Reid Hoffman and Chamath Palihapitiya on Angel Investing and The Future of Venture

the company was very early on in sort of um really understanding virality and growth and um you know i think reid and i learned a lot just by watching these guys because they were genius and insidious like it was just it was crazy some of the that they were coming up with and i will remember um this really incredible memory that i had where we were actually reid and i were in park city for dialogue um and this would have been reid you'll know the date i don't know i'm guessing it was 2009 or 10 and he was uh doing the series a investment in airbnb and he was in the parking lot we were in the parking lot just walking around and he basically let me tag along with him while he was on the phone because it was in the midst of our you know we were just hanging out uh and talking and uh you know my only memory at the time was oh that's kind of a funny name airbnb what does that mean and then also thinking ah this idea will never work reads crazy and it turns out both were completely wrong and you know he's a genius and b obviously it's enormous business but um yeah i've i've known i've known you now for 15 years yeah exactly yeah i left my walker around the corner um so i want to remind everyone as we get in now to to other questions well we'll take a bunch of audience questions so you can post your questions in the q a tab i might even call on a couple of you to come on stage on camera uh if you can compete with chamos video quality it's already received wide praise in the chat uh chamazo hats off on uh on your setup um but you know the audience as everyone knows here everyone in this this meeting our angel investors early stage uh founders or or executives who are doing angel investing and we're all really intrigued by the future of venture capital there's a bunch of innovation happening and both of you are on the record with both words and dollars arguing that venture needs to evolve reid in addition to being greylocked a gpa greylock you're also a significant lp and a bunch of these new disruptive venture capital strategies village global of course with our luminary network and scout network sweat equity which delivers talent services for equity entrepreneurs first which co-founds companies coming to academia and chamoth you famously of course have have moved away from a traditional venture capital firm you've called venture firms uh multi-varied ponzi schemes and are now are now you know helping revitalize uh spax so chamoth maybe you can go first what do you think is broken about venture today and what are your ideas about how to fix it and then read why are you backing a handful of these new experiments that are trying to do venture differently i think um i think both of us probably feel the same thing which is that when we were first in the valley um you know going back to the year 2000 um even earlier for read the first generation of venture capitalists you'd need were all operators um and they had all been founder entrepreneurs in some way and so they were um very sympathetic to the journey of the entrepreneur and i think that what happened somewhere along the way is what happens in success to a lot of people which is that they become risk-averse and i think that these early venture capitalists when they had some success scaled by adding people who themselves were talented but at a very different concept of what they were doing and they viewed themselves as managing risk and so it became a relatively predictable group of people and they were essentially minimizing um looking back and so you know whenever a cohort of like reasonably smart people want to not look bad they just cop each other um and so you end up getting a bunch of like lemming like bad investment decisions over waves and and that's sort of what frustrated me and it was basically impossible to swim upstream from that because it doesn't it doesn't really matter how you know uh excited you could be about a certain thing if other people aren't invested in uh in that idea and want to help support that thing um you basically die on the vine and um i think that's what's made for me venture problematic and so that so then when you double click into that problem and you look inside of most venture firms you see fewer and fewer people who've actually built things and you see more and more people who look and behave and act like a risk manager um and so it just becomes a very um non-exciting place and so then then then the most dangerous thing happens which is then the entrepreneurs who themselves are very scrappy start to morph themselves and change their language and their behavior and their ideas to match what will get accepted because there's an impedance mismatch from with the capital and what's acceptable um and then the people themselves inside those firms and double click on that and they say wow you know like it's much easier to just have all these other guys who look like me believe in what i believe mark up the deal i'll raise a new fund they'll generate more fees and now you go four or five funds without ever returning capital uh i mean it just it's it's nuts it makes no sense um so um you know it was impossible for me to find a like-minded group of people that i could work with at the early stages who were like that and uh at the same time i thought that there was more opportunity in the later stage so you know i think that venture will go through a renaissance at some point again but um it needs people like i think reid and myself frankly to win and it needs uh traditionalists to lose so and trump and i unsurprisingly agree on the fact of company building versus you know i don't think i would put his risk manager as much because there's this risk question but like you know banker right like it's not just capital or kind of stock picker but a person who you know has built stuff before knows how to that's not a partner in doing it because sometimes people who build stuff before actually back don't know how to partner well in doing it they're you know great great great athletes themselves not not so not such great coaches or partners so you know you have to look for that kind of combination