SPEAKER_02: I literally don't want to talk about brigading guys though only because it's getting crazy. And I had to like mod my stuff. So
SPEAKER_00: start the recording, please start the recording. I'm going to strike it by brigades. Do you mean like maga brigades? All right, listen, it No, I'm serious. Do you think? Because I can call him I'm gonna call him off.
SPEAKER_00: Hold on. Hey, Donnie. Hey, Donnie. Yeah. Jake. He's been brigaded by maga. Yeah, he can't handle it. He's tapping out. I tap out. I tap out. The dogs. Okay. All right. It's all good. It's all good. It's over. They're not gonna they're not gonna brigade anymore. The sign up is over. Thank you. Thank you. It's getting pretty
SPEAKER_02: it's getting pretty acute. Don't worry about it.
SPEAKER_02: Let your winners ride. Rain Man David Saks.
SPEAKER_01: We open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy. All right, everybody. Welcome to episode 96 of the all in
SPEAKER_02: podcast. We had a bomb drop just yesterday with Adobe agreeing to acquire figma the design tool. We'll get into that in a minute what it actually does for $20 billion. This is just astounding for this to happen period full stop. The largest private company purchase I believe in history. This company, if you don't know, it helps you design web apps, or user interfaces. So if you're a designer, we used to make mockups, we'd send them around in the industry as images or PDFs. And then like Google Docs, where you can put comments on somebody else's words, and you can collaborate in real time, we call it multiplayer mode. figma is multiplayer mode, the company is just a juggernaut. If you work in startups, you get figma designs all day. And Adobe stock got crushed because of this was down as much as 18%. On Thursday, figma is most recent valuation was $10 billion in June of 2021. Their series eight so peak market, they had raised 200 million at that time. There's a lot of details to get into here. But you know, listen, let's ask the Sultan of SAS here, what you think of this, because it's double what was an incredible market last year, that was overheated. So what does this say about the market figma? You know, figma itself, or maybe Adobe's, you know, jumping the fence or being skittish? How do we reconcile this sex? Oh, if you judge Adobe stock price, the other day, the market
SPEAKER_00: hated the deal. I mean, the Adobe stock price went down like 15%. And that's $150 billion company, roughly. So they lost almost the entire purchase price in the market capitalization of figma. I think that's, that's basically an overreaction. I, you know, I know all the news is basically on how Adobe is paying 50 times and that's no longer the multiple, the multiple is more like, you know, 8, 9, 10 times for high growth SAS companies. There is truth to that, but, but I think it misses some important details about how fast figma is growing. We actually throw up on the screen, the AR history of this company so, and for people who know the multiple is the multiple times
SPEAKER_02: top line revenue. So it's ARR really. Okay. So explain that to folks. Yeah. Well, ARR is just the annually recurring revenue. It's
SPEAKER_00: subscription revenue. Sometimes people will look at next 12 months revenue, which is a similar concept, not quite the same, but sort of in the ballpark. So you know, what's interesting about this company, I think it was founded 2011, 2012. It had a very long wilderness period. That's when I call the period where the founders are trying to figure out what the product is going to be. Really for almost five years, they finally launched a private beta in 2015. They then opened it up to public launch in 2016. And they didn't turn on monetization until 2017. So five years into the company, they hadn't made a dime. So you know, it's roughly a 10 year old company. And for the first five years, didn't make any money. And then they started to make money five years ago. And then in 2018, I think they turned on the enterprise tier. And then it's been kind of off to the races. That's incredible. Yeah, what I what I can tell you looking at these numbers, by
SPEAKER_00: the way, so I don't know if these numbers are perfectly correct. This is sort of, I would call the scuttlebutt numbers. These are numbers that I believe to be true. But it's not like these are numbers that the company is confirmed or anything like that. This is just me gathering, you know, intelligence from talking to people in Silicon Valley. So this is what I believe to be the case. Can you read the numbers for people that are on YouTube watching this? Yeah. So in 2017,
SPEAKER_00: again, the first year they monetize, they did 700,000. They ended the year with 700,000 of ARR. Remember that ARR is kind of a point in time metric. It's the amount of subscription revenue, your annual run rate, subscription revenue at that time. So they ended 2017 with 700,000. 2018, they ended with 4 million. 2019, they ended with 23 million. 2020, they ended with 77 million. 2021, 210 million. And then the estimated number for this year is 450. So you've seen in the press, I think it has been publicly reported, a $400 million ARR number is currently where they're at. I've heard that they're going to end with something more like 450 this year, and then their forecast for next year is or was at some point in time when somebody heard this. 800 million, you know, forecast for 2023. So my point is, I've seen a lot of SaaS metrics. And I can tell you this ARR ramp is phenomenal. You know, I'm sure people have kind of heard about the triple, triple, double, double, that's kind of what VCs want you to do. They want you to triple two years in a row, then they want you to double two years in a row and so forth. This company did way better than that. I mean, 700k to 4 million is a really fast ramp. And then 4 million to 23 million is incredible. That's like, you know, over a 5x. And then they did over a 3x going from 23 to 77 million. I can tell you that is super hard. I think most companies, even the ones that hit, you know, low 20s tripling year over year, they tend to decelerate to two and a half times or something like that. This company was still growing over 3x, then they roughly tripled again to get to 210. And then since they got to, yeah, so now they're double that. Do you think the triple in 2020 was a COVID pull forward? Or do
SPEAKER_01: you think that that was a natural like a zoom or not? That's what I was gonna say. I mean, it's possible, but
SPEAKER_00: people were collaborating. I'm not I don't see. I mean, so far in the numbers, I don't see a huge slowdown here. I mean, look, once the numbers get into the hundreds of millions, it's really hard to maintain the same growth rate, you're compounding off such a large base that it's just inevitable. You can't keep growing 3x year over year, once you're at, you know, 200,000 million of ARR, but the fact they got first from 23 to 77, and then 77 to 210. And now to 10, they're at let's say they're at 400. Now they're going to be at 450 by the end of the year plus, it's, it's pretty amazing. And so, okay, so yeah, so Adobe's paying 50 times current ARR. But if you believe this, they're only paying divide by two, they're paying 25 times end of next year, so like 18 months from now. And then you're paying 25 times end of next year. And then you figure, you know, within say two years after that, they're going to be, you
SPEAKER_00: know, at somewhere between one and a half and 2 billion. Yeah, of ARR. And as you guys know, there just aren't that many SaaS companies that even get to a billion of ARR. So, so I don't think Adobe's making a bad deal here. I think there's a question about, is there any point at which this product hits some sort of market saturation? But Adobe's in a good position to make it. They are in this market. It feels to me like I
SPEAKER_03: don't know, I've been using Adobe Photoshop right around when it first came out like 1992. And this product I've used, it was built web first. It was built for collaborative years. And Photoshop over the years, they've really tried to take what is a desktop installed software application, and then try and create cloud based features. And it's a terrible, terrible user experience, at least from my perspective, having grown up on using Adobe Photoshop. But what's most important, I think is a lot of people think about this on is it the right price to pay for the company. But at the end of the day, the right price to pay for the company is what Adobe views to be the risk and reward for their business. And they effectively paid roughly 12% dilution of their company to do this deal. So they're saying let's take 12% of our company and effectively de risk, the biggest risk to our business, take out the biggest threat to our business for 12% of our company at 12%. Was it 12%? You have to factor in the actual
SPEAKER_01: drawdown of the stock as well. So it's about 33%. They effectively, well, I'm talking about like, assume take take the
SPEAKER_03: price of the stock aside the number of shares they're issuing, because this by the way, the deal value went down with the stock. So I read the merger terms last night. And there's a couple billion of cash. And then a good chunk of it is in stock. And it's, it's 10 billion of cash. And it's 10
SPEAKER_01: billion of shares at the price when the deal was announced into your price. So it's a fixed number of shares. The stock,
SPEAKER_01: it's a fixed number of shares. It's not a fixed, it's not a fixed monetary value. So it's down 20% from the deal announcement. So that 10 billion of stock is now actually 8 billion of stocks. So no, the whole deal is now 18 billion, not 10 billion of cash to month, 10 billion cash. Yeah. And
SPEAKER_03: then there's, there's 2 billion of deferred RSUs and stock
SPEAKER_01: based compensation. But there but I mean, if you think about it at the time of
SPEAKER_03: the merger, they're, they're either, you know, I think they have, they're going to use some term loan that they have to get the cash. But they're effectively issuing, you know, 10 divided by their total share count, which is roughly 6% of their total shares outstanding. So you know, they're kind of taking 6% or let's just aggregate the two together and say they're taking roughly 12% dilution, sure that the value of the stock goes down. So look, I think like this deal is really interesting. So first,
