The Idea Dinner #1 (with Mario Gabriele and Packy McCormick)
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Hello, Acquired LPs and readers of Not Boring and The Generalist.

So Ben, Mario, Paki, and I have been longtime fans of each other's work and have the great pleasure of becoming friends through a couple great recent collaborations like our Slack emergency episode with Paki and our Roblox DPO preview with Mario. And given all the recent buzz on new audio platforms like Clubhouse and Twitter Spaces, we all decided to team up and run a little experiment. The Idea Dinner.

So last night on Twitter spaces, we all got together and brought one beverage of choice, one public market idea, public market investment idea, and one private market investment idea.

And honestly, despite some technical audio issues, which you will hear in the audio to come, we had a blast. It's always super fun collaborating with other creators we respect. And given that we all come at the business tech world from different angles, I think we were able to push each other's thinking in new ways.

So fortunately, we also hit the record buttons on our end before we started. And superhero Ben has stitched it all together so we can share it with all of you who couldn't make it. Please bear with the audio quality. This was done live over what is very much still a beta product, as we found out. So it does not have anywhere near the normal level of editing and polish that acquired not boring and generalist fans.

fans are accustomed to, but it was a total blast. We had a great time making it and we hope you all enjoy it too. Stay tuned for more to come. Uh, I'm drinking Costco fake champagne. How about you guys? Oh man, we'll go in order of order of classiness. Um, so I'm really taking the man of the people approach straightforward ideas and we're drinking white claw. I'm down in Florida right now. So I think it was the appropriate level of class, uh,

And for folks joining... I mean, it's exactly as you'd imagine. It's just, you know, deals happening left and right. How many cafecitos have you had? I mean, term sheets and cafecitos are in a neck-and-neck race for me right now.

Berries, cafecitos, and uncapped notes. Exactly. Well, so I was asking Paki before if he was tipping his hand with the idea that he'll be sharing tonight by drinking a White Claw because the... Let me look up the name of this company. Arda Metal Packaging, who is the manufacturer of the aluminum for the cans of White Claw, just got spacked by...

Who did the SPAC? Gores. It was one of the Gores holdings. I think G-H-V-I-U, if I remember correctly. Or G-H-I-V-U. They couldn't get Claw. That's what will happen when they merge. Yeah, when they SPAC. That'd be pretty funny. Let's see if we can get Claw. That business does. White Claw, I think, as of pre-pandemic, was doing $4 billion in revenue a year. So...

White Claw is a very, in the holding company that owns White Claw, is a very legitimate SPAC candidate. But for everybody out in the audience who doesn't know this, if you've heard the Acquired podcast, you think David and Ben are fancy and smart and talk about big, legitimate, old companies. Ben is our resident SPAC expert. Every morning, wakes up, checks the SPACs. Ben, you want to tell us a little bit about what's going on in the SPAC world? Yeah.

I do. And I was planning to save this caveat for later, but I guess we're going to have to throw the caveat in now. This is not investment advice. We may hold, I don't know, the securities that we may hold the things that we're talking about here. So everybody be warned. Yeah. SPACs are fascinating because they have downside protection because they're backed by the money in the trust, which actually is in, I think most of the time in the Cayman Islands, uh,

but they can go up. And so as long as you buy them pretty cheap and close to the value of the cash and trust, so long as you believe that there's not fraud happening and that that cash pile isn't going to go away somewhere, there could be random, unexpected asymmetric upside that happens like a pop when a SPAC, you know, de-SPACs. However, so far, and we are in unprecedented times, as they say, it's...

it's been a reasonably downside protected asset. So, uh, yes, it has been very interesting to, uh, to watch the SPAC pops and, um, and, you know, see how you can play that. It's the definition of stocks only go up structurally. Yeah.

Yes. But one more note on that White Claw comment from earlier. They have done very well this year. So I was sort of wondering, like, would people being home, you know, inhibit them as they tend to be very popular among social gatherings, but people are just fine drinking them in their houses. And it's been a great year for the White Claw company. Popular among the youths. As they say. As they say. Rosenthal, what are you drinking? I am drinking. So...

