Why a Do-Nothing Congress could be great for markets | E2359

This Week In Startups is made possible by: Every: https://every.io/ Vanta: https://www.vanta.com/twist G2i: http://G2i.co/twist Plaud: https://Plaud.ai/twist Fintrx: https://www.fintrx.com/ Today’s show: Democrats took the House and Senate, and overnight trading suggested a huge market drop. But in the morning, the markets went another way, and D. A. Wallach thinks he knows why. A Congress that can’t get anything done can’t do anything BAD, like start a war or a tariff fight. The only thing markets hate than gridlock is uncertainty. On the first post-midterm This Week in VC roundtable, Jason is joined by Wallach (Time BioVentures), Elana Gold (Two Roads Capital), and Tomasz Tunguz (Theory Ventures). Together, they work out what a split government could mean for tech and venture. Data centers are now a political target for both parties. 2027 might be the last major window for big M&A. Plus, D. A. worries that an intergenerational war could be brewing, between the people who own AI’s upside, and the young workers who fear getting replaced. Plus thoughts on Cava’s 22% layoffs, Sequoia shutting down its Scouts and Arc program, the SPV “boiler room,” and more. Guests D. A. Wallach on X: https://x.com/dawallach Time BioVentures: https://www.timebioventures.com/ Elana Gold on X: https://x.com/ItsElanaGold Two Roads Capital: https://tworoads.vc/ Tomasz Tunguz on X: https://x.com/ttunguz Theory Ventures: https://theoryvc.com/ Relevant Links: NBC exit poll: 56% say AI and data centers were a crucial or major factor (DCD): https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/nbc-exit-poll-56-say-ai-data-centers-were-a-crucial-or-major-factor-in-congressional-vote-decision/ How AI backlash shaped the 2026 midterms (TIME): https://time.com/article/2026/11/04/midterm-elections-results-ai-industry-data-centers/ Musk on chips outrunning electricity in 2026, with Elon's reply: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2117649850644705591 Panthalassa raises $140M for wave-powered AI compute at sea (Tom's Hardware): https://tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/palantir-co-founder-peter-thiel-backs-usd140m-wave-powered-ai-data-center-startup-panthalassa-aims-to-run-offshore-compute-nodes-using-ocean-energy Marvell to buy Lumentum in a $115B deal (The Next Web): https://thenextweb.com/news/marvell-lumentum-acquisition-115bn-all-stock San Francisco mourns bodega cat killed by a Waymo (CBS SF): https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/sf-mission-district-mourns-store-cat-killed-by-waymo Meta launches $115M program to train workers for data center jobs (Axios): https://www.axios.com/2026/06/08/meta-data-center-workforce-academy-job-guarantee Keep track of the value you're getting from AI (TWiST): https://twistartups.substack.com/p/keep-track-of-the-value-youre-getting-da4 Meta's Muse hits 10.9M downloads (Yahoo Finance): https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/article/metas-muse-ai-agent-hits-109-million-downloads-as-chatgpt-slides-25-153532560.html Curbie (Revere Robotics): https://www.revererobotics.com/ Canva lays off over 1,200 people amid slowing growth (TechCrunch): https://techcrunch.com/2026/11/04/canva-lays-off-over-1200-people-amid-slowing-growth/ Ollama raises $65M as it nears 9M developers (Startup Fortune): https://startupfortune.com/ollama-raises-65-million-as-it-grows-to-nearly-9-million-developers/ Sequoia hits rewind, undoing 20 years of expansion (TechCrunch): https://techcrunch.com/2026/11/04/sequoia-hits-rewind-undoing-20-years-of-expansion/ "The Sequoia of Tomorrow" (Sequoia): https://x.com/sequoia/status/2117961312143855764 Travis Kalanick's Atoms raises $1.7B (TechCrunch): https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/22/travis-kalanicks-robotics-company-raises-1-7b-led-by-a16z/ Vast: https://www.vastspace.com SEC accredited investor exam could expand private-market access (CNBC): https://www.cnbc.com/2026/10/01/sec-accredited-investor-exam-private-markets.html General Compute raises a $100M Series A (DCD): https://datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/neocloud-general-compute-raises-100m-in-series-a-funding-round Hyperliquid CEO Jeff Yan on democratizing pre-IPO access (Motley Fool): https://www.fool.com/investing/2026/10/19/hyperliquid-ceo-jeff-yan-says-perpetual-futures-ma/ Kalshi Perps: https://kalshi.com/perps Aalo Atomics: https://www.aalo.com Exowatt: https://www.exowatt.com Timestamps: 0:00 The Blue Wave: Dems take Congress 0:10 Plaud: If your work depends on conversations - interviews, meetings, calls - you need a Plaud NotePin S. You can check it out at https://plaud.ai/twist and use code TWIST for 10% off! 6:42 What a split gov’t means for defense tech 9:21 Is 2027 the last big window for tech M&A? 11:04 Every.io: For all of your incorporation, banking, payroll, benefits, accounting, taxes or other back-office administration needs, visit https://every.io. 13:44 Are anti-robotaxi laws coming? 18:51 The need for positive AI stories 24:12 Vanta - Get $1000 off your SOC 2 at https://www.vanta.com/twist 25:59 How AI can make voters smarter 31:22 Self-driving and the future of car insurance 40:17 G2i has been recruiting software engineers for over a decade. Go to https://g2i.co/twist to find out how G2i vets engineers, and can help you hire them in days, not weeks. 45:00 Jason’s $12K Mac Studio 50:12 Sequoia retires its Scouts and Arc programs 58:21 Jason’s barbell: Zipline, Atoms, and Vast 1:01:19 When VC firms go public 1:08:42 Scrap the accredited investor rule 1:14:26 Hyperliquid and permissionless synthetic markets 1:17:17 Kalshi perps and Anthropic price discovery Subscribe to our newsletters on Substack: TWiST: https://twistartups.substack.com/ TWiAI: https://www.thisweekinai.ai/ TWiVC: https://thisweekinvc.substack.com/ Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis Check out all our partner offers: https://partners.launch.co/ Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland Follow TWiST: Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com

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

• 0:00Jason Calacanis?

  All right, everybody. Welcome back to This Week in Venture Capital. It's our Venture Capital Roundtable for November 4th, and we have a lot to talk about. Before we do anything, I have my Plaid pin on. I'm going to start recording, so I don't miss a minute. If you are involved in a lot of conversations like I am, you can record all those conversations, interviews, meetings, calls. Check it out at plaud.ai/twist. Use the code TWIST to get 10% off, and they know that we sent you. All right, back for a second week in a row. My guy, DA Wallach, is here. Co-founder, general partner, Time Bio Ventures. I'm an LP. How are you doing, DA?

• 0:39Speaker 01

  I'm doing great.

• 0:40Jason Calacanis?

  Awesome. Great to be here. Great to have you here. For the first time, Ilana Gold from Two Roads Capital. Tell us a little bit about Two Roads.

• 0:49Speaker 02

  We're an investment syndicate, so we do deal-by-deal basis. We're in AI infra, space, robotics, defense, and energy. Some companies who've done is like general compute. They just raised their Series A, Pantholosa, Allo Atomics, ExaW, et cetera. But super excited to be here, Jason. Been a huge fan of you for a while.

• 1:07Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, well, thank you. That's very kind of you to say. And you've done over $50 million across 200 companies. Do you use Angel List as a platform? Or is the syndicate over there if people wanted to check it out?

• 1:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, Angel List and Sidecar, but you can find me if you just look up Two Roads Capital, Angel List, it should come up. And that's my previous syndicate in this one. And yeah, it's been super exciting.

• 1:26Jason Calacanis?

  Love it. Yeah, Sidecar is a great platform as well. And Tomasz is back, the founder and general partner at Theory Ventures. Man, you and I have been at this for a long time. You're on your second fund or third fund?

• 1:40Speaker 03

  Second fund, yeah.

• 1:42Jason Calacanis?

  And mostly early-stage Series A, seed, still?

• 1:46Speaker 03

  Seed and Series A, yeah. So anywhere from about $5 million investment to about $50.

• 1:50Speaker 04

  This Week in Startups is brought to you by G2I. G2I has been recruiting software engineers for over a decade. Go to G2I.co/twist to find out how G2I vets engineers and can help you hire them in days, not weeks. Vanta compliance and security shouldn't be a deal breaker for startups to win new business. Vanta makes it easy for companies to get a SOC 2 report fast. Get $1,000 off for a limited time at vanta.com/twist. Every. For all of your incorporation, banking, payroll, benefits, accounting, taxes, or other back office administration needs, visit every.io.

• 2:27Jason Calacanis?

  All right. We have a lot to get to here, and we got to just talk about the most amazing 48 Hours, DA. We had a lot of folks hand wringing, "Oh, the prediction markets are wrong," shout out to our partners, "Bally Market." "Oh, the polls are wrong. This is all made up. They're all fake news." But a blue wave happened. It wasn't a spritz. The Democratic Party is taking control of the House and the Senate. We now have a split government. And you know, some of these issues are pretty significant for tech. Obviously, the data center trade being the number

• 3:12Jason Calacanis?

  one trade. Overnight markets look like we were going to have the market correct 2%, 3%, 4% today, and instead, we've had the opposite. And I think the theories there, DA, are, hey, the war is going to end, oil, the having tariff madness, and that kind of chaos will go away. Great state of Texas was a clean sweep, shockingly, for the blow. So don't blame me for that. That's not just because I came here. But DA, what's your take on what this means for the venture capital startup, entrepreneurial community, and just the wider country?