SPEAKER_01: let's just give huge kudos to the CEO and the team and the investors. What an enormous win for all those folks. That's awesome. It keeps Silicon Valley kind of going right. And that's just awesome to see these kind of big wins. I read this incredible profile about the founder. And he sounded like such a fascinating person, he basically, it would the profile basically said that he was spending months and months, going from office to office all around the world, meeting customers sitting with customers reading trouble tickets, that's what he would do, you know, reading help desk tickets about the product on vacation. Whenever you see a CEO that is so customer obsessed, typically there's good outcomes. And so this is just another validating point on that theme. Now, let's just put figma aside. And let's just talk about Adobe for a second. What is so incredible is you have a company, yes, they spent $20 billion, or whatever, 18 billion now. But the way that they did it is really interesting. If you go back to Zendesk and Survey Monkey, when those guys announced that merger, it was above a threshold of stock, where you had to go to a shareholder vote. And because there was so much turbulence in the market, whether the industrial logic of that deal made sense or not, didn't matter as much to shareholders when it came time to vote, and they voted it down. Right. So interestingly, Adobe was very clever, they said, I'm going to do half cash half stock, so that I'm below the threshold, we are below the threshold where it goes to a shareholder vote. Okay, interesting. But then you have to factor in the dilution, not just the dilution of the stock, but then the rerating of the stock. And this is where you know, you lose 20% of your market cap. And then you tack on this, you're talking about, you know, a 40, 30 $40 billion price tag to get the deal done. And I think that's where the head scratcher was in the public markets, where folks basically rebuilt their model and said, hold on a second, you know, you've been telling me that this problem is a solved problem. But when you pay such a premium, not only does it mean that this product is clearly materially growing and disrupting, but the existing revenue base that I was counting on in my model must be wrong as well. And that's the actual flywheel that now Adobe is in where people are trying to really figure out how under pressure are those existing cash flows. And then if you compound that with something else, which is nothing specific to Adobe, but to the whole market, which is now interest rates are going up behind the scenes, you have this sort of parade of terrible for Adobe that they're going to have to navigate, right, they have a very large portion of cash, they have a large portion of stock, they have decaying earnings in their core business that they now have to explain. And then they don't really have a lot of earnings. I think Shantanu said that it's going to be year three before it's accretive, which is typically a way of saying we're going to lose money, and then in year three, we'll make at least a penny. That's what accretive means doesn't mean you're going to make billions necessarily. And so these guys have to find a way for Figma to drop about a billion and a half dollars dollars of free cash flow into the business for this to kind of make sense in the short term. So I think those are all the mechanics that sort of putting a lot of pressure on the Adobe stock, but it just goes to show you the amount of disruption that happens this movement to the cloud or the movement to collaboration. Monolithic products are just sort of very much DOA, you know,
SPEAKER_02: that is the key. I think you guys did a great job of summarizing it. This is an absolutely great deal for Adobe. It's a transformative deal in the same way the WhatsApp deal was for Facebook. It removes one of the two existential threats to Adobe. And it turns Adobe I guess into a growth story. Now, as pointed out, Adobe's product was single player mode, and Adobe grows at about 12 or 13% quarter right now. And now you have a company that doubles. And they really have been facing three paradigm shifts in the last five or so years. Obviously, you pointed out one Friedberg desktop software downloading it versus cloud based software. Well, here they go. Now they've got experts in cloud. And then the second one, yeah, but they have a thing called creative clouds. And they
SPEAKER_02: are slowly trying to figure that it's a paradigm shift. Terrible company. They've really struggled. So now they have somebody who's cloud first. Shammoth, do you guys ever use those products?
SPEAKER_03: We have but hold on, let me finish here. There's three paradigm shifts here. feature for feature. They look very similar. No.
SPEAKER_01: So these these three paradigm shifts, the one is the desktop
SPEAKER_02: versus the web. The other one is subscription. So Adobe was charging $1,000 a year for the creative cloud. Now they charge 25 bucks a month for it. They successfully did that. Now they successfully, I think have figured out collaboration software. But he has one thing that they have not done, which I think is
SPEAKER_01: the real reason they had to buy figma Adobe. See, this is the problem with these big public companies. Adobe and all of their investors got very addicted to the free cash flow generation of that stock. And it's been an incredible performer. And let's just be honest, Shantanu is one of the best CEOs of the last few decades in the public markets, period. End of story. Okay. Since 2007, he has just run a masterful playbook. At the tail end of that, though, you know, in 2022, this is a company that has I think six or seven, maybe I think maybe $8 billion of free cash flow. It is a gargantuan money making business. And so they refused in Creative Cloud to go to that free tier that figma has. And if you look at all of the stories around figma, one of the most powerful things they did was basically allow people to use this for free effectively forever. Yeah, bottom up sass.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah. And the problem with Adobe is like, that's a business model
SPEAKER_01: disruption that they could not afford in the public markets. Because if you condition a set of institutional investors to be expecting seven to $8 billion of annual free cash flow, and all of a sudden you're willing to torch it, to take a quarter of that and make it free. That is probably the biggest reason why they had to buy this thing, which was that they needed to tuck it in. And they're like, how can I do it? Well, I just have to do it by diluting the stock one time. Yeah, that was it. It was a one to 12% dilute. It's still in there. It's one
SPEAKER_03: and done. It's one more to go. The point the point you guys are making is more broad, which is it's not just about Adobe. This is the classic innovators dilemma, right? Like any big company that reaches maturity in their market, and has scale and has cash flows, you have a different shareholder base, you move over from growth to value. And once you've got value shareholders, I mean, I've been to these institutional meetings when I was on the exec team at Monsanto. And you know, they wanted dividends, and they wanted stock buybacks. And they they're like, it's nice to see growth. But at the end of the day, I want to know, what's my dividend gonna be? And what's my stock buyback target going to be? And then to say, Hey, I got to go invest in innovating my way out of my corner, because, you know, in this case, cloud is reinventing my marketplace. It is a very hard place for a manager of a business of that scale to be, by the way, every industry, by the way, I think
SPEAKER_01: there's another takeaway that's really interesting here, which is that if you look at big tech companies, I think you almost have to sort them into two buckets, at least in the enterprise and sad that's acts, you can tell me if you disagree, but there's one type of enterprise company, which makes basically a single linear monolithic product, or a handful of those monolithic products, right? Think workday, think Adobe, etc. But then there's this other type of company, which are more platform level businesses that have this, you know, mixture of things that they do relatively well integrated, maybe each product is not so great. But together, they're pretty decent. And you have distribution leverage, and you have pricing power, think Microsoft and the totality of those products. So what's interesting to me is, you cannot effectively compete, as it turns out, against Microsoft at any point product. And Slack, I think is the best example where, you know, Microsoft Teams was fundamentally cannibalizing this business, which is what drove Slack into the arms of Sales Force. And, you know, you could say that Teams was not as great of a product, I would have I would make that claim. But what Microsoft had was distribution scale and pricing power, where you could discount and effectively give it away for free. Adobe isn't in that situation, right? They can't do that kind of stuff. And so when you compete against those kinds of businesses, you have a better chance of winning the takeaway, I think, for the entrepreneur is when you're thinking about the next enterprise business to start, I would try to bucket these companies that you want to compete with and say, if I'm going to build a newer version of x, make sure that version of x is going after a company like Adobe versus a company like Microsoft, because it's much, much, much easier to build value when you're competing against a monolithic product company versus an entangled platform company. Sax, would you bundle if you were the CEO of Figma, which you
SPEAKER_02: now I'm sorry, CEO of Adobe, would you bundle Figma into the creative cloud and then just make it one subscription? Would you Microsoft Teams it?
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, maybe I don't know. I'm not sure about that. I do think that Microsoft is a little bit unique in its ability to bundle. So what so tremendous right about the power of the bundling, what they do is I think it's called the E5 bundle. They have all these products that virtually all enterprises use from office to, you know, Active Directory to you know, there's like a whole long list of them. And so what they've done is they've created one price for all of those products, they sold a bundle under a wall to wall enterprise license. And what they do is when they see a new competitor come along, whether it's Slack or Zoom or, or Okta, is they'll basically just clone it, create a worse version of that product and throw it into the bundle. And so now every single enterprise is getting the Slack clone or the Zoom clone or whatever for free. And that has a huge material impact on, you know, it pulls the rug out from under those startups. So now that's not to say that Microsoft product is anywhere near as good as those those competitors. But, you know, now all of a sudden, the the Microsoft product is on a marginal basis free. But then what Microsoft does is, you know, every year or two, they go raise the price of the bundle. So basically, you know, they get you hooked on the bundle, they then use it to systematically kill or undermine a competitor. And then they know you're stuck and then they raise the price, they basically have inflation of the price of the whole bundle. I think it's very anti competitive, actually, I think it's, it's akin to dumping. I'm not sure what the logical stopping point of it is like, I don't know if we can have a healthy SaaS market if Microsoft is allowed to keep doing this forever. Because think about it, I mean, they will just every year, they will take the hot SaaS company into Xur, clone it, it'll be a shitty version, they'll throw it into their bundle. And now they're dumping, they're dumping the product in the market. It's basically free, it's free until they basically drive and they drive out the competitor or destroy it, or basically undermine its market cap to the point where it can no longer make the kinds of investments it needs to pose a real threat to the Microsoft larger entity. Right. So think about how any competitive this is. And you don't hear a word about this from Lena Khan or Washington, they're only focused on social networks.
