E161: US strikes Houthis, market instability, Q1 rate cuts in doubt, Carta's major mishap, DEI

(0:00) Bestie intros! Friedberg's jumper (1:21) US and its allies strike Houthi targets in Yemen (16:24) Markets: Q1 rate cut looks unlikely, December CPI print slightly hot, soft landing in jeopardy? (29:46) Carta's mistake, why verticalized SaaS tools could be in trouble, Chamath's 8090 incubator (51:02) Why and how Sacks is taking on Slack, where Carta went wrong with founders (1:05:17) DEI debate: cultural significance, real solutions, Motte-and-bailey Follow the besties: https://twitter.com/chamath https://twitter.com/Jason https://twitter.com/DavidSacks https://twitter.com/friedberg 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://twitter.com/SpeakerJohnson/status/1745642200866738254 https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/saudi-arabia-calls-restraint-after-air-strikes-yemen-2024-01-12 https://twitter.com/DavidSacks/status/1745723423396118593 https://twitter.com/DavidSacks/status/1745604701654298826 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120885 https://twitter.com/Jason/status/1745514413782917262 https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/12/politics/joe-biden-lloyd-austin-yemen-houthis/index.html https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/why-the-white-house-didnt-know-about-defense-secretary-austins-hospitalization https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-11/fed-s-mester-says-march-is-probably-too-early-for-a-rate-cut https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/citi-swings-18-billion-loss-slew-charges-2024-01-12 https://layoffs.fyi https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=pet&s=mcsstus1&f=m https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=pet&s=mcsstus1&f=m https://twitter.com/karrisaarinen/status/1743398553500971331 https://henrysward.medium.com/how-we-handle-captable-information-c98d85d79277 https://henrysward.medium.com/should-carta-facilitate-secondary-trading-c319e0c9f080 https://twitter.com/chamath/status/1744414462986375440 https://twitter.com/coffeewithone/status/1744488896766042277 https://twitter.com/chamath/status/1745542094696145103 https://once.com https://twitter.com/jasonlk/status/1745552662572208473 https://twitter.com/MattWalshBlog/status/1742583950944432607 https://www.oscars.org/awards/representation-and-inclusion-standards https://wdwnt.com/2023/04/disney-ceo-bob-iger-doubles-down-on-inclusivity-and-diversity-during-shareholders-meeting https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/30/disney-ceo-bob-iger-says-movies-have-been-too-focused-on-messaging.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4722408/Brian-Truitt-ridiculed-Dunkirk-diversity-review.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/23/business/pilots-diversity.html https://twitter.com/Jason/status/1735164131806986441 https://www.thecollegefix.com/umich-now-has-more-than-500-jobs-dedicated-to-dei-payroll-costs-exceed-30-million https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy

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

• 0:00Jason Calacanis?

  Nick, can you cue the tape?

• 0:01Chamath Palihapitiya?

  This is now the worst form of a shot. Oh my God.

• 0:06Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, the fact that he hit the rim is a miracle.

• 0:09Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The most unathletic. What is? Oh, God.

• 0:13Jason Calacanis?

  I have to wish we could get slow motion down that.

• 0:16Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Oh. It's like the ball, the ball is moving forward.

• 0:19Jason Calacanis?

  No, look at his hand. Look at the right hand. Look, oh, look at that. What is that about?

• 0:25David Sacks?

  One handed.

• 0:27Jason Calacanis?

  It's, I mean, that has nothing to do with basketball. It was the most unnatural basketball slash athletic movement I've seen.

• 0:35Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Come on, wasn't that bad?

• 0:37Jason Calacanis?

  Hmm. I mean, the lean forward too.

• 0:41Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The lean forward, the kind of like sassy jump, you know, the sassy jump.

• 0:46Jason Calacanis?

  When you say sashay.

• 0:47Chamath Palihapitiya?

  He little sashayed on the side bit. Nice.

• 1:08Jason Calacanis?

  All right, everybody. Welcome to the All In Podcast. With me again, the Chairman Dictator Chamath Palihapitiya, David Friedberg, the Sultan of Science, and the Rain Man himself, David Sacks. Our first topic, we'll go to our war correspondent. The US and its allies have struck Houthi targets in Yemen. Sacks?

• 1:28David Sacks?

  Well, we talked about this two weeks ago on the show, and we talked about it as a escalatory risk in the Middle East back then. And I think that that is playing out now.

• 1:39David Sacks?

  We fired, I don't know, maybe 100 rockets and missiles at Yemen last night. The purpose of the strike is to restore deterrence.

• 1:50David Sacks?

  And I guess try and prevent the Houthis from attacking commercial shipping in the Red Sea. But that deterrence is not working. I mean, there's already a new attack by the Houthis this morning of a commercial ship in the Red Sea. So I don't think this is going to have any impact other than to escalate the conflict in the Middle East and put us on a path to war with Iran, which is really where the neocons want to take us. You've heard, obviously, the war mongers like Lindsey Graham are calling for that, but even Speaker Mike Johnson is talking about that. I think that's where this is all headed, is a larger war in the Middle East that features the US and Israel going to war with Iran. I think we should all be very concerned about that, actually.

• 2:34Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But, I mean, you have to be fair. It's not just, it's not just the US, right? It's now the US, the UK, Israel, Qatar, UAE, and Saudi against the Houthis rebels. That's a big alliance, and you've got to think that Iran will think very carefully about how close they want to get to the Houthis in the middle of all of this, because that's a, that's a huge armada, if you will, of countries that I don't think you really want to cross as a group.

• 3:03David Sacks?

  Well, I think Saudi Arabia and UAE are playing this very carefully, I think. They did not participate in the strikes. They did allow the US to fly overhead or to use its territory, but they released a statement calling for restraint and de-escalation. So I think they're very nervous about this blowing up into a wider regional war. I don't think they want that. The allies who participated in the campaign of airstrikes were UK, Australia, Canada, Netherlands, and Bahrain, but I don't think they actually did anything. I don't think they contributed any assets. They just provided their names to this operation and provided some diplomatic cover.

• 3:44David Friedberg?

  Friedberg, any thoughts? Well, Sacks, you posted a comment on Twitter, which I wanted to respond to, where you said China has the largest shipping volume through the Red Sea, and they're staying out of this conflict, letting the US do, do the dirty work. But the Houthis didn't attack Chinese ships. They specifically attacked Western ships. Isn't that correct? I mean, this is a very targeted disruptive event that the Houthis have been undertaking for some time now, and they're using these very interesting tactics with drones that can be very destructive and very hard to block, and doing it not at Chinese ships, but at a very targeted enemy.

• 4:22David Sacks?

  Right. Well, what the Houthis have said is that they're only attacking ships that are either Israeli or going to Israel, but in reality, they've attacked, they've attacked a much wider range than that.

• 4:33David Friedberg?

  But not Chinese.

• 4:34David Sacks?

  It may be true that they haven't attacked ships that are declaring themselves to be Chinese ships or Russian ships, however...

• 4:43David Sacks?

  There are more Chinese shipping containers on all of the ships that are going through the Red Sea and the Suez Canal than any other country. So there's no question that if we're talking about the disruption of global trade, this is going to have a big impact on Chinese trade, whether it's on Chinese ships or not.

• 5:01David Friedberg?

  Or it could benefit them because they can get through that shipping lane and the West cannot.

• 5:05David Sacks?

  Their own ships can get through, but foreign ships, European ships that have Chinese shipping containers on them are not getting through.

• 5:12David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 5:13David Sacks?

  So their trade is still getting disrupted.

• 5:14David Friedberg?

  And they need that.

• 5:15David Sacks?

  Nevertheless, they don't feel the need to engage in this militaristic response or participate in that.

• 5:21David Friedberg?

  So in terms of understanding implications of the escalation in this conflict, let's just quickly talk about, number one, I'm assuming shipping prices are going to go up, freight prices are going to go up.

• 5:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But hold on a second. We talked about this with Ryan. Remember the question that I asked him? This is really an issue for Europe. It's not an issue for the United States because there are alternative routes. You can go through the Pacific and you can go down through the bottom of Africa, right? And all that does is add like a five or 10% increase. So what we're really debating is what is the risk of inflation and a backup of goods and shipping rates into Europe?

• 5:56David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 5:57Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And this is why I don't understand why America needs to even get involved. I understand why the Netherlands and the UK and France and all these folks need to send resources to unclog this. That makes a lot of sense. But I don't see why the US needs to be involved, other than providing moral support or logistical support. What is the point?

• 6:17David Sacks?

  Well, Chamath, this is exactly my point, is the number one type of trade that's going through the Red Sea are shipping containers from China going to European ports.

• 6:28Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Right.

• 6:29David Sacks?

  And as a result of what the Houthis are doing, it's having to go around the Horn of Africa, it's adding two or three weeks to the trip, and it's raising the cost of a shipping container from China from, say, $1,500 to

• 6:41David Friedberg?

  Okay.

• 6:42David Sacks?

  $3,000. It's Europe and China who are impacted the most, but for some reason, it's the US that decides it has to take the lead in doing this. And the problem is that First of all, the action is futile. I mean, the Houthis have been at war on and off with the Saudis for a decade, and the Saudis have been backed by Western weapons, and we have not been able to defeat the Houthis. So this missile strike last night is not going to deter them, it's not going to stop them. They're very determined, very tough fighters. Second, they are going to be looking for retaliation. They're going to be looking for blowback. And to Chamath, to your point, they're not going to be looking for retaliation against China or Europe, they're going to be looking at it against the United States.

• 7:24David Sacks?

  So we're incurring this cost and risk onto ourselves.

• 7:28Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So let me put this question to you then. We have no obvious economic incentive to get involved, because we can sustain our economy through different shipping ports that at best raise rates five or 10%, right? We can absorb that in the economy. 100%, which could drive inflation, is a European problem. So there's no economic incentive necessarily to get involved. So what is the incentive? It feels like, not to play conspiracy theorist, but like a wag the dog moment. Another distraction to add to the plate. What do you think about that line of thinking?

• 8:05David Sacks?

  I tweeted something just like that. This does feel, it's a wag the dog in the sense that the Biden administration was looking-

• 8:13Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You want to explain the reference for folks that may not get it?

• 8:15David Sacks?

  Yeah, there's a movie called Wag the Dog that came out in the early 90s where the president is up for reelection, and there's a horrible scandal that's about to come out, like a Monica Lewinsky-type scandal. This is before Monica Lewinsky, by the way, but it really was sort of one of those movies that kind of predicted the future. But in any event, the president's trying to avoid this Monica Lewinsky-type scandal, and so the political aides and advisors decide the way to do that is to start a war. But they don't start a real war. They basically manufacture a fake war on a soundstage and in a movie studio. And it's pretty hilarious how they keep the whole thing going. David Mamet, who's a brilliant, brilliant writer, wrote that script. But

• 8:58David Sacks?

  this movie came out right around the time of the Lewinsky scandal with Clinton. And so therefore it took on this larger political and cultural significance.

• 9:06Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, it's been used.

• 9:07David Sacks?

  So yeah, so Wag the Dog is, you know, you basically start a war because of the political benefits as opposed to the real necessity of going to war. And I think you can make that accusation here, Chamath, because I think that the Biden administration was looking impotent. I mean, they were basically telling the Houthis to stop. They're pleading with them to stop interfering with international shipping. The Houthis weren't listening. By the way, the reason why the Houthis are doing this is they're doing it in solidarity with the Palestinians in Gaza. They've demanded that the Israeli invasion of Gaza stop and humanitarian aid be let in. And they're not going to stop interfering with global trade until that happens. So that's the Houthis' position. The Biden administration's been

• 9:46David Sacks?

  telling them to stop. And I think that they were looking increasingly feckless and impotent. And that's why they did this strike.

• 9:55Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, is it?

• 9:56David Sacks?

