二级市场为何正在吞噬 IPO | All-In 流动性二级市场专题

Brad Gerstner (00:00:00): Everybody wants access to these private markets. Gavin Baker (00:00:02): Right now to discuss all of this is Kelly Rodriguez. He's the Forge CEO. Kelly Rodriques (00:00:06): We see a world where the private market opens up and is accessible to any US and global investor. There's 19 companies in the private market AI basket. These companies have grown on average 300%. Jason Calacanis (00:00:20): Please join us in welcoming Gavin Baker, managing partner and CIO of Atreides. Gavin Baker (00:00:24): The ROI on AI has empirically, factually, unambiguously been possible. Investing is the search for truth. Kelly Rodriques (00:00:33): We welcome in Brad Gerstner. It's good to be Gavin Baker (00:00:35): back with you. You have a program called Invest America. Brad Gerstner (00:00:38): I think we have a historic moment right now to get everybody into the game of capitalism. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:00:46): We have a few slides from Brad to kick this off. Brad Gerstner (00:00:49): You know, let's let's get started. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:00:51): A little spicy like Brad Gerstner (00:00:52): old times. This this panel, I I actually was backstage. I said, Gavin, do you know we're talking about secondaries? He's like, what do you mean? And I said, okay. So here, let's just set this up for everybody. The room's full of people who are allocators, people who are looking for distributions. So this is secondary markets over the course of last decade. Is the amount of money going into VC each year, the amount of money coming out of VC each year. The red line represents the net effect of that. Chamath, we're in like five years, right, where a lot more is going in than it's coming out. But the secondary market is at record volume. So this is, you know, I call these companies quasi public companies. These are these later stage companies. There's buying and selling that's going on every day. Look at that Jason, relative to the 21 peak. We thought that was crazy. At the end of twenty one, we're double that now in terms of secondary transactions. This is the amount of employee secondary. So this is people buying into Andoril, Anthropic, SpaceX, now represents 31% of all primary venture activity is buying into these secondaries in 2025. Secondaries are now competing with IPOs and acquisitions as the principal way that these guys are exiting. So, thought that was a decent setup to start the conversation this morning, just a level set how important secondaries have become. And then the final one is secondaries over the last couple of years were trading at a discount to market. So, if we wanted to sell shares in one of our companies, right to buyers out there, they were willing to give us 80¢ on the dollar in order for us to get liquid so that we could send DPI back to our LPs. Today it's at a 106. So, a premium in the market as of Q1 Jason Calacanis (00:02:40): And twenty this doesn't include some of the wild west of SPVs have been unraveled recently. Correct. People charging 10% load in fees, double carry and a lot of gray market, off market stuff. This is also having a profound impact, Gavin, on employees at these companies that I wanna hear about because you've seen it up close and personal with SpaceX and they have a very orderly process here. So why don't we start there? What impact is this having on the employees, Gavin, and then on the market, how orderly is this? And who are the buyers? Are the buyers the sucker at the table? Are these family offices, high net worth individuals who keep hearing us talk about Anthropic or SpaceX or Andriel, and they just say, I have to own the name and they're not discerning. So, Gavin, maybe you could start about the impact on the SpaceX employees you saw firsthand, etcetera. Gavin Baker (00:03:38): Maybe broadening beyond SpaceX. Yeah. I do just think if companies are going to be staying private longer, this is absolutely necessary. There there I think there are a lot of people who are very very wealthy on paper, but actually cash poor. And if you're making tremendous sacrifices because, you know, you work for a company that you really believe in and you're contributing a lot to that company, it's hard if you can't buy a nice house for your family. It's hard if you can't afford to do nice things. Jason Calacanis (00:04:12): Especially in your seven, eight or nine of working at the company, you tell your spouse we're worth 10,000,000 on paper, 30,000,000 on paper and you don't own your home. Gavin Baker (00:04:20): Yeah, or year fifteen. And so I think this is necessary and important and whether it is good or bad, think it is very clear that companies are going to stay private for longer. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:04:32): What's the reason to stay private longer, truly? I Gavin Baker (00:04:38): don't think there is actually a good reason to stay private longer. Brad Gerstner (00:04:42): Hear, Chamath Palihapitiya (00:04:42): hear. I completely agree with you too. Gavin Baker (00:04:44): Yeah. I Jason Calacanis (00:04:45): was But why has it happened? This is founders don't want let's just call it what it is. Founders don't want to be under a microscope. They want to build and enjoy life and have it easier than being on the public market microscope. Gavin Baker (00:04:56): Yeah. I think there is a perception that life as a private company is easier and you have more freedom and you can think long term. I don't agree with this. I always think about Mark Zuckerberg's commentary that had he been public. So just, you know, Facebook, I won't call it a near death experience, but long ago, it's difficult to believe, but I don't know, 02/1112, Facebook did not believe in apps. They believed in something called HTML six. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:05:28): HTML five. Gavin Baker (00:05:29): HTML five. Yes. You you you were Chamath Palihapitiya (00:05:32): the It actual a cataclysmic debate. And it was me and Bret Taylor, me versus Bret. I was like apps, I wanna go build a phone. Bret was like HTML five. Zuck picked Bret. Spent the next three years unwinding that decision. Gavin Baker (00:05:45): Absolutely. And Mark Zuckerberg, basically the idea was, you know, the iPhone comes out and initially there was not a big app ecosystem. And there was a thought that, hey, there's no need for apps. You're just going to use the web browser on your phone and HTML5 was a way of making websites look mobile native. Dynamic. Yeah. And this seemed like kind of the future to a lot of very smart people, including Google, Facebook, but it was not the future. It was wrong. And what Mark Zuckerberg has said, I think several times in public, is he profoundly believes that had he been a public company when there was this internal debate between Chamath Palihapitiya (00:06:29): Shamaf And and the detail was actually I went to Zak and I said, I need a billion dollars to build this phone. And we are in this moment in 2010 where we can have the third leg of the stool. There's Android, there's iPhone, neither have really taken off yet. And he's like, we don't have a billion. And I said, but the public markets will And give us a he said, no, but then we went public a year later. But that year made all the difference. Gavin Baker (00:06:54): Made all the difference. And he has said that I had the constant pressure testing from public market investors. It was a dynamic. I was talking to another CEO here this morning. When you're the CEO of a private company, you are the most special flower to all of your investors. You're you are as important to your board members, particularly if you're really successful, you know, maybe as the board members' families or parents, you know, the board members think about you a lot. Once you're public, you're one of thousands of companies, and that's its own dynamic. But the consequence of this is that private investors are often selling to management teams. And at some level, that can mean telling management teams what they need to hear because you want to be able to keep participating in the rounds. Once a company is public, you can buy or sell as you wish, and this means that investors feel freer to give companies management teams. And Zuckerberg said, had I been public, had I been getting rigorous detailed questions from really smart public equity investors, I think I would have And this made is the Chamath Palihapitiya (00:08:01): I do a second unwritten story of that, which has never been said, he called me. He's like, hey man, what the is going on over there? And I was like, yeah, I know. Because I had just left. And then we wrote a deck. And I walked over to Zak and I'm like, here's the deck of what you need to do. Do these things. Jason Calacanis (00:08:21): Maybe. Well, this is a key point, think Gavin. We are private, you do not get clean information as the CEO and the management team because people want access. And once you give the truth or you ask the hard questions, you might lose access. A 100%. The sycophantic nature of private markets is real. Gavin Baker (00:08:40): Now an exceptional CEO Elon. Seeks out Chamath Palihapitiya (00:08:44): Seeks it out. Negative feedback. Jason Calacanis (00:08:46): He's looking for that. Gavin Baker (00:08:47): But not many and actively discards. But not many CEOs maybe are are wired that way. By the way, do think we have to give Brad credit. Yeah. That was a very good deck. You sit back in 2012. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:08:58): No. Because he did a second one. Gavin Baker (00:08:59): He had to get that deck. Second one. He did the open letter to Zuckerberg at the end of was that at the end of twenty two? '22. Brad Gerstner (00:09:05): October 22. Gavin Baker (00:09:07): What do you call it? Get fit? What was the Brad Gerstner (00:09:09): Time to get fit. Gavin Baker (00:09:10): Time to get fit. That was an impact those are two very impactful Okay. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:09:14): So look, there's You're hearing the bulls on going public, but Kelly, take the red team the other side because you're on the other side. You built a private business. You sold it to Schwab. So clearly, of the largest financial institutions now is going to ram its way into this market. But then you're seeing a lot of pushback. Anthropic is like, Hey, dissolve these SPVs. OpenAI, I think, was saying today now, Dissolve these SPVs. Should we dissolve the SPVs? Where are they coming from? And why are you on the right side of history? Jason Calacanis (00:09:45): And have you had to dissolve any of the ones on your marketplace? No. Kelly Rodriques (00:09:49): No. Look, I think that first of all, being a private company CEO for most of my career and then being a public company CEO for three years, I recognize the job is incredibly different. It's much less fun. You're not What Chamath Palihapitiya (00:10:06): what do you mean when you say much less fun? Kelly Rodriques (00:10:09): Turning into an investment manager primarily as a public company CEO is a very different job than being a visionary product first, first principles business. When you become a public company CEO, everything changes. And I would say in the world we're in now, the kind of capital you can raise, the kind of capital that was represented in the very last discussion allows you to extend your private life. SpaceX, a private company for twenty four years. But the reality is these SPVs that are now emerging because these companies are getting so big is because a market's trying to happen. And a company like SpaceX has done this extraordinarily well. They've run essentially liquidity programs for almost a decade because there's so much pent up interest in both being an investor and getting liquidity for some of the reasons that Gavin was mentioning. So, I think what we see now is the next phase of this. This Schwab deal with Forge basically says to the world, this is a real asset class. It's more than just secondaries. We're going to put the company's equity into fund products, into very well managed regulated SPV structures because they do serve a purpose in the market. Jason Calacanis (00:11:40): Yeah, but if you're How do you convince Elon specifically to give you access to that when he wants to do it himself? And he has a team and every six months he runs it himself. How do you get access to that? What's your pitch to the next Elon? Kelly Rodriques (00:11:54): Here's the pitch. The pitch is you're going to go from being a private company eventually to a public company. What Schwab represents is 46,000,000 investors and $12,000,000,000,000. This will change capital access and the way that you distribute your shares moving from private to public. Jason Calacanis (00:12:15): How did that work when you pitched him on that? Kelly Rodriques (00:12:18): Were you successful? Well, I'll tell you. We got our first SPVs on SpaceX in 2018 and 2019. Jason Calacanis (00:12:24): Were they Was he okay with it? Kelly Rodriques (00:12:26): Absolutely. Totally permissioned. And then, as we got closer to the IPO, we said, guess what? We've got 30,000,000 retail investors that would like to have a $50,000 slice of SpaceX. And and he went out publicly and talked about having broad based distribution At the IPO price. At the IPO price, and Schwab was named one of the IPO allocations. Jason Calacanis (00:12:52): Beautiful pitch. I do think Gavin Baker (00:12:53): this is actually a very effective pitch. I think a lot of these CEOs, they're a little bit ambivalent about and I think they understand that maybe the institutions who are investing in these private rounds, they may represent unions, they may represent retirement plans, but I do think they like the idea of democratizing access. And if they're building something that they think is great, giving ordinary Americans an opportunity to participate. I actually think that's a very appealing story to a lot of these CEOs. Well, because they're capitalists Jason Calacanis (00:13:25): and they understand the power of equity. So Brad, what is the downside then of because you're part of the go direct movement now, BG2 pod officially fifth bestie. Gavin officially sixth bestie. Gavin, that's new news. We officially made you sixth bestie today. Gavin Baker (00:13:42): But does that mean that definitively behind Brad? Because that's the real news. Can see You're Jason Calacanis (00:13:47): standing behind Brad. You're just giving him that big bear hug right behind him. Gavin Baker (00:13:52): Wow. Are you seeing of the big spoon? Jason Calacanis (00:13:54): You're the big spoon now. Definitely. In the side draw with the extra spoons. But Brad, it's getting very weird, very quick. In all seriousness, with great power comes great responsibility. Sometimes the enthusiasm people can have can exceed reality. Correct. Going direct, you've become more measured, I've noticed, as your profile has gone up. I think all of us have to like, just make sure people don't blindly follow trades. Don't, and you were talking stuff down on CNBC a couple of times saying, Hey, I don't think the average American needs to be in some of these companies. There's time. Brad Gerstner (00:14:38): I get worried. I get worried at this point in the market stage, particularly on CNBC where you're talking to retail investors at home. Yes. I was one of those retail guys looking up to everybody on this stage, trusting everybody on this stage. And when people are telling you to YOLO into right double fee structure SPVs and all this, like it's time to be careful, to do your work, to be thoughtful. We're in this because we want this to be durable democratization for a long time. Yeah. We want to build