SPEAKER_01: It's so funny. It's like she's more focused on, you know, making sure Amazon doesn't buy Roomba, that, you know, this stuff that's happening, Facebook doesn't buy one VR app. Yeah,
SPEAKER_02: she's, it's not very sophisticated approach. This is
SPEAKER_01: the kind of stuff that actually really matters. I really think you nailed it on the head sacks. It's a, it's an impossible strategy to defend against the, the other thing that is interesting, by the way, about all of this is, you know, if you think that the valuation, the takeout premium was basically two X post to post, what that means is that if Figma was last valued at 10 is now worth 20. You know, does that mean that Canva, which was last priced at 40 is worth 80? Well, potentially to well, potentially to Adobe, right. And if you add those two together, now, you know, what you really have is basically the the entire totality of the Creative Cloud for Adobe is basically embedded now, in these two businesses at an extreme premium. And so it makes it very difficult now, I think as well, for Adobe to execute a strategy here without it being forced to do some more expensive, diluted M&A. Well,
SPEAKER_02: and the other problem, Chumath is this is going to ring bells. So when I said before, there were two existential threats. Canva is the other one. And that is the other paradigm shift that's occurred in computing is that making things radically simple. You talked about a freeburg Photoshop is complex, and it's single player Canva is how people create, you know, any kind of marketing materials today, and they don't hire a designer anymore. The job of graphic designer is now everybody's job. Everybody can make something on Canva. But then I think sacks or freeburg, maybe you have thoughts on this. If you're Alina Khan, and they do make a run at Canva, Adobe, now are you saying like, hey, wait a second, you're not run the table on all design tools. You can't buy it.
SPEAKER_03: It's a weird classification. It's only called design tools, because it was sold to someone that was called a designer before. And that's not the case anymore. Now it's a tool that anyone can use in the enterprise setting or in a small small business setting or in an individual setting to create stuff. And that wasn't the case with Photoshop. And I think that's what makes this arguably a very different business, a bigger business, a more transformative business, and a farther reaching business. And I don't think that there's necessarily a speaking of the figma deal, right? A case to be made here, that they're preventing the extinction of their monopoly. They're buying what looks like a very different business. And it's really additive. It's, it's a business that can turn anyone into a creator. It's really cool.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, but you're kind of you're kind of speaking out both sides your mouth now, because on the one hand, you're saying it's a different business. But on the other hand, you said that this is basically protecting them against an existential disruption to their core business. So if it's an existential disruption to their core business, how could it not be in the same market? Of course, it's in the same market. Well, there are new entrants, competitors, right?
SPEAKER_02: There are new entrants. And there are, you know, different
SPEAKER_00: underlying, you know, technology trends. This is all about cloud. But nonetheless, I don't see how these things aren't competitors with each other to some degree. So I don't know how this doesn't get seriously reviewed. Yeah, I trust authorities. It feels so
SPEAKER_03: similar to Facebook, Instagram, and Google, YouTube. And by the way, it's similar in both those examples in a number of ways. Both Facebook, Instagram was not competing in the same product as Facebook at the time with the newsfeed or whatever. It was a photo sharing service that clearly created a broader addressable market that got more people to use a social network. And YouTube people and people thought they were overpaying, right? And then YouTube, everyone thought it was crazy. They paid a billion six for that business. And it's probably the greatest acquisition of all time. It's been the greatest managed acquisition of all time, I should say. And that business similarly, I think Google recognized that people were going to move to video content as an alternative to text based web content. And that it was a bigger picture opportunity than what they were pursuing it in the lane that they operated in at that time. And they were right. And in both cases, it was more about paying whatever it took to get the deal done. Then, you know, hey, how many users do you have? How much revenue? How much EBITDA? What's your ARR? All that stuff goes out the window, when you're sitting in that strategic driver's seat at that big company, and you're saying, this is a bigger market, these guys are transforming the market. And ultimately, over time, that will eclipse us. And you can say, hey, you're protecting your business. But really, you're protecting your mark. I mean, the market is going to go away is what the vision is like the market that you exist in today isn't going to exist in the same way in 510 years. And that's what you're trying to buy your way into. I have a question and a
SPEAKER_01: statement. The statement is, I think Canva should absolutely go public versus sell because it seems like they'll have a much easier time competing against whomever that they compete with. I do think that David, you're right that there is a lot here for regulatory review. Because if you go back and think about visa Plaid, you know, it's not dissimilar, meaning you have a young startup that has this really credible and viable technology, potentially being acquired by in that case, it was you know, one of a duopoly. But here, you could make a very credible claim that it's in a market where it's roughly a monopoly. Because there aren't really that that many meaningful alternatives. So I think Sax is right that there's that there's some, you know, there's a case here. Yeah, there's a case here where it just depends whether that was literally my question or this. Well, not not just Roomba. How about how about that VR game
SPEAKER_00: that Facebook was like, that was a tiny acquisition that maybe
SPEAKER_02: have a million users. Exactly. They are being putative. I think I think it
SPEAKER_00: seems like it's Yeah, well, it seems like what the antitrust authorities are doing right now in Washington is they've got a list of companies that they think are putatively suspect. And our job is to stop these companies from accumulating more power. And it's really about seeing everything through this lens of power. But that's not what the competition authorities are supposed to do. They're supposed to ensure competition. It's about anti should be a rule book, right? And the problem with just approaching things in this way of the punitive way, we just have to stop these companies is it creates a chilling effect on on reasonable exits in Silicon Valley, there aren't that many great exits, and we want them to go through now, I think if monopolies need to be reined in, there are other tools to use besides just saying that those companies can't acquire other companies, no matter how unobjectionable they are. I mean, let's do things like allow sideloading. Let's basically what explain what that is. Well, that's that's
SPEAKER_02: basically a way to say that I think Google, the Android
SPEAKER_00: already does it, but iOS does not, where you would be able to basically install an app or download an app without going through the Apple App Store, you could enable competitive app stores, basically, you know, I think I think it's a real issue that you have operating system monopolies. I mean, Google, Android and iOS with Apple and then Amazon, with sort of, you know, white label products, those are all operating systems that are competing with apps on their own platform. And there have to be some constraints and rules around this. And I think that's a good thing to think about. And I think the constraints around that otherwise, the operating system will eventually dominate and replace any app they want to on the platform. We saw that's what the whole Microsoft thing was about. Microsoft Netscape was 100% about that. So I think if you can show that somebody has an operating system monopoly, there absolutely should be rules and constraints around that. Does it mean the company should never be able to buy anything? No, I mean, I think all that does is stifle innovation without really getting to the crux of what the issue is. I
SPEAKER_02: think you nailed it. A good first step would be allow other companies to do less iOS as App Store could be on another platform, etc. And I mean, the other issue here is Lena Khan's been pretty clear her entire thesis in taking the job was, well, I want to prevent a downstream competitive issues. So future competition, there's no better example of a future competitive issue and future consumer harm. I think it's how she phrases it, then this acquisition, if you're going to do it through the lens of future consumer harm, this creates consumer harm because figma, you're not going to compete with Adobe, you're saying that it does, it does massively, massively. I mean, it this is the the dissonance here. It is great for consumers because they will bundle it, they'll bundle the two things together. And it'll it'll make it more valuable and reduce churn, and it'll make it simple to buy. So that's good for consumers, right? You get more free stuff. But future harm and a future competitive harm here is the marketplace will be less competitive if there's one less independent strong company in it. That's and if you if they buy Canva, that's the definition of downstream competitive harm, it'll be a less competitive marketplace with these two companies together. Full stop. So Jake, do you if you're Lena
SPEAKER_01: Khan, you actually pay attention to this Adobe figma thing in like a serious way? Or are you still more focused on Amazon and you know, Facebook? And I would hope that they would do multiple
SPEAKER_02: things saying, What would you do? If I was her, I would create a rulebook and apply the rulebook evenly and fairly. And this is the problem. This feels very political. It feels like they're going after Facebook, because of the downstream political issues Facebook causes, and they're ignoring the Microsoft issue, and they're ignoring issues like this. It just feels like they have their thumb on the scale.
SPEAKER_01: If you look at what happened to the visa plat thing, it was an enormous blessing in disguise, because you know, the the thing went away. And that was I think, like a $5 billion acquisition, and then platt turned around and raise money, and it's like a, you know, multiple teens billion, it's going to be a wonderful, independent company. To your point, Jason, that will now, you know, create more competition in a space that desperately needed. Now, in that case, that was sort of like, financial payments and rails and Visa, MasterCard, blah, blah, blah. But that that that could also be, you know, if there is a lot of attention paid to the deal, and it doesn't end up being consummated, that could be the positive outcome. But if you want a future competition, if you asked me if I was betting that I think this thing is going to close. I think it closes. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it closes it closes because it doesn't
SPEAKER_00: intrude on the hot buttons of Washington, not because the merits of the antitrust are superior to the room by deal or to that VR deal that Facebook wants to have. This is all about political and cultural hot buttons. So it's so weird. Yeah,
SPEAKER_00: but I think we all understand what what's really going on. It's all political. But hey, Jason, can I go back to your question? I think it was a really good question. And I've had more chance to think about about should Adobe change the pricing of Figma? Should they basically bundle it? I've spoken about the merits of what Microsoft does. I don't think that Figma should do that here. Now that I've had a chance to think about it. The reason is this that you have to think of pricing as not an element by itself, but as sort of the most important element of a go to market strategy. And there's no way that you can basically reprice Figma completely as part of some other bundle and expect not to create massive disruption to your go to market organization. So for example, you've got now a whole huge sales team at Figma, including enterprise sales, they are commissioned based on their the quotas that they close. And that's based on the ACV of the deals, and so on. If all of a sudden you price this as being free, because it's part of some bundle that enterprises get because they're buying old Adobe, now all of a sudden those salespeople can't earn commission on that sale, they can't be incentivized to take that product to market the same way. The marketing team is tasked with feeding the sales team. So now all of a sudden they're like, wait a second, can we spend money to basically promote this product when it's going to lead to a deal that's priced at zero, because the enterprise already has an ELA with Adobe. So you can't just look at a pricing change in isolation, you have to look at it as the tip of the spear of the whole go to market, I can tell you what's going to happen because I kind of experienced this with Yammer when Microsoft bought my company 10 years ago. And by the way, I'm not critical of Microsoft at all. They were an extremely high quality acquirer that lived up to all their promises and did everything they said they were going to do. I think if you ever get an offer from Microsoft, you should take it really seriously. I think like I said, I think they're a great company, great acquirer. But I can tell you what happened is that once Yammer was folded in to the office suite and didn't have its own independent pricing, and didn't have its own independent sales team, it just disappeared. I mean, the promotion of it to stop because nobody had an incentive to basically go sell it and nobody in the center to go market and promote it. And it just kind of disappeared. And that is why you remember a couple of years after we sold it slack kind of came out of nowhere, and there was no one to really oppose them. Because you know, all the promotional activity we had done around the hammer just ended because again, we weren't, we didn't have the incentive that was created by the sales organization. Just to explain the pricing thing, David, I think that the
SPEAKER_01: way this decision will get made, and I'm not saying it's right or wrong. But it will get made not by the sales teams and not by the product teams, but it will get made by the CEO and the CFO in talking to their largest shareholders. And the reason is because there is an implied cost of capital that Adobe has. In fact, right now, if you look at like all of the models that all of the analysts use is roughly around 9%. And so you know, they're going to have to achieve a return on top of that cost of capital. What that means is that they're going to be forced to find a way in short order to make this accretive and to start generating incremental cash flow. And I think that they will be hard pressed not to bundle and not to do these creative packaging strategies. Because otherwise, I think that there's a risk that this free cash flow machine that folks have become very addicted to at Adobe starts to shrink. And that will have huge ramifications, I think, to the stock and to the executives and to the morale. And so I think that they're going to do whatever it takes. And by the way, you've seen that you've seen that in other companies who've gone into this phase of their growth, Oracle being the best example, you know, they have consistently found ways to package to bundle to cross sell to upsell. And they have incrementally walked free cash flow generation up.
