All-In Podcast: Inside the Private Stock Market Boom: SpaceX, Anthropic, OpenAI & the Rise of Secondaries

Sourced by podcast-ingest on 2026-06-08. Auto-transcribed via AssemblyAI (universal-2, en). Speakers identified by AssemblyAI Speaker Identification using the per-podcast host/regulars hints; the resulting label→name mapping is in the frontmatter. Duration: 39m. Episode page: https://allinchamathjason.libsyn.com/inside-the-private-stock-market-boom-spacex-anthropic-openai-the-rise-of-secondaries. Audio: https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/traffic.libsyn.com/secure/allinchamathjason/LIQ_MarketsPanel_Ch.mp3?dest-id=1928300.

Show notes (from RSS)

(0:00) Brad Gerstner, Gavin Baker, and Kelly Rodriques join the Besties! (0:47) Secondary Markets are Booming & Competing with IPOs (3:10) Why Companies are Staying Private So Long? (9:22) SPVs, the Forge-Schwab Deal, Democratizing Private Market Access (13:28) Secondary Markets as Exit Liquidity for VCs (27:00) The Private Market Bubble? (32:03) Hottest Secondary Companies Right Now

Transcript

Gavin Baker: Everybody wants access to these private markets right now.

Kelly Rodriguez: To discuss all of this is Kelly Rodriguez is the Forge CEO. We see a world where the 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%.

Jason Calacanis: Please join us in welcoming Gavin Baker, Managing partner and CIO of Atreides.

Gavin Baker: The ROI on AI has empirically, factually, unambiguously been possible. Investing is the search for truth.

Brad Gerstner: We welcome in Brad Gerstner.

Gavin Baker: It's good to be back with you. You have a program called Invest America.

Brad Gerstner: I think we have a historic moment right now to get everybody into the game of capitalism.

Jason Calacanis: We have a few slides from Brad to kick this off.

Gavin Baker: You know, let's start a little foxy slide.

Brad Gerstner: Like old times. Like old times. This panel, 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 secondary markets over the course of the last decade 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 chamath, we're in like five years, right, where a lot more is going in than is 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 Anduril 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 a level set how important secondaries 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 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. So a premium in the market as of Q1.

David Friedberg: And this doesn't include some of the wild west of SPVs that have been unraveled recently. People charging 10% load in fees, double carry and a lot of gray market off market 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 who are the buyers? Are the buyers the sucker at the table? Are these family offices high net worth individuals who keep hearing us talk about Anthropic or Space X or Anduril and they just say I have to own the name and they're not discerning. So Gavin, maybe you could start about the impact on the SpaceX employees you saw firsthand, etc.

Gavin Baker: Maybe broadening beyond SpaceX. I do just think if companies are going to be staying private longer, this is absolutely necessary. I think there are a lot of people who are very, very wealthy on paper, but actually cash poor. And if you're making tremendous sacrifices because 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,

David Friedberg: 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.

Brad Gerstner: Yeah.

Gavin Baker: Or you're 15. And so I think this is necessary and important. And whether it is good or bad, I think it is very clear that companies are going to stay private for longer.

Jason Calacanis: What's the reason to stay private longer? Truly,

Gavin Baker: I don't think there is actually a good reason to stay private longer.

Brad Gerstner: Hear, hear.

Jason Calacanis: I completely agree with you too.

Brad Gerstner: Yeah.

Gavin Baker: And I was.

David Friedberg: 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.

Gavin Baker: 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 Mark Zuckerberg's commentary that had he been Public. So just Facebook. I won't call it a near death experience, but long ago. It's difficult to believe, but I don't know. 2010, 11, 12, Facebook did not believe in apps. They believed in something called HTML6.5.

Jason Calacanis: HTML5.

Gavin Baker: HTML5. HTML5, yes. You were the actual expert.

Jason Calacanis: 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, HTML5. Zuck picked Brett spent the next three years unwinding that decision.

Gavin Baker: Absolutely. And Mark Zuckerberg, basically the idea was the iPhone comes out and initially there was not a big app ecosystem. And there was a thought that, hey, there's no need for apps. You're just gonna use the web browser on your phone. And HTML5 was a way 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. But it was not the future. It was wrong. And what Mark Zuckerberg has said, I think several times in public is he profoundly believes that had he been a public company when there was this internal debate between Chamath and Brett, and the

Jason Calacanis: 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 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.

Gavin Baker: Made all the difference. And he has said that had I had the constant pressure testing from public market investors, 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. 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. Once you're public, you're one of thousands of companies, and that's its own dynamic. But the consequence of this 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 said, had I been public, had I been getting rigorous, detailed questions from really smart public equity investors, I think I would have made the second

Jason Calacanis: unwritten story of that, which has never been said. He called me, he's like, hey, man, what the is going on over there? And I was like, yeah, I know, because 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 do these things.