  The problem is that the strike's not going to have any impact. And so, so what's the point?

• 10:02Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, is it that? Or is it that? I think if you take the Wag the Dog analogy to the limit, I think maybe a different interpretation, I'm not saying that they did this, but a different interpretation of that analogy would be that they are struggling domestically. And I think J. Cal tweeted this, but if you look at the polls and you look at Dean Phillips all of a sudden, and you look at what's happening on the Republican side, there's so much activity and momentum, frankly, for non-Biden candidates all across the board, that that would be the most Wag the Dog explanation, in my opinion, which is like to distract folks from the domestic malaise by pointing someplace far away and saying, we're doing something very righteous

• 10:46Chamath Palihapitiya?

  here. Let's all get on the same page and support us.

• 10:49Jason Calacanis?

  How does that logically make sense, Chamath? If the US is against wars and people are tired of wars, like what would be the, this is the only problem I have with the logic of the Wag the Dog theory is.

• 11:00David Sacks?

  You think America's against wars?

• 11:02Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Who's against wars, Jason?

• 11:04Jason Calacanis?

  The American people. They've been very much against starting foreign wars. We've talked about it here.

• 11:08Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But they don't. So let's talk about the people that run the country.

• 11:12Jason Calacanis?

  No, I know that. So what you're saying, they're doing it, the logic here is wag the dog is to curry favor. Sax, you said they're rallying, this is to rally the American people around like a patriotic cause. But this isn't like a, you know, 9/11 situation where Bush got a lot of credibility for saying, hey, we're going to go get these terrorists. Americans don't want more wars right now. The polling is very specific on that. So then, I guess, Sax, what is the, the logic there to wag the dog if this is something American people don't want?

• 11:43David Sacks?

  Well, I, I think you're right, Jason, in the sense that the American people are exhausted by wars, especially Middle Eastern wars. We've just gotten out of two decades of endless forever wars in the Middle East. And I don't think the majority of the American people want to get back in. So I think you're right on that level. And it's true that if you were to poll the American people and ask them, are you in favor of getting in more wars, they would say no. The problem is that with every war, the mainstream media starts propagandizing for the wars and they'll basically demonize whoever it is that we're going to go to war with and explaining why they're a huge threat. They'll engage in threat inflation. And so the American people end up supporting it. So we're against war in the abstract,

• 12:26David Sacks?

  but in every particular case, we end up supporting it. That's what happened with Ukraine. It's even happening right now. If you look at polling for this Houthi conflict, I think most Americans believe it's a good thing to strike the Houthis. So yeah, they're against it in the abstract, but in each particular case, the media is able to manufacture consent for the US involvement.

• 12:48Jason Calacanis?

  So just to challenge that

• 12:49David Sacks?

  Yeah.

• 12:50Jason Calacanis?

  as well. So now our theory is, or your theory is, the media plus the Biden administration are in cahoots to wag the dog, create this support of a war in order to distract from domestic issues, in order to curry favor with the American public that doesn't really want more wars. That's where I'm saying, like, I think wag the dog might have been something 20 years ago, like you're saying that.

• 13:18Jason Calacanis?

  Could work as a technique, but I can't imagine anybody would want to do more military action at this point in time when the American public is exhausted from it.

• 13:29David Sacks?

  Well, I tweeted that.

• 13:30Jason Calacanis?

  Which is what you've said for the last six months on this pod.

• 13:32David Sacks?

  Yeah, look, I tweeted exactly that sentiment is that I don't think wagging the dog is gonna work. I think there'll be a short-term rally around the flag effect. But I think that overall, if this conflict is still going on in November, it's gonna weaken Biden by making him look like a president who's lost control of events. So I agree with you that ultimately the perpetuation of this conflict is not ultimately in Biden's interests. Now, nonetheless, it may factor into their political calculation that in the short term, they think this makes them look good.

• 14:06Jason Calacanis?

  That would seem super incompetent as like a political strategy to me, but I'm no political expert.

• 14:11David Sacks?

  I mean, despite the fact that this administration claimed to be the foreign policy grownups, they haven't shown a lot of competence. They couldn't even find Lloyd Austin, who's the Secretary of Defense for five days. I mean, no one knew where he was.

• 14:22Jason Calacanis?

  That's the one happened.

• 14:24David Sacks?

  No, he checked into the hospital for a procedure and no one could find him for several days. And there was an article, I think on CNN, talking about how he was managing this hoochie strike from his hospital bed.

• 14:36Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, that was weird.

• 14:37David Sacks?

  I hope the man's okay. I don't want, you know.

• 14:39Jason Calacanis?

  He's got prostate cancer.

• 14:41David Sacks?

  I know. It's that's sad.

• 14:43Jason Calacanis?

  And he had a UTI. He had a UTI. That's why he was in the hospital.

• 14:46David Sacks?

  But fair enough. But no one in the White House, the White House couldn't find him for a couple of days.

• 14:50Jason Calacanis?

  Is that true? They couldn't find him?

• 14:51David Sacks?

  Yes.

• 14:51Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, having a UTI is a very benign kind of thing, right?

• 14:55Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, he had a prostatectomy and then he got discharged from the hospital. And somewhere along the way, he got a UTI, which was severe, apparently.

• 15:05Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, okay.

• 15:06Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Went back to Walter Reed. And yeah, in those three or four days, the handoff of power to his.

• 15:12Jason Calacanis?

  Deputy happened. She was on vacation on a beach somewhere. And you're right. The, and the problem was that the other person, the chief of staff had the flu. So they couldn't escalate to the White House. So it was like a comedy of errors, but I don't think it was anything.

• 15:30David Sacks?

  But I mean, imagine if you were like a C level executive at a company. And you're going to be out of the office for a few days and unreachable. You would set up a clear chain of command. You'd have a deputy who the CEO could get a hold of if necessary. In this case, you've got the Secretary of Defense, who if the United States was attacked in some way, is part of the chain of command. The president would need that person in the Situation Room. So the fact that they couldn't find him for a couple of days is really, I think, unforgivable. How does that even happen?

• 16:02Jason Calacanis?

  Is that really true that they couldn't find him? Like they literally could not call-

• 16:06David Sacks?

  They didn't know where he was for a couple of days. This was widely reported.

• 16:09Jason Calacanis?

  But they couldn't call him on his cellphone or his chief of staff for the eight people who-

• 16:13David Sacks?

  Nobody knew where he was.

• 16:15Jason Calacanis?

  Wow. Yeah. Okay.

• 16:18David Friedberg?

  All right.

• 16:18Jason Calacanis?

  Very good. Having kept up on the details of his UTI and his cancer, I hope he's okay. So segueing into markets, the likelihood of a Q1 rate cut is not looking good. We had a slightly hotter than expected December. CPI interest rates hit a 22 year high in July. As everybody knows, when the Fed raised the range from 5.25 to 5.5, but they've left rates unchanged. If you haven't been following it, as inflation has cooled. But in December, the CPI rose 3.4% from a year earlier. That was just a slight tick above. And of course, markets are wondering, is this going to be a glide path into

• 17:01Jason Calacanis?

  a soft landing or could it be choppy going forward? Friedberg, higher for longer interest rates. You think that's still going to be the case? And what are your thoughts going into the new year?

• 17:14David Friedberg?

  Well, Larry Summers put out a note saying that he thinks that the rates are going to stay higher than the market is predicting based on the yield curve right now. So I think the market's currently saying no cuts in March and high probability of cuts in June.

• 17:34David Friedberg?

  But some folks like Larry are saying might be longer because inflation is very sticky. And if you look at the breakdown on the drivers of inflation, you start to think about what's the underlying business activity that's going on? Like, car insurance went up by 20%, which was one of the key drivers. And car insurance has always been this lagging indicator, but it does ultimately drive costs up later. The reason car insurance rates go up is because the cost to repair a car goes up and the cost for medical care goes up. When that happens, the insurance companies actually have to file with state regulators to get approval to raise their rates. And it can take over a year for the regulators to then approve those raising of rates.

• 18:20David Friedberg?

  So by the time the rates get raised, the other factors have maybe leveled out, but you're still going to have some elements of costs that are going to continue to climb for some period of time after you get the core engine tuned down. So these are the sorts of things that I think we're seeing in the current CPI data is that there are some of these lagging effects of an overheated economy or overstimulated economy that are now starting to play through. And so there's a number of these. It's not just car insurance, but there's a lot of things that are going to linger for a while and they're going to be very hard to work their way through the system very quickly. And as a result, it may be the case that rates are going to need to stay higher for longer.

• 18:58Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think the thing with inflation that is worth noting is that a couple of things are true at the same time, which I think is interesting. I think we were the ones in May of 21 that started getting very antsy around inflation and we started to look at the five and 10-year breakevens. Do you guys remember that? We would like, look at that chart a lot and I think it was very predictive.

• 19:23Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We also used to look at the future oil curve. You know, not that we're macro economists, but I think it's it's useful if average everyday people can have a few things to look at. If you look at those things today. It tells you the same picture, which is inflation has cooled. We're going through the last kind of like throes of some of the random variables still being a little sticky. But the broad trend is down. I think it's indisputable. At the same time, even with the conflagrations in the Middle East, if you look at what people think about the future price of oil, it's also down. Oil futures are, I think, about five to 10%.

• 20:09Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Future prices are about five to 10% lower than spot right now, for whatever that's worth. But the third thing, which I think is important, is we've now started to see folks come back from the new year and start to effect some pretty big layoffs, and they're across industries, right? Citibank today just announced 20,000 layoffs. That's a huge amount of people that are going to lose their jobs. So what does all of this mean? It's that I think that people expect that as inflation contracts, the money supply will expand, but demand has yet to reset properly. So that's the last thing, and I think Friedberg's mentioned this a bunch. Consumer spending has always been crazy, people living on credit, all of this stuff.

• 20:51Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That is now finally, I think, the last thing that has to get sorted out. So in the absence of demand, back to the way you started, Jason, companies will cut expenses in order to maintain profitability because they don't really want to cut prices unless their product really sucks.

• 21:06Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, and just to note that Citigroup, as you mentioned, 20,000 cuts by 2026. Google also laid off hundreds of people, Amazon, hundreds of people, Discord laid off 17%. And there's a viral video going around of a woman laid off by CloudFlare, you know, who was only on the team for like six months or something, or five months. And it does seem like, yeah, firing people before the holidays, laying them off is considered, yeah, you don't do it in the fourth quarter. So maybe there was some backed up layoffs that people decided to do into this year. But it certainly feels like Saks people are, and you said this, I think, in the predictions episode or the recap episode, hey, you know, maybe it's still going to be a little bit of turbulence and the soft landing isn't guaranteed.

• 21:51Jason Calacanis?

  Maybe you could expand on that.

• 21:53David Sacks?

  Yeah, my prediction for the year was bumpy landing. I thought soft landing was a little too optimistic. And I also thought that this big stock market rally that we had in November, December was too much too soon. The market, starting in November, started pricing in about one and a half percent of rate cuts this year, believing that the inflation problem had been licked. And now what we're seeing is, first of all, you had a slightly hotter than expected inflation report. And now we have this escalating situation in Yemen where this war in the Middle East might expand. And just so you understand, I mean, the Houthis have already said that if the United States attacks them and uses Saudi or UAE airspace to do it, that they will consider themselves

• 22:37David Sacks?

  at war with Saudi Arabia and UAE and that they will try to do things like light the Saudi oil fields on fire. I don't think they have the capability to do that necessarily, but it's an indication that things are very volatile. Another thing I think we're likely to see in the Middle East is continued attacks on US military bases in Iraq and Syria. So that whole region is a powder keg. And if it develops into a wider regional war, then I think you can see an oil shock. And if there's an oil shock, I think you can kiss rate cuts goodbye because that's going to percolate through the whole economy and have a big impact on inflation. So I just think that there's a lot of downside to these very optimistic projections that

• 23:22David Sacks?

  we're going to get these huge rate cuts. It might happen, but I just see a lot of risk.

