E73: Late-stage VC markdowns and mistakes, market strategy, Ukraine/Russia update with Brad Gerstner

0:00 Bestie Guestie Brad Gerstner is filling in for Friedberg 1:34 Understanding public SaaS and Internet multiples, Instacart's cuts its valuation by 40%, understanding reality of overvalued late-stage companies 21:52 Capital allocators at fault, how crossover funds are reacting, late-stage price discovery, investor and founder behavioral psychology 40:37 Sacks' burn multiple, managing growth spend, new VC qualifications, lessons from the COVID bubble 53:58 Russia/Ukraine: US potential non-ceasefire strategy, Zelenskyy's revelations in CNN interview, rhetoric getting more aggressive 1:08:58 How will Putin withdraw without redacting the sanctions? What is the offramp? Zelenskyy's posture on global war 1:24:18 Understanding China's recently announced tax cuts, All-In Summit talk Follow the besties: https://twitter.com/chamath https://linktr.ee/calacanis https://twitter.com/DavidSacks https://twitter.com/friedberg https://twitter.com/altcap Follow the pod: https://twitter.com/theallinpod https://linktr.ee/allinpodcast Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://twitter.com/yung_spielburg Intro Video Credit: https://twitter.com/TheZachEffect Referenced in the show: https://sacks.substack.com/p/the-burnmultiple-51a7e43cb200 https://substack.com/profile/11803623-jamin-ball https://twitter.com/nfergus/status/1506243619384037378 https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-03-22/niall-ferguson-putin-and-biden-misunderstand-history-in-ukraine-war https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB10014.html https://twitter.com/samramani2/status/1507378113893871617 https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russia-says-first-phase-ukraine-operation-mostly-complete-focus-now-donbass-2022-03-25/ https://www.wptv.com/news/national/russia-ukraine-conflict/zelenskyy-warns-of-world-war-iii-if-russia-ukraine-peace-talks-fail https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2022/03/20/zelensky_ukraine_failed_putin_talks_would_mean_a_third_world_war.html https://www.politico.com/news/2022/03/20/zelenskyy-ukraine-zakaria-interview-00018716 https://fortune.com/2022/03/25/russia-g20-summit-putin-biden-indonesia-bali-china-ukraine/ https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/23/world/europe/putin-speech-russia-ukraine.html https://fortune.com/2022/03/24/putin-russia-natural-gas-europe-imports-pay-in-rubles-sanctions/ https://www.wsj.com/articles/saudi-arabia-considers-accepting-yuan-instead-of-dollars-for-chinese-oil-sales-11647351541 https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/23/world/europe/putin-speech-russia-ukraine.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/24/biden-says-us-would-respond-to-russia-if-putin-uses-chemical-or-biological-weapons.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2014/03/09/blinken-u-s-would-not-recognize-crimea-secession/ https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-sticks-with-longstanding-u-s-policy-on-use-of-nuclear-weapons-amid-pressure-from-allies-11648176849 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-03-21/china-embraces-supply-side-economics-with-tax-cuts

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Jason Calacanis?

  Hey everybody. Hey everybody. Welcome to another episode of the All In Podcast. We have a new bestie-yestie filling in for the prince of panic attacks, the queen of quinoa, the sultan of science can't make it this week. I think after his incredible performance last week and him trending on TikTok with his incredible insights over sadly, the potential famine that could come after this Ukraine war, he decided he would take a week off. I think it's just a little too much attention for him. So we have a bestie guest today. Yes, the shaman of stocks is with us. He brings the equanimity to equities. You know him. He'll bring that namaste to your payday. His predictions are the anti-Galloway. Brad Gerson, welcome back to the program.

• 0:45David Sacks?

  Thanks for having me.

• 0:47Jason Calacanis?

  Namaste. And also with us, of course, the Rain Man himself. He's bitter on Twitter. He's brawling on call-in. He's the Bill of Rights from Pack Heights.

• 0:58David Sacks?

  Boy, you've really outdone yourself today.

• 1:03Jason Calacanis?

  And the prince of Palo Alto, the overlord of the Overton window, Shama Poli-Hapatio.

• 1:10David Sacks?

  J. K., are you the stinker of Stonks?

• 1:13Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, God. Relax. You know, leave the comedy to me. All right. It's been a pretty, pretty crazy couple of weeks here. We are not a political show here, but obviously when world affairs become acute, as they have, we cannot ignore the war that is occurring in Ukraine. We're going to talk a little bit about markets. I think we'll start with those with Brad Gerson here. The SaaS market and the index.

• 1:59Jason Calacanis?

  Why don't you walk us through this chart here because everybody's wondering what's happening with the markets, given the war, given interest rate hikes and the repricing of stocks. I don't know how you would look at what happened in November, December, January. Brad, how do you contextualize?

• 2:14Brad Gerstner?

  Well, certainly a repricing. There's certainly a repricing, but I think of it more as normalization.

• 2:19Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 2:19Brad Gerstner?

  Right? Chamath was saying it in November. I was, I was on CNBC talking about the fact that when, when we got to a post-COVID world, rates were going to normalize, go back to where they were in January 2020. That was around 2%. And then growth multiples would have to come off of this historic Red Bull high that we were on during most of 2020 and 2021. So we were 30 to 50%, depending upon the index, above the five-year average growth multiple pre-COVID. So that just needed to happen. Like, we should be celebrating in one sense that that happened because that means that we overcame a global pandemic. The downside is we couldn't play with artificial money, 0% rates, trillions of dollars, you

• 3:01Brad Gerstner?

  know, of congressional and Fed injection in order to prop up valuations. And when it happened in and of itself, that was going to be extraordinarily painful. What I didn't anticipate, and what most people didn't anticipate, is that on top of that, we're going to have increasing fears of hyperinflation, not just getting back to normal rates, and that we were going to find ourselves in the middle of an incredibly devastating war in Ukraine. Those two things added to the uncertainty, the risk premiums, added to uncertainty around future inflation. The dot plot exploded higher, and expectations of forward rates went higher.

• 3:42Brad Gerstner?

  Now, why the hell does this matter? It matters because when you take, you know, if you're looking at that chart, the five-year average, the 10-year was 2.5%. Like, we all got comfortable investing in this period of time. The markets hate uncertainty. We had a predictable way for us to estimate where we thought our whack should be in our discounted cash flow models. All of a sudden, that was thrown into, thrown into the air. Oh, my God, look what we got going on. I can't compete with that. Look at this.

• 4:13Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, yeah. Never compete with babies or animals.

• 4:15Brad Gerstner?

  No chance.

• 4:17Jason Calacanis?

  No chance.

• 4:17Chamath Palihapitiya?

  This is Talita.

• 4:19Jason Calacanis?

  Talita. Look at this little, look at this little butterball.

• 4:22Brad Gerstner?

  Oh my goodness.

• 4:23Jason Calacanis?

  Lord, look at that.

• 4:24Brad Gerstner?

  So, so good.

• 4:25Jason Calacanis?

  Sax, that's called a child. It's a, you have three of them. Those are babies and what you're seeing there is affection from a father and a child. Look at how cute this little baby is. Sax is like, ah, well, this is taking from my time. Get that baby out of here. Ah, so cute. So Brad, I guess what everybody wants to know now that we see this repricing occur is what do you think is going to happen in 2022 and then into 2023?

• 4:53Brad Gerstner?

  So we're now, multiples are now below the five-year average. For, for, for software, we're about at the five-year average. For internet, we're well below the five-year average. I said on Twitter that the rate path last week became a lot more certain. The Fed said something last week that I think is still not well-reported, well-understood. The Fed said at the end of the year, we're going to have 2% negative real rates. They said we expect inflation exiting the year to be 4.3 and we expect the tenure to be around 2.3. The reason the market exploded higher is because under the Fed's prior protocol,

• 5:36Brad Gerstner?

  a 4%, a 4% inflationary rate would mean that rates would have to go to four and a half. And if you take rates to four and a half, then growth multiples need to be about 30% below the five-year average. Okay, so as investors, whether we're investing in mid-stage venture, late-stage venture, whether we're investing in the public markets, like we need to know what exit multiples are. And it was bad enough that we had to bear the drawdown coming off of, you know, this, this Red Bull high of 2020 and 21. But if you think we're durably going to an inflation rate of 3% or 4% and an interest rate environment of 3% or 4%,

• 6:20Brad Gerstner?

  then you simply have to adjust what you're willing to pay for growth assets. And so as I look ahead, right, we don't, we don't know with certainty. The question is, what's the distribution of probabilities? And, you know, just this morning, Citi Goldman Sachs raised their exit year, their, their exit tenure for 2022 to 2.7% and took it as high as 3.5% for 2023. I think it's going to, this period is going to be marked by a lot of uncertainty around inflation and rates till we have more clarity. And what that means is allocators of capital are going to allocate less to risk assets and they're going to pay less for risk assets. But, you know, listen, if I look out over the, the five, 10-year horizon, I don't believe in global stagflation.

• 7:05Brad Gerstner?

  I don't believe that we're in this new hyperinflation environment. But we're going to have to get through this next six, 12, 18 months and it's going to be filled with a lot of volatility and a lot of uncertainty.

• 7:15Jason Calacanis?

  Jarmath, what rings most true about what Brad just said? And then what can you add to the prediction for this coming year?

• 7:22Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I mean, I don't know what the prediction for this year is. I, I think the markets are mostly moving upwards for the short term. And then I think volatility is going to come back.

• 7:36Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I'm just trying to find good long-term businesses and just kind of close my eyes and not have to look at these stock prices every day. And as long as I can manage my own psychology, I think I'll be fine. And I think that's probably the thing that most of us need to be doing. The interesting thing about Brad said is that the implication of that is that it means that late-stage venture is pretty badly mispriced. And I think you're going to have to knock these things back by 50, 60%. I think you saw the first real big movement there yesterday, which was the Instacart print, right? We went from a $40 billion valuation to, I think it was 24.

• 8:20Chamath Palihapitiya?

  If you look at from February of last year, which was really the high for all of us, right? That's when we all thought we could do no wrong. You know, the comps to Instacart are off anywhere between 50 and 70%. You know, takeaway is off 70%. Uber's down 60%. DoorDash was down 55%. So these are some big moves. And so, you know, it made sense that Instacart had to get kind of like reset.

• 8:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The problem that it has is that it's now the nth player trying to get public into a space with many players who've guzzled up a lot of capital in a low-rate environment. And so if you think about company building, this is why entrepreneurs have to pay attention to this stuff. You want to get money when money is cheap. But the problem is you can't control that timing. And so if you can't control your operating margins and your profitability, then you're going to have to go and basically pay somebody an enormously high price to get their money. And I think that's what's setting itself up to happen in a bunch of these markets. I think enterprise SaaS has always claimed long-term profitability.

• 9:28Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The thing is, when you look at sort of like the real long-term companies, they've built some enormous moats, right? Like if you look at a ServiceNow or Salesforce at the high end. And then there's a crop of a couple of companies like Palo Alto Networks, who are the next ones coming after, who seem like behemoths in the making. But everybody else, I think people have to really question like where the long-term profitability is going to come from. And so if that's true, then the late-stage private SaaS companies are in trouble. Similarly, in places like Delivery, where again, you've had a bunch of comps come out. They've been curing in the public markets for years. You know, Uber, DoorDash, there's a couple of these behemoths getting built, DoorDash being the most obvious. And then there's a bunch of more kind of question mark business models, including Uber,

• 10:12Chamath Palihapitiya?

  which is not really hanging together in the public markets. So I think the real question for entrepreneurs is if you have the nth business, nth being not the first, not the second, but you're the seventh or eighth or tenth trying to go public, and all the seven or eight before you are gas-guzzling machines, you're going to pay a very heavy price to get public. And I think that that's the reckoning that we're starting to see. So I'm really interested to see how that plays out. You know, the Instacart valuation... Could easily be cheap at 24, but it could just as easily be overpriced by another $10 billion, depending on how people think about who the last buyer of resort is in the public markets.