David Friedberg: Well, this is a key point, I think, Gavin. 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 sycophantic nature of private markets is real now.

Gavin Baker: An exceptional CEO, Elon, seeks out negative

David Friedberg: feedback looking for that.

Gavin Baker: But not many actively discards, but not many CEOs maybe are wired that way. By the way, I do think we have to give Brad credit. Yeah, that was a very good deck. You sit back in 2012.

Jason Calacanis: No, because he did a second one.

Gavin Baker: He had to second one. He did the open letter to Zuckerberg at the end of.

Brad Gerstner: Was that at the end of 22, October 22nd.

Gavin Baker: What's called get fit. What was the time to get fit? Time to get fit. That was an impact. Those are two very impactful.

Jason Calacanis: Okay, so look, there's. 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 pushback. Anthropic is like, hey, 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?

David Friedberg: And have you had to dissolve any of the ones on your marketplace?

Kelly Rodriguez: No, look, I think that 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. You're not doing this.

Jason Calacanis: What do you mean when you say much less fun?

Kelly Rodriguez: Turning into an investment manager, primarily as a public company CEO is a very different job than being a visionary. Product first, 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 your private life. SpaceX, private company for 24 years. 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.

David Friedberg: 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?

Kelly Rodriguez: 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.

David Friedberg: How did that work? When you pitched him on that, were you.

Kelly Rodriguez: Well, I'll tell you, we got our first SPVs on SpaceX in 2018 and 2019.

David Friedberg: Was he okay with it?

Kelly Rodriguez: Absolutely, totally permissioned. And then as we got closer to the IPO, we said, guess what? We've got 30 million retail investors that would like to have a $50,000 slice of SpaceX. And he went out 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.

David Friedberg: Beautiful pitch.

Gavin Baker: This is actually a very effective pitch. I think a lot of these CEOs, they're a little bit ambivalent about, you know, I think they understand that maybe the institutions who are investing in these private rounds, 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 a lot of these CEOs.

David Friedberg: Well, because they're capitalists and they understand the power of equity. So, Brad, what is the downside then of. Because you're part of the Go Direct movement now. BG2 pod, officially fifth bestie, Gavin. Officially six bestie you got. That's Gavin. That's new news. We officially made you six bestie today.

Gavin Baker: But does that mean I'm definitively behind Brad? Because that's the real news.

David Friedberg: You're standing behind Brad. You're just giving him that big bear hug right behind him.

Brad Gerstner: Wow.

Gavin Baker: So are you saying I'm the big spoon?

David Friedberg: You're the big spoon now 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.

Jason Calacanis: Correct.

David Friedberg: 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. I mean, like 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.

Brad Gerstner: 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.

David Friedberg: Yes.

Brad Gerstner: 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.

David Friedberg: Yeah.

Brad Gerstner: 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 and then they come rushing in. That's right.

David Friedberg: They could be not so good cards.

Brad Gerstner: 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 100, I may put 30 to work today. I'm never going to pick the bottom, I'm never going to pick the top, but, but I certainly wouldn't be putting it all to work. And I'd say the same thing about late stage privates. People who are YOLOing into this stuff and then they feel really disappointed. Hold on a second. I bought the SpaceX IPO and it didn't go up 3x.

Jason Calacanis: Let me ask you then, 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, let me send it to my LPs and just call it a day.

Brad Gerstner: We are selling into this.

Jason Calacanis: You're selling into this, Right?

Brad Gerstner: So I have LPs in this room who say, listen, we invested in your VC5 or VC6, seven or eight years ago. If you can go sell a slice of that at 4 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 ventureland. 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 if we're going to stay private for longer and we're going to have trillion dollar private companies and databricks at $200 billion, you got to think about is today a day we should be selling some and returning it to our investors.

Jason Calacanis: Because it create though, 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.

Brad Gerstner: Well no, in the, in the private.

Jason Calacanis: Sorry, in the publics, nobody knows.

Brad Gerstner: Exactly, yeah, publics, 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 Chamath. They're always like, we Wish you wouldn't do that. They don't want it known, etc. Yeah, but my job as a fiduciary to the LPs in this field is to do that.

David Friedberg: 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 ma and we saw in the presentation yesterday that during the wrath of Lina Kahn there was no MA 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 pursuit, selling into every chance we get because our average Investment is at 10 to 20 million dollars 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. 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 ZURP 2021, they begged me, Jake, how you have to be loyal to us. You can't sell Parsu. And I said, you guys are clearing 40 million of the $110 million round. I'm just asking to be next to you, same amount.

Jason Calacanis: 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 asked my cfo, he calls five guys, they then my fund cfo, she calls like four. You know, it's like ticket brokers.

Kelly Rodriguez: Yes.

Jason Calacanis: 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 agita from the CEO. It's gotta be easier than this. Like.