but the thing that i i think that i was also being driven by in addition to let's let's make this be company builders is you know silicon valley and i think other ecosystems are moving from you know kind of a pure cottage industry to something more of a of an industry um and so different rules start applying because you start having you know like like for example how do you how do you reinvent thinking networks right that's part of the reason why the village global it's kind of like you know having a whole bunch of network leaders it's part of the reason why i think about entrepreneurs first which is all right so um you know like how do we say we recruit entrepreneurial engineers you know we put them in a in a place where they're fundamentally matchmaking they still generate their own ideas but how do you get kind of more interesting deep tech another one in silicon valley here is sweat equity which is you know how do you have the best engineering recruiting services uh tied into these early stage companies in order to make them work and so you start thinking about this as kind of reinvention at a at a at a kind of a at a network level and thinking about now it's not just a cottage industry but actually in silicon valley as a complete network and that and then and operating the network and you know i think another thing where i would where i would you know we kind of maybe different lenses into some critiques of cook or traditional vc is to be thinking about it isn't it isn't you have to be operating in networks and that's how i think part of the reason why like modern vcs you know try to say hey how do i have good recruiting services good customer acquisition services other kinds of things in order to uh really do that um but i think the the you know group think i think becomes endemic and i think you know part of the opportunity that is presented when you get group think within a class is you get to to to to kind of uh break left or break right um and you know one of the things that i you know always appreciated about chamoth and small number other people it's like okay how do you think like if everyone's going down path a how do you think about path b uh as an example so chamoth what's your prediction in terms of the early stage venture as an asset class um you said you did just in terms of returns it's terrible um uh you know you basically are signing up for what is now 13-year illiquidity um and you're paying you know basically like three to four hundred you're paying three to four hundred basis points uh of risk premium what does that mean if the you know public markets can give you fifteen sixteen percent a year you know the typical venture fund returns uh you know 12 or 13 so it returns less so why would you have your money locked up for 13 years where you can't touch it to make two or 300 basis points less than the public market which is infinitely liquid um it's it's a hard proposition where i think the question more is so then where does it go and i think it's going to very different sources that i think are quite inspiring to me so one is all of the sort of startup studios and incubators i think that those are wonderful and the reason that those are wonderful is that they give people a chance to coalesce in a very safe space around ideas and they decouple this idea that you need a whole bunch of capital to start with really you don't you just need a willingness to sort of bank around a concept and not have the intellectual persuasion to go to something easier and at the earliest phases i think like incubators will separate themselves and their ability to do that and i think like for example even if you look at yc like yc's was a puppy mill for a while and now they've gotten back to a really legitimate form of company starting which i think is much more ambitious and and exciting and they have these vertical tracks that's one and then the second thing to me that's really exciting is the emergence of these individual angels super angels solo gts and the mechanisms in angel list to make them uh functional uh because then again you decouple and you break the group think dynamic and you know folks again like you saw this in the election like the the ability for people to basically you know uh preference falsify at the highest order is incredible and but when they're in the voting booth by themselves and they have to answer you know what they're like trump great uh but you're better off in a place where you felt like you could just say that and i think similarly solo gps are in this world where they can just vote with their dollars and not have to justify it to anybody and so i think what happens is you have a broad distribution of outcomes there is where you'll find alpha and uh and i think that's what we have to do and then the second thing is we need to move the window of liquidity in because you can't have these companies hanging around long in the tooth for 13 years it doesn't make sense it's not that's not an institutional asset class that works at scale um and so this is what you know what reid is doing what he and mark are doing what i'm doing with ipo 2.0 i think are really good too so those those three things give me hope that the the asset class is uh can be more productive well and that that's certainly aligned with uh with our views at village of course and a lot of the people on this call are are the solo capitalists microphone managers angels people trying you're writing studios incubators so i think all these experiments are are super exciting you've said the word risk a couple times already in this conversation and you've said that one of your biggest strengths is assessing risk and read you as well have talked a ton about taking intelligent risk and as one of your superpowers so we'd love to hear both of you opine on this um jamal how have you gotten better at thinking about risk over your career is there an example of a risk you've taken recently or not so recently that you think has benefited from this evolved judgment and what advice would you give to the angels and investors on this call about how to be better uh at understanding risk and then and then read same to you um i'll i'll give you my answer as it is today