Everybody wants access to these private markets. Joining [music] us right now to discuss all of this is Kelly Rodriguez. He's a Forge CEO. We see a world where the [music] private market opens up and is accessible to any US and global investor. There's 19 companies in the private market AI basket. These companies have grown on average 300%.

Please join us in welcoming Gavin Baker, managing partner and CIO of Atrades. The ROI on AI has empirically, factually, unambiguously been positive. Investing is the search for truth. We welcome in Brad Gersonner. It's good to be back with you. You have a program called Invest America.

I think we have a historic moment right now to get [music] everybody into the game of capitalism.

Do we have a few slides from Brad to kick this off?

You know, let's startic like old times. like old times. This uh this panel I I actually was backstage. I said, "Gavin, do you know we're talking about secondaries?" He's like, "What do you mean?" And I said, "Okay, so here, let's just set this up for everybody. The room's full of people who are allocators. People are looking for distributions. So this is um secondary markets over the course of the last decade. This is the amount of money going into VC each year, the amount of money coming out of VC each year. The red line represents the net effect of that. So Jamath, we're in like 5 years, right, where a lot more is going in than's coming out. But the secondary market is at record volume. So this is, you know, I call these companies quasi public companies. These are these later stage companies. There's buying and selling that's going on every day. Look at that, Jason. Relative to the 21 peak. We thought that was crazy at the end of 21. We're double that now in terms of secondary transactions. This is the amount of employee secondary. So this is people buying into Anderal, Anthropic, SpaceX now represents 31% of all primary venture activity is buying into these secondaries in 2025. Secondaries are now competing with IPOs and acquisitions as the principal way that these guys are exiting. So, I thought that was a decent setup to start the conversation this morning just to level set how important secondaries [clears throat] have become. And then the final one is secondaries over the last couple years were trading at a discount to market. So, if we wanted to sell shares in one of our companies, right, to buyers out there, they were willing to give us 80 cents on the dollar in order for us to get liquid so that we could send DPI back to our LPS. Today it's at 106. Uh uh so a premium in the market as a coupon.

And this doesn't include some of the wild west of SPVS that have been unraveled recently.

People charging 10% loadin fees, double carry and a lot of gray market offmarket stuff. This is also having a profound impact, Gavin, on employees at these companies that I want to hear about because you've seen it up close and personal with SpaceX and they have a very orderly process here. So, why don't we start there? What impact is this having on the employees, Gavin? And then on the market, how orderly is this? And and who are the buyers? Are the buyers the sucker at the table? are these family offices, high netw worth individuals who keep hearing us talk about Anthropic or SpaceX or Andril and they just say I have to own the name and they're not discerning. So Gavin, maybe you can start about the impact on the SpaceX employees you saw firsthand, etc.

Well, maybe broadening it beyond SpaceX, I do just think if companies are going to be staying private longer, this is absolutely necessary. There I think there are a lot of people who are very um very wealthy on paper but actually cash poor and if you're making tremendous sacrifices uh because you know you work for a company that you really believe in and you're contributing a lot to that company. It's hard if you can't buy a nice house for your family. It's hard if you can't afford to do nice things,

especially in year seven, eight or nine of working at the company and you tell your spouse we're worth 10 million on paper, 30 million on paper and you don't own your home.

Yeah. Or year 15. And so I think this is necessary and important and you know whether it is good or bad, I think it is very clear that companies um are going to stay private for longer.

What's the reason to stay private longer? Truly

I I I don't think there is actually a good reason to stay private longer

here. Here

and

I completely agree with you too.

Yeah. And I

Why has it happened? This is founders don't want let's just call it what it is. Founders don't want to be under a microscope. They want to build and enjoy life and have it easier than being on the public market microscoped.

Yeah. I think there is a perception that life as a private company is easier and you have more freedom and you can think long term. I don't agree with this. I always think about um Mark Zuckerberg's commentary that had he been public. So just you know Facebook um I won't call it a near-death experience but long ago it's difficult to believe but I don't 10 112 um Facebook did not believe in apps they believed in something called HTML 6

and HTML 5

HTML 5 HTML 5 Yes. You you you you were the actual

it was the cataclysmic debate and it was me and Brett Taylor. Me versus Brett. I was like apps I want to go build a phone. Brett was like HTML 5. Zuck picked Brett. Spent the next three years unwinding that decision.