As you guys know, I think we're going to, are we going to vote on, are we going to have the audience vote on, um, our, our beverage choices as well here? I think, I think this is all up for as like a warmup voting system. So I think so. Yeah. All right. So, uh, I guess we'll, I think we'll have to save it all for the end when we're going to bring folks up on after we go through all our picks. So everybody, you know, everybody's judging all the time and then we'll discuss at the end. Um,

So, as you know, I'm focused on finding value and I am drinking literally the best value in wine. This is so insulting. Just listen to you. I'm really focused on finding value. I am drinking Michel Schlumberger 2018 Russian River Valley Pinot Noir. This

This is great. Michelle Schlumberger, Great Winery in Sonoma has gotten Jenny and me through the pandemic because for on their email list, they run these specials like every couple of months or so where they sell cases of like leftovers. So you get leftover reds, leftover whites, like, you know, 30, $40 a bottle wines that I think we got this one for 150 bucks for the case. So that's $12 and 50 cents.

per bottle uh and i think we ordered like three cases and i think it's gotten us through the whole pandemic so it's guys i thought we said no no sponsorships you can go sign up for their email newsletter inquire.fm slash uh something or other michelle slumber jay yeah that's what i'm drinking

What about you Mario? Alright, I'm gonna attempt to class this group of uh, of degenerates up with what I uh, could find was the swankiest bottle of whiskey I could find in my local store which is called Virgil Cane and it is a Ribbon Rail Rye um, and I'm enjoying it very much so far. Um,

And that's all I have for you. And did you walk inside a real store to purchase this fine whiskey? I did. It was me and a gentleman at about three in the afternoon. Full disclosure, I initially said, do you have Woodford Reserve? Because it's a name I know and enjoy. He said, no.

And then I was like, what's kind of similar to Woodford Reserve? And then he was like, oh, you should get this one. And I had that awkward moment that you all have at like a restaurant where you're like, oh, what do you recommend? And they recommend something. You're like, cool. I'm not going to get that. I'm going to get something else. And yeah, so I went with this mostly, I would say, probably because of the typeface. So really a discerning buyer. Judging the book by its cover.

Yeah. And I think that's sort of a good preface for the rest of the choices I'm going to give tonight, which are very aesthetically driven, shallow. Unlike David's value that he's finding that the rest of us are apparently not focused on. Me and roaring kitty. Yeah.

Yes. All right. Well, let's go around the horn real quick. Who is everyone and what are we doing here? I'll start. I'm Ben Gilbert, one half of the Acquired Podcast Duo with David here. And Ben,

By day, I'm the co-founder of Pioneer Square Labs and an investor at PSL Ventures, our early stage venture fund. And I come to you tonight bearing one private and one public idea of companies. I think we're picking companies we think will go up is the general idea. At least that's what I went for. You guys didn't tell me that.

David, complete the half and then we'll go around the horn to Mario. I am the other half of the acquired duo and technically the only one of the four of us who has Twitter Spaces access. You weren't supposed to give that away. Spaces team, if you're listening, I know, Paki, you've been waging a campaign. To no avail. To no avail. Um...

I'm a, let's see, I've done lots of things. I've been a VC for a long time, but currently I am one half of the acquired duo and an angel investor. Great. Mario. Love it.

I just took a large sip. That was a bad timing. My name is Mario. I run The Generalist, which is a publication that covers tech from idea to IPO, as I insist on saying. And that includes S1 clubs and Friday startup ideas and weekly sort of essays and stuff. So

Yeah, that's about it. And I get to collaborate with these guys a lot. So got to jam with the acquired folks on a Roblox pod and Paki and I... Paki's probably my most...

I don't know. Frequent collaborator? Definitely out there. I think the same goes for me. Yeah, read The Generalist, listen to Acquired. My name is Paki McCormick. I write a newsletter called Not Boring, also about private and public tech companies. So I think we should be in... This is my environment today. So excited to be here with all of you. Do a little bit of that, a little bit of early stage investing. If you don't think that I'm going to pump the portfolio with my private picks, then...

You haven't been reading Not Boring, but you should at notboring.co.

