Robinhood Venture Fund, Polymarket adds earnings, and LAUNCH Accelerator 35 is here! | E2178

29:06Sure. This comes from your conversation with the Secretary of Energy, I believe, Mr. Chris Wright. Round two. Round two. Round two. Yeah. This went viral on social media. Yeah. And I pulled some data to help us understand the argument, but here, let's hear from both you and the Secretary. Okay, here we go. The solar supply chain. And think about this. Is that why you guys are down on it, that we would have to buy the solar panels from them? Because it seems like you're looking backwards and China's looking forward. That's where the disconnect is coming for me. But there's no there there. There's no there in solar and batteries.

29:45So Elon Musk has it completely wrong. He has a wildly exaggerated view of where solar and batteries will go. And if we could make a bet 50 years out, I'll make a bet, solar never gets to 10 % of global energy. Solar has a future. And so after 30 years of subsidies, maybe it should fly on its own as an energy source. It has roles. There's remote power. In the United Arab Emirates, they're building a firmed one gigawatt solar, eight gigawatts of panels and a ton of batteries. They've got great sun resources. They have low cost labor. They can build things there. Solar has a role. But we've had this inflated role that somehow the world is going to run on solar panels.

30:26There's no math that shows that'll ever happen. And China doesn't believe it for a moment. But think of the great... Why are they installing three times as many as us per capita then? And why are they so effective at installing nuclear power plants? Like, this is what I'm... I don't know if you're gaslighting us, no pun intended. Like, and this is just like a Trump-Maga thing where we have to dis natural sources. But do you really want to dig coal out and burn it and pollute the environment that we're giving to our kids? I want energy to better human lives and the cost and reliability of electricity and energy sources.

31:00The other thing we should say, electricity delivers 20 percent of global energy. Wrap the panel and wrap the whole planet in a solar panel. You've got 20 percent of energy delivered. Where's the other 80 percent going to come from? It's process heat. It's it's transportation fuels to run jets, to run ships. That's not going to come from solar. So, Jason, what's going on in there? Here's what your first reactions are to it. I mean, I was trying to make a point about just the approach this administration is taking and trying to parse out what is their actual beliefs versus what is political posturing.

31:39One of the things I've learned through being pulled into the political arena against my will is that politicians will sometimes say things that don't match their actual reality, whether it's a Republican, a Democrat, or anybody in between. And I felt like when speaking to Chris the two times I have, there was this over-indexing on clean, beautiful coal, clean, beautiful coal, clean, beautiful coal. And in fact, President Trump made a joke that sometimes people were saying it too much and not enough emphasis and an actual dissing of solar and batteries. And when you look at the Chinese and what they're doing, or you look at what's happening here in Texas, the great state of Texas, people are voting with their dollars to install solar that is not even subsidized.

32:31Why? It's cheaper to install solar than it is to install clean coal. So the idea that we're going to burn more coal rather than put in solar, rather than invest in nuclear, just seems illogical. And so all due respect to the secretary, I believe there's a little bit of politics in this. and that Elon and the Chinese have it right. So if that's the case, you'd have to wonder why. Typically when there's a little bit of this cognitive dissonance, my take on it is special interests are at work or are being appeased. And so perhaps we were appeasing, you know, solar and renewables, wind, geothermal, and all of that in the Biden administration.

33:22And we are subsidizing it too much. And we're all going to be up to our ankles in water. And like, obviously those predictions of global warming never came true. We're in terms of like crazy weather patterns, but secretary Wright does agree that global warming is a real trend, just not a cataclysmic one. So far, we haven't had cataclysmic flooding of the places people claimed would be underwater. So I don't think we need to be precious about which energy sources we go with in the short to midterm, but I do think we need to be honest about the long-term. And the long-term is nuclear, solar, and batteries.

