I were president, I'd say, you tell me the fair market price for TikTok and I'll go find, you know, I'll make sure that there's buyers. Right. Because CCP won't name any price. There is no price. It's the greatest tool they could ever have. That would be like giving up your nukes.
I don't think they should have to sell at a less than fair market price. I think that's legit. I believe in capitalism. But any free market should allow for some price discovery. And if they can't name any price period, that suggests that you're doing something that's nefarious. There's a reason, by the way, Chamath, you probably know this.
100%.
Exactly. Pretty obvious. Yeah, exactly. Also, there are phones that can be designed to be weapons, as we've seen. A number of people got some nut shots with their pagers recently. All right, let's talk about venture as we wrap up here. Man, Keith, for boy, cooking with oil, new sacks, new red meat sacks. Are you a steak guy too? Keith, do you eat a steak once in a while? Oh, of course.
What's your cut? What's your cut? Are you a Kool-Aid? Are you a ribeye guy? I see like a Tomahawk. The healthiest, wow.
Eight to 10, 12 ounces max, medium, you know, solid. I don't really care on the cut. Yeah, pretty much. Wagyu, I'll be a little non-American, go Wagyu, you know, like Australia or Japanese. Yeah, sure.
All right, all right. I think, yeah, shout out to my friend Kimball.
I'm a mad girl, you know, red meat Republican.
Of course, of course. I'm a big fan of this coulette slash the cognac.
Oh, you know what I bought? Yes. I just bought recently a Denver cut, which I'd never tried. Incredible. Denver cut?
Okay, there you go. All right, let's wrap up with a venture update here at the darkest hour, Keith. Sometimes before the dawn, VC deal activity begins.
has uh getting close to uh pre-covid numbers in 2019 obviously major funding drop-off happened in 2022 yeah it's been a couple of years of this but deals uh the number of deals is coming back the amount being put to work coming back to i would say the steady state perhaps even normal level uh and um But VC exits, sadly, are not keeping up. But we did have ServiceNow go public today, up 50%.
And the wrath of Lena Kahn is officially over. She's out. Andrew Ferguson is in. This looks like a great appointment. Another one by Trump in the column of somebody who wants to allow business to occur and wants a free market. He wants to do basically everything Lena Kahn didn't do, which is allow some M&A. Roy, what's your pulse like here? And what's your take on the venture industry?
And then we'll go into M&A and exits. We'll start with just investing. Is it ramping up? Are you seeing high-quality companies?
Well, I'd say that you should cut that data by AI and non-AI, and you might see a tell to different cities. My anecdotal experience is there's AI companies where the market's pretty hot, maybe cooling a little bit, but hot, and AI companies with the right team are getting funded frequently, quickly, etc.
And then there's non-AI companies, and I think you'll see a very different sort of chart there. I do think net-net, you're probably at a steady state that looks reasonable across 40 years, etc., But it would be interesting. And you have to make some methodological decisions about what's an AI company, what's not.
But if you could do that, it'd be interesting to see if the lines look similar or not. But it's pretty hot. People starting companies, founders are optimistic. Crypto companies also are back in vogue, obviously, due to the change in administration. I think a lot of people have been hesitant to start new crypto companies. Of course, yeah.
And there's a belief and confidence in the new administration, the SEC, et cetera. So we'll see if the innovation accelerates with all the new capital and all the new founders back in crypto. In enterprise software... It had been pretty cool, non-AI-based enterprise software. But, you know, like as you mentioned with the IPO this week, trading very aggressively.
I think, you know, maybe there's some inspiration there for, you know, more traditional, boring tech companies. Stripe. Stripe. Stripe should go public, but, you know, they don't listen to me, so...
Yeah. Why aren't they going public, Keith? What's the story with the boys over there?
They're waiting to get disrupted by crypto stablecoins. Seriously, talk about missing your window. Get out there, boys. They bought that crypto stablecoin company for like a billion dollars. Defensive, yeah.
I personally believe and subscribe to the view that companies should go public as early as possible on the Bill Gurley sort of school of thought.
What amount of revenue? What amount of revenue?
