Industry Episode (SVB): Dan Primack (Axios) + Eric Newcomer (Newcomer) - Where the Venture Industry Goes from Here

In a special bonus episode of the Logan Bartlett Show, Logan is joined by journalists Dan Primack from Axios and Eric Newcomer from Newcomer to discuss the implications from SVB and where the tech and venture capital industry goes from here. Executive Producer: Rashad Assir Producer: Leah Clapper Mixing and editing: Justin Hrabovsky Check out Unsupervised Learning, Redpoint's AI Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@UCUl-s_Vp-Kkk_XVyDylNwLA 🎥 Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCugS0jD5IAdoqzjaNYzns7w?sub_confirmation=1 Follow on Socials 📸 Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/theloganbartlettshow 📱 X - https://twitter.com/loganbartshow 🎬 Clips on TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@theloganbartlettshow About the Show Logan Bartlett is a Software Investor at Redpoint Ventures - a Silicon Valley-based VC with $6B AUM and investments in Snowflake, DraftKings, Twilio, and Netflix. In each episode of The Logan Bartlett Show, we sit down with the people behind today’s most important startups and extract the tactics, lessons, and frameworks they’ve learned the hard way. Conversations span hiring to GTM, product, growth, fundraising and everything in between - collectively forming the ultimate playbook to make you a better CEO, investor or board member. Tap follow and enable notifications to stay ahead of the game.

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

• 0:05Logan Bartlett?

  Welcome to a special bonus episode emergency podcast on Silicon Valley Bank. On this episode, what you're going to hear is a conversation I have with Dan Primack from Axios, as well as Eric Newcomer, who was formerly with Bloomberg and now has his own blog and podcast called Newcomer with Substack as well. We talk about the fall of Silicon Valley Bank, what the implications are for the venture capital industry, who's at fault for how all of this played out and where we go from here. So a fun conversation with those guys, talking about a pretty somber subject. And I think we're all still sort of processing in real time what exactly happened and what's going to happen to the industry from here. So getting their perspectives and talking through all of that stuff with them was definitely interesting. So I appreciate them coming on.

• 0:48Logan Bartlett?

  Before you hear that, just a brief plug to like, subscribe, share, all the usual stuff. We do this to continue to grow and hopefully you enjoy all the episodes that we're bringing. And so please do share, like, subscribe, all the, all the normal stuff. And with that, now you'll hear a conversation with Dan Primack and Eric Newcomer. We're sort of shooting from the hip, but I imagine all you guys have been digesting this in the, in real time over the course of the last couple of days. So I guess what I wanted to talk about with you is both what happened with SVB over the course of the last couple of days, as well as where, I think the most interesting thread for, for me at least, and probably the people that listen to this, is where the venture industry goes from here.

• 1:29Logan Bartlett?

  And there's a lot of, there's schisms that exist in a way that never had in the past, right? And I think in a weird way, the venture industry is now sort of reckoning with the fact that we're not as well received in the mainstream, I think, as we would like to be, right? I think it's, it's one of these things that now we're, we're realizing that there's elements of just social pariah that people are, are, are, view us as. And the ironic thing is like, we could lean into that and be like, oh, well, you know, we're villains now, but it feels very, it doesn't feel genuine in a way that like LeBron in, you know, joining the Heat and being like, I'm a villain now. And it was just like very inauthentic to who he was as a person.

• 2:12Logan Bartlett?

  I think VCs still hold this thing in the back of their head that like, oh, yes, we're capitalists, but we're also helpers too, right? And so now being the social pariah.

• 2:22Speaker 01

  Well, I tweeted, you know, That for the last couple of years, it feels like venture capitalists have been trying to shoot the messenger. You know, tech has been, tech reporters have been like poking and prodding at VCs and a lot of that criticism has been blamed on the media. And now suddenly it feels like there's a revelation that, oh, maybe there is some public animus that the media was sort of the messenger for. And so it's, it's interesting to see.

• 2:52Speaker 02

  But it's also VCs hitting each other. I mean, there's obviously this fascinating schism that I don't think is going to amount to anything. Like, you know, I don't think the, the VCs who stuck with SVB versus the ones who pulled their money, I don't think that's going to last very long. You know, maybe a couple uncomfortable, you know, social interactions at a bar over the next couple of weeks. But I mean, I, I don't think that one of the, the holders and the sellers, you know, if there's a deal to do together and to co-lead, they're going to do it together. They just are. I don't think this, I don't think it has legs in part because SVB, well, SVB dies, but everyone got their money on Monday, right? Like if people, if companies were actually failing right now, like literally failing, didn't make payroll, couldn't make their AWS bills, then I think the, the animosity would grow, right? Because people are actually losing money. In this case, people lost a weekend and a little bit of sleep.

• 3:34Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, I think there's kind of three tiers of how at least I view people on, on the actions on Thursday, right? There's kind of the people that were publicly espousing a bank run in some way, like on Twitter. And that I don't have a lot of sympathy for.

• 3:48Speaker 01

  The all, all in people.

• 3:50Speaker 02

  You mean, wait, can I, can I just ask the, as opposed to the people who were privately talking about it in WhatsApp groups?

• 3:57Logan Bartlett?

  I think, I think there is a distinction. I think, I think so. I mean, I think in terms of how broad, how widespread your broadcasting stuff. And what happened was it went from this niche sort of tech thing on Thursday to this mainstream thing by Friday where I have my, my mother and my friends that work, you know, in, in other industries asking me, hey,

• 4:21Speaker 02

  But your mother and your friends, most likely, and I'm not going to speak for your mother, your friends, probably don't have money or a lot of money in SVB, right? The people who mattered in terms of pulling deposits were people who were, were companies really, for the most part, they were pulling 10, 15, 20 million dollars.

• 4:33Logan Bartlett?

  Totally, totally. But I I think the public like had it just been the WhatsApp groups and it had it just been SVB. I don't know if it would have, uh, if it would have expanded from a psychological standpoint to the way it did. I think Twitter really, uh, brought it from this niche tech, commercial banking thing to this mainstream. Oh my gosh, what's going to happen thing. And obviously that's not a totally fair.

• 4:56Speaker 01

  I don't know if I agree. I mean, my, my sense is, you know, like Andreessen Horowitz and other firms had groups of founders who were like messaging each other and posting in big groups. And so you could watch some big startups say, yeah, we're going to move our money from SVB. And then if you're any other startup in that thread, you start to feel like a sucker if you're just sitting on your hands.

• 5:18Logan Bartlett?

  No, I agree with that. I'm saying, but my mom isn't in that what's, my mom isn't in that WhatsApp group, right? And so that wasn't why she, I think some of the social element that maybe.

• 5:27Speaker 01

  Did your mom really drive the withdrawals at SVB? Was she, uh, she?

• 5:31Logan Bartlett?

  No, no, I'm, I'm saying the subsequent run that, that branched over to the mainstream. And that's sort of why I draw the distinction in all of this. I forget, I, I've read so much over the last couple of days. And so I, I want to give credit to whoever, uh, put this in my head, but I actually forget who it was is the, the failure. I mean, there are so many different failures of SVB specifically, and we can talk through each one and like who's to blame and where blame shared. But there was the quite matching of the maturity of the book and seeking higher interest rates and all of that. I think the biggest mistake in all of this, like, yes, that's a mistake, but the biggest mistake was Silicon Valley Bank not fully recognizing that they actually only had like eight customers or 12 customers or 20 customers or something.