Coming with that Miami energy. We were like debating, are we talking our own books tonight? Are we hyping our own picks? I don't know about you guys, but I stayed away. It felt too incestuous to literally just pick companies I've actually invested in privately, but I definitely didn't shy away from companies we've covered on Acquired because that would disqualify like 150 really good companies that I didn't want to disqualify.

That seems fair. I wish I had a book to talk all of you angel investors and VCs out here. Well, so I was wondering about the idea dinner. So obviously, this is like a thing. I at least know about it from watching Billions. Do people talk their own book there? Is the whole thing like show up and then try and convince someone to foolishly take the other side of your trade and then short squeeze them? Or how's this work for someone who's ever dabbled in public equities for real? Tell me about it. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, I think literally that is the idea. I think everybody shows up with their best idea. I think it's less trying to get another idiot to take the other side and more trying to kind of get the weight of the industry to the extent that there is collusion in the markets working together. I think this is one of the vehicles for that. But it's also, as we're doing, an opportunity to get together, drink, hang out with friends, and of course, pump your own socks. Yeah.

And I think also for our idea at dinner, at least I would posit a chance to get feedback on the ideas. We all got some great analysts here that we can pick apart each other's theses. That's great. I think that's dead on. That's great. Well, I would say that, you know, the most, the person who came out the strongest with the largest assertion that they're here is

really, really to identify value should be the one that sort of has to open and they can choose whether we're starting public or whether we're starting private. But, um, you know, it's good cause I'm, I have high expectations for, for either one here. Okay. Okay. I assume you're talking about me. I, yes, of course. Um, Mr. Value. Mr. Value. Okay. Um,

I think, should we, let's start public first, because I think that'll be maybe the more robust discussion that we can pick apart the ideas and then move into private. Okay, so a little bit of history and facts. We're going to go back. We're going to start about a month ago on Acquired. No, that actually is where we're going to start. But okay, so how, one of the motivations, I think,

for me and wanting to do this is that, um, the pandemic over the past year has just, uh, taught me some like serious lessons about investing, uh, the hard way. Um, and particularly I really debated. So I had three ideas that I was debating coming into this, uh, one, I'll say the two, I didn't do one was Spotify, um, which, uh, especially I was just blown away by their stream on event.

this, uh, this past week I was, Ben and I were texting the whole time. It was just like, you know, we've spent a lot of time thinking about the podcast ecosystem, what it means for acquired more broadly, starting companies around it. And just like Spotify is executing on every level in podcasting that I don't see any private or, you know, fan companies out there doing. Um, so that was one thought I had. The second thought was, um,

My biggest mistake of the pandemic, which was Square, I was from way back. What was it, Ben? 2015, we did our episode on Square. 2017, maybe? 2017. Yeah, that's right. That's right. It was either 2016 or 2017. I might have been late 2016. It was definitely post IPO, but before it became a meme stonk.

Yeah, it was. I think it was trading at about eight bucks a share when we did that. And I picked it up and it became I think it was one of if not my top performing holding after that episode. I loved it. And then the pandemic hit and I was like, oh, my God, I can't hold this anymore. If you know the whole thesis, small business retail is like going to zero. Yeah.

So I sold it 60 bucks a share and I completely ignored cash app and, uh, huge, huge mistake, huge mistakes. That was the second one I was thinking about. Um, but I think when I zoom out, the biggest lesson that I've learned over the past year in investing is, uh,

well, maybe two lessons. One, don't overthink things. Uh, cause I way overthought stuff around square, but then two, just like winners can go so much farther than you imagine. So, um,

All of that brings me to, can you guys guess? Wait, before we say that, I think, doesn't Packy have some sort of trademark on winners can go so much further than you imagine? Like, I feel like, what was the title of your blog post last week? That was dreams all the way up. So pretty close. Dreams all the way up.

Yeah, which for the uninitiated was that, at least my paraphrase, these tech companies are so much more valuable than we ever thought that they could be that, gosh, isn't it realistic to actually value companies on the probability that they too could become a trillion and a half or two trillion dollar company? Is that about right? When I hear it from somebody else, it sounds way dumber than when I was writing it in my head. But that is certainly the idea, right? That

there are big fan companies that are fairly valued and everything else, whether it makes sense or not, seems to be at least valued more off of a probability that they can break that one, $2 trillion mark or get to some percentage of it than on, you know, a price to sales or certainly a price earnings ratio. Yeah.