• 10:54Jason Calacanis?

  Saks, did Instacart miss their window to go public? And then what does this say about the backlog of hundreds of unicorns that the venture community is investing heavily in?

• 11:04David Sacks?

  Some of them are probably going to have to IPO at down rounds. I think that's sort of the takeaway.

• 11:09Jason Calacanis?

  Explain what that is to neophytes.

• 11:10David Sacks?

  Well, it just means that they're going to have to go public at a valuation lower than what the last private round was. So all of these late-stage private investors who assumed that they would always make money investing in a company in the last private round before it went public, they thought that was sort of an automatic gain, an arbitrage, and it's not. And there's going to be some disappointment there. Brad's been sharing these charts with me since, I guess, what, December, Brad? Where then the charts basically show public SaaS valuations as a multiple of ARR. And then he's got a similar chart for it sort of the internet companies, that's sort of non-SaaS internet companies as a function of revenue. And we've been looking at these charts. You know, once Brad showed these to

• 11:54David Sacks?

  me again, four months ago, it became so obvious what was going on, which is that valuations were reverting back to the historical mean. If you look at, you know, during the two-year period during COVID, the multiples had risen to some insane level, right? And because of all the liquidity that had been pumped into the system. So as soon as you saw the charts that way, you could just see where things were headed, which is back to historical averages. Now we're below those averages, partly because of the surprise of the war.

• 12:25Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Not really.

• 12:26David Sacks?

  The multiples are.

• 12:27Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Can I summarize Brad's chart? Because it is extremely elegant and simple for the layman to understand. So here's a layman's understanding of Brad's analysis, technical analysis and balance sheet and P and L analysis, which is accurate. When rates are zero, typically people are willing to pay eight times revenue for a company. Okay, so if you're generating a hundred million.

• 12:54Jason Calacanis?

  Top line revenue.

• 12:55Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Top line revenue. You're generating $100 million revenue in your reasonably high-margin, reasonably high-growth software business. That's worth $800 million in the public markets. For every 100 basis point increase in rates, you decrease the valuation between 15 and 20%.

• 13:13Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So if you think rates are at 2.75%, the price is somewhere between 30 to 40% cheaper than what it was when rates were at zero. So if you go back and you look at every TechCrunch article and every Bloomberg article and every information article and you look at all those headline valuations when rates were at zero, we all just said rates are going to be somewhere between, you know, 2.5 to 3% at the end of this year. At a minimum, you have to haircut those things by 30 to 40%. Steady state, meaning the company is continuing to execute on all, on all cylinders. If they have a downtick in their performance, then it, it increases

• 13:56Chamath Palihapitiya?

  that discount. If rates go higher, it increases the discount. But the basic way to think about this is for every 100 basis point increase in rates, you got to downtick that valuation by 15 to 20%.

• 14:08Brad Gerstner?

  And I think, you know, just to be fair, I think, I don't think there's any daylight between you and Sachs on this. What, what's actually saying is the 40%

• 14:15Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I'm just giving the numerical rule that, that summarizes it.

• 14:17Brad Gerstner?

  I think you're right. That is the, that is the, the correlation. And so this idea, listen, we all get paid to find good companies and avoid bad companies. That's generally what we get paid to do. We're decent at it. All of a sudden, in fact, most fundamental investors say, hey, I'm not a macro expert. I don't know where inflation's going. I don't know where interest rates going. I just find good companies. We've had a decade or longer where that was okay to do. That was easy to do because guess what? Inflation was at two and we had two and a half percent tenure. When all of a sudden you have massive volatility in that, it's not acceptable as an investor just to say, well, none of this matters because

• 14:57Brad Gerstner?

  it does matter. Right? Price matters because what you can exit for is essential to the game. And there were a lot of people invested in 2013, 14 and 15 when, when the cost of entry was low and exited when the cost of entry was high. Multiple expansion hides many sins. Right? And now just the opposite is happening in a dramatic and historic way in that multiples were higher than they've ever been caused by a global pandemic. And the exit rate for a lot of those companies, right, is going to be very painful. I think that Sachs's point about down round IPOs, I don't think this is the exception, David.

• 15:37Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, Reddit, Reddit.

• 15:38Brad Gerstner?

  I think the vast majority of companies that come public in the next 12 months are going out below their last round's valuation.

• 15:44Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yes, Reddit, the Reddit rumor was that Goldman put a $10 billion price on the cover and that, you know, it effectively been cut in half. Again, these are all rumors, so these could completely not be true. I don't, I don't have any knowledge one way or the other, to 5 billion. And that may actually end up being too expensive. It just depends on where the market is.

• 16:06Jason Calacanis?

  Well, just so people are clear, when investors, sophisticated investors, make these late-stage valuations at very high multiples like they have, they do have some downside protections. In other words, they cannot lose more than the money that was put in when this thing IPOs, or they may get kickers of additional shares. So maybe David...

• 16:22Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, these IPO, no, no, in fairness, you're talking about something very important, but they're very rarely in these high-priced rounds because most of these high-priced rounds are in go-go companies where all of those rights get stripped away. This is why I do think, Jason, what you're actually bringing up is, in, in the last innings of a bull market, you have incredibly irresponsible behavior by a bunch of these investors. And that's also going to get exposed as well. So Jason, what you're talking about is what's called an IPO ratchet.

• 16:48Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 16:49Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Which means I'm giving you this money at this price, but if you can't IPO at this price, then you're going to give me an equivalent number of shares that makes me hold.

• 16:58Jason Calacanis?

  Right.

• 16:58Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Right? So it's as if I am, I am indifferent to what price you IPO at. That's extremely dilutive to really one really important class of individual, which is the employees of the company. It's also really dilutive to other investors who've come in before them. But Jason, you're probably right. To the extent that there were IPO ratchets, they'll get triggered. But I think in many of these go-go companies, and you know, Brad and Sachs can confirm, but I see it, all those rights get stripped away. It's like, come in at this crazy price.

• 17:25Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, we're not negotiating it. No jelly chips, no governance.

• 17:28Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Get our, get, get our logo on your fundraising deck for the next round. And so this is the price of the capital.

• 17:34Jason Calacanis?

  It's been a little bit of sloppy behavior, just so people understand this. If the Reddit valuation was 10 billion, somebody put in, you know, 100 million in this late-stage round. If it came out at 5 billion, they would get twice as many shares to make up for that difference.

• 17:48Brad Gerstner?

  That doesn't exist in the case of Reddit, J Cal. You know, it was Fidelity who led that last round. So they're going to be price takers at whatever price the company comes public.

• 17:57Jason Calacanis?

  What does that mean? Explain that price takers.

• 17:59Brad Gerstner?

  So, you know, if they come public at $5 billion and you put in $100 million, your stake is now worth 50 million.

• 18:06Jason Calacanis?

  Right.

• 18:06Brad Gerstner?

  Right? So you lost 50 million.

• 18:07Jason Calacanis?

  Why didn't they have the discipline to put in these protective provisions, ratchets, et cetera? What happened in the market?

• 18:14Brad Gerstner?

  To Chamath's point, they haven't really existed in most deals for the last five years. Right? Uh, I go back to 2000 and I think 2007, 2008, Kayak raised money with a ratchet in their last pre-IPO round. It prevented them from getting public for three or four years. That dilution overhang um was a significant impediment to getting public. So, you know, listen, we all know that Groupon raised at $20 billion, went public and a year later is worth $2 billion. I mean, it's not as though this hasn't happened before. Uh, but yes, uh, people, people got a little laxity. That is a cool. I just wanted to, I just want to say one other thing though, because multiples coming down is a problem.

• 18:54Brad Gerstner?

  What this really reveals is the importance of stock and company selection. Right? Because if you were a shitty company with an unproven business model way out on the risk curve. Okay. And you had a super high valuation last year and you don't, you know, there's a good chance you never grow in it, grow into it. You never get back to that valuation.

• 19:15Jason Calacanis?

  Example?

• 19:16Brad Gerstner?

  Your, your growth will decel.

• 19:18Jason Calacanis?

  Give us an example company.

• 19:20Brad Gerstner?

  Okay.

• 19:20Jason Calacanis?

  Discord, Ripple, Plaid, Grammarly, Brex.

• 19:24Brad Gerstner?

  Minute, in the 15 minute delivery space in Europe.

• 19:27Jason Calacanis?

  GoPuff?

• 19:28Brad Gerstner?

  You know, I, I, I would say GoPuff is one of the best of them. There are a lot of startups that got funded with billions of dollars in Europe. Unproven business models, burning tremendous amount of cash. Right? Like, I don't know why they need to exist. I don't think they're going to get funded. Right? Maybe one or two of them do. But when you have DoorDash and Uber that are free cash flow positive, that have strong brands and that can redeploy those profits back into compete in those markets, I think it's very tough.

• 19:55Jason Calacanis?

  Neobanks are another example. Neobanks, you know, the number of neobanks that have been funded at exorbitant valuations.

• 20:03Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Where, you know, the problem is all of these financial services companies are essentially an arbitrage on rates, right? When rates are zero, they take that money at zero percent and then they can go and execute a business model, you know, and sell that money at one percent and take the difference. But when their cost of capital is two or two and a half or three percent, the whole business implodes on them. So you're going to see a bunch of these financial services companies get under pressure. Another example, Jason, is like all the low end, you know, bottoms up SaaS companies. And the reason is because they spend their time inside of Google and Facebook doing customer acquisition and managing this very intricate dance of LTV to CAC. And when all of those input costs go up, their business implodes because you can't

• 20:47Chamath Palihapitiya?

  raise rates faster or you can't raise prices faster than the input costs are. And then all of a sudden your unit economics blow up. And in all of this, what is the salvation in a moment like this? It's being healthy gross margins, healthy contribution margins, and a realistic path to profitability, which means being EBITDA positive this year or within the next two years.

• 21:11Jason Calacanis?

  Said another way, if you're profitable, you're not going to go away.

• 21:14Chamath Palihapitiya?

  If you can't, if you can't show that you're, you know, to use the famous Paul Graham adage, default alive in a moment like this, then you are a price taker, which means that you will have to pay probably a very high cost of capital to raise incremental capital to support a fundamentally fragile and non-resilient business model.

• 21:35Jason Calacanis?

  Is the issue here, Sax, that when you see the Getter, Gorilla, Zap, all these instant delivery companies get funded at exorbitant prices and they're the seventh, eighth, ninth, as Chamath is pointing out?

• 21:48Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, no, Instacart was the seventh. Those are like the 10th, 11th, 12th, 13th.

• 21:51Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so now here we are. This to me seems like the fault of poor judgment by capital allocator, Sax. Are there too many venture funds chasing too few deals and not thinking through what investing in the 10th, 11th, or 12th player in a market is going to be able to do? Is it too much venture?

• 22:12David Sacks?

  I think part of what's going on with the companies you mentioned is that they're physical world companies. They are very capital intensive. They burn a lot of money. They're operationally intensive. I have sort of soured on those businesses years ago. And that's why I just focus on SaaS because they're basically perfect gross margin businesses. They're very, they can be very capital efficient if the founders want to run them that way. So what we're doing now is telling founders, lengthen your runway, be more capital efficient. You need to understand that, you know, multiples, if you raised last year at 100 times ARR, you need to understand that the next time you raise it may be at 20 times ARR. So now you can grow into that, right? If you're tripling and then triple again the next year,

• 22:55David Sacks?

  you'll be able to grow into that valuation. But, you know, make your money last two, three, four years instead of, you know, burning it in 12 to 18 months, unless you want to down round.

• 23:05Brad Gerstner?

  I think this is, this is the point that now allocators, venture capitalists are going to spend the next six months thinking about what's in bucket one, low quality companies burning a lot of cash that may very well not make it across the chasm.