34:04That is the winning combination. Anything other than that is a short-term solution. and I would rather see us have leadership in Washington that can say that. And I feel like they don't say it consistently enough. So I just wanted to just tackle it head on and, you know, we'll continue the debate. Well, that's very polite, Jason. That was a very, very, I thought you were going to come out a little bit more swinging because I think maybe I'm more extreme than you here. Like nuclear for baseload, good. And then solar plus batteries for variable. I mean, my God, why can't we just do that and not have extraneous CO2 emissions that are causing problems?

34:42I'm a little bit more worried about climate change than the secretary, but I'm also, you know, as you said in your thing, worried about what we're leaving to our kids. And building more coal-fired power plants is not a good thing to do if you care about that. Pollution is, I think, the easiest way for people to understand why we shouldn't be using these things. If you lived in a major city where you had a lot of carbon emissions, you have years taken off your life, whether it's Shanghai or Los Angeles in the 70s, 80s, and 90s in that smog cloud. And so the fact is this stuff is dirty. And if it's dirty and it takes years off your life and you have a haze cloud above your city, that's a good enough reason to go with these other solutions.

35:28You can also see evidence in what poor people are doing around the world and what rigorous, independent people are doing here in the United States. People who are rigorous and independent, resilient individuals on ranches, on farms, at their homes, people who have a couple of acres of land, they're all putting in solar. Why? Yes. They want to be independent of the grid, which will be increasingly unreliable as demands increase and the government's incompetent. And it's just nice to be independent because you also get the benefit of lower costs. In India, people are buying cheap solar panels and cheap batteries off of, you know, like Amazon and installing them in their homes.

36:15So if poor people and then rugged individualists in Texas are embracing this technology, not because of subsidies, they're just buying it on Amazon without a subsidy. That tells you something. And so I will be proven correct here. Solar is the future. And we will eventually realize that, build solar factories here. And somebody with vision like Elon will build a solar factory in Nevada. and they'll buy a bunch of land around Nevada or Arizona. And what they will do is the solar panels will come back, come out of the back of a factory, Alex, I predict. And somebody will walk them out and put them in the ground or a robot like Optimus will go, put four screws in and then go back to the factory, grab another one and walk it five feet further and go.

37:09And that'll be happening 24 hours a day with an Optimus robot and cheap solar panels, and they'll be digging the minerals and everything they need on that same site and making them and deploying them. Cool for me. And then running cables to the rest of the country to get that energy out there. And so I don't mind us using short-term fossil fuels to bridge to this new future, but I do think as a country, I don't mind subsidizing sustainable, clean energy. I would like there to be no incentive to install coal, oil, and natural gas. And I would like to see incentives, moderate, modest, to accelerate the deployment of renewables, not to a level that it's absurd, but just enough to make people lean a little faster towards it.

38:04This administration thinks different. That's something we could bring to the voting booths in the future. Yeah, well, we're not going to get into the one big, beautiful bill and its impacts on renewable energy versus coal. But I'll just say this. There is a company called TerraBase, T-E-R-A-B-A-S-E, on the Twist 500, that is working on building solar technology for what they call the terawatt era. And just a couple of data points before we move on. Jason, in 2015, global solar photovoltaic was about 1 % of total electricity generation. By 2024, it was about 7%. And if you convert that to total global energy usage, it's about 1 % to 2 % last year.

38:40So I can see that getting to above 10 % in 50 years, no matter how we draw the number. So I would say the secretary here is talking someone else's book, which is a little bit disappointing, but we can move on. It is what it is. And we probably over-subsidized in the past and gave the renewable energy a too big of an advantage, and now it's swinging the other way. hopefully we get there to a place where just the economics are undeniable. The economics are kind of undeniable. It would be great to show a chart here. If somebody could pull it up, maybe producer Claude can help me out because they are so fast at this.

39:16The declining price of solar panels. And if you look at the cost of solar panels from, let's just say the nineties to now, and producer Claude will have this information in just a moment. We can even pull up the producer Claude screen and just show how amazing Anthropic is at doing these kind of things. I really respect that company, by the way. They've just been doing a great job. All right, Jason, here's what our producing team sent over to us. I think this is actually from our world in data. Claude would have taken an extra second, and we're on a short show today, but here we are. Solar panel costs have fallen by about a fifth for every doubling of cumulative global capacity.