• 23:27Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. Friedberg, do you think these oil shocks are here for the long term or a possibility? You've been talking a lot about alternative energy, nuclear, obviously.

• 23:39Jason Calacanis?

  And so is, and the US has become a net exporter of oil. So do you think this risk of oil disruption from the Middle East is with us for the long term or do you think that's waning now?

• 23:52David Friedberg?

  There's definitely structural risk because you have a supply chain that can get disrupted in a number of ways and limited alternative options. If you look at the chart I just shared, it's the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve. So we have about 350 million barrels in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve today. That's down from

• 24:21David Friedberg?

  Call it early 21 when we were at 650 million barrels. And you know, it was pretty much at that level for decades after the buildup leading up to 1990. We haven't been at a level this low in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve since 1983. And so there's not a lot of levers for the government to intervene to support the supply as there may have been in the last couple of years in the case of some supply shock because of a conflict that arises in a major oil producing region.

• 24:55Jason Calacanis?

  It's really interesting chart, isn't it? Because that was after the oil crisis of the seventies. And you look at how long it took to build it up and how large we built it. It's a really fast. I've never seen that chart before, but if you look at the, you know, I don't know if you guys remember the oil lines. Did you have them in Canada, Chama? Where in, I remember in Brooklyn, you had an even number or odd number license plate thing. If you wanted to get gas, you know, some days was the even number, some days was the odd number. I remember my parents getting online for gas and waiting for two hours or three hours to get gas.

• 25:24David Friedberg?

  Yeah, by the way, I'll say this is not a real cost today that we're experiencing. But as Sax is pointing out, there's a number of ways that this can become a real cost. I was in Austin this week and the thing that shocked me the most was how cheap gas was at the gas station. You can get gas for like two bucks and 25 cents a gallon. Pretty awesome.

• 25:43Jason Calacanis?

  It's like $6 when you're in Lake Tahoe.

• 25:46David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 25:46David Sacks?

  Just so everyone understands how the SPR got depleted last year when inflation was the top story, you know, on the front page of every newspaper and gas prices were hitting what seven or eight dollars. The administration started releasing crude from the SPR to try and bring the price down. And they did that for about a year and they were basically subsidizing the price of oil. Now that's why our stockpile is low and that was a really great political strategy. But if we end up in a real crisis, we're going to have less dry powder to deal with it. So, you know, we could have a perfect storm of things coming together here where at precisely the time we end up getting involved in a big war in the Middle East are.

• 26:30David Sacks?

  Tools to mitigate the oil shock that would create have been reduced by what the administration's done over the past year. Now, I don't know that that's gonna happen. I mean, I still think we're several steps away from a regional war. But you look at how many fronts now we have conflict in the Middle East. There's about five different fronts where there's conflict. You've obviously got Israel's war in Gaza. You've got Hezbollah in the north, basically firing rockets. You've got US bases in Syria and Iraq coming under attack. And now we have the US striking Yemen. So there's just so many ways that this could spiral out of control.

• 27:12Jason Calacanis?

  Isn't the SPR designed so that when we have an economic crisis like this to use it? Like, I mean, it's

• 27:16Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, you're the Biden administration is allowed to dip in. By the way, you have to give credit to the Biden administration in one in one form. It's not necessarily skilled per se, but when you look at the SPR depletion, they were selling at incredible moments in the market. And the Energy Department, I actually, I think they they just announced that they're buying another, you know, four or eight billion dollars to replenish the SPR. So they'll be doing that now. But they were selling, if you look at these price points here, they were selling when prices were eighty and ninety dollars a barrel. And now they're buying it back at seventy. So at least the United States can take some solace in the fact that we arbed out a few billion dollars for treasure.

• 27:59Jason Calacanis?

  I wonder how the SPR relates to consumption. You know, we see this chart, but it's in the number of barrels, right? Three hundred fifty million barrels or something like that? Is that what the chart says? And then it peaked at six or seven hundred thousand? I wonder what it needs to be, Chamath or Friedberg, on a as a percentage of our consumption as more EVs hit the market, right? And as the number of miles per gallon goes up. So I couldn't find a chart for that. I tried to find if anybody in the audience knows the SPR in relation to consumption, that would be a very important chart, no?

• 28:31Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think they're pretty independent, Jason.

• 28:34Jason Calacanis?

  How so? Like, we just build it up independent of what we need?

• 28:38Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is is essentially that. It's not meant to be something that's that's meant to

• 28:47Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Bookend usage, you know, if in a highly functioning market, there's theoretically an infinite amount of oil that's available. And so if there's more consumption, you'll be able to find more oil, you'll just have to pay a different price for it. This SPR is meant to be used in very different kinds of situations. This was interesting.

• 29:03Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, right. Like when there's a disruption.

• 29:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  When there's an acute disruption.

• 29:07David Sacks?

  It's supposed to be brake glass in case of emergency.

• 29:09Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Exactly.

• 29:10Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, but how many days is it supposed to last is what I'm sort of getting at. Like that's what I wonder because over time, are we consuming more oil now as a country or are we consuming less? I would think.

• 29:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We're consuming more, but the thing you have to keep in mind is that even in an acute shock, what you can't just look at the SPR because we have now domestic oil capability.

• 29:29Jason Calacanis?

  Right.

• 29:30Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And a lot of that developed under two presidents, Obama and Trump. And both of them deserve a lot of credit because we have a capability now to be self-sufficient and we are a net exporter because of the work that happened during that time. Yeah, not gas. Oh my gosh, do you guys see all of this machigana with Carta this week? Crazy.

• 29:51Jason Calacanis?

  Absolutely. Actually, it's on the docket. So those of you who don't know, Carta is cap table software. If you don't know what the cap in cap table is, which many of you might not, stands for capitalization. What is it? It's a Google or an Excel sheet that says who owns the number of shares in a company. This gets very complex in private companies and they've made quite a business out of it.

• 30:11Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Wait, wait, wait, can I pause you there? There was a lot of comments that said exactly that. It gets very complicated. I apologize. I've owned equity in companies for 20 years. What the hell is exactly complicated? I don't understand that statement. I'm not, I'm not directing it at you, Jason.

• 30:26Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 30:27Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But I want.

• 30:27Jason Calacanis?

  I can tell you.

• 30:28Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 30:28Jason Calacanis?

  Because I feel like that is like some BS statement. Yeah, it's not. The thing is you as acting as a price round individual in a lot of these cases, it was very simple to do a price round, but when you inserted safes into this. You know, a simple agreement for future equity that Y Combinator created and you put capital convertible notes into this. Founder started doing like dozens of these Chamath and at the early stages, the cleanup work and understanding how many shares people owned, especially with-

• 31:01Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But JCal, what I'm saying is, why, like, okay, let me stop. Let me ask it differently.

• 31:06Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, sure.

• 31:07Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We did this with spreadsheets.

• 31:09David Friedberg?

  Let me answer your question.

• 31:10Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Okay.

• 31:11David Friedberg?

  So, in a private company, let's say a company issues options to an employee and they don't have a good record of that. The employee executes the options. They now believe that they own shares. Unlike in a public company where there's a broker of record, every share is registered in a public company. You know who owns the shares, you know what broker is holding those shares, and every share is traded through a public exchange. So there's a record of every transaction that takes place with every share in a public company. In a private company, there's no independent legal regulator that tracks all the shares. So you could issue options to an employee and forget that you did that, put the document in a drawer, and the employee shows up five years later and they're like, "Wait."

• 31:53Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I get it.

• 31:54David Friedberg?

  I've experienced this. I've had advisors show up, be like, "Look, here's my advisory agreement. I was given options."

• 31:58Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I'm asking a different question. You're saying something. Great, I get that.

• 32:02David Sacks?

  I'll tell you what I think the killer feature was.

• 32:04Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Why is that complicated to implement in software?

• 32:07David Sacks?

  I'll tell you. I think the killer feature for Carta, it was called E-Shares back then, was getting the shareholder to sign for their stock certificates. So to Friedberg's point, in the old world, where it was all done by email and a spreadsheet, they would literally have to send you a paper stock certificate that you put in a file cabinet somewhere.

• 32:24David Friedberg?

  If you lost it, you have to sign a document with a lawyer saying, "Oh, I lost my certificate. I promise you I lost it."

• 32:30David Sacks?

  I think the killer feature was digitizing the stock certificates and then you would sign for them using like an e-signature, you know, on Carta, and they would just keep it for you.

• 32:42Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, I get it. I'm not saying that it's, I'm not debating the value, guys.

• 32:45David Friedberg?

  You're saying, "Why is the software complicated?" Yeah, why is the software complicated?

• 32:48Chamath Palihapitiya?

  This is not complicated. Nothing you guys have said is complicated.

• 32:51David Sacks?

  But what happened was, because I remember when, like, the market- Tipped, right, is I got one email from a company that was using eShares back then. And I would just do the digital signature and I started getting a few more and a few more. Pretty soon, there was a network effect. Like, I don't want to have to wonder where my digital stock certificates are. I just know that they're all at Carta. That's very convenient for me as an investor. I think it's very convenient for the company to be able to manage all this stuff digitally. So, look, I mean, DocuSign is not a complicated technology either, and that is, what, a multi-billion dollar company? Because there's a very strong network effect. You don't want to have to have all of your signatures at a whole bunch of different companies. So I think that's how it kind of got off to the races. And then since then,

• 33:36David Sacks?

  they've been able to add more workflows, they've been able to add fund management, they've been able to add a number of things to make it stickier and more feature-rich. And it's not that expensive. It's like ten grand a year or something like that.

• 33:49Jason Calacanis?

  It's kind of getting very expensive for startups. We're talking-

• 33:52David Sacks?

  Ten grand a year is expensive?

• 33:54Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, for a seed-stage startup, it's a lot. And then we invested in a company called Cake Equity that's doing it for like a thousand dollars a year. To Chamath's point, you tweeted, "Why can't this be a thousand dollars a year? Go to Cake Equity, you'll see."

• 34:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, can we, can we just go to my tweet? Like, I was confused by all of this stuff.

• 34:10Jason Calacanis?

  Well, we haven't even gotten to the story yet. So just sorry, Jason, go ahead. Yeah, yeah, sorry. So, anyway, what you're hearing is this software is very integrated into startup culture. We all have a lot of opinions on it because the cap table is where all the value is recorded. The cap tables have gotten much more complicated, but this is not like building the TikTok algorithm or ChatGPT. To be clear to Chamath's point, this is not really hard software to build. So, correct on that. And Sax, correct to your point, it's super convenient if everybody uses the same platform. And for a Series A, B, C company, spending ten, twenty thousand dollars a year on this is not that big of a deal, although there are cheaper options.

• 34:48David Friedberg?

  And VCs and investors use it too, to track their portfolios.

• 34:52Jason Calacanis?

  Absolutely. And so

• 34:53David Sacks?

  It grew from one to the other, just to be clear. So, I mean, first, companies started using it for their cap tables. Then they got into the fund management business. So if you were a fund, you were receiving all of your stock certificates. Then you started using it to communicate with your LPs. So we've started doing that. And it's very convenient for that.

• 35:09David Friedberg?

  So it's a real, it's more of a network effect business than a hard software business, I think is Zach's point.

• 35:14David Sacks?

  Totally, totally.

• 35:14David Friedberg?

  This business has benefited from the network effects.

• 35:18Jason Calacanis?

  So they had such strong network effects. Here's the brouhaha, the Donnybrook that came up this past week.

• 35:26David Friedberg?

  Donnybrook.

• 35:26Jason Calacanis?

  So you can look it up.

• 35:29David Sacks?

  I like that word.

• 35:30David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 35:31Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. So the company

• 35:34David Sacks?

  I bet you knew a lot of Donnys in Brooklyn.