trust among those who feel left out and left behind in capitalism. We all think that we need to go public sooner. The reason I think we It is destabilizing when you're creating trillions of dollars in private value and 80% of America think it's a scam where they're left out and left behind. Jason Calacanis (00:15:29): And then they come rushing in and they could be playing not so good cards. Brad Gerstner (00:15:35): Right. So all I'm saying, like I said about, they asked the question on CNBC last week, if you had a $100,000 of fresh capital and you were sitting at home, is today the day that you would shove it all into the market? And I said, no, I think about it in sizes, right? We just had two of the biggest months in the last ten years in the public markets. They've been big months. So, if I had a stack of a 100, I may put 30 to work today. I'm never gonna pick the bottom. I'm never gonna pick the top, but I certainly wouldn't be putting it all to work. And I'd say the same thing about late stage privates, people who are YOLO ing into this stuff, and then they feel really disappointed. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:16:12): They're like, Brad Gerstner (00:16:13): hold on a second. I bought the SpaceX IPO and it didn't go up three X. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:16:17): But let me ask you then. Do you view this as exit liquidity for you? Like, would you shape your portfolio and returns and increasingly say, you know what? I don't know when this guy's going to go public. Gavin Baker (00:16:27): Yes. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:16:28): Let me just pump the stuff out. Let me get the distribution. Let me send it to my LPs and just call it Brad Gerstner (00:16:32): a day. We are selling into this. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:16:35): You're selling into this. Brad Gerstner (00:16:36): Right. So, I have LPs in this room who say, listen, we invested in your VC5 or VC6 seven or eight years ago. If you can go sell a slice of that at four or 5X and we get DPI and it's priced really high, then go sell some of it. And we often don't talk about this in venture land. Half of what we do is in the public markets. Gavin and I get up every morning and we think to ourselves, should we buy today or should we sell today? Venture capitalists don't think about the sell part, they think about the buy part. So, if we're going to stay private for longer and we're gonna have trillion dollar, you know, private companies and Databricks at $200,000,000,000 you got to think about is today a day we should be selling some and returning it to our investors Chamath Palihapitiya (00:17:26): because Doesn't it create though, as what Jason said, these very complicated personality dynamics where maybe you get shut out of a new company, maybe you get shut out of an incremental round, and there's bad blood because you're a credible investor and there's this signaling risk. Whereas in the privates, if you and Gavin decide to sell, nobody knows. Brad Gerstner (00:17:46): Well, no. In the private Sorry, Chamath Palihapitiya (00:17:49): the publics nobody Exactly. Brad Gerstner (00:17:51): Publics, they don't know until our 13 f comes out. Okay? In the private market, it's always a conversation between me and the founder to say, listen, we're gonna sell 30% of our position. They never like it, Shama. They're always like, we wish you wouldn't do that. They don't want it known, etcetera. Yeah. But my job as a fiduciary to the LPs of Jason Calacanis (00:18:12): It the does room is to do feel Gavin like we have crossed over for early stage venture to a point in which there is a third way. Either your company had M and A and we saw in the presentation yesterday that during the wrath of LenaCon, there was no M and A and they just froze the market. Now it's coming back. IPOs, we did have some freezing of that market for certain periods. But this third way is now fantastic. I can tell you as the earliest of the early, we are now pari pursue selling into every chance we get because our average investment is at 10 to $20,000,000 valuations. When they hit 500,000,000, I tell the founder, you're gonna start selling at 500,000,000. I'm gonna sell right alongside you so that I can invest in the next you coming into the market. Everybody's fine with it. But I can tell you six or seven years ago, when I did this with a company, they begged me to not participate when they hit peak ZERP $20.21. They begged me, J Cal, you have to be loyal to us. You can't sell pari pari. And I said, guys are clearing 40,000,000 of the 110,000,000 I'm dollars just asking to be next to you, same amount. Can I Chamath Palihapitiya (00:19:24): ask Kelly a question? How do you systematize this so that it's like an exchange? So like, if we just wanna hit the bid, we can do it. Like what I don't like about the secondary markets is, I ask my CFO, he calls five guys, then my fund CFO, she calls like four, you know. It's Jason Calacanis (00:19:38): like ticket Gavin Baker (00:19:39): brokers. Yes. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:19:39): We get a bunch of bids, none of it makes any sense, and I'm like Yeah. I'm already dealing with, as Brad said, the agita from the CEO. It's got to be easier than this. Yes. Kelly Rodriques (00:19:50): Yeah. Look, ten years ago, we said there needs to be infrastructure to pull this off. This can't just be a big shadow market. We're sort of in this tipping point now where we spent the last three years building this brand new platform so that a company could plug into it the same way they could list on an exchange and say, we're going to offer liquidity. And furthermore, if you're a VC and you're on that cap structure for ten years and you want to offer LP liquidity, you can do it in What do Chamath Palihapitiya (00:20:18): you mean? You're like, we would be plugging into Schwab's 30,000,000 humans that are buying stuff on Yes. Kelly Rodriques (00:20:26): There's a platform. We brought a platform with about 3,000,000 investors and now we're going to add 46,000,000 investors to them. Jason Calacanis (00:20:33): Yeah. But wait, hold on a second. Aren't those are those accredited investors? Who do they need to be because Kelly Rodriques (00:20:38): you just had Jason Calacanis (00:20:38): the chair of the SEC on Yes. Kelly Rodriques (00:20:41): So today, if you are trading individual shares, whether it's in an SPV or direct on a cap table, you're accredited. However, there are products coming to market, we can talk about this in detail later, that have 60 companies, including SpaceX, that are listed products for unaccredited $500 minimums, and that capital for those funds will be the Jason Calacanis (00:21:05): underlying Closed end funds? Kelly Rodriques (00:21:07): These are interval funds. Jason Calacanis (00:21:08): Interval funds. Robinhood's Brad Gerstner (00:21:09): got one out Jason Calacanis (00:21:10): now. I think Naval just did USBC as one of these. He's gonna contribute Kelly Rodriques (00:21:15): to Now, closed end funds are a very different bet because you're betting on FOMO because if you look at the underlying value of some of the assets in those closed end funds, they have no bearing to reality of what those underlying shares are actually worth. So, price discovery is another key component of this structural shift. But to answer your question specifically, if a VC's LPs want to recycle or want to get liquid, then a platform like this will allow them to recycle that capital and put it back into the next vintage fund if they want Chamath Palihapitiya (00:21:48): Gavin, I have question for you based on this. When these returns come out, the mean return inventor is going to look incredible. The BD in return is still going to be shit. So, walk us through how people will sort through that and the reality of what's going to happen in the next year. Gavin Baker (00:22:08): Well, so I think there's two very important things. One, I observe if you were a venture firm and you do not have material exposure to one of these trillion dollar plus companies, that you had many, many chances to buy into, not only your returns are not going to be good, but you're not going to have DPI on a relative basis, but you're not going to have DPI. And, you know, there's exceptions. Our great Series A firms, they may not have this, but their returns are still amazing with great DPI. And so, I am beginning to see venture firms who don't have exposure to one of these companies behave in strange ways because I think they're starting to feel a little bit of franchise risk because their DPI and their returns are going to go from, you know, hey, top quintile, top quartile, tercel. Jason Calacanis (00:23:03): So they're doing unnatural Gavin Baker (00:23:04): acts They're doing for natural things. They're writing what I see as call options. Like a bunch of these, you know, neo labs. Well, I need a story. I've done something. And maybe some of these call options pay off, but I do think they're engaging at some level and maybe They're chasing it. They're chasing. In Jason Calacanis (00:23:23): gambling terms. Gavin Baker (00:23:24): Whereas the people who have exposure to this, they're being a lot more disciplined because they know they're in a great position. I think another very important dynamic is going to happen in the world of long only mutual funds and crossover funds. So long only mutual funds, you know, my former employer, Fidelity, amazing place, love it, Bailey Gifford, Capital Research, Wellington, TRO, they all can, per SEC rules, allocate up to 15% of their funds into privates. And these are the biggest pools of capital in the world. They dwarf sovereign wealth funds. But, you know, most firms, because they don't want to get in trouble with the SEC, they say, hey, we're going cap at 3% or 5% or 7%. It was very public. Bailey Gifford was forced to sell SpaceX last year for regulatory reasons. And what's going to happen as these companies go public, All of these long only mutual funds are by and large finding it hard to participate in private markets right now because they're at the limits of their self imposed 3%, 5%. When a company goes public and lockup expires, it moves out of that bucket. Nice. So this is gonna be hundreds of billions of dollars of new late stage demand that is coming back to the market after kind of being out Out of That's the market for a lot Jason Calacanis (00:24:49): of dry powder. There's a lot of dry powder. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:24:51): The next trade is up then. The marginal trade is up. Jason Calacanis (00:24:54): Well, founders are going to be in the catbird seat. People are going be looking to put money to work. Interesting buzz going around about accreditation rules. We had the head of the SEC on all ins interview show. We did it. And they're gonna have a sophisticated investor test, something I've been talking about for a long time that would really democratize the way Invest America has access. And then funds, I've been getting pitched for years on, oh, put your fund on blockchain or sell your fund into this ETF. Maybe you could talk a little Kelly about the possibilities around venture funds being more tradable like secondaries are. Is that on your roadmap? Obviously there's demand for it. What would that because I can tell you what that would do for my LPs, Brad, Chamatz LPs and previous funds. If you could come in and out of these funds, the way you can come in and out of Anthropic, my Lord, that could be just incredible for folks who, I don't know, they have a divorce, they have a life event, just a little more fluidity. Kelly Rodriques (00:26:01): So there's been secondary fund trading for a long time. I think blockchain and tokenization makes it more efficient, that world will come. But the question we're asking ourselves now is, if you're an LP in a fund that's holding something as valuable as this, are are you really interested in trading your fund position or do you just want to get out of Jason Calacanis (00:26:25): That name. Kelly Rodriques (00:26:26): The big winner, that name? And our view is it's probably the latter. And in some cases, funds will come to us and say, we've got a vintage fund that has two companies in it that are fifteen years old and we can't clear that fund. And so that's an application of liquidity to the market that we think is coming to the market. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:26:53): Are worried at all over this next year about this idea of retail being exit liquidity for these three ginormous companies? Like, there any risk? Like how do you bucket the risk? How do you manage the risk? What is the risk? If something were to happen, what's the blowback? Kelly Rodriques (00:27:09): Was talking with Brad about this yesterday. We're watching these valuations in these multiples. We had this conversation at dinner last night and saying, wow, these extraordinary and people should come into this market. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:27:23): And not Extraordinary is a coded word for Kelly Rodriques (00:27:26): Elevated. It's okay. Fine. Jason Calacanis (00:27:30): It's a bubble. Call Chamath Palihapitiya (00:27:30): it You're it saying you think they're high, the valuation Kelly Rodriques (00:27:33): is I think the retail investor coming into this space needs to look down market and look at interesting opportunities that aren't the things that are on CNBC every day and have access to them earlier. And we had a bunch of retail investors show up in 2018 and 2019 that wanted to be in SpaceX. And they're thrilled that they got in when the valuation was 30,000,000,000. Yeah. And I think if the market opens up, that's what we'll be talking about. What do I want to get into now that's not at the very, very top of the market getting ready to go forward? Jason Calacanis (00:28:05): Also, Brad and Gavin, we're getting better, shout out to Gurley, we're getting better at pricing these IPOs and not leaving money on the table. They're fully valued in most cases when they go public. Yeah. Or in some cases. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:28:18): Oh, they're mispriced. They're massively mispriced. Jason Calacanis (00:28:20): Well, no, we have seen some that have gone down after they go out. Nothing good that anybody wants. Brad Gerstner (00:28:27): I mean, listen. Jason Calacanis (00:28:28): Wait, what you guys think? Are we closer to pricing them? Brad Gerstner (00:28:33): I mean, Gavin and I have been doing this twenty five years. There are moments that the public market is undervalued relative to privates and moments where privates are undervalued relative to public. Right now, everything in the world of technology is pretty fully valued, right? Like, you can't have the parabolic moves we've had and think that everything is cheap. That's not to say that we're not going to go higher, but when you've been punched in the face as many times as all of us have over the last fifteen years in technology, we know it's a jagged line up into the right. So, for the retail investors, so long as they have staying power, so if you're going to launch a product, as long as the retail investor can stay in that product through the drawdown, they're going to do fine. The problem is most of them YOLO at the top because everybody gets them all jimmied up and excited. And so, they're levering up, they're doing 2X levered memory trades and all this shit that Gavin and I are watching. There are 14 ETFs launching on the day of the SpaceX IPO that are levered ETFs into SpaceX at like whatever, 1,750,000,000,000. So, this just tells me that there's a lot of We may not be at the top, but we ain't at the bottom. Jason Calacanis (00:29:51): We're