August 11 2023
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Friedberg haircut stories
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Chamath out (probably first time!)
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Bill Gurley doing some angel investing and working on a book
- Happy to do his dream job of investing, etc
- Advice
- Study history of your space
- Networking like crazy
- Learned from Danny Meyer’s story
- Restaurauteur, Shake Shack founder
- Read Setting the Table
- Union Square Cafe, Gramercy Tavern
- Friedberg
- Read Walter Isaacson bio of Jobs
- Immediately helped him (use/learn from his management style)
- His book on Elon coming out soon
- JCal and Sacks were interviewed for it
- He was there for the transition to Twitter
- Rocket launches, everything in between
- Read Walter Isaacson bio of Jobs
- Sacks writing a book on how to create, start, run software companies
- Sacks read Good to Great and was a little confused by the message
- Chamath dials in
- Alexander Hamilton, Phil Knight (Shoe dog?), The Man in the Arena
- Akira Kurosawa
- Born standing up
- On Writing - Stephen King bio
- Great to listen to before writing a book
- He wrote the novella that became Shawshank
- Malcolm X
- Seven Samurai best film to watch if you’re a startup founder
- George Lucas, Scorcese and Copolla were all disciples of Kurosawa
- Jason recommends cold plunge
- Kurosawa was inspired by Shakespeare
- Hidden fortress was inspiration for Star Wars
- Steven Spielberg owns the rights to High and Low
- Breaking Bad also inspired by one of Kurosawa’s characters
- Ikiru?
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Series As
- Median round is now 7 figures raise - which is down huge from a year ago
- Pre-money valuation down 40M
- AI deals still higher valuations
- Like 2021
- Series A is competitive, not maybe crowded
- VC market peaked in Q4 2021 and kept going down through 2022 and bottomed out in Q1 2023 and now pace of deployment has stabilized at a pre-pandemic level
- Seed makes the most sense for AI startups
- VC market is very hot still
- Stock market is within 10% of all time highs
- later stage is also hot - $500M-$600M
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Dry powder myths
- Classic venture fund will do 5-6 drawdowns over the 10 year period of a fund
- Dotcom bust - Yahoo revenues were surprisingly tied up with startup funding (sold banner ads to startups who lost money)
- PE > VCs
- Dave Swensen model of investment
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IPOs
- ARM might do a big IPO (Softbank investment)
- Instacart
- Reddit went dark maybe
- Stripe in line
- There were more private unicorns than public tech companies worth > $1B at some point of time in the recent crazy environment
- IPOs are coming
- ByteDance, Databricks, etc will also probably go public
- University endowments make a lot of money
- mainly during ZIRP environment
- Worst software recession
- Watch Margin Call
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Cycles in venture capital
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QQQ is the best (best is QQQ top 10 reconstitute)
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Maui wildfires
- Very sad
- Southern Iran - temperature hit 155 degrees
- Saudi Arabia and Dubai - 130 degrees
- Texas has biggest renewable energy percentage of any state - ahead of California
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Macro economy
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Market thinks rates will go down soon
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Crazy scary economic picture
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