• 6:10Logan Bartlett?

  Right? It was a handful of VCs that were all very interconnected and everyone makes jokes about moving in herds, but like quite literally, we saw that be the case. And once it starts snowballing, it was done. And so I think of all the risks that they had, it was that they were kind of beholden to an industry of like 15 people, right? And their decision or whatever it was.

• 6:29Speaker 02

  I also think that one thing that's been underplayed here. So yes, so certain VC firms told their, their companies pull money. And by the way, I don't blame them for doing so, but, but beyond that also, there, there started to be a narrative, not even just narrative reports on Thursday, late Thursday morning, early Thursday afternoon, at least east coast time. The people who were trying to pull money were having a hard time doing it. And that, let, let me tell you, if I had had money in SVB and wanted to hold it, if I heard someone else was having a hard time getting their money out, I would have been sprinting to the bank at that point, right? Because.

• 6:57Logan Bartlett?

  You hear someone can't get their money out of a bank? That says to you, I'm not going to be able to get my money out of the bank if there's a problem. That was, I mean, that was a fundamental problem. SVB had too many wires coming in that it could handle and its systems started breaking down. That, that contributed, I think, to the run as well.

• 7:10Speaker 01

  I totally agree with that and I want to make like two points. Number one, if I was a startup founder, I would absolutely want my VC to have been telling me to pull, pull the money, even though it got covered. It's like, I, I feel like the VCs and Logan, I know you're going to have thoughts on this, but there was a little bit of, you know, I'm going to be, there was a crowd that was like the elder statesman, let's protect SVB. Personally, like I would want the person who's like, survive, protect your money, get out. I can hear this coming. That's my first thing. And second, I feel like, I don't know, some of the reporters in the chattering class on Twitter is like criticizing, like the bank run people, like would they have preferred a situation where all the insiders know this thing is coming undone?

• 7:54Speaker 01

  They're messaging in their threads and then nobody gets to find out about it in the public. That's usually what reporters are like totally against. And so I think it's good that some of this seeped out into the actual public and people figured out what was happening, had a chance to react. Now, I don't know if like people needed to be shouting in capital letters like Jason Calcanis over the weekend and just like really threatening to create further and further fear for the entire banking system. But, but yeah, I mean, I cheer for information becoming public.

• 8:25Logan Bartlett?

  I mostly agree with that sentiment about like inside versus outside in communication. The one thing that is a distinction within bank runs specifically is that they are self fulfilling. Right? And so the extent of where you communicate it also manifests what actually plays out. And so I agree philosophically with that in mass, but like in this specific situation, it's a little unique there. On the, the, the VCs encouraging pulling out versus not, I guess I'll say what we did. We, we encouraged our startup founders to take at least six months of cash to make payroll out of SVB. Right? And hey, we, you know, we feel like this is, you're going to get a hundred cents on your dollar, even if the bank fails, but it could take a while and it could be a big unwind and all of that. That was sort of our, our prudent thing. Now, when I had a specific conversation with any founder, what was my advice?

• 9:09Logan Bartlett?

  That was what we communicated in mass. If I had a specific foundation, communication with any founder, my, my wording was exactly the same. Like, hey, here's what we're telling our portfolio at large. If I were you, am I going to fault you? Am I going to judge you if you pull your money out? Absolutely not, right? We're in the survivorship thing. And so it's, I mean, everyone's talked about the prisoner's dilemma of the entirety of this. And like any founder's job and potentially any VC's job is to protect their individual companies and investments. One of the things that I think is most interesting about Silicon Valley as an entity, Silicon Valley Bank, is we did move from this, I think it was representative. I mean, when people report on it, there's a bunch of nefarious angles that they can talk about, about like how they did, you know, fund, they were our fund bank, right?

• 9:54Logan Bartlett?

  And they were all of our portfolio or in mass, our portfolio companies banked. I had a capital call line with them, different people had mortgages with them, they were an LP, right? We sort of go through and it can sound very nefarious in terms of how it was all entangled. The one thing that I think Silicon Valley Bank represented was this generation of, it was quite literally an entity that brought the venture industry together, right? And it was intertwined, they would do, we joke about it, they would do Bottle Rock and like all these different social events that they would bring people together for. And there was this world that our older partners grew up in, in which it wasn't zero sum, right? You were splitting rounds with your friends, you were trying to help one another out. You were thinking of the, the greater good of the industry and what Silicon Valley represented in large, in mass.

• 10:37Logan Bartlett?

  And I think over the last couple of years, we've seen that lost with hedge funds entering the sector, with opportunity funds, with growth funds, that we've moved to this zero sum game, which is totally fine, right? Like it is what it is, finance plays that world as well. But I think there were a lot of people that didn't have the realization that we have shifted from this.

• 10:54Speaker 01

  Well, Dan probably remembers this better than I do, but wasn't there like a famous like Michael Arrington story? Where it was like, early stage investors were like in some cabal back room, like trying to set prices. That was sort of the old Silicon Valley before I started covering it, where it was a sense. You know, I think that's sort of bad. I mean, the collusion, you know, wasn't great. But then in something like a bank run, it's it's much harder to assemble sort of, you know, I don't know, the the super team and say like, let's put a stop to this. Or, yeah, Dan.

• 11:27Speaker 02

  There's also a little bit of an irony here, right? Which is that Silicon Valley created its own bank run in the following way. Like, this can't happen. You know, people said, well, how did this happen? So this couldn't happen 20 years ago because everyone would have had to physically go and line up at the damn bank to get their money, which takes time and is hard to do. Everyone's got an everyone, every company's now got an app and they can literally just do the wire. It takes very little time. Plus, obviously, the social media part. So Silicon Valley kind of funded its own bank run and and kind of funded its next bank run.

• 11:53Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, one of the things that I think is interesting, and I'd love your guys' perspective on this, is I, I mean, the faces of the industry right now, and we could say industry being tech at large, or we could say industry venture capital. But I think Elon's the representative for industry of tech at large, right? And as we've seen over the course of the last couple of months, I think he's come off, I don't know him personally, but I think he's come off like, and I think the technical term is asshole and how he's run Twitter, right? And I think that that's had big implications for how people view the tech industry and and the rich people in the world. And sure, that sentiment has always existed a little bit. I also think that like 10 years ago, we would have had, this would have played out much differently

• 12:35Logan Bartlett?

  with Bill Gurley or someone like that, very prominent in their ability to sort of get get people in line, at least to some extent, in terms of having a coherent message and communicating with Congress, whatever, people in DC about this stuff over the weekend. And all the different, like, more diplomatic approaches to at least having people kind of march in the same direction with some of this stuff. And instead, what we had over the weekend was people tweeting in all caps and people like attacking, you know, reporters for their reporting and and all these different things. And I kind of get the feeling that there's a leadership void. I'll give like, come on to my partner Satish, a lot of credit for trying to pull a bunch of different people together and kind of move in the same direction. But

• 13:20Speaker 02

  There was a leadership void over the weekend and a bunch of very prominent firms that you guys report on quite a bit were very, very silent.