• 3:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, look, for the wider country, democracy works. It's a great thing. This is what we want. We want this vacillation between the parties. We don't want a monarchy. We don't want one-party rule. We want there to be an active debate in the country that's happening on Main Street and that's happening in Washington. And I think that's exactly what we've got. As it pertains to our worlds of venture capital and the capital markets, look, I think it's got two sides of the coin, right? On the one hand, obviously, the data center story is a big political winner, and it's probably going to be a big political winner for both parties. So I think whether, you know, I think the narrative for the Democrats this time was, we're going to

• 4:34Speaker 01

  stop these data centers. And, you know, in a couple of years, the narrative on the other side may be, we're also going to stop these data centers. So, you know, like, what politician wants to get up there and say, "We've got this great technology we need to support that's coming for your job?" And whether it's intellectually true that AI ultimately displaces jobs and ruins local communities and takes too much power and too much water, whether any of those things are true, what matters is that you have to jump through all kinds of hoops and contort yourself to make the counterargument. In other words, for Marc Andreessen to go through the whole

• 5:15Speaker 01

  history of technology and point out with exacting detail how every other wave we thought was going to put out everyone to work, but then it didn't, that's a more complicated story, even if it's true. So-

• 5:27Jason Calacanis?

  You got to read like five or six books.

• 5:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:30Jason Calacanis?

  And, you know, have two or three-

• 5:31Speaker 01

  Very counterintuitive.

• 5:33Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 5:33Speaker 01

  Now, the flip side, maybe why we're seeing the markets not be so negative, even though that could really take the thunder out of AI, is that Trump has been a chaos agent, right? And, you know, whether he likes that, or it's just something he can't help but do, he sows this endless level of uncertainty. And capital markets do not like uncertainty. So I would maintain, we don't need to get too into macro. I would maintain what we've seen happen in long-term interest rates over the past, like, you know, year, has been much more about uncertainty and fiscal unsustainability than it has been about crowding out with AI borrowing or anything

• 6:16Speaker 01

  like that. And, you know, when the uncertainty around everything in macro goes up, markets just don't like that. So I think divided government, even if it means sclerosis, even if it means that nothing gets done in DC, what it does mean is that nothing crazy is likely to happen. And that's good, you know, that's good for business.

• 6:38Jason Calacanis?

  Nothing getting done is good for business. It's like a little bit of indigestion there, and, you know, they're debating stuff endlessly in committee. It means they can't also start a war. It means they can't also start tariff chaos. Makes things a bit more predictable. Ilana, one of the things that the Trump administration was great at the last few years was embracing the tech community, American dynamism, you know, defense tech, and supporting data centers, supporting the industry, perhaps even too much. And at the expense of talking about, and optics do matter, the plight of the, you know, everyday American,

• 7:17Jason Calacanis?

  what do you think this, what do you think this will, how this might impact what you're doing in terms of defense tech, in terms of American dynamism, robotics, the hardware? A lot of these things have government as customers, and you might have a government that is less excited about having these founders to the White House.

• 7:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think one of the biggest narratives are happening right now is people are saying, okay, like, no more build-out of data centers. And I think it's going to be obviously a state issue now of, hey, if you're building out data centers, are you going to be able to build them out nationally? And that's a really big question. But I think that still doesn't change the underlying fact that we don't have enough power right now. I think Elon just tweeted this past week saying, like, we're going to run out of power in 2026. So even if we were able to build out however much data centers that we want to build out, we still need other forms of power. And so from a startup perspective, I think there's a lot of interesting things happening. And the nuclear space, I mean, Pantholosa is putting nodes in the ocean. You're seeing more

• 8:22Speaker 02

  different types of chips being built that require new types of power. And so I don't think that changes. I think, sure, there's going to be more regulatory rules and regulations around this. But you're still going to see startups continuously be like, okay, there are power constraints for amount of AI compute that's needed in these next two years, five years, 10 years. And so what startups are going to build to be like, hey, maybe we can't build out as much data centers, but maybe we're going to build chips that don't require as much power. And so I'm seeing that a lot happening right now. And I think it's, this just shows that that's even more prevalent and more important as we continue to grow and build.

• 8:59Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, necessity the mother of all invention. If you can't get power, well, maybe you could use less, or maybe you can find new power sources, or make the ones you have less wasteful, more efficient. Tomasz, who wins in all of this with the split government in the short and the long term? Let's assume the Dems then win in 2028. What does it look like for our industry? Because we had four years of no M&A under the wrath of Lina Khan. That is top of mind for me. Our industry was- Just stymied from a lot of acquisitions that made a lot of sense. Now, with the last two years with Trump, everybody's evaluating every possible acquisition.

• 9:44Jason Calacanis?

  And we'll talk about some of those acquisitions. Maybe the next two years is the next 18 months, maybe just the next 12 years. 2027 is the last year to get a big deal done. And then you could be looking at five years of no more, you know, M and A. Terrible for our industry if that happens.

• 10:02Speaker 03

  It would be really tough. I mean, we've seen Lina Khan come out, I think, pro anthropic. That was an unusual position that she had when it came to, you know, protections around civilians or sorry, citizens, when it comes to what the AI models do. I think we may have six months here in the beginning of 27, because every like HSR process or any kind of OJ or the FTC has an 18 month approval process. And many of these acquisitions, like we just saw with the, the ex J D S Uniphase business that Marvell bought in what or has tried to buy for maybe might be the largest M and A ever in tech history. The long pole in the tent there is actually Chinese approval rather than American approval. So if you really want a big acquisition, you probably have to get through, you have

• 10:44Speaker 03

  to execute that, that, that transaction before June of July or next year, or you're probably within an 18 month window where either the US, the EU, whose posture on acquisitions really hasn't changed, Draghi really has not changed his position on M and A. Or China will become an important blocker or at least a constituent in that conversation.

• 11:04Jason Calacanis?

  All right, listen, if you're running a company and you're the founder, hey, you're going to have so much work to do. You got to hire a team. You got to build the product. You got to do customer interviews and understand what your product or service is going to do for your customer. Well, you're also going to need to incorporate and you're going to have to do your taxes. You have so much work to do on payroll, benefits, taxes, banking, incorporation, and you need a partner and that partner is every, every has worked with over 1,000 startups. You're going to make mistakes and some of those mistakes are going to be costly. That's why you need a partner like every, they're going to handle your Delaware C corp,

• 11:45Jason Calacanis?

  your EIN and getting a registered agent with no legal fees and no delays. They're going to get all that done for you. And if you're further along and you need to scale up your team, well, every will help you hire contractors in over 200 countries and do it right. Tight is right. Plus their banking platform keeps your funds board compliant while making it easy to collect receipts, pay reimbursements and stay on top of your spending. So head over to every.io and stop wasting time on stuff that isn't growing your company. That's every.io. It is, to your point, DA, shocking how big of an issue the data centers have become. I don't know why we're here and how we got here exactly.

• 12:28Jason Calacanis?

  But an NBC exit poll, and it just seems farcical to even say this, but it apparently is true, true, found 56% of voters called AI and data centers a crucial or major factor in their vote. And Democrats spent more than a hundred million on ads tying Republicans to big tech and data centers per time. Doesn't feel like that is matching the reality of what data centers do. Data centers bring a ton of taxes. They don't, and they don't ask for discounts or tax breaks from local communities anymore. And in fact, they'll guarantee that prices of electricity won't go up, but maybe it's just too late to change this narrative, as you said.

• 13:13Jason Calacanis?

  Projected winner of the governor of Texas, Gina, is not super, not super pro data center. So this seems to be one of the, the big challenges is turning this narrative around. I think it dovetails with jobs, as you mentioned there, DA. And something I monitor, because I have probably a dozen investments in autonomy, including my original one in Uber, or I still have a significant portion of that.

• 13:44Jason Calacanis?

  There's been a lot of hand wringing on the, in the Northeast around these self-driving cars, autonomous vehicles, robot taxis, Waymos, Tesla, and then Zooks, AV Ride, et cetera.

• 13:59Jason Calacanis?

  I think there's a non-zero chance that we're going to see a wave of anti-self-driving go across the country and that we're going to, and that's terrible because self-driving saves a lot of lives. But if you're trying to save jobs, that's a place where I don't think you can win the argument, DA, that there's some great benefit to self-driving for employment.

• 14:22Speaker 01

  Ultimately, we want every person doing something that is worth their precious life, right? And as soon as you can have a robot drive a car perfectly well, it's sort of a waste of time for a person to do that. Now, of course, realizing that also requires you to have a new job for them to do. That's better than the job they were doing. And I think there's this interesting tension right now in that, you know, kind of like the Robin Hood bros are also Uber drivers. You know, that's what they do at night. They do Postmates, they do Uber, they do whatever. And then they go on Robin Hood and they trade Tesla stock and they trade Uber stock and they listen to All In and they, right?

• 15:04Speaker 01

  And so it's like navigating all of these conflicting interests among these constituencies is going to be really challenging for politicians. And I think the backdrop of it all, and you're seeing this play out in Europe in a big way, is that the intergenerational war is the true winter that is coming. Like winter is coming. The social security trust fund is going to be insolvent in 2032. And the truth is that the people who own equities that are really going to be the beneficiaries of Uber and Tesla and SpaceX and autonomy and data centers are old people.

• 15:47Speaker 01

  And those old people are not driving Uber. Okay, those old people are chilling in Boca Raton and, you know, checking their Schwab account every day and feeling good about how great things are going. And meanwhile, the 22 year old Uber driver is looking out at a future where their job may be taken. They can't buy a house. It feels like everything's gotten more expensive. And that's why irrespective of whether they voted for Trump or Kamala last time, they turned out yesterday and they said, no, this isn't working for me. No one is out here actually giving a shit about me and my future.

• 16:23Jason Calacanis?

  Well said. Intergenerational concerns here, Ilana. And we have the M and A concern, jobs, data centers. This is just going to be a tough setup, I think, for the technology industry. I guess my question is, can the Dems actually find a middle ground here between being anti-capitalist, anti-progress, being D cells and getting economic growth? Because if they do take this position that young people or socialists want them to take, well, we're, now we're getting into Ayn Rand kind of territory.