• 35:36Jason Calacanis?

  We, I was involved in a couple of drugs, if I'm being honest. And they escalated from brouhahas typically. Not unlike an average episode of this podcast. And so

• 35:47David Sacks?

  There are probably some Donny Brooks involving guys named Donny.

• 35:50Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, Donny was typically the guy who started.

• 35:52David Friedberg?

  This episode is going to be named the Donnybrook episode, please.

• 35:55Jason Calacanis?

  So the company had a massive violation of trust. As they were expanding to figure out other businesses to come into, they got into what's called the secondary market. For those of you who don't know what the secondary market is, people like to trade stocks of private companies. You may have heard people buying and selling Stripe or SpaceX. And so employees, early investors, might sell their shares to other people. Now, this is not happening as a primary offering from the company where they raise money and issue new shares. This is people who have shares. Carta was in a great position to do this because they had the cap table. Now, on your cap table might be 100 investors. 30 of them might be your friends, family, very quiet, you know, it could be Jeff Bezos, who was a seed investor in Google.

• 36:40Jason Calacanis?

  Some folks at Carta who were in the secondary business, violated the trust and the privacy of companies who had angel investors or early-stage investors on their cap table and started contacting them directly, saying, hey, do you want to sell your shares in company A to this person? We're trying to create a market for it. They got called out publicly, the CEO, Henry Ward, who is a unique individual, as many CEOs are, tried to do some comms. It was a disaster of comms for a couple of days, while they tried to explain, basically breaking their own terms of service. And it all ended up with them selling the secondary business, which I understand was

• 37:22Jason Calacanis?

  a tiny business for them. Overall, your thoughts, gentlemen? I don't know if anybody has strong thoughts.

• 37:28Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Why did you say he was an interesting individual?

• 37:30Jason Calacanis?

  He communicates directly in a very effervescent, candid way, like some founders do.

• 37:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Effervescent. Wow, that's a nice. Yeah.

• 37:42Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, I'm just trying to.

• 37:44David Sacks?

  He's sparkling?

• 37:46Jason Calacanis?

  I think he is bad at PR, but entertaining to listen to, right? Like, I think maybe they should have had a little bit of a slightly more thoughtful approach to this, but it all happened in real time. So it's very difficult to deal with the crisis in real time, I think.

• 38:00Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I have two comments. Go ahead. The first is I actually disagree with David Sacks. I think that there's literally no concept of network effects in this business, and it makes no sense here. And the reason is that when you look at the public markets, which are infinitely larger, we have a vibrant public stock market that has no concept of this, and it works. Where you have companies like ComputerShares, you have companies like SS&C. There's just a plethora of providers that do fund administration. And frankly, I'm glad that there's a plethora of providers. I use some of them, and I trade one against the other to get a constantly cheaper price. We use the distribution agents.

• 38:42Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And depending on which bank I'm working with on whatever deal, I have shares at multiple different agents. And they also cost virtually nothing. And. I don't see a world where that deflationary cost reduction doesn't come to this market either, because I don't see this as a as a defensible area of software. I think it's a necessary piece of software. So I kind of like randomly tweeted out just kind of like, oh, because I was just watching from the sidelines. Now, in full disclosure, I was a card investor. I sold all my equity in a secondary transaction, actually. Speaking of secondary transactions, was that a good trade? Yeah, I sold it all two and a half years ago. So I have no opinion one way or the other on this company.

• 39:25Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I understand process automation, but I don't think process automation is defensible. So if you build software around process automation, you will be competing in a race to the bottom on price. That is, and I have not seen a single example of a company that's proven this otherwise. There are different companies that create real lock-in because of what they build. That isn't one.

• 39:48Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So I tweeted this out. Some person sent me this and Jason, to your point, the two most prevalent competitors that they showed me were Mantle. Never heard of it. I think one is a Y C company and one is not, but Mantle and Pully, I think, were the two that that came up the most often. And Jason, to your point, what they both told me was Carta is like 10 K a year, 12 K a year. And these guys are 90% discounted at a 10th of the price, which again proves there is not a lot of super compelling software lock-in here. It's useful stuff, but that useful stuff is eventually going to get as close to free as possible. These guys are proving it. And then last night, while we were at poker, I got this thing. Somebody in two days. Oh.

• 40:33Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Built an open source competitor and just put the code out there and said, here you go. Take it. Isn't that incredible? Exactly. Guys, that happened, that happened in two days from that tweet. Right.

• 40:45David Sacks?

  And by the way. I don't know. If I got.

• 40:47Chamath Palihapitiya?

  How crazy is that?

• 40:48David Sacks?

  If I got a stock certificate from what's the name of this thing?

• 40:52Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Open source clone.

• 40:54David Sacks?

  Buy by carda.com. I'd like groan. I'd be like, oh, here we go. I've got like.

• 40:59Chamath Palihapitiya?

  First of all, that's totally not true.

• 41:01David Sacks?

  And like five different sites and this thing's probably going to go out of business in six months.

• 41:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Come on, that's not true and you know it. You know it. You don't know where the certs are.

• 41:08Jason Calacanis?

  I can actually.

• 41:09Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You don't care.

• 41:09David Sacks?

  Be seriously annoying to have to deal with something new.

• 41:12Jason Calacanis?

  What's happening in the market with startups. Startups are looking at the alternatives. They want to save money. The bigger companies are probably not as price sensitive, Chamath. So, you know, spending $20,000 as a series B company, nobody cares. But for the startups, they tend to find the most efficient software and you're exactly right, Chamath, on that.

• 41:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, my comment is less about Carta itself and its price point. My observation is twofold. One is software that doesn't have a fundamental lock-in.

• 41:44Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 41:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Does not have pricing power, number one. And number two, we are almost at the tipping point of a set of tools that will allow competitors in a matter of days to compete with an 80% feature complete solution at a fraction of the price. That's my, that's my generalized observation as manifested in this Carta example in less than a week.

• 42:06Jason Calacanis?

  Well, what do you do with some observation like this? If you have this 80% observation, is there anything you could?

• 42:10Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I was like, well, you know what? I'm just going to go for it. So I.

• 42:13Jason Calacanis?

  I'm taking it up for you here.

• 42:14Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So I, I'm starting this thing and I've been working on this idea for a little bit, but and I've been experimenting with it with some of my companies. But then I was like, you know what? We should just do this. So the concept here is we're going to build this incubator. It's called 8090. I have a team.

• 42:30Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I have a bunch of developers offshore and we are going to basically create a hit list of software that we think is relatively straightforward and mispriced and could be built much more efficiently in 2024 using all of these co-pilots and tools. And our, our boundary conditions will be, can we deliver 80% of the functionality at 10% of the price? So at a 90% discount.

• 42:57Jason Calacanis?

  So 8090 is like sort of.

• 42:59Chamath Palihapitiya?

  8090 is what, is what the name of the incubator is. And what was interesting is when I tweeted this out, we had 1,200 people essentially give us a product roadmap.

• 43:09Chamath Palihapitiya?

  They told us the software that they would want. They told us the features that they need. They told us the things that they don't need. And so the idea here, Jason, I think is I'm just going to build this in the wild. I'll create the list of companies. We'll publish that out. Let people vote on it. Then we'll publish the PRDs of what the 80% version is. And we're going to work backwards with my team in South Asia to try to build these things at a 10% price point.

• 43:35Jason Calacanis?

  So Sax, your thoughts, you're a SaaS investor. It's your vertical. Your thoughts on Chamath's plan to be the most hated person in Silicon Valley by underpricing every piece of SaaS software by 90% in real time?

• 43:50David Sacks?

  Well.

• 43:50Jason Calacanis?

  Can he do it in your estimation?

• 43:52David Sacks?

  Well, I think there probably are categories where you could do that. But in general, what I would say is that it always looks easier from the outside than from the inside, meaning that you look at any particular SaaS category leader and you're like, this is easy. Like, I could do this. And then when you actually get into it, you realize that, okay, the product I'm seeing is kind of an iceberg. I'm just seeing the tip of the iceberg. Below the waterline is all the business logic that's been written into the system. There's like a much deeper and longer list of features. Not in every category. You might be right that in some categories, you don't need the product depth. But in many other categories, there's just a lot of subtle features, usability issues have been figured out, integrations, you know, with other.

• 44:37Jason Calacanis?

  Ongoing support.

• 44:39David Sacks?

  Ongoing support.

• 44:40Jason Calacanis?

  Training.

• 44:40David Sacks?

  And then you have the whole sales and marketing component to it. So what ends up happening is you attack a category saying, oh, this is going to be easy. You know, a year or two into it, you're like, wow, like the category leader, we're not even close to where it is in terms of table stakes here. And it ends up being more of a slog than you thought. And then you find out the market doesn't necessarily have as much of an incentive to switch. I'm not saying it can't be done. There are categories where I think the category leader has become stagnant and has stopped innovating. And I think those are ripe for disruption. I mean, look, I'm kind of trying it in a way. We're going to be launching my Slack killer soon.

• 45:19David Sacks?

  I feel a lot better about that because Slack out of choir doesn't hasn't really innovated in a few years.

• 45:23Jason Calacanis?

  And Salesforce, by the way, just announced zero hiring in 2024 and the Slack teams were like, what? How are we supposed to hit our roadmap without more people like what's going on here? So there is, there is.

• 45:35David Sacks?

  I definitely think it can be done, but I don't know. I think you got to choose carefully the categories where the iceberg isn't bigger than you think.

• 45:44David Friedberg?

  Well, Sacks, I want, do you think that there's a shift in the business model for SaaS companies? That emerges from what Tim is talking about where I think right now sales and marketing costs as a percent of revenue on average for a scaling enterprise software company around 55% of revenue or something in that range. Does that number get compressed by bringing price down? So you bring price down, but you need fewer people to go in and do the selling fewer.

• 46:10David Sacks?

  I don't think so. That has not been the pattern. I mean, look, everyone was saying things like this when enterprise software shifted from on prem to the cloud. You know, when we went from Oracle and Seaball to Salesforce.com, people would say, oh, it's going to fundamentally change the business. Sales won't become that important. Product's going to be all important. It was true to some degree. I mean, I do.

• 46:31Jason Calacanis?

  You tried to do it. That was your, what you pioneered at Yammer. You, you tried to do bottom up.

• 46:35David Sacks?

  Yeah, so there was product led growth became a thing, you know, and a very important thing. And I still think that's the best way to build a SaaS company is you let the users just try it on a freemium basis as opposed to having sales knock on the CIO's door, let the employees pull the product into the company, then go close the deal. So it did make important changes, but it did not get rid of sales. I mean, you know, what I believe doing this stuff way back in 2008 is we'd be able to get rid of sales and just make enterprise products completely self distributing. That never happened. People have been predicting that the death of sales for a long time and it's never happened.

• 47:11Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think your vision is absolutely right. And I think this in a world of auto GPTs, it's going to happen. And I think the way that it's roughly going to happen is as follows. I think what happens is that, and Zoho is another good example of how you can do this, which is what you need are a small set of tools that provide useful capability for a company that work elegantly together. Now, when you work elegantly together, there's a bunch of things that you need. You need security, you need handoffs and handshakes, you need different ways of handling exceptions, you need a. A common kind of data model. All of those things can actually be configured on the fly dynamically by and between two sets of software if you let the AI actually run and auto configure itself.

