April 20 2022
- Antonio Gracias and Gavin Baker (Altreides) Bestie Guesties - JCal taping from Starbase - in a tiny home
- SpaceX launch
-
AG is board member
-
New engine/ship
-
This vehicle will take us to Mars
-
Falcon 9, etc were most successful vehicles
-
This is a new one - needs to be stable
-
$2M is the (variable) cost to get a 100 tons to orbit
-
This is a step function change
-
Falcon 9 mass to useful orbit is 17 metric tons - variable cost is ~$15M
-
100 metric tons for new engine is conservative
-
This is about 50x change in cost - so Starlink, etc becomes much cheaper
-
Interior space of this is size of ISS - its huge!!!
-
There will be no more trans-atlantic trans-pacific flights - transportation logistics - fundamental change
-
Experience of visiting Starbase is special - human beings can accomplish something like this is amazing
-
Engineers living in gulfstreams in the middle of the desert - miles away from any major city - no potable water, no electricity, etc
-
Mainstream media coverage is ghoulish or glee - on Twitter it was covered as if it was a failure
- They don’t care - and its a way to dunk on someone they don’t like
-
This is an amazing accomplishment by an American company and here is how American media covered it:
-
Chamath is going to have a babushka of planes - he will make lot of money from SpaceX shares
-
Starlink will get cheaper, faster, better, smaller
-
Starship can carry 600+ satellites
-
Previous - Falcon9 can only take 20-30 or so
-
SEC approves SpaceX satellites deployment
-
The crowds are getting bigger or bigger - near San Padre island - people are lined up in the area with cameras - Americans in RVs, cars with cameras - want to watch the amazing progress
-
You can overestimate what you can do in a year, you underestimate what you can do in ten
-
- Fox settlement with Dominion
- Paid $787M
- If media makes a mistake - they should correct it and correction should be at same level as the mistake
- Fox has $4B in cash - they lost ~20% of it - so a shareholder can question their decisions - also Smartmatic lawsuit coming
- This stuff doesn’t make economic sense - why lie, get sued and lose a lot of money?
- Finland fines match income - so people should get proportional fines maybe?
- Alex Jones got a judgement from multiple courts of > $1B
- Media should do more fact checking, less anonymous sources, and clarify fact vs opinion
- Rebuilding trust is on the media
- AI
-
Reddit wants to get paid for AI training data
-
Such an important world for how the world and Silicon Valley work - things you spitball about - they come to pass a few weeks later
-
AutoGPT renders ChatGPT+ Plugins almost useless
-
Google merged Brain and DeepMind - something that people thought would never happen
-
Some AI company let go a third of their company within 6 weeks of training an agent that has replaced those people
-
10 times the value will be created in this economy now than during internet
-
Its harder than it has ever been to predict a technology cycle
-
There’s a chance > 70-80% Series C+ companies have lower valuation than amount raised in preference stack
- Just extrapolating from what happened in public companies that have also dropped in valuations - and they’re the best
-
So a rush of talent and therefore capital will go to AI bubble - employees will quit and start new stuff - investors will also prefer to go to early stage
-
Height of previous bubble took $30-40M into Series A for silly NFT style projects - now its just 100K+ or low million dollars for just a few people and cloud resources
-
Maybe its better to just do 500 or so of these 2-3 person companies
-
Chamath tried this a while back with Capital as a Service
- Administrative burden of managing so many companies was crazy
- VC is a software light, person heavy artisanal business becomes difficult
-
Lot of funding going into
- AI infra: like vector databases, etc
- AI copilots - coders, doctors, etc
- SaaS products
-
JCal looking for office space in San Mateo
-
Midjourney - 12 people team and bootstrapped
-
Writers Guild strike might come - not the time to give studios excuse to not need you
-
Zuckerberg laying off more and hiring freeze
-
Series C funding dropped
-
No growth stage funding
-
Tiger Global’s $12.7B fund has lost like 20% or so
-
Private Equity has more realistic/pessimistic outlook vs optimistic outlook for VCs when they invest
-
Chamath not sure about investments right now
-
Greater Fool Theory - no one wants to be the last guy in
-
Stack OverFlow also will charge AI giants for training data
-
- Coinbase could move away from the US?
- Crypto is dead in America
- Gensler is blaming the banking crisis on Crypto
- Not a coincidence there are concerns on de-dollarization while crypto ban is happening
- The company that did all the right things (Coinbase) was furthest from regulation while most fraudulent was closest (FTX)
- DeSantis vs Trump
- Polls moving in Trump’s favor
- Republicans registered their displeasure with Alvin Bragg by going with Trump - maybe that was the strategy?
- This might be similar to Obama vs Hilary in 2007 - she was ahead at this stage, but then he beat her - out fund-raised her, out-hustled her, built narrative to turn the page - it took time but he did it
- DeSantis vs Disney - the bill is a parental rights bill
- Doesn’t seem to be hurting DeSantis
- Polling - for Disney - NPS was in the 50s, now its in the single digits
- Pew study recently - Democrats and Republicans are on completely different sides of issue (trans rights)
- This issue has become a lightning rod
- This is a proxy for quality of education for children in the country
- Getting rid of advanced maths, test taking, etc
- Schools are overrun by unions, ideology, etc
Comments