39:49As we build more, prices go down. As you can see from this chart, it used to cost over$100 to get a single watt of power from solar. Now that's about a penny. Yeah. So this will keep declining to a point of, my gosh, it's almost going to be like we're giving these solar panels away. We're going to be giving these things away soon. They will be like, you know, coolers. When you go to the store, they would give you a styrofoam cooler for free when you bought a 12 pack. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's going to be kind of like that. They're just going to be like, hey, would you like some solar panels?

40:29And if you go on Amazon, people are buying these things for, you know, solar plus battery from Anchor for a couple of thousand dollars. It's unbelievable how quickly this is all happening. All right, Jason, here is the Claude chart that you requested. And it also came with a bunch of other data points that are quite interesting. So if you look here, Claude writes that there's been a 99.8 % total price reduction in solar panel prices on a per watt basis since 1975. Hell yes, technology is what I have to say to that. Absolutely. All right, let's keep going. Just incredible data. All right, next up, Jason, Alphabet reached$3 trillion in market cap, becoming, I believe, the fourth company ever to do so, coming in just behind NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Apple, ahead of Amazon, Meta, Broadcom, Aramco, and so forth.

41:17I remember writing a post maybe five, seven years ago about the first group of the kind of mag seven back then it's called the big five reaching three trillion total in market cap as a combined unit kind of nuts to me today that we're seeing so much value here so uh why well alphabet shares are up 21 in the last month in the last half year 48 in the last year 57 google's going nuts jason i presume you're sitting pretty on a couple shares yeah i'm pulling up my Robin Hood right now. Gosh, I'm getting a ton of dividends on this stock. I bought, let's see, March 18th, 2023, I bought a thousand shares at a hundred.

41:58And on December 6th, 2023, so this is two years ago, I bought another thousand shares at 130. That$230 ,000 in Google shares I day traded are now worth in two years. Drum roll. God, I mean, they're now worth$268 ,000. I'm up 115 % in two years. How did I make this trade? It's very simple. It was a very simple trade. They have deep mind. They created a lot of the Marden LLMs. The idea that they wouldn't be able to make the transition through search moving to answers, I thought was farcical. Why? Because in conversations I had with Sergey and Larry 10 and 20 years ago, they said, at some point when you do a search, we'll just give you the answer.

42:54And I watched over 20 years as they went from the 10 blue links to when you typed in Uber stock price, it would just give you the stock price. Just give you the answer. Just give me the answer. And they know what they're doing. However, a lot of people didn't believe this. I think sometimes the pie gets bigger. In other words, if you put more ride-hailing cars on the road and the prices go down, consumption goes up. Consumption is not fixed. Consumption can increase. The number of people who were using the web when it was dial-up was de minimis. It was low hundreds of millions. Now it's billions.

43:37And it was because it became broadband. Not only did we see 10 times as many people go online, or maybe 20 times as many people go online between those two eras, they started doing a hundred times the activity. Why? Because it was faster. It was better. It was cheaper. Faster, better, cheaper. Faster, better, cheaper. I think Google is firing on all cylinders. And I don't know if you saw it over the weekend, And Gemini became the number one downloaded app in the world. I don't love the name Gemini, but I do love the product and I do love Notebook LM. I make my decisions on the management teams and the products they're releasing.

44:18When I see a management team releasing products as good as Gemini and Notebook LM, a sleeper inside that company, and I see their focus level, and I see Sergey going back to the office when, you know, let's face it, Sergey's got an incredible life and he likes to, you know, go wakeboarding or whatever else, but he loves coming to the office because this is so exciting. It was obvious to me, they would figure out this transition. Doesn't mean they're out of the woods yet. It just does mean they were undervalued. And, you know, people like Nate Silver, you know, uh i'll just sorry nate but here is a nate silver tweet i was unable to replicate this they need to shut gemini down it is several months away from being ready for prime time it's astounding that google released it in this state i don't know the date of this was that february 2024 and the uh the reason why i grabbed this particular uh tweet jason is because uh he had prompted gemini who negatively impacted society more elon tweeting memes or hitler and uh gemini which was clearly programmed in this case to not take a position on anything said it's not really possible to say precisely who was worse and he's like this is terrible to take it down but that was a year and a half ago yes right that was not that long shortly after i made my shortly after i made my trade i might point out yeah but also there were other detractors as well here's a fortune headline from someone that everyone's heard of, former CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt.