Absolutely. And Mark Zuckerberg and basically the idea was you know the iPhone comes out and initially there was not a big app app ecosystem and there was a thought that hey there's no need for apps. you're just going to use the web browser on your phone and HTML 5 was a way of look of making websites look mobile native

dynamic.

Yeah. And this seemed like kind of the future to a lot of very smart people including Google, Facebook. Um but it was not the future. Um it was wrong. And what Mark Darker has said, I think several times in public is he profoundly believes that had he been a public company um when you know there was this internal debate between the

and the detail was actually I went to Zuck and I said I need a billion dollars to build this phone and we are in this moment in 2010 where we can have the third leg of the stool. there's Android, there's iPhone, neither have really taken off yet. And and he's like, we don't have a billion. And I said, but the public markets will give us a billion. And he said, no, but then we went public a year later,

but that year made all the difference.

Made all the difference. And he said that had I had the constant pressure testing from public market investors, you there's a dynamic. I was I was talking to another CEO here this morning. When you're the CEO of a private company, you are the most special flower to all of your investors. [laughter] You're like, you are as important to your board members, particularly if you're really successful. You know, maybe as the board members families or parents, you know, the board members think about you a lot. Um, once you're public, you're one of thousands of companies. Um, and that's its own dynamic. But the consequence of this is is that private investors are often selling to management teams. And at some level that can mean telling management teams what they need to hear because you want to be able to keep participating in the rounds. Once a company's public, you can buy or sell as you wish. And this means that investors feel freer to give companies management teams. And Zuckerberg Zuckerberg said, "Had I been public, had I been getting rigorous, detailed questions from really smart public equity investors, I think I would have, you know,

by the way, the second unwritten story of that, which has never been said, he called me. He's like, "Hey, man, what the is going on over there?" Uh, and I was like, "Yeah, I know." Cuz I had just left and then we wrote a deck and I walked over to Zuck and I'm like, "Here's the deck of what you need to do." Yeah,

do these things. Well, this is a key point. I think Gavin is when you're private, you do not get clean information as the CEO and the management team because people want access and once you give the truth or you ask the hard questions, you might lose access

100%.

The sickopantic nature of private markets is real.

Now, an exceptional CEO

Elon

seeks out negative feedback. looking for that.

But not many and actively discards, but not many CEOs maybe are are wired that way. And by the way, I do think we have to give Brad credit. That was a very good deck.

You said back in 2012.

No, cuz he did a second one. He had

when he did the second one, he did the open letter to Zuckerberg at the end of Was that at the end of 22?

October 22.

Why don't you call it? Get fit. What was the uh time to get fit?

Time to get fit. That was an impact. Those are two very impactful.

Okay. So look, there's you're you're hearing the bulls on going public, but Kelly, take the red team the other side because you're on the other side. You built a private business, you sold it to Schwab, so clearly one of the largest financial institutions now is going to ram its way into this market. But then you're seeing a lot of push back. Anthropic is like, "Hey, uh, dissolve these SPVS." OpenAI, I think, was saying today now, dissolve these SPVS. Should we dissolve the SPVS? Where are they coming from? And why are you on the right side of history?

And and have you had to dissolve any of the ones on your marketplace?

No.

No. Look, I think that uh first of all, being a private company CEO for

most of my career and then being a public company CEO for three years, I recognize the job is incredibly different. It's much less fun. Uh you're not doing

Hold on. What do you mean when you say much less fun? Turning into an investment manager primarily as a public company CEO is a very different job than being a visionary [clears throat] product first uh first principles business when you become a public company CEO everything changes and I would say in the world we're in now the kind of capital you can raise the kind of capital that was represented in the very last discussion allows you to extend extend your private life. SpaceX private company for 24 years. Um but the reality is these SPVS that are now emerging because these companies are getting so big is because a market's trying to happen and a company like SpaceX has done this extraordinarily well. They've run essentially liquidity programs for almost a decade because there's so much pent-up interest in both being an investor and getting liquidity for some of the reasons that Gavin was mentioning. So I think what we see now is the next phase of this this Schwab deal with Forge basically says to the world this is a real asset class. It's more than just secondaries. We're going to put these companies, the company's equity into fund products into very well-managed, regulated SPV structures because they do serve a purpose in the market.