• 23:21Jason Calacanis?

  No path to profitability.

• 23:22Brad Gerstner?

  What are the high quality companies that, yeah, the multiple's down because public market multiples are down, risk premiums have changed, inflation changed, but they have plenty of cash on the balance sheet. And think about it this way, Snowflake became a poster child in the public markets of a high priced SaaS business. Snowflake this year will grow its free cash flow at over 100% a year. Next year, probably, you know, 80 or 90%. Free cash flow, not just revenue, free cash flow. In Q4, I think they booked 1.4 billion of revenue, Q4, on a business that entirely in last year did 1.2 billion in revenue, right? You think about that. The incremental was more than what they had

• 24:02Brad Gerstner?

  generated in the prior many years. That business, so let's say we reduce the multiple by 50%. But the company's growing top line and free cash flow by 100%. Doesn't take you very long to grow through the multiple compression. So Snowflake's multiple is plummeting for two reasons. One, because the stock price came down. Number two, because, right, their growth rate and free cash flow growth is so high. And so now, if you look at the multiple, it's similar to what we'd expect of a regression of the five-year analysis.

• 24:35Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Unless these companies, unless these private companies want to go dark for the next three to five years, meaning, you know, no sophisticated late-stage investor doing a round or going public, they'll be okay. But otherwise, they're going to have to reckon with a version of what Brad just said, which is the flight to quality problem. You know, in moments of uncertainty and high volatility, it's just more straightforward to go to the things that are reliable. And so, you know, when you think in the public tech markets, what is a reliable must-own company? Well, I would put Snowflake in the list of these must-own, high-growth software businesses, right? You know, the fangs tend to be in the must-own category.

• 25:20Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But then there are all these other businesses that then get orphaned because they're kind of nice to own, would love to own, would be great in any other circumstance. And that gets even more exacerbated in the private markets. You have to remember, right now, like, the private markets cannot really exist without an incremental buyer of equity, right?

• 25:42Jason Calacanis?

  AKA, bag holder. Somebody has to buy the stock after you.

• 25:46Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Somebody needs to be the bag holder after you. And the problem right now is that those folks have a lot more credible, safe, durable assets that they can own and not have to deal with all the crazy anxiety that comes with owning something that's high volatility like this.

• 26:06Jason Calacanis?

  Or, Chamath, correct me if I'm wrong, or Brad, if they don't want to even be involved in this, they could just be in cash and the interest rates are going up. So maybe they could say, you know what, I'll just sit this out for a year. Is that also happening with those folks? Or is that too hard to do because of...

• 26:19David Sacks?

  Brad actually knows a bunch of these folks, but like, take for example, D1, you know, it's Dan Sonheim's great investor. I mean, my understanding is that they are sort of off privates completely. Because why invest in a private company at X times ARR when you can invest in a public SaaS company for six times? So they've substituted, I think Tiger is still in market with a gigantic fund for privates, but the valuations have come down. So they're essentially repricing everything. I think those are probably the two broad reactions you could have, right, Brad?

• 26:53Brad Gerstner?

  Certainly. I would say this, broadly speaking, the late-stage private financing market in venture is closed, because there hasn't been, right, we're in this buyer-seller standoff. Sellers aren't to the point where they're willing to accept that a new regime of multiples exists, right? It's painful. We saw, you know, the Instacart news here recently, but I think, you know, like, listen, we're not even 10 or 20% of the way into the psychic reset that needs to occur in order for us to see real price discovery. That's not going to occur until these companies need money or want to go public. This fall is when we'll start to see real price discovery.

• 27:35Brad Gerstner?

  You couldn't pry a late-stage dollar out of my hand right now, because I don't think that we have real price discovery going on. Early-stage venture, if we're investing in an incredible, you know, software business at 300 million, 400 million, 500 billion, we think can be worth tens of billions, you can withstand a little inflation. But the later you get in the lifecycle of a business, it's about IRRs. And IRRs in late-stage at last year's valuations relative to today's public market valuations, that is a negative arbitrage.

• 28:04Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Explain IRR, why that matters, yeah?

• 28:07Brad Gerstner?

  We're just, you know, we expect our hurdle rate in the public markets is a 20% risk-adjusted rate of return. So if I'm, you know, like, you know, you look at these late-stage private valuations from last year, I mean, you know, Saks just talked about companies repricing down 40 or 50 or 60%. So if they haven't done that, then you can't even have a conversation.

• 28:30Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Just to up-level this, what Brad is saying is the following, Jason. Any person can wake up tomorrow and buy the S&P index, right? What Buffett would tell you to do, just buy the S&P 500 index. That historically has compounded at around 8% a year if you reinvest the dividends. So you can do nothing. Right. Get a basket of the 500 best companies in the world that are automatically selected for you based on revenue and profitability. You don't have to do anything and that'll compound at 8%. That is effectively the risk-free rate if you want to own an equity. So if you're going to step into the late-stage private markets and, you know, buy some shares in, you know, dingdong.com, you gotta be rewarded for that, which typically means

• 29:12Chamath Palihapitiya?

  that there is a premium above the 8%. And what Brad is saying, like, you know, it's actually more than double. In his case, what he's saying is it's two and a half times. You know, you've got a clear 20% to you. Otherwise, you're better off on a risk-adjusted basis.

• 29:25Jason Calacanis?

  And the opposite is what's likely to happen. I'm looking here at a list. GoPuff at 40 billion, Canva at 40 billion, Klarna at 45 billion, Discord at 15 billion, Ripple at 15 billion, these, Grammarly at 13 billion. These don't make sense, given that if they were public, they would be trading at 50% of that.

• 29:43Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, here's what you can say. Here's what you can say. If everything is held equal, just with the rise of rates, you have to reset those valuations between probably 15 and 40%, okay? At a minimum.

• 29:55Jason Calacanis?

  Minimum.

• 29:56Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But what Brad said is also true, which is if they then keep growing at a superior rate, they can get back to even. So meaning 18 months, they could also show up again at 40 and be net-net awash.

• 30:09Jason Calacanis?

  They could get unstuck.

• 30:10Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But a lot of hard work will need to happen underneath the covers of these businesses in the next two years for that to happen.

• 30:16David Sacks?

  And that's what's going to happen with a lot of these early-stage private companies, right? Is let's say the ARR multiple has gone from 100 times to 20 or 30 times. They have to grow their ARR 5X to get the same valuation. So the question is, can they grow their ARR 5X before having to return to market? That's just to get a flat round. Now, if they are tripling this year and then doubling next year, then that's 6X growth in ARR. So even if, you know, the multiple's gone down 5X, they could still get a slight up round. So that's the game I think all these companies are going to be playing, is lengthen your runway so that you can grow into your valuation and not take a down round. Because the problem is, if you're ever in a situation...

• 30:59David Sacks?

  Where you take it down round, it's way worse than just the dilution because now the psychology of everyone in the company changes. Everyone has to worry that you're gone sideways.

• 31:09Jason Calacanis?

  It's the death spiral.

• 31:10Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But here's the difficulty of what Sax is saying, though. In order to grow revenue, you have to invest, right? You have to invest in salespeople and account management functions, in engineers and product managers. Right? And all of those people need to exist, which actually increases OpEx, right? It increases burn, it doesn't maintain burn. And so this is the death spiral, Jason, you're talking about, which is in order to actually grow by those multiples. You actually don't have.

• 31:35Jason Calacanis?

  Burn more fuel. You gotta increase your speed.

• 31:37Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Burn more fuel. You don't actually have the money to withstand two or three years.

• 31:41Jason Calacanis?

  Or the altitude. You're now.

• 31:42Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So it's going to be a very precarious balancing act of trying to figure out how these companies actually get to the other side. Because, again, I think the buyers in this case will be, will drive a hard bargain. I mean, like, look, organizations like, you know, durable, D1, Tiger, Ultimater, these guys are the smartest of the smart. They're not dumb. And so, you know, the price of capital is going up in that case. And so, you know, they're going to strike really good opportunities for their investors, right? For their LPs.

• 32:11Jason Calacanis?

  If we were going to do an analogy here.

• 32:13Chamath Palihapitiya?

  20%.

• 32:13Jason Calacanis?

  The analogy here is these founders were on autopilot. They were asleep at the wheel and now all of a sudden they're in the soup and they gotta really perform.

• 32:22Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, that's not fair. I don't think they were asleep at the wheel at all. I just think that they, you know, Bill always says this. When the, when the music is on, you gotta dance. They did it. They raised money at the highest valuation possible. God bless them. Now you're going to see who is really good at what they do. And who is benefiting from a lot of just natural, you know, you know.

• 32:45Jason Calacanis?

  But people were only, when I say they were on autopilot.

• 32:50David Sacks?

  The pencils for the first time.

• 32:50Jason Calacanis?

  Exactly. That's what I'm talking about. Yes.

• 32:52David Sacks?

  To make real trade offs. Look, in an, in an up market. In a, well, in an up market or a boom market, the three things that matter are growth, growth and growth. In a down market, the three things that matter are growth, burn and margins. It's not that growth stops mattering. It's just that burn and margins also matter. And now there's going to have to be real trade offs. Before, it was just how much money can we spend, how quickly to get growth? Now it's, wait a second, is this growth efficient? You know, and will we have enough runway to get to the next round without having to take a down round?

• 33:24Jason Calacanis?

  Brad, when we saw at the peak of the pandemic, some leadership, I'd say, you know, seasoned or well-informed leadership, Airbnb and Uber come to mind, cut their staffs massively. They used that crisis to reset their cost structure and get to profitability quicker. Those were money-losing businesses for a long time, maybe, you know, taking advantage of these hot markets. Is that what needs to happen here? Are we going to see a cascade of companies lowering their valuation, lowering their costs, sharpening their pencils, cutting staff, and then becoming more efficient and more ruthless at, you know, the sixth, seventh, eighth product they're launching, saying, hey, let's go to the core product and make it sing, make it profitable?

• 34:02Brad Gerstner?

  You know, Frank Slootman has said that Silicon Valley is full of companies that are walking dead and they don't even know it. Right? And, you know, Frank is, you know, he says in Tape Socks, he says, listen, I'm a wartime CEO, not a peacetime CEO. Right? He came into, he came into Snowflake when it was growing over 300%. And he, you know, he reconstituted what that culture was about to prepare for wartime. Right? Because he says, when wartime comes, right, and it gets challenging, I want to run the field. Right? I don't want to be laying off employees. I want to be, that's the time to hire. That's the time to press the advantage. That's the time to invest in product. That's the time to win the new customers. Unfortunately,

• 34:47Brad Gerstner?

  over the course of the last 12 to 18 months, a lot of people without that experience, right, took a negative signal. And the signal was money will always be available and it will be available at ever-increasing valuations. And of course, anybody who's been at this for 20 years, like the four of us, we know that isn't true, but it's amazing. I mean, the behavioral psychology, our ability to gaslight ourselves in these moments and move out on the risk curve and ignore these lessons. Right? And so, I really actually heard, and I've spent a lot of time on Zoom lately, with founders and with their teams, talking them through this, because like, we talk

• 35:29Brad Gerstner?

  about it in the abstract and through the lens of a spreadsheet. But there are a lot of people's lives at stake. If you're an employee and you went to this company and you took everything in stock at 15 billion, that's now worth 5 billion. You're totally underwater. At the same time, the cost of buying a home and mortgage rates and everything else is going up against you. I mean, this is a massive morale problem, right? Uh, you know, for, for, for companies that frankly, we want to invest in. These are the innovators, but this is what happens when you have government intrusion. Right? That we can all debate whether or not it's worthwhile, but it was hugely distortive. What we know to be true is that we had more distortion in markets the last two years

• 36:13Brad Gerstner?

  than probably any time since post-World War II. And the consequence of that is dramatic. And, you know, we all kind of saw it, but we all kind of gaslighted ourselves as well because you were like, well, maybe there is a new normal. Maybe we have accelerated digitization. The truth of the matter is the law of economic gravity is interest rates and inflation, and it remains.