45:47He says that Google's struggling on AI because they decided their work-life balance was more important than winning. Put your pitchforks down, everybody. He doesn't work there anymore. But that was the sentiment in the market that Google had missed the trick. They had dropped the ball. They were behind the curve. We'll pick your analogy. But it was brutal. I mean, OpenAid was running circles around them. And I think, Jason, what really peeved people was the original attention is all you need paper came from most of Googlers. So why did they miss? And now here they are. And, you know, they took steps to change their culture.

46:18If you're up against a bunch of lunatic startups going 996 and you've got a bunch of people working from home four hours a day, Eric Schmidt was right. Sergey got back in the office. People started taking, you know, working at Google more like working at a startup. So I give them a lot of credit for having a sense of urgency. And at a big company, there's a very simple way to do this. I hate to sound like a cutthroat capitalist, but - Oh, here it comes. You start firing 10 ,000 people and saying, come back to the office and start lighting a fire under people, you will see a dramatic shift. And that's what all these big companies did.

47:03Meta, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon decided that the cultures they had created and enabled were ones of entitlement. Massive compensation without massive effort. If you want to work at these companies now, you can't lollygag. And you know what? Sometimes, I'm sorry if it sounds a little bit cutthroat, but sometimes the leaders of companies need to put their foot down and say, we're going for this. If you don't want to work this amount, if you don't want to be compensated phenomenally, this is not the company for you. Andy Jassy, Sundar, Satya, everybody has realized in-person work beats a team working from home, Period.

47:56Full stop. The end. And so that's the change that's occurred. I give Eric Schmidt, and I challenged him on this at the All In Summit, was my first question to him. His first question on stage was that video that Stanford took down. He saw it clearly because he was at Novell. He was at Google. He understands hard work and in-person work, and that kind of culture will beat a work from home culture every day of the week. all right next up alex is like does that mean i have to come to the office no alex i have volunteered to fly down to austin a dozen times that's because you love barbecue i know no actually to the contrary it's because i want to go play play a lot of poker in texas that's what i want let's do it we'll go over to see my friend doug polk at the lodge that's literally where i want to go because um good friend of mine brad brad's a uh shareholder there and i love brad um okay Next up, Robinhood's newly publicly traded venture capital fund.

48:55So this is a little bit of a strange one, Jason. I think we can unpack this for people. So Robinhood announced a thing called Robinhood Ventures Fund 1. It's going to be a publicly traded, closed-end fund that is designed to give ordinary investors, you don't have to be accredited, access to private market companies. The thing that I'm a little bit uncertain about is what companies are they going to put into this fund? because if you go to the Robinhood explainer page, it says, do you want to join the fund? Are you a company? Send us an email. So I'm trying to sort out exactly what Robinhood's going to do.

49:27I don't think it's fully clear. The idea is concentrated positions in leading startups, but at least they're trying to do this. Your thoughts, Jason. Kathy Wood did one of these closed-end funds. I have been pitched on it. I did take a look at it. I haven't done it yet, but there's the ARK Innovation ETF. So you create these funds. You can buy into them. The fund then goes and acquires shares, either secondary or primary from previous investors and employees, et cetera. And you get access to these in a basket. It's a great idea. The reason I never sold a share of Robinhood is because Vlad is a product genius and he listens to his users.