SPEAKER_00: If they do that, they're taking a huge risk. Because here's what's going to happen is, so I agree with you about what may happen. This may be decided by the CEO and the board. But I think if they do this, they could blow it. I mean, the Dylan field, the founder in his blog post on this said that Adobe is committed to letting them run independently. Well, you can't run independently. If you don't have your own independent pricing, you just can't, because how long is the
SPEAKER_02: question? How long? Because look, if all of a sudden, Adobe
SPEAKER_00: salespeople can sell this product and included in their bundle, and the marginal price is basically free, because it's part of some bundle. That means the sale has been taken away from whoever the dedicated salespeople are on the figma side of the house, I can tell you, that will create irrationality in the sales organization. And very soon, there'll be pressure to consolidate the figma sales organization with a larger Adobe sales organization, they will be moved in, they may become product specialists or experts, but the go to market efforts will be consolidated. And then Dylan's going to end up running a quote, standalone version of figma that doesn't have its own go to market organization. And then you don't get the feedback into product from your sales and marketing team. So all of a sudden, you're running a product and engineering team, but you don't have eyes and ears in the market. I hear all of that. I think that the Facebook, WhatsApp,
SPEAKER_01: mergers, probably pretty instructive, which is yon had two years, roughly, where he was left alone to kind of like run independently, and then slowly and slowly, it was absorbed back into the mothership. And you know, that was a product with zero monetization. But there was a lot of strategic touchpoints within WhatsApp, and, you know, core Facebook app and everything else that they were doing. And I think that you have to do that, because when you're spending 10s of billions of dollars on something, there needs to be an industrial logic that is beyond just let me just buy this thing and stick it on the shelf and let it be on its own. So I think that, you know, that die is sort of cast, I think we're just debating the timeline in which it happens. Let's talk about, you know, you're probably right. And
SPEAKER_00: that's what usually happens is, is when they promised the founder, that you'll be left alone, that usually last two years. That's coincidentally usually the length of the the earn out or the the golden handcuffs. That's how long my golden handcuffs were. Yeah. And they left us alone for one year, by the way, our error tripled that year. But then once they got serious about integration, the organization started merging. And really, I was just running a product organization, which is fine. But that's not running an independent company. Because like I said, you lose your eyes and ears, you lose the pulse of the market when you're not selling into the market. Freebird, how did YouTube do it so well?
SPEAKER_02: It was a very different situation. They were Yes, Google
SPEAKER_03: basically took a team of, you know, two dozen people, and their infrastructure was terrible. And they basically rebuilt the entire company. So it was the complete opposite. Think about them taking the front end shell of YouTube. And then they rebuilt everything underneath it, ran it. And then they actually put their own people in to optimize the front end. They put their own ad sales team on top of it. I mean, they just bought a skeleton of a growth engine. And they built everything. And so it was a very different story. And the one thing that YouTube, the one thing that Google did so well, with that acquisition was the conviction bet that they made on the business. And they made billions and billions of dollars of investments into that business for years before it started to make money. And that is a very hard thing to do. Because to Chumaf's point, you often have this question of where your free cash flows, where's your dividends, where's your buybacks, as a business gets to a certain point of maturity. But what Google had that many businesses of that scale have never had before, is their extraordinary growth rate that continued even as they were of that scale. So the the leeway that Google's executives and board were given by shareholders was extraordinary, not to mention the dual voting, where Larry and Sergey could decide to do whatever the heck they wanted. But they really were able to take advantage of
SPEAKER_03: their high growth rate, to take all this cash they were generating and reinvest it into this YouTube platform, as well as many other things, many of which haven't worked out. But when they do work out, you have a business that I think YouTube is probably worth what 300, 400, $500 billion at this point. And and it's really paid back multiple. So YouTube is really a one off because it's a one off acquirer. And it was a one off kind of acquisition integration scenario that we haven't seen before. What Google in effect got when they acquired YouTube
SPEAKER_00: was a flywheel. I mean, it was a brand and it was a network effect. The network effect was massive, it was off to the races. And I remember Google had Google videos, but they just couldn't come close to catching YouTube because the flywheel of creators wanted to be where all the viewers were and viewers wanted to be where the most content was, it was just impossible to catch. But that organization was relatively tiny at the time it was acquired, and it didn't have any monetization. And it was being deluged, it was being deluged by legal problems that that Google legal could solve very unique situation. Yeah, that was one of the bold acquisitions of all time. But
SPEAKER_02: what was incredible is right after the acquisition, and
SPEAKER_03: Google started to scale this thing, most of the content being watched on YouTube was copyright content. And I was at a conference and I remember Philippe Damond, the CEO of Viacom stood up and Larry Page and Eric or Larry and Sergey or someone was on stage with and he yelled at them. And he was like, you guys are making all this money and growing this YouTube business off of the back of our content. And you know, the DMC eight, the digital millennium copyright Act says that someone can file a takedown notice and then the platform has a period of time to respond and to deal with it. And the amount of time it was taking them to deal with it, new content was being uploaded, then they'd have to file another takedown notice. So it created this insurmountable, you know, mouse game, right copyright thing. And, and then what did Google do that YouTube would have never been able to do to Saks's point, they built an engine that could automatically recognize copyright content and pull it down before it was made publicly available, finger without ruining the user experience of instant upload and availability of content for other fingerprint system was
SPEAKER_02: even more nuanced than that. The fingerprint system not only told him, Hey, this is an SNL skit, or this is a music video from Prince, it said, What would you like to do and it put the power in their hands and said, turn it off, claim it, and we get the money from it. And then it was like, well, we're telling you before you even know about it. And what all these people did was they say, Okay, yeah, you can make a remix of my Prince song or this episode of a TV show. We'll collect the money. And that was just, yeah, the revenue share was the brilliant part about it, because it put the power in the copyright holders names. This just speaks to how singularly
SPEAKER_03: how singular and unique that deal was, because I don't think any other company at that time, maybe Microsoft would have been able to develop technology to do this and do it at the scale and do it with this low latency and high speed for users. And so on. It really was a singular transaction, which freeburg I think speaks to their accumulation of talent,
SPEAKER_02: especially in those early years where they were just like hire smart people will figure out what to do with them later. They actually had those people sitting around who could just go jump on the YouTube. Oh my god, salt solar common gar went and
SPEAKER_03: ran YouTube and absolutely crushed it probably one of the best CEO runs that's never talked about in the history of tech. He stepped in and he ran YouTube. And now Susan runs it, you know, another incredible run and monetizing that thing since but I mean, and these are people by the way, both solar and Susan were sub 30 employee people at Google. So yeah, good point. Nick, can we throw up the slides contrasting valuation to ARR.
SPEAKER_00: This is actually more interesting than just who made all the money. So I actually created a plot ARR is the red chart. And it's the right axis. So as we talked about, they're at around 400 450 million of ARR right now. And then the left axis is expected value. Basically, this was their valuation. And it's in purple. And it obviously it goes up to the 20 billion or 22 billion that Adobe just paid. You can see he was the last round they did in 2021, where they're valued at 10 billion. Before that they're valued at 2 billion in 2020. And then you know, the series C, I think they're valued at like 440 million or something like that. And then I think the B they're valued at like 125 million and then the A they're valued at like 50 ish million, you know, and then there were seed and so forth. I think what you see here is that is how efficient in a way venture capital is where it's tracking just slightly out of ARR, it is predicting where the hockey stick is good. So first of all, look at ARR, it is as close to a pure hockey stick as I've ever seen in SAS. And then we have the last one in the last kudos to them. I mean, the crazy thing is just how long it took for the hockey stick to get
SPEAKER_03: going normally. Why didn't you invest in this company? Did you see it?