• 36:35Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, and, and this time turns out is not really that much different. I think, Jason, if you take your list of these high-priced startups.

• 36:43Brad Gerstner?

  Yep.

• 36:43Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think it would be a good, useful exercise for somebody to do. Somebody in the press should probably do it. But if you take that list and just rank companies based on valuation, the last announced date.

• 36:54Brad Gerstner?

  Yep.

• 36:54Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And then if they are not announcing layoffs of any kind, you can probably forecast when they're going to burn through the money, especially if they're hiring. And the reason that you can probably forecast that accurately is you can pretty much predict what OpEx will be, especially knowing the fact that their input costs are actually going up. So for example, most of these businesses that rely on Facebook and Google and Instagram for customer acquisition, those input costs are going up. And the reason you know that is that's $2 trillion of market cap. That doesn't give a flying fuck what's happening in startup land. They're going to make their numbers.

• 37:30Brad Gerstner?

  Right.

• 37:31Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Okay. Those are the most important companies in the world. They will ratchet up the prices and so your input costs are going up. It's not just the physical supply of materials that I think is going up. It's just the cost of customer acquisition is going to probably go up by 20, 30, 40%, right? And you know this because Facebook and Google guide to where they need to perform. And so if you pass that through the venture ecosystem, that all of a sudden now upticks your burn.

• 37:58Jason Calacanis?

  Yep.

• 37:58Chamath Palihapitiya?

  If you're adding more people, it upticks your burn.

• 38:00Jason Calacanis?

  Yep.

• 38:00Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And now, back to David's math, you then also have to grow five or six X. None of this hangs together. So we are at the beginning of probably a very complicated process of unwinding

• 38:11Jason Calacanis?

  Yep.

• 38:11Chamath Palihapitiya?

  the distortion that we've lived through in the last couple of years.

• 38:13Jason Calacanis?

  At this point, I mean, you have to blame the capital allocators in this instance. They bought these logos, they suspended disbelief. We've had this ridiculous culture of no governance, uncapped notes, just pushing, I see it on the boards I'm on, you guys probably see it too, some people just pushing top line growth, never discussing unit economics, never discussing the bottom line, and they created these crazy fugazi markups, they raised bigger funds based on it, and they just were never the adults in the room, the stewards of capital. It's infuriating.

• 38:43Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I'll tell you an incredible conversation I had yesterday with one of my partners. So he's been, you know, with me for 10 years. He was really the one that pushed us very early on to go into deep, deep, deep tech when nobody else is doing it. 3D printing of rockets, satellites, all that stuff. And it's been, so I really trust and respect his perspective. And he was telling me a story. He called a recruiter, you know, because we've been toying with, you know, helping get some folks to help us manage some of our early-stage deal flow. And he asked her essentially something to the point of like, who are the types of GPs that are getting hired today in early stage? And he said, you know, this is how we approach our business, right? We have a permanent capital balance sheet, you know, we do, you know, at most one deal

• 39:28Chamath Palihapitiya?

  a year per partner. And she said, well, you're never going to get anybody. Because a mid-level executive at one of these high-flying startups that then goes and joins a venture firm, she said, the consistent, single thing that they make their decision on, are you ready for this?

• 39:43Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, boy.

• 39:43Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Is how many deals will I be allowed to do per year?

• 39:46Jason Calacanis?

  What?

• 39:49Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And so, you know, these people are make-work construction workers, right? That's dig a ditch, fill a ditch. That is not what investing is. That's not about having a discerning philosophy on what a business should be or a market. So if you have a bunch of capital allocators, Jason, to your point, who are unsophisticated about investing, probably very sophisticated operationally, but fundamentally don't know what they're doing, and they're coming and transforming in an organization that should be a disciplined, discerning allocator of capital and turning them into a velocity deal machine, this is what you're going to get.

• 40:24Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, sometimes the best money, Sax, is money you put into a bet you've already made, continuing to build the pot with a startup that's already proven themselves, correct? So I think what we're going to see-

• 40:34David Sacks?

  We have a follow-on fund.

• 40:36Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I mean-

• 40:36David Sacks?

  I gotta say, the things you guys are saying are making me feel great about our portfolio.

• 40:40Jason Calacanis?

  Explain.

• 40:41David Sacks?

  Not because we won't get hit with the same valuation corrections that everybody else is going to suffer, but because, you know, a few years ago, we decided we were going to invest in a certain kind of company. I mean, high-margin SaaS and marketplace businesses that were not capital-intensive. We defined a new metric that didn't exist called burn multiple, which is the amount of money you burn for every dollar of incremental ARR that you generate incremental subscription revenue. And, you know, we turned down investments that were growing fast, but they had a horrible burn multiple. And so, and I do think most of our companies raised last year when, you know, they made, hey, while the sun shine.

• 41:23David Sacks?

  So there's going to be, they need to manage their cash flows so they don't have to raise too quickly, but as long as they do that and they keep growing, they're going to weather the storm.

• 41:33Jason Calacanis?

  What's the right number? Spend $3 to make one, spend $2 to add one? What's your ratio?

• 41:38David Sacks?

  So what I've said is that if you can spend a dollar or less to generate an incremental dollar of ARR, you're doing amazing. And between one and two is good. So in other words, if you're burning 20 million in a year to add an incremental 10 million of ARR, you're doing quite well in startup land. And then when you start getting into two and a half, three, that's a problem. And then above three is just bad.

• 42:03Jason Calacanis?

  Spending thirty million to add ten million in ARR. It means it takes three years or probably four or five because you'll have churn to get that money back. Yeah. And that's just a lack of discipline. And how many VCs are we on the boards or, you know, other investors are we on the board and having that nuanced of a discussion? It's always just top line, top line, top line. Who's going to be the next bag holder?

• 42:22Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think it's very difficult because I think the number of qualified investors have gone way down as the surface area of investing has gone way up. So again, just going back to this conversation, this woman is staffing most of these venture firms with their junior and mid-level partners. And again, the qualification to become a venture capitalist at this point is not that you have an ability to pick or, you know, in David's case, have operated and actually run a business and then actually have developed a methodical framework or Brad's business, which is Brad had to start from literally zero in the public markets and work his way backwards to end up with fifteen or twenty billion of assets. It's none of that. It's are you a VP at an XYZ unicorn that may also be poorly run?

• 43:03Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And all of a sudden that, you know, gives you the qualification to go into a job where, and it's not their fault, where what they are told is what you want is what we're going to give you, which is the ability to write, you know, X number of checks per year. That is insanity. That's not what makes a good investor. And then your ability to then give advice, I don't know, it's probably zero or less than zero.

• 43:27Jason Calacanis?

  Your ability to give advice is, I think we have to qualify, bad advice is being given. So the ability to give quality advice is what's missing in this formula.

• 43:36Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I just think these people are really naive, like, you know, and it's not their fault, but, you know, they're given way too much rope to hang themselves with and the unfortunate byproduct is going to be the companies who gets bad advice or the bad businesses that get funded. And that's not what, you know, an efficient capital market should do.

• 43:55David Sacks?

  So one of the things I'm seeing our portfolio companies do is use burn multiple as a governor for how fast they're going to grow. So for example, they will say that the burn multiple should not exceed two in the next quarter. So, you know, we want to, so the old way of doing it would be that the company would just have a forecast and say, we're going to grow three X this year. We're going to grow ARR from 10 million to 30 million. And whatever that costs, it costs, right? That was basically how companies did it. Now, what I'm seeing from some of our portfolio companies is they are saying, yeah, our goal is to grow from 10 to 30, but we will not spend so much money that our burn

• 44:35David Sacks?

  multiple exceeds two. So, you know, if, if it turns out that there's a trade off here between growth and burn, burn is going to win. We're not going to exceed that level of that ratio of spending. And that's actually a good, I mean, I've, I've seen a few companies implement that already. And it's probably something they should all be doing.

• 44:55Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, if these are pilots, they basically created a rule to not stall the plane. Right? You got to keep a certain altitude, a certain speed. So what is the opportunity here then? If we're going to have too many companies, too high evaluations, if we're going to hang around the rim and try to get some rebounds here and try to find opportunities, what are the opportunities? What are the layups here for capital allocators and for founders? If we have great advice for them, there's nothing.

• 45:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  There, there, there've never been layups. And the problem is, you know, in, in other markets, whenever we think that there are, it ends up being what causes our downfall later because we, we just take the wrong signal away. I, I, I don't think that there are, I don't want to be investing incremental capital into a late stage startup that's poorly run, that doesn't have their margins in line, and then having to work it out. Why do that? Again, I can just go in the S and P 500 and get 8%. And yeah, it's not 30%, but it's 8%. And I don't have to deal with all this nonsense, like, well, a bunch of people that don't necessarily-

• 45:54David Sacks?

  Because you're a crossover investor, right? I mean, you have the ability to choose between public, private, or wherever you want to play.

• 46:00Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I actually think what I am is an investor.

• 46:02Jason Calacanis?

  But you, you don't have LPs for a VC fund like Saks and I do.

• 46:06Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But, but this, but this is my point. Like, I think investing, irrespective of whatever stage you do it, still fundamentally comes down to the following, which is, do you have the judgment to understand whether these decisions are marginally good? Marginally average or marginally destructive for the short, medium and long term of a business. And I just don't think that enough people steep themselves in the practice that it takes to get good at that kind of a game. And I think what these moments expose is that the status games that come around investing. Because it just seems like it's easy. It just seems like you don't do much work. That's what ruins these periods and the implications, I think, as Brad said, is really right.

• 46:49Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It affects the employees, it affects the entrepreneurs, it affects the startup culture, it affects the incremental desire for people to take a shot at things. You can overcome all of it. We have and we will again.

• 47:01Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But I really think like to the entrepreneur, the message is if you're, you know, taking a term sheet, I think you have to have better judgment to really look at that investor and say, is this person really qualified to help me? Because in these moments, in the absence of help, you're probably going to basically have a valuation reset at the minimum case and the worst case is you go out of business.

• 47:22Jason Calacanis?

  What's the side form about what you said, Chamath, and I'll hand it to you, Brad?

• 47:24Brad Gerstner?

  Yep.

• 47:24Jason Calacanis?

  Is that a lot of the founders picked based on the highest valuation who their next investor should be. And now we see what a trap that is. Brad?

• 47:33Brad Gerstner?

  You know, the takeaway for me is we return to a place we've always been, which is about selection. Right? Look at the mean returns for ventures for 20 years. They're lousy.

• 47:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Lousy.

• 47:46Brad Gerstner?

  Right? 90% of the spoils.

• 47:50Chamath Palihapitiya?

  They barely, barely mapped to the public market.

• 47:52Brad Gerstner?

  Five to 10% of the investments and that's the way it's always been. Look at Buffett, right? Buy superior companies at good prices. What are the two technology companies Buffett bought in the public markets?

• 48:04Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Apple.

• 48:05Brad Gerstner?

  Apple and Snowflake.

• 48:06Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Snowflake.

• 48:07Brad Gerstner?

  Apple and Snowflake. He doesn't own a broad basket of long tail internet or long tail software. And so I think what you're going to see and to Sax's point, I think even running a recipe on software as though all ARR is created equal. I mean, I can show you five companies, each with 100 million of ARR, each growing at 30%, and there's massive dispersion in future outcomes.

• 48:31Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 48:32Brad Gerstner?

  Right? And so like, I, I just think that this, at the end of the day, is a craft business. It's an essentialist business. It's about finding and identifying those very, very, very few companies that ever durably are worth more than $10 billion. You know, on my screen today, Chamath was just talking. There are four internet companies that are green today. Amazon, Google, Apple, and Facebook. Everything else on my screen is bleeding.