• 17:02Jason Calacanis?

  We're getting into who's going to create these jobs? Where are they going to come from? If you slow things down too much, this could be quite problematic. So your thoughts there on Dems maybe finding a middle ground here?

• 17:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, a few things there. And I know we were talking before the podcast about, okay, people who can't even drive cars, people who can't afford a car. Well, suddenly now they could get somewhere so much cheaper, maybe even further away for less of the cost than they were before. And I think like, that's a huge opportunity to be like, hey, now they could go somewhere that's further away because they didn't have a car. They're not waiting for a bus that will take them two hours to get to the job site. It will take them 20 minutes by going and getting a robot taxi. And so I think there are a lot of opportunities there. I don't think our country will go and look at China, look at other kind of countries that are building and continue to go and really take in the technology that's being built and be like, no, we're actually just slowing it down here.

• 17:58Speaker 02

  We'll let you guys have the self-driving cars. We'll let you guys have the robots. But here in the US, we just want to like, keep driving our own cars, like not have robots, even though that we have the technology to do so. I think as a country, we're scared of it. Like you always hear this thought of AI is taking over, jobs are done, nobody's going to have anything to do anymore. And there will be no way to make money because AI and robots will be doing it all. And I think with all this, there are more opportunities. When horses stopped and cars came, opportunities came up too. And so I think it's scary. I think we're living in a world and where AI agents are doing 50% of the jobs that were before and all the manual work you no longer need.

• 18:43Speaker 02

  But I think that there's still opportunities in there. Who's actually going and building the robots? And you're seeing blue collar jobs continue to grow and more and more is necessary. And so all in all, I think like as a country, we probably need to change our sentiment around technology because we are going to have to embrace it. And we're, as a country, I don't see us just watching other countries continue to succeed and not go and really embrace it here.

• 19:07Speaker 03

  Jason, you have an amazing perch. Like who's telling the positive, like the, I remember going to Disneyland and seeing like the House of the Future, right? Like in the 1950s, right? And it looked like the Jetsons. And, and there was this view that we would be landing rockets and we would have Rosie, who's the household, like who, we have like movie stars telling this positive story of AI. But have you seen anybody actually with that Rosie scenario?

• 19:31Jason Calacanis?

  In America, I think if you look at Zuckerberg, as crazy as it seems, he created a program for Generation Tool Belt to train people for free to become plumbers, electricians, et cetera. So he's got such a bad, the corporate reputation at Meta is the worst of almost every company, right? And they have really good comms people there who are like, how do we turn this around? And that was, I think, one of their efforts. And, you know, they, they started that program. Then they're doing a lot on like landing pages about data centers. So you constantly see them putting up these landing pages around, hey, data centers are great. Look at the tax, look at the short-term jobs, the midterm jobs, the long-term jobs.

• 20:15Jason Calacanis?

  We're going to have 4,000 people there building this, you know, data center in Waco, Texas or whatever, El Paso, you know, and here's all the downstream effects. Plus we're going to pay for your kids, you know, new soccer field or whatever it happens to be. And then Muse, I think the thing that's going to turn this around as crazy as it seems is when the stay at home mom or dad, the teacher, your everyday American starts using an agent and the agent starts making their life better. And the agent says, you know what? I went through your emails. You're paying for Netflix twice. I can I unsubscribe from one of those? And they're like, yeah, I don't have time to do that. It's done. And then they say, oh yeah. And by the way, you know, you have your small plumbing business. I went through all your emails.

• 21:00Jason Calacanis?

  You missed these two quotes. There's one in your spam filter and I took the time to write a quote to the person. Would you like me to send it on your behalf? And then, you know, Joe, the plumber and, you know, Susan, you know, with her small business, you know, they start actually experiencing gains that we're all experiencing. I did a tweet earlier this week. I'm spending as a company $40,000 on Claude, on Grokbot, you know, Cursor, Lovable, Eleven Lips, this long tail of things. And I calculated I'm getting $2 million in value. How did I calculate it? I looked at three different software projects we're doing internally. One to build essentially Angel List, Alana, for the syndicate.

• 21:45Jason Calacanis?

  We left Angel List to do our own thing. We were a little bit too big for it. And now that platform, I always wanted to build. It would have taken four people, five people to build it in two years. And we built it in three months with no developers and no designers. And it works and it's getting better every day. We did the same thing for our programs and our accelerator. And we did the same thing for the podcast and the media business. Each of those would have been 12 full time employees that call it 100 to 150 K each. Once that trickles down to not a 20 person venture capital firm, but a two person, you know, mom and pop shop, that's like, how do we make more money? And it says, oh yeah, by the way, you know, there's these three other services. I could take your inventory and the photos from your camera roll and put this stuff on eBay

• 22:31Jason Calacanis?

  for you automatically. And then you'd have two ways to sell from your store. And do you know about Etsy? I could set up an Etsy store for you and I'll manage the Shopify store for free. And you're currently paying $4,000 to some vendor to maintain your Shopify store. I can do that all for free. That's the kind of stuff that's going to make people feel great about it. And if their kids can get a job because their kids embrace the tool and the kid learns how to play guitar or be a plumber or be a ranch hand or be a chef because not just of YouTube, but their agents kind of help them fill in that knowledge. When everybody gets their own personal tutor, when the price of homes goes down significantly, when the price of healthcare goes down because AI is providing it, that's when I think we

• 23:16Jason Calacanis?

  could turn this around. But there's nobody leading that charge.

• 23:19Speaker 03

  No, but nobody has that narrative. I think, and I think this will happen much faster than we expect. I mean, you look at the Muse numbers, you have 10 million people in the first quarter downloading it, two and a half million people are daily active. You can imagine, okay, let's wake up in 24 months and now we actually have some meaningful fraction of Americans, 330 million Americans. Let's say we have 30 or 40 million people on Muse every day. All of a sudden we're outstripped of capacity because even now some of these systems are having problems. And then we are in the U.S. A net exporter of tokens, a net importer of tokens. I think one of the narratives that we need to start talking about is just like oil, just like diesel, are we a net importer of tokens or are we a net exporter? And I wonder, like, you need that positive science fiction view of the world before

• 24:02Speaker 03

  you can actually have this conversation because there needs to be enough domestic demand and will for us to be producers of tokens to change this data center narrative, which is absolutely essential.

• 24:12Jason Calacanis?

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• 24:56Jason Calacanis?

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• 25:21Speaker 01

  I think, I think there's the, there's the digital domain and then there's the physical real world, right? And if I look at my monthly credit card bill or my bank statement, all the expensive stuff is basically physical stuff. It's my, it's my rent, it's healthcare, it's school, you know, it's a, it's a babysitter. It's all that kind of stuff. It's a car. And there's this interesting moment we're at right now where it's like AI is here and it can solve a bunch of business problems for business people. But the question is, can it actually solve these problems that are material to an average person's life?

• 26:05Speaker 01

  And as I was just hearing you guys talk about this, what occurs to me is like, unfortunately, the real problems that need to be solved in the average person's life are today largely problems that require public policy. And so I actually think the way that AI can be most helpful would be if it helps us as a society to be less partisan and more constructive in our politics. And I don't know that AI had anything to do with the election results yesterday, but just imagine that everyone going to the polling booth is, you know, going to be using their AI assistant to help them understand what they're voting on and what would actually

• 26:50Speaker 01

  be good for them. I mean, fundamentally, the importance of this technology is that it should make you smarter. If you're not that smart, which, you know, I'll be the first to admit, I'm not that smart. I got bad at math in high school.

• 27:03Jason Calacanis?

  And there's multiple types of intelligence as well. You have artistic, emotional and pure IQ. You have all three.

• 27:09Speaker 01

  Well, keep it coming, keep it coming, Jason. I like that. But, but here's what I would say, when I get the ballot, okay? It's, it's impossible for me to manage this thing. Okay. It's like 100 decisions. It's so complicated. I never heard any of these people. I get one sentence on each of them. So of course I went on, you know, Gemini in this case, and I just, every single one, I typed in the candidates' names and I said, here's what I care about. Tell me who to vote for.

• 27:36Jason Calacanis?

  Love it.

• 27:36Speaker 01

  So imagine that what AI does is it basically is the infrastructure for us to be smarter as a people and stop shooting ourselves in the foot on all of the issues that we need to deal with. Like we have to deal with, you know, permitting issues for construction. You've seen obviously in Texas where you are, how much they've been able to move the needle on this in cities like Austin or Houston. Like it's not as if we don't know how to solve our big problems. Lurie's doing it in San Francisco. You've got great mayors and governors who are trying things all over the place. That is the beauty of federalism.

• 28:19Speaker 01

  We get to try things all over the country, figure out what the best ideas are. And then if we were smart, we should just take those best practices and scale them up. And like being partisan is just a huge impediment to doing the smart stuff that we should do. So I think that's my hope. It's like AI helps us be smarter. Being smarter helps us fix our actual problems, which AI can't solve on its own. It takes us to do that.

• 28:44Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, you need to have the, the meat layer between the AI, that software.

• 28:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, you love this meat thing.

• 28:50Jason Calacanis?

  I love the meat thing. I mean, I didn't eat breakfast, so I'm kind of hungry here, but I need my protein.

• 28:54Speaker 01

  You're a meat boy.

• 28:55Jason Calacanis?

  I gotta go get some brisket at the Salt Lake. But in all seriousness, I do think you're on to something with the real world. Another thing that will turn this narrative around is when people start experiencing things like this little tiny robot they attach to their garbage. I love that. Here's an arduous task. And I saw this come across like a hundred pound trash bin. You gotta drag this thing out. I literally, you know, I have a ranch, so it's literally a half mile from the house to the gate. There is a service we pay to show up on Sundays, take these from our house, put them in a truck and drive them to the front and then come back the next day and put it back. These like literal companies that do this.