$50 million minimum, but predictability matters definitely, so not just $50 million, but $50 million with line of sight to $100 million and knowing $100 million to $200 million. I wrote a whole chapter in Eli Gill's high growth handbook on why companies should go public as early as possible. So I've been on this crusade forever. I like accountability, transparency, discipline.
I think they're good things. And there's a critique that like, oh, you're not going to be innovative anymore. If you look at some of the companies we've been talking about, what are some of the most innovative companies in the world? They're public companies.
It just takes the right leader to say, I'm going to be innovative and I don't care what the bureaucrats and lawyers, I'm just not going to get distracted with that. And so I like public companies. And so I think you'll see a lot of the companies I am involved in go public at a fairly rapid clip by historical standards. Different founders, though, have different sort of views on this.
It's very reasonable. Stripe, SpaceX, for example, founded 2003. Who knows when it's going to be a public company? So you can have a very successful company like SpaceX or Stripe. But my preference is to go public early. And then you have the capital, resources, equity, or capital to be strategic, per your point about potentially missing window.
And they were able to transact in that particular case and get ahead of the curve, or at least not miss the curve. But sometimes when you're a private company, there are strategic assets that you can't get your hands on. And think about Facebook buying Instagram. We talked about the taste issue. Instagram had taste at the time, like Kevin had taste.
And think about where meta would be had they not been able to acquire Instagram.
Yeah, totally different timeline. Or the public currency to have bought WhatsApp.
Yeah, or WhatsApp.
So optionality increases as you have that public currency. If you're a private buying a private, the acquired company needs to believe that you're going to get it over the finish line. They're going to have some liquidity at some point, whereas with the public government, they just sell within whatever their window is. Chamath, your thoughts?
Well, I was just going to ask Keith a question, which is what is the game theory behind Stripe not going out? What's the strategic rationale?
You know, honestly, yeah. Without sharing like, you know, one-on-one conversation sort of stuff. I think the question, the burden, they inverted the burden, which is why should we go public? A lot of, a lot of people ask the question the opposite way, which is, you know, why wouldn't I go public? I think their first principle thinkers like put, put my point about Trump.
And I think true of Elon, they asked like, why? And they're like, well, what advantages would we get? And I actually think the M&A one is very real. I think they've been able to construct alternatives to most of the advantages, but not every company is going to be able to do that. It took a lot of effort, energy.
And then the question is, would you substitute that energy into something else that might be higher value creation if you weren't creating the alternatives to a public structure?
That is a great answer. Freeberg, your thoughts here on public markets, M&A, the end of the wrath of Lena Kahn, and what we might see in the new year post-January 20th?
I disagree with the conflation of Lena Kahn into all this stuff too much. She's a big company break-apart. kind of mandate. It has nothing to do with tech M&A, small, like the typical kind of deal flow stuff that I think you're focused on. I've said this a number of times, so I'll just say it again.
But I think on the general liquidity thing, I don't think that the thing holding up acquisitions and IPOs is markets. I actually think it's investor and board expectations on valuation relative to where they put money in the last couple of years. So if you look at the valuations from 21 to 23, early 23, so much money went in at such high prices.
Those investors can take those companies public today. There's a public market appetite at all times for anything, just depends on the valuation. And the real issue right now is that a lot of the VCs, the late stage private equities, the ones that did the big markups in the late stage D rounds, E rounds, et cetera, they don't want to take these things out and take a 60, 70% haircut on the IPO.
They'd rather kind of let this thing sit private and see if they can earn their way back into the valuation that they did the mark at when they put the round together.
So I 100% agree, 100% agree with this.
Yeah, I mean, these overhangs are very real. I don't think the exit liquidity dearth fundamentally is driven by markets. I think it's just driven by the sell side and the investor expectations.
But there's also a culture thing, I have to say. In talking to a number of the leaders of these public companies that were very inquisitive and M&A, they are taking the position, it's easier for us to build a competing function, a competing adjacency than do any tuck ins.
If they just told the corp dev people pencils down, and they are not wanting to spend a year or two on a deal, when they have a breakup fee when they see what happened with Adobe, or they just think, well, why don't those are big build ourselves?
Those are big deals. The small deals are different. The small deals are more, the small deals are the fact that over a couple of years, like Google bought a cybersecurity, like there are these acquisitions that happen at 800 million that maybe should have been done at 200, 250.