which is that i think that there is a continuum of risk and um on one end of the spectrum is what i would call um small quantums of capital and you can define what that means for yourself and then on the other end are large quantum capital capital over here in small quantities of capital my risk tolerance is prone to action i don't like to think about things too much i think that it's much more about optionality and the positive optionality of being able to see if something works and a lot of the times the things that you bet on that you expect to succeed don't the things you bet on and think marginally you can so there's a there's just a bunch of unpredictability so for me like you know i still do a reasonable amount of angel investing and early stage investing but purely off of my own balance sheet i'll get an email randomly in an inbox i kind of like it i don't think at all about it you know the guy wants a million bucks 2 million bucks 500 000 you know i'll just send it to my team and be like just wire her the cash and let's just see so there it's all action get you know 100 bets a year on the field and just see and then you know when i'm writing quantums for me which are like sort of like 250 500 million and up it's all about inaction and i try to create enormous amounts of time where i don't make the decision and that allows me to get to the the level of thinking that i need to be right because over here it doesn't matter that i'm right or wrong i'm learning but over here i need to be right because this is where you go out of business there's the going out of business risk you know if i write three or four bad checks at 500 million each i've burned through two billion dollars for me that's a lot of money so it's tough so um you know in the last for example since the financial crisis or sorry since uh the coronavirus pandemic really started you know i've written 500 million of pipes and then now you know another 250 odd million of these facts and uh it's taken me a long time but i've gotten really good at just going deep into the process immersing myself i don't respond to any emails i it's like you know i don't listen to anybody i come to my office i lock myself in and i'm just here i'll be randomly wasting time listening to podcasts reading but i'm always just thinking and letting it marinate i get to an answer but over here it's just constantly firing fifty thousand a hundred thousand five hundred thousand i don't think twice and i let it bake so i think the parameter of capital obviously and kind of risk assessment is a is a very good one i tend to look at these kind of questions of how do you know that you're taking an intelligent risk because risk is one of the things where if you're if you're handling it well it could be a huge differentiator in returns in success etc and so um part of it is you think okay what are the kind of mechanisms well um one of them the ones that i most like is when you take kind of contrarian risks um and are right now that's the hard part of course uh and so what you do is you say okay what would smart why would smart people not think this is a good deal and what do i know that they don't know and i think this kind of lends a a question for how you take intelligent risk because you say okay what are the real risks in this and then why do i have a theory that the risk that that we can navigate that risk the risk may not play may not play blow up like for example you know chamath was mentioning airbnb this has kind of one of the funny storied um uh kind of greylock investment things because when um when we were we were discussing at the partnership table david z who who i love probably reason i'm at greylock uh looked me and said hey every venture capitalist has to have a deal they're gonna they're gonna fail on airbnb can be yours uh very similar to to chamath's reaction now part of the thing i love about david is he came back to me six months later number seven jane said i was wrong i was wrong you were right what did you see and i said well look you were right about the fact that there could be some horrific event that could quell the growth there could be regulatory et cetera but if it didn't play out if those risks didn't play and they weren't necessarily going to play then you have something huge and that's when you kind of look at this as a as a whole portfolio so part of being a great kind of stuff and one of the things that i think you're you're really interested in with respect to risk is how you take risks on people and many of the angels in this event are making founder bets fundamentally you know it's day zero it's a it's a guy and a gal in a garage um and and you have this incredible incredible superpower being able to not let certain flaws overly cloud your judgment people can be flawed and still be backable people people can have weaknesses and still have unbelievable strengths and you can see those strengths at least in my experience how do you think about risk as it relates to betting on founders or betting on colleagues or team members so the risks you you take and the risk you shouldn't take um for example a risk you shouldn't take is if you think the person is is kind of like um you know ethically challenged or you know a deceptive uh you know it doesn't understand like fundamentally partnering with you it's one of the reasons the piece of advice i give to entrepreneurs is present the risks that you see in the business so you can start working on them and have a genuine partnership in doing it those kinds of risks you know once you once you get there you're like done right you just can't navigate any of the rest of it you know good luck route the kinds of risks you should take are you know for example classically is oh you should only invest in people who started coding before they were 12. well then you wouldn't invest in brian chesky that that their heuristics like if they started coding before they were 12 there's interesting characteristics that are likely to be there that's useful mostly you kind of look at are they learners and are they willing to also work with other people so because no one is all strengths right um anyone who's like oh yeah they're all great at everything