Philippe Laffont
speaker
118 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Philippe Laffont’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
or can they completely re-engineer their business? And they do have two great businesses, Waymo and YouTube, and really cloud and all the cloud apps. So they have three great businesses. And then they have this one search business. Like you said, maybe it's 60% of the revenue. It's probably 85% of the profits because it's just so profitable.
110, right? So you're right, because some of these others lose money That's actually a good point. So if you put that together, it's just a classic innovator's dilemma. And imagine that they create a Gemini app and we start downloading the Gemini app. I would love to be the fly on the wall between the head of the Gemini app and then the head of like the search box.
And they're both fighting because one guy is stealing the business from the other and stuff like that. Personally, me, I found that these stocks, they're like a little bit too complicated for me. And I think that sometimes in life, you just got to say, hey, this is just tricky. There's like a lot of forces at work.
But the one thing stepping out that I would think about is there was this concept of the max seven. And for the last two or three years, everybody is like, oh, you just need to own the max seven. It's really easy. I can do it on my own.
And I think what AI is showing is that at a time of great change, and like you guys said on the show, a couple of you, AI is sort of precipitating so many fast changes. To me, it's a little bit like the end of the Mac 7. And what we should do is almost think like, hey, what is the next? Remember when the Mac 7 used to be Fang and then Fang++ and nobody talks about Fang anymore.
And now, I don't know, like with the Mac 7, the Sexy 6 or the Fabulous 5, there's going to be a new index that comes up. And I think we should think about like, who's going to be on the new index, which private companies, which public companies. And I think Google for sure has some struggles, but it's got a lot of advantages and a lot of cash.
I think they're right to invest. I find these companies that decide to harvest you know, the cash cow and buy all their shares back, you know, it never really works. I think that the only chance that Google has to create an amazing company is you got to take some risks.
At the end of the day, the man in the arena, he who takes the risk usually gets the spoil and they've got to invest in the future. It'll be interesting to see if their shareholders, you know, agree with that or not.
I wish.
Yes, where there's so much more usage, imagine you get, you lose 99% of one bucket. but you're only getting 10 or 20% of the new bucket.
That's exactly right.
That's the issue.
Okay, I'll try, but I have to ask you guys a question before. Do you guys think that the two founders come back in a very forceful way into the company? I don't know exactly why, but one thing that I was wondering, Chamath, is you bring up a very important word, taste. Do you have to be a founder to be able to impose this sort of new taste?
And do you need sort of founder credibility at the junction at which Google is at? It seems like this is a big junction, right? This is the first time in their 20, 25 year history where I feel like, whoa, there's a real threat. How do you do that without the founders? And on top of that, they're alive. It's just they may not be at the company. Sergey, yes.
Yeah. So I have, I've thought about that a lot. I'm not sure, you know, great answers, but the first one is I keep defaulting to the number 25. I can't explain you why, but they're not a hundred companies. But if you think there's only five and all these money managers, you know, they have like five stocks that represent 80%. I feel the level of risk that you're taking is too high.
And that one has to be, you know, I started with a public market. I would say most French people are not known to be particularly humble. But at least if you've been in the stock market as a French guy, you've been beaten up so bad. I started January 1st, 2000. So imagine what my first three years looked at. I got reduced to, you know, ashes. just beaten up by the market.
You know, we did reasonably well because thank God being a hedge fund, you know, you have different tools that you can do. And so I think you need to have a certain number of stocks. You need to know that some stuff you get lucky, some stuff you get unlucky, some stuff you get right, and some stuff you get wrong. And then... I think that there's a second phenomenon.
Once you agree to the 25, you say, wait a minute, why are there no IPOs? Why are these private companies, amazing private companies, some of the best in the world, SpaceX, Stripe? Answer that question, why? OpenAI.
I think that the cost of being public is too difficult, one. What cost? Like actual legal fees? The reputation, the regulatory, like you get busted like left and right by agencies. And like, when's the last time that a public company, I think that
during the last administration, something like someone told me, I don't know if it's true or not, but I love the quote so much that I'm using it without checking if it's 100% true or not. Something like 35% of the S&P had an issue with a government agency in the last few years, right? When's the last time that you guys remember a private company that has an issue with a government agency?
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