Yeah. But if you're how do you convince Elon specifically to give you access to that when he wants to do it himself and he has a team and every six months he runs it himself? How do you get access to that? What's your pitch to the next Elon?

Here's the pitch. The pitch is you're going to go from being a private company eventually to a public company. What Schwab represents is 46 million investors and 12 trillion. This will change capital access and the way that you distribute your shares moving from private to public.

How did that work when you pitched them on that?

Were you Well, I'll tell you. We got our first SPVS on SpaceX in 2018 and 2019.

Were they was he okay with it?

Absolutely. Totally permissioned. And then as we got closer to the IPO, we said, "Guess what? Um, we've got 30 million retail investors that would like to have a $50,000 slice of SpaceX." And and he went out [snorts] publicly and talked about having broad-based distribution

at the IPO price.

At the IPO price and Schwab was named one of the IPO allocations.

Beautiful. I do think this is actually a very effective pitch. I think a lot of these CEOs, they're a little bit ambivalent about, you know, and I think they understand that maybe the institutions who are investing in these private rounds, you know, they may represent, you know, unions, they may represent retirement plans, but I do think they like the idea of democratizing access and if they're building something that they think is great, giving ordinary Americans an opportunity to participate. I actually think that's a very appealing story to to a lot of these CEOs

because they're capitalists and and they understand the power of equity. So Brad,

what is the downside then of cuz you're part of the go direct movement now? BG2 pod officially fifth bestie. Gavin officially sixth bestie. You [laughter] got that's Gavin. That's new news. We officially made you six bestie today.

But does that mean I'm definitively behind Brad? Cuz [laughter] that that's the real news.

I can You're standing behind Brad. You're just giving him that big bear hug right behind him.

Wow.

So, are you saying I'm the big spoon?

You're the big spoon now [laughter] in the in the side draw with the extra spoons.

But Brad, it's getting very weird very quick.

In all seriousness, with great power comes great responsibility. Sometimes the, you know, the enthusiasm people can have can exceed reality.

Correct.

Going direct, you've become more measured. I've noticed as your profile has gone up.

I think all of us have to like just make sure people don't blindly follow trades. Don't

you were talking stuff down on CNBC a couple of times saying, "Hey, I don't think the average American needs to be in some of these companies. There's time."

I get worried. I get worried at this point in the market stage, particularly on CNBC where you're talking to retail investors at home. Yes,

I was one of those retail guys looking up to everybody on this stage, trusting everybody on this stage. And when people are telling you to yolo into right double fee structure, SPVS and all this, you know, like it's time to be careful, to do your work, to be thoughtful. We're in this because we want this to be durable democratization for a long time. Yeah.

We want to build trust among those who feel left out and left behind in capitalism. We all think that we need to go public sooner. The reason I think we it is destabilizing when you're creating trillions of dollars in private value and 80% of America think it's a scam where they're left out and left behind. That's

and then they come rushing in

and they could be not so good cards,

right? So, all I'm saying, like I said about they asked the question on CNBC last week, if you had $100,000 of fresh capital and you were sitting at home, is today the day that you would shove it all into the market? And I said, no, I think about it in sizes, right? We just had two of the biggest months in the last 10 years in the public markets. They've been big months. So, if I had a stack of a hundred, I may put 30 to work today. I'm never going to pick the bottom. I'm never going to pick the top, but I certainly wouldn't be putting it all to work. And I'd say the same thing about latestage privates, people who are yoloing into this stuff, and then they feel really disappointed. They're like, "Hold on a second. I bought the SpaceX IPO and it didn't go up 3x."

Let me ask you then.

Yeah.

Do you view this as exit liquidity for you? Like, would you shape your portfolio and returns and increasingly say, "You know what? I don't know when this guy's going to go public."

Yes.

Let me just pump the stuff out. Let me get the distribution. and let me send it to my LPs and just call it a day.

We we are selling into this.