• 47:54Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And so I think the experimentation is as follows. You have product A and product B, you want to adopt them both. They have elements of an agent that can go and auto configure themselves to each other. Separately, I think what the CFO or the CEO does is allocate a budget and that budget is an agent. And what that agent does is works with these other agents to say, okay, great, I can spend money on these features. That is the thing we've not explored. We've always taken software that we build and all of a sudden pause automation and hand it over to people to run it through a relatively archaic go-to-market process. And I think what's worth trying to figure out in 2024 and beyond is how to use these

• 48:38Chamath Palihapitiya?

  tools to automate all of the low-level negotiation that happens before you can adopt software. I just think it's totally unnecessary. And I think that this is where software can do a very powerful job on behalf of the salesperson. Does it mean the salesperson is totally out of the loop? No, but I do think that if these tools are lightweight enough, especially the young nimble companies, will actually say, great, my procurement person is actually an AI agent with a budget. And it's the products that then figure out how to negotiate for the share of that budget and then configure how to work amongst itself. That is the key innovation that I think someone will figure out. That is the Zoho 2.0, right? That is the Salesforce 2.0.

• 49:23Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It's sort of this app, app store, common data bus kind of an idea that that I think somebody will build. I would like to try to help.

• 49:31Jason Calacanis?

  Well, people have started building in Chamath because you're starting to see the features overlap in many programs. You're seeing HubSpot, Salesforce, Zendesk. They're all kind of getting into each other's businesses.

• 49:41Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Those are, that's a great observation, but those are all closed products. What I mean is like, there is like a totally open. Protocol and set of standards for how

• 49:51Jason Calacanis?

  Sure.

• 49:51Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Product A integrates and interacts with product B on many levels. Right? From security to data model and everything in between.

• 49:59Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 49:59Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And I think that that is what needs to get figured out and be very much an open source idea.

• 50:04Jason Calacanis?

  The great part about this is this is going to be massive competition. It will lower prices. It'll add features and the, the, the team over at 37signals is doing something similar. If you look at once.com, they are also going to go after Slack, Saks, and they're going to just charge one time for the software. I think I may have mentioned it on a previous one, but their concept is, yeah, just.

• 50:24Chamath Palihapitiya?

  My gosh. Can we, can we take a moment? Actually, Nick, can you throw up my tweet? Can you take a moment to just say thank you to Stuart Butterfield and what he pulled off? Thank you. As a series A investor, I thank you.

• 50:38David Sacks?

  Yeah. 27 times ARR is looking like a pretty great exit multiple.

• 50:44Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Oh, there's my reply. Oh yeah. Look at my reply. Yeah. I mean, my gosh. What a deal.

• 50:51Jason Calacanis?

  And at the time it was, they were public and people were wondering like, hmm, was this a good deal or not? Should they have stayed independent? But the product velocity never seemed to get going.

• 51:02Chamath Palihapitiya?

  How are you thinking about what the critical go to market MVP capability is for Slack? So this here's what I'm curious about.

• 51:13Chamath Palihapitiya?

  There's chat, right? But the problem with chat, in my opinion, is that Slack has become totally overrun where you could be a five person company and all of a sudden you have 500 channels. So there's no scarcity and that scarcity is, in my opinion, what makes, what makes all corporate chats in this modern version, teams included, totally unusable, so much noise and distraction. So how are you thinking about that product problem?

• 51:39Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 51:40David Sacks?

  I totally agree with that. What you hear from every single company that has more than, I don't know, 50 employees is that Slack doesn't scale. Because what happens is you have a channel get created. And there's a whole bunch of conversations in there that are kind of munged together. If anybody in the company wants to participate in any one of those conversations, they have to join that entire channel. And as a result, every single employee ends up in every single channel. And it's just a giant mess and there's way too much noise. So I think that the channel model was beautiful in terms of letting people get started really easily. You just jump into a channel and start posting. That's why it took off, but it's not particular enough in terms of of addressing conversations to the right people.

• 52:25David Sacks?

  So that's basically one of the problems that we're fixing. The other thing I've heard from people is that we love chat, but we also really like the feed that Yammer had as a way to quickly scroll through new stuff. You have a top level corporate feed. People forget that there was like this, hey, if you want to get the pulse of the entire organization, go to this one corporate feed. We were the first ones to figure out that like a feed should be used inside of an enterprise, not just in a consumer social network. So in any event, I'd say those are like two of the main concepts is combining feed and chat in a way that actually makes sense and solving the noise, the signal of noise problem. Do you have a name for it yet? Yeah, it's gonna be called glue. Oh, I love that.

• 53:05David Sacks?

  Can I remind you, can I, can I remind you that as a, as a humble investor, sir, I, I, I think I was part of Yammer and Slack. So I'm, I can add value. You're in, you're in. There's this one requirement for the early investors is you guys actually have to use it. You gotta do a rip and replace on your Slack and. What? Sure, sure. If you're willing to do that, you're in. Perfect, I'm in. I'll take two fifty, five hundred K, yeah, lock me in first place. I'll take five hundred. So I think what we're gonna do is before launch, we'll do like a seed round. Right now, it's all been incubated by Kraft, so we'll do a seed round. I'll take fifty million.

• 53:43David Friedberg?

  So like sixty million, six million posts, six posts?

• 53:46David Sacks?

  I'll put fifty in at six pre. Fifty six posts. It's not gonna be that cheap, but it won't be, it won't be a super expensive round because what we want to do is incentivize, you know, influencers to like support the product, switch to the product. So it really is gonna be. Do you have glue.com? We have glue.ai.

• 54:06Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, wow. Nice. I was gonna get eighty ninety.ai, but then I didn't like it. You know what I got instead? Tell me if you like this. Eighty ninety.inc. So it's just eighty ninety, Inc. That's fine. It doesn't matter. Everybody searches. I mean, eventually you fake it till you make it. If the eighty ninety domain happens, you get it, or you put get or go eighty ninety.com. So do that before the show gets published. What is it? Get or go? Like, if people have an app. Get eighty ninety. Get eighty ninety. Or go eighty ninety. So, you know, if it's a service, you say go eighty ninety. And if it's whatever, you say get, if it's an app or something, right? Like, you're just gonna go get it here at this domain name. It's just easier to remember. I also got vcsascoboom.com. Oh, excellent. Well, I have wet your, people don't remember this for a callback.

• 54:51Jason Calacanis?

  I have wetyourbeak.com. I think it just goes to, wetyourbeak.com just goes to our website. So, I mean, that was the basic scandal. Saks, they let the sales team doing secondary, apparently, or somebody broke a rule. They weren't exactly clear with it. It sounded to me like, you know, they didn't want to throw anybody under the bus exactly.

• 55:14Jason Calacanis?

  But how big of a violation is it to let people go sell into the cap table secondary shares without the CEO or your customer even knowing that you access that data? Where would you put that on a violation of trust scale?

• 55:27David Sacks?

  I think it was a huge issue for them because the only reason startups give their data to Carta is because they trust them to keep it private.

• 55:36Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 55:36David Sacks?

  And I think a big part of the problem with the Carta vision of creating the secondary marketplace is that founders don't want it. Fundamentally, that's the problem. I mean, Carta is in the perfect position to rationalize and make liquid the secondary market. The vision was correct in that sense. And the reason for that is because Carta not only has the cap table and they know who all the investors are, they also have all the documents. They got all of your corporate documents, the bylaws, all that kind of stuff. They can very easily execute these transactions. So Carta was in a great position to replace all of these secondary brokers who are running around creating books on their own. The problem they have is that, at the end of the day, founders don't really want secondary markets

• 56:19David Sacks?

  to take place in their company's shares. And I think there's a few reasons for that. One is price discovery. I think a lot of these startups now, if their shares were to be freely traded, would be trading below.

• 56:32Jason Calacanis?

  Bad timing.

• 56:34David Sacks?

  Below the last round's mark, so they don't want it. Second, the founders don't necessarily want their investors getting out and then getting new investors on the cap table that they don't know. So founders are somewhat particular about who their shareholders are. It's different than public companies in that way. I mean, Apple doesn't really care who its shareholders are. Private companies do care.

• 56:54Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Do you think that that's sustainable in a world where companies take 14 or 15 years and they're trying to retain talent?

• 57:00David Sacks?

  Well, I think it would be better for everybody if there was more organized liquidity. I mean, one of the things I love that SpaceX has done is that for the last number of years now, they've had a tender offer every year.

• 57:12Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Not even every year, like almost every quarter, right?

• 57:14Jason Calacanis?

  It's every six months, I think, was what my understanding of it is. But yeah, I mean, it would be good for this.

• 57:19David Sacks?

  Think about that example. So with SpaceX, it's been up and to the right on a pretty consistent basis. So every tender round has been a bump. Sometimes it's been a small bump, sometimes it's been a larger bump. The company I don't think has gotten greedy. So they haven't tried to shoot the moon and raise the valuation too much. So they've been able to keep a very organized process. And they've had this attitude from the beginning of letting their employees and investors get liquidity when they need to. So it's been great. But that's very different. By the way, that sort of organized tender process is very different than the secondary market that Carta was organizing, right? Because Carta was trying to do what all these secondary brokers are doing, which is they hit up people one at a time and just say, are you looking to buy or sell? And they're trying to organize secondary transactions

• 58:04David Sacks?

  that are not part of an official process. And I think that's a huge part of the problem here.

• 58:11Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Freeberry, did you have thoughts on it?

• 58:13David Friedberg?

  Well, I mean, there's an element of secondary transactions in private companies that are unstructured generally being a problem. The issue with Carta was was there a violation of trust with respect to the transparency onto the cap table that they have access to because they have all the data in their systems? And when I was at Google in oh four or so, Sergey was kind of throwing around the idea, why don't we start a hedge fund? Because we have all this data about what people are searching for and we can see all of this consumer behavior. And we could trade on that and have a huge data advantage in the marketplace. And ultimately,

• 58:52David Friedberg?

  Whether or not there was an impropriety of the use of data, and even if we excluded personal data and search data, just using internet-based traffic and internet data, the perception of the problem would have damaged Google's brand so much. First of all, is there an actual conflict where you're taking people's, what they consider to be private data, and using that to make money from their data without their permission or acknowledgement or explicit consent? And secondly, even if you are doing this in a way that doesn't use their data, because you generally have knowledge about who buyers and sellers are in the market, outside of your software, the view that you may be using the data in conflict can damage your brand and damage your customer relationship so much. So it seems in hindsight a little silly,

• 59:36David Friedberg?

  but I think to Chamath's point earlier, it may indicate the necessity for them to think about building another business on top of this core software business that is a more true marketplace-driven business, so they can make, you know, over time, more money. And that's probably where this all came from. They saw a need to build something that was more than just monthly subscription fees.

• 59:54Chamath Palihapitiya?

  They weren't making money from it, and they shut it down.

• 59:57David Sacks?

  It's true that Carta is trying to become a multi-product business. They started with, you know, startup cap tables, then they added fund management, then they added this broker business. But if you read Henry's last blog, the secondary market is what he originally wanted to disrupt. Is he always wanted to create the secondary market? And he created the cap table business, the SaaS software, as a way to get to that. I think what he's realized is that the real value is in the SaaS software, and this marketplace is not that valuable. I mean, the SaaS business is doing something like 250 million a year of revenue, and the broker business is only doing a few million, yeah, 3 million. So I think the value has turned out to be in the SaaS. And moreover, this broker business was compromising

• 1:00:42David Sacks?

  the trust and safety, or the perception of trust that the company has from customers.

• 1:00:49Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The problem with that SaaS revenue is if you look at Mantle and Pulli, that 250 million could be 25 million.

• 1:00:56David Friedberg?

  And cake.

• 1:00:57Jason Calacanis?

  My investment, yeah.

• 1:00:58Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And cake, sorry. Yeah, and cake. But but the point is, the fact that there are there are many competitors, I think is a sign of the of a low barrier to entry and a lack of a true fundamental lock in.

• 1:01:11David Sacks?

  Let's say you are an investor and you're looking at Polly or Mantle. Why would you even think that's an attractive company to invest in if success looks like you're compressing a $250 million market down to 25 million? Like, what's the point?

• 1:01:25Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well,

• 1:01:25David Sacks?