bouncing along the top might Brad Gerstner (00:29:53): be a You fair description, you gotta allocate accordingly. And that's what active management is about. If we do not, if we're not thinking about that, when people are puking into their garbage cans at the start of the Iran war and the market is down, Gavin and I are looking at each other and saying, good God, these anthropic revenues are off the charts. We gotta get more dollars at risk, shove more onto the table in both anthropic and public market stocks. But then seventy five days later, it's all changed, right? The Have Chamath Palihapitiya (00:30:25): market you guys ever been in a market cycle where these moves are just so concentrated in time, Where you take like a year or two's worth of moves and you compress it into thirty days, sixty days? Gavin Baker (00:30:36): I mean, this is nothing relative to '99 and 2000. Nothing. This is nothing relative to that. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:30:44): Like, I mean Yeah. I'm packing it. Sometimes they wake Jason Calacanis (00:30:47): up What was '99, 2000 like in terms of like if this is a roller coaster, what was that? Chamath Palihapitiya (00:30:51): Yeah. Gavin Baker (00:30:52): And what was that? I mean, don't you know, this is a roller coaster that's like kind of a gentle sine wave. Brad Gerstner (00:31:01): That's fun. '99 was Vegas on a Friday night after way too many drugs. Yes. Okay? Like, it was out of control nuts. CMGI had no revenue and the stock went from $2 to $2,000 over the course of six months. Quite a big They buy Foxborough Stadium. They're on the cover of Time magazine and they're out of business two years later. Right? Like that is very different than Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceX. Right. These are extraordinarily real businesses. So, think the better compare is like 2021. Kelly Rodriques (00:31:34): Yeah. Brad Gerstner (00:31:35): Right? Where valuations get ahead of themselves or they're at the top end of the range, we could have a normal run of the mill consolidation in the public markets in the semi index of 10 or 20%, which means high beta would be down 30 to 40%. And a lot of people who just got in would be panicking, right? But the people who've been in for six months or three years would notice that that's just a blip. So, I don't think it's at all like Okay, Chamath Palihapitiya (00:32:02): a question for the three of you. Four. Yeah, final question. Have final question. Take the top 10 names, private companies off. Okay? Forget those. You can't pick those. Give me a sub, you know, the tens of billions, few 100,000,000,000 private company that you could buy today a secondary and that you do not own that you would want to own? I'll start with you, Brad. Just go around the horn. Something you don't own, but if you had the chance to buy secondary, you would. Brad Gerstner (00:32:31): I mean, I take a company, in that what I call inflection growth, Jamas, so these are companies, the thousand companies that are over 3,000,000,000, but let's call it sub 50,000,000,000. I think it's the trickiest area of the investing landscape because they're the beneficiaries of high valuations yet they still have binary risk. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:32:51): Right. Brad Gerstner (00:32:51): Right? Like Anthropic OpenAI, SpaceX, I don't think these companies have binary risk, there are a lot in that bucket that do. And so, I mean, we own most of the ones I wanna own. I can't give you one that Jason Calacanis (00:33:04): we don't Well, Gavin Baker (00:33:05): what one I wanna own it, I generally own it. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:33:08): Yeah, it's hard question. I'll give you, how Jason Calacanis (00:33:10): about the last one you bought? Brad Gerstner (00:33:10): I'll give you one. I'd say like Sierra, Bret Taylor's company. What do they do? So, they're building basically Salesforce agent native. Got it. So, marketing, customer service agents that are agent native. I'll give you the downside and the upside. We also own a company called Parlow in the same space in Europe that I think is really interesting. Downside, OpenAI and Anthropics say we're going to do this and all of a sudden it eviscerates their hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. The upside on these businesses is that they actually have already built very sophisticated agentic layers and that all these guys, Meta, Google, SpaceX come along and say, we want to buy you because we want to accelerate our path into agent first. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:33:56): I'll give you the name that I was convinced of today. Okay. Yesterday by Thomas LaFonte, which was Revolut. I had always kind of like, I had some early Explain what fintech. Like, I own some Coinbase, I own some Robinhood. We did all of that stuff. It was fine. Kind of ignored fintech. And Thomas backstage gave me an incredibly We were together, an incredibly compelling pitch for Revolut. And I actually went and I was like, okay, show me what the Revolut share price is in these secondary markets. I got kind of curious. Maybe I should pick up some. So that would be my point. Jason Calacanis (00:34:26): What does Revolut do? It's a It's a bank. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:34:29): And what's interesting is it's a neobank that has a completely next generation stack. Kind of what Brad said is like that theme of you rebuild it in the modern era and you unbundle the incumbent, that has a lot of legs. And in a regulated market, that has a ton of legs. And so, they're doing really well in Europe. They're coming to The United States. The founder seems to be just an absolute star. Brad Gerstner (00:34:49): Tens of millions of customers, 14 lines of business. They're like a billion Gavin, Jason Calacanis (00:34:55): do you have shareholders you bought recently? Gavin Baker (00:34:57): No, would just say, two names that we've been involved in publicly as leading are ARIA and DriveNets, and they're both in the networking space. And basically, as data centers get more specialized and complicated, you're going to have increasingly specialized chips. It's called the disaggregation of inference and prefill and decode. And to make all of these chips work together like a symphony and have the right chip for the right job at the right time, I do think we need to reinvent networking. And ARIA and drive nets are coming at the problem in a very different way. And if you're Chamath Palihapitiya (00:35:33): an AI lab You've been one of the earliest. I'll I give you think that you framed this on a podcast that I saw, which is there is an impending super cycle in infra, networking, silicon. You've really been at the front end. I buy into it completely now too. I have It's really good. It's really good. Kelly, any names? Kelly Rodriques (00:35:53): Neurorobotics in Europe. Neurorobotics Jason Calacanis (00:35:56): is a company Yes. What do you Kelly Rodriques (00:36:00): AI powered logistics robotics. Love it. They're not in the main strip of high value real estate in Silicon Valley. They're in Germany. Quiet company, big investors, 100,000,000 revenue, kicking ass. Jason Calacanis (00:36:19): Love it. Jason, I a couple of thesis that I've been looking at. One is, what is Elon helping put into space as the price goes down? And so we did direct on the cap table and SPV for VAST, which is building space stations and we think they're going to win. The other one is what I'll just call Uber two point zero, Gurley and I took a lot of notes on that Brad as well. And so we were able to do zip line and we put a small ticket size into zip line as well, because if you can take the delivery cost down from $15 to $5 and then eventually $2 that's going to just drive consumption massively and it's going to happen in the air. And these actual drones had such a false start that everybody gave up on the entire sector and now it works. And it was just a very simple innovation that Keller told me, which was it's the drone stays up in the air and drops a tether with the box in your burrito. If you grab the tether and you pull it, it just comes down. You don't have to land like this giant robot in your backyard with blade spinning to kill your dog. Gavin Baker (00:37:22): Well, I think there's actually a very important like on zipline. It's an amazing It has done great things for the world. My my Atreides is also involved in zipline. But zipline started so the hard thing is to make anything autonomous work, you need to get it out into the world and gathering real world data. This is how AI works. And it's hard to get approval to fly things around autonomously in American airspace. So Keller had the idea of we're going to go to African countries we are going to, to deliver these small and they focused on maternity. And they have cut the maternal mortality rate in some of these African countries by ninety to ninety five percent. So you're in a small village, there's one midwife, there's an app, a woman goes into labor, they press a button, and you know, an hour later, a zipline drone drops a refrigerated package of modern medicine, blood and everything. Jason Calacanis (00:38:24): You did it for seven years. Gavin Baker (00:38:26): And it's had a huge impact on health outcomes in these African countries. And now it's come to America. Jason Calacanis (00:38:32): This is an incredible story. And I've basically now reconstructed my firm to do the barbell. I missed the seed investment. I turned him down because I was like, we don't invest on that continent. We don't have any insight into it. We don't understand it. And hardware is hard. And he has the email, whatever. And I've stayed in touch with him. And he said, listen, I figured it out. And I said, hey, I have the syndicate. Let me see if I can correct that mistake. May I invest? He said, You're my dream investor. I've wanted you on this whole time. And it's just so important. No, we've been friends for all this time. And I've had him on the pod three times. And he said, when are you gonna be on the cap table? And I said, you know what? Learning from you guys specifically this late stage shop, I'm like, well, I Chamath Palihapitiya (00:39:14): can do that. And here we are. On that note, let's wrap up. Jason Calacanis (00:39:18): Yes. Well done guys. You so much. Thank you. Kelly, Chamath Palihapitiya (00:39:21): thank you. Brad, thank you. Jason Calacanis (00:39:22): Thank you. Thanks, Chef Bo. Thank you.