You're selling into this,

right? So, I have LPs in this room who say, "Listen, we invested in your VC5 or VC6 7 or 8 years ago. If you can go sell a slice of that at four or 5x and we get DPI and it's priced really high, then go sell some of it." And we often don't talk about this in Venturland. Half of what we do is in the public markets. Gavin and I get up every morning and we think to ourselves, should we buy today or should we sell today? Venture capitalists don't think about the sell part. They think about the buy part. So one of if we're going to stay private for longer and we're going to have trillion dollar you know private companies and data bricks at $200 billion you got to think about is today a day we should be selling some and returning it to our investors because

doesn't it create though as as what Jason said these very complicated personality dynamics where maybe you get shut out of a new company maybe you get shut out of an incremental round and you know there's bad blood because you're a credible investor And there's this signaling risk. Whereas in the privates, if you and Gavin decide to sell, nobody knows.

Well, no. In the in in the private, nobody knows.

Exactly. The public's they don't know until our 13F comes out. Okay.

But in the private market, it's always a conversation between me and the founder to say, "Listen, we're we're going to sell 30% of our position." They never like it, Chimath. They're always like, "We wish you wouldn't do that. They don't want it known, etc." But my job as a fiduciary to the LPs of this is to do that.

It does feel Gavin like we have crossed over for early stage venture to a point in which there is a third way. Either your company had M&A and we saw in the presentation yesterday that during the wrath of Lena there was no M&A and they just froze the market. Now it's coming back. IPOs we did have some freezing of that market for certain periods. But this third way is now fantastic. I can tell you as the earliest of the early we are now pari pursu selling into every chance we get because our average investment is at 10 to$20 million valuations. When they hit 500 million I tell the founder you're going to start selling at 500 million. I'm going to sell right alongside you so that I can invest in the next you coming into the market. Everybody's fine with it. I but I can tell you six or seven years ago when I did this with a company they begged me to not participate when they hit peak zerp 2021 they begged me Jay Cal you have to be loyal to us you can't sell paru and I said you you guys are clearing 40 million of the $110 million [clears throat] round I'm just asking to be next to you same amount can I ask Kelly a question how do you systematize this so that it's like an exchange so like if we just want to hit the bid we can do it like what I don't like about the secondary markets is, you know, I ask my CFO, he calls five guys, then my fun CFO, she calls like four. You know,

it's like ticket brokers. We get a bunch of bids. None of it makes any sense. And I'm like,

and I'm already dealing with, as Brad said, the agit from the CEO.

It's got to be easier than this. Like,

yes. Yeah. Look, we 10 years ago, we said there needs to be infrastructure to pull this off. This can't just be a big shadow market. We're sort of in this tipping point now where we spent the last 3 years building this brand new platform so that a company could plug into it the same way they could list on an exchange and say we're going to offer liquidity. And furthermore, if you're a VC and you're on that cap structure for 10 years and you want to offer LP liquidity, you can do it in

to be specific. What do you mean you're like we would be plugging into Schwab's 30 million humans that are buying stuff on?

There's there's a platform. We brought a a platform with about 3 million investors and now we're going to add 46 million investors to them.

Yeah. But wait, hold on a second. Aren't those are those accredited investors? Do they need to be? Because we just had the chair of the SEC on

So today, if you are trading individual shares, whether it's in an SPV or direct on a cap table, you're accredited. However, there are products coming to market, we can talk about this in detail later, that have 60 companies, including SpaceX, that are listed products for unacredited $500 minimums. And that capital for those funds will be the underlying

closed end funds.

These are interval funds.

Interval funds. He's got one out now.

I think Naval just did USVC as one of these. He's gonna contribute to

now. the closed end funds are are a very different bet because you're betting on FOMO because if you look at the underlying value of some of the assets and those closed end funds they have no bearing to reality of what those underlying shares are actually worth. So price discovery is another key component of this structural shift. But to answer your question specifically, if a VC's LPs want to recycle or want to get liquid, then a platform like this will allow them to recycle that capital and put it back into the next vintage fund if they want.

I have a I have a question for you based on this. When these returns come out, the mean return in venture is going to look incredible. The median return is still going to be So walk us through how people will sort through that and the reality of what's going to happen in the next year.

Well, so I think there's there's two very important things. one, I observe if you if you were a venture firm and you do not have material exposure to one of these trillion dollar plus companies that you had many many chances, you know, to to buy into. You're not only your returns not going to be good, but you're not going to have DPI on a relative basis, but you're not going to have DPI. And you know, there's exceptions. you know are you know you know great series A firms they may not have this but their returns are still amazing with great DPI but in so I am beginning to see venture firms who don't have exposure to one of these companies behave in strange ways because I think they're starting to feel a little bit of franchise risk because their DPI and their returns are going to go from you know hey top quintile top tile tile

so they're doing unnatural ads doing unnatural things.