• 48:59Jason Calacanis?

  Must own, must own versus, nah.

• 49:02Brad Gerstner?

  Everything else is red, and my growth internet stocks are down 400 basis points. Right? The market is voting with its wallet where it wants to sit on the risk curve. Right? And I think we're just gonna go, there's no new normal here. This is just back to the future, right? This is what we've always done, and you know, the reset is always painful. Uh, the only surprising thing is how often we have to go through it.

• 49:25Jason Calacanis?

  If, if opportunities do arise, where will they, where will they be bred? I mean, I was watching Peloton, I always love that company. I see the change in management, I see the management, you know, thinking about profitability, thinking about creating it into a marketplace, maybe having, uh, more hardware available, disconnected from the software, et cetera. Do, do you think there's opportunities there? Or there will be opportunities over the next year to buy some of the names that aren't the fangs?

• 49:50Brad Gerstner?

  Um, what we do in the first instance, Jason, and listen, we, we outperformed the last year because we owned quality and we were short lower quality stuff. Unfortunately, this year, the market said, guess what? It's all overvalued, quality, low quality, doesn't matter, we're taking, we're taking it all lower. And so for us, in moments like this, and I've lived probably through five of them in the public markets, we always do the same thing. Degross, take risk down. First thing is like have less chits on the board. Number two, reduce the number of outliers, pull in the risk curve.

• 50:30Brad Gerstner?

  Right? For me, I want to own five or six things because remember I'm the biggest LP in the fund. This is my money. I want to sleep well at night and I want to protect the foundations, the endowments, the good causes we represent. I can't do that with a company that has an unproven business model. I may think that it's going to be great in the future, but I don't know. So the problem for the Pelotons of the world, right? They may be incredible returners. But what every portfolio manager on the planet is doing today is compressing the number of names in their portfolio. Saying what are the companies I know with absolute certainty, whether rates are two and a half, three and a half, four and a half, five and a half, is going to be worth more

• 51:13Brad Gerstner?

  over the course of the next two to three years. That's what I want to own. Right?

• 51:16Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Jason, what, what, I was just going to say, not really about Brad, but Jason, what you're talking about is what a lot of people do. You see a lot on Twitter and I call it clapping as a strategy. What about this? And what about that? And what about if they do this? And what about clapping is not a strategy. Clapping is something people do at the blackjack table. It turns out it doesn't actually influence the cards.

• 51:39Jason Calacanis?

  Sure.

• 51:40Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And so I think you have to stop with the clapping as a strategy because it doesn't work.

• 51:44Jason Calacanis?

  That's not my strategy. I was asking Matt as the moderator. Is there some opportunity coming? Yeah, just to be clear, I'm not advising that as a strategy.

• 51:50Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I'm saying, I think you're representing a psychological reaction that a lot of people have. And I think what Brad is trying to tell you is clapping is not a strategy.

• 51:57Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, no, I'm asking that on behalf of the audience. It is not my belief, just to be clear.

• 52:01Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So my, my commentary to the audience is clapping is not a strategy.

• 52:04Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, correct. Yes. If enough people though, do what you're saying, Brad, and they just retreat to quality, at some point that those quality companies would then become fully valued, maybe even overvalued, and thus the cycle begins again or not? And how long does that take?

• 52:20Brad Gerstner?

  No, you nailed it. What happened last year, 2021, dispersion collapsed. Go check out Jam and Ball, who does incredible software analysis on our team. Dispersion collapsed between the best cohort and the worst cohort of software companies last year. The first thing that happened is dispersion returns. We pay a higher price for the best shit, but we pay a lower price for the low quality stuff. Right? Then when we start to recover, when there's more predictability in the world, when we've resolved the war, when we understand the path of inflation, right, the stuff close in on the risk curve, that'll start being fully valued. So then we will be brave enough to

• 53:00Brad Gerstner?

  walk a little further out on the ice on the lake, testing it, is it safe to walk here? And then you walk out a little further and sadly, right, eventually we're in the exact same pattern we've been before, which is we'll know we're at a market top five or six or seven years from now, when we repeat the same asinine behavior that we just went through, when everybody becomes complacent again and overbidding this stuff way out on the risk curve. I'm just suggesting to you, the number one question I get from GPs, venture capitalists and others right now is when are we going to bounce back? Let me be absolutely clear, there is no bouncing back to where we were the last 18 months. That was the outlier. That was the make believe. What I hope and expect is that we can bounce

• 53:45Brad Gerstner?

  back to the five-year average, but even to durably trade at the five-year average, we have to have a lot more clarity on the war in Ukraine, on inflation and rates.

• 53:55Jason Calacanis?

  So that's a perfect place to pivot, Sax. We are now here, and I think this is the fourth or fifth episode where we've been discussing the war and we flipped it today just to do markets first, for a little change of pace. And since we had Brad here, where are we at with the war? And what are your, what is your expectation of it wrapping up or it escalating?

• 54:15David Sacks?

  Well, actually, there's a tweet storm this morning that Chamath, you sent to the group that, from a Russian official, and it seemed to indicate, well, it indicated what we've kind of known for a few weeks now, which is what the broad contours of what a peace deal would look like, which is there's three main pieces. Neutrality for Ukraine, the Russians insist that it not be part of NATO, they get to keep Crimea, which they annexed in 2014, that's been a fait accompli. And then some version of independence for these sort of breakaway territories.

• 54:51David Sacks?

  In Eastern Ukraine, in the Donbass region. Everyone kind of knows that's the broad strokes of the deal. Then there's, you know, a lot of details are going to matter a lot to the people who live there. Like, is there this land bridge from Crimea to Donbass? But frankly, don't matter as much to all of us, the United States of America. So the question is, you know, what is the administration going to do about it? Biden just went to Europe. And, you know, my concern is that no one in Washington, and I talked about this last week, seems to be pushing for a ceasefire. It seems like their preferred position is for Russia to bleed out as long as possible in Ukraine, for the US to fund an insurgency à la Afghanistan,

• 55:35David Sacks?

  where, you know, these fighters in Eastern Ukraine are sort of like the Mujahideen.

• 55:39Jason Calacanis?

  Insurgency, is that the right word?

• 55:41David Sacks?

  Well, sure, because, you know, if the-

• 55:43Jason Calacanis?

  They're defending their own land.

• 55:45David Sacks?

  And so are the Mujahideen. I mean-

• 55:47Jason Calacanis?

  I know, but why would you call it an insurgency? They're defending their land.

• 55:51David Sacks?

  If the government of Ukraine falls, then it becomes an insurgency. So the point is that the administration, the question is, what's the administration's endgame here? Do they want to lead the world to a ceasefire? Or do they want to protract the conflict to impose on the Russian state a Afghan-style, you know, debilitating defeat to destabilize the Russian regime? Neil Ferguson had a column this week in, it's his Bloomberg column.

• 56:18Jason Calacanis?

  He's from the Brookings Institute at Stanford.

• 56:20David Sacks?

  No, he's from Hoover.

• 56:22Jason Calacanis?

  Hoover, rather, sorry.

• 56:22David Sacks?

  Yeah, so I'll read this part.

• 56:24Jason Calacanis?

  Hoover is at, could you just explain to people what the Hoover Institute is and how that leans?

• 56:29David Sacks?

  Hoover Institute for Foreign Peace. I would say it sort of leans idealistic in foreign policy. I would describe Neil as sort of the most realistic idealist.

• 56:39Jason Calacanis?

  Got it.

• 56:40David Sacks?

  So, but he's quite well sourced, I think, with, you know, and with, you know, various people in Washington and Europe. And what he wrote is, "The US intends to keep this war going. The administration will continue to supply the Ukrainians with anti-aircraft Stingers, anti-tank javelins, explosive switchblade." drones, it will keep trying to persuade other NATO governments to supply heavier defensive weaponry and so on. He says Washington will revert to the Afghanistan after 1979 playbook of supplying an insurgency only if the Ukrainian government loses the conventional war. So the concern here is that the US government

• 57:21David Sacks?

  has an incentive, actually, that they don't want a quick end to this war, is basically the theory, is they want the Russian state to bleed out and be destabilized.

• 57:30Jason Calacanis?

  They, in a way, it's the one chance we have for like regime change there without us actually starting a war is that they have this self-inflicted wound. That is the theory.

• 57:39David Sacks?

  Yeah, and I think a lot of people are saying that. That is what a lot of people want in Washington. I don't, you know, this is not like conspiracy theory. People are saying this is our chance to topple the Russian state, destabilize it. There was a Rand Corporation

• 57:52Jason Calacanis?

  How do you feel about that?

• 57:53David Sacks?

  survey done a few years ago. Hold on, there's a Rand Corporation study done a few years ago that was commissioned by somebody, probably in our State Department, or someone like that, where they talked about this, that if we want to destabilize the Russian regime, Ukraine is the way to do it.

• 58:06Jason Calacanis?

  Right. They would fall for it, right? They would actually fight that fight. That is an unwinnable fight. We would basically be putting an af, we'd be supporting an Afghanistan-like path for them to go down like we did, and they did previously to that.

• 58:18David Sacks?

  Right. And the problem, the problem that I see is just this, which is, we've discussed on, on this program, the downsides of this war. First, it's a humanitarian disaster. Second, we've talked about the risk of recession later in the year. Third, Friedberg talked about famine, the risk of famine later this year if the spring planning doesn't happen. And then fourth, we have this always we have this risk that the war spins out of control and goes nuclear, right, and leads into World War III. Those are some vital American interests to avoid all of those scenarios. I don't see an equivalent vital American interest in determining the exact nuances of who rules the Donbass. In other words, the broad strokes of this agreement are there.

• 58:59David Sacks?

  You know, what the US should be doing is leading, they should be pushing for lead, not bleed, lead the way to a ceasefire, not to inflict maximum damage on the Russian regime.

• 59:09Jason Calacanis?

  Which we don't know exactly what their intent is because they're doing this behind closed doors. Brad, what's your take on this?

• 59:15Brad Gerstner?

  I think Dave and I talked about this at dinner the other night. I think there's something bigger playing out here. I mean, clearly, he's the expert on real politic and, you know, but it seems to me That we have had decades of military diplomacy, right? And, and most recently, the Powell Doctrine of overwhelming force. We don't want to make the same mistake we made in Vietnam. So like, we're gonna go in with full force. And, you know, basically, the public doesn't support, you know, military adventurism anymore, right? And so now we have, maybe we'll call it the Blinken Doctrine, which is the Powell Doctrine equivalent, but for economic force. It's the nuclear economic weapon that is on full display by the West right now,

• 1:00:00Brad Gerstner?

  that I think has really significant implications, right? It's reunited the West. Um, and I don't think this is just about Putin. And I think the reason that the US and Western Europe is slow-playing this a bit is they're sending a message to the Chinese as well, which is that we, we are unified and we will use an economic weapon of mass destruction. If, right, you don't play by global norms. And so the box, I think, we're in from a negotiating perspective, right, uh, in Ukraine right now is not a box around neutrality. I mean, neutrality is already clear. I mean, we had, Zelensky didn't even ask for a no-fly zone. He's not even asking for NATO membership. They've already ceded neutrality.

• 1:00:45Brad Gerstner?

  I think the real question is sanctions. I don't think the West wants to roll back sanctions. And I think Putin's saying, I can't high-tail it out of here unless you roll back all the sanctions and give me a little bit of the Donbass. And so, watch the next week or two. Like, in any good negotiation, unfortunately, I think both sides are gonna amp up their current strategies. We may see missiles coming out of Russia, and we may see European, uh, complete European embargo of Russian oil, 3 million barrels a day. Those will be the final straws, right, before we enter negotiations, because then they can see the last things that they took as part of the negotiation. But this, I think, is gonna be all about economic sanctions.

• 1:01:28Brad Gerstner?