that that's a huge mistake and if you get that then you can look at what are the risks you might be taking with this person and the most often one that i find entertaining when as a successful and entrepreneurs go oh that person's really or sorry successful investors there's a little bit of traditional thing oh that person's really arrogant you know like actually in fact uh arrogant people who are really hard hard driving may be irritating at a dinner party but very successful that's awesome um look we're going to shift to a question from athena carp uh we can put her on stage uh sheila athena you had a question about uh about silicon valley and uh and its future oh great well thanks thanks for joining and um really appreciate the wisdom shared so far uh it's been been really um fresh and interesting content i think one of the questions i have um representing typically the tel aviv ecosystem is um and especially with covid maybe making marketing and sales in certain elements less material than having very strong sound tech and or healthcare tech ai technologies that can pivot much easier than others so wondering if you guys feel um we've hit the peak in silicon valley and will there be different ecosystems or what will the attributes of emerging ecosystems be uh in your mind shamans do you want to go first you want me to uh uh go ahead please right so um i think we i think the answer is both um i think that the we've been over the last 20 years we've heard a lot of you know peak silicon valley this housing prices peak silicon valley that you know lots of capital too much capital uh chewing things around immigration difficulties and actually in fact i think silicon valley will continue and strength even with the kind of covid and the and the kind of the the fact that there's a bunch of movement out i think it's just the same things that lead to that density of urbanization anything in headquarters to cities to silicon valley i think will still be there post vaccine et cetera now the great news is is i think that this that we've already seen even pre-covered other ecosystems flourishing i think it gives them more of a sense one of the things that we've been doing at greylock we've actually already made multiple investments this year in places outside of silicon valley because it's pretty easy because you're doing it all through zoom etc and so i think that that so i think the short answer will be both and jamal just quickly are you long or short in the valley over the next 10 years yeah i actually think the coronavirus pandemic has been the salvation of silicon valley for exactly what reid just said which is that it's forced people to um break away from this whole idea that you know all of life's you know goodness exists between san francisco and and palo alto not even mountain view and that's just kind of nutty and just kind of reductionist and lazy thinking um and so the fact that you're forced to now go abroad is good i think like like i said and i don't mean to be too nostalgic but it's like yeah it's a i think the best of silicon valley is really a mindset where you're celebrating failure you um you're celebrating heterogeneity not homogeneity um you know you're you're finding ways to cooperate because you don't feel like you are competing over scarce resources i really felt like the last few years uh that wasn't the case um and so i think now is a good way to just have the pendulum swing back to what it was like so athena we have another question thank you for the question i appreciate it uh sandra daniels do you want to do you want to uh come up ask about specs yeah hey timothy reed thanks for being here my name is uh sandra daniels i'm one of the founders of thumbtack um my question and uh asking for a friend is are some the most upvoted the most up-voted question sander congratulations 13 votes go for it awesome um it's about specs so do you think spax are an enduring alternative to companies going public or do you think they're a point in time trend that's only uh popular until direct listings with simultaneous fundraising is permitted on the new york stock exchange in nasdaq um i think that uh i'm going to be really blunt i think the your friend that is asking that question is well-intentioned uh but is not really thinking from first principles neither of the people that voted that thought that that question was good um it's it's kind of like any instrument you know you could take a pencil and a piece of paper and write um you know the great american tragedy or you could write a dr zeus book you know you could write some really incredible tomb or you could just write you know chicken scratches so the question is what is the goal i think that the goal is you want to align yourself with partners who can help you thrive for the duration of how long you intend to build a company and going public is sort of in what should be a multi-decade plan if you really want to try to build something enormously valuable and in as much i think there's a big problem today in the public markets and the private markets which is that um there are there's just not a good translation layer for what your plans are so for example i'm sure or maybe you guys don't know this but if you go public in a traditional ipo you can't present a forecast for your company now think about that when you raise capital in the private markets you actually show the future because what are people buying they're buying the future now you can only imagine the mindset when all of your presenting is the past and there are all these type guardrails i saw that todd mckinnon is todd mckinnon maybe the ceo of octa um you know he he tweeted on twitter like how was chemotherapy to say these things if i had said these things you know i would have the sec up my ass yeah no sherlock that's the whole point of like why this whole process is broken if you spend all your time looking in the past you can't describe the future now in the case of todd and octa it's a beautiful business but it still took a little while for people to really realize what it was and if you could have skipped all of that confusion in the middle skipped all the volatility in the middle and just got to the punch line and had