50:08I just did the closing fireside chat with Vlad at the Robinhood Summit. We had, it was supposed to be like me interviewing him and then him maybe asking me a couple of questions, but he used the time to just ask me a bunch of questions and it kind of flipped, which was fine and charming. But they keep figuring out new ways to engage their customers. They added crypto, they added prediction markets, they added this closed end fund. Innovation beats stagnation any day of the week. The reason why, when I, again, purchased Robinhood as a private investor, the reason I invested was the leadership and their product velocity.

50:49And that's how, when we went through the launch accelerator class at the top of the show, that's how I picked these companies, product velocity, builders running the company, and delighted customers, and that product velocity, which of course delights customers. They've only gotten faster. Robinhood's gotten faster at producing great products. They're leaving everyone in the dust. I mean, that's actually something that I very much agree with, because they announced tokenized private shares a couple months back and then a little controversy about how they were getting their open nice stock, you know, SPVs and so forth.

51:23It's always going to be a little bit complicated, but at least they were really trying new things. And then it feels like the drop of a hat later. Here we are with this entirely new offering. Two things to keep in mind. One, there are some publicly traded venture capital funds. So Molten Ventures over in the UK, for example, is a publicly listed venture capital fund with a permanent capital base, which is an interesting model. Hasn't really taken off around the world, but there are some examples of that. And then Jason, speaking about making wagers on things involving companies, did you hear what Polymarket is building?

51:53They are building prediction markets for earnings. Yes. Yes, my friend, this just came out. How did I not know about this? I think this dropped today. We were very busy news cycle for a Monday, but this is the, if you're on the audio version, I'm showing the Polymarket earnings calendar, which shows what people think is gonna happen on a percentage basis. So if you click into, let's say, I think this is FedEx right here. What do we got? They have a 60 % chance that they are going to beat its quarterly EPS estimate. Yes, Jason, I knew you'd love this. Look at that. I mean, what would be great about this for me is, you know, I can now hedge my Uber shares, my new bank shares, et cetera.

52:33So I could say, hey, listen, I'm sitting on all this Robinhood. I'm sitting on these Google shares. I'm concerned they're not going to hit earnings. so I can essentially hedge against my holdings. Or I could say, you know what? I have a feeling based on my tracking of these companies, they're going to crush it. I believe in management. I believe in these new products. So if I were to look at Robinhood and Robinhood, if they came up here on Polymarket, I might say, you know what? I'm gonna put$10 ,000 that they beat their earnings, right? Because I believe in the company and maybe I can make an extra, you know, whatever, 5K.

53:09I love prediction markets. I am all in. Polymarket will be available to American traders very soon. And I have been on the side playing around with this. On Saturday night, I bet on the underdog Crawford, I think was his name, in that fight on Netflix. I bought - Oh, the Canelo Crawford fight. Yes. I put 32 cents on it. And then I got to watch during the fight each round. I watched them. I watched a change from him being the underdog at 32, hit 38 cents, 50 cents, 60 cents, 70 cents. And I could close out at any time my position, which is really interesting when you think about that, Alex. I could have just locked it in and said, you know, in case Canelo hits a knockout punch, I'm willing to take my 40 cents as opposed to my full 70 cents.

54:02then i was talking to editorial director lon harris and he told me we were just talking about the emmys and he's been saying the pit the pit the pit's gonna win uh over um severance and so i was like okay i'll put a thousand dollars on the pit at 38 cents boom i make my quick 600 bucks lon also now becoming a degenerate uh gambler he puts he put a hundy on it what have you done to poor Lon. No, he, this is Lon's wheelhouse. He understands this better than anybody. He's got an edge. He's my sharp. I'm going to bet on every single bet he gives me because he's my sharp. You know, in that movie where he says, meet my quant, he doesn't speak English.

54:46Oh, I know what you're talking about. That's, that's my Lon. He's my quant when it comes to entertainment. I'm my own quant when it comes to some other things like technology and earnings. You might be my earnings quant, actually. We got to have a little conversation next time these things come up. And then I also put Andor was trading at two cents. So what I basically did was I faded, I faded severance. Now, listen, I love my guy, Ben Stiller. I love severance, but I thought they're going to sweep so many other categories. They're over-indexing a bit here. The pit's a bit of a phenomenon. People can't shut up about it.