  Um, and, uh, and, and, and I think the West is playing a, a really strong game. What I worry about, and Sacks has talked about this at length... Is that we overreach, we overplay our hand here in an effort to send a signal to other parties around the world, right? And that has fat tail risk associated with it.

• 1:01:48Jason Calacanis?

  You're referencing China and Taiwan?

• 1:01:50David Sacks?

  Let me ask a question. How many of us woke up or this at the beginning of this year or making our New Year's resolutions and said that we need to risk recession, famine, and war in order to destabilize and topple the Russian regime? When did this become a vital American interest? No one at the beginning of the year thought this was an important goal of America. What's more important is is basically getting our economy back on track, getting back on track after this long, after this long, this plague we've had. I mean, nobody needed this problem. And what the administration should have done was use diplomacy and all the resources to try and prevent the conflict. And now the

• 1:02:33David Sacks?

  conflict has occurred, we should be pushing for a negotiated peace and ceasefire. We do not have a vital national interest in the details of who rules the Donbass.

• 1:02:44Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, the problem with your setting up of that question is that we did not start the war. Putin did. Chamath, you've been silent so far. What are your thoughts on this war that Putin started?

• 1:02:54David Sacks?

  Jason, I'm not saying we started the war.

• 1:02:55Jason Calacanis?

  Well, you're saying, did we wake up and say that we should do this? We did not.

• 1:02:58David Sacks?

  Listen, you and a lot of other people in the media woke up on February 24th, and you think Putin went mad, and there's no prehistory to this conflict. Now, here's the deal. Hold on a second. This is a war of Russian aggression. It's true that Putin started it. He's the invader. However, there were things we could have done to prevent or to avoid this war. And American diplomacy completely failed. And we even discussed it the month before this war started. We talked about how the US could have given a written guarantee to Russia that Ukraine would not be part of NATO. Just this week, Zelensky in an interview with Fried Zakaria admitted, he was told by Blinken, you will not be part of NATO, but we don't want to admit that publicly. What games were they

• 1:03:41David Sacks?

  playing? What is the point of playing that kind of game with the grave issue of war and peace? Why didn't Blinken say publicly what he said to Zelensky? This administration did not do everything it could do to prevent war. And now we are faced with all of these existential risks. Why? For what reason?

• 1:03:59Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The reason is that it gave the United States an opportunity to topple Russia.

• 1:04:04David Sacks?

  I mean, who of us thought we needed that at the beginning of this year?

• 1:04:09Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, I think that, you know, the thing to keep in mind, and again, I don't, I don't, I'm not saying that this is right, but I'm just game theorizing. Uh, that these are like, you know, um.

• 1:04:21Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Grudges that these guys have held for a very long time. And I think it started when they were in the Obama White House and it carried over to now.

• 1:04:30Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And I think they saw an opportunity to basically execute a strategy that essentially now I think we're moving into the second phase of this war, which is effectively trying to bait Russia into doing something really egregiously bad. Uh, and that is terrible, David, to your point. I think we're willing to, you know, sacrifice a lot. I think we've decided that implicitly by based on the actions of, of the American government. And, and it's weird. It's like, we're trying to get Russia to react. And so the rhetoric, in fact. The rhetoric since that, do you guys remember? I think it was only 10 days ago that both Russia and Ukraine said the surface area of a deal is pretty much in sight.

• 1:05:12Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Um, oh, Friedberg from the top rope coming in. Look at you, Friedberg. I mean, like you, you look like an everyman. I mean, I'm so proud of you. Are you actually driving your own car?

• 1:05:22Jason Calacanis?

  Gas guzzling car, SUV in the mountains. You should be, you should be canceled. Who's gases in that tank? Is that Putin's gas?

• 1:05:30Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I only use, I only use ethanol I make in vats in my backyard.

• 1:05:34Jason Calacanis?

  I only use solar panels that are handcrafted in my backyard. I went out of my way to find, find a Lukoil gas station filled up.

• 1:05:41Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Um, what I was saying, guys, was that, uh, you know, from the 10 days from when, you know, both sides, Russia and Ukraine were like, hey, you know, we think we're basically there. We have a deal. The rhetoric has gotten really insane. Uh, you know, yesterday, I think it was like, the United States said, you know, we, we think that Russia should be kicked out of the G20. Then Russia responded and said, I'm only going to sell that gas and settle it in rubles.

• 1:06:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You know, all of a sudden, other actors, China and Saudi Arabia are in the game now. You know, China and Saudi Arabia are negotiating, settling a huge oil trade in yuan. Why in the last 10 days of all these things happened when we were so close to getting something done? I think the best explanation is that we are willing to, I guess we've decided, I mean, none of us have decided, but the American government has decided that some amount of sacrifice is okay. If it could trigger a Russian escalation, which could then further destabilize that country. And I think they believe that that's more important than anything else.

• 1:06:41Jason Calacanis?

  And I think we, you know, from where I said, I think we can take Putin out of his word that he actually cares about reunification. And that's not to say he's crazy, David. And I don't think we can control his behavior. I think you're

• 1:06:51David Sacks?

  When's he ever used the word reunification?

• 1:06:53Chamath Palihapitiya?

  He's never sent back, Jason, and also just today, the Russian military, the tweet that I sent to you guys was from the Russian military, and that was an official statement. And I don't think he, they would be allowed without Putin's explicit sign off. They no longer talked about denazificating Ukraine or demilitarizing Ukraine. They simply focused it on the Donbass. And to use your Sun Tzu argument, it's almost like they're trying to construct their own golden bridge to exit in a way where they can claim victory to the Russian people to explain the tens of thousands of, you know, Russian military people that have been killed in this whole conflict, right? Because they have an explanation that they have to give. But in all of this, I think that we're, we're probably exposing a very high risk game of poker

• 1:07:38Chamath Palihapitiya?

  that we're playing, which is it seems that the US government is focused more on the destabilization of Russia than they are in getting this conflict behind us.

• 1:07:46Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, he did, he did say in his speech, since time immemorial, the people living in the southwest of what has historically been Russian land have called themselves Russians and Orthodox Christians.

• 1:07:55Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That's Donbass.

• 1:07:56Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I know, but he is-

• 1:07:57David Sacks?

  There's been a, Jason, there's been a civil war going on since 2014 in this Donbass region between Ukrainians and these sort of, these Russian speakers. And now that civil war is, as this is a Balkan-style civil war that has now escalated with, you know, Ukraine and Russia getting in, and now the whole West potentially could get in. This is a very dangerous situation that we should not let spin out of control.

• 1:08:19Jason Calacanis?

  I'm agreeing with that. You guys asked me, did he ever talk about reunification? He did. He did in his speech about Ukraine.

• 1:08:24David Sacks?

  That was not, that was not one of his stated war objectives. Now, you could keep accusing him of being a liar, but, look, what his objective-

• 1:08:29Jason Calacanis?

  I'm not, I'm just taking him at his word that he believes these areas are Russian, and they should be considered Russian.

• 1:08:34David Sacks?

  The Donbass area, where they are predominantly Russian speakers. Look, I'm not taking a side, I'm not taking a side in who should rule the Donbass, okay? I think it's a complicated ethnic strife sort of issue, like we saw in the Balkans all the time, between the Russians who live there and the Ukrainians who live there. What I do know is it's not worth risking war three over that kind of issue.

• 1:08:56Jason Calacanis?

  Hundred percent agreement. Hundred percent agreement.

• 1:08:58Brad Gerstner?

  Sax, let me, can I ask you a question? Um, so, how is Putin gonna withdraw without a hundred percent lifting of the sanctions? And how is the West possibly going to trust him to withdraw? Right? While, while, while taking all the sanctions off? That seems to me like, when, when I try to construct the Golden Bridge in my mind, it comes down to, you know, like, how do, how, how do we whack up the sanctions? Do we take some of them off, say, prove to us, be out for X period of time, and then we'll roll the other ones off? Because these sanctions are not gonna be rolled back in the next three months based on some ceasefire.

• 1:09:39David Sacks?

  I, I agree with that. I, I don't know that Putin can expect the sanctions to be lifted, or that he can effectively negotiate for that. I think, again, where I think the, the, the peace deal is, is that, we've known all along what it's gonna be. Ukraine will agree to neutrality in exchange for some security guarantees from the West. Uh, Russia will get to keep Crimea, because that's been a fait accompli since the annexation in 2014. And there will be some sort of regional autonomy for these sort of Russian-speaking areas in the Donbass, uh, which, by the way, we could have had that too. There was a, a deal called MINTS II since 2015 that simply hasn't been implemented. So-

• 1:10:24David Sacks?

  You know, I think that those are the broad strokes of the deal. And then there's questions about, well, is there a land bridge from Crimea to the Donbass? And, you know, what weapons exactly does Ukraine get to get from the United States or get to keep? I mean, so look, those details matter a lot to the people who live there. But the broad strokes of this, I think, are pretty well understood.

• 1:10:43Brad Gerstner?

  I'm not betting this way with with our book. But if I had to guess, we are going to have a period of significant escalation on both sides before they both get to the table. Macron said this week that we still have the Europeans have not made a decision about the embargo of Russian oil. That will collapse the Russian economy, and oil will go to $180 or $200 a barrel. I think that's a real likelihood. And the second one is, I think the Russians will amp up military aggression in some face-saving measure and to have more to negotiate with. So maybe to answer my own question is, if there is an oil embargo, then you take the oil embargo off, right? As part of the economic sanction

• 1:11:28Brad Gerstner?

  whacking up of the sanctions, because that's really the nuclear option against the Russians economically. But it's a, you know, unfortunately, I think we have to be prepared for this to get worse before it gets better, because it makes sense from just a game theory for both sides to grab as much as they can right before Yep. they sit down at the table, so they have more shit to give to each other.

• 1:11:53David Sacks?

  Right. But the problem is, if both sides keep asking, I agree with that fundamental analysis, is that neither Putin nor Zelensky can be trusted on their own to basically make peace, because they want to push their advantage. If either one believes that they're winning on the battlefield, they're going to push their advantage to grab as much they can to then negotiate from a position of greater strength. The problem is that they're in an escalatory spiral, where if, you know, one or both of them miscalculate, we never get that deal. And I think the longer the war drags on, the harder it is to make a deal, not easier. One of the, I'd have to say, one of the disturbing things that came out over the past week was in that interview that I mentioned where Fareed Zakaria interviewed Zelensky.

• 1:12:34David Sacks?

  Zelensky said, he said that it's, we're either gonna get a peace deal or World War III. And I'm listening to this thinking, wait a second, you know, that, that is a pretty scary posture for him to be taking. And furthermore, who appointed him leader of the free world? You know, the decision to have War III is not his decision. He is not the President of the United States. We did not vote for him. We may think he's heroic. We may think he deserves our support, but he does not get to turn this into War III for us. The American people did not choose that. And this is where I go back to Biden and the administration and their leadership. What are they pushing for? Are they pushing for

• 1:13:17David Sacks?

  a protracted, never-ending Afghan-style war in Ukraine? Or are they gonna lead the situation to some sort of negotiation or ceasefire? And I just think if we're considering the interests of the United States, we would not let this decision purely be Zelensky's. This guy's willing to entertain War III. That can't be acceptable to us.

• 1:13:38Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, what, what, what is his worst alternative? I mean, like, he's losing his country. So of course he wants to say the thing that would scare us into action potentially, right? So he has nothing to lose.

• 1:13:49David Sacks?

  Right. But that's why, but that's why we can't let him, we can't let him decide for us.

• 1:13:53Chamath Palihapitiya?