They're writing what I see as call options, like a bunch of these, you know, Neolabs. Well, I need a story. I've done something. And maybe some of these call options pay off, but I do think they're engaging at some level and maybe

they're chasing it.

They're chasing gambling terms. Whereas the people who have exposure to this, I are being a lot more disciplined because they know they're in in in a great position. I think another very important dynamic is going to happen in the world of longon only mutual funds and crossover funds. So, Long Only Mutual Funds, uh, you know, my for former employer, Fidelity, amazing place, love it. Uh, Bailey Gford, Capital Research, Wellington, Tro, they all can, per SEC rules, allocate up to 15% of their funds into privates. And these are the biggest pools of capital in the world. They dwarf sovereign wealth funds. But, you know, most firms, because they don't want to get in trouble with the SEC, they say, "Hey, we're going to cap it at 3% or 5% or 7%. It was very public. Bailey Gford was forced to sell SpaceX last year

for regulatory reasons. And um what's going to happen as these companies go public? All of these long only mutual funds are by and large finding it hard to participate in private markets right now because they're at the limits of their self-imposed

3%

3 5%.

When a company goes public and the lockup expires, it moves out of that bucket. Nice.

So, this is going to be hundreds of billions of dollars of new late stage demand that is coming back to the market after kind of being out out of the market for a while.

That's a lot of dry powder. There's a lot of dry powder.

The net trade is up. Then the the marginal trade is is up.

Founders are going to be in the cap bird seat. People are going to be looking to put money to work. Interesting buzz going around about accreditation rules. We had the head of the SEC on Allins interview show. We did it. And they're going to have a sophisticated investor test, something I've been talking about for a long time that would really democratize the way Invest America has access. Um, and then funds. I've been getting pitched for years on, oh, put your fund on blockchain or sell your fund into this ETF. Maybe you could talk a little, Kelly, about the possibilities around venture funds being more tradable like secondaries are. Is that on your road map? Obviously, there's demand for it. What would that because I can tell you what that would do for my LPs, you know, Brad Chamat's LPs and and previous funds. If you could come in and out of these funds, the way you can come in and out of anthropic, my lord, that could be just incredible for folks who, I don't know, they have a divorce, they have a life event, you know, just a little more fluidity.

So, there's been there's been secondary fund trading for a long time. Um, I think blockchain and tokenization makes it more efficient. That world will will come. But the question we're asking ourselves now is if you're an LP in a fund that's holding something as valuable as this, uh, are are you really interested in trading your fund position or do you just want to get out of

the big winner, that name?

Um, and and our view is it's probably the latter. Um, and in some cases funds will come to us and say, "We've got a vintage fund that has two companies in it that are 15 years old and we can't clear that fund." And so that's that's an application of liquidity to the market that we think is coming to the market.

Are you are you worried at all over this next year about this idea of retail being exit liquidity for these three ginormous companies? like is is there any risk? Like how do you bucket the risk? How do you manage the risk? Yeah. What is the risk if something were to happen? What's the blowback?

I was talking with Brad about this yesterday. We're we're watching these valuations and these multiples. We had this conversation at dinner last night and saying, "Wow, these are these are extraordinary and people should come into this market." And

extraordinary is a coded word for

uh it's you know, it's okay fine. Um

it's a bubble. You're saying you're saying you think they're high the valuation.

I think the retail investor coming into this space needs to look down market and look at interesting opportunities that aren't the things that are on CNBC every day and have access to them earlier. And we had a bunch of retail investors show up in 2018 and 2019 that wanted to be in SpaceX and they're and they're thrilled that they got in when the valuation was 30 billion. Yeah. Um and I think if the market opens up, that's what we'll be talking about. what what's what what do I want to get into now that's not you know at the very very top of the market getting ready to go public

also Brad and Gavin we're getting better shout out to um Gurley we're getting better at pricing these IPOs and not leaving money on the table they're fully valued in most cases when they go public yeah or in some cases

they're still mispriced they're massively mispriced

nothing good that anybody wants

I mean listen anyway what what do you guys think is are we are we closer to correctly pricing them?