people that were there to support you it would have been better you could have raised money better at cheaper rates faster you could have consolidated market quicker and now it's not you know it wouldn't have been octa plus ping plus nine other people maybe it would have been octa and the valuation could have been three times bigger so it's not to take away from what todd has done it's to sort of give you guys an insight to the fact that if you're really trying to have a winner take most or win or take all outcome speed is important and the public markets can really slow you down so the thing with spaxart it's a super fast time to market you have a exact price up front that you decide to underwrite at that point just like a private round you can raise as much or as little money around it that you want and the most important thing is if you have a good partner you can explain the vision of the plan for the next five to ten years and that gets into the water table and once you do that that gives you the chance for people to actually want to own this business for a decade and in the publix i actually think you could see people owning things for a decade because it is liquid you know so that that's my view i just think it's a i do think it's here to stay i think that uh direct listings are kind of interesting i i did one with slack i think it's kind of like a little bit of a long walk from a short period to be quite honest i think people hear about the naval gazing technicalities of it but um i think spats are just much simpler and more straightforward reid do you want to go for a hot take on specs and we'll go to the next question yeah so um trout's been doing them longer actually plus one to the things he said although i do like dr seuss uh so i think that's a good that's a potentially good outcome um what i would say is the other thing in addition to what chamas said and so i think they are here to stay its new vehicle is it also gives you another chunk that's kind of at uh adding vc capabilities to these companies because it gives you a chance for a kind of a concentrated ownership position and help and and kind of network going on so i think that's another thing that's advantageous to to uh the stack process can i can i give you an example like look let's take airbnb right they're they're in the middle of a process so we won't talk about it but let's put let me put it to you this way in a traditional ipo process for airbnb i'm willing to bet dollars to donuts that what happens is it will get comped to booking.com and the minute you do that they are going to trade on room nights now you can take all the grand complexity and vision and drive that that team has which has built an incredible company and it'll get reduced to one metric and that is what the traditional process will do now take that same company and put it through let's just say you know read and think as were the guys that did it the conversation is completely different they can talk about what they want to talk about experiences the long value of like how you're creating all of these interesting patterns like it's it's just completely completely different and you can't do that in a direct listing either awesome uh sander thanks for the question uh dan taran we'll we'll uh bring you on stage want to introduce yourself and we're going to shift gears and talk about the tactics a little bit more of angel investing in your question on check size that was interesting go for it down great yeah hey so this is a little bit more of a i'm dan i founded a company called managed by q and then was on the exact team that we worked tragically for for a hot minute um and left in october um so uh yeah my question is a little bit more tactical i think there's there's a bunch of folks in this group that have recently had some liquidity and are starting to do angel investing um sort of for the first time uh and or are raising rolling funds or whatever i'm curious like tactically how do you think about check sizes at the early stage when you're really just trying to start to build a portfolio and get a feel for um for investing i think both mike had asked a question around stage as well just how do you think about sort of starting out to build a portfolio as an angel or seed investor well a little bit like what chamath was saying earlier i would say that um make sure you're thinking portfolio i mean if you have deep deep conviction and one particular thing then fine uh you know kind of back up the truck but back um you know when chamfers and i were both doing angel investing chamos still is apparently um the um uh it's kind of like make sure you have a portfolio so it's kind of like whatever that check size is over like if you say i have x dollars that make sure it's like a 20th or you know like you know that kind of thing as as part of doing it with relatively selective doing it now the other thing i would add to angel investors i think this is still true even with the um you know kind of challenges in in in current vc is the best way you can predict are you on track is what is the next financing round look like did i did a smart person lead that financing round you know whether or not this person was a smart vc et cetera and that's a little bit of how to condition like which things you should be doing this frequently um you won't really have good metrics you're making the earlier kind of judgments that ben prompted me on about people and the back of the envelope number but that's how i would look at it i think that um portfolio construction is really um something that's somewhat of a lost art you have you mentioned a comment in in here which is that on what planet does silicon valley celebrate heterogeneity my point is i agree with you i don't think it has over the last five or six years there's been too much copycatting um but my point is that wasn't the case meaning the surface area was a lot different 10 or 15 years ago you'd have a company and you wouldn't have nine competitors behind it so you had a lot of room to play around and find your niche and you know there was there was as a result there was a lot of really interesting non-obvious innovation how we go back to that is you know i think