• 29:35Jason Calacanis?

  Here's a garbage can with a little robotic attachment that Kirby from Revere Robotics. And then when people start experiencing this, we're investors in ZipLine. And when people start experiencing, you know, their burrito or their extra diapers or their prescription, let's say they, they got a cold and they need to get like a Z-Pak or something. When this stuff starts getting dropped off by ZipLine. No tax, no delivery fee, or the delivery is a buck or it's incorporated into the price is essentially what I think will happen. There's no tip and it comes in under 15 minutes, under 10 minutes. This is the kind of stuff that will get people excited about AI and about technology again, Alana, I believe.

• 30:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I have a robot vacuum and I think it's the best thing in the world. My neighbors over here have like a robot lawnmower. And I mean, if a robot could go and be like doing my laundry, folding my clothes, making my bed, like I'm all here for it. But I think people are just like, kind of what we talked about before, just saying, okay, data centers are being built around me. The cost as an individual is going to rise, which just isn't true because there's so many regulations around that right now saying that that isn't the case. Or people are going to say, hey, we're going to lose all our jobs. And I just think what we're all saying here is like, there's also so many positives to this. And there's so many things that are going to come from this that the manual tasks, the manual labor, maybe. People get hurt in driving a car every single day, but we're not really talking about how many lives it saves.

• 31:04Speaker 02

  Because instead of texting and driving and being distracted by driving, we have a robot driving you. And I think the headlines that read is, oh, this Waymo got into an accident. Or I feel like there was a video the other week that like, oh, Waymo made a left turn when it shouldn't. And like, one Waymo in the whole fleet of them made that mistake.

• 31:22Jason Calacanis?

  They did kill one cat. They killed a cat. But I'm not a cat guy, so I wasn't particularly. I wasn't particularly a broken hearted about them. I'm actually kind of not a fan of cats. I'm not, I don't like them.

• 31:35Speaker 02

  They might make that the headline later, like Waymo kills cat, Jason doesn't care.

• 31:39Jason Calacanis?

  FSD, I mean, I don't, does everybody here drive a Tesla with FSD?

• 31:44Speaker 02

  I don't, but I'm considering getting a Tesla.

• 31:47Jason Calacanis?

  What about you, DA? Are you?

• 31:49Speaker 01

  I do, I do, I used to, I don't, I'm waiting, I'm waiting for the next version.

• 31:53Jason Calacanis?

  The next version, it's, Tomasz?

• 31:55Speaker 01

  I hear it's amazing.

• 31:56Speaker 03

  It's a game changer. I mean, it's a Waymo in your driveway.

• 31:59Jason Calacanis?

  It's crazy, right?

• 32:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, it just drives itself. It's, it saved me from two or three accidents. I was driving home in the rain last night in San Francisco and the reaction times, I just, I, I think it's, I think, one, I think if you're an insurer. Like, I wonder if actually the mandate to shift to self-driving will not come from insurance. Because the.

• 32:19Jason Calacanis?

  They'll have no business.

• 32:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's just, well, yeah. And so maybe you see the convergence of the self-driving car company with the insurance business. But you just look at like the, I think maybe car insurance ultimately ends up looking like title insurance. We all buy title insurance when we buy a house. The redemption rates on those policies are less than 2%. And, you know, what happens if car insurance, you only get, you know, only 2% or 1% of people actually who drive in a year actually get into accidents. We can get there, right? Waymo's at 93 or 95%. So I, I think it's pretty fundamental and it's almost, there's this joke on Twitter, right? The most expensive Tesla, the most expensive car I ever bought was the Tesla full self-driving because my spouse wanted one immediately. And so I had to buy two. I, I think you're, you know, there's almost a certain level.

• 33:05Jason Calacanis?

  It's a true joke, too.

• 33:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, a certain level of personal responsibility, like I care about you and my family. I want you to have the safest driving experience if you have a 16-year-old. What are you going to put them in? You know, if you can, you'll put them in a self-driving car so that they can't hurt themselves or other people.

• 33:20Jason Calacanis?

  I, I think being anti-AI will become increasingly a losing position as consumers get huge value from it. It'd be like being against.

• 33:31Speaker 01

  Jake, yeah? I got a question for, for the group, which is, you know, it's like, AI is already quite cheap for the end consumer. I mean, you just talked about how disproportionate the value you've gotten in your business is relative to what it's cost you. But it still could be cheaper. It could be free. And you think about how China's going at this. As I understand it, their national strategy is basically focus everything on getting AI out there into the economy. Because the real beneficiaries are going to be the people like you who are using it in their business, making their businesses better. Or individuals making their lives better.

• 34:10Speaker 01

  And what I wonder is like, there's this thesis in Silicon Valley, the so-called everyone wins thesis. And, and that is, just to recap it, that the memory makers can win, Nvidia can win, the Neo clouds can win, the Frontier Labs can win, everyone can win. That is basically an argument that there is so much profit to go around.

• 34:36Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 34:36Speaker 01

  That everyone in the ecosystem has this opportunity to basically extract monopoly rents. And what I wonder is like, is that sustainable? Like, I don't know that that is at all part of the political conversation around AI yet. But I do have to say, like, it makes me a little uneasy to watch all of these companies making 80% gross margins.

• 35:02Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 35:03Speaker 01

  And that's not how capitalism is supposed to work. When you're, when you got those fat margins, it's supposed to attract competition. The margins get pushed down, your competitive advantage period wanes. What's going on here? And, you know, we, we alluded to Lina Khan earlier, like, is there anything that needs to happen here to either spur more competition? Or otherwise bring down these margins, which just seem unwarranted?

• 35:32Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, this is a key question. And I think when we, what we saw from Canva, just this week, Canva cut 22% of their staff. That is 100% AI taking and compressing down things people are paying for. How many people do you know who pay for Canva? Who are moms and dads at home and using it? You know, 1,200 people, I think it's 20% of their staff. I can't believe they have 5,000 people working at that company or 6,000 people working there. That's a large number. It feels like if Bending Spoons was running Canva, they'd have 400 people, you know, like 10% or something.

• 36:14Jason Calacanis?

  So, yeah, I think a lot of this software is going to be, come free, Alana. And then a lot of this margin is going to get taken away, don't you think?

• 36:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, if your business relies on kind of third-party inference. What happens when a lot of these customers demand lower prices and you have to continue to cut your margins? And I think a lot of these, I mean, Canva's great, but like, they're almost, a part of their business is this AI wrapper. And they're relying on other AI tools and LLMs to be able to create what they want. They have to be able to cut their costs. And I think it's going to be really interesting because in the future, I think a lot of AI is going to be discussing these economics. And we've sent years talking about what these models are capable of. But now companies are starting to ask what is actually the cost to deploy them at scale?

• 37:06Speaker 02

  And so I think companies have been riding this, okay, we need to deploy as much AI as possible in all the different features and aspects. But now they really have to hone in on, hey, if they are using AI, how many people are really necessary to build the same thing that they're building today? And I mean, I think you were just saying it where you're spending 40K to do, what, $2 million worth of work?

• 37:28Jason Calacanis?

  And. Yeah.

• 37:29Speaker 02

  I don't think AI could do everything, but I think AI helps a lot of these shops do things quicker and easier and not as many people.

• 37:36Jason Calacanis?

  Tomasz, these were software projects internally that I wanted to do. I tried to do one of them, blew through like $100,000 and I gave up because I just couldn't make forward motion on it. And I was like, this is going to wind up costing me $1 million and I'm going to get 250K worth of value from it. So something has changed dramatically here. What's your take?

• 37:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'll, I'll take the other side, which is, I mean, you've seen GPU costs go up 120% from about $5 to about $13 in the last six months. I think as a result of the election.

• 38:05Jason Calacanis?

  That's the hourly cost of a GPU you're talking to.

• 38:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, for Blackwell 300, which is state of the art today. I, I think we're going to get to a place where we won't have enough AI in 27.

• 38:18Speaker 03

  And I think for Muse, we won't have it, for other products, we won't have it. And so we will start to buy AI the way that we buy internet. When you buy internet, you buy a certain amount of bandwidth. How much stuff can I download? And then I buy it as a function of speed. How quickly does it come? We are going to start to buy AI in the same way, which is like, how many, effectively, how many questions can I ask? And how quick is the response?

• 38:40Jason Calacanis?

  It's going to be rationed, is what you're saying. You're going to get an allotment, it's going to be rationed. And this all-you-can-eat stuff is maybe going to go away.

• 38:47Speaker 03

  Right. And so that goes back to the Canva point, which is, sure, today, when inference is cheap and you can get as much of it as you want. Vibe code whatever I like. But in an environment where GPU and AI is constrained, not everybody will be able to afford state-of-the-art AI. Not everybody will be able to afford sort of performance. And so instead of spending $100,000 to vibe code a custom app, I'll spend $30,000 and I'll make do with an app that I have to kind of shim and wedge in. And so I think we'll ultimately see a pretty big resurgence at the app layer as a result, just because of the, the, the supply, demand. Will make application, like bespoke application development and maintenance too expensive for most people.

• 39:28Speaker 02

  So do you think we're not going to find like a cheaper GPU and a cheaper chip? Because right now, obviously Nvidia owns most of the chips, there are cheaper way to get power.

• 39:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, we're seeing a doubling in intelligence per watt year over year. That's what the head of Google data centers has said, you know, we've seen a 400x reduction in overall costs. But the, the reality is like, there is a finite supply. Next year, we'll have probably around 81 gigawatts. We have to decide what fraction of that is inference. How much of that are we selling to each other in order to do stuff for the enterprise? And about 60% of it is for model training. And if we continue to train these models at 3, 4, $500 million run, there's just not that much inference to go around. Even with the overall efficiency and the next generation chips, as you point out, Alana, like you have the Vera Rubens coming online and they're twice as productive. But the demand is, is growing way faster than. Then a 200% per year.