  I I think a lot of these competitors got funded during the whole Zerp era where everything got funded. I mean, if you were to if you were to look at that market today, why would you even fund a disruptor?

• 1:01:34Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, so, look, I think Mantle

• 1:01:36Jason Calacanis?

  There are other strategies to, you know, there's other strategies you could add on to this and adjacencies.

• 1:01:41Chamath Palihapitiya?

  My understanding is Mantle and Polly raised in the low, single-digit millions. That gives them a lot of room to run a 25 and 50 million dollar business profitably and never raise any more money. The problem is, on the opposite side, if you raise money at eight or nine or 10 billion dollars, when companies trade at 20 times, and now companies trade at six times, now, all of a sudden, you have to have 1.3 billion dollars of revenue a year to break even. And I think that's the real problem. So it's not that Henry hasn't built a great company. I think he deserves a lot of credit. The question is entry point, and the question is upside. And the upside is governed by the difficulty of the things that you're doing and how much pricing power you have for those difficult things.

• 1:02:23Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And so I think what we're realizing is that there are few difficult things in software. Few. I was just like, it's just true. And as a result, every product, this is not a Carta thing, every product will see a ton of competitors. So the only thing that you can do is have an extremely leveraged OpEx and an extremely low cost to serve. That is the only predictive protective mechanism one has, it seems to me, on the outside looking in.

• 1:02:52Jason Calacanis?

  Network effects are also important.

• 1:02:54Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Unless you have an Instagram, you're right, that product is infinitely better with everybody. Or a TikTok, great. Now you can just you can spend as much money as you want.

• 1:03:03Jason Calacanis?

  Airbnb, yeah.

• 1:03:04Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But that's not what I think procedural software is.

• 1:03:10David Sacks?

  Yeah, I don't know. I mean, look, we're gonna just have to agree to disagree. I think there is some pricing risk to card it from these competitors, but my guess is it ends up being stickier than that. But in any event, I mean, I do think that Henry, at the end of the day, pulled off a nice save by just getting rid of the business.

• 1:03:26Jason Calacanis?

  I agree with that.

• 1:03:27David Sacks?

  Altogether. I think that was a smart way to respond. Clearly, the first response didn't work.

• 1:03:32Jason Calacanis?

  No.

• 1:03:33David Sacks?

  The first response was sort of like a very

• 1:03:35Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:35David Sacks?

  Yeah, it was a very confusing denial where he said, this isn't our policy, but

• 1:03:40Jason Calacanis?

  And he also blamed, he also got into it and blamed the person who called him out on it was like, why are you calling us out on this? And then like every founder was like, because you violated our trust. And he was like, oh yeah, sorry.

• 1:03:51David Sacks?

  Yeah, well, also people were showing, people were showing like email campaigns that have been going on for months and it seemed much more organized and it

• 1:03:59Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:59David Sacks?

  It was very hard to believe that this was just an accident instead of a deliberate strategy. And you could see the whole startup community was, was, you know, evaluating its options in real time on X.

• 1:04:09Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:09David Sacks?

  And that's when he came out and hit the whole thing with a sledgehammer and just said, we're gonna get out of this business.

• 1:04:13Jason Calacanis?

  Smart move.

• 1:04:14David Sacks?

  And I think it was really smart to do that. It's kind of called the crisis. Like I said, I don't think this is a business that startup founders want their cap table software to be engaged in.

• 1:04:26Jason Calacanis?

  No, definitely not.

• 1:04:27David Sacks?

  And just by the way, just a third point on that, you know, one reason was price discovery. Another reason was having undesirable shareholders. The third reason is just founders don't want to create a competing fundraising process to primary financing.

• 1:04:39Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:40David Sacks?

  I think this is actually a really important point. The reason why founders don't want there to be a secondary market is because their company may need to raise money.

• 1:04:48Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, you want to go through the front door to the CEO and the board, not the side door to get a, get some, you know, exposure to the company.

• 1:04:55David Sacks?

  Well, I think, I think in the Zerp era where there was all this excess funding flying around, then it kind of made sense to let secondaries happen. But in a world in which funding is scarce, you want that money to go into the company, not into the pockets of the early shareholders. And so I think like the timing of this whole thing is like really off. It all feels like kind of a function of Zerp in its own way.

• 1:05:16Jason Calacanis?

  Agreed. All right, Zach, you were in the group chat talking about this viral clip about Star Wars. You wanted to chime in on it. Maybe you could cue it up, Nick?

• 1:05:25David Sacks?

  I mean, as you may recall, my pick for business loser of 2023 was Disney. And it seems like they haven't learned anything from the horrible year they've just had.

• 1:05:34Speaker 04

  What is the balance of activating a force for change?

• 1:05:39Speaker 04

  But also trying to permeate that patriarchy, that power structure. And is that a part of the calculation of your art as well? And, and what's been the reaction to that?

• 1:05:54Speaker 05

  Oh, absolutely. Um, I like to make men uncomfortable. I enjoy making men uncomfortable.

• 1:06:04David Sacks?

  This is the new director of Star Wars. All right, your thoughts, Sam? Well, I saw the comment on that tweet was, this is gonna be the biggest Disney flop yet. Isn't that what it said? I mean, look, I, I don't know what Bob Iger is doing. He seems to wanna burn Star Wars to the ground like the rest of the Disney brands by playing politics. This director doesn't seem to have had a lifelong fandom for the franchise. And she didn't really talk about how she had grown up marinating in this universe, loving its characters. Her background is in documentary filmmaking, and there's nothing wrong with that. But there's no indication from her that she truly loves Star Wars. And in fact, the comments that she's making right now are indicating that she's gonna politicize it.

• 1:06:48David Sacks?

  The patriarchy is not why anybody is a fan of Star Wars or goes to see its movies. So nobody wants to see that movie. It's the opposite. It's the opposite. They wanna avoid it. They don't go to Star Wars movies for the politics. And she's also trying to solve a problem that doesn't really exist. I mean, science fiction may skew male in its fanbase, but it's not because sci-fi franchises don't like strong female characters. I mean, just stepping out to the larger world for a second. You've got Ripley in Aliens. You've got Sarah Connor in the Terminator movies. You've got-

• 1:07:22David Friedberg?

  Princess Leia.

• 1:07:24David Sacks?

  Trinity in the Matrix. You've got Princess Leia, Padme, Ahsoka in Star Wars. You seem to know a lot of these female characters. You're deep in Star Wars. Dude, I'm a Star Wars geek. You've got some good pulls here. So it's not this idea that there aren't strong female characters in Star Wars is, that's just kind of a myth, right? Yeah. So it's not, it's not like the universe needs to be reset in this way. And you could just see the whole fan community kinda groaned at this comment because they're just like, oh, here we go again. Star Wars is gonna ruin another franchise by playing politics. And the amazing thing is that, is that, you know, Iger just doesn't seem to learn from this at all.

• 1:08:05David Friedberg?

  But there's nothing wrong with having a female director either, right, Sacks? I mean, you're not saying that. You're saying that a particular person who has a political agenda in how they want to shape the story of Star Wars is the issue.

• 1:08:16David Sacks?

  Of course.

• 1:08:17David Friedberg?

  Right.

• 1:08:17David Sacks?

  Of course.

• 1:08:17David Friedberg?

  Now, I'll also say, I think one of the core driving narratives, emotional narratives of Star Wars is the oppressor-oppressed.

• 1:08:26Jason Calacanis?

  It's a highly political, it's a highly political storyline.

• 1:08:29David Friedberg?

  Well, I've always said, I think Star Wars has been like the most anti-technology effector in society since the 70s because Star Wars is all about the, I've said this before, but the Ewoks destroying the Death Star and like the no-tech overcoming the oppressor big tech. And so we have to destroy big tech and anyone who has the better technology is very likely the oppressor and they have all the wealth and they have all the power and they have all the control. And so those who do not have the power, do not have the wealth, do not have the control, do not have the technology, have to go and destroy that, whether it's the Empire or that, you know, kind of evil force. And that's the core narrative of Star Wars. So I do think that at its heart, Star Wars in and of itself is an oppressor-oppressed

• 1:09:13David Friedberg?

  storyline that relates very deeply to technology and wealth and has helped shape the Western psyche for a couple of decades in a very meaningful way, or has really reflected maybe perhaps the Western psyche in a very meaningful way.

• 1:09:26Jason Calacanis?

  What did you think of Andor?

• 1:09:27David Sacks?

  I think you're superimposing current day terminology on a movie that was created in, the first one in the 1970s, when intersectionality did not exist. Yes, there are political overtones to Star Wars. You've got the rebel alliance against the Empire. That is not diversity politics. Sorry, it's about...

• 1:09:48David Friedberg?

  I'm not saying diversity politics.

• 1:09:49David Sacks?

  It's really about the corruption of power. I mean, you know, the famous phrase by Lord Acton, which is power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. To me, those are the political overtones of Star Wars. It's not...

• 1:10:02David Friedberg?

  Yeah, so you always have to destroy that.

• 1:10:04David Sacks?

  ...dividing the world into intersectional categories.

• 1:10:06Jason Calacanis?

  It was about war. I mean, let's be honest, it was, Lucas was a child of the Vietnam War era and he was highly influenced, as was Francis Ford Coppola and...

• 1:10:14David Friedberg?

  The Americans with all this wealth and power came into the jungle to try and destroy a peasant nation and cause death upon a peasant nation. And the peasant nation survived and won. And there was a narrative to that that I think is reflected in this and is reflected very deeply in a lot of the stories that have come since. And I'm not saying DEI is as a solution was the storyline out of the original Star Wars, but the original Star Wars was very much driven by the leverage that technology provides to those in power. That gives them, you know, extraordinary influence over those who don't have power.

• 1:10:45David Sacks?

  Well, if there were political overtones to the original two trilogies. And actually, I think there were some really interesting themes, especially in that second one where.

• 1:10:53David Friedberg?

  Not even, not even, not even political, but by the way, not even political, let me, let me just be clear, social, right? So social systems, which.

• 1:11:00David Sacks?

  I understand, but, but my point is that Lucas didn't hit anybody over the head with those themes. And his goal certainly wasn't to make anyone feel uncomfortable. His goal was to entertain. And whatever political or social overtones there were, were very much in the background because that's what good art does. One of the reasons why Hollywood produces so few really interesting movies these days is because the political overtones are really in the forefront and they really hit you over the head with them. And so therefore they're just not very entertaining. It's not very good art. And I think that's why the fan community was like, oh, here we go again.

• 1:11:40Jason Calacanis?

  Let me just make sure people understand this is a nine year old clip and for context, this is probably during like the your early days of the DEI movement, just so we're clear on that, but you had another point to make, David.

• 1:11:51David Friedberg?

  But Sacks, I think that Hollywood has imposed upon itself a certain degrees of restriction on the artistry of the artists in the community. Because the standards now to be nominated for best picture define a number of DEI representation and inclusion standards and they're listed here. So in order to, and I, if you guys will remember it at our summit in LA, I asked Gwyneth Paltrow about this and she wasn't familiar with these changes that had been put in place. But in order to qualify for a best picture nomination, you have to meet some of these standards. And these standards include on screen representation, themes and narratives

• 1:12:30David Friedberg?

  that relate to having at least one of the lead characters or significant supporting actors come from minority background, including ethnic background or, or by gender.

• 1:12:42Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Could get nominated for an Oscar. Look, I'm so lucky. South Asian. Look, I'm in the parents here.

• 1:12:49David Friedberg?

  Or at least thirty, or thirty percent of the actors in a secondary cat, in the secondary group have to be women, racial or ethnic group, LGBTQ plus, or people with cognitive or physical disabilities, or who are deaf or hard of hearing. The main storyline, theme or narrative of the film is centered on an unrepresented group, either women, racial or ethnic group, or LGBTQ positive. They can meet the criteria if the creative leadership team has at least two of the following creative leadership positions met by one of the underrepresented groups, and so on and so forth. If you're an artist, a filmmaker, and you wanted to make a film, a World War II biopic, which was on the front lines in World War II and was entirely white males, would you have been able to be nominated for Best Picture?