again in the early stages i'm the most hopeful and if you really take the heart what portfolio construction means you can uh make that happen so if if i was starting out angel investing i would take this quantum of money let's just say i had a million dollars that i was willing to allocate i would think about that as you know kind of 20 companies i would make the same quantum of capital because i'm telling you the eight priority ability to size is impossible right and so you might as well just make 20 50k checks and again at some point in success you'll get to this place where you know now you can start to be super risk on and size but that's going to be many years in the future and you should do that once you know you know what you're doing and then you can mortgage the house and sell the things and blah blah blah and then you can make the multi-million dollar bet but i would start with like you know take a million dollars okay if that's the number it's um 22 texts of 50k and then i would try to sort of not be overlapping so meaning you can create a heterogeneous portfolio and the reason is because that's how you will identify where the alpha is yeah right having seven food delivery businesses in a portfolio of early stage investments is dumb you wouldn't do that right thanks dan for the question um appreciate it different topic you've um you've called social media businesses that hook us and addict us immoral on some level should the angels in this call with a moral compass not invest in startups that employ some of the growth hacking techniques that that you helped develop back in the day no i i think no i i kind of viewed like folks on this call and you know reid and i back in the day we're like farmers and uh you know all of a sudden like you know we find these ingredients and we sell these ingredients and so you know ammonia there's nothing wrong with ammonia there's nothing wrong with tar you know when you first use those things to make a cigarette there's also nothing wrong with that it's the point when you realize that cigarettes cause cancer uh that's when you start to become immortal um and so i don't know i i kind of think like i i don't think you should judge the tool i don't think you should judge the instrument i think that tools and instruments evolve and then morals and a moral attitude around things evolve and that's where you do have to have courage like i took a lot of flack because the whole commentary was hey hold on you made so much money at facebook and how dare you comment and i'm like okay but like i never was trying to become this rich and i've always kind of said what i believe because i like to go to bed with a clean conscience so take the money away i'd rather tell the truth um and so i do think that there is a point where once you know you have to make your own moral judgment by the way it can also be completely okay um but you just have to be able to own the decision and not judge other people for it um so that's my got it um okay awesome uh michael magano you want to come on and uh and ask your question sure thank you for application across stage go for it hey guys i'm mike um i'm one of the founders of anchor now at spotify uh thanks for doing this um question that's sort of related to to dan's line of questions the previous question um for early stage angels people that are new to angel investing um obviously you know most often we're doing we're doing early stage how important do you feel like it is to stay focused on early stage or would you recommend de-risking by diversifying into later stage if you can get the access you know i'm doing mostly c but every once in a while i see an a or a c or something like that it's the same risk it's just more money which is crazy yeah i wouldn't say i wouldn't go stage risk i mean some portfolio management's a good idea but it's not like oh look i'm de-risking or portfolio managing because i'm doing later sage that's essentially chamoth and i would have the same point of view there it's it's it's active decisioning and as you put more capital in a little bit like what chamath was saying earlier as you put more capital in then you have to think more about it you have to have a higher probability being right right that makes sense cool simple question simple answer thank you guys um we're waiting for the next person to go into the green dust question but read quickly turner novak asks do you think uh what do you agree with many folks predictions that linkedin will be unbundled it's the meme on twitter that never refuses like every month people come out and start attacking linkedin saying it's ready to be unbundled they're gonna be all these vertical competitors what's your hot take um well i haven't seen it yet um obviously there's there's times where you get stuff that's in-depth enough of what you're doing like for example github or something else that says that's a different distinct area from linkedin there's a there's a value in the generality given that you know it isn't that for example you know the classic one usually people talk about as doctors like doctors don't just talk to doctors and doctors aren't the only referral to other doctors for patients and other kinds of things and so there may still be that thing there but the general thing is also very useful broadly um but you know it's not like it depends on depth and configuration of market and so forth and i'm certainly not it's not a religious point of view um sean do you want to come on stage and ask your question about peter thiel hi chamoth hi reid i'm the founder and ceo of placement.com i'm curious if either of you subscribe to peter's views on technological stagnation if yes i'd love just a small there and if no which sectors lead you to hold a more optimistic view than he does uh well i'll just go first i mean because i argue about this with peter a lot you know he's like oh we didn't get our flying cars although maybe we're about to you know and actually i think that the broad answer is the the the digital realm artificial intelligence everything else so while some areas have been much slower these areas acceleration apply to all these others that doesn't mean that we shouldn't also do and i think