I mean Gav and I have been doing this 25 years. There are moments that the public market is undervalued relative to privates and moments where privates are undervalued relative to public. Right now everything in the world of technology is pretty fully valued, right? Like it's you can't have the parabolic moves we've had and think that everything is cheap. That's not to say that we're not going to go higher, but when you've been punched in the faces many times, as all of us have over the last 15 years in technology, we know it's a jagged line up and to the right. So for the retail investor, so long as they have staying power, so if if you're going to launch a product, as long as the retail investor can stay in that product through the draw down, they're going to do fine. The problem is most of them yolo at the top because everybody gets them all jimmied up and excited and so they're, you know, they're levering up. They're doing 2x levered, you know, memory trades and all this that Gav and I are. There are 14 ETFs launching on the day of the SpaceX IPO that are levered ETFs into SpaceX at like whatever 1.75 trillion. So, this just tells me that there's a lot of signal. We may not be at the top, but we ain't at the bottom. We're bouncing along. The top might be a fair, you know, you got to allocate accordingly. And that's what active management is about. If we do not if we're not thinking about that, when when people are puking into their garbage cans at the start of the Iran war and the market is down, Gavin and I are looking at each other and saying, "Good God, these anthropic revenues are off the charts. We got to get more dollars at risk. shove more onto the table in both anthropic and public market stocks. But then 75 days later, it's all changed. Right now, the market,

have you guys ever been in a market cycle [clears throat] where these moves are just so concentrated in time where you take like a year or two's worth of moves and you compress it into 30 days, 60 days?

I mean, this is nothing relative to 99 and 2000.

Nothing. This is nothing relative to that.

Like, I mean, describe describe. Yeah. Just package. Sometimes they wake up. What was 992000 like in terms of like a if this is a roller coaster, what was that?

Yeah. And what was that? I mean, I don't you know, this is this is this is like a uh this is a roller coaster that's um like kind of a gentle sinewave.

99 was Vegas on a Friday night after way too many drugs. Okay. Like it was out of control nuts. CMGI had no revenue and the stock went from $2 to $2,000 over the course of, you know, six months. They buy Foxboro Stadium. They're on the cover of Time magazine and they're out of business 2 years later, right? Like that is very different than Anthropic, Open AAI, and SpaceX. These are extraordinarily real businesses. So, I think the better compare is like 2021. Yeah.

Right. Where valuations get ahead of themselves or they're at the top end of the range. We could have a normal run-of-the-mill consolidation in the public markets in the semi-index of 10 or 20% which means high beta would be down 30 to 40% and a lot of people who just got in would be panicking right but the people who have been in for 6 months or 3 years would would would notice that that's just a blip. So I don't think it's at all like that.

Okay. I have a question for the three of you. Four. Yeah. Final question.

I have final question. Take the top 10 names private companies off. Okay. Forget those. You can't pick those. Give me a sub, you know, in the tens of billions, few hundred billion private company that you could buy today a secondary in that you do not own that you would want to own. I'll start with you, Brad. Just go around the horn. Something you don't own, but if you had the chance to buy a secondary, you would.

I mean, I take a company, you know, in that what I call inflection growth, Jamas. So, these are companies, the thousand companies that are over 3 billion, but let's call it sub50 billion. I think it's the trickiest area of the investing landscape. Um, because they're the beneficiaries of high valuations, yet they still have binary risk.

Right.

Right. Like Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceX, I don't think these companies have binary risk, but there are a lot in, you know, in that bucket that do. Um, and so I mean, we own most of the ones I want to own. I I I can't give you one that we don't. If I want to own it, I I generally own it.

It's a hard question. [laughter] I'll give you How about the last one you say?

I'd say like Sierra Brett Taylor's company. Um, you know, what do

they do?

So, they're building basically Salesforce agent native.

Got it.

So, sales, marketing, customer service agents that are agent native. I'll give you the downside and the upside. We also own a company called Parlo and the same space in Europe that I think is really interesting. downside open AI and anthropics say we're going to do this and all of a sudden it eviscerates their hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. The upside on on these businesses is that they actually have already built very sophisticated agentic layers and that all these guys Meta, Google, uh SpaceX come along and say we want to buy you because we want to accelerate our path into agent.