Kelly Rodriguez: Yes. Yeah. Look, 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 three 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 the

Jason Calacanis: Way to be specific. What do you mean? Like we would be plugging into Schwab's 30 million humans that are buying stuff on Schwab?

Kelly Rodriguez: Yes, there's a platform. We brought a platform with about 3 million investors and now we're going to add 46 million investors to that.

David Friedberg: Wait, hold on a second. Aren't those a. Are those accredited invested or do they need to be? Because you just had the chair of the SEC on.

Kelly Rodriguez: 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 unaccredited $500 minimums. And that capital for those funds will

David Friedberg: be the underlying closed end funds.

Kelly Rodriguez: These are interval funds.

David Friedberg: Interval funds.

Brad Gerstner: Robin's got one out now.

David Friedberg: I think Naval just did us VC as one of these. He's going to contribute.

Kelly Rodriguez: Now the closed end funds are a very different bet because you're betting on fomo. Because if you look at the underlying value of some of the assets in 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 VCs, 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.

Jason Calacanis: 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 shit. So walk us through how people will sort through that and the reality of what's going to happen in the next year.

Gavin Baker: Well, so I think there's two very important things. One I observe, if you're a venture firm and you do not have material exposure to one of these trillion dollar plus companies that you had many, many chances to buy into, 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 there's exceptions, great series A firms, they may not have this, but their returns are still amazing with great dpi, 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, hey, top quintile, top turtile tercel.

David Friedberg: So they're doing unnatural action.

Gavin Baker: They're doing unnatural things. They're writing what I see as call options like a bunch of these 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 are being a lot more disciplined because they know they're in a great position. I think another very important dynamic is going to happen in the world of long only mutual funds and crossover funds. So long only mutual funds. My former employer, Fidelity. Amazing place. Love it. Bailey Gifford Capital Research, Wellington T. Rowe. 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 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. Baillie Gifford was forced to sell SpaceX last year for regulatory reasons. And what's going to happen has 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 lockup expires, it moves out of that bucket.

David Friedberg: Nice.

Gavin Baker: 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.

David Friedberg: It's a lot of dry powder.

Gavin Baker: There's a lot of dry powder.

Jason Calacanis: The net trade is up. Then the marginal trade is the founders

David Friedberg: are going to be in the catbird 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 all ins 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. 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 roadmap? Obviously there's demand for it what would that.

Brad Gerstner: Because I can tell you what that

David Friedberg: would do for my LPs, you know, Brad Chamath's LPs 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.

Kelly Rodriguez: So there's been, there's been secondary fund trading for a long time. I think blockchain and tokenization makes it more efficient. That world 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, are you really interested in trading your fund position or do you just want to get out of the big winner that name? And our view is it's probably the latter. 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 an application of liquidity to the market that we think is coming to the market.

Jason Calacanis: Are you worried at all over this next year about this idea of retail being exit liquidity for these three ginormous companies? Like, is there any risk? Like, how do you bucket the risk? How do you manage the risk? What is the risk? If something were to happen, what's the blowback?

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

Jason Calacanis: And not extraordinary is a coded word for elevating.

Kelly Rodriguez: Okay, fine.

David Friedberg: It's a bubble. Call it what it is.

Jason Calacanis: You're saying you think they're high the valuation?

Kelly Rodriguez: 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 thrilled that they got in when the valuation was 30 billion. I think if the market opens up, that's what we'll be talking about. What do I want to get into now that's not at the very, very top of the market getting ready to go.

David Friedberg: Also, Brad and Gavin, we're getting better shout out to girly. 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.

Jason Calacanis: Oh, they're still mispriced. They're massively mispriced.

David Friedberg: Well, no, we have seen some that have gone down, you know, after they go out.

Jason Calacanis: So, you know, nothing good that anybody wants.

David Friedberg: I mean, listen, anyway, what do you guys think? Is it.

Brad Gerstner: Are we.

David Friedberg: Are we closer to correctly pricing them?

Brad Gerstner: I mean, Gavin 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 face as 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 investors, 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 drawdown, 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. They're doing 2x levered memory trades and all this shit that Gavin 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.

David Friedberg: We're bouncing along the top.

Brad Gerstner: 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, have you guys ever been

Jason Calacanis: in a market cycle 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.

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

Jason Calacanis: Nothing.

Gavin Baker: This is nothing relative to that.

Jason Calacanis: Like, I mean describe, describe times. Yeah, because sometimes they wake up.

David Friedberg: It was 99, 2000. Like in terms of, of like if this is a roller coaster. What was that?

Gavin Baker: Yeah, what was that? I mean, I don't. You know, this is, this is, this is like a, this is a roller coaster that's like kind of a gentle sine wave.

Jason Calacanis: Yes.

Gavin Baker: Fun.

Brad Gerstner: 99 was Vegas on a Friday night after way too many drugs.