  He's not deciding for us. He's, he's using rhetoric to get us to talk about it, which he just won. Like, you can see that what he's saying is working. Yeah. Because you're talking about it. So I think the, I think the bigger question in all of this is, when is the United States willing to draw a really hard line? So there was another thing that happened, which is that, you know, Biden essentially said, like, you know, if they use chemical weapons, we will react sort of in kind, right? There was some, some version of that. It's a red line, basically, he said, yes. And, and then he also said, you know, depending on, you know, how they use nuclear weapons, we could theoretically respond. So just, the rhetoric is ratcheting way, way up. And that is surprising to me because I would

• 1:14:38Chamath Palihapitiya?

  have thought. We had a deal in sight, just get it done, be pragmatic.

• 1:14:43Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, but you're assuming, David, you're assuming that we have the influence, you assume, David, that we have the influence to actually cut a deal. You were saying yourself for the last couple of months that the US power has waned and that we don't have influence. So which is it?

• 1:14:58David Sacks?

  I believe, I believe, I believe we have the influence to facilitate a deal.

• 1:15:02Jason Calacanis?

  You were saying like last couple of weeks that we lost our influence.

• 1:15:05David Sacks?

  Listen, let me give you an example. We are giving Zelensky and the Ukrainians all these incredible weapons. What are the conditions on that? If Zelensky is unwilling to make a reasonable peace deal, do we, do we have any conditions and are giving him these weapons? Why wouldn't we insist, Zelensky, listen, we support you. We basically are against this Russian aggression. You should have the right to defend your homeland and drive them out, but we also want you to take a reasonable peace deal if one is available. And we need you to specify what that is.

• 1:15:36Jason Calacanis?

  You're assuming.

• 1:15:37David Sacks?

  Are we exercising that kind of discretion? I don't think so.

• 1:15:39Jason Calacanis?

  I think you're assuming that Biden is blocking this, when in fact, it might be that Putin is. And I believe you're taking Putin's sort of position here over our own presidents. I think you need to think for a second that we don't want to have this continue or escalate. You actually think there's a world in which Biden wants to see this escalate? I don't think that that's the case. I think that we don't have influence.

• 1:16:00David Sacks?

  Chamath just explained it.

• 1:16:01Jason Calacanis?

  We don't have the influence, David, we do not have the influence today that we did. It is no longer.

• 1:16:04David Sacks?

  Neil Ferguson.

• 1:16:05Jason Calacanis?

  The United States, you know, gets to dictate to the world what's going on here. We no longer have that.

• 1:16:09David Sacks?

  This is not about, this is not about the United States.

• 1:16:11Jason Calacanis?

  Putin wants to talk to Israel, Putin wants to talk to Macron in France, not us.

• 1:16:14David Sacks?

  Because we're not seen as an honest broker. But, but look.

• 1:16:16Jason Calacanis?

  We don't have the influence we once had.

• 1:16:19David Sacks?

  Okay, let me explain. I'm not saying we can dictate the outcome, okay, but we can push for a negotiated settlement instead of a protracted, we can lead, not bleed, okay? Chamath laid it out, Neil Ferguson laid it out, the Rand Corporation laid it out. These, there is a significant chance that there are definitely actors in the State Department who want to see an Afghan-style situation insurgency play out in Eastern Europe. That's their goal. Okay? Now, I don't know what Biden is thinking, but he has made no statement. To the contrary, what have we done to help lead the situation to a negotiated settlement? Name one thing.

• 1:16:57Jason Calacanis?

  Well, I don't think we're in the room, David. But Biden is in Europe, right?

• 1:17:02David Sacks?

  I read all their public statements. I don't see anything.

• 1:17:05Jason Calacanis?

  I don't think they want to negotiate through the press with Putin.

• 1:17:08David Sacks?

  I don't think they want to negotiate at all.

• 1:17:09Jason Calacanis?

  Biden is in Europe right now. I think that says enough about what his intent is. He's in Poland, right? He's going to Poland?

• 1:17:15David Sacks?

  He's in Poland. We're scaling up our military presence. Listen, I mean, I don't, all I'm saying is, look, I don't know exactly what Biden is saying or doing behind closed doors. What I'm saying is that the US should be playing a constructive role to get to a negotiated ceasefire, not indulging this sort of fantastical thinking that we can basically perpetrate a regime change operation in Russia.

• 1:17:38Jason Calacanis?

  I agree with you on that. I agree with you on that.

• 1:17:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I, I'm worried that there may be a small strain of that probability in the range of outcomes here. And I didn't think that before. I really thought that, okay, maybe we were a little bit on the outside looking in, but it looks like, you know, we're pretty close to a deal. These guys will get in a room. They'll, you know, chop it up and it'll be done. And instead, honestly, if you just look at the headlines and the rhetoric and the words from all these three leaders in the last 10 days, it's been, it's been in the other direction. And so you have to wonder, what is the point of all of this right now?

• 1:18:12Jason Calacanis?

  Or it could be crescendoing, like Brad said.

• 1:18:15Brad Gerstner?

  It's, you know, I, I, I listened to Blinken over the weekend. And he talked about, well, I think he defined what is this new doctrine of economic statecraft? He said, "Our objective is we have the power to impose overwhelming costs on our target." Okay, economic cost. And he said, "Our cause, Putin's actions are remembered as a strategic failure, not regime change. That's what's within our control." That is very different. Bush wanted regime change in Iraq, and we executed it through the Pal doctrine of overwhelming military force. I think that this is a doctrine of overwhelming economic force that is meant to not only signal to the Russians,

• 1:18:59Brad Gerstner?

  but every other rogue dictator in the world, if you go rolling into your neighbor, uninvited, you can count on the fact that there's going to be massive economic sanctions because... Our military deterrence is no longer a deterrent. Everybody knows we're not going to go defend Taiwan. Everybody knows we're not going to send our military to Ukraine. So we have to demonstrate that we actually have economic resolve, not these poo poo sanctions we've been having around the world for the last 20 years. And if that is the lasting impact on this.

• 1:19:30Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think you're right.

• 1:19:31Brad Gerstner?

  You know, that we turn this into an economic nuclear weapon.

• 1:19:35Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:36Brad Gerstner?

  That's actually a lot better than sending our kids, you know, running around the world to get killed.

• 1:19:41Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think you're absolutely right. And I think Tony is very smart to say what he said. The, um, the one thing that I would want, though, on top of that, tell me if you agree, is just to ratchet down our rhetoric, which we can control.

• 1:19:54David Sacks?

  And maybe to, to, to, I mean, why not say that, listen, we're willing to put these sanctions on the table. We're willing to basically reinstitute economic ties with Russia if we can get to a satisfactory outcome.

• 1:20:06Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, you don't want to reward them, right?

• 1:20:08Brad Gerstner?

  I mean, David, I would say is we're making a big assumption to say that there's not back channel diplomacy going on from the Israelis, the Turks, the, the French, you know, having those conversations on our behalf. Right? Like, I, I, I don't, I honestly, I don't know that that's a high probability that we're not sending those signals. But to your point, I just don't know. I don't know.

• 1:20:29David Sacks?

  Look, I don't, I don't, I don't know either, but I don't know either. But, but, but here's what I would say is, look, I can only judge from the public statements. And I think there is signal in these public statements. And the statements are all one way. There is no olive branch. It's all, it's all basically about escalation. Just like in January before the war, what were the State Department's statements about the situation? They said that NATO's door is open and will remain open, even though they told Zelensky in private that he would not be joining NATO. Okay, that was an astounding revelation that came out this week on the Free Zakaria show. Number two, Blinken was saying that there, there was no change in the American position and there would be no change. They said, these are all public statements,

• 1:21:13David Sacks?

  that the US would never recognize the Russian annexation of Crimea, never. You know, he said that we went into these peace talks to represent our core values. There's no change of that. So in other words, it's been the position of the United States to be hardline with Russia, to basically engage in no compromise whatsoever.

• 1:21:31Jason Calacanis?

  You assume.

• 1:21:32David Sacks?

  And it's basically to double down. It's to double down.

• 1:21:35Jason Calacanis?

  You assume. You assume, David. You don't know.

• 1:21:37David Sacks?

  No, those are the public statements.

• 1:21:38Jason Calacanis?

  I know, but you're assuming that there's no backshells going on. And just to, just to wrap this up, I wanted to make one quick point, Chamath, which was, you know, what if we offer to take the sanctions off and then we are training Putin that these kind of misadventures get him something, Donbass, et cetera, and that the sanctions roll off? So isn't there a possibility, Chamath, that if we don't keep the sanctions up, we're actually rewarding his behavior?

• 1:22:02Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I'm a huge guy. Look, I've been the first person in the front of the line on sanctions. I thought this was the most brilliant approach to this whole thing, and I still believe that sanctions work, and I think that this will cripple that country. What I'm saying, though, is that there are these moments where, instead of then sticking to the rhetoric that Tony talked about, what he said, I don't know, Brad, where Tony said this, this weekend, but like, sticking to that, there are these added flourishes that I think are unnecessary. So what I mean by that is to talk about, you know, us reacting or retaliating for the use of chemical weapons. Biden made a campaign vow, I don't know if you guys remember this, about nuclear weapons, where, you know, he was very clear that, you know, it is a mechanism to demonstrate

• 1:22:46Chamath Palihapitiya?

  that this deterrence exists. And instead, he actually caved, and instead, he put out this carefully worded statement, which kind of walked back the campaign vow earlier this week, and I'll just read it to you. I'll just read what the Wall Street Journal said. It said, "President Biden stepping back from a campaign vow has embraced the longstanding U.S. approach of using the threat of a potential nuclear response to deter conventional and other nuclear dangers in addition to nuclear ones. During the 2020 campaign, Biden promised to work towards a policy in which the sole purpose of U.S. nuclear, the nuclear arsenal, would be to deter or respond to an enemy nuclear attack. Instead..." Now it holds that the fundamental role of the nuclear arsenal will be to deter,

• 1:23:29Chamath Palihapitiya?

  but that it leaves the opening to respond and use it in extreme circumstances. So these are big changes. And if our whole goal is to just focus the surface area to an economic set of sanctions, these are somewhat unnecessary, wouldn't we all agree? We don't need to talk about changing our nuclear policy.

• 1:23:46David Sacks?

  Yeah, Biden was right on the campaign trail. The United States of America should never use nukes, except if nukes are used on us. Come on, we know that. And we're talking about changing that now? That's insane.

• 1:23:57Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, no, we changed it.

• 1:23:58David Sacks?

  Look, it shows that there's an influence in our government, in our State Department, of certain hardline elements who want this very tough policy that includes destabilizing the Russian regime and maybe toppling Putin. I'm just saying that objective is not worth all the existential risks that we're now facing.

• 1:24:19Jason Calacanis?

  All right. Do we want to touch on the CCP tax cuts? We want to wrap? We're at 80 minutes.

• 1:24:23Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I mean, the CCP tax cuts hearkens me back. Brad, you can react to this because you lived it with me. 2018, 19, I'll say it again. We were in this unique moment where, you know, we were not sure whether there was runaway rampant inflation. And in Q4 of 2018, the Fed basically said, okay, you got us. You know, the boogeyman exists. We're going to go tame inflation. And they ran forward and raised rates. And low and behold, the Chinese economy turned over in Q1 of 2019. We had like a, you know, kind of a blippy little recession. And we had to overcome it because China became stimulative. Now, here we are again. We're worried about this inflationary boogeyman.

• 1:25:04Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And the Chinese government basically extended these tax cuts, increased the tax cuts, and essentially said, we're going to be very stimulative in the economy, especially through the back half of the year. Now China again is a massively export driven economy, right? So the reality is that as goes China, so goes the rest of our economies. And so I think that it's a setup where how can the United States be under so much inflationary pressure where China is effectively telling you that we are in a contraction and a recessionary period? And so if that's where China is, there's a risk that we may already be there or entering that. And so I think it's a little, you know.

• 1:25:48Brad Gerstner?

  You hit two really important points, Jima. Number one, which we didn't get to earlier. I tweeted a few weeks ago, the Fed's probably behind the curve on recession, not inflation. Right? We have massive demand destruction going on right now in the US economy.