I I'll give you the name that I was convinced of today yesterday by um by Thomas Leant which was Revolute. You know, I had always the kind of like I had some early Jack like I owned some Coinbase, I owned some Robin Hood, we did all of that stuff. It was fine. Kind of ignored fintech and Thomas backstage gave me an incredibly we were together an incredibly compelling pitch for Revolute and and I and I actually went and I was like, "Okay, show me what the Revolute share prices in these secondary markets." I got kind of curious. Maybe I should pick up some that. So [snorts] that that would be my

What does Revolute do? Explain for the audience.

It's a bank. It's a bank. And what's interesting is it's a neo bank that has a completely next generation stack. kind of what Brad said is like that theme of you rebuild it in the modern era and you unbundle the incumbent that that has a lot of legs and in a regulated market that has a ton of legs and so you know they're doing really well in Europe they're coming to the United States the founder seems to be just an absolute star tens of millions of customers 14 lines of business they're like a billion curious like that I I have

Gavin do you have one that you've bought recently

no I would just say um well you know two names that um we've been involved in publicly is leading are Arya and Drivets and they're both in the networking space and basically as um data centers get more specialized and complicated you you're going to have increasingly specialized chips it's called the disagregation of inference and pre-fill and decode and to make all of these chips to work together like a symphony and have the kind of the right chip for the right job at the right time I do think we need to reinvent networking and Arya and driveets are coming at the in a very different way. And if you're an AI lab,

you've been one of the earliest. I'll give you credit. I think that you you you framed this on one of on a podcast that I saw, which is there is an impending super cycle in infra networking, silicon, and you've really been at the front of it. I buy into it completely now, too. Really, it's a really It's really good. It's really any names.

Uh Neuroobotics in Europe.

Neuroobotics is a company name.

Yes. and uh AI powered um logistics robotics.

Love it.

Um they're not in the main strip of high value real estate in Silicon Valley. They're in Germany. Uh quiet company, big investors, 100 million revenue, kicking ass.

Love it. Jason, well, I you know, I I have a couple of thesis uh that I've been looking at. One is what is Elon helping put into space as the price goes down. And so we did uh direct on the cap table and SPV for vast which is building space stations and we think they're going to win. The other one is what I'll just call Uber 2.0. You know, we girly and I took a lot of notes on that, Brad, as well. And so we were able to do zipline and we we put a small ticket size into zipline as well because if you can take the delivery cost down from $15 to five and then eventually two, that's going to just drive consumption massively and it's going to happen in the air. And these actual drones had such a false start that everybody gave up on the entire sector and now it works. And it was just a very simple innovation that Keller told me, which was it's the drone stays up in the air and drops a tether with the box in your burrito. If you grab the tether and you pull it, it just comes down. You don't have to land like this giant robot in your backyard with blades spinning to kill your dog.

Well, I think there's actually a very important like on Zipline. It's an amazing It has done great things for the world. Um so my my at trades is also uh in involved in zipline but zipline started so the hard thing is to make anything autonomous work you need to get it out in to the world and gathering real world data. This is how AI works and it's hard to get approval to fly things around um autonomously in American airspace. So Keller had the idea of we're going to go to African countries and we are going to de you know if a we're going to help or deliver medicines to these small villages and they focused on maternity and they have cut the maternal mortality rate in some of these African countries by 90 to 95%. And so you're in a small village, there's a one midwife, there's an app, a woman goes into labor, they press a button, and you know, an hour later, a zipline drone drops a refrigerated package of modern medicine, blood, and everything needed. They did it for seven years and it's had a huge impact on health outcomes in these African countries and now it's come to America.

I I this is an incredible story and I've basically now reconstructed my firm to do the barbell. I missed the seed investment. I turned him down because I was like, "We don't invest on that continent. We don't have any insight into it. We don't understand it and hardware is hard." And he has the email, whatever. And I've stayed in touch with him and he said, "Listen, I figured it out." And I said, "Hey, you know, I have the syndicate. Let me see if I can correct that mistake. May I invest?" He said, "I I you're my dream investor. I've wanted you on this whole time and it's just so important." Um, no. No. we've been friends for all this time and I've you know I have had him on the pod three times and he said when are you going to be on the cap table and I said you know what I learning from you guys specifically this late stage stuff I'm like well I can do that and here we are and

on that note

yes let's wrap up yes well done guys thank you so much thank you Kelly thank you

thank Thank you. [music] [music]