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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And it's broken the entire ecosystem now.
Well, Saks, right now we're seeing people do things like selling their early SpaceX or their early Stripe, whatever it is, to other VCs, to later stage funds, a lot of ways to try to secure DPI. What's your thoughts on the state of venture today, given all this data that we're looking at today?
Well, two points. So first, I agree with Chamath that the amount of time it takes to generate an outcome for, I'd say, most startups is longer than the 10-year period of these funds. And these funds can be extended up to 12 years usually, but then what do you do after that? This takes a lot longer than that in a lot of cases to generate a meaningful outcome.
I just had two companies that I invested in in my second fund. So in 2019 and 2020, so four years ago and five years ago, just got marked up. And it was a big markup of the company's doing well. I call them late bloomers. It took four to five years for them to accomplish what they wanted to in terms of like building out the tech. I mean, I invested at like the earliest stage.
So that's how long it took. And now they just did growth rounds and they're kind of off to the races. But I could easily be 10 years from here to get to a liquidity event. So you're talking about more like 15-year funds. So I agree with that point. The second thing, though, is that The big thing that's happened in our industry is we had a bubble in 2020 and especially 2021.
And we just had a ton of capital come into the industry because the Fed and the federal government airdropped $10 trillion of liquidity onto the economy in reaction to COVID. And not all that money went into VC. It went into a lot of places. But the VC industry was flooded with cash. And you see this in the deployments.
I mean, in those bubble years, there was something like $200 billion a year of capital deployment when normally it's $60 to $100 billion. So if twice the amount of money is going into the industry and is being deployed, and rounds are now twice as big, and valuations are twice as big, that has a huge effect on returns. So for example, the average venture fund is like a 2x return.
But if the entry prices were artificially double, then there goes your return right there. You get 2x times 1x. This is such a key point. Look, I think we're just in the hangover of this massive liquidity bubble that didn't originate in the venture capital industry. It came from, frankly, the federal government. But we're just downstream of that.
Now, what I would say is I do think we're at the tail end of working that out. And the good news is that we now have maybe the most exciting tech wave ever, which is AI. Definitely the most exciting tech wave since the internet. came along in the mid to late 90s. So the hope is we're finally going to have really exciting things to invest in again.
But yeah, look, I think we're at the tail end of the last cycle and the beginning of a new cycle.
And vintage distortion is so real. It's very hard to understand how each of these vintages with your late bloomers or overpriced things, companies getting $100 million rounds at a billion dollar valuation before they have product market fit. And those distortions,
were just so pronounced the last five to 10 years that we're now sorting them out like a house of mirrors where you don't know who's tall, who's fat, who's skinny, what the reality is here. And the other big thing is this peanut butter effect that I tweeted about today. During peak Zerp, you had all these exceptional team members
You know, the number two, three, four, five person at a company that was doing great, they would leave to start their own company. So the talent got spread. Then you had so many of these founders rushing into the same vertical. So you'd have 20 startups because there was too much capital pursuing the same opportunity. You pursued the same opportunity. What happens to earnings?
They get spread then. What happens to customers? They get spread across 20 different products competing for the same customer. And then what happens with, you know, ownership stakes for us as GPs and LPs, Chamath, the ownership stakes, because the valuations went up so much, they got spread like peanut butter. And instead of a Series A getting you 20% of a company, it got you 10.
Instead of a C-check getting you 5%, it got you one.
I don't know what it is, but we need to do something because the status quo doesn't work. I think there's so many good points that we're hitting here. I'll just say the other thing to build on your point about, hey, these take less capital. You have to look at what does your ownership, after you've been diluted half by 50% as a seed or series A investor, you're going to be down to half.
So if you own 10%, you own five. If you own seven like YC or we do in a company, you're going to own three. You're going to really have to model out, is the valuation you're looking at, what does it pencil out to for an outcome?
And when I did this with our investments, I saw a leak in my game, which was, hey, I'm putting $100K into a $25 million round or a $50 million round as a follow-on investment to support the founder. okay, what does that do for my LPs? Well, that 100K would need to hit some extraordinary outcome, five, 10, 20, $40 billion in order for us to return the fund.
So now my team understands, hey, take that 125K, that 250K, that 500K, do four more accelerator companies with it because those could return the fund. And that fund math, people stopped doing. I think all these fund managers who are getting wiped out, they never penciled out What does this company I'm giving a million dollars need to hit in order for me to return my fund?
And now they're finding out that it doesn't work.
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