• 1:26:03Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Massive.

• 1:26:04Brad Gerstner?

  The producer.

• 1:26:04Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Define what that means, Brad. Define what that means, please.

• 1:26:06Brad Gerstner?

  So I mean, if you just think about what does $6 gas mean? What does no STEMI checks mean? What does the fact that you actually have to go and get a job again mean? You know, we're, we're rolling back trillions of dollars off the Fed balance sheet. I'll tell you what it means is that people can't spend as much money. Just the increase in the 30 year mortgage means you're buying power in December, four months ago, to buy a house. And if you could afford 1,200 bucks a month, that buying power bought you a $350,000 house. Today it buys you a $295,000 house. People's ability, right? To have money, to spend money is getting crushed. So I think we are going to face an economic slowdown. If you look at the PMI, so this was the inflation read in January.

• 1:26:51Brad Gerstner?

  Little, people didn't really notice it. PMI in January came in at point two versus the consensus estimate of point six. That means the producer level of inflation was meaningfully less than we expected.

• 1:27:08Brad Gerstner?

  If you look at consumer confidence, it's plummeted. One of the four biggest drawdowns over the last 20 years. Retail sales in UK this morning crashing. Consumer confidence in the UK crashing. The Chinese government sees this. We're not surprising. Look at what's going on in the world with energy prices. We've never had oil over 120 bucks and not gone into a recession. We're facing a global slowdown. That will have big implications for inflation, big implications for rates. But China sees this coming and says, we're going to get ahead of this. We've got a people's congress in November. We've promised them 5.5% GDP growth. 3 trillion of that is export driven. That means if Europe and the United States catches a cold, they catch the flu.

• 1:27:53Brad Gerstner?

  Okay. So they have to do everything in their power. This is why they're not going to supply the Russians with weapons. Right. Because it's economically assassinating themselves. Right. So we have this interconnected world, this idea that we're de-globalizing. What we do doesn't impact anybody else. Like that ship has sailed a long time ago and the Chinese see this. That's why I think there's also a probability by the middle of the summer. The Fed in the United States is saying we now see a balanced risk between growth and inflation.

• 1:28:26Jason Calacanis?

  Sax, let's get you in on this just as we wrap here. The Chinese Communist Party premier talked about tax cuts. And this is a quote, fertilizer applied directly to the roots of the economy. Tax rebates look like reductions, but actually are in addition. Today you give back, tomorrow you get more in returns. Does this mean the United States, people will go back and get jobs because they need to have more money? And that maybe we should be looking at, you know, tax cuts at some point?

• 1:28:52David Sacks?

  Listen, Jake Al, I think we got big problems here at home in the United States. Brad and Chamath, they've laid out these gigantic economic risks that are facing the country. You know, I tweeted at the beginning of the year, January 24th, the president's main job is to ensure peace and prosperity. And Biden's popularity was already plummeting. I think this is when his poll numbers were at 38%. But if he gets us into war and recession, he ain't seen nothing yet. This war, the longer it drags on, the longer it basically can spin out of control and become something worse. That sucks us in, the longer it creates the risk of basically causing a recession in the United States. We need the American, we need the Biden administration to help try and lead to a better

• 1:29:37David Sacks?

  outcome here instead of rationing up the rhetoric.

• 1:29:39Jason Calacanis?

  All right, folks, there you have it. That's your All In Podcast for this week. Thanks so much to Brad Gerson for joining us and filling in for the Sultan of Science.

• 1:29:49Chamath Palihapitiya?

  BG, thanks, bro.

• 1:29:50Jason Calacanis?

  And a lot of great announcements here. Brad will also be joining us for the All In Summit. We're about to wrap up tickets. We've announced a bunch of great speakers for the event, May 15, 16, and 17 in Miami. You can just do a search for the All In Summit. We have given out, we've sent 200 emails to people who asked for scholarships and 100 of them have taken the tickets. 500 of the 650 tickets or so are accounted for. We'll be wrapping up registration in the next week or two. And we look forward to seeing you all at the New World Symphony in South Beach.

• 1:30:22Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You got any announcements of people? Who else is appearing?

• 1:30:25Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, my Lord. We have great announcements. Keith Verboy is coming. Joe Lonsdale is coming. Nate Silver is coming.

• 1:30:30Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Nate Silver. I love Nate Silver.

• 1:30:32Jason Calacanis?

  Well, we decided, Chamath, we would have people do 15 to 20 minute TED-style talks, like position papers. And so who else do we have doing that? Tim Urban of Wait But Why, who is a brilliant TED speaker and writer. Nate Silver's going to do that. And then Antonio is coming. He was just on, and he was just on Rogan Show. And so we're going to have these like 20-minute kind of hits. Then the Bessys will sit with them. We'll do those back to back. Kimball Musk is going to come and talk about his DAO that he's doing for nonprofits. Brad, we're going to talk about what topics. So we're collecting all this talent and then we'll figure out what positions they're going to play in the show and what

• 1:31:14Jason Calacanis?

  the themes will be. But the themes will match what we've been talking about here. And we don't want to pre-set the themes six or seven weeks, seven weeks out from the event because we don't know what the world will look like then. And then Friedberg said he wanted to do a position paper and actually give a 20-minute talk. So Bessys will have that ability. And Bessys will start the event and end the event. Tons of different speakers rotating in and out, talking about the most important topics of our time. But I would like to have Peter there. Can you get Peter Thiel to come?

• 1:31:39David Sacks?

  Maybe.

• 1:31:40Jason Calacanis?

  He's the most iconoclastic. Please, Peter, come.

• 1:31:42David Sacks?

  I'm just not, I have to get over my uncertainty that this whole conference thing is really a grift.

• 1:31:48Jason Calacanis?

  It's not a grift. We're putting all the money is going back into the event. And we gave 200 scholarships. There would be no profit from the event.

• 1:31:55Chamath Palihapitiya?

  There needs to be a really nice swag bag and I, I think it's

• 1:31:58Jason Calacanis?

  Already at $600 a person. I just spent 300, 400,000 on the bags.

• 1:32:02Chamath Palihapitiya?

  What is the material of the hoodie?

• 1:32:04Jason Calacanis?

  All right.

• 1:32:05David Sacks?

  It's gotta be a cashmere hoodie if it's beyond brand.

• 1:32:08Jason Calacanis?

  600 dollars.

• 1:32:09Brad Gerstner?

  People need to be able to buy up to the, to the special hoodie.

• 1:32:13Jason Calacanis?

  Brad, I just spent $600,000 per gift bag for 600 gift bags. Okay? It's like 400 grand in gift bags and Chamath wants to put a $6,000 sweater in there.

• 1:32:23Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I just wanted to know what the material was of the hoodie in the bag. That's all. I'm just asking a question.

• 1:32:27Jason Calacanis?

  This is my life, Brad. I am busting my ass to put this event on and then Chamath's complaining about the gift bag. Sax is complaining on me making a dollar from it and Free Burke's having a panic attack that we don't have enough great speakers and I'm doing all the work. It's my whole fucking life.

• 1:32:41Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I appreciate you, J. K.

• 1:32:43Jason Calacanis?

  I know you did say some nice stuff to me. You did say some nice stuff. I appreciate that. I made me want to get back to work.

• 1:32:47David Sacks?

  I've actually been on board with you getting a fee for your hard work.

• 1:32:49Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I don't need the fees.

• 1:32:51David Sacks?

  They could give you like an hourly wage, you know, $15 an hour.

• 1:32:53Jason Calacanis?

  No, I'm not your wage slave, David Sacks. I'm working hard here. I'm smart and I'm working hard.

• 1:32:59Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But I, I just want to

• 1:33:00Jason Calacanis?

  I need to be appreciated.

• 1:33:01Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I don't think you should have like a cotton blend is my, I think it's safe.

• 1:33:07Jason Calacanis?

  By the way, Brad, do you have any thoughts on the sushi? Is there, should we be using brown rice and not the lime clod tuna?

• 1:33:15David Sacks?

  No, just make sure there's gold leaf, gold leaf on the sushi.

• 1:33:18Jason Calacanis?

  No, literally we're spending, I think for 300 or 400,000 per party. It's over a million dollars in parties and I'm talking to talent bookers about serious talent coming to perform.

• 1:33:30Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Drake, can you get Drake?

• 1:33:32Jason Calacanis?

  How about Dua Lipa? That's $3 million. Dua Lipa, $2 million. I'm, I'm deep in this.

• 1:33:36Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Dua Lipa's $2 million?

• 1:33:37Jason Calacanis?

  That's what I got.

• 1:33:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  How much is Doja Cat? She's great.

• 1:33:41Jason Calacanis?

  I think those are all seven figures. I would like to, anyway, what I'm trying to find.

• 1:33:45David Sacks?

  That would be a worthwhile use of the money.

• 1:33:46Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That would be worthwhile use of, I mean, that would make it an incredible party.

• 1:33:48Jason Calacanis?

  Oh God. I mean, I really would like to get.

• 1:33:51Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But sorry, how much is Drake again? $2 million?

• 1:33:53Jason Calacanis?

  I heard 2 to 3 million for Drake.

• 1:33:54Brad Gerstner?

  Skip the granny bags and get Drake.

• 1:33:56David Sacks?

  Yeah, good idea.

• 1:33:57Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cancel the bags. Give it all to Drake.

• 1:34:01Jason Calacanis?

  So you guys are saying I should bust my ass and all the work I do, I should take $2 million and hand it to fucking Drake?

• 1:34:08Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yes.

• 1:34:09David Sacks?

  Yes.

• 1:34:11David Sacks?

  Drake is more valuable than you.

• 1:34:12Jason Calacanis?

  25 years of working on events and media, Brad. And these, these are my friends who are like, take the 2 million that you could put in your pocket and finally make a profit on your work and just hand 2 million in a bag to Drake.

• 1:34:27David Sacks?

  We don't need the bags.

• 1:34:28Jason Calacanis?

  I need a plane, guys. Can I get a plane? I'll turn you a jet card.

• 1:34:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Do we get to work with Drake on which songs he's, he would sing?

• 1:34:35Jason Calacanis?

  I think he, he does like a medley of like three. What I would like to do is have-

• 1:34:38Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Three songs for 2 mil? Come on, Jason.

• 1:34:41Jason Calacanis?

  I think it's basically like a hundred thousand a minute. I think that's what you're in for. A hundred thousand per minute, just 20 minutes.

• 1:34:47Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, that seems egregious.

• 1:34:49David Sacks?

  No.

• 1:34:49Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, these guys get paid bank.

• 1:34:51David Sacks?

  When, when I hired Snoop, he did like 20 songs for me. I mean, it was unbelievable.

• 1:34:55Jason Calacanis?

  And what was that? 250? 300? 250?

• 1:34:58David Sacks?

  Sax, that's because he forgot he was there.

• 1:35:01Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:01David Sacks?

  He had a great time.

• 1:35:02Jason Calacanis?

  Oh my God, man. He was blowing this joint that was so powerful that I was 10 feet away and I got stoned. It, I mean, it was like a cloud. He walked in, it was like a cloud.

• 1:35:13David Sacks?

  It was like 20 Super Bowl shows.

• 1:35:16David Sacks?

  Good stuff.

• 1:35:17Jason Calacanis?

  Alright, everybody. Love you, besties. Love you, Brad.

• 1:35:23Jason Calacanis?

  Rain Man David Sax.

• 1:35:28David Sacks?

  We open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it.

• 1:35:32Jason Calacanis?

  Love you, besties.

• 1:35:51Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We should all just get a room and just have one big U-Jorgie because they're all just pissed. It's like this like sexual tension that they just need to release somehow.

• 1:35:59David Sacks?

  What? You're the B. What? You're the B. What?

• 1:36:04Jason Calacanis?

  We need to get merch. Besties are back.