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• 40:59Jason Calacanis?

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• 41:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, when you say the demand is growing so much faster, I mean, this is what all the companies in the space say too, right?

• 41:22Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 41:22Speaker 01

  And, and my question is, well, then why don't the prices just go up? You know, I mean, they could raise the price to the point where there is only the amount of demand that they can meet.

• 41:34Speaker 03

  Well, they're already at 85% margin. They're 85% approximately. I mean, you can look at the Anthropic S1, approximately 81, 82% gross margin compared to a publicly traded software company of about 71. And we've seen a price war. So you look at what OpenAI did with Luna, they cut prices 50%, then they cut prices 80%. You have open source models that are significantly less expensive, 80 to 85% less expensive than closed source. You have a lot of deflationary pressures that are going here. The problem is, think about it like a pharmaceutical company. If it takes me half a billion dollars or a billion dollars to make a drug, if I'm a pharma company, I have 17 years to commercialize that with a patent. If I'm a state-of-the-art AI lab, I have 41 days. Because in 41 days, someone else is coming out with another soda model and then all of a sudden, share starts to shift.

• 42:18Speaker 03

  And so I need to generate a pretty significant and healthy margin in those 41 days to be able to finance the development of the next model.

• 42:24Jason Calacanis?

  Capitalism is so brutal, D. It's so, it's so brutal.

• 42:28Speaker 01

  Can we speculate? I, I would love to get your speculation, Tomasz, about what the steady state margin ought to be for these companies. What you just said, sounds like an argument for Frontier Labs having no sustainable margin in steady state. Tell me, one, is that a correct representation? But two, if you start to think through these other layers, is, are the memory guys going to be doing 80% gross margins four years from now, five years from now? I mean, Micron's trading at a forward P of four and a half, Hynek's trading at a forward P of 2.8. I mean, if you believe what you're saying about the scale of this, how do you not put all of your retirement funds into Micron stock?

• 43:08Jason Calacanis?

  I'll be right back. Jay trading like a lunatic. As the market came down, I just bought a million dollars in Uber and Tesla and I totally hit the bottom. But Tomasz, answer the question here about this.

• 43:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 43:20Jason Calacanis?

  The steady state, because it, we're, we're kind of evoking Jevon's paradox here, I think.

• 43:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, look, I, I think the problem, okay, the problem with the hardware companies and why I wouldn't load up on those stocks is primarily because their GPUs lying fallow in warehouses. We don't have enough electricity to light them up. So at some point, Nvidia bookings plateaued just because we can't deploy them within the US. And then you have a seismic shock to the, to those stocks. I think on the other question, DA, like what is the terminal margin for some of these businesses? You look at AWS, right? AWS massive, largest hyperscaler. A lot of the business before the AI wave was selling commodity compute. If you rent a server on AWS, it's a server just like there is on Amazon, sorry, on Azure, just the way there is on GCP. The operating margins, not the gross margins, but the operating margins of that business.

• 44:07Speaker 03

  In other words, the profitability of that particular business unit is 35 to 36% net. So the, even if they're selling a commodity good, even if you're an oil company and you're selling crude or diesel, you can still have a really nice, healthy business with competition, right? Like Coca-Cola's gross margins and net margins are not zero because they're competing with Pepsi. They just continuously try, try to develop new products and innovate. So I, I think, you know, having, even for like the broader macroeconomy, geopolitically, having these companies generate 70 to 80% gross margins is very healthy, sustainable, and it's probably the right thing because we want to encourage them to continue to develop and innovate.

• 44:44Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, at the $50 to one ratio, I put my spend, Alana, at $50 in value for every dollar. Now, I might not have built that stuff, so maybe it's really 10 to one or something. But I see the revenue going up and the projects I'm doing, I'm seeing the ambition, the dollars invested. Everything's going up and to the right because when we deploy the software, we kind of get more efficient. That argues to me that they're undercharging me. And I think everybody's getting undercharged here massively. And plus, I just ordered a $12,000 Mac Studio to run local models, which is exactly what I paid for my PC Junior, PC XT, PC AT in the eighties. They were $4,000 computers, $5,000 computers.

• 45:29Jason Calacanis?

  Maybe you can get down as low as, I think, $2,000 back then. In, in today's dollars, that would be three or four X. So here we are, like it used to cost 15, the equivalent of $15,000 to buy a desktop computer. You just go back to $15,000 desktop computers and you got unlimited, unmetered, well, not unlimited, but unmetered local compute.

• 45:49Speaker 02

  And then just to add to that, like you're still hiring at like your podcast. So it's not like you're doing everything, it's all automated and you're completely done. Like I saw on your Twitter, you're hiring for what, 10 jobs, 14?

• 46:01Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 46:02Speaker 02

  I had to check the numbers and it's like, okay, sure, you're able to automate a lot of the manual tasks, maybe some of the editing that's needed for your podcast, some of the like preparation, but there still needs to be hands-on. And I think some people forget that, especially as we continue to grow.

• 46:15Speaker 03

  But on this local inference point, Jason, I think you're right. Like in, in, in an era or a year in 27, when GPUs are limited, local inference will become really big. We're investors in a company called Olama that is about 10 million people.

• 46:25Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 46:25Speaker 03

  Using local inference.

• 46:27Jason Calacanis?

  Of course.

• 46:27Speaker 03

  Stanford released a study that, you know, 90% of the work that non-coders do with AI can be executed on a local model. So I think this is a really big wave and you'll start to do stuff locally. And then when you need a cloud model, you'll spike. And this is one of the ways that we'll maintain costs.

• 46:40Jason Calacanis?

  I would have no problem, DA, buying everybody in the company on a Mac Studio or Nvidia Windows Spark-enabled computer. I would spend 20K per person. Because if I'm spending on average right now, 2K per person per year,

• 47:00Jason Calacanis?

  it's going to kind of net out eventually, you know, if I sell them in five years for half the price.

• 47:05Speaker 01

  I agree. And I think it's like, you know, as they used to say in the internet 1.0 era, information wants to be free, the internet wants to be free. I think intelligence wants to be free.

• 47:16Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 47:17Speaker 01

  And, and, and hardware can't be free. And so, you know, I don't know how long this takes, but ultimately, you know, you're going to have to, you know, to Tomasz's point, you're, you're going to have to have hardware companies that earn a big enough profit to attract the people who know how to do these crazy, complicated things. Right now, those margins are maybe, maybe people are over-earning. You know, you've got a situation right now where Elon is financially incented to put literal rocket engineers on general contracting type jobs, right? Because it's just so valuable to build these data centers as quickly as possible. That isn't steady state.

• 48:00Speaker 01

  I mean, it's not what we want those rocket scientists doing over the long run. But still, someone's going to have to be assembling those ASML machines. Someone's going to be having to produce all the stuff that we need to make this, to make this work over the long run. And, and that, I think, is the most durable business in a way.

• 48:18Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. Elon Web Services came out of nowhere. SpaceX all of a sudden has Colossus 2 going, four times bigger than Colossus 1. And who better to build real stuff in the real world, like factories and data centers than Elon? He's got really great engineers working for him. But yeah, they're, they're, they're shifting key talent, I think, over to Elon Web Services because it's so, it's such a money printing business. When we get back from this quick break, I want to talk about changes at Sequoia, my alma mater, where I started and I was the first scout. The scout program has now been. Retired at Sequoia. I have feelings about it. Before we do that, I want to just give a shout

• 48:59Jason Calacanis?

  out to my friends at Fintrix, F-I-N-T-R-X. This is a great subscription that applies to all of us in the venture business. We started a forward motion. We wanted to beat a bunch of family offices. We looked for a database of them. Didn't exist. Then I tweeted, hey, is there a database of this? And the founder of Fintrix contacted me and we got this incredible database. They have, they are tracking tens of thousands of decision makers across the four or 5,000 family offices there are. I started doing late-stage deals, Ilana, from my syndicate. We did ZipLine. We did Vast Space. We did Adams, Travis's new company. But I needed bigger check sizes, not

• 49:40Jason Calacanis?

  the average check size from, you know, angel list level syndicates that I was doing, early stage. Those were $5,000 to $50,000 checks. I needed $250 to $2 million checks for those allocations. Got on Fintrix, built a database, built some AI, queued everybody up, started doing family office meetings, myself personally and with my team, and it worked. Go to fintrx.com to learn more. An incredible database if you want to meet family offices. And the detail they had in there was crazy because I found my family office in there, which was like a family office of two, me and my wife, which we, you know, just started allocating stuff in a little more of a thoughtful way. And they had details of us. So thanks to Fintrix

• 50:21Jason Calacanis?

  for supporting the show and supporting my syndicate, syndicate.com. All right, let's talk about Sequoia. And I'm obviously close to this. Ruloff Botha, I met him. He invested in my company. He's no longer there. And a number of the projects he set in motion, along with the rest of the team there, now that he's not leading it anymore, have been retired. Sequoia published a long post this morning, the Sequoia of Tomorrow, making one year since its generational transition that occurred. The firm is closing its London office, which Sequoia says means several people will be leaving. The firm says this is not about the team. It's sunsetting. It's batch accelerator ARC, which a lot of people really love. They

• 51:03Jason Calacanis?

  were doing their own high-end bespoke version of Y Combinator, sort of a couple hundred people, a dozen companies, I believe. And the scouts program, which famously myself and Sam Altman started our investment careers in, me doing Uber, him doing Stripe in that very early stage, and one of their most profitable programs. And they also, they're shutting that down. And they've removed much of the complexity associated with the Sequoia Capital Fund, which is how they held shares post IPOs for their LPs if they chose to do that. And they got rid of early and growth stages, which were two different groups there that would

• 51:43Jason Calacanis?

  focus on those different stages. And now there's back to only one Sequoia. Doug Leoni, who's been super invigorated, a friend of mine, friend of the program, is back in the seat. So they have him making investments and driving the firm. And they've raised $10 billion in new funds. They also got rid of the 40-year-old Monday morning partner meeting cycle. And they're going to go 24/7 like their founders. Tomasz, what do you think of these changes? You know, people over there, you know, the firm and its history. When you look at these changes, is it just the standard thing that happens when you have

• 52:27Jason Calacanis?

  a change in management? People, you know, have their projects they want to work on? Or do you think it's a streamlining that has something to do with maybe Andreessen Horowitz? Which is also, that's a bunch of different fiefdoms. But what do you think about what's going on at Sequoia?