• 13:28Speaker 01

  Sequoia and Andreessen in particular, I'd say like Sequoia is supposed to run the valley and like, where have they been? They've just been like, feels like they're just like ducking the news cycle on this. I don't know, Dan, if you would agree with that.

• 13:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think they're ducking. I mean, I think so. A few thoughts. Like, if we're talking 10 years ago, yes, Sequoia, so that would have been Maritz at the time. He would have talked. He loves to talk. It would have been Bill Gurley who said Benchmark. It would have been John Doerr from Kleiner Perkins, right? That would have been the group, you know, 10 years ago, maybe 15 years ago. I also think, you know, yeah, Elon is the kind of call it the avatar right now for tech, but he's the latest in a line, right? And look, and this partially because we, when I say we, kind of the general public like bad stories, right? Go back, you know, go back to Uber and Travis. He was for a while. Zuckerberg before that, right? And all most people know about Mark Zuckerberg is they saw the social network and to them that is Mark Zuckerberg, beginning, middle and end. And there's no more to him than that. So like, kind of the, whether you want to call it bad actor, or at least bad personality actor is kind of just Elon, to me, is the last in a series. He's,

• 14:25Speaker 02

  he's the most public and in most real time, right? It's not that he's being fictionalized. He's kind of a supervillain in real life, but he's, he's the latest in this.

• 14:32Speaker 01

  I mean, to really-

• 14:33Speaker 02

  And that, and that takes a, that takes a toll, I think, on the national psyche and kind of just like, I think if you go back to 2008, I think a lot of people, or even before that, I think a lot of people's view of Wall Street was like Michael Douglas and Wall Street, right? And maybe even Michael Milken before that. Tech is that now, or VCs are that now for the general public who doesn't, who don't really follow this stuff on a day-to-day basis like we all do.

• 14:55Speaker 01

  I mean, to really zoom out and agree with that totally. It's like the theme of the last Code Conference was basically Silicon Valley never recovered from the death of Steve Jobs, right? Like, Steve Jobs was a great standard bearer despite his flaws for what Silicon Valley wanted to represent. And, you know, there have been people who stepped in over time and Elon is certainly the loudest voice now. And yeah, I think the all-in crowd was able to be super loud. I think- You know, I, I think my personal view is just even though David Sacks is a super smart guy, like just the ideological contradiction in being very, you know, an extremely viral tweet

• 15:36Speaker 01

  saying, uh, there what, uh, you know, no atheists in a foxhole and no libertarians in a bank run, you know, it just felt very directly contradictory with his ideology that he was cheering for this bank run. Um, I would say, you know, Gary Tan at Y Combinator struck a good message and I think they were working hard behind the scenes and would like to see him continue to play more of a statesman.

• 16:01Logan Bartlett?

  I think another thing, I mean, with Silicon Valley, uh, as an entity in general, one of the things that has become very clear is people look around and they look at like what, I mean, what do I focus on? What is a large percentage of the equity value that's been, uh, delivered over the course of the last five years? Where has that come from? It's come from B to B, B to B software in large part, right? And there's been more and more VCs that have moved into, uh, doing B to B and doing stuff around software. And I don't know if, uh, I mean, and so then you look at like what, what, what actually has driven, uh, people, change in people's lives. And for the most part, those things all happened over a decade ago, at least when those companies were founded. And so the average American looking around and saying, hey, how is my life

• 16:43Logan Bartlett?

  different because of Silicon Valley? And sure, we can point to Zoom or we can point to Moderna, or we can point to a bunch of other stuff at the edges, but the things that actually impact people's lives that they use every day, those things, uh, haven't changed. It's Uber and it's Airbnb and it's Instagram. And, and in some cases, people argue that it's actually not made their lives better. It's actually made society worse, certainly with regard to social media and those things. But now all the pushback on DoorDash workers and go ahead.

• 17:08Speaker 01

  Not a winning message to be like toast was essential to your pandemic experience, New York dining, you know, like it was, but I don't think people don't love.

• 17:15Logan Bartlett?

  Moderna was, Moderna was like Moderna, and I think VCs did a shit job promoting the fact that Moderna was theirs. I mean, Moderna wasn't just like a couple of guys in a garage and they pitched a VC. Moderna was literally created in the boardroom of a venture capital firm on a whiteboard in Cambridge, Massachusetts, down the street from me. That is a VC created and backed company. And arguably, I think it is probably, if you think about it, the most important company of the last 20 years, because there is, there are a lot of companies that have made life better, some that have made life worse, impacted your life better. There are none of them essentially saved society. Cause if you even look at the Pfizer.

• 17:48Speaker 02

  Vaccine, it's based on mRNA technology that really Moderna kind of pioneered. So I, there's not a more important company in the last 20 years. And it's a VC created company and VCs did a crap job. But can I add as a piece of that? The NVCA has done a lousy job. There is a trade group that represents venture capitalists. Where the hell were they last weekend? Where were they? I know there was a statement put out on Friday afternoon or something. They were silent. And if I was a VC who was paying dues, I would be livid.

• 18:12Speaker 01

  I mean, you know, like Lulu, um, at Activision, you know, who's running their comms and was at Substack comms and has a great Substack, has been pushing, you know, VCs and the tech community just to be much faster and more open in their communications, right? And I think the people who are willing to sort of tweet as it's happening, get heard, and people who are looking to craft like an old school statement, don't. And I think that's true both for groups like the NVCA and for Silicon Valley Bank itself, though they didn't really even put out new statements. But it's just, you need to communicate with people where the conversation is happening.

• 18:52Logan Bartlett?

  Is this just natural, a natural maturation as an industry has gone from kind of this cottage thing to this institutionalized thing? And we have this generation of people that grew up in the world of SVB, quite literally, in which they were friends with, uh, you know, different people across different venture firms and all sort of worked together to split rounds. And I guess in some cases nefariously collude. But is it, is it that we haven't recognized that, hey, we are, yes, NVCA exists, but is it, is it something that we haven't recognized that like, hey, we need to be coordinated in this political way and have the message that we're all sort of singing from the same hymnal? And instead, because everyone's prolific tweeters and because there's all these individual personalities out there, people are just kind of shooting from the hip without a cohesive message, without saying the same things over and over again.

• 19:36Logan Bartlett?

  And now that there's just this recognition that we actually need to talk from the same book, i- i- i- at least with the most important messages?