• 1:13:34David Friedberg?

  Or would you have had to go and, you know, take some actions that have, would have affected your artistry and your freedom of expression in making that film? And as a big fan of film, and you guys, I think all of us are probably in the same boat, at least a couple of us are.

• 1:13:47Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Three of us are.

• 1:13:48David Friedberg?

  Three of us are. This would have limited a lot of the Best Pictures of all time, I would say, if you had to impose standards on what the artists were allowed to do, or how they were allowed to make their film. And that's really what's taken over Hollywood. So I, Sax, I would say it's not just a Bob Iger Disney thing, but this has become a standard in Hollywood, that the DEI movement has so deeply affected the intentionality of what has historically been a truly creative.

• 1:14:13David Sacks?

  I agree. If you talk to Hollywood writers, if you talk to Hollywood writers, they'll tell you that things have become extremely politicized, and it's a mess. Iger's been a little bit contradictory about this. In April of last year, there was this article saying that Iger was doubling down on inclusivity and diversity, and he described that at shareholders' meeting. By November, he was saying that Disney movies have become too focused on messaging. So it seemed like he was finally getting it, that after the horrible year they had. But then we had this Star Wars news, and it seems to suggest that they were hiring a director who really wasn't right for the material. So we'll just have to see. My sense is that they have not made the course correction they need.

• 1:14:55Chamath Palihapitiya?

  If you want to see the peak of this, there was a bunch of blowback on Dunkirk.

• 1:15:00Jason Calacanis?

  An absolutely tour de force of a film, if you haven't seen it. Especially go see it in IMAX, just extraordinary Christopher Nolan film, that it lacked diversity and gender diversity. It's a war film. Historically, kinda hard to make it about anything else if it was just narrowly focused on a couple of battles. And so, yeah, this has gotten to the point of, yeah, a little bit of absurdity.

• 1:15:24David Friedberg?

  I relate this very much to the point that we made a couple of months ago about stand-up comics being restricted and canceled based on the things that they say that are offensive to the narratives of social inclusion and DEI. These are artists who should have freedom of expression, creative freedom, unlimited creative freedom. If we want to have a different set of standards for how we value the art that comes out of it, fine, but I don't think that it ends up being true. So what the peer group would otherwise recognize and say, you know, is the greatest art of the year, is the most impressive achievement of the year in some particular artistic discipline. It's really sad. There's also been this change

• 1:16:04David Friedberg?

  in live performances, in symphonies. It used to be that to avoid discrimination in auditions for symphony orchestras, auditions were conducted behind a curtain. So the director and those who were making the election on who would get to join the orchestra would listen and they wouldn't see the person performing because they were behind a curtain. Recently, that trend has changed and now those artists are required to perform not behind a curtain, but in front of the curtain, so that we can judge them not on their musicianship and their artistry, but on their race, on their gender, and on some other standards. So I think this is obviously part of a very broad narrative, but it's very deeply affecting-

• 1:16:44Jason Calacanis?

  Can I ask a question?

• 1:16:45David Friedberg?

  The community of art.

• 1:16:46Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I was about to bring you in on this, Jamal.

• 1:16:48Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:49Jason Calacanis?

  Is listenership of the symphony gone up or down?

• 1:16:52David Friedberg?

  It's a loaded question.

• 1:16:53Jason Calacanis?

  It's been going down for a long time, but I don't know that has to do with diversity.

• 1:16:56David Friedberg?

  Symphonies around the world are seeing decline in audience, but it happened before the changes.

• 1:17:00Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:01David Friedberg?

  It's been happening. Yeah.

• 1:17:02Jason Calacanis?

  Has it accelerated or has it slowed the negative decay to zero?

• 1:17:06David Friedberg?

  I'm not sure. I'm not sure it's made a difference.

• 1:17:08Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:08David Friedberg?

  Yeah, to be honest.

• 1:17:09Jason Calacanis?

  Well, if it hasn't, if it hasn't made a difference, then you're-

• 1:17:12Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Then it has made a difference.

• 1:17:13Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, I think this is part of a wider discussion of DEI.

• 1:17:17David Friedberg?

  But sorry, the goal of some of, uh, some forms of art, like these live performing arts, may not necessarily be audience growth. The goal may be, you know, finding the best artist.

• 1:17:25Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, but I suspect, but I suspected it should be to sustain itself indefinitely.

• 1:17:30David Friedberg?

  I mean, that was, by the way, that's, that's a big point I've had, which I disagreed with.

• 1:17:34Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Quality erodes, as the quality erodes, fewer people will care because there are other options that you can go to that are high quality. And then these things will die out. And, you know, maybe that's what it's supposed to happen.

• 1:17:45Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, this is part of a wider discussion about, I think, DEI facing the reality of whether it's like, I guess, this whole pilot thing with Boeing and who's getting hired to be pilots and training and what should the focus of a company board be? What should the cope focus of hiring be?

• 1:18:02Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The problem, I think, with the argument you guys are having, in my opinion, is that it's a little too premature. And the reason is that there are other people who will make semi-credible claims while you guys make semi-credible claims and no progress is made on this whole DEI discussion as it touches cinema and Hollywood or music. What's much easier, if you want to dismantle DEI, which will eventually come and cleanse Hollywood and the symphony, is if you go to the jobs where it's irrefutable, where even the most ardent defender of DEI says, you know what? I can't take that risk with my own family or with my own life and the lives of my family.

• 1:18:44Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And I think that we're, we would be better off if we just focus in a really disciplined way on those and get the criteria to be entirely based on skill. And then eventually it'll come back in Hollywood and the symphony will also get cleansed.

• 1:18:59Jason Calacanis?

  So doctors, pilots.

• 1:19:01David Friedberg?

  I mean, I think it could be.

• 1:19:02Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I would say certain doctors. I would just say pilots for sure. I would say surgeons. I would say that you could probably go through, I haven't thought enough about it to know, but you could go through and say systematically, what are the categories in the professional world that we interact with every day where?

• 1:19:24Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Skill can be the only criteria, must be, because otherwise innocent lives will be lost. That's an important question.

• 1:19:34David Sacks?

  I, I agree with you that the fundamental choice that we have as society is whether skills is going to be the determinant of success, skills and merit, or whether it's going to be about something else. You know, and as soon as you tell somebody that they can't get the job, even though they're the most qualified because of their race or gender, then I think that is racism or sexism. So it's doubly bad.

• 1:19:56Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I agree.

• 1:19:57David Sacks?

  But Shama, I think, I think the reason why this happens is because people don't really have the right skin in the game. So the reason why the, the recent discussions about pilots and whether cockpits should have this sort of DEI program is that everyone can relate, everyone has skin in the game. If your kids are going to fly on a plane, the only determinant you want for who the pilot is, is skill, obviously, because you have real skin in the game. The problem is people will, will falsify their preferences when they're discussing other people flying on the plane. So people will start saying, well, you know, we need to have DEI programs. You know, in other words, when it doesn't

• 1:20:37David Sacks?

  affect me, you're willing to basically virtue signal and genuflect towards these programs. And I think that, that's the fundamental problem is that people will pretend to support something other than skill in all of these contexts where they're not directly affected. But as a society, we are.

• 1:20:56Chamath Palihapitiya?

  With respect to aviation specifically, my thought is that this is a very easy skill to determine who is high quality versus not, because you have such sophisticated training apparatus and schemes. Simulators. Simulators and all of this stuff. It's easy to know how to rank people from one through N. And I think that as a society, if you want an efficient transportation infrastructure and aviation infrastructure where the consequences are really bad if things go wrong, you just want the best, period, end of story. However, I think it's also fair to say that then the government owes the people a responsibility to advance the technology if they actually

• 1:21:38Chamath Palihapitiya?

  want to have a multifaceted hiring criteria. So what do I mean? We can have a lot more automation in the cockpit. The reason we don't is because of how certain lobbies are able to affect rules inside the federal transportation infrastructure. And we know this because our friend has been trying to, our friend Sky Dayton, wonderful pilot, has been trying to improve airline safety. And he's talked about this a lot. And these things get blocked by the pilots' union and otherwise, because they don't want to get disintermediate. Okay, fair enough. That's the game. Well, if that's the game, at some point, we need to have a conversation as a, as a society that says, okay, look, if we're going to hire

• 1:22:23Chamath Palihapitiya?

  on a multifaceted basis for pilots, let's also tell Boeing and Airbus, you need to build even better, more automated planes. That's a fair trade off.

• 1:22:33Jason Calacanis?

  The great irony of all this, Sax, is it's illegal to hire based upon gender, race, et cetera. And then at the same time, people are trying to hold this construct of, hey, we want more diversity, we want more inclusion, at the same time in their heads. And we're seeing lawsuits happen. So they're, you know, want tech companies to report on their diversity. They want venture firms to report on, you know, either diversity in investment. But it's illegal and you can be sued if you were to give investment dollars based on race, gender, et cetera. And Fierce Founders, I believe is the name of the firm that's being sued for only investing in a certain demographic of women.

• 1:23:14David Friedberg?

  Yeah, or to ask people their sexual preference. You're not allowed to ask that in an employment application.

• 1:23:17Jason Calacanis?

  I don't know. I've always had a problem with, how do you keep these two things in your mind in our own venture firm? And I just said to folks, just to get personal.

• 1:23:25David Friedberg?

  This is considered a diversity target? And now to hire people, whether it's on a Hollywood film set or in your company, you've got to go ask them what their sexual preference is?

• 1:23:33Jason Calacanis?

  That's, I mean, it's crazy that we're being asked to do that. And what I did in our company was I said, hey, if we don't feel we're getting enough applicants for the programs, Found University, the accelerator, we could have, you know, efforts to increase the number of applicants. But we can't make investment decisions based on anything other than the merit of the company, or we will get sued. And so this is, I think, the problem in corporate America with these issues is how do I? Try to help this problem if we think there is a diversity problem in our particular industry, which is noble and thoughtful. And I wouldn't criticize anybody for that. But then the rubber meets the road at legal and then performance, right? And this is very hard for, I think, leaders to manage those two dichotomies.

• 1:24:15Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I could see a case for why barbers and priests should be multifaceted. Good bedside manner, crack a few jokes, be able to listen.

• 1:24:25Jason Calacanis?

  Relatability.

• 1:24:25Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Pathetic, relatability.

• 1:24:28Jason Calacanis?

  Perspective.

• 1:24:28Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But if a pilot, but the first time, like, the thing is now, this thing is so on the front burner of people's minds that heaven forbid, if there is an incident or a near incident, you're going to see lawsuits that are going to focus on this issue. Show me the training records of the pilots and show me, show me how they fared relative to alternative folks that you either did hire or didn't hire. And, you know, why was this selection? It's going to be a mess.

• 1:24:59Jason Calacanis?

  We might even see that with Harvard and their selection of their president. Like, why was this person selected as president, right? And did we check their?

• 1:25:06Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The new one.

• 1:25:06Jason Calacanis?

  Or the past one, like, was there, did we know about the plagiarism stuff? You know, did we not know about it? And this is, I think, the race to nowhere when you get into identity politics. And, and I think this is why everybody, and I think Coleman Hughes said it really brilliantly when he was on this pod, talking about his TED Talk, like, we at least want the aspiration of having a colorblind society. I think what Coleman said that was really, I think, profound was, well, where can we actually affect change that will be important? And I think that's early education. It could be providing pre-K. It could be providing, you know, support for people with childcare so that, you know, they could, they could get into, you know, more job training, et cetera.

• 1:25:47Jason Calacanis?

  So like, where do we, where do we put our efforts if we do want to see a more inclusive, diverse, just world is, I think, the question.