• 52:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, obviously, you know, legendary firm, clearly have terrific people leading the operation. I think a couple of different, the things that stood out to me, one was the unification of the early and the growth. And, okay, why is this? Well, it's because if you call a seed-stage company a seed-stage company, the odds are that it's a $5 million investment, a $50 million investment, or a $500 million investment, I'm being, are roughly equal. I'm, it's just a bit tongue-in-cheek, but like, the, the idea that, you know, we had T-shirt sized financing rounds 10 years ago. Now, any one of those can be a seed. And so the, the structure of like an early fund versus a growth fund no longer really applies in this ecosystem, because if you have a team of wonderful PhDs of researchers

• 53:26Speaker 03

  coming from a NeoLab, they might need $300 million to $500 million just to prove the idea, the same way that, say, a biotech would, in order to reach that first milestone. And so you need really big funds in order to supply them, hence the unification of those two funds. I think that's a really smart move.

• 53:40Jason Calacanis?

  Ilana, you have a thought there about what's going on at Sequoia and the emergent, emergence of these sort of mega funds. Sequoia fought it off as long as they could. They wanted to stay small, bespoke, stick to their knitting, but they had to raise growth funds. They had to do bigger things with other players. Yeah, Menlo, Andreessen Horowitz, et cetera, going big. If everybody's going big, you kind of get left out, right?

• 54:06Speaker 02

  And I think over the past kind of five years, a lot of these venture funds have become incredibly complicated businesses. They have their accelerator, they have their scout fund, like kind of everything that you just discussed. And I think at the end of the day, if you look back at their returns, like their job is to find exceptional founders and then continue to invest in them over the course of the seed, the Series A, the Series B, et cetera. And so I think what they're saying is, first off, like, you still have to continue to make those decisions, even if you invest in a company at the Series B company, it could still make generational returns. If you invest in SpaceX at the Series B price, your fund would have done great. And so I think by combining that all, they're saying, hey, those decisions are just as important as early-stage companies that are the later, because they'll just write a bigger check for the same ownership. I think the

• 54:51Speaker 02

  one part that was really interesting about this is shutting off their scout program. And you probably have a lot of thoughts here, because you're like, hey, me and Sam found great companies. Like, why would you ever kind of take this away? Because there's some people who don't necessarily want to do VC full-time, or maybe they do, and this is their step in. Or there's some founders in your network that could really find these. Like, why take away those specific people that you have early on? Because like, what do you really get from doing that? You just had people going out and finding the best companies, and if they work, great. If they didn't. I'd be super curious to know the numbers that came from this. I mean, they must have done a lot of research to be like, hey, we had these scouts, maybe they weren't the best companies in our portfolio. So like, why are we doing this? And I think there had to be something that came from this decision

• 55:35Speaker 02

  that ultimately led them to decide not to do it.

• 55:37Jason Calacanis?

  I think it's complexity. It's obviously sad for me, because I was literally the first one. They, Ruloff called me, said, I have this idea for a program. We want you to be the first scout. And then it got to hundreds of them. It was their way of kind of recognizing there's so many companies out there, we can't possibly meet with them all, we can't possibly process them all. And we, there was a signaling issue in the early days of venture capital, where if you did the seed, or you put but 100 or 250K, and we were putting 25 and 50K checks in originally, then it went to 100, 250. If you didn't do the next round, then you basically damaged the company by not doing the next round. Because everybody would say, well, why Sequoia not doing it? They're, they're the best in the business. So you're

• 56:21Jason Calacanis?

  the loser in the portfolio. So this is a way for them to say, we have no control over the scouts program. If Sam Altman wants to write a check, if Jason wants to write a check, they write it. We don't. All they have to do is submit it. We, we fund it. So it was a way to get around that originally and spread a wider net. And, you know, everybody copied it. So now everybody's got scouts. So the originator of it's getting rid of it. Maybe they just think we want to be simpler, and we have such a great reputation, everybody's going to come to us at some point. And to Tomasz's point, if we get, and your point as well, Ilana, hey, we don't have to get them in the beginning. We can get them in the middle. We can get them in the end. If it's truly a generational company, we just

• 57:03Jason Calacanis?

  have to get in there at some point. So we just need really great partners, a really great reputation, and we could miss it.

• 57:10Speaker 02

  I don't think Sequoia, given that their brand and now how well they've done over their last few funds, is having any issue getting in touch with the founders. So I think that also takes into account where they're like, hey, maybe we don't need these smaller guys getting it. And we could just do it from all the people who work here full time. And we'll just continue to invest in the best companies.

• 57:27Jason Calacanis?

  I do think they should have kept going on ARC, and they should have expanded that program. A16Z DA is being incredibly aggressive with their speedrun program. And they're accepting people to speedrun, you know, in week 10, or just like, we had one company that I think got accepted like two weeks before the demo day. And I think they just have really good terms. They put in 500K at $5 million. Then they have the option to put another 500K in at $20 million. So they just have this way to get to 10 or 12% of the company with the super pro rata option, which they copied from me, and Y Combinator copied it from me. I put that into our early documents with our accelerator. But it's hard work at the beginning. And then, you know, with these programs, they're really

• 58:10Jason Calacanis?

  like, kind of, I don't want to say cut you off, but you kind of have to cut people off, or else you'll have, you'll wind up having thousands of companies that you have a small percentage ownership in that expect you to perform for them like you have a board seat. And that's just becomes very untenable for these programs. So that's why you create a program. It's like, hey, we're going to make a quick check and then move on. I don't think many people want to work in the earliest stages. I don't think people want to do year one and year zero work, because the late stage is so profitable, DA, which is why I popped up the barbell strategy with the syndicate. My syndicate members kept saying, can we get into ZipLine? Can we get into Travis's new company? So I said, okay, I'm not going Just fight it on principle. That's what the members want. Let me go ask people. So I ask TK,

• 58:55Jason Calacanis?

  can I get an allocation? A zipline? If you can get an allocation? A VAS SPAS? Can we get an allocation? And everybody says yes. In fact, out of six companies, everybody said yes. The only one I wasn't able to get an allocation in was Waymo because they were massively oversubscribed and Google wanted all of it. Or we would have done an allocation there. So.

• 59:10Speaker 01

  Well, I think you get it. I mean, let's, let's talk, let's put this in the context of what you said last week here on the pod, which was that the next wave of unicorns are alicorns. And I love this, right? Like, can you suck with you? Before I say my thing, I want you to just regurgitate what a alicorn is.

• 59:28Jason Calacanis?

  So two or three people can get a company to a million dollars. Forget about ram in financing. They can just do it, you know, on the weekend. You have people doing this on a regular basis now, building a product with AI, getting 10 to 50 to 100,000 a month in revenue, and then coming to us and saying, hey, I got this business. Is it venture ready? And we're like, yes, yes, it is venture ready. You're at a half million in revenue. So I believe unicorns, obviously, are billion dollar valuation companies. And alicorn has wings and they fly over funding rounds. Many of the companies I'm seeing right now don't want to raise money. They're like, we're profitable. Why would we raise money? And I say, oh, rainy day fund. Maybe you want

• 1:00:09Jason Calacanis?

  to be able to buy something. What if the market has a pullback and you become the acquirer as opposed to the person who gets acquired because you run out of money? And they're like, but we're profitable. It's a pretty great argument. So it's going to be harder for venture firms to get a good price and have a decent entry price if founders believe, hey, we don't need you. We don't need your money. And so then that argues to get in early or get in late and be essentially like a crossover hedge fund.

• 1:00:39Speaker 01

  Right. Well, I think this is, again, this is like the great tension of this moment. Probably the best businesses that are going to get started in the next several years are going to be started by these incredibly capital efficient, young hustlers who are AI native. And the investment opportunity to back them is probably going to be small because they're alicorns. They want to fly over the rounds. They don't want a VC on their board. They don't want to go through this gauntlet that has been standard for the past 20 years. And I, what I see is that they're financing their companies through their social network. I mean, they don't want to go to some big fund. Like, why would you go to Sequoia unless you really

• 1:01:23Speaker 01

  need a lot of money? And to me, everything about that press release is really smart, with the possible exception of the $10 billion number. You know, I'm not saying they're doing something dumb for their business, but you have to ask, what is the product of a venture capital firm as far as its LPs go? And, you know, what it has meant historically was that it was a high, you know, high dispersion of returns, but the really good venture funds, we're going to deliver just these unimaginably high rates of return. Very, very hard to do that with $10 billion, no matter what you're doing right, no matter how smart you are. So

• 1:02:08Speaker 01

  that's the challenge. We're in this moment right now where, as these intergenerational transitions are taking place at all these firms, the founders want to monetize, in many cases, by taking their firms public. And that's what you've seen with Blackstone and Ares and, you know, Apollo and all these other big asset managers in other asset classes.

• 1:02:28Jason Calacanis?

  Ackman's is public, I think, Persian swear, yeah.