Cool. All right, David, sorry for that interruption, but had to go down that path. Very eloquent interruption. So Bitcoin is my pick.

And it's, you know, it's, it's like obvious. It's the safe bet. It's not, I'm not coming in here with something that obviously not everybody is thinking about, but I just look at this and I'm like, you know, when I look at the stock, I'm like a stock or an asset. Like, can this still get 10 X bigger? Yes. If you realize that we spend three plus hours talking about this, me and Ben and January unacquired. If you just look at the gold thesis, the gold thesis is like nine X bigger.

Market cap of gold is $9 trillion. Market cap of Bitcoin right now is $1 trillion. That's 9x. But then I just look at all these companies holding Bitcoin on their balance sheets. And I mean, I think that's the path to the gold thesis. But then there's the reserve currency thesis on top of that, which is another 10x path.

On top of that. So you're basically saying like even if if Bitcoin eats gold, it still has an order of magnitude. And then even if it doesn't become a reserve currency, like it still has this 10x of running room and the knock it out of the park on top of that is it becomes a reserve currency and you could go even higher than that.

So as I look out on the landscape of like fully liquid public securities out there and think about what has 100x upside, 10x plus times 10x upside. I just I can't come up with anything better than Bitcoin right now, as hot as it is.

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I wonder if any of us are going to disagree here, which I wonder. I feel like we're all pretty Bitcoin bullish. I've run the cash flow models. I've done the DCF on Bitcoin. I'm having just the hardest time squaring what I see there. What does the DCF on Bitcoin look like? Can you just tell me just some of the inputs? Yeah, it's...

No, there are no inputs. David, how do you...

Okay. Fair point. Fair point. But my rebuttal, which I tried to land on the episode and I don't think I did well enough, is that what Bitcoin is, is the product of the work of miners. Literally, Bitcoins are created by miners for verifying transactions and the robustness of the system. As in child labor? Yeah.

Is that a joke or is there some news about Bitcoin mining? No, no. Like M I N O R S as opposed to M I N E R S. Got it. M I N E R S. Uh,

And so every Bitcoin is payment for mining and that is work and there is value to that work. So I would say like... The value of that Bitcoin is all the carbon put into the... But actually, seriously, it is the value of all the energy that was consumed to verify that transaction. And the DCF is, you know, because it's all one system and all Bitcoins are fungible. By the way, I'm expecting some...

NFT talk from you guys later. The future amount of work and energy and carbon that is going to be put into Bitcoin is captured on a discounted level back to the value of Bitcoin today.

There's so much here. The one other point I do want to bring up as we talk about, especially if we're picking companies that we believe will get more valuable, the nice thing about companies is they're tied to the intrinsic value of the future claims on their profits, the sum of all future cash flows. The thing about currencies...

is that there is no intrinsic value. Literally, the point is that it's not backed by an underlying value. And the entire value that we give it is the greater fool theory, is that someone will buy it from you in the future at the same or maybe a higher price, you know, higher if it's an appreciating asset, the same if it's an actual stable currency. And I always like this argument where people are like, well, it's backed by nothing. And you're like, yeah, like,

It is the everlasting bubble. That is what currencies are. Having a reserve currency, a fiat currency by the government is extra nice because it's backed by the full faith of the government. But for a currency to be successful, the whole point is that it's not necessarily backed by an intrinsic value. Otherwise, we'd all just be going and using stocks as if they were currencies. Oh, wait a minute.

