Chamath
speaker
939 appearances
12 recordings
2 series
first heard Jun 2024
last heard 3 Jun
Chamath’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 8 in all, peaking in Nov 2025 with 2.
Appearances
I mean, we're talking about laying fiber lines, cable modems to people who are hundreds of miles into the countryside. That makes no sense when you can just beep, put a satellite dish up today. What are we even talking about here?
I mean, government has never been particularly efficient, but there was a period of time where people would at least care about wanting to make it more efficient.
And it would be a scandal if there was political corruption to try and bias the result in a way that actually deprived the intended recipients of the program from getting the services they were supposed to get and cost the government way more money than it needed to. We're so far beyond being that country anymore. Where we actually debate the best policy.
Now it's just like we're warring political tribes. And the objective of the party is to punish its political opponents, to engage in retaliation, and to basically loot the public coffers as much as possible on behalf of their constituents. And that's what's basically happening. You know, it's completely dysfunctional.
Well, let's use this podcast. If you see government waste, tell us.
And no one really cares because the media doesn't really shine a light on it because they're completely tribalized as well.
No, no, I meant their donors, their donor constituents, not the citizens of the country.
For sure. How do you think these contracts get awarded?
I mean, that would be... So they're giving the money away and they're so incompetent they're not getting the political benefit from it.
No, they're so incompetent they can't get it out of their own way. But somebody's getting that, call it 50 billion, that we don't need to spend. And the way that money is awarded is going to be political. You don't think that they're going to turn around and give big political contributions?
Let's start a running list.
On this program, we'll do it at the end of the show. Every time we'll have a running list at all in.com of just every one of these scandals and we'll feature it. So leak it to us first. Send it to us. My DMs are open. All right, listen, early stage investing has always been hard. There was a tweet storm this week that Y Combinator might be having a hard time replicating their early success.
We'll discuss it now. A thread this week from ex-user Molson Hart caught a couple of people's eyes. He made the case that it's been a rough decade for YC based on the accelerator's top companies page. YC lists its top companies by 2023 revenue there.
And you'll notice there's not a lot of companies from the recent cohorts out of the 50 companies featured, only three are from the classes after 2020, most of them being from the early 2010s. Obviously, that's because they've been around longer, but it sparked a big discussion that there were so many winners from the 2009 to 2016 era, and that maybe the class size at YC has expanded a whole bunch.
And maybe that's part of the problem. But there's a bigger problem in VC that we've talked about here. Here's a chart from Carta that just shows the percentage of VC funds that have made a distribution since 2017. Over 40% of 2018 vintage funds have not made a single distribution yet.
And it's getting to the point, year five, six, or seven, where you probably should have had some distributions occur. Obviously, a lot of this has to do with maybe M&A and those early wins being taken off the table. We've talked about that a whole bunch, but here's the chart that kind of gets really interesting.
An explosion in fund managers occurred, as we all know, and this chart shows from PitchBook, the first-time VC managers that raised a second VC fund as a share of all first-time VC managers, and it's now down from above 50% to below 50%. gosh, 15%. So what are your thoughts here, Shama?
And that was M&A in year, what, five or six sacks?
Well, and thank God for the secondary markets even emerging, because at the same time that the secondary markets emerged and people were willing to buy venture assets going into their second decade.
Yeah. And I took advantage of almost every time I had one of those opportunities to sell some shares, pair some positions. And that's how we got our DPI as well, because let's face it, Melina Khan and the anti-tech sentiment has led to these large companies not buying startups. And instead, they compete with them. They just say, we'll build it in-house because you're not letting us buy it.
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