December 16 2022
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JCal as Spirit Airlines person?
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Doxing debate
- Doxing = giving a person’s location
- Elon did exactly what the previous regime did
- This case shows just how hard it is to build these sites
- Moderation decisions are hard
- Feels pretty terrorizing when you are being doxed
- Twitter is emotions and psychology and not physics like Tesla and SpaceX
- Had to sell $3.8B of Tesla stock
- Chamath had margin loan at Credit Suisse
- Probably Elon’s margin account with Tesla stock is being called
- There’s no canonically right decision you can take in this instance - some people will always be annoyed
- Elonjet shows persistent location
- CNN claims that public criticism of Yoel Roth is a threat to safety, but publishing someone’s physical location like in the case of Elon is apparently not threatening his safety
- Elon’s policies are maybe better than previous regime because he is being open about the banning - there is no more shadow banning, and yes his personal reasons should not influence the decisions but there needs to be a principled basis which he has put in
- Political speech is the most protected kind of speech
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Fusion breakthrough
- 15% of mass in Sun is dense enough to drive Fusion
- National Ignition Facility
- Inertial confinement system
- Deuterium (1 proton, 1 neutron) and Tritium (1 proton, 2 neutrons) pellet
- 1.5 energy came out vs what went in
- 10-15% of the laser energy to capsule - so lots lost
- 2 megajoules in, 3 megajoules out
- 33 private tech companies have raised $3-$4B this year to try to develop production versions of fusion systems
- Human genome took $100M 20 years ago, now its $100 and 2 minutes
- This breakthrough is similar to ENIAC breakthrough in 1950s when we demonstrated that humans can do compute
- But we already have virtually free energy today with solar - 3c per kwH - coming down to 1.5c and with storage back to 3c
- Resource curse - worst govts happen in countries with most natural resources - they have corrupt governments, you have a giant oil reserve, dont need to do anything else, just fight over who controls the oil reserves
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JCal and Sacks great night
- Chappelle, Chris Rock, Draymond, Steph, Joe Lacob
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Coupa
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SaaS does revenue management, expense forecasting, etc
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Was off 70-80% off the high
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Got offer from Thoma Bravo
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Private equity can still be active because SaaS companies make money
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This is canary in the coal mine - tidal wave of PE sponsored deals of tech companies
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Tape private credit markets, finance based on ARR
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Cut 50% head count
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$8B
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People generally thought Thoma Bravo paid a lot
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Bidding war with Vista
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Valuation multiples are still so much lower than what private company founders used to think
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Public markets are valuing median SaaS company - 20% yoy growth at 5.5x, fast growing at 8 times, Thoma Bravo paid 10 times
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Coupa growing 45% last year, 35% this year
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Checkout.com cut internal valuation from $40B to $11B
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Cooley
- Series D - $3.5B → $527M
- Series C - $502M → $130M
- Series B - $164M → $90M
- Series A - $58M → $45M
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Companies are spending like drunken sailors - last year raised $200M at $2B valuation - you think its only 10% dilution - but now valuation is actually $400M - so now that $200M is 50% of your value - and if you burn $100M per year you will lose 25% of company value every year
- So this crazy money is probably the last money you will ever see
- Treat this money much more preciously - the world has fundamentally changed
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3 major sources of slowdown for software companies next year
- People will cut spending - new business down 50%
- Churn will be higher - next year lot of companies will go out of business - for next 2 years
- Seat contraction - doing layoffs so they will just not buy as much seats
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Deal of the century was Figma selling to Adobe for $20B
- Today Adobe could have bought it for $7B
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If you’re flying a plane and facing crazy headwinds and you want to maintain same speed, you will burn up your fuel - so instead try to grow at slower rate
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Scam of venture capital is laid out by this chart - actual sale is 73% of peak valuation
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There will be more such bolt on acquisitions
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Have to work 50-60-70 hours a week if you want to survive in silicon valley
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Worst person in tech
- Chamath lost to SBF - of course
- Sacks lost to Jassy
- Marc Andreesen beat Bill Gates
- Brian Chesky beat Jack Dorsey
- Chris Dixon beat Sam Altman
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