That is where we are in 2020. So I wanted to make the point, of course, for Bitcoin, but it is interesting in having this discussion right now when the prices that people are willing to pay for these corporate assets also seem to be wildly depreciating.

and in some cases extremely decoupled from the possible future cash flows that that company could generate. So that made it especially difficult to pick ones tonight. You're like, okay, are we going to pick stuff that's going to become a meme stonk and go up in the next few days? Or are we picking something where we're like, hey, we think the next 10 years they're going to build a really strong and defensible business because...

you know, the latter may actually not appreciate in value in the near future in a way that you would hope that it would. Well, it feels like in that respect, David, sort of like get the perfect middle. It's both meme and, you know, generational long-term view. I mean, everything I remember in sort of like 2015, 16, when I first got into Bitcoin, I was like trying to do a little bit of day trading version of it. And you just get like,

massacred so fast and so um now i'm just like cool i own what i own i still like do some you know dollar cost averaging in and yeah i'll buy the dip and then i don't touch it i mean really i'll do anything else the other thing that i feel like people aren't talking about enough right now is um for most people you know unless you're really like running your own while

wallet and doing a lot of it yourself the fees for trading bitcoin on all platforms are super high cash i was gonna ask where you where you buy it i actually just buy on cash app which i know is not efficient but it's so easy by the way i i bought some on robin hood for the first time um earlier this week because i i used coinbase pro normally but i wanted to check it out i

Somehow it's there's no fees, but I also don't think you have a real crypto wallet So I think what's happening at Robin Hood is they actually just hold all the Bitcoin in one Robin Hood owned crypto wallet and Then it's effectively like an internal little ledger or balance sheet that they sort of create for all the accounts So you really do just have an entry in the database That's then pegged to the value

I don't know how else they could do this no transaction fee thing for cryptocurrencies because there is literal work involved to do the transaction that you do have to pay for. And so that's the only thing I can kind of figure. I don't know if any of you know something that I don't about how Robinhood's system is set up. No, but let's get Vlad for next week.

He's on the circuit. Acquired is the only podcast that he hasn't done at this point. Exactly. All right, let's move on. David, are you classifying that as your public or your private? So we know where to go from here. That's my public. That's your public, okay. Yep. Got it. That's in charge. All right, well, let's break David and Aya. Mario, you're next.

Cool. Um, all right. Well, I'm definitely going in the more sort of hipster route with this pick, um, which is the Bridgetown SPAC, which is Peter Thiel and Richard Lee's SPAC. They have two of them right now. There's, there's Bridgetown and Bridgetown two and potentially a Bridgetown three coming down the pike. Um,

And the reason I'm excited about it serves two reasons. One, the volume of SPACs targeting Asia is still so, so, so much lower than SPAC targets in the US. I think it's something like 85% of SPACs are US-focused versus 5% in Asia. These are expressly focused on finding targets in Southeast Asia.

So that's sort of the high level idea. That market is just... And as you guys know, because I've been tweeting aggressively about it and writing pieces about Indonesia. As you know, I've been sort of going down this rabbit hole. But...

The region in general, like Southeast Asian nations, population of 649 million, nominal GDP of 3 trillion and growing 5.4% per annum. But the internet population is like expected to, I think it's triple in the next, the internet economy, let's say, is expected to triple over the next six years. Wow. Yeah.

reaching 300 billion by 2025. And then, you know, obviously sort of demographic trends, huge number of people are sort of entering this period of when they're going to be, you know, having a mobile phone, buying online, having a job, all of these sort of things. So I think there's sort of this like broad trend

geographic tailwind story that you can tell. I was going to say, and the best way that you are deciding to play this sort of secular trend is to buy one single SPAC targeting a company there. Riddle me that. How are you picking that? Because I am not a better picker than Peter Thiel and Richard Leighton.

I mean, look, for all of the noxiousness of some of Peter Thiel's politics, I think he's one of the best pickers of all time and probably one of the smartest living people. And I think combine him with the, one, the expertise, but also the network of Richard Lee, who is Cushing Lee's son. And who's Cushing Lee? They have like a bunch...

Hong Kong billionaire. He does money in telecom, right? Yeah, exactly. I think Richard Lee's money is also building on that with Star TV, which was like a television network. Yeah.

But all to say, I think they're going to have incredible access and incredible pickers on this. And then the final point I'll say is that...

You know, Packy, I don't know, but I suspect you might remind me. Somebody on this call should know this. I recognize the name. Let's look it up. And I feel like I recognize the name because I remember David telling me that it was... If there's somebody who either did really well or did really poorly on Tencent, then David would have told me about it. Yes, it is. You're right. Nice call, Packy. Wow. It's...