this is one of the things that chamath has been doing a good job of beating the drama on and investing in it's like hard tech and other kinds of things as well and make sure we we get there but i think that's part of it like the one exchange that i saw that i thought was really interesting is peter saying stagnation and then stephen johnson said help by not having faster planes and steven johnson said well that's because you think that what people most care about is the speed of the plane versus safety and getting everywhere and if you actually look at like the evolution of the the plane industry what it was really going to is safety and getting it right now i think we're about to see speed too because i think the supersonic planes are you know you know boom and others are are actually going to start delivering in useful ways but uh that that's kind of a breadth of it i don't know if you had anything yeah do you have a hot take off otherwise we can i just think technology is inherently deflationary and so i think we confuse stagnation and deflation because it it rears itself in the same thing which is that um you know we give more for less so people get lazy okay thanks thanks sean thanks for the question um next question well i'll ask it because sheila hasn't gotten to the green room yet but how do both of you think about your legacy um what are you trying to at this stage of your life you've made both of you have made a ton of money had a ton of success ton of impact on the world when you think about the next 20 years of your life what are you looking to to accomplish oh the small question for the last time off do you want to go first you want me to uh well maybe maybe chabot you can go first you've reflected publicly about like how much reflection you've been engaged in these last few years and like how you've evolved your worldview to some some extent based on that i uh i have a very specific goal which is i think that i can compound over the next 20 years sort of more than um 100 billion or so and i want to apply all of it to climate change and there's one thing that i think that i would like to sort of know that i burned all the money on which is just some form of uh practical efficient carbon sequestration um uh i think that that would be an incredible thing to give to my kids um that's really honestly like i i spend a lot of time investing to me it's feedstock it helps me refine my risk-taking ability but i feel like i'm a prepping for a decision in 30 years where it's going to be all in on one thing um and it's that i would really like to do that well so actually so i can give an answer that gives an interesting contrast because i've been actually doing more of a kind of a venture portfolio approach so i have been doing some stuff like with you know part of the my hardtech investing in in fission and fusion is is partially in the climate change arena but also kind of like you know how do you get good entrepreneurial ecosystems how do you uh help you know kind of like get the next generation of of you know kind of education and you know kind of um other kinds of things so it's kind of i'm taking more of a venture approach across a number of things versus versus a the the lunar uh moon bet uh the closest the lunar moon that i've gotten so far is the stanford uh human centered uh ai institute with a bunch of kind of risk uh grants to try to make those uh the catalyst in ai technology uh much better across you know all the different industry and and chabot just regarding the final question just on climate change what's like the for people who want to learn more and engage and obviously it's top of mind for all of us in the west coast these last few weeks what's one book resource organization person who you've learned the most from with respect to climate change in fact that's honestly ben i couldn't give you a great answer um it's just all over the place the people i've learned to learn from the most has been on twitter i asked folks to just send me you know some ideas and some write-ups i got a thousand of them within two weeks i've been and they're all seven pages this is seven thousand pages so i'm like uh you know i'm like a thousand pages in but i feel like i've learned more from that than the internet um and uh we all know what the problem what sorry what the solution is um just is that we haven't pushed the boundaries of science to really be able to figure it out yet and i think that that's just going to require a lot of energetic people and a lot of money that's awesome jd ross want to bring you up we'll end on a sort of oddly tactical hyper in the weeds question but such as the nature of the passage of time here there's been some chat about seed stage pricing and series a pricing and risk you want to just recap your your view in question there and if we have a sec reading smart can react yeah absolutely um jd i co-founded a small company called opendoor uh [Laughter] it seems like seed stage pricing is getting more expensive on a risk return basis right now than a b a and d stage curious if you guys agree disagree and you know how you see that evolving over time well i guess what i would say is i think that there's this kind of because so many people are focused on technology as part of the future i think there's inflation and pricing across the whole thing and so it becomes one of the things you have to be you have to pay attention to um at all and the stack and so i'm not sure that it's seed versus a and b as much as you know capital going into tech means that all the pricing is inflating yeah yeah i really agree with reid i think a great idea by the way i just want to say the quality of the people on this thing it's just like it's out it's outrageous and so congratulations thank you for including me but you guys should be you know your individual fund if there's a way for you to like weave together and partner you guys will compete with support and benchmark to do series a's as well i mean holy like it's it's really incredible um just occurred to me like you know on that fantastic uh jd thanks for the question chamath and reid thanks so much for

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Published: Thu Dec 17 2020