And again, it's the same problem that the sellers of the high quality companies demand too high a premium that the buyers of these rational scaled companies are like, that's not worth it. Just like IPO candidates. So I don't know, Keith, if you've got a experience.
Well, I also agree. So I used to be an antitrust litigator, which I know Jason knows. And I think I hate like, you know, the current leadership, the antitrust division. I called her a fraud. And I think she is intellectually a fraud.
Why?
Well, she published a paper that was false. Like her whole claim to fame is this paper about Amazon. And the data in the Amazon, the data she used in the paper at Yale was false. She's too smart to have done it accidentally. Benedict Evans wrote a good critique of it if you want to read all about the data. Second thing is you look at Amazon, which is this alleged quintessential example.
Have you heard of Shopify? Shopify is one of the biggest success stories of the last decade, right down the middle competitive with Amazon. And there was nothing Amazon could do. They lost the core market to a competitor that was started and went public at a very low valuation. And Shopify is dominating D2C commerce. Nobody builds a D2C commerce brand except on Shopify.
So everything about her is like a fraud. That said, I don't believe that what she's done has affected, you know, exits very much at all. Because like the truth is in high-end venture, like institutional venture capital, other than the WhatsApp and like maybe like a plot acquisition or something like one every two years.
You don't drive returns in venture to an institutional venture capital fund through an M&A. WhatsApp may be the only one that really drove a fund returning exit to a serious fund. It just doesn't happen that way. I need IPOs to return our funds. Our funds are like billions of dollars. You don't get returns on lots of acquisitions at $50 million to $100 million. Yeah, but a $300 million fund can-
Yeah, but most funds have ballooned for lots of reasons.
There are a lot of big ones.
And that's actually led to some of the perversity that David talked about. If the funds get large, their tendency to do these things also increases. So yes, a seed fund can drive returns on M&A acquisitions that might be deterred in a bad, hostile administration. But a venture fund of $500 million to $2 billion drive returns through M&A? No. No.
No, I mean, they could fill in the first one X, maybe.
I've been lobbying officials for a long time on this crusade. They come in and they expect that, oh, you know, M&A, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, no, no, no, I could care less. Only my most mediocre companies are acquired.
And the IPO window has started to crack open. Just give me a couple more data points, gentlemen. We ride the Chinese-based... Self-driving car company went public on the NASDAQ last month, $4.5 billion market cap. Pony AI, another Chinese-based self-driving car company, went public in November. Klarna plans to go public in the U.S. I think they quietly filed service tightened today.
The taping of this on Thursday. And Sheen, the fast fashion company.
Well, Sheen's going to have some real problems in the new administration.
Yeah, right. Tariffs. As we wrap here, that's a good place to wrap on. What do you think of, I guess, two issues, Keith? We'll end with politics as we started there. Two things seem perplexing to people in finance. One is tariffs and how that's going to work.
And the other is inflation and what the impact would be on 15 million people being shipped out of the country and the impact that would have on inflation vis-a-vis the unemployment rate getting even lower than the historic low it's been in our lifetimes. What do you think of those two issues? Take either one.
Well, I think, first of all, the Treasury Secretary understands this. I think Scott actually, from everybody I've talked to, I don't know him, but I've interviewed about 10 or 12 people that are very successful on Wall Street, and every single one of them universally has a claim for him. And they've all made points to me that these kind of subtleties, he really does grok.
And so when he says you can raise tariffs without inflation, he understands how all this substitution works and is running an equation in his brain. He's a very successful trader, and that's a really good skill. Also, Chamath's earlier points about Darwinistic evolution of brilliant people being successful, understanding how the economy actually works, he's perfect.
So I think you're going to see real tariffs, especially against China, And the Trump administration is completely committed to reducing inflation, the cost of eggs and groceries. And I think those things can be reconciled. I know amateur economists with random degrees from Wharton don't think so. But as Trump pointed out in the debate and J.D.
Vance pointed out with some research, his first administration imposed all these tariffs and there was no inflation. And then J.D. Vance pointed out that the Fed Reserve has a study that says, you know, housing prices, which are a primary driver of affordability for a normal American, are inflated because of illegal immigration. So I think this administration... And not making more units, I mean.