55:24Lon gave me his inside take on it. that the people who were inside, who vote on these things really did love that show. And Severance was a hit amongst other elites, but he thought that that was underpriced. And I think this is gonna get everybody to start thinking in bets, like Annie Duke says in her book. And if you can start thinking of everything in the world as bets, you can have a better life. Because if you're not willing to wager on it, you're really not paying attention enough. the reason I love investing in the public markets and on startups is it makes me sharper it makes me think more rigorously because I have money at stake yeah also a great way to save the award shows which I've seen declining viewership in the last 10 years if everyone's betting on them they're going to turn into spectator sports so precisely I can see a lot of stuff looking more like that well and the reason I used to like listening to the Oscars was I would be in a betting pool.

56:25They would do these at offices, and I think we did them sometimes at Mahalo, et cetera, where everybody would put in 50 bucks or 100 bucks, and you would do these things. It just does make it more entertaining. And I got to tell you, I watched that fight on Saturday night until the end. Why? Because I had a vested interest in it, and it just makes it more engaging. So I like this new addition. I also like the fact that it gives you something to do over the weekend. You trade stocks during the week, the stock market closes. And then you got something on Friday. Did we just talk about how everyone should go outside a little bit more?

57:05I don't think we need to be preparing our, our Monday earnings, but maybe we do. Maybe we do. I mean, I'm trying to go outside more. That's what I'm saying. Yeah. I mean, listen, I was outdoors. I was on the ranch making these wagers on my phone. So you can still be out and about. Um, And you can make very small wagers. You can make a$10 wager, a$20 wager. You can make a wager that's less than your monthly Netflix. But let's say you make one that's, you know, you have real conviction and you have an edge. You can pay for your whole Netflix. I think it makes everybody think sharper and it gets people more engaged, gets people reading more, doing more analysis, and just being a better predictor of the future.

57:46I love it. I love it. Yeah. I think I agree with like 90 % of that. The 10 % you don't is what? Just my concern about addictive gambling. I mean, do you think addictive gambling is what? 5 % or 10 % of the population kind of fall down that where they get too into it? Yeah, something like that. I mean, so the analogy here is sports. I think, Jason, I have a lot of friends that love to play small sports bets. Your five$10 wagers on X, Y, and Z for their favorite teams. They watch the games anyways. They have a lot of fun with it. I've also, I think I may have told the story once, but I was at a gas station nearby to where I live and I was watching some of the people who work there.

58:26They were showing me their sports bets and they were betting, I mean, gosh, it must have been most of their income. And they seemed all pretty dejected and sad and they were young men, kind of as you'd expect. And I think just watching that made me a little bit leery. So I'm 90 % in, I'm a libertarian in this way, but I mean, I'm always gonna be a little bit concerned about individual welfare. Yeah, it's great that you think that way. I, my take on it is those folks are so into it that they're going to go do it anyway. I think those are the folks who, you know, are doing scratch off tickets, the lottery football sheets, you know, they're going to play in their local poker game and go overboard.

59:03I think the other 90 % of people or 95 are probably not doing it and can do it in a control fashion. I look at it in some ways, like I might look at cannabis or look at alcohol. Yeah. You know, like there's a certain group of people who will overdo it. And GLP-1s are starting to show that addictive behavior, and this is orally, so, you know, we'll see where it winds up, but that a GLP-1 also dampens that trade in individuals. I just thought of an idea. If you're a startup founder and you're building the company that's going to use GLP-1s in addiction treatment, I don't have Jason money, but I'm in for your first 10K.

59:50Okay, here we go. All right, this has been another amazing episode of This Week in Startups. He's Alex, cautious, optimism,.news. .news. Good job. By the way, I watched your episode with Leo Laporte. Not this week, the previous week. Great job on This Week in Tech, the OG This Week in Podcast, This Week in Tech. Go check it out. And we'll see you next time. Bye-bye.