So, so you're saying maybe that like you shouldn't outsource your decision-making to, to Li Ka-Shing. Oh, it, no, it was Richard Li. Oh no! I mean, that's the worst call of all time. Oh no, new data coming in on draft day. This is hot stuff. Um, listen guys, I'm really caught off base here. Listen,

Daniel Wong is leading it. He's also part of the Pacific Century crew. You have the head of private investments of Teal Capital allocated $550 million across South Korea and Southeast Asia. They're good people on board. Sam Altman is involved. Who knows how he's getting in there, but he'll take a look at whatever they're checking out. And anyway, final point I'll say is that I like the two targets that they've been

sort of around the hoop on. How are you finding that out? Is it like, was there a journalist that sort of said, here's the two that they're rumored to be targeting? Do you remember how I said Bill Gates was sort of pissed off at me earlier? And that's why he had the competitive clubhouse. Sam to him. Yeah. Yeah. There's just been a news. There's been like, actually, I think it's all been for majority Bloomberg coverage on it. So yeah,

Traveloka, which is the sort of like largest travel website in Southeast Asia has chosen to go to SPAC with like a JP Morgan vehicle. Um, but that was one that they were sort of around the coupon, which I thought was interesting. And then the one that I really hope happens is Tokopedia, which is, you know, large e-commerce player, uh, in Indonesia, potentially merging with Gojek, uh,

We'll see if the SPAC is dependent on that deal falling apart. I'm not really sure. But all to say, these are trading at like $12 or something like that.

And I think there's a lot of upside left. All right. So I'll come in with my SPAC hot take here. There's a couple of things. One, for those of you buying SPACs in Fidelity, you do have the privilege of paying a $50 foreign transaction fee, unlike picking domestic stocks or SPACs to make a purchase of Bridgetown Holdings, too, of which I may or may not have a standing limit order on. So I like your pick. Yeah.

I will say SPACs overseas, particularly in Southeast Asia, seem to make a lot of sense to me because I suspect they have a... Even if you're...

a screaming company, you probably have a less clear path to an IPO on a major stock exchange than you would if you were the exact same company in the US. So you have less of the sort of adverse selection issue that you have with companies getting SPAC'd here. And on top of that, the one point that I'll make on this one, which is why I'm a little, you know, a little...

makes me a little queasy to potentially buy the stock at $12 is any SPAC that is above $10.50 is meaningfully trading with sort of speculative value on top of the cash. So if you're buying at $12,

12, 13, 14, and then people just don't like the merger and a lot of people decide to redeem, then it can crash back down to $10. So you're sort of taking speculation risk in buying the stock. You're buying basically $1 for $1.20 because you feel like this person is going to pick such a good company that I'm willing to take that 20% risk above the principal cash in account, which you may be saying,

I'm like totally down to do because I think they're going to find a great opportunity here. But, you know, buyer beware that that is definitely what's happening when you buy a SPAC above $10. And I have a question on that as well because you're assuming that one, they pick a good company and two, they do it at a good price, right? Because you're...

if, if Peter Thiel says I want to do this and we're buying 5% of the company for the whole SPAC and that values it at $200 billion, that's not a good deal either. People could totally redeem because they don't like the price just as much as if they don't like the company. Yeah. I mean, I've been holding on to Churchill, uh, for a couple of weeks. It's all good. I sold a CCIV. Like what are you? CCIV. Yeah. Um,

And I just sold a bunch off of the rumors, right? Like I held on to some, but like, I don't know. I think there is a lot of that dynamic with any SPAC, right? Yep, absolutely. Should we go to the SPAC master himself? Yes. Yeah. I will tell you, I thought about picking a SPAC and I ultimately decided not to because

Fortunately, we've gotten plenty of coverage on this call. I decided that what I wanted to do is pick one that I knew super, super well from a bunch of recent research. And if you've listened to our most recent Acquired episode, you know exactly where I'm going with this. My pick is the New York Times company. And this is one I just think... Acquired is really talking its own book here. Our last two episodes. Yeah.