Well, I think this administration... There is substitution, right? If the price of one gig goes up, consumers typically have, you know, like people on this podcast, typically have a limited budget. And at the end of the day, if one price goes up, you have to substitute somewhere else. So the net deflation might be negative even. So in any event, this administration is not naive.
And the people that Trump has put in place to drive this in Treasury, the National Economic Council absolutely understand this. And they're committed to driving down actual prices. The hardest area is going to be health care. That is really, really difficult. And it is difficult. a major driver of costs to a normal person. And Obamacare has been a disaster.
The question is, what do you do about that? And I don't have an answer for you right away. I have some ideas.
Chamath, your thoughts on tariffs and or immigration and inflation? And that seems to be a place where even across the aisle, you got people debating.
I think Keith said it pretty well, which is that we do have a lot of experience with how tariffs can be implemented and that the practical experience is not what the fear mongering is about. That being said, I think the devil will be in the details, which markets for which goods, what is the tariff and why?
What I hope happens is that if we can really study the second and third order degree impacts of some of these markets, what the tariff does is it acts almost as a reverse subsidy for American companies to compete. I'll give you one very narrow example. If you believe in electrifying the American economy, one of the underlying things that you need are electric motors, right?
Electric motors and electric batteries. And just to double click on electric motors for a second, electric motors needs a permanent magnet. If you look inside of a permanent magnet, there are these rare earths that are just required to make these magnets. But as it turns out, it is impossible for any company that is not a Chinese company
to be able to manufacture these magnets in an economically viable way. And the reason is because not only can China make it and they can make it in the absence of a lot of environmental controls, they'll also subsidize. So if anybody tries to compete, they'll just inject a subsidy into that economic supply chain where they're always cheaper. So what do you do, Jason?
If you can observe that and realize that we want supply chain diversity, What the tariff does is it starts to push back on those kinds of activities because it doesn't allow it to continue to work. Then if you take that with what the United States government already does through the DOE, which is through subsidies and underwriting,
This is what I mean by it could be a really amazing new moment for the American economy. And that would please a lot of people, including a lot of people on the left, if they just took the time to understand what's being proposed.
I mean, look at rare earths. You mentioned them. We have some of the great deposits in the world in our country.
Why can't we get them? We have one of the largest lithium deposits in the world.
It's because of environmental regulations. And it's the same thing with Starship going up. We got a lot of regulations in this country. I understand people want to do the right thing, but we also have a lot of debt. And if we could start mining rare earth metals here... maybe loosen the regulations.
The lithium supply chain is another really good one that's emblematic of all of this, but there are so many other markets. I'm sure that if you looked in something that's a little bit more down the middle like appliances, what you would also see is the same thing where Whirlpool will try to make an appliance or Bissell will try to make a vacuum cleaner and the Chinese equivalent
makes it almost like fighting uphill. And there has to be a way to course correct that.
Well, I mean, look at BYD. Some of these cars, they're just copying wholesale everything Tesla's done in their design and feature set, and they're half the price. And so they're selling really well in countries that allow them, and they would decimate US automakers and German automakers if they were- By the way, different
version of this. I wrote this in my weekly newsletter, but I was curious why these Chinese models are so good. And I was like, the training of these models seems to be quite fast. The quality of these models are really good, the Alibaba model, et cetera.
And part of what you realize is when they do their training runs, the Chinese models have no guardrails in the sense that there's no copyright checks. No. There's just none of these things that otherwise slow down an American company to make a useful model. They don't have any of those things.
So that's another example where maybe there's not an economic tariff, but there has to be a simple reciprocity. And in the absence of reciprocity, I think it's reasonable to say that there needs to be checks and balances.
Freeberg, you have anything to add there on tariffs? Okay, four. Chamath Palihapitiya, your chairman dictator, the sultan of science, and New Sachs. better BMI, hates dictators. What's your take on Ukraine? Maybe we can fire up a Ukraine discussion.
How do you feel about Ukraine? By the time you have me back, hopefully that's solved.
Hopefully that's solved. Day one. We're going to solve it on day one. Okay? Keith, you were excellent. You were excellent. Tremendous. Keith Raboy, excellent husband. Very, very effective. Great, great American. Great host. Great co-host.