SPEAKER_00: Well, no, we didn't see it. Also, look at what a late bloomer This thing is, you know, like that's kind of see it like look, look, like hockey stick didn't really start inflecting until 2018 2019. Right. So
SPEAKER_03: it's more that your your table is more striking, where these guys for years were toiling away. And then all of a sudden this thing just took off, right? It's really such a late bloomer.
SPEAKER_00: You're doing a SAS company and you're in it five years and you still have zero revenue. And like that doesn't mean you're dead. I mean, they basically were zero grind for five years. I'm doing exactly nothing. And that's a $20 billion exit five years later. I actually think I think the only hard round to invest in this company would have been if you were going to invest in I think the 2014 time period 2015 because you were investing in a company that hadn't even launched yet that had been grinding for three or four years with by the way, the founder was like 19. When he started this, he was a teal fellow. He was one of the first, you know, 20 under 20 teal fellows. Yeah, yeah. And he dropped out of school to do this. And you know, and they spent several years in the wilderness. I think that's when it would have been hard to invest is maybe not the first seed round because you could tell this guy was brilliant. He had a really specific idea. Moving design tools to the cloud was, I think, like a very clear and sensible vision clear, you know, why now underlying trends, I always say my my three biggest traits for entrepreneurial
SPEAKER_03: success. One of them is grit. I mean, you know, if you have a high index on grit, you're, you're able to grind your way there. It's really, that's a really incredible. This chart is
SPEAKER_02: brilliant, because you know, what we see in the seed stage is right before that series A is where most people give up sex, you know, you get three or four years in, people aren't paying for the products, you're under resourced, and they don't get the A and they got a, you know, that 2013 1415 period, they were probably trying to get an A, but it taken him two years to get the A. And then somebody finally decided easy for a young person
SPEAKER_03: to give up and go get a friggin job at Google or go back to school. And to grind it out to have the grit and the persistence and commit to your vision. He didn't pivot away. He persisted. And he actually clarified, he clarified, he clarified, right? Yeah, but he but he didn't he didn't go five steps away and say, I'm gonna do a new startup. And, you know, there was his business, right? And there's no credit here. Yeah, Dylan field, by the way, as the founder, I had him on the pod
SPEAKER_02: back in the day. And really the, you know, ultimate customer focus, customer session, like I said, you need to just have your
SPEAKER_01: pulse on what your customers are saying constantly, because the answer is there, you just have to develop it and give it to them. By the way, also, in this chart, that's, I think, very
SPEAKER_02: interesting, sacks. I'm interested in your position on this, if you look at this chart one more time, they could have turned on monetization, I think a year or two before they did. So they purposely didn't charge for it to get the network effects going. I would love to see in here the number of users as a third vector, you know, as a third line on here, because I think they started getting a lot of users in 2014 2015 2016. That's when that's why they got the seed. But they purposely did not charge to let the network for Yeah, 2015 was a private beta. I don't think they were even had
SPEAKER_00: a product in 2014. That was usable yet. 2015 was private beta 2016 was public launch. And then they turned on monetization in 2017. And then they turn on enterprise pricing in 2018. So I think that's a pretty sound progression. I, I'm not I mean, to be honest, I'm not a big fan of taking three or four years in the wilderness to build your product, I think you need to get to market sooner. But I do think it is a little different in an existing industry where the table stakes are high. So you know, Adobe is not a cloud based product. But those were very rich client products. And so to get to the point where you could even compete with them with the classic clay Christensen Innovators Dilemma, lightweight version of the product, there were significant table stakes there. And it was a significant technical challenge to move design tools into the browser, they had to do a lot of cutting edge browser tech.
SPEAKER_02: The browser wasn't ready for it. Yeah, this chart is going to
SPEAKER_03: be calling in a few years. Now that I'm doing after all in,
SPEAKER_02: 48 hours after it, I think that's correct. Come join me with any questions. SPACs are back. I don't know if you saw on the news, but freeburg launched a SPAC.
SPEAKER_01: No, no, no, he he announced a target and a merger agreement. Incredible. Now he goes into the D SPAC process. Now we have
SPEAKER_02: two out of four besties have SPAC. Freeburg, you want to tell us about what you SPAC? Well, I mean, we announced that we're
SPEAKER_03: merging the production board SPAC, which is TPB Acquisition Corp with Lavoro, which is the largest agricultural inputs retailer in Brazil and operates across Latin America. You know, we've got a good slide in the presentation that I think echoes some of the points I've talked about on our podcast here about the importance of having resiliency and redundancy in global food supply chains and increasing famine risk. So we've got a slide that shows for about 30 years, you know, we've reduced the number of people globally that have been undernourished down to about 600 million as of about three or four years ago. And in the last three years, we've seen that number spike back up to 800 million, which we thought we were done with global famine. And now here we are facing these issues again, climate change, the lockdown, supply chain disruption, the Ukraine war and all the other geopolitical tension issues. So that's been a big thesis of mine individually. You guys know we've talked offline about some investments I've made and my strong interest in the area. Brazil and Latin America is the largest ag export market in the world. So they produce calories for the rest of the world. And farmers, they're largely lag in terms of technology adoption. I've got a nice Brazilian farm as my background today. But technology adoption doesn't look like it does in the US. There's a huge opportunity to influence and drive productivity up in that region. And so we partnered with the largest ag retailer. Ag retail is the local locations that work with farmers. They have these teams called agronomists. They meet with the farmers typically weekly, help them make decisions about what products to use, what to do, how to do it. And so with the footprint and the reach that they have, I think we can really drive up productivity per acre across the region, increase total global calorie production. And that's why I'm so excited about it. Fundamentally, it's also a great business. All the financials are presented in the investor presentation and will be published with the SEC here in the next couple days. But it's a scaled business, it's a profitable business, and it's growing pretty significantly. So it's got great tailwinds, it's a great base business. But for me, there's huge opportunity to continue to drive technology through the platform that they've built. And that's why we're also making a $100 million investment off our balance sheet into the company. So that's big skin in the game. Big skin in the game. And we put two-thirds of these founder promote shares, they're the only vest if we can hit the stock price of $12.50 and $15 over the next three years, otherwise we lose them. So we've really tried to align ourselves with shareholders and really put our money where our mouth is on this and show people that this is a real strategic partnership for us. It's not just an investment that we intend to kind of
SPEAKER_03: hold for a short period of time. This is a key platform for me, for our for our TPB business, and for many of the companies that we operate at TPB. So I'm super excited. It's been a long time coming. It's been a very hard process as Chamath can attest. And as we all talk about, capital markets are very difficult right now. Getting a transaction announced is the first step. Now there's a bigger step of getting it closed. But yeah, a lot of work, but I'm super excited about this. Thanks for letting me talk about it. Yeah. Well, and the other thing I just want to double click on
SPEAKER_02: there, Chamath, this idea that two-thirds of the sponsor promote have to hit certain hurdles. I think that's probably a pretty good thing for folks who maybe want to invest to just say, hey, yeah, this is great. There's some alignment in how these shares get distributed. Yes.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I think it's a good feature. I think that the thing with SPACs in general in a moment like this is that it's it actually performs better in periods of high volatility. And the reason is because, you know, you have this redemption feature, which essentially allows you to get back your your basis. And so, meanwhile, while, you know, Friedberg was hunting for a deal or whatever, that cash, you know, that you've contributed into this SPAC sits in a savings account that then actually is generating some, you know, reasonable interest as rates go up. So the whole combination of all of this stuff actually makes SPAC a pretty good risk adjusted vehicle when the markets are highly volatile. Because if at any point you don't like how you feel, even if you love the deal, you just vote to redeem, get your $10 back and effectively win the market. Right. Let's say the market goes down 30% from here to March of next year when Friedberg's deal closes. Well, an investor could theoretically just say, you know what, I just want my $10 back. Now all of a sudden they've gotten zero. They felt zero percentage of that drawdown. And that's what's so interesting about this structure in a moment like this. So I think there's a lot of really interesting features that SPACs in the future. I think we'll have to incorporate in order to in order to be a successful tool in the toolbox. One thing I learned from, I
SPEAKER_02: guess, the pattern AG company that I think you incubated as well, or was that a copy? Yeah, you incubated as well. Yeah. And you guys invested through your launch platform. Yeah. So
SPEAKER_02: we invested this syndicate is that the way this retail works is we have farmers, but then there are these retailers or these sales reps, I guess they call them in the industry that service the farmers. And so that's what this is. Yeah, that's exactly how this technology. Yeah, that's right. They don't
SPEAKER_03: know how else is a farmer supposed to know what to buy and what to do. So AG retail, the local retail store, the people that work there are called agronomists. And so the agronomists are like technical salespeople. They understand the science and the technology of farming. They understand what the farmers have done in the past, and then they partner with them to help them decide what to do going forward, what products to buy, how to use them, how to get the most out of their land. And so when new technology, when new AG technology comes to market, it's the retailer that can influence the farmer to make a decision on making a switch or using a new tool or using some software, you know, to drive that decision. And so that's why ag retail is so important. And why it's critical for any new technology to get adopted in farming, it has to go through retail. You know, there's the big ag input companies, there are the seed companies, and the chemistry companies, and the protection companies, and the software companies, they all don't sell direct to farmers. Typically, they're going through these retailers. And so yeah, is there a version of Livoro that's been, that's
SPEAKER_01: an American company that's public or not? Yeah, it's
SPEAKER_03: called Nutrien. And so Nutrien owns CPS, which is the largest retail chain in the US, ag retail chain in the US. About, I think, 70-80% of Nutrien's business is actually fertilizer production. And then the rest is the retail business. You know, that's the key comp that we actually show in our financial presentation that we published yesterday. How is Nutrien done
SPEAKER_01: just as a public market? Do people understand sort of the value that it creates in the marketplace? Yeah. So in the
SPEAKER_03: last year, as we've talked about on the show, companies that are in the fertilizer business are making money hand over fist because of the the issues with the supply chain for natural gas, potash and phosphates. And so if you have access to supply, like Nutrien does, and various other fertilizer companies do, you are absolutely minting money this year. And so they're having record earnings right now. And, you know, people are kind of estimating that the fertilizer market will kind of reset. And as a result, these companies are over earning right now, which means that they're getting low forward multiples. But generally speaking, yeah, these businesses have done very well. And one of the, you know, I would say the U.S. is about 15 years ahead of Latin America. And remember, Latin America produces and exports more calories than the U.S. And corn farmers in Brazil, for example, are only getting half the yield of corn farmers in America, or a little more than half per acre, yield per acre. And the reason is the retailers in the U.S. are so sophisticated that they're introducing services, and they make a bunch of money selling services now. That wasn't the case 20 years ago. So now they're offering farmers advice using software and other kind of custom, you know, soil testing services and whatnot. And that's really changed agriculture. It's given farmers data that they didn't have before, and help them make better decisions using that data that didn't exist before. And that's really, you know, I would say concentrated in the U.S. that kind of sophisticated behavior. I think it's really important we see it happen around the world now, because we need to grow more food, and we need to do it without expanding land and acreage, and so on. And we need to do it more sustainably, which is another kind of key part of this.
