March 3 2023
- Chamath austerity measure jokes
- Friedberg took company public
- Bestie Guestie - 5th Beatle - Brad Gerstner!
- Secretary of Saas - Sacks
- DeSantis article in WSJ - anti woke
- Maher press tour kinda - liberalism vs wokism
- VC Fomo Frenzy in AI
- Insane fund raising in generative AI space
- ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion
- 500 generative AI startups
- Collectively raised $11B
- Doug Leone - next Platform like Mobile and Internet - AI is real, its the next platform, how do we not invest in everything that walks
- Credit Suisse is offering 6.5% for a 3 month TBill
- So if you’re going to invest for 10-15 years, you need to get 20-25% return vs safer money in TBills
- LPs to VCs: What am I paying 2.5% per year in managements fees for if you can’t invest well when instead I can get better returns in TBills
- If you rush in now, you won’t have enough time diversity and high correlation
- Be careful, in 2000 you knew internet was going to be big - but if you invested in Altavista, Yahoo, Excite, Lycos, etc you lost a lot of money
- In this space just like gold rush picks and shovel providers will win vs the people panning for gold - so AMD, NVIDIA, infra people will win, they have been winning, they will keep winning - maybe custom
- Notion AI demo was pretty cool - they don’t have to build their own LLMs, they can just use the API and build cool use cases
- OpenAI can become a trillion dollar company by making their price so low that everyone relies on them and no one competes with them
- Potentially instructive that they offered 49% of their stake for $10B - would they do that if they really believed they were sitting on a trillion dollar company?
- Markets
- Sequoia walking away from Citizen, Instacart doing well now 39% revenue growth
- Inflation situation is weird
- Rates are going to be higher than we like for longer than we want
- Might have 5.5% fed funds rate
- Invest safe
- Innovation cycle has nothing to do with macro picture
- Housing prices continuing to fall
- Marc Benioff channels Elon Musk
- Salesforce shares up 11% after reporting earnings
- Bought back stock, will buy $20B more
- 2015 Salesforce had 19000 employees, now 80000 employees
- Meta went from 10k to 85k
- At those levels its very difficult to govern these businesses
- Over last 6 months we have seen courage gain momentum in Silicon Valley
- CEOs have a lot of agency that they’re not using - Elon changed whatever he didn’t like at Twitter
- Chamath and early facebook management team would rank all the employees - they did this till like 2000-3000 employees
- Stock based compensation FAS 123R - GAAP EBITDA - excluded SBC, its called adjusted EBITDA
- Over the last 5 years this went parabolic
- Coinbase said SBC was 70% of revenue
- Booking.com said SBC is a real expense
- Removing SBC from EBITDA and then buying back stocks = cash - just admit it, its cash and don’t hire so many people
- Charlie Munger said he would rather throw a pit viper down his shirt than hire a comp consultant
- Fox News sued by Dominion about election stolen claims
- Tiktok ban lawsuit
- Proxy for hard or soft decoupling from China
- CHIPS act and onshoring semiconductor industry is a way to be able to fight Taiwan war with China and maintain optionality
- GPC framing - great power competition
- So Tiktok is roadkill here
- China’s peace proposal for Ukraine vs Russia
- naftali bennett from israel tried last year but said west threw cold water on it
- US is not acting as mediator - because US is a co-belligerent
- From China’s point of view Ukraine war has been good news
- Because US is not deploying to Asia
- Massively depleting stockpiles in Ukraine - running out of stockpiles - Russia has 6-1 artillery advantage
- Chinese are benefiting from economic sanctions on Russia because of cheaper prices on oil and minerals
- All Russian elites - read Nyet means Nyet memo - were threatened by potential of NATO expansion into Ukraine
- Harvard statistic
- 43% of white students are legacy, athletes or related to staff or donors
- Stripe chart erratea
Comments