• 1:02:30Speaker 01

  Ackman took his thing public in a closed end structure. Now, I think you're going to see Andreessen try to go public. And you may see other traditionally venture funds try to go public because that's how you monetize the equity that you've built up as the last generation founder of one of these things. And, you know, that just fundamentally changes the nature of these businesses. I think ironically, what it creates is, you know, sort of an emerging opportunity for small agile funds who are just playing the old venture game. Small funds deeply in the social networks of the most compelling young founders in the world. And they're the ones who are going to have a really good shot at getting this, you know, sort of alicorn class.

• 1:03:15Jason Calacanis?

  Kamash, sounds like your fund. Sounds like what you're doing.

• 1:03:18Speaker 03

  I hope that's what it is. Yeah, we, I mean, we're, you know, we're only about three years old. We've raised a little less than 800 million. And we don't invest in very many companies. We put about 10 companies per fund. And then we have a team that's actually forward deployed. That's great experience goes and builds the go to market functions of the companies. So it's not necessarily these businesses that reach profitability. I don't think we have a lot of conversations around how quickly a company can get to profitability. I think on the B to C side, so selling to consumers or product led growth where you can grow by yourself, there's no doubt that those businesses will be incredibly capital efficient and can finance their own growth. But a lot of software, even today, because of the way that we're sort of educating people about how to modernize their businesses,

• 1:04:02Speaker 03

  requires lots of increasingly expensive people.

• 1:04:05Jason Calacanis?

  I wonder how much of what we're experiencing is the tension between public markets, classic private markets, and this new weird thing in the middle, which is the trading of secondary. And so if we're sitting here, Ilana, and you're doing a syndicate, sometimes are you buying previous people's shares? Or are you just doing primary?

• 1:04:27Speaker 02

  I had at my previous syndicate, we did Anthropic and or SpaceX. At my current one, we've been going direct, not really looking at secondaries too much. It's an interesting market right now. I mean, people are paying crazy prices. I think the really interesting thing I'm seeing is to get access to the next round of funding. So many founders are like, oh, just do an uncapped with a 10% discount, a 15% discount. And then you're like, okay, they just raised a round. It gets two weeks after it closed. You have no idea when they're going to raise their next round of funding. If you're etched or instinct, maybe it will be like three days from your last round. But I think it's super interesting that now you're seeing these uncapped saves. And a lot of LPs are taking on this rick saying, hey, can

• 1:05:11Speaker 02

  they execute? You have no additional numbers than their last round. And you're just agreeing to get into their future round of funding that you have no idea the price on. And I do think there's some opportunities that you say, yeah, sure, we'll do uncapped. It's generational business. We truly believe in it. But seeing it more and more is pretty interesting. I don't know if it will.

• 1:05:29Jason Calacanis?

  That's a top of the market. And we just don't do them. We don't do deals if we don't have parata and for some basic information rights. I'm just like, life is short. Like, why would I do that? But it was really interesting, DA, is as this middle boiler room kind of before public, after the VCs have done this work, there's just like this boiler room of people who are just trying to trade in and out of the stock and get a percentage. So they're like, unlike us, who, you know, we want to be fans of the company. We want to know the founders. We want to be part of the team. And, you know, even if we're not working there every day, and it's like, there's a great esprit de corps around this concept.

• 1:06:07Jason Calacanis?

  We've now inserted a boiler room trader mentality to the industry where just, I'll take 10% of whatever I sell. So you want $10 million in this robotic company, $10 million in SpaceX? Yeah, great. I'll just take a million dollars now. And I'll get the trade. And there'll be some fees. And who knows if the SPV is going to be recognized by the company or not. Not my problem if it gets unwound.

• 1:06:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, I think it's crazy. And it's, look, on the one hand, you've got the investor, or sort of so called investor side of this, which it occurs to me is almost like freelance investment banking. It's like, there's this new industry of freelance investment banking, where people's, you know, they're not investors. They're brokers, right? They're unlicensed brokers who charge a fee and they make their money on the trade. And it's, it's an interesting thing that has emerged, I think, exactly as you alluded to, to fill this gap between public and private markets. And it really speaks to the failures of the public market

• 1:07:15Speaker 01

  system that we have today. I mean, what should have been happening for the past decade is these amazing growth companies should have gone public much earlier. And the average American saver should have had a shot to participate in that growth and see their retirement account go up as Palantir goes up, as SpaceX goes up. But instead, the, you know, the poor, lowly public markets investor is left with the dregs after all these freelance investment bankers take their cut. And the reason it's been allowed to happen is because the founders have had so much leverage. And everyone has been so permissive to enable

• 1:07:57Speaker 01

  these founders to have, you know, dual share classes, complete autocratic control of their companies. So it's like, why would the founder go public? They don't have to. They're in control of their business. Money's easy to find anywhere. They can, you know, have all these supplicants who are fee takers on the deal, who are doing, you know, freelance investment banking out there wherever. And, and so it's like, you know, and by the way, you know, like my, my, you know, I've got the cleanest dirty shirt, but mine's a little dirty too. I've done a couple of these, right? Everyone has, because it's been free money. And so it's like, but it's not a good system. Like, what we want is shareholder capitalism. Like, America needs to innovate. We've got amazing entrepreneurs. The broad public should

• 1:08:42Speaker 01

  have a shot at participating in these companies. They should go public earlier. Sequoia doesn't need a $10 billion fund. Let your great winners go public to get all that growth capital.

• 1:08:52Jason Calacanis?

  Better system. I agree. I think what they need to do is get rid of the concept of accredited investors. And this is another thing that Trump was really making great progress on, being so pro capitalist, that will probably revert under Democrats and be protectionist again. I've been shouting, why can't people who have under $150,000 a year salary or $200,000 a year salary on the weekends, take a course and become a sophisticated accredited investor? If you want to take that course, you want to learn how to put your own money to work, and then you want to start a syndicate, and you're not an accredited investor, or you want to buy into these companies, let them join that class. And then let venture

• 1:09:30Jason Calacanis?

  capital firms have 10,000 members. Why can't I have 10,000 people in my venture firm and have them put $1,000 each, right? Like, this could get very interesting. You could have, you know, a much different world if.

• 1:09:48Jason Calacanis?

  People who are quote unquote, poor, middle class, too stupid to invest in this class. Well, what if they could invest in a venture firm and pay their two and 20? Put a thousand, put $10,000 to work, do five years of $10,000 capital cost, $2,000 each. Like, an Uber driver could participate in investing in Uber because they were driving Uber and they saw how popular and how much the customer love was. You're an HR person, you see LinkedIn having an impact, you're able to buy $25,000 worth of LinkedIn with your 401K, you know? They should allow anybody to get in here. That would be another way for their, to solve your problem, DA, which is give access earlier to a wider swath of people.

• 1:10:31Jason Calacanis?

  And I've thought about starting my next fund offshore. And there are some countries, I wouldn't be able to have American LPs, but there are other countries that allow anybody to participate, or they have a sophisticated investor test. We gotta get this done. I had, I talked to the head of the SEC about it. They're, they're working on it.

• 1:10:48Speaker 02

  It's so crazy because you, I always said you could really go gamble your life savings away, go on debt, but you can't go invest in startups if it's something that you believe in. And if you go, who has a huge voice and you want to go raise publicly, suddenly now you're not just an accredited investor, you have to be a qualified purchaser. Now you need, what, $2.5 million? And so I think it's so crazy, this aspect of like, hey, you could go gamble away your life savings, spend it all on whatever it is that you want to buy, but you can't go invest in startups.

• 1:11:15Jason Calacanis?

  You could put it on black.

• 1:11:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:11:16Jason Calacanis?

  Or red.

• 1:11:17Speaker 03

  Put it on black. And then, and then just to go back to the original point, think about how different the narrative would be if every American had exposure or could have had exposure to Anthropic at the Series D and beyond, and you could ride it the whole way. And so that data center down the street is actually what's paying for your kid's college.

• 1:11:32Speaker 01

  What these asset manager scam artists are going to do, what they're in the process of doing, is they're going to try and force all of these private vehicles that can hold these private company securities on savers. So the, the argument is well underway that the average person should be able to hold private equity in their 401K account, should be able to hold private credit in their 401K account. Now, the reason this is happening is because ETFs have commoditized active public equity management. All the money's gone from that. You can't charge 2% anymore to pick a bunch of great tech stocks in a mutual fund.

• 1:12:14Speaker 01

  And so what all of these big asset managers have done is they've tried to find new strategies that they can launch where they can still charge. And that has been the private stuff. So I think this is all rotten. I want these companies public earlier. I'm sorry, if you're, if you've got a $5 billion company that's doing $800 million in revenue, why can't you be public? Like, you know, what are you scared of? You just go, why, why can't you disclose your financial? Why do we need to wait so long to see Anthropic's financials?

• 1:12:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, there's two regulatory reasons. I mean, the first, just to put this into perspective, right? I, I was working with a company who was about to go public. You know, the financing cost of an IPO are 25, this was 10 years ago, 25 million on a company generating 100 million in revenue. So just the, the expenses associated with that transaction compared to a private market transaction, which would have been $500,000 or $600,000, were inordinately high. I think the second thing that really changed this and, and really allowed a lot of private companies to remain pub, private is the Jobs Act. The Jobs Act allowed a private company to massively increase the number of shareholders. And it's, it used to be, there were two reasons why you needed to go public. The first was you needed access to a huge quantum of capital was not available in the private markets. That's clearly changed.

• 1:13:30Speaker 03

  And the second was you needed to raise from more and more people. And so at some point you exceeded the shareholder count. So there you need to go public. Both of those have been relaxed. And I think the second order unanticipated effect of both of them has been that the total number of publicly traded companies is significantly less. And the reality is the private markets, you know, you can look at private credit, which has absolutely exploded, right? Four, global private credit's four trillion. That comes out of the 2008 legislation because now the banks are no longer allowed to lend. So you need to find lenders in, in the different private credit markets. But I agree with you. I think there is a transparency that really needs to start to happen because a lot of retail capitalists is starting to come into privates. Privates are exploding because really tough for them to go public for one reason or another, or just unattractive.