• 19:45Speaker 02

  You know, maybe. I, I'll say, you know, there's a few things that have changed, right? One thing that's changed is I think we all, when I say we, I'll, I'll say people like me and Eric and Logan, you do, I think we kind of all used to know who the best investors were. Not just, not in a little niche, but like, who were the two people who did Google, right? Real massive outsized ones that even if you were very good venture capitalists were like, shit, I've never, you know, I've, I've never hit five grand slams in a game, right? There were a handful of those people. I don't think we know who those people are anymore like, like they exist, like, because it's, it's, it's all based on, you know, there's one huge hit this year and then one huge hit next year. And they seem to be often different people who are backing them. And then plus you have the later stage funds, you know, it used to be these companies would raise three rounds. It was obvious who the VC was who drove that thing and, and it's changed now. I, I will say though, in, in defense of venture capitalists and what they did, there were a lot

• 20:28Speaker 02

  of venture capitalists who spent their weekend, yeah, tweeting a bit, but really trying to work the phones in DC. There were like, and really, because there was a perception, I, I had this sense, certainly over the weekend, talking to people in DC, that the Biden administration did not fully appreciate this in time or not early enough, what was about to potentially happen, not just Silicon Valley Bank and kind of all the stuff that would happen with its companies, but the potential kind of national banking crisis that could have happened on Monday morning. And there was a lot of VCs who really, you know, from talking to me were saying, you know, could you try to, you know, they, they wanted mess, their messages amplified not to promote themselves or their companies, but to kind of shake, you know, shake Yellen, shake Joe Biden to say, there's shit happening here. Wake up.

• 21:09Speaker 01

  I, I think we're talking about this in some ways, like Silicon Valley failed, but in some ways, I mean, they, they had a massive success. They got the protections they want. And I don't quite get all the sort of pessimism on the timeline. Like this was happening on Friday and by Sunday they got what they wanted. Like that seems extremely fast in the political world. To me, you had people like Ron Conway, you know, I think he, it was reported maybe, maybe in Puck that he had like dinner with Obama and Kamala Harris, I believe, like around this time. I mean, I just had Lawrence Tosi on my podcast and he was calling Ro Khanna. It felt like every, every important person in Silicon Valley was on the phone with Ro Khanna while this was happening.

• 21:50Speaker 01

  And they, they got what they want. The deposit, the deposits got covered. Obviously the government could have moved. Before this, but you know, a lot of people in Silicon Valley didn't see this coming until, you know, the week it was playing out.

• 22:03Logan Bartlett?

  Dan, to back up to your point, though, on the, on the, who are the prominent venture capitalists? I do think there's a schism where 15 years ago, we knew it was John Doerr and Mike Moritz. And there was success also led to notoriety, right? It was this symbiotic loop of who the best people were, were also the most prominent people. And now with Twitter and podcasts and whatever, like being successful no longer is being prominent. The names that people come up with aren't necessarily the names of who actually is a good investor. Right. And who is actually respected in the industry? It's the people that are maybe the loudest on Twitter or whatever is the case. And, and I, Eric, to your point, I agree that, listen, we got what we wanted. And there's, there's a, there's a funny meme of Wario and it says like, I won, but at what cost?

• 22:46Logan Bartlett?

  I feel like that's sort of the way I feel right now about this is like, yes, we got what we wanted. But I think we burned so much political goodwill in, in getting there. Right. And I think also there was a lot of long-term damage in terms of, I mean, I don't know. We can talk about the psychological impact of everything that happened and how it's going to manifest across the, across that industry, across the economy and all of that. But I do think that there's definitely at least a perception that, uh, that what happened with Silicon Valley Bank and the way everything played out is going to have ramifications for things like Credit Suisse and things like First Republic and people's psychology across the industry. And so instead of being this little niche thing related to tech, because of how it all played out,

• 23:29Logan Bartlett?

  because of the chaos, because of the uncertainty, people are going to look back at Silicon Valley and say, hey, these rich people made this happen. It's their fault. True or not?

• 23:39Speaker 02

  By the way, there's a name we didn't mention here, which is Peter Thiel, who never says a damn word, yet somehow is considered the avatar for all of venture capital, right? You never, like, he's not on Twitter. He never says anything, but everyone blames him for, or credits him for everything. By the way, Founder's Fund, probably like, if you want to say who really are some of the best investors in the valley, that firm, you know, they, yeah, their returns are insane. Now I can't even remember what I was gonna say. Yeah, go on. I can't remember. I had something to say after that, but I can't remember what we're talking about now.

• 24:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. Peter Thiel's a unique case, just in the. You know, I think people are always looking for, you know, puppet masters and he's sort of branded as one. So then even if he touches something, it has sort of a super high narrative.

• 24:19Logan Bartlett?

  Dan, the point I was gonna make, do you remember it?

• 24:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, which is the one mistake I think venture capitalists made, and I think they will now correct it, and is they did a pretty lousy job talking to their portfolio companies, particularly the earlier stage ones, about cash management, corporate cash management, a bad job, like an actively bad job. This idea that I think a lot of founders didn't know until Thursday that only $250,000 of their cash was protected. I think really if you did a survey Thursday, like maybe Wednesday morning before all this happened, like they wouldn't have known, or if there had been a follow-up, what do you do then to protect your money if there's a problem? They definitely wouldn't have known that. Like the idea that so many startups just basically were keeping effectively checking accounts, you know, with 20, you know, would get a check from a VC firm

• 25:02Speaker 02

  and just put it in cash and bad, like weren't even putting it in money markets, weren't using Introfie to, you know, split it up. I think that is something that will actually change in the valley. It's a structural thing. It'll matter to accountants and the CFOs, not in the big picture, but that's going to be a change. I don't think you're going to see a startup get a $10 million check from Redpoint anymore and just, you know, throw it in an account and walk away.

• 25:21Logan Bartlett?

  No, and I will say, so our more mature companies, I mean, yes, there's examples of Roku and big companies, but our more mature businesses did have more sophisticated money market policies. And so the, it was interesting to see basically the scale of the business, like if you had a CFO in place, you were generally fine, right? At least across our portfolio, and that's what I've heard anecdotally. As you get early and earlier, that there are some structural things like, hey, you had to have a certain amount to put it into these money market accounts. And also, there weren't VPs of finance or controllers, or even certainly not CFOs in place with a lot of these companies. And so ultimately, our failure or success, as we think about investing,

• 26:03Logan Bartlett?

  had little to do with the risk of a bank run for those very early-stage companies. Instead, finding product-market fit and whatever, all those other things. That said, I mean, that was, if there's one thing across the valley that people were single-threaded through an individual bank and didn't have at least diversification of financial institutions that they were working with, that's the big thing that's going to be corrected. I think that's a, it's a very specific point that's very important for not creating this exact same problem. I wonder, I guess this whole thing, I sort of look at as an individual sort of niche thing and I, we're going to solve this niche thing for sure. The broader issues are the things that I guess I'm still sort of ruminating and digesting is like,

• 26:47Logan Bartlett?

  where are we in the maturation of venture capital in general and how the asset class actually works together or not? And I think that's where there's a lot of lessons that I'm not sure anyone agrees on.

• 26:59Speaker 02

  I got nothing to say. I agree with you. I, I agree with you. I like, I think it is safe though. I, I, it is definitely true though, that the general public does not like rich people in Silicon Valley. I think we can agree on that. That is what it is. By the way, that's not surprising. Most people who aren't rich don't like people who are rich. And, and, and the portrayal of venture capitalists in media, and I don't mean media like news media. I mean, you know, venture capitalists, I don't think, I watched a lot of TV as a kid. I don't think I ever saw a venture capitalist character in any show or any movie I ever watched. Maybe, maybe one. They're kind of around a lot now and I don't, can't think of any who have been good. They are either the villain or the buffoon. And then that's, that's the caricature right now. And that matters when things like

• 27:44Speaker 02

  this happen in terms of how people feel about actual venture capitalists.

