Shervin Pishevar
speaker
179 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Shervin Pishevar’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Oh, yeah. There's a history of VCs who have done this type of thing. And in Benchmark's case, they did it against Naval. They hired private investigators and Naval Ravikant.
uh he had a company called e-groups and he got thrown out of it very similar playbook and so that's happened multiple times at benchmark and it's happened in other funds and it just needs to stop also the political operatives who came into silicon valley post uber and facebook it attracted them like flies and uh they started to apply before with me a brilliant thing you said it was the 2017 one which was a drunken period of vc
Yeah, yeah. 2017, the period from like 2005 to 2015 was incredible. That's when most of these great companies, wherever it was, SpaceX or Tesla or Facebook or Uber were founded. And there was a culture of like meritocracy and everyone was helping each other and open-minded and you'd meet at cafes. It was a beautiful era in Silicon Valley.
Then what happened is when people realized, oh my God, these people are going to become billionaires and there's billions of dollars to be made, you had the carpetbaggers, you had the political operatives, you had the consultants, you had all these people started to come in.
And then the other thing that happened, and I blame myself a little bit because bringing TPG into Uber and the Series C kicked off.
the whole wave of private equity coming downstream into venture series c b a like you know when you looked at you know what happened from 2017 to 2021 22 in the drunken period mega funds come in spread billions of dollars at massive valuations that didn't make any rational sense we work as an as an example 18 billion dollars went into that company And I pass on that company.
That was ironically another benchmark company. I pass on that company because I remember the dot-com crash and all the office buildings being cleared up. And I was like, I don't get this business model. You don't own it. And you could be removed pretty quickly from your customers. So I didn't see strength in that business model.
But companies with bad business models were getting $18 billion in cash. That's crazy. That's not... classic venture capital.
Venture capital as it is today, especially with private equity coming downstream and what we've seen with the drunken era, venture capital is dead. The venture capital that we grew up with and that we looked up to, that model is gone. So why is that model gone? The rate at which companies can be accelerated has grown to the point that you can execute on a business plan.
In many cases, we're seeing more and more founders actually self-fund or be able to generate enough success to be able to build a company. You see more and more opting out of venture capital. The other trend, especially with crypto, is that you have these kind of DeFi and alternative financing mechanisms that are evolving to a point where I think you can actually tokenize venture capital.
I think you can democratize venture capital and allow non-accredited investors to begin investing in the future. And I think we have a moral obligation to open up venture, and by early I mean early stage angel investing in the Facebooks and the SpaceXs of the future. But to let mom and pops be able to invest, small checks be able to invest.
So I think in the Trump administration, we'll see changes in that direction of like opening it up. That model I think is gonna change.
Liquidity has been a major problem, and especially during the four years of Biden. And it just coincided with really bad policies and a dearth of M&A, lack of IPOs. I think that's going to change in the next four years. You do? I think I was an early... person to come out and support Trump. And I co-hosted David Sachs' fundraiser with Chamath back in June 6 and publicly endorsed Trump.
And most of my generation, my cohort, people like Elon or David Marcus or Sean from Sequoia, Emile Michael, like all of these guys and gals are in Palm Beach doing like 17 hour days. You know, it's like the best and the brightest have converged. And also it's very similar, like Silicon Valley goes to Washington, you know?
And so I'm very excited because, you know, you look at David Sachs is now the AI, you know, and crypto czar for the president. Elon is running Doge or Vivek. You have some of the brightest minds in the world about to revolutionize the way government works and make it way more efficient. I wrote a proposal about privatizing many aspects of government, including the U.S.
Postal Service, which is a big money loser, is not using modern technology to compete with FedEx and UPS and DHL and so on. And we could do a lot better Amtrak. Amtrak should be privatized and turned into Hyperloop and high-speed rail. We can do really great things, and there should be also moonshots for AI. I do a lot in quantum computing. I've done it for a long time.
I believe AI and quantum are going to merge, and that's going to accelerate the future. So I think the market's waking up, especially after Willow and what Google announced yesterday. This has been my thesis for over 10 years. There's another company called Psy Quantum that came out of Cambridge here in the UK.
I mean, they're basically state-owned enterprises, right? So the Chinese government is subsidizing them. And so that's a major threat to our ability to be competitive. But even with tariffs, the Chinese electric car companies have gotten to the point that, you know, their cars are like $15,000 and they're good cars. So even if you add 100% tariff,
You're still talking about $30,000, still affordable to a lot of people. So they're still going to be able to compete because their prices are so low. And so that's something that we need to think through because America has to build its own manufacturing capabilities, especially in the semiconductor space.
So you saw Masa announcing the $100 billion investment in AI in American economy and companies. What did you make of that? Uh, Masa and Saudi, one of the things he talked about is he, he did his calculations and the numbers for me make a lot of sense. Basically you need to spend trillions, single digit trillions, and then you're going to get 9 trillion of annual value coming out of it.
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