I love it. Part of picking, like part of us deciding to do that episode was, you know, we got a suggestion from a listener of the show, sort of super senior finance person. He's been a CFO of public companies and was like, hey, I think this company is really interesting. You should check out the mind safety disclosures piece on it, which was like the principal starting place for at least my research on the analysis. And part of suggesting to David, hey, we should do this episode was like, I want to learn more about this company. Like, I think there might be

something sort of not only undervalued, but sort of undertold here. And one thing we did discover is there's like no audio content on the New York Times. There's a few interesting books out there, but there's like no one who's, you can't find a podcast on the history of the Times. So I was like, oh, this will be cool. We're kind of the only one to do it. Anyway, so here's my investment case for the New York Times.

In the last 15 years, they have shifted from a business that had incredibly high variable costs, so the printing presses, the people that have to deliver the paper, ink, to a business that is a digital subscription business. So it's all fixed costs. And then, like Netflix, they sort of get all the upside once they sort of have paid for the content. Obviously, there's things that scale like bandwidth and hosting and all that stuff.

with the number of audience, but it's pretty minimal. It's a software business. It's high gross margin. And the way that they're being valued right now is their market cap is like...

I think it's $5 billion, which is almost exactly the same as it was in their print heyday when they were making more revenue. But of course, their cost structure in the 2000s was way worse because it was all these variable costs to actually print and deliver the paper. So what I think is the right way to look at this company now is to compare them to Netflix.

As I launch into this, let me remind everyone, not investment advice. Do your own research. We may or may not hold positions in the companies we're talking about. But, I will say it's very interesting that The New York Times only has 7.5 million subscribers.

Netflix has over 200 million subscribers. So obviously, Netflix has almost 30 times more the subscriber base. So you can't really compare apples to apples in terms of the size of their current business. But what you can compare is the fact that they're both $15 to $17 a month in terms of the average revenue per user.

And what the New York Times trades at is about 4.8 times their trailing 12 months revenue.

Whereas Netflix trades at about 10 X, they're trailing 12 months revenue. And you might say, well, gosh, that's probably because Netflix is growing way faster. It's not. Netflix is growing their revenue and their subscribers at about 30% year over year. The New York times is digital subscription business is growing 40% year over year. Now that that's in subscribers, the actual, uh,

revenue is trailing because they have a lot of like introductory offers and stuff out right now, which should cause you to have some discount. But should it really be trading at half the sort of revenue multiple of of Netflix? I don't think so. I'll also say that like

The way that The New York Times gets its content in actually hiring out a team of 1700 writers instead of licensing content. And of course, Netflix has some original productions. But that seems to also be a much better model to me because they really do own audiences.

all of their sort of proprietary IP. They don't have any licensing deals and it's diverse. So like no one piece of, no one journalist has too much power, whereas there could be an individual piece of content on Netflix that would have a lot of power over the bundle. So that's kind of my starting place on this one. I think the New York Times, it looks a lot more like Netflix than it does the New York Times of 15 years ago, but I don't think investors are sort of yet looking at it that way.

How do you take into account the fact that the replayability of a single piece of Netflix content is so different than a piece of news? Like it feels like the, the value of your archive is,

It accumulates much more or accumulates differently at least. And at least I would think the archive has considerably more value of Netflix than it does for the New York Times. Although there's like probably some element of value there that I don't know, goes to brand and all those other things too. That's a super valuable point. I think the way that I sort of like accounted for that was, yeah,

well, it's way cheaper to produce any piece of content for the New York Times than it is for Netflix. And I don't know if they cancel each other out, but like, I don't know, both are true. One pulls in Netflix's direction, one pulls in the Times' direction. If you had to pick, though, I don't know, at least for me, I would way rather have the one that's more expensive, but like way harder for someone else to produce.

I think that is a, uh, I think the New York times has sort of like a hidden moat where no one else is going to be a large scale newspaper at this point with the internet. And so like, it's really hard to catch up to Netflix, but it's deceptively hard to catch up to the New York times. I wonder, like, did you guys, I haven't finished the episode full disclosure. Yeah, exactly. I only work out with 30 minutes guys. Um, but, um,

Did you guys uncover how much of their content is now video or podcast or more digital native in that respect? Video, they do some, but they don't...

