December 2 2022
- Friedberg hungover
- Scam Bankrun Fraud
- Andrew Ross Sorkin gave him softball after softball
- NYTimes continues to embarass themselves but George Stephanopoulos killed it on GMA
- GMA interview was 2 hours reduced to 10 minutes
- SBF was also on a 2 hour twitter spaces afterwards
- Media has a very variable way to deal with this obvious fraud and crime
- Strategy here is: cop to criminal negligence in order to avoid more serious charge of fraud
- Wants to avoid image of Bernie Madoff in the press
- He wants to succeed muddying the waters - so prosecutors can give him a plea deal so he doesn’t get sent away for life
- Such narcissistic fraudsters think they can talk their way out of everything - because they have
- Before this he was portraying himself as the smartest guy in the room - now he’s a babe in the woods
- Hard to believe when he loaned himself a billion dollars of the company money
- SBF and Trump through the lens of the media
- 2016 Trump violated every rule of left liberal western media - in election they were proven wrong - 50+% of the country had a very different view of the person
- So they doubled down and wanted to control the narrative and power
- SBF went to perfect elite private high school - then perfect elite universities - MIT - parents went to elite institutions of america - Stanford - so they are in political left - wrapped himself in effective altruism - all the stuff people on the left have bought into
- So now they refuse to underwrite this kid - its eating your own tail - because it would be admitting they were wrong
- He manipulated them 1st time by making them think he’s like them
- Now its to protect himself
- Enormous financial fraud that millions of people lost money in - and media is missing accountability
- Health establishment wants amnesty - atlantic magazine was willing to give it to them - media and institutions want authority but if they get it wrong they don’t want to be held accountable
- Propublica/Vox/Semaphore etc all paid off by him
- When there is institutional rot mice will come out to look for cheese - if not him, it would have been someone else
- Prescribed legal prescription drugs using patches on their body
- There is too much evidence of sophisticated behavior here to accept narrative of simpleton
- Alameda had backdoors
- Intentionality to hire people like Caroline Ellison
- Who wasn’t hired: No board, no CFO
- He is more sophisticated
- Saying it had to happen excuses too much - he courted regulators, he donated to politicians, he courted the media
- Only an insider could have pulled this off at scale -
- Gensler is intertwined to the parents - parents bundled money to Elizabeth Warren - he is clearly a sophisticated con
- Not a single reporter or a regulator thought to dig in - he said every thing they wanted to believe
- Replace him with a random kid from public high school or public school - they don’t have the elite patina
- So its not a crypto problem, its an elitism problem
- He monetized his parents’ life work
- People have been confused to think that opposite of liberal is republican or conservative, the opposite of liberal is illiberal - its to be puritanical, intolerant
- If you are an elite you get to make the rules
- No one in the media asked any questions about Alameda or FTX - no disgruntled employees? Not a single person came out - because the elites gave him a hall pass and he paid a lot of hush money
- Media, regulators and VCs (capital allocators) failed to do due diligence or put in governance
- SEC not only didn’t regulate him but he was in the room with them trying to craft regulations
- CZ pulled out his funds and is being framed maybe not in the best light
- FTX culpability
- Semaphore is trying to frame it as a run on the bank - like its not his fault - they were not a bank
- Margin accounts typically allow 30-35-50% tops
- This token could not have got more than 5-10%
- His collateral was no good
- Alameda had auto liquidation turned off
- David Z Morris coindesk article is quite good
- John Carreyrou exposed Theranos but no one could have done it with FTX?
- Bulk of responsibility rests with who
- Investors
- Regulators
- Journalists
- NYTimes and Semaphore should also apologize - when they make a mistake they never admit it
- You are on your own now as a consumer - consumers have to become extremely literate and trust their own process for figuring out the truth
- Media coverage
- Xi Jinping is very powerful
- Newsom had 10 pages of exceptions for his political donors for his lockdowns
- Gretchen Whitmers, Tony Fauci etc all imposed lockdowns - when did they repent or disavow lockdowns
- OpenAI
- ChatGPT
- Table read of Chamath, Sacks, JCal script talking about ChatGPT
- Model takes only 200G of space - can fit on your iPhone
- knowledge workers replaced
- kids can get homework done
- code can get written
- real estate insurance sales people
- copy writers
- customer support
- 100K startups are going to emerge
- Bubble will form
- Next hype cycle in SV will be this generative AI thing
- This will disrupt the search box
- Google started the onebox
- Is there an entirely new model here that disrupts search
- Andreesen tech VC vs journalist example is amazing
- SaaS will be replaced by MaaS - Models as a Service
- Models are still imprecise - so last 1-2% of getting it perfect will be important
- Inference and Training
- These model companies might need to go vertical - like tumor finding startups getting a hospital so they can get proprietary data
- SaaS slowdown
- Salesforce huge slowdown - net new ARR dropped 2-3rd from previous quarter
- CAC payback was 2.5 years - now its 155 months
- Vicious cycle:
- Layoffs → Seat Contraction → Sales slowdown → Cut Costs → Layoffs: Repeat
- Idea that growth is on autopilot could go in reverse
- 2x is the new 3x
- in this environment
- Eventually all these models will get commoditized
- Data is the new oil
- Use devices as trojan horses to collect data
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