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.
Trend
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, it's basically the capital deployments gone back to where it was in 2019, let's call it. So again, we had this bubble. The foam started building in 2020, but you had COVID, people didn't know what to think. So there was some restraint, I guess. And then 2021, it just went wild.
That was nuts, man.
If you could return capital, you're going to look like a Euro. Also, Chamath, I remember, I don't know if it was Michael Moritz or Doug Leone, but I was talking to Sequoia about the time dispersion of your fund, like over what period of time are you deploying a fund? And man, people started deploying funds in 18 months because they can raise the next fund so quick.
So like, screw it, I'm gonna deploy this fund in 18 months, 24 months. And LPs were saying to me like, what period are you gonna deploy this? And I said, well, you know, I was taught by Fred Wilson and this person, 36 months, 48 months would be a good, window to deploy capital because, you know, it smooths it out.
Just by the way, I feel better about those late – bloomers in my portfolio because i know the marks are real because if they're getting marked up now then it's very very solid compared to frankly some of those marks that we got in the bubble year like 2021 i call them tiger marks whether it was tiger or not
It's just less real, quite frankly, and a lot of those companies are retrenching and have issues. So a mark now, it just means something different than a mark then. But look, just so we're not totally beating up on VC, you remember that in this bubble period of September 2021, everybody thought that this party would just continue forever.
And this is a good example from the Wall Street Journal, where it's talking about how university endowments were minting billions in golden era of venture capital. So The bubble wasn't just in VC, it was in the public markets too, because we had ZERP, right? Like interest rates were zero, liquidity was just flowing.
And so it was very easy for companies to get liquid, they IPO'd, and then the valuations were stratospheric. So the distributions to LPs were massive in 2021. And then that led to, again, more funds, being able to raise bigger funds. Everyone was just kind of paying it forward and thought the party would just keep going. So-
this is what happens in a bubble is everybody thinks that it's just gonna keep going like that.
This is why it's so important as a fund manager or an entrepreneur for you to get great advice from people who've been at this for a long time and focus on the process. You cannot control all these outcomes. You cannot control all these meta events. What you can control is your relationship with your customers, building a team, making great bets, supporting late bloomers.
That's the critical part of all this is the process and you can make your process better. And so with my team internally, I'm constantly talking to them about our selection of companies, how we help companies get pulled through and get downstream funding. Literally, our big effort this year is how do we introduce our companies to the top VC firms?
And we've been working on that as an internal project, right? Of just getting our great breakout companies to the best investors to increase our pull through. It is a process and you have to trust and focus on the process. Yeah.
Well, look, ironically, just to end on sort of a positive note, if these interest rate cuts are real, like if we just got 50, if we get another 50 this year, if inflation's really tamed, and interest rates are never going to go to zero, but if they go down substantially... And we have this new AI disruption, this new AI tailwind. We could be back in another golden era.
It's not going to be a bubble, but it could be another golden era. So we'll see.
All right. Chamath had to go do work, apparently, starting this new concept, SACS, where Chamath is actually going to work at a company. We never got to talk about the debate because we were busy doing the summit and we took the week off from a new episode. People wanted to hear your take. What did you think of Kamala and Trump, the one and only debate we're going to hear, apparently? Any thoughts?
I think that Kamala Harris performed better than expected. She did that, I think, mostly through having canned answers to topics. And she was able to kind of memorize those answers and say them. And she was never knocked out of her preparation.
She was well-prepared, yeah.
I think she was well-prepared. However, we now know that these were canned answers because in subsequent press interviews, she gives the exact same thing. It's like a jukebox where you just push the button and you get the same answer. Exactly. So she's memorized a certain number of talking points, and that's all she's going to give you no matter what the question is.
And if you saw that, it's become a meme now where You saw that question when she was asked about inflation. There's a pause when she's figuring out which greatest hit she's going to play. And then, you know, she, I guess, pushes B26 in her head and then it begins. So I was born in the middle class.
And it's working apparently, right? It seems like it's helping her.
Showing 861–880 of 939 · page 44 of 47
← Previous
Next →