Gavin Baker: Yes.

Jason Calacanis: Okay.

Brad Gerstner: 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.

David Friedberg: Quite a big buy.

Brad Gerstner: Foxborough Stadium, they're on the COVID of Time magazine and they're out of business two years later. Right. Like that is very different than anthropic OpenAI and SpaceX. They're extraordinarily real businesses. So I think the better Compare is like 20, 21. 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. But the people who've been in for six months or three years would notice that that's just a blip. So I don't think it's at all likely.

Jason Calacanis: Okay, I have a question for the three of you. Final question, final question. Take the top ten 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 and 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 secondary, you would.

Brad Gerstner: I mean I take a company, you know, in that, what I call inflection growth jama. So these are companies, the thousand companies that are over 3 billion, but let's call it sub 50 billion. I think it's the trickiest area of the investing landscape because they're the beneficiaries of high valuations, yet they still have binary risk.

Jason Calacanis: Right, right.

Brad Gerstner: Like Anthropic OpenAI, Space X I don't think these companies have binary risk but there are a lot in, you know, in that bucket that do. And so I mean we own most of the ones I want to own. I can't give you one that we don't.

Gavin Baker: Well, one was if I want to own it, I generally own it.

Jason Calacanis: It's a hard question. I'll give you.

David Friedberg: How about the last one?

Brad Gerstner: I'll give you one I'd say like Sierra, Brett Taylor's company, 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 in the same space in Europe that I think is really interesting downside. OpenAI and Anthropic 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 these businesses is that they actually have already built very sophisticated agentic layers and that all these guys, Metta, Google, SpaceX come along and say we want to buy you because we want to accelerate our path into agent.

Jason Calacanis: I'll give you the name that I was convinced of today, yesterday by, by Thomas Lafont which was Revolut. You know, I had always the kind of like I had some early explain what they did. 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 Revolut and, and I, and I actually went and I was like okay, show me what the Revolut share price is in these secondary markets. I got kind of curious. Maybe I should pick up some that so that, that would be my.

David Friedberg: What does Revolut do? Explain for the audience.

Jason Calacanis: 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 they're doing really well in Europe, they're coming to the United States. The founder seems to be just an absolute star.

Brad Gerstner: Tens of millions of customers, 14 lines of business. They're like a billion dollars.

Jason Calacanis: I'm curious about that.

David Friedberg: I like that. Gavin, do you have one that you've bought recently?

Gavin Baker: No, I would just say, well, two names that We've been involved in publicly as leading are ARIA and Drivenets and they're both in the networking space and basically has data centers get more specialized and complicated, you're going to have increasingly specialized chips. It's called the disaggregation of inference and pre fill and decode. And to make all of these chips 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 ARIA and Drivenets are coming at the problem in a very different way. And if you're an AI lab, you've

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

Kelly Rodriguez: Neurorobotics in Europe.

David Friedberg: Neurorobotics is a company name.

Kelly Rodriguez: Yes. And AI powered logistics robotics.

David Friedberg: Love it.

Kelly Rodriguez: They're not in the main strip of high value real estate in Silicon Valley. They're in Germany. Quiet company, big investors, 100 million revenue, kicking ass.

David Friedberg: Love it. Jason? Well, I have a couple of thesis that I've been looking at. One is what is Elon Musk helping put into space as the price goes down? And so we did 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 put a small ticket size into zipline as well because if you can take the delivery cost down from $15 to $5 5 and then eventually 2, 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 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 like this giant robot in your backyard with blade spinning to kill your dog.

Gavin Baker: Well, I think there's actually a very important like on zipline. It's an amazing. It has done great things for the world. So my Atreides is also involved in zipline, but zipline started. So the hard thing is to make anything autonomous work. You need to get it out into the world and gathering real world data. This is how AI works. And it's hard to get approval to fly things around autonomously in American airspace. So Keller had the idea of, we're going to go to African countries and we are going to help or deliver medicines to these small villages and villages. And they focused on maternity, and they have cut the maternal mortality rate in some of these African countries by 90 to 95%. 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 an hour later, a zipline drone drops a refrigerated package of Modern medicine, blood and everything.

David Friedberg: He did it for seven years.

Gavin Baker: And it's had a huge impact on health outcomes in these African countries. And now it's come to America.

David Friedberg: 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's 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 this syndicate. Let me see if I can correct that mistake. May I invest? He said, you're my dream investor. I've wanted you on this whole time and it's just so important. No, no. We've been friends for all this time, and 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 off? I'm like, well, I can do that. And here we are.

Jason Calacanis: And on that note. Yes, let's wrap up.

Gavin Baker: Yes.

David Friedberg: Well done, guys. Thank you so much, Gavin.

Jason Calacanis: Thank you, Kelly. Thank you, Brad.

Gavin Baker: Thank you, thank you.