• 27:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, I just feel the wealth inequality issue hasn't gone away and needs outlets, right? And by, I think Silicon Valley, I mean, I, and I don't think that's like to Silicon Valley is to blame for sort of the Trump tax cuts or anything like that, even though there are pockets of Silicon Valley that supported them. But I just think the reality is like Silicon Valley would probably be in a better place if the average American wasn't as resentful about.

• 28:18Speaker 01

  You know, wealth inequality in the United States. And so to some degree, it's like you have this unresolved wealth inequality issue in many people's minds. You know, we still don't have great universal healthcare in the United States. As long as like those issues are at the front of people's minds, they're going to look for villains. And so then it's, you know, the, the very prominent capitalists. And I, I think that's a lot of the story that's happened.

• 28:42Logan Bartlett?

  In terms of the, the animosity towards Silicon Valley, I sort of chalk it up to a few different buckets. One is that there's the money side of things, which will always lead to resentment. Right. And that's certainly true. Then there's this side of things that this is a group that is way more online and tweeting and doing podcasts and way more accessible than the average hedge fund manager is, or the average private equity manager is. And so you can get to know these personalities. I also think there's this, this element of seemingly people don't view themselves as pure capitalists. Right. And so there's this, there's this thing, oh, we're trying to help and we're not financiers in the way that, that a hedge fund manager is. And that could come across as hypocritical in a lot of ways. And so I think people will say,

• 29:26Logan Bartlett?

  well, you're actually trying to take credit for what other people are doing. And so shut the fuck up just in general about all that stuff. And so I think there's elements of all, and then there's the societal, like, what are we actually investing in? And is, is Instacart and is DoorDash actually a good thing for society? And I would argue, yes, but is Instagram a good thing for society? Is, and that goes back to the messaging thing of what we're actually investing in. And there's a bunch of things in healthcare that I think people are investing in that are going to be super impactful over the course of the next five years. Right? That doesn't touch people. One, we're not doing a great job of branding and getting the message out there. Instead, I think we can't avoid the fact that people try to jam crypto down everyone's throats for the last three years, right? Or five years or whatever. And who, what were the use cases that came out of that?

• 30:09Logan Bartlett?

  Not a ton, right? Who got rich off of that? Uh, DC grifters and just mainstream grifters. That was basically who made money off of, uh, off of that. And when we were saying that was the next big thing and trying to force feed that to people, and now they look around and they say, wait a second, I either lost a ton of money here or nothing came Out of it and all these other people made money on it. I think crypto actually in large part like deserves some blame for the animosity because we just kept trying to say, oh, this is the next big thing. This is the next big thing. And then nothing came out of it, other than a handful of people getting rich. Right? And so I think all these things are kind of intertwined to the part of like why Silicon Valley is now being viewed as these pariahs. But I'm not sure what the exact answer is, or if we just need to embrace this and we're entering our villain stage.

• 30:52Speaker 02

  I can I say, I think you are, and I think you should because, and I won't speak for you, but I will say in general, everyone can go, you know, crying to their pools of money in Atherton, right? Like tough luck, like, you know, there are, there are worse fates. And can I say, as part of a profession that is not nearly as well compensated, who also is probably more hated as a, as a rule, like, like it's always been lawyers and Wall Street people now VCs and journalists. Journalists, we get the short end of this stick here financially. We don't have the mansions to go home to. So like, generally speaking, so like, yeah, it is what it is. But ultimately, no one's going to stop doing the job because of that. People I think still like the job and obviously are well paid to do the job. And you know what? Like, I hate say, get off Twitter and then you won't notice it anymore. Like, get off Twitter.

• 31:37Speaker 01

  A couple of points. First of all, I agree. I mean, it's always fascinating. I mean, people just really don't like to be attacked and don't like to be lumped in with groups that are attacked. I think we're all guilty of that. And like, it's amazing that no amount of wealth can change that for lots of people.

• 31:52Logan Bartlett?

  By the way, I give, I give journalists far more credit of, you guys do get criticized way more, like the amount of mean comments when you run a story versus the amount of mean comments that VCs get. Like not only on the compensation side of things, but also the amount of vitriol that you guys get for.

• 32:08Speaker 02

  Can I, can I tell a stupid story about this now?

• 32:10Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 32:10Speaker 02

  I'm going to, okay. On what night was this? This is Monday night. On Monday night, I had written something, actually on Sunday, I had written something about bank bonuses or about bonuses, SVB, and I was getting a lot of crap for it. I was also getting privately some threats, like actual threats, like which I get, which isn't unusual, but these were a little bit more specific and a little bit more on the nose. My child, who I had taken to see the movie Scream Six, and I don't know this, all I know is my phone rings and I'm with somebody, but we're alone, right? And it's late at night and my phone rings. It just says on the, my phone, the thing says. Ghostface New York City. I think that's weird. And I pick it up and someone with that damn voice says, "You're Dan," says my name, "Dan, you are going to die. You have 10 seconds." I freaked the fuck out because I'm literally had just been sitting there scrolling through a Twitter DM of people who were threatening me.

• 32:51Speaker 02

  It turns out there was a phone number you could call and my kid thought this was hilarious and all she had to do was put my name and my phone number in. But for a little while, I was very worried about what was about to happen to me.

• 33:00Speaker 01

  That's terrible.

• 33:01Speaker 02

  And now I'll let you continue. Sorry to get so off track.

• 33:03Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, sorry Eric, you got through your first point.

• 33:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, the first is people are very, very, I mean, it sucks. Uh, nobody, you know, we're, we're social animals and nobody likes to be, you know, on the outside of, uh, the social group. Um, I mean, I, my, I feel like the, the corrective to some of this is just like, American institutions across the board pull very poorly, right? People say negative things about everything. People complain about everything. We have a culture where you can generate content by complaining, but the reality is that like, I still think Amazon and Google are pretty popular relative to other institutions. Like, personally, like if I had a major crisis and needed some like,

• 33:47Speaker 01

  organization to just like execute on something, I would trust, Amazon and Google, Amazon Prime, maybe Google depending on the thing, to do it more than maybe even like, you know, the federal government. So, on the one hand, yes, there's a lot of negativity. On the other hand, people rely on this stuff. I think Facebook has hurt, uh, the reputation just because people experience social media more negatively. Um, but a lot of these tech products are a core to people's lives. If tech should just turn them off for, you know, 24 hours every once in a while to remind people that they can't take them for granted. And it's like a service that is provided on a ongoing basis.

• 34:28Logan Bartlett?

  Good. Well, anything else, Dan? I know you need to hop here in a minute. Any other thoughts that are, or anything for me?

