Chamath Palihapitiya — Venture capitalist and engineer, founder and CEO of Social Capital, and a former early senior executive at Facebook. He is also a co-host of the All-In Podcast.
The gist
Chamath opens with the physical and psychological abuse of his childhood on welfare in Ottawa and the decades-long process of forgiving his late father. The conversation moves through his core life framework, that success is simply making fewer mistakes than the other player and treating mistakes as fast learning loops. He discusses lessons from scaling Facebook, the meaning and limits of 'move fast and break things,' and his big investment thesis that the marginal cost of energy and compute are both heading to zero. He and Lex steel-man both sides of contentious topics including de-platforming Trump and the Kanye West controversy, then turn personal again on divorce, friendship, his daily regimented routine, building teams, and what advice he would give a young person fighting the feeling of being 'less than.'
Big reveals
- Describes being forced as a child to fetch the tree branch his father would beat him with, learning to judge how far it could bend before breaking.
- Says the 'dam broke loose' when he lost his best friend and his father within a six-month period, ending decades of compartmentalizing.
- Claims he has 'tried a hundred and back' and even '400' on the happiness scale of escalating wealth, and happiness isn't there.
- Argues the marginal cost of energy and the marginal cost of compute are both going to zero, which will let AGI emerge over 10-15 years.
- Predicts 100 million American homes will each become their own power plant and compete with the roughly 1,700 utilities.
- Says Trump should NOT have been removed from Twitter, calling the de-platforming a 'rigged game' with no scientific method behind it.
- When asked if he'd trust himself with absolute power, says no: 'I'm still riddled with bias... I don't deserve that position.'
- His central advice: 'We are all equal,' and the lifelong fight is against the inner demon telling you that you are less than others.
Things worth remembering
- His parents bought a discounted Loblaws cheesecake (marked down from $7.99 to $4.99) just once a year, and it felt like everything.
- Cites a study claiming the maximal link between money and happiness tops out around $50 million.
- Says he coined the term 'data scientist' at Facebook to lure a Google PhD who refused a 'data analyst' title.
- Facebook's first scaled machine-learning feature was PYMK ('People You May Know'), built on simple table joins of harvested address books.
- Frames 'move fast and break things' as societal language for 'make mistakes as quickly as you can.'
- Argues utilities are monopolies hiding in plain sight; upgrading US power lines is roughly a $2 trillion, decade-long proposition.
- Notes US interest payments next year will be about $455 billion, roughly 29 cents of every discretionary budget dollar.
- Calls Fed Chair Jerome Powell the most important figure in the world for preventing war, because non-zero rates make long wars unaffordable.
- His firm's ratio of winners to losers over 11 years is 23 to 1, and he aims for near-zero correlation with other top VCs.
- References Steve Jobs's last words ('oh wow, oh wow, oh wow') as his model for an awesome way to die.