SPEAKER_01: Did you worry a lot about, like the FX risk of, you know, all these inputs coming into Brazil, having to deal in local currency, then having to kind of get the revenues out in U.S. dollars and all of that stuff? How did you think about that? Yeah, it's a good question. So, when all ag commodities around
SPEAKER_03: the world, most commodities, right, they trade in dollars. And so, you know, if the dollar strengthens against the local currency, the REI, the farmers actually make more money, and the input companies charge more money in local currency. So, basically, the entire ag market and around the world commodity markets, generally speaking, inputs and outputs trade in dollars. And so, if you're a local business, you actually make more money when your local currency goes down, and you're willing to spend more money. And so, businesses in a commodity cyclical business generally are currency hedged because of that, because they're selling stuff in dollars. And then, as a result, the places that they're buying stuff from charge them more in their local currency, and they can still make a good spread. So, you know, there may be fluctuations in FX risk. But generally speaking, I think we see, and I'm just speaking generally here, not about this particular transaction, we generally see, and we saw this at Monsanto. So, that's a good example. All ag input companies, when the local currencies devalue in a market that they're selling into, they charge more, and the farmers can afford to pay more because they're making more selling the product into the market. I think this company is super interesting. So, I'm rooting for
SPEAKER_01: you. It looks really cool. And it seems like a very good entry valuation, good margin of safety too.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, $1.2 billion valuation, if I'm reading correctly here. So, yeah, congratulations. Hard to get a deal done at this time. For people who don't know, FX foreign exchange, just trading one dollar or one currency for another. Did you guys see that there was a Title VI lawsuit filed against
SPEAKER_01: Pfizer for some... In the Civil Rights Act, there's something called Title VI, which means that if you take federal funds of any kind, you can't discriminate. And Pfizer has a program to recruit African American and Latino people into the company. And they're not being sued because Pfizer takes NIH grants, they work with the US government, they work with Medicare, they work with Medicaid. And so, as a result of that, it's really happening one month before something else that we talked about, which is there's the affirmative action case that's going to the Supreme Court where, I think it's Harvard actually, you know, people pushing back on Harvard's ability to have some form of race-based admissions. So, I just don't know if you guys were monitoring this. For me, I just took a step back and I thought, look at what has happened legislatively in 2022. We basically repealed Roe v. Wade. The Supreme Court also went after a concealed carry in New York and said that New York cannot legislate against concealed carry, which had pretty big ramifications with respect to gun laws. The consensus opinion is that we're going to repeal affirmative action in the next month or the Supreme Court is going to do that. These are three pieces of an enormous change in the United States civil society that has happened in a really small, condensed period of time. So, I have these thoughts on affirmative action, but my other thought is like, it's incredible how conservatives have been able to organize and how disorganized, you know, progressives have been in order to create a counter maneuver against them. Because this has been a systematic effort since Karl Rove literally wrote about it in the mid 2000s and he said, here's what we're going to do. We're going to raise a bunch of money, we're going to redistrict everything, we're going to get the state legislators on our side, we're going to basically, you know, fund the Federalist Society, we're going to, and they did it. And in 20 years, they've created an enormous amount of change that I'm not sure all Americans agree with. Meanwhile, the progressives are just kind of like navel gazing at each other. I mean, and then you left off this past week, Chamath, that it
SPEAKER_02: seems like the gay marriage bill is going to be put to a vote. And that they're not going to be able to find. I didn't see that. What? Yeah, yeah. And Ted Cruz said he's not going to vote for it because it's attacking religious freedom. So we had talked on a previous episode, and I think, Saks, you said you didn't think gay marriage would come up and well, no, if I had
SPEAKER_00: to guess what the political gamesmanship is here, because they think it's not going to pass, they want to bring it up for a vote because it preserves the issue, it intensifies the wedge issue. When it looked like they had enough votes, they weren't going to put it up for a vote. So I don't know, I think there's a lot of gamesmanship here. Look, I think enough for Republicans should vote for this just to pass it. I don't think that... Yeah, why wouldn't they? Well, I think there's some issues with the way the bill is written in terms of maybe requiring religious organizations to perform gay marriages. I think that somebody should just make an amendment to clarify that's not the case to solve this religious freedom issue. I think if that happened, then you'd get more Republicans
SPEAKER_00: on board, or at least they wouldn't have an excuse. But yeah, look, I would like to see enough Republicans vote for this to take it off the issue. I don't think gay marriage is at any risk of being overturned by the Supreme Court. Remember, it was Gorsuch who wrote that opinion. So I think this is a scare tactic that progressives are able to use to fundraise off their base. Nonetheless, it'd be nice if enough Republicans would vote to canonize marriage equality so that they wouldn't be able to do that. That's the smart play here for Republicans.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it looks like by the way, breaking news in the Washington Post, Democrats have postponed the same sex marriage vote until after the midterms. So but I mean, you can understand why people are going to be nervous about this after... Well, maybe they're doing that because they want to run on it
SPEAKER_00: as an issue. They want to have that as an issue. Yeah, I mean, I've been smart enough to force it. 70% of people are in
SPEAKER_02: favor, right? 80% are in favor. Look, if Republicans want to be smart, find 10 Republicans in
SPEAKER_00: the Senate who can support this. Announce now that you're going to support it. Come on, Republicans have a brain. Don't let them change the issue from this economy that's spiraling out of control. I mean, the Republicans are clueless.
SPEAKER_01: What do you guys think is going on there? Oh, yeah. So FedEx stock has dropped 25 as much as 25% as we're taping
SPEAKER_02: this this Friday, after the CEO after a little I don't know if you saw the video I sent to the group chat. But Kramer, Jim Kramer was kind of pushing him. Do you think there's a recession? Do you think there's a recession? He finally said yes, I think there's a global recession. They missed on revenue and they have cut their predictions for next year severely. And the stocks way down. I think, based on what I heard on CNBC from and reading some stories right before this breaking news is happening. Some people think this is 6040 market versus management. But either way, I think the feds interest rates are doing their job and glass packages are being shipped because people are Chamath you would think spending less money. And that was the whole point of this exercise was to slow the economy down freeburg.
SPEAKER_01: I think this is a little bit of a head scratcher. This is a new CEO. So I think the game theory on this is that it made a lot of sense for him to reset expectations. I get that. And I think that that's a that's a reasonably smart thing to do when you're incoming, you know, leader of a very complicated organization. That really is at the end of the bullwhip, so to speak on on consumer demand. The problem is there's just so much conflicting data. You know, retail sales was pretty reasonable. You know, China actually looked a little bit stronger than people expected just this past week on some data that came out there. It looks like Europe is going to really draw a hard line and make sure that they spent whatever it takes to have enough energy so that their productivity doesn't fall off a cliff. All of those signals would say that, you know, we're not at the precipice of this kind of like cratering of demand. And then you have Powell basically saying, yeah, we're going to go another 75. And you know, we're going to take rates to probably somewhere between four and 5%. So the FedEx data point was pretty starkly in contrast with at least some of the data that we've seen over the last few weeks. So I don't know, it was a bit of a head scratcher.