• 34:33Speaker 02

  No, I, I don't think so. I mean, I'm, I guess the one thing I would ask you is, do you think this is over? And when I, I don't, I don't mean the, the repercussions from SVB, but I, I mean, do you think that the, the banking tremors are over? We're obviously seeing what's happening with First Republic today. Uh, like, I think the, the quest, like there is this broader question of, You know, a lot of people are like, well, if SVB on the outside, if SVB disappears, who really cares? Some people maybe lose their money so long as they get their money back. There is the reality that SVB serves a very important function in Silicon Valley. And even if you want to say that all current companies are fine, that next generation of companies, there's got to be, it doesn't have to be a bank, but it needs banks who will do business with them. And the reality is that if we end up with just the three or four big banks, they're not going to open a line of credit for two guys in a garage. They're just not. They never have.

• 35:18Logan Bartlett?

  So I have one thought there is that when SVB serves such an important point for companies making it, right? And they still served a very important point as of a week ago, but they served a super important point 15 years ago when there wasn't this proliferation of venture capitalists willing to give equity financing as well. And so now as the VC industry has risen, I think the ability for companies to get going from a pure banking loan standpoint, I think that has definitely decreased because now you have all the equity value that people are, all the equity funding that people can go to, to help get off the ground. And I do think there's a lot of good business that if there's good business, people are going to find their way to servicing that good business, right?

• 36:02Logan Bartlett?

  And so I think, I don't know if it's going to be First Republic or PacWest or JP Morgan or Comerica, or someone's going to find the good business that exists to make money from Silicon Valley. Now, do I think that the elements of all of the things that Silicon Valley Bank represented is going to get recreated and that's more of the ethos and the bringing together of different venture funds and helping coalesce around these ideas or whatever, like that social dynamic, I think that is dead. I think Silicon Valley, as it was 15 years ago, died with SVB. And I think we were on its last legs anyway. And so I can't say that that's like the biggest surprise that we were heading in this direction,

• 36:43Logan Bartlett?

  but I think that's gone. When SVB represented is gone, the services that are actually good products, I think someone will service those if they actually are beneficial to their bank.

• 36:52Speaker 01

  I mean, I'm super interested in like the quality of Silicon Valley Bank's venture debt. You know, like, do depositors get paid back based on the value of the bank's holdings, right? Because, I mean, this is sort of a nuanced point I'm trying to thread, but if depositors get covered.

• 37:11Speaker 01

  And fairly quickly and they get a lot of the money if they would have anyway. Then this the freak out over the weekend where they got special protection. From the government like is Silicon Valley going to come to regret that? Given that they would have gotten covered anyway. I I just don't believe that like the freak out was really driven by a fear of like. A bank run like, do you think it was a sincere fear of contagion? It felt like self preservation to me.

• 37:40Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, so it was interesting. I sort of felt like the message changed over the course of the weekend. And for people listening, Dan, Dan had to drop. But I think the. How this played out and the message changed over the course of the weekend. As people kind of realized what was going to resonate and what was actually going to get fixed. Or what was going to lead to this being fixed in the way that people wanted it to be fixed. And so I think from a pure hey, like it felt like we Silicon Valley at large was losing the message on. Oh, this is such a big deal. If we don't get recovered on 100% of dollars, this is going to create so much damage to the economy.

• 38:21Logan Bartlett?

  And within all these small businesses and this isn't these people's faults. And I think all of that stuff, that message alone, I don't think carries the day. Because at the when all is said and done, it was going to be on Monday. We were going to get 250K of the FDIC guaranteed deposits back. We were going to get a dividend that I had heard was going to be on the order of 50 cents on the dollar of what everyone had in their in their bank account. And for the most part, then it was going to take another. Three, six months to unwind the loan books to get people back to something hopefully close to 100 cents on the dollar. Maybe it was going to be 90 cents.

• 38:59Speaker 01

  The vast majority of.

• 39:00Logan Bartlett?

  The vast majority. And so what were we going to lose in that right? And so I think it wasn't going to be that like I think losing 10 cents on the dollar for the Silicon Valley industry would be really damaging across a whole bunch of different psychological and literal cases that were going to play out. But at the end of the day, that wasn't going to get this bailed out, right? That wasn't going to get this bank saved.

• 39:22Speaker 01

  Right, so it had to be a systemic message. The question was the systemic message sincere or strategic?

• 39:29Logan Bartlett?

  So I think. I don't know the answer to that. From my perspective, I, uh, I felt like the psychological element of where this had moved over the course of the, the weekend was such that I was really concerned about the systemic risk that was going to play out. And now, how much were the people that were yelling on Twitter, how much do they deserve blame for that?

• 39:57Speaker 01

  That's where, it felt like a threat. It felt like we are gonna make this thing systemic. Like, I like Jason Calcas, and David Sacks drives me crazy. But the two of them, it felt like they were tweeting out like, we're gonna make this thing systemic if, if they don't bail this, us out. Right? Like, I, that, that felt like the message, like.

• 40:17Logan Bartlett?

  Well, and, and so I, I agree. I mean, some of those tweets, I, uh, I did not, uh, I did not think were appropriate for the time and how all that was playing out, all the all cap stuff. I, I didn't feel like that was an appropriate way to handle a potential bank run. Uh, but I do think at some point over the course of the weekend, the tenor changed from, hey, this is gonna be really damaging to Silicon Valley, to, hey, this is gonna be systemic. And I actually agree that, that, that actually occurred, that that change did play out. And it seems, based on what we saw with FRB's trading on Monday, it did seem like, absent, uh, fully guaranteeing

• 40:56Logan Bartlett?

  the FDIC, uh, depositors of uninsured, and also them raising liquidity from JP Morgan, it seems like we were gonna see a bank run at a minimum on Monday with, with them. I mean, they, their stock was down 50%, even with that stuff. And we're recording this on Thursday, and Wednesday night, they announced that they're gonna explore strategic options, including a sale. And so.

• 41:20Speaker 01

  And Credit Suisse seems way down too. There, there are signs.

• 41:23Logan Bartlett?

  There are signs that like even the psychological damage that that has occurred is leading to a bunch of these other either entities that are very close to Silicon Valley Bank in the case of First Republic and PacWest and Truist and some of these other banks or in the case of Credit Suisse, like another totally independent entity that has made a bunch of faults in their their execution of the course of the last couple of days, it does or years. It does seem that the psychological elements of a bank run did shift. And so how how much of that was, hey, this message is now the right one for us to play to get what we want versus this is actually what's going to happen?

• 42:06Logan Bartlett?

  It's hard for me to isolate like which one it was, but I do think both are true.

• 42:12Speaker 01

  Some if banks are really capitalist entities that aren't controlled by the government, then some of them should fail, right? If if banks are never going to fail, they should just, I don't know, they should be, they're pseudo governmental entities at that point, right? I mean, there is an acceptable level of bank failure, I would assume.

• 42:33Logan Bartlett?

  A hundred percent.

• 42:35Speaker 01

  Like, so I feel like framing this as, yeah, we had a big interest rate shift that caught some weak banks flat footed, and so it makes sense that some of them, that, you know, that's they got caught, they got caught out, they weren't ready. Like Silicon Valley Bank made a disastrous strategic decision. They were double exposed to interest rates going up. Their bond holdings were at too low of an interest rate, and they were super exposed to startups that thrived in a low interest rate environment and struggled in a higher interest rate environment. And the fact that they weren't hedged or prepared for that was like reckless and like they brought that on themselves. And the fact that nobody is willing to buy the bank outright, I think raises some serious questions about their like venture debt portfolio. So.