• 1:14:15Speaker 03

  And so we have this like new sort of emerging market that has a lot of opacity. I mean, you figure out how to make it more transparent, but I would argue not regulated in the same ways that we have in the past, because otherwise we'll just recreate the same problems that we were, you know, the same second order consequences that the original regulation produced.

• 1:14:31Speaker 01

  Well, and I think we've got, I think there, I think the, the one possibility that maybe hasn't gotten enough heat yet, and it kind of hearkens back to the tokenization stuff in crypto world, is what's, what you're seeing with hyperliquid, you know, in particular.

• 1:14:47Jason Calacanis?

  Explain what it is, because I don't know if everybody understands what hyperliquid

• 1:14:50Speaker 01

  is. Well, it's, it's a, it's a platform, a protocol, you know, it's a crypto-ish kind of concept where decentralized market participants are basically able to create effectively, think of it as synthetic securities whereby you can bet on anything. You can bet on private company valuations, you can bet on individual company milestones. If it were a pharmaceutical company, you could bet on an individual clinical trial, not just need to buy the entire Pfizer stock in their huge portfolio where, you know, the one trial you have an opinion on is not going to move the needle on the overall valuation. And this really marries with what we've seen happen in the prediction markets world.

• 1:15:35Speaker 01

  I believe we may be right on the doorstep of this whole conversation we just had becoming totally irrelevant because it's kind of going to supersede, I mean, it conceptually supersedes the regulated securities market entirely, just as an end run around the whole thing. It's permissionless. You can go on, I don't need some SPV hustler to get me into Palantir, or rather to, to Andorul or something. I can just like make a bet on it in some weird synthetic market.

• 1:16:09Jason Calacanis?

  This is, I, I think this is, um, hyperliquid's market for Anthropic. I'm not sure yet.

• 1:16:18Speaker 03

  No, this is for, this looks like the USDC market, which is.

• 1:16:20Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, it's USDC.

• 1:16:21Speaker 03

  Yeah. It's a stablecoin backed by a US dollar. Well, I agree with you. I mean, so tokenized assets, which is what you're talking about, can you take existing equities and debt and move them on chain and then trade them 24 hours a day? It's growing faster than AI. It's the fastest growing technology market in the world. It allows people outside the US to buy US stocks. It allows US investors to buy Korean stocks. If you really wanted to get a stock, a share of SK Hynix is actually really tough. And you should be able to get exposure. The other thing that's really interesting about these markets is there's a new kind of options. So for a lot of people, myself included, options are kind of impenetrable. You have all these Greek letters associated with understanding what they do. But there's a thing called a perpetual option or a perp, which is, makes it much simpler. And so I can decide like, okay, let's see what's happening in the Brazil election.

• 1:17:06Speaker 03

  I want to short that economy. Here's a really great instrument for me to do it. And so, you know, many of the major, the largest banks in the world are pushing extremely aggressively into tokenization, both of public and private assets in equities and credit. And it'll be a huge wave. So I totally agree with you.

• 1:17:24Speaker 01

  I mean, look at, Jason, you gotta pull up, pull up the Kalshi perpetuals markets. People need to see this. I mean, what Tomasz is talking about is crazy. And if you pull that up, you're going to see, you can bet on anything and the price ticker, I'm sure you've seen this, Tomasz, and, and the price ticker's moving in real time. I mean, this is catnip for a gambler's mind.

• 1:17:48Speaker 03

  Well, and then Jason just had the Anthropic pair up. And what's amazing is two or three weeks ahead of an IPO, you have price discovery happening on these exchanges, which means as a retail investor, I can say like, oh, I think the right valuation for this business is 1.75 or two, and I can make a bet. And all of a sudden now I have access in a way that I didn't have before. So it's, I think it's a really exciting phenomenon.

• 1:18:11Jason Calacanis?

  Wow, you can put on whatever leverage you want here.

• 1:18:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, you, you see that little purple slider over there?

• 1:18:21Speaker 01

  Okay, you can just, you can just put on a bet and you're just voting up or down with up to almost seven times leverage.

• 1:18:32Jason Calacanis?

  Wow.

• 1:18:33Speaker 01

  And they're doing this in real time and you're going to have this, at least outside of the US, on virtually every asset, including any derivative you can make up.

• 1:18:44Speaker 01

  So I think there's a good chance that this just eats a lot of the capital market if it were left to its own devices. Of course, regulators are not going to let that happen. This is going to be heavily regulated in the US, but you know, we'll see how much they tighten the screws on it.

• 1:19:03Jason Calacanis?

  And if you're not buying the underlying asset and enough capital moves to perpetuals, then that would make the existing assets go down in value if people, too many people move over here, or this is just crazy.

• 1:19:19Speaker 03

  Not really. I mean, no, it's like, I mean, okay, so you know, the history of the options market is you had farmers who wanted to buy insurance so they could sell their corn here from now at a particular price. And you look at the derivatives markets, which are options or futures on top of corn or stocks, those tend to be about five to 10 times the size in terms of total trading volume compared to the underlying. So if there's a billion dollars worth of corn that's sold every day, there's probably five to 10 billion of derivatives that are sold on top. And anyway, so those markets tend to be significantly bigger and it actually makes the price discovery of the underlying asset much healthier. Going back to DA's point about how there's no, there's a lot less active trading, except for hedge funds in public markets.

• 1:20:02Speaker 03

  And so you should actually see a significantly healthier under, overall private market as a result of a.

• 1:20:09Jason Calacanis?

  These are getting very popular in Korea, I understand. Like people love to bet with this massive leverage and they have stocks. So you can buy an actual stock that's trading at 10 times. So here, if you bought, this I guess is the US Tech 100, if you buy this at 11.8 times leverage, a 1% move feels like 11.8%. So you're just getting much more action. This is like caffeine to meth, like no stopping at cocaine. You're just going straight to Breaking Bad blue meth. Don't recommend, folks.

• 1:20:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:47Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, I guess if you just want the stock to move in the next two days, I guess you could. I mean, it's interesting. I'm very good at calling bottoms.

• 1:20:56Speaker 01

  Well, we've got all kinds of levered ETFs right now, by the way. I mean, look, this is all sort of a symptom of wealth inequality in a way. I mean, people are just, as Charlie Munger used to say, the world's not run by greed, it's run by envy. And the numbers that people are seeing in terms of how rich these anthropic founders are getting, and even the employees who were hired last year, this kind of thing drives a mindset of rabid, you know, risk-taking. And you know, if you're that, if you're that Postmates driver who's trying to figure out how to escape from that life, you know, and you like a stock, it's really tempting to go buy the 3X levered ETF in Heinecks or whatever.

• 1:21:40Speaker 01

  You know, what, in your mind, you go, look, I mean, if, if.

• 1:21:43Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, if I lose the $2,000, who cares? If I hit, I do care. So it's like putting on a parlay. It's like, I need to have like.

• 1:21:52Speaker 01

  And we're, and we've told people, you know, I mean, this is again, going back to the beginning of the politics, the tech guys have told people that they've got three years to make all the money they're ever going to make.

• 1:22:03Jason Calacanis?

  And then the world ends.

• 1:22:04Speaker 01

  You know, the world ends or you're forever frozen in your place in the economic hierarchy. And so people are just throwing caution to the wind. They're doing crazy stuff and you know, that's not going to be a good formula when their retirement rolls around.

• 1:22:16Jason Calacanis?

  All right. Another amazing episode this week in Venture Capital Roundtable. Where can people find you, Tomasz? Where can people find you online if they want to follow you and your missives?

• 1:22:27Speaker 03

  Oh, tomtungus.com or theoryvc.com.

• 1:22:30Jason Calacanis?

  There you go. Ilana, where can people find you? Maybe even if they were interested, participate in your syndicate, join your syndicate and see what you're investing in.

• 1:22:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm under it'silana gold on Twitter and LinkedIn. And then my website that Jason has up right now, tworoads.vc, just actually updated it. And then if you press apply at the syndicate, you could directly go and join the syndicate. And I mean, as Jason knows, it's basically, you could think of it like an email subscription if you're a credited investor. There's no, like money that's necessary. You go and you get an email for the different deals that we're doing and you decide on a deal by deal basis if you want to invest. So yeah, let me know.

• 1:23:08Jason Calacanis?

  Deal by deal, critical. You get to make the decision how much you invest and which deals are in. DA, your thoughts? Where can people find you?

• 1:23:17Speaker 01

  X.com/DAWolick. And this is my firm's website, timebioventures.com.

• 1:23:23Jason Calacanis?

  I'm an LP, there it is. And for me, go to thisweekinvc.substack.com. We're working hard. This is why I'm hiring six, I was trying to hire six journalists. Nobody wants to be a journalist. I'm hiring six analysts for our associate training program, looking for people who would be willing to write either about AI, defense tech, energy, robotics, venture capital, or startups. So I need analysts who are willing to write coverage of these companies and deals. If that's something that sounds interesting to you, if you're out of school, we can teach you how to be a great writer. Go to careers-launch.co, careers-launch.co.

• 1:24:07Jason Calacanis?

  As you were saying, I'm hiring a lot of people. You know why? We built so much software, the system's working, we have a flywheel. So now I'm like, well, maybe we should start a newsletter around defense tech and energy and robotics, but I don't have somebody who's a human who can look at the research being done by AI, call people on the phone, check the facts, and actually write an interesting narrative worth reading. That's what I believe the future is. I think DA, people are going to want to find acoustic humans and listen to them.

• 1:24:39Speaker 03

  Meat.

• 1:24:39Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it's pretty crazy.

• 1:24:41Speaker 03

  The future is meat.

• 1:24:42Jason Calacanis?

  The future is meat. We'll see you next time. Bye-bye.