February 24 2023
- Jason is in Japan
- Stripe
- Needs $4B for RSUs
- 4square is letting early employee stock options expire
- Does it make sense to wait as long as possible before going public?
- Apparently if stock options are granted and its been 10 years they have to refresh it or something and so IRS deems that an event and so you need money to cover it
- Apparently ADYEN is very profitable
- Stripe has added way too many employees
- Stripe has to hire a lot more people to fund tons of features to go after tail customers
- Adyen goes after head customers so they have to build fewer features
- So in hindsight Stripe should have gone public 2018-2019
- Not clear if there is long term profitability in tail products
- Sacks post on Enterprises vs SMBs
- Enterprises provide better Annual Contract Value but SMBs are better early adopters
- Both strategies are good
- Its about founder market fit - better sales founder = Enterprise, better product founder = SMBs
- If you start with SMBs and do well then you can grow bigger and bigger
- If you start with Enterprises its very hard to go downmarket
- The long tail gives Stripe a lot of pricing power - those small users can’t negotiate prices with Stripe
- Big accounts can negotiate pricing with Adyen
- ZIRP environment
- Boom cycle - growth, growth, growth
- Bust cycle - growth, burn, margin
- Keep an eye on the CAC
- Critically important
- Need to have low burn multiple - ≤2x
- 2021 is not going to be a great vintage for VC likely
- AI everything in SaaS
- Auto summarization - very quickly a 1000 articles or a meeting, recap vs action items, does all work for you
- In app customer service kinda like CoPilot - ask the AI within the app, like a poweruser sitting next to you and making you very effective in the app
- Auto complete for everything - type ahead for any content type, todo lists, tables
- These are great consumer surplus business opportunities - consumer becomes incredibly productive and more leveraged with our time
- Very little money made in AI, but a lot of money made by NVidia - pick and shovel players
- Not clear who the economic venture funded player is the winner
- AI will do for SaaS what mobile did for Web 1.0 companies
- APM space - $10-$15B space - this can get disrupted by AI
- Tech company should be capturing 1/3rd of the value delivered to the customer
- Infosys or TCS can add a lot of money to your business because you need fewer people and can use a bot
- Jobs advice
- Start with the customer experience and work back to the technology
- He understood product development better than anyone else
- John Sculley disease quote - difference between a great idea and a great product
- That’s the quote from where Craft Ventures comes from
- Section 230 challenge doesn’t seem to be going anywhere
- Trump strategy on East Palestine
- He is a media savant
- Biden is saber rattling in Ukraine
- Biden is ignoring American problems
- This war is going to turn out much worse seems like
- Biden has painted himself into a corner
- Refused to take NATO expansion off the table
- Refused to let Minsk accords work where Donbass should have got some autonomy
- Xi Jinping is going to visit Putin before Biden does - China buys Russian oil at cheap price - China would like to keep it going, if markets open up, they have to pay market prices
- BRICS countries are not with US and the West, global south is not with the US - and so the Russian economy has only had a 3-4% hit
- Trump was exceptionally pragmatic at being anti-war
- Only president in modern history that hasn’t got us into a war
- He is a deal maker
- He would have shut down the deep state people who wanted to position for the war
- Trump has deep instinctual resistance for what the deep state wants
- Military industrial complex and foreign policy establishment
- Major presidential candidate running against MIC is fairly unprecedented
- If this war leads to a recession that Trump can lay at the feet of Biden
- The war is existential for Putin and extra-curricular for us - thats why Obama said in 2014 that Russians have escalatory dominance
- 2 minute video where Trump mentioned Victoria Nuland by name - she is the Fauci of this situation - and called out MIC - she was supposed to be chief diplomat with Russia and Eastern Europe - we backed an insurrection in Ukraine in 2014 of a democratically elected leader called Yanukovich who was doing a balancing act between nationalists and Russia - since then Russia relations have gone south - brought in right wing extremists
- Fed reserve said rates will go to 5.5% and stay there
- Bush Sr came off Gulf war 91% approval rating - but lost on domestic issues
- We are pushing China and Russia together - these regimes were much worse back then - Stalinist and Mao
- Nixon and Kissinger still went to China and paid respect to keep China and Russia apart
- We are poisoning relations with India also - they have had long history with Russia
- Besties
- JCal getting $52M in commitments (last fund $44M) - 506c - on Launch
- Sacks owns some Quora - Poe from them might be good
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