SPEAKER_03: They got three things working against them. Number one, Amazon just continues to build out local delivery infrastructure at an incredible pace. At the end of 2020, Amazon was already up to 25% market share, which put them ahead of both FedEx and UPS. And FedEx has seen their market share decline for the past eight or nine years now. So that's kind of, you know, a key point. Number two is people are just shipping less stuff, doing more stuff digitally. And number three is this recession impact, where they obviously have key economic indicators that allow them to do a better job forecasting deliveries than most companies, I would imagine. And so they can see order volume and trading volume and use that as a predictor for, you know, for what volume for shipping is going to be in the future. And I would guess that all three continue to work against them. It's not like they have a lot of diversification in the business and other ways to expand out into. So you've got a key vertically integrated player, namely Amazon, that is investing heavily to replace whatever they use you for. I think as of a few years ago, Amazon was only like 2% or 3% of FedEx's revenue anyway. But still, I would imagine Amazon is playing a key role here. Your first comment to me is now that
SPEAKER_01: sounds like the most credible explanation. And you know, to blame a recession is sort of a little bit of hiding the cheese. It's probably fair to say that their lunches get eaten by Amazon. So I can understand why FedEx is under a lot of pressure because of that. But if you just compare it to just all the other data, it doesn't seem like this whole thing makes any sense. What you just said about competition makes to me a lot more sense. And yeah, competition with digital and
SPEAKER_03: Amazon. I mean, digital, like how much do you guys sign letters today versus e-sign? I mean, there's just a lot and you know, I'm giving an example. Maybe that's a 1% impact and there's probably a few more things. And these things all layer up. Well, they could be losing market share while still
SPEAKER_02: growing because e-commerce is growing so violently in the world. But Sax, what do you think?
SPEAKER_00: I think what's going on here is that whatever the issues of FedEx, and no matter how overstated these warnings may have been, I think they're directly correct. He's saying that the world's headed for a global recession. And directionally, he appears to be right. I mean, things look really grim. We just had this inflation report that was much worse than what people were expecting. Inflation was supposed to go down to 8.0%. And actually, it was 8.3%. That's why the stock market cratered a few days ago. It's like the worst day in the stock market. I think maybe all year or certainly since June. We're almost towards the June lows. Now, this FedEx executive is saying we're headed for global recession. So it seems to me that the economic news is just pretty grim here. And we're in a, we're in stagflation. The Fed has to keep raising interest rates at the same time that we have persistent high chronic inflation. And you have to wonder, you know, I tweeted a few months ago that the White House economic advisor, Brian Deese, he said that in this interview with CNN, that the Biden administration was willing to endure a global recession in order to keep Russia from controlling the Donbass region, Ukraine. Well, mission accomplished. It looks like it's getting its wish. The administration has made some progress in the Donbass, but we are also having a global recession. So what percentage of this rate, what percent of the recession and inflation has
SPEAKER_02: to do with the Russian invasion of Ukraine? I think it's meaningful. It's meaningful. We know it's a huge exacerbator of
SPEAKER_00: all these. What percent if you were going to put a number on Listen, I don't think the economy is going to get better
SPEAKER_00: with the risk of war three hanging over our heads. How does that work? Yeah, but what percent of the economic issue
SPEAKER_02: do you think is percentage wise impact? I don't think we're in a recession. Maybe you answer. I don't think we're in a recession yet. You know, retail sales are still quite strong.
SPEAKER_01: There's just a lot of signals that tell us that people are still consuming a lot of things and jobs too. And that GDP is pretty reasonable and then jobs and wages, you know, are pretty much, you know, quite full. So I think that's a good thing. Yeah, it's quite full. So I think Saks, you are right, that we will be there, because you can only bring rates up so high until you break things. Do you see there's a tweet by I think a
SPEAKER_00: Charles Schwab analyst today about that issue of wages, and she was tweeting off to find it that for the second year in a row, we now have because of inflation, we now have real wage decreases. So you may be right about like where things stand and this is about the trajectory right now of the economy and the trajectory is not good. Inflation is not coming down as fast as people were anticipating. It's worse than expected. You have the situation in Ukraine where, listen, we can all cheer on Ukrainians for this counteroffensive that appeared to be successful, but we are playing with fire over there. I mean, I don't recall a time during the Cold War where we did anything remotely this risky. You have American, we have American generals, American generals were taking credit for this counteroffensive. Do you see this New York Times story where they talk about the inside moment of this Ukraine counteroffensive? So you now have America, America is now giving Ukraine more and more advanced weapons. Okay, this sort of the the long range artillery. They're telling them where to point the weapons. They're giving them the intelligence for it. They're training them on how to use it. They've got commanders on the ground there and and they actually are hand correcting the battle plans. The Ukrainians had a counter offensive plan. The Americans said that's not good enough and they rewrote it. So the Americans are now doing everything in this war except pulling the triggers and taking the bullets and I don't want to minimize the sacrifice the Ukrainians are making because they are dying in huge numbers and you know we can all respect and admire the sacrifice they're making for their own country. But this is a very risky strategy for the United States of America to be pursuing. I mean we are we are basically playing with fire in we are you know this close to being at war with a nuclear armed Russia and we never came close to this type of behavior during the Cold War and I don't understand what's changed so much that we have to take this kind of risk. Now at the beginning of this conflict, I said that I was open to arming the Ukrainians under Cold War rules. Cold War rules meaning covertly like we did in Afghanistan. We now have multiple examples of the administration boasting and taking credit taking credit for the counter offensive for the sinking of the Mosfah for killing Russian generals. This seems very risky to me. So
SPEAKER_02: Sacks a court premise of the discussions we've had here is that the United States screwed up the negotiation with Putin by not taking NATO off the table. Reuters reported that Putin rejected a Ukrainian peace deal at the start of the war at the start of the war. Russian chief envoy on Ukraine told Putin that a provisional deal with Kiev had been struck deal would have satisfied Russia's demand that Ukraine stay out of NATO. Two of three sources said the push to get a deal finalized occurred immediately after Russia's February 24th invasion. Does that change any of your thinking on what's happened here and Putin's culpability? I
SPEAKER_00: think it's a data point you know, but let me explain why I don't think it's just positive and by the way I saw the article every neocon on Twitter was basically tweeting this trying to prove that this. Yeah. No I was CC it on everybody's. The whole Meersheimer analysis. Let me tell you why it doesn't okay. First of all if you read the article closely this offer did not come until after the invasion started. Okay and we already knew Zelensky was publicly saying in the early weeks of the war that they were willing to take Ukraine off the NATO off the table. So this isn't that much news. It happened after the other key point here is that not only did it happen too late, but also the offer did not come from the Americans. This is a really important point to understand about the Russian position on this and I'm just saying this based on all their public pronouncements. The Russians made an ultimatum in December and then Lavrov negotiated with Lincoln in January. They were absolutely insistent that they would accept nothing less but a written guarantee from Washington. Why is that? Well, the written guarantee was necessary because they've always claimed that James Baker Ucured Gorbachev over you know German reunification and not one inch eastward. So they've always demanded a written assurance from the Americans and the reason they wanted from America and not Europe is because they know that Europe are America's poodles and Ukraine is a client state of America. So listen they wanted a written guarantee from America before the war started. They never got that. Now if your point is did Putin do everything he could to avoid this war? Absolutely not. I will absolutely grant you that but we already knew that the question is did the US State Department do everything they could to avoid this war and my point is absolutely not. They should have taken this Ukraine issue off the table in writing before the invasion. Got it. Okay. And talking about Ukraine.
SPEAKER_02: No, no, I just it was major news and we have an obligation. I think to close the loop on it. I'm glad to yeah we have an obligation to listen. People are taking this one article in
SPEAKER_00: this one day. I think it's going to talk about it because listen I've seen all over Twitter that people take this one article and they're like see there's nothing to this. We're giving you the opportunity. Sax. Now let me
SPEAKER_02: ask you another follow up question for Freeburg. Freeburg the other follow up people would like us to have made here is we predicted famine and massive disruption in food. We debated that here. You were pretty clear that this is going to be or could be disastrous. It hasn't turned out to be disastrous yet. What's the update on you know fertilizer is shipping not shipping. Are we going to have global famine or are we not going to have global famine? What's the update there based on this conflict? Yeah. We have a
SPEAKER_03: massive starvation problem. The UN told told everyone. I mean no one writes about this stuff because it's seemingly not interesting in mainstream media, which I don't freaking understand, but the UN thinks that 345 million people now are incrementally marching towards starvation. And so I think they did this at their meeting yesterday because of the war in the Ukraine. So David Beasley, who I know well, he's the executive director of the UN World Food Program. He told the UN Security Council yesterday that 345 million people are now experiencing acute food insecurity in 82 countries where the UN operates, which is two and a half times the number of acutely food insecure people that existed before the pandemic hit. And so this is creating like we talked about these rippling effects in terms of initially it was fertilizer cost, which means less food is being produced locally. Then there was the acute crisis of getting food out of the Ukraine. And now it's less planted acres and less yield getting out of those acres, which I you know we said was going to happen in the back half of this year. And if you look at the price, you know, a good proxy for this is the price for corn. We're at near record highs, you know, for the last couple of years in terms of corn pricing. The 2023 futures pricing for next December for corn is at 620 a bushel, you know, and it kind of peaked out right around the middle part of the Ukraine crisis in April at 673. So we're getting right back to that high point. And so this is a major problem that's brewing. And as I highlighted at the beginning of our talk today, which I show in the presentation for the the La Voura transaction I talked about earlier, we have done an incredible job building a resilient food supply and excellent global supply chains to feed people around the world going back 30 years. And we've been able to steadily decrease the number of people that are food insecure or facing famine and famine in the UN definition is less than 1200 calories per day on average for a year. And so we went from like a billion people around the world facing famine about 30 years ago and got that number all the way down to 600 million. And then in the last two and a half, three years, it's shot back up to 800 million. And now the UN thinks it's going to shoot up even more. So we may even be retracing our way all the way back 30 years because of the crises that have enveloped the region around Ukraine and the resulting impact on fertilizer availability, fertilizer pricing, and so on. And as I mentioned a few weeks ago, many ammonia fertilizer plants, which is nitrogen fertilizer, the main kind of component of fertilizer in Europe are being shut down because they run on natural gas. And so government agencies and the local producers are turning those plants off to make more natural gas available for heating. Would you describe this freeburg as because we are
SPEAKER_02: seeing the EU, you know, they remember they made that decision. This is why this is why South America is so
SPEAKER_03: important. But sorry, go ahead. Yeah, no, it makes no sense.
