June 21 2025
-
Thomas Laffont joins the show
-
Friedberg has 4th baby
-
LA is behind national average of recovery in food and beverage industry (going out to eat, etc)
- Filmings in LA are down 50% from the peak
- Other places are giving better movie deals
- 30% more expensive to shoot in LA/CA
- Levered to 1 industry that has secular decline
- AI is helping SF
- OpenEvidence is a company helping doctors
- Example of AI accelerating a health care provider
- OpenEvidence is a company helping doctors
-
Zuckerberg AI offers
- Scale AI almost acquisition
- Alexandr Wang joining Meta
- Crazy $100M offers to OpenAI engineers and other researchers
- Trying to hire Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross
- Meta has $70B in cash
- Scale acquisition seems like the Onava deal from a while ago
- Similar to HTML5 vs native app discussion at Facebook
- HTML5 decision one but was wrong - and Zuck admitted it
- Facebook generically trains on Nvidia and open sources- whereas everyone else is optimizing their models to the hardware (Google with Gemini + TPU, OpenAI with Azure, presumably xAI with whatever they’re using, etc)
- Need to have dedicated infrastructure and compute architecture so you can get best model performance
- Does his (Zuck’s) activity encourage other companies to be aggressive too?
- Scale AI almost acquisition
-
Mag7 has diverged a little - not so correlated anymore
- MSFT is up ~13% apparently (terminal can’t display more for Thomas Laffont)
- Could also be policy choices leading to differences in performance here (tariffs, etc)
- Important to understand which of these countries control their destiny in AI
- Thomas → Nvidia (established players), Tesla (dark horse)
- Chamath → Tesla (full integration), Google (best models)
- Jason → Tesla/Elon, Google
- Friedberg → Google (varied portfolio), Tesla (thinks Nvidia could be hit by China semiconductor work)
-
Apple is struggling with AI
- Decline like other successful companies like AOL, IBM, Lotus, etc
- They are like the PC makers who don’t control the OS
- Bets Apple could take
- Thomas - buy OpenAI for $500B?
- Jason - start a humanoid robot?
- Friedberg - Ambient AI
- Chamath - Apple is in trouble
-
IPOs and M&As
-
Chime, Circle and Coreweave all going IPO
-
Acquisitions - Google and Wiz, OpenAI bought some, Databricks bought, Salesforce bought, Doordash and Uber also bought some recently
-
Public SaaS growth rates are lower nowadays
-
Huge opportunities for investors picking the right companies in SP493 that will do AI right vs those that are laggards
-
Software SaaS cartel will be unwound - huge opportunity
- Anthropic added 3/4 of net new revenue of the market its disrupting
-
SPAC
- Chamath tweet got community note about his bad SPAC record
- He is going to do a SPAC maybe
- Direct listing vs IPOs
-
Jobs
- Applovin and Microsoft operating with fewer people
- Andy Jassy says they will have smaller corporate workforce in Amazon
- Can Amazon/AWS be a kingmaker in the AI space for physical stuff too?
- Will Microsoft have more employees 5 years from now or not?
- It would be amazing to have an index of AWS, Azure and GCP over the next 5 years - then you won’t need to own anything else
-
Sacks joins
- Genius Act
- Stablecoin bill
- Big change towards crypto in Trump administration
- Gensler and Warren were hostile to crypto (as was Sherrod Brown who lost his seat in the last election to Bernie Moreno)
- Crypto industry wanted regulation - this is something even Democrats should be able to get behind
-
Vinny Lingham shoutout
-
Comments