• 43:21Speaker 01

  From a Silicon, just as a, somebody in Silicon Valley, I write about startups, I'm invested in the startup ecosystem. I'm happy depositors got covered from pure self-interest. But if you expect me to say, I think it makes sense as like governing the country. I'm much more like, I don't know, some banks fail, like people get covered. I'm more mixed.

• 43:44Logan Bartlett?

  That's generally, that's generally where I am as well on this. And it's clear, it's clear we now have three different classes of banks that exist in the ecosystem. Right? We have the very clear, too big to fail, super heavily regulated entities that are the JP Morgans and cities and Bank of Americas and those folks. And they have, they have a whole bunch of different rules that they need to follow and different capital ratios and liquidity and all of that stuff. Right? And so I think we agree there. Then for the long time, we had everyone else, right? And Silicon Valley Bank fell into the everyone else category. First Republic fell into the everyone else category. PacWest fell into the everyone else category. We can come up with all the different names that were in the everyone else category.

• 44:25Logan Bartlett?

  But now I think what we've said here in the last week is that actually there's this middle bucket that we believe still present this contagion risk if given a, you know, handful of circumstances that I think the Fed and FDIC felt like they saw over the course of the weekend here, that we're also going to step in and make sure that at least those banks, and we can debate the definition of a bailout, right? And whether or not that includes bondholders or shareholders.

• 44:54Speaker 01

  I don't care about that. It's such like a totally semantic. Anyone smart knows what happened. Depositors got bailed out, everybody else didn't, does bailout, you know?

• 45:03Logan Bartlett?

  But it is an important like political football type thing that, you know, the branding of how it's going to get labeled. It is important in that regard, but that isn't a particularly interesting conversation to have for us. But, and then there's this other class now that I think we're willing to let fail. And so now we have these three different tiers of banks that exist in the ecosystem. And I like now the middle group, Silicon Valley Bank and First Republic are going to need to be regulated. I don't know if they're going to go all the way and need to be regulated like a JP Morgan or Bank of America. Needs to be, or if they're going to go, uh, there's going to be some middle tier that ends up being, uh, being decided from a regulatory standpoint. But we've sort of said, hey, we have three different classes of banks, right? We have three different buckets at this exact second.

• 45:46Logan Bartlett?

  And that middle one, we don't want to fail either, at least for risk of contagion and in these specific circumstances.

• 45:53Speaker 01

  I'm not disagreeing with you, but I just, it needs to be said that Silicon Valley Bank lobbied the Trump administration successfully in 2018 to lower the standards for regional banks like Silicon Valley Bank like this. This is like what you get from electing Trump. This from the, the low regulation crowd. This is what Silicon Valley Bank wanted. And then people like David Sacks can go on and say that the government should get them bailed out like that is rank hypocrisy. Like that is why people are furious. Like that's insane. Like at least support the regulation before this happens.

• 46:32Speaker 01

  If you want to get protected when it doesn't, but if you're a let the market run, then how can you be for protecting depositors? We have set limits, set new laws, like that's, that's what's so toxic about this situation in terms of messaging to me.

• 46:47Logan Bartlett?

  Well, and I, I do think that the, the point on the depositors and, uh, like the, the, your earlier point of bank failures have happened for a long time. And we have, we have a system of how these things should be handled and unwound. And what ultimately happens when that occurs, like that is as, as American as capitalism has existed, right? And now we've, we've said, hey, in certain, in certain ways, we're not going to let that play out. And that was to my benefit for sure, right? Over the course of the weekend and we were, I mean, I, I, I, my body, we had our annual meeting on Tuesday. And I was actually supposed to sit down and do a one-on-one interview with Greg Becker.

• 47:32Logan Bartlett?

  It was scheduled, uh, last week, we were supposed to do our prep interview Thursday. And I, we sent him a note saying, hey, like early in the morning, hey, I see. You're dealing with all this stuff. We're not going to do this, right? Uh, and we didn't hear back. And then by Thursday night, we canceled. We were like, hey, I assume you have to deal with all this. And it was, it was interesting. I was actually in SVB's office on Thursday as well, which was just like another weird surreal uh, thing to be getting calls from portfolio companies about whether or not to withdraw their money. And I'm walking through their office and like, you know, everyone can hear what I'm saying. But I will say that like, yes, there is this hypocrisy that existed with the lobbying and the efforts of all of that. And there is this, hey, good for me, not for thee type sentiment that has certainly

• 48:18Logan Bartlett?

  played out, right? And it's been very beneficial to me of how all this stuff, at least in the near term, how all of this played out. And uh, my companies en masse getting all their money back a hundred cents on the dollar this week rather than six months from now or whenever it was going to play out. But I do think that the political goodwill that was burned in doing this, right? And it was coming from all different angles. It was funny to see uh, my sophisticated friends in finance were angry about this. Uh, the left was angry about this. The right was angry about this. Like literally every person that I interacted with had some different level of vitriol about

• 48:56Logan Bartlett?

  what had played out. And I actually think it was the right decision. Like based on what we saw on Monday, uh, and over the course of this week, I can only imagine what we would be seeing for banking stocks and outflows and all of that stuff from regional banks if we hadn't done this. And so I actually think from a contagion risk standpoint, now we can debate who caused the potential contagion risk and whether what role Silicon Valley played in threatening that this was going to incur and actually scaring people to pull out their money and all of that. But I do think it was ultimately the right decision for the Fed and FDIC to do what they did, at least as I see it today. But we should also be able to hold in our head that bank failures are a normal thing and we have ways of dealing with it.

• 49:38Speaker 01

  I mean, I, I do think Silicon Valley and startups are one of the most important pieces of the American economy. It's where a lot of the promises and where we're extremely competitive. So I, I think protecting it.

• 49:55Speaker 01

  Is good and important, but it doesn't feel like we could make that that argument wasn't a winning one. And then we pivoted to the systemic one. Larry Summers had literally tweeted out, it wasn't systemic. And then felt like over the weekend, he was saying, this is not the time to worry about moral hazard. It felt like there was a strategic intellectual pivot. I mean, and then, yeah, the bank failure thing is still to be seen. I thought that, I mean, they announced, what was it Signature Bank in the same violin? Yeah. And I felt like that was like, oh, maybe it is. It almost like fed into the messaging that it was systemic, when Signature seems to have a very unique set of issues that the government didn't like for a long time. And like, so that just gets folded in. That made

• 50:38Speaker 01

  me super cynical. And, you know, I brought this up before, but, you know, I had Larry Tosi, a West Cap former CFO, Blackstone, smart guy. And he was, he thinks First Republic is fine, you know, and they are getting short up, you know, they're getting money outside of the government. So I guess, you know, I don't want to, I don't want to stake out some position that the, you know, banking, I'm not a banking industry expert, but, but, you know, we'll, we'll see what, what happens here in terms of the broader contagion.

• 51:10Logan Bartlett?