SPEAKER_02: Would you describe this, though, because the EU was also at the same time the UN was, you know, highlighting these concerns, the EU was also praising the massive progress we made from the Russia and the Ukraine, Russia and Ukraine, allowing fertilizer allowing exports and this resiliency being built up.
SPEAKER_03: So we got wheat moving, and then we got some fertilizer exports moving. So two steps forward, one step back would be how you
SPEAKER_02: describe this maybe? Yeah, net gas prices are still elevated,
SPEAKER_03: right? And net gas availability in Europe is obviously significantly restricted. Will we get through it? Will we get
SPEAKER_02: through it? Do you think we can we can manage this? Yeah, look,
SPEAKER_03: I don't know how many look at this. There's some number of people, some number of 10s of millions, maybe hundreds of millions of people who are going to starve between here and there that otherwise weren't going to be starving. By the way, there's always, you know, some hundreds of millions, as I mentioned, of people around the world that are starving under 1200 calories a day. And that number climbing some incremental amount, that's an incremental 300-400 million people that didn't need to starve. And that's a condition we're now going to be facing. And so people like, yeah, yeah, people are still eating, you know, there's still food around the world. We don't pay much attention to these third world countries, we don't pay much attention to these under 2000s because we don't have press coverage there. And when people are on the streets and unable to eat, it doesn't seem to make everyday mainstream media coverage, but it is happening. And statistically, it is a massive problem. Yeah,
SPEAKER_02: we're doing a great job of covering Kanye and Kim. But yeah, we maybe get some reporters to cover the people starving. We've covered it, and I appreciate you guys giving me
SPEAKER_03: a chance to talk about it, because I think it's super important. So yeah, I mean, when this show is at its best, I
SPEAKER_02: think we're highlighting things that other people are ignoring. Listen, I just want to say on this Ukraine situation, and this
SPEAKER_00: applies to this episode, as well as all the previous ones, I don't want to be right about this issue, just like I'm sure freeburg doesn't want to be right about famine coming true. We don't want these things to happen. Okay, if I could choose an outcome right now, I would say be great. If the Russian army collapsed because of its morale problem, tucked its tail between its legs, went back to Moscow, and then the Ukrainians had the good sense to respect the rights of the Russian speakers living in the Donbass and Crimea. And this whole thing basically tamped down and basically was over. Okay. But look, I think there's an equal and opposite chance that that doesn't happen. That certainly could happen. Okay. But I think there's an equal and opposite chance that instead what happens is that we climbed the escalatory ladder that Putin, I think we are backing him into a corner. Everybody says that he cannot survive the loss of this war, and yet we're not willing to give him an off ramp. So what choice does he have but to escalate? So what does that mean? It could mean a full mobilization of that country. It could mean they resort. If they can't achieve their aims by conventional weapons, maybe they resort to unconventional weapons. We don't know. This seems like a highly volatile, risky situation. And I just think that, you know, we, the United States of America, need to be thinking very clearly about what is in our interest, because all I see is an identification. We're so interested in helping and identifying with the Ukrainians that we've lost sight of an American interest that's separate and independent of Ukraine's desire for self termination. I can understand and respect their nationalism and their patriotism, but we are a different nation. We better think really carefully about our interests here. Yeah,
SPEAKER_02: and I think, David, sometimes you're misinterpreted as this is a partisan issue for you. You're a dove. You're David the dove. I have dubbed you David the dove. You are a dove, not a hawk.
SPEAKER_00: You want peace. Listen, I believe that if America is going to risk war with a nuclear armed power, there better be a vital interest at stake. Otherwise, we should find every diplomatic off-ramp we can. So do you feel optimistic about
SPEAKER_02: our ability to navigate Chamath, the Ukraine situation, the war in Ukraine, famine, supply disruption, energy? Do you think we'll get through all this? Are you optimistic? I
SPEAKER_01: think that rates are going to go somewhere between four and a half to 5%. I think Stan Druckenmiller is right. And I've said this, I don't know, I'm now ad nauseam, so I'll just keep saying it, but I think everybody has consistently been wrong. And they have wanted inflation to be a transitory phenomenon that goes away and they've been consistently wrong. Even in our group chat, we see these forecasts. They've been utterly consistently wrong. So rates are going to go higher than people expect. It'll stay around longer than people want. This will have an impact to the economy. That impact in 2024, 2025 will not be that great. So that's one thing. If you want to focus on Ukraine for a second, there's something that I think we should focus on, which I read this interesting article about Russian mothers. And you know, in the 1980s, when Russia was at war with Afghanistan, there were these bodies that were sent home to Russia. And these mothers got very, very upset and they protested. And then in early 2000s, I think there was a nuclear submarine that basically sank, got shot and sank. And then Russian mothers protested in the Chechen War. They are a group of individuals in Russia that have enormous organizing power, it turns out. And they really can tell what the real temperature is on the ground. What Putin has done so far is that he's largely recruited people from these Spartan communities inside of Central Russia and used third-party contractors. So he's minimized the risk of the real cohort of the Russian population who will really stand fervently against what's going on. So until you see that happening, those guys have a long way to go. And I think that this thing is going to drag on for a really long time. So it's a paid army, therefore
SPEAKER_02: it's obscuring the impact on actual citizens in Russia. It's half paid, but the other half are from places where their
SPEAKER_01: organizing power is limited. And I think that that was Putin's calculation, seeing what has happened before. Again, sort of like the tip of the spear, these Russian mothers. And we're not seeing that. So that means that the ability for him to manage perception inside of Russia is apparently pretty good. Greater than people expected. Yeah. Greater than people expected. So this is going to go on for as long for
SPEAKER_01: much longer than people think. So I would just prepare for this inevitable outcome and just kind of, you know, manage this. Another year of slogging it through a choppy waters might
SPEAKER_02: be one way to look at this. And I think that's a very good way
SPEAKER_01: to think I think we're in a very volley choppy market for the foreseeable future. Yeah. And that there in lies some
SPEAKER_02: opportunities. And also maybe some discipline in various markets. One thing to just keep in mind where most people feel these rate hikes is in the 30 year fixed mortgage, right? This is where most Americans are going to feel it. And if you look at the chart, you know, like, this is a big jump up from our absolutely free money environment that most Americans were feeling doing, you know, you know, what do they call it when you take out equity on your mortgage, like a second mortgage or a credit line credit line? Most people credit? Yeah, people were, you know, experiencing a lot of free money and upgrading their kitchens and taking money out of their homes, yada yada. But when you look at it historically, you know, even at 6%, or even if it goes to 7% for mortgages, it's a lot less than we our parents experienced and we experienced in the first half of our adult life. So I think it's surmountable. And this number you don't think is going to get up to above 10%. Right? The 30 year fixed, you don't see that happening. So I think it's manageable, which is going to be choppy. All right, listen, Sax didn't get to promote it. But he has a wonderful film at the Toronto Toronto Film Festival about Dolly. And he is doing an awesome Dolly experience with the AI that paints pictures. And so we're just going to insert into the end of the program, the beautiful work he's doing there. And his Dolly film is going to be excellent. It's the second film David is producing after Thank you for smoking. So congratulations to our own little Scorsese for the Sultan of Science, the dictator, and the David the Dove. I'm the world's greatest moderator, Jason Calacanis, and we'll see you next time. Bye bye. Love
SPEAKER_01: you guys. Bye bye.
SPEAKER_00: All right, so I'm at the Dolly Land exhibit here at the St. Regis. The St. Regis Hotel was a very important hotel in Dolly's life. He actually lived in the penthouse of the St. Regis in New York and the St. Regis Hotel has very graciously agreed to host this exhibition for us. And this exhibition is it's basically a rendering of Dolly's studio or what Dolly's studio might have looked like. And those works of art are actually generated by GPT-3, the so-called Dolly Engine. So thanks to the OpenAI team and Sam Altman for giving us access to the DALL-E, D-A-L-L dash E. And so fans can just come here and they can use these tablets to enter, you know, what art they want to create. They can just enter terms and the, you know, the engine will spit out art that is made not obviously by Salvador Dolly, but it's in the style of Salvador Dolly. So I thought it's a very cool way to commemorate the film. We are premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival this weekend. This is an independent movie I've had in development for something like over a decade and the great actor, Academy Award-winning actor Ben Kingsley plays Dolly and gives a phenomenal performance. So we're excited to premiere this movie, show it to the world for the first time this weekend. Alright, thanks for watching. Bye.
SPEAKER_00: Oh, man. We should all just get a room and just have one big huge because they're all just useless. It's like this like sexual tension, but they just need to release it out.
