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i like company building like i think part of my role is to help the founder increase the amplitude or probability of success and i enjoy that at ff that's very controversial
ff is a momentum investor and is maybe the best on the planet as at being in a momentum investor so almost every successful investment of founders fund over eight funds was invested at 500 million dollars or more entry valuation
coastless culture of weekly partner meetings which included debate and coastless hands-on investing approach and founder mentorship was a better fit for him than founders funds more individualistic approach
I do think there's more in AR than VR. I think there's clearly applications of AR that will resonate, whether they're industrial or consumer, but there are times and places for AR that will be real companies.
I think the fundamental innovation step, innovation DNA is not something Facebook has.
I do think Facebook's bet on Meta is insane. I think it's the wrong company with the wrong DNA, with the wrong founder, with the wrong vision, and the combination is really lethal. You should look at their stock price since they changed the name. It's a perfect proxy for where the company is going. Facebook's never been an innovative culture. A VR-ish headset is very innovative. Facebook's really good at executing consistently compounding advantages quantitatively, but disrupting through a new p
Yes, Elon should buy Twitter to save the world, but it's not going to be a good financial investment.
I don't think we ever really wanted to keep up. But there's a there's a gap, like some band, let's say we're 25% more discipline or whatever, we can't be 50% and still work with the best founders on the planet. So I think there, there was, you know, some pricing pressure that the people who weren't seeing prices definitely posed a real challenge to our normal discipline, we're not immune from the entire world.
So I'll speak for founders fund first, we are definitely much more disciplined than we were six, nine, 12 months ago. So we will not fund things at valuations that don't make any sense given the public market comparables.
typically, as founders fund runs a growth fund, we would typically have a few days to make a decision about a new investment. Currently, for growth rounds, even for very attractive companies and potential investments, we have days to weeks to make an investment decision.
he did that with Tesla and I'm like I'm having dinner with him one night back when Tesla was gonna fail in 2008 and um he's really like at the end of the rope and he's like he's told us very publicly so again I'm not speaking out of school but he said yeah I'm living off a loan from beep yeah our mutual friend and I I'm at zero and at the time it's a weblog think I was like I think I can lend you a couple million yeah do you need like if I give you two or three million I mean it's big deal for m
one of the reasons why Elon has been so successful is he was willing to double triple quadruple down he still does it yeah well you know in that but he's addicted to that he in you know that maybe obsessive but everywhere excessive but like that allows him it should still be aligned with his employees because he's overexposed as well yeah he's got some rich guy sitting around no input his last 50 million he's got a loan yeah he's putting his whole net worth at risk so he's just as leveraged the
why does Apple need 250 billion dollars why are they not buying companies I mean they should the truthfully they have under invested in acquisitions I think it's a cultural Bureau Drive which is what makes Apple special in many ways is how they run the company yeah and they have a very distinct philosophy of how they build products and they're afraid and terrified almost of if they acquire entities that have skilled humans that those humans won't act like Apple employees and hence you won't get
I think this might be maybe the best investment I've ever made
I was gonna lead the seed round for a great company and they required me to join the board which we typically you know don't do in a seed round... it's now a several billion dollar company... it's Robin Hood... so I screwed out it's a six billion dollar company
if you're running a Content site I wouldn't filter my content right TV in China which Google is willing to do yes but I wouldn't do that now those running a different product where the value proposition to end-user was not freely dissemination of the content yeah like or an iPhone even some extent yeah I can see a different perspective on that because that's not what I'm selling to my consumers so I wouldn't I wouldn't back down on the value proposition that I promised my consumers and that peop
and so Google could take care of monetization and the legal risk goes away a legal risk goes away
by the way Google bought Motorola I forgot that yeah they also bought YouTube and Android in both were indispensable this company people would be shorting Google massively if they hadn't bought both yeah
TV in China which Google is willing to do yes
I compared Trump to uber which actually turned out to be even a better comparison and I realized at the time but I think Trump like a very strong founder who has great strengths and incredible weaknesses has some great strengths
my biggest investment uber has a lot of money took a lot of money from in two rounds what they took it from The Saturdays directly then they took it from Massa who took it from the Saudis right and I didn't sit well with me
I mean imagine Tesla right so Elon has built by any metric the best car on the planet like any Consumer Reports any evaluation says it's the best car ever built built up from scratch with a bunch of people that had no experience and has actually beat every other auto manufacturer has been around forever
When I joined PayPal which was right after Peter had come back as CEO in September 25th 2000 Peter came back as interim CEO PayPal Peter and I had this negotiation about me joining PayPal and we went back and forth we agreed on title and equity compensation and cash compensation
half the founders of PayPal built bombs in high school
less than half the company went to Stanford most went to University of Illinois which is a large state school in the middle of America yeah that's where all the engineers came from none of them came from Stanford
we made our own network and we made our own success and then we rebuilt a network of ourselves but we didn't have any connections
if you think about the PayPal my friends at PayPal why were we successful we were able to marshal a critical density of talent in one building and you know sustain it for a period of time
Peter Thiel back in PayPal taught me the answer to this, which is, he used to insist every single employee was allowed to do exactly one thing, like one thing, and not two, not three. And he wouldn't talk to you about anything else.
we need to get to 50, 60 cities. This should work everywhere.
I think there's a couple big challenges in a market like San Francisco... One is that it's not that hard to sell a house right now... So our value proposition to the seller is a lot less right now. Second thing is the median house in San Francisco is right now is a million dollars... That means our model inaccuracy is very expensive... I think there's two challenges. That said, we can help on the buyer side pretty soon... I think we'll get around to it eventually. But it's not a priority. I mean
We have a new tool for her to enter the information about my house, plug it in, and say, hey, what offer would you give me? And then we give them an offer, and then she tries to convince her client to take our offer, and then she gets paid.
We're generally buying directly from the home buyer. But when we sell our houses, we're perfectly happy if people in the audience want to buy a house and show up with their own agent, and we pay out the full commission when you show up with a buying agent.
That's the primary reason we're expanding to different markets, is housing markets haven't moved historically in the last 100 years together. So our risk of holding inventory decreases the more cities we're in.