• 1:25:55David Sacks?

  Backing up a second, I think there's a fundamental dishonesty about the DEI movement that's really coming to the fore right now. On the one hand, DEI activists will explicitly say that their goal is to engineer job categories to explicit population numbers.

• 1:26:14David Sacks?

  But like you said, that's actually illegal to do. So when they get in a lawsuit, like the Harvard affirmative action case that went this through court, they'll deny that they're discriminating against Asian Americans. So when they're preaching for what they want to do, when they talk about, say, Kendi-style anti-racism, they will say that the explicit goal here is proportional representation. But then, when that results in discrimination against groups that are basically selected against, they'll deny that that's what they're doing. And I think it's gotten to the point now where they just can't maintain both things being true. And I think we saw this in the dust-up that just happened between Elon and Mark Cuban, where Elon was saying, "Look, we should be a colorblind, meritorious society.

• 1:26:57David Sacks?

  We just shouldn't discriminate for or against anybody on the base of race." And then Cuban jumps in and says, "Oh, no, that's not what DEI is doing. DEI is just trying to expand the pool of applicants." And it's just not true. I mean, I don't know if he's being disingenuous. I don't know if he's virtue signaling.

• 1:27:12Jason Calacanis?

  I think they were talking through each other. I mean, you do want to expand the pool if you're not getting a pool of diverse applicants. There's nothing wrong with that, expanding the pool. But what you are correct, there was a DEI grift that occurred. I think that's kind of what you're alluding to. And I can tell you the inside story on that.

• 1:27:28David Sacks?

  I think that if you look at the DI movement, it goes way, way beyond just expanding the pool of applicants. It explicitly puts its thumb on the scale in terms of what it's looking for, in terms of hiring and promotion.

• 1:27:41Jason Calacanis?

  It turned into a grift. And I can tell you the inside story on this. And it's going to come out eventually, but there was a, I don't know if you experienced this in any of your companies, or if anybody's willing to talk about it, but company has lack of diversity in their company. Then diversity activists, and this is, I think, where it really started to build up resentment. Diversity activist comes in, says, "Hey, you have problems." They call them out on social media. There's a, you know, a Twitter brigade comes in, "Oh, my God, look how horrible this company is." People go, "Oh, I'm sorry, we didn't want to be horrible." And then they say, "Oh, well, hire us, and we'll teach you how to do DEI, and let's build a DEI group, and we want to be consultants. Pay us to come in, pay us to speak at your organization, to tell you what you're doing

• 1:28:26Jason Calacanis?

  wrong, and then rally a reverse support of it after you've gotten paid." For solving the problem for them. And I saw this shakedown occur. And I had people ask me for advice on like, hey, what do we do here? And you can just imagine, you know, you're a person of good faith who wants to do the right thing. And then these DEI folks come in and then try to brigade you, basically publicly shame you in order to get like rich DEI contracts. And we saw this with like the size of DEI groups at companies. And you're wondering, well, what are these people actually doing? Are they just? What does a DEI department actually do inside of a company that is accretive or valuable?

• 1:29:05David Sacks?

  It creates more bureaucracy to do more DEI.

• 1:29:09Jason Calacanis?

  Right.

• 1:29:09David Sacks?

  It feeds on itself. And that's why it keeps getting bigger and bigger.

• 1:29:11Jason Calacanis?

  Did you guys see the size of the Michigan DEI group? Did you see that tweet? I thought that was a, I thought this was a Babylon B story when I first saw it because there are 250 people working who have DEI.

• 1:29:23Chamath Palihapitiya?

  500 people at Michigan.

• 1:29:24Jason Calacanis?

  What? What's the denominator? 500 out of how many people?

• 1:29:28Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I don't know, but they're spending $30 million in payroll benefits.

• 1:29:33David Sacks?

  I mean, look, big companies can kind of afford this stuff, but startups cannot. I mean, this is really the kiss of death for startups. You just can't afford to have these large bureaucracies.

• 1:29:44Jason Calacanis?

  And then also, you know, when you're a startup founder,

• 1:29:48Jason Calacanis?

  if you have six months of runway, 12 months of runway, you might not have the luxury to be looking at your statistics and saying, you know what? We've got 10 people who are of this demographic. Statistically, we should have this. So the next hire we need to make our sales numbers has to be of this composure. And I've had seen people do this, Zach. You've probably seen it too on boards or whatever. Hey, we need to hire more of this type of person, this profile. And, uh, you know, then hiring gets slowed and, you know, yeah, it's, it's challenging. And it's also illegal. So I don't know how you win in this thing. Other than have a colorblind society as a goal at least, you know, and to put your efforts.

• 1:30:31David Sacks?

  Are you familiar with a Mott and Bailey tactic?

• 1:30:36Jason Calacanis?

  No.

• 1:30:36David Sacks?

  Have you heard of this? This is a rhetorical technique or fallacy?

• 1:30:42Jason Calacanis?

  No, I haven't heard this one. Yeah, I love a good.

• 1:30:44David Sacks?

  So this comes from medieval times. The Mott and Bailey was a type of castle where the Bailey was this wider area that was just defended by a wooden wall. So it's not that secure. The Mott was basically the, you know, stone fortress on the hill. So a Mott and Bailey tactic is when you go out and stake out a very aggressive position. You take the Bailey, basically, but then when you get challenged, you retreat into the Mott and pretend like you never took the Bailey position. The Bailey position is basically the Kendi-style anti-racism where you say, look, we have to achieve proportional representation in every job category.

• 1:31:22David Sacks?

  And that is what the DI movement in the main advocates for. But then when they get challenged by somebody like Elon or by somebody like the Supreme Court, they retreat into the Mott and to say, no, no, we weren't trying to do that. We're just trying to expand the pool of qualified applicants because who could be against that? And they'll claim that they were never doing the whole proportional representation thing. And then on top of it, they'll say, well, listen, obviously, increasing the pool of qualified applicants is so unobjectionable that if you're against that, then you must be racist. And then you get all the accusations. And so this is basically the rhetorical technique that the movement uses to defend itself.

• 1:32:02Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:03David Sacks?

  But eventually, when this stuff gets litigated, as it just did at the Supreme Court, you start to pick this apart and you see that there's a lot of evidence that they are actually engaged in overt discrimination against certain groups like Asian Americans.

• 1:32:19Jason Calacanis?

  No easy answers here, but.

• 1:32:20Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I for one think that that's bad.

• 1:32:22Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, there was something really nice about a merit based society if there was fairness at the starting line, but you know, that's, that's the thing I've learned is not everybody starts at the same place. And so if you just look at, it seems to me, and listen, I'm no expert, but the starting line seems to matter most. So if we could focus on making it as equal and fair and just when it comes to education, that seems to me to be like the quickest solution to feeling better about all this. I, I just think we should have seven day, 365 day a year school available, public school available, competitive schools available to, to, to make the world more just and give people more opportunity, right? Skills training, et cetera.

• 1:33:03Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Why do you think that having school 365 days a year will make the world more just?

• 1:33:09Jason Calacanis?

  Well, because I do think that if you had more competition in schools and you had parents who care or students who care and they could get more education and there was more available, then you could say, well, how many days a week did you go to school? How much effort did you put in? And there was just more high quality school available. And if you look at public schools right now, there's just, it's very unjust how poor the schools are and how poorly run they are and what the teachers unions have done to these schools in disadvantaged communities. And if I look back on my life and I look at people who did well, they had engaged parents and they had opportunities in education that other people didn't. And that seems.

• 1:33:50Chamath Palihapitiya?

  How does keeping the school open all year round change that?

• 1:33:54Jason Calacanis?

  If you think about parents who maybe don't have coverage for their kids after 2:30 or 3 o'clock and then those kids, you know, we called them, we were called latchkey kids, I think, in the eighties and nineties, you're having the ability for them to do more enriching things, to be in chess club, to be in taekwondo club, to, to do a little extra math, whatever it is, that could be something society could do for a very low cost or skills training even, right? Hey, this is a culinary school after school. This is a culinary school on the weekends. This is a coding school on the weekends. It doesn't have to be just them. It could be welding. It could be, like I said, you know, could be design, whatever it is, more opportunities for people to learn more skills. Without, you know, having the benchmark be, my parents can afford Kumon, my parents can

• 1:34:36Jason Calacanis?

  afford a chess tutor, right? We, we live in a time of incredible privilege and all of us have unlimited resources. And many of the people who listen to this podcast have a lot of resources to hire tutors for their kids and give them more opportunity. I didn't have that opportunity, you know, and if I had that opportunity, I would have learned chess faster, right? I would, I would have had more opportunity for it. It just wasn't available to me. And then there's a lot of people who started behind me, who, who certainly didn't have it available, single parent, you know, in, in a worse school environment than Brooklyn where I grew to, grew up. So, I don't know. Do you disagree, Jamal? Would you have a better idea of how to make the world more fair and just than education and skill strength?

• 1:35:15Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think, I think, I think education is the, probably the most important. I do think that we need to find it fashionable again to have nuclear families. I think that if you look at the marriage rates of 20 and 30 year olds, it's meaningfully depressed relative to older cohorts, including ours. We're the last generation where it's a structural part of our identity is being married. And I think that that has long-term implications because when you look at the success rates of how to grow kids, poverty matters a lot less than having a structural nuclear family, meaning a two-parent household. And so I think that there's a lot of, there's a lot of work we need to do to figure out how to

• 1:35:59Chamath Palihapitiya?

  reincentivize folks to want to commit to a single person, not this rampant promiscuity, but just kind of lock down and find somebody and build a long-term partnership with them. I think that that's really crucial for a functioning society.

• 1:36:13Jason Calacanis?

  Giving tax incentives is a way to do that, or just cultural norms?

• 1:36:18Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I haven't studied the problem to have a real idea.

• 1:36:21Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I've, I've heard this before. I just don't know how that gets implemented in society, right? And I, and I can think of ways that tutoring and having more education available, vouchers, et cetera. I mean, if you give every parent under a certain dollar amount of income a year, a voucher to hire tutors, man, that could, that could change the world, right? It could change a lot of people's fate.

• 1:36:42Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We need more two-parent households.

• 1:36:44Jason Calacanis?

  That would certainly help more. All right. Well, we got, we really got into it here in the end, man. What a, what a great episode. All right, four.

• 1:36:54Jason Calacanis?

  The Rain Man, David Sacks, with a tight haircut now. The dream is over. I mean, it's just...

• 1:37:00David Sacks?

  It's a new year.

• 1:37:00Jason Calacanis?

  I don't know who got to you.

• 1:37:02David Sacks?

  It's a new year.

• 1:37:03Jason Calacanis?

  It's an election year. It's a, it's a big year for you.

• 1:37:05David Sacks?

  Gotta clean it up, clean it up for...

• 1:37:07Jason Calacanis?

  I think it's just a huge, critical mistake. I think you were, you were going to a certain iconic look and I think you've blown it. I, I, I'm gonna take the other side of that bet. And for David Friedberg, the CEO of Ohalo. And Chamath Palihapitiya, the founder of the new 80/90 incubator and the chairman dictator of the All In LLC. I am the world's greatest moderator. Yes, you are. And angel investor. And we'll see you on next time. Bye-bye. Love you, boys. Love you, guys. Bye-bye.

• 1:37:40Speaker 06

  We'll let your winners ride.

• 1:37:43Speaker 06

  Rain Man David Sacks.

• 1:37:47Speaker 06

  And instead, we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it. Love you, Westy. I'm the queen of Kim.

• 1:38:00Speaker 06

  Besties are gone.

• 1:38:03Speaker 06

  That's my dog taking a piss in your driveway.

• 1:38:11Chamath Palihapitiya?

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

• 1:38:19Speaker 06

  What, you're the bee? What, you're a bee?

• 1:38:24Speaker 06

  We need to get merch. Besties are back.