  What do you think long-term for Silicon Valley? Like, is it, is there a more appropriate messenger or branding that needs to be much more coherent in terms of how we represent what it is that we do? Are we just waiting on the next, like, if AI proves to be a major technological shift in progress, which I think I have my cynicism about, or my cynical perspective about some of the negative externalities that are going to come out of that as well. But like, do we just need a new paradigm shift like mobile and people will go back to being optimistic about it? Or do we need to embrace this negativity that's just going to come from all angles? And it's, it's something that we just need to be comfortable with going forward?

• 51:52Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, we sort of touched on this in the beginning, that I do think Silicon Valley is not the cabal anymore. You know, it's not whatever word we're using, you know, it's not the backroom sort of deal, you know, it's, there are different players who are competing with each other with different strategies. So I think the idea that You know, we're going to be able to all sort of coalesce and come up with one message is going to be tough. I feel like leading with the things that Silicon Valley does well, you know, like the Moderna stuff, to the extent it's helping health. I do think we talked about in this conversation, one of the challenges is just like, it's hard to tell people like SaaS is super important to their lives, you know, even if it has been sort of important to a

• 52:37Speaker 01

  lot of the developments.

• 52:39Logan Bartlett?

  I'm sort of, the, the impact of all of this stuff, I'm sort of still digesting the, the long-term ramifications of it. And it's interesting to see how many people seem to be realizing for the first time that, that people aren't cheering for venture capitalists.

• 52:59Speaker 01

  I'm surprised people are so surprised. Like, I don't know, that, that, that is not like news to me. I mean, they're like conservatives have been, you know, have like not very good, not very loyal to tech, even when they're receiving tech's money, you know, and looking for ways to attack, you know, the moderation issue. Like clearly that's been brewing. And then the left is just, you know, the far left is pretty anti, you know, capitalist. And then sort of the governing Democratic Party has been trying to split up big tech, you know, like, I don't know, this has all been happening. So that, that is not surprising to me.

• 53:38Logan Bartlett?

  I think the surprise to people was, and I wasn't in this bucket, but I think the surprise to people was not that there was animosity towards big tech, because I think everyone knew that. I think even towards venture capitalists, I think most people knew that that was the case. But I think animosity towards small tech, right? Or the venture capital companies and the perspective and the memes that sort of went around about what these businesses do and what their purpose is. Like I saw so many things about, oh my gosh, my subscription dog walking app is, is going under like Crimea River, or oh my

• 54:23Logan Bartlett?

  gosh, I'm not going to get my like, you know, whatever, my, my venture subsidized. Nutrients that are

• 54:30Speaker 01

  I just think I think Silicon Valley should see more that like promising the world to people and then disappointing feels a lot like lying. You know what I mean? Like, I feel like Uber and WeWork promise these huge revolutions and, you know, I still think Uber is a good service, but like, you know, some of the core reforms around transportation haven't happened, you know, like WeWork certainly is not a transformational industry. And then the clearest one is obviously just like the crypto phase where they got all these people to speculate behind them. And then it just like they, the valley just sort of moves on to the next narrative. Um, so I do think it's just like, yeah, um, being more accurate in, in the technologies you hype.

• 55:15Speaker 01

  Like I am very excited about, uh, generative AI and even though metaverse like, you know, is not what it was in terms of a conversation, I think it's still interesting, something people could talk about, but I just think sometimes like, you know, the money has been driving some of the conversation, right? Like Uber and WeWork were stories because they had so much money to do what they wanted. Like crypto was a money driven story. And so to the extent that venture dollars are sort of built propping up narratives that aren't supported by the technology, that inevitably crashes down. And I think Silicon Valley wins when it has great technology, you know what I mean?

• 55:56Speaker 01

  And it doesn't need like billions of dollars to prop it up as something that excites people only for it to sort of underwhelm or, I don't know. Yeah. Do you, do you agree with that?

• 56:07Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I, I think, uh, and I hate to, I know people, uh, come here for the, for the crypto love that we, we've

• 56:15Speaker 01

  Famous for, you know?

• 56:18Logan Bartlett?

  That we've, we've, we've really built a brand around, but I, I do think that the, uh, The ability to deliver on what is promised, right? And to be able to follow through on if we think these things are going to change the world in some way, shape or form, the ability to actually deliver on those promises. And also to have a cogent message on how this actually impacts people's lives is just something that we need to be better about. And crypto in particular, I think, was one in which people just spread it so far and wide and it was so

• 56:56Speaker 01

  Rapacious.

• 56:58Logan Bartlett?

  It was beneficial to a handful of people and flopped so hard on its face that, and so many people got exposed to it, quite literally, like the mainstream people participated in this.

• 57:11Speaker 01

  And I'm not against people working on crypto, obviously, but it didn't need extra hype. You know, there was like plenty of hype, like just like, I feel like if you're overhyped, you try to cool it down, you know? But like, it felt like people were just like trying to hype it more and more because they obviously wanted to just see the currencies.

• 57:30Logan Bartlett?

  The prices go up more and more. Yeah. Okay. Well, Eric, thanks for doing this.

• 57:35Speaker 01

  This was great. Sorry, it's a bleak time. I'm wearing, I have a tech podcast newcomer that I'm promoting in this comment.

• 57:43Logan Bartlett?

  I'm cutting that from this.

• 57:44Speaker 01

  I'm on a tech podcast and I'm wearing a hat for Alexis's non-technical podcast. This is free swag turns into great marketing because, so we have several tech podcasts represented in this. And I've been shitting on All In constantly on this episode. So that's four of them. You know, we can live in our little own ecosystem.

• 58:04Logan Bartlett?

  I, if, when you play the tape back, I think I, I think I tried to hold off from, from shitting on All In, but I

• 58:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, you didn't want to. I, I, I mean, I, you know, I've written positively about All In. I think, I think they're important and I guess I'm feeding into their importance by making them central to this narrative.

• 58:22Logan Bartlett?

  I, well, I was gonna, I, I, I thought of a meme I should have told someone else to do, but it's like the dominoes tipping over and it's, it's like, hey, let's, let's record our poker buddies talking and then it's like collapse of global economy.

• 58:36Speaker 01

  Exactly. Yeah.

• 58:39Logan Bartlett?

  Cool. Eric, thanks for coming on.

• 58:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, always. Thanks.

• 58:47Logan Bartlett?

  So that will do it for this special bonus episode of the Logan Marley Show. Thank you to Dan Primack and Eric Newcomer for coming on. Thank you, everyone, for listening. Hopefully, you enjoyed this special bonus episode. We'll continue to do that as things up that are particularly notable and try to have some topical discussions as well. I think we're going to try to show you in the feed which ones with different icons for which ones are the special kind of bonus episodes versus the standard interview style as well. I think this was one of the biggest news stories we've had in the last 30 years of tech, certainly the last couple. So it felt appropriate to have at least one, if not a few, bonus episodes about everything that's going on here. So thanks, everyone, for listening. Thank you to Eric and Dan again for joining.

• 59:31Logan Bartlett?

  Thank you to Rashad and Sam for their help with the production and hope everyone has a good weekend. Hopefully, it's a little slower than this last weekend and we're able to get back to some sense of normalcy in the tech and financial community. Have a good weekend, everyone.