Awesome.
You may have heard of two words, all in. Okay, you may have heard of it. David Sachs, brilliant crypto. I mean, we didn't even dive into crypto.
I mean...
People are going a little nutty on this crypto. What do you think about all this crazy crypto going on here, Keith? Everything's spiking back up, XRP, Bitcoin. What do you think of Saylor? I know the Saylor fans are like obsessing about him coming on the pod. What do you think of Saylor taking these loans to buy Bitcoin and then other people are following suit to put it in their treasury?
Well, short version on crypto generally is I still think the primary use case is speculation. And not that there's anything wrong with that. People speculate on stocks, retail, trading. People speculate on football games, gambling. Like the natural tendency for humans to want to speculate is very real.
The art to me is because everybody's now a node connected into these crypto, let's call Bitcoin, you know, Can you build an application on top that would have too much inertia, too much friction to start from scratch, but it has real value? And I think it's possible because so many people are now connected based upon speculation initially. So that's what's exciting to me. But, you know,
We've watched speculation before in crypto markets and it's very volatile. So hopefully someone builds real layers of productivity or utility on top, but takes advantage of the network.
It's a little bit like back in your days at Facebook, Chamath, you had the social graph and you'd say, you can build applications on top of the social graph, but if you had to create a social graph from scratch, that was a heroic effort and nobody else was going to do it. That was like literally the Facebook monopoly story. And so I think that's true of crypto. There's lots of nodes.
Someone's got a sociographic net.
And there's no Zuckerberg to rug pull and say you can't use it.
Someone's got to build the application on top. And then it'd be extremely exciting.
What do you think, Freeberg? You were monitoring this Saylor situation, the Mr. MicroStrategy.
The way it seems... Well, I think the way the Saylor... financial structure is set up is it looks a lot like a synthetic call option on bitcoin you get a convertible note so you earn a coupon on the note and then you have a conversion price which is a premium to the stock price which you can translate if you look at the book value or the net asset value of the stock
That's how much Bitcoin there is.
And the premium- It was two to one, I think, or two and a half to one.
Yeah, the premium that the conversion price is at tells you what Bitcoin needs to be for you to have equity upside. So it's effectively a convertible note. You earn a coupon and then you have a conversion premium that you can kind of convert to equity, which basically gives you a call option. You're saying the premium you're paying is the price for the call option, effectively.
And you're earning this kind of coupon in the meantime. So it's a way for some people to kind of trade the price of Bitcoin. Seems like this guy said a lot of hedge funds. And I don't know if you guys saw the CNBC article that it's kind of like Bloomberg. It's like the hottest trade in hedge fund land right now is to buy up these convertible notes that he's issuing.
So if you actually were to sit down and do the Black-Scholes modeling of the value of the synthetic call option that he's selling you with the convertible note, there's a reason people are paying for it. They think that there's value there. So there's certainly something to the structure that makes sense. All right.
So, for your Sultan of Science, The Dictator, and FitSax. FitSax here. Low BMI, low heart rate. What's the heart rate at right now, Keith?
40 to 42, like measured by eight sleep, typical day.
Oh, eight sleep. What do you think of our Knicks, by the way? Ooh.
Ooh.
So good.
Well, we'll see. I don't know if I would have made that trade, honestly, but it's complicated. For Carl Anthony Towns? Really? Yeah. Fascinating. He's playing so good. I know, but I think he had the chemistry all dialed in. Hopefully they can build back better. Build back better, absolutely.
All right, listen, we'll see you all next time. Don't worry, SACS isn't going anywhere. It's just a little bit busy right now. There's a transition going on. SACS is transitioning and we'll see. The pod will transition as well. We'll see what it looks like in the new year.
We have a good lineup of co-hosts.
We're going to do eight weeks. It's going to be all in idle. All in idle is occurring. We're rotating people in and you get to vote, audience. Keith, that was great. Thank you. You did great, Keith.
Thank you. Thank you for joining us.
Really, really excellent. That's really good, guys.
Love you, boys.
Love you, boys.
Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Let your winners ride.
Rain Man, David Sackler.
to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it.
We need to get merch.