They're still not like a video centric company. I think they sort of waited on the sidelines in the whole pivoting to video phase where Vox and BuzzFeed and everyone did. They obviously have some, but it's not huge. The podcasting thing is crazy. Like the Daily has four million downloads every day or maybe it's four million downloads on every episode. It's by far the most listened to podcast ever.

But the interesting thing is, since it's free, it's a completely different stream for them. So it's not included in the subscription bundle. And it's really like a way to expose the Times brand to a completely different demographic.

demographic of people it's like 70 75 percent or under 40 um it's people that that otherwise wouldn't have a relationship with the times they did announce though right that they are gonna have a paid version of the daily or some subscription there's some paid podcast thing coming but we don't know what it is yet there's also some paid version of the wire cutter coming that we don't know what it is should that's intriguing should spotify buy the new york times

Well, Spotify stock is really high, so they should buy something. I was just going to take it another way, which is like, who should, which podcast should the New York Times buy? But I think yours is a more adventurous idea. $8.5 billion market cap. That's like nothing compared to Spotify at this point. They're acquiring podcast content from all over the place. Just acquire somebody who's been acquiring podcast content. Then you have this whole other arm.

That's interesting. Let's see if we can get Daniel on this. Invite him up. Yeah. That's a really good point. I think the New York Times will have a hard time acquiring things of scale because, frankly, the Times themselves just don't have that large of a market cap compared to tech companies today. They...

They have cash, but they only recently have cash and they don't have a ton of cash. It's in the hundreds of millions. And their stock isn't wildly overvalued. Meanwhile, the rest of the landscapes is, or at least richly valued or fully valued. I can't remember what the phrase we're supposed to use is. So there's like...

They have to be smart and niche-y in their acquisitions the way they were with like Autumn or the Wirecutter, which was a screaming deal, by the way. They bought it for $30 million and it spits out $50 million a year in cash right now. I'm sorry, it does $50 million a year in revenue right now. But yeah, it's a good question.

I would love to see them be more aggressive with products. New York Times cooking is amazing. We're seeing all these companies emerge at venture scale, which is like making a food social network or better recipe readers and all of these things. I don't know. It feels like they have one of the best bases of recipes there. And that is...

a piece of content that has like high replayability, so to speak. Um, I don't know, things like that feel like they're big opportunities in and of themselves. I, I, well, I am a, um, bull, a New York times bull and, and think it's, uh, it's potentially undervalued. Uh, I completely agree with you that there have been big execution misses in podcast and all their digital app stuff. Um, and I think they talk about doubling down on these things, but, um,

they double down on them modestly and slowly and linearly and not...

Not the way that a fast-growing tech company would. Can they just not compete pricing-wise with Netflix on documentary content? Why aren't the Obamas signed up with the New York Times instead of with Netflix? I think Netflix is paying a really pretty penny for Barack and Bruce. Just can't.

can't get close to it. Yeah. I mean, and that's the, that, that would be the bear case for the times is like, Hey, they're competing with people who also have this very same property, which is, uh, who, whoever has the largest audience can pay the most. Cause you can amortize it across the widest set of people, which is what's the seven powers of that. That's, uh, uh,

Scale economies. Scale economies. Scale economies, yeah. They have the sort of... Scale economies. Oh, there you go, Mario. Perfect, perfect. So yeah, that would be the argument is like, look, if the New York Times is actually competing with Netflix or Spotify for non-commodities for unique sources of content, then they're up a creek.

because they're way, way, way, way behind on paid subscribers. But to the extent that they're in a different category, then you should be excited because they're running that same playbook, but with a different modality of journalism, which I think is still, I think they will forever be a journalism company. Respect. I like it. We'll see. Are we doing this? Are we going to make an air table and track the future? I think so.

And I actually had maybe, I mean, dare I pat myself on the back too much. I think I had a maybe even better idea, which is I think we should create a public account where we buy the securities the next day and then people can just see our portfolio. That would be fun, right? Let's do it. It's like fantasy stock picking, but you actually have to put your money on the line. So it's not really fantasy. And we're not going to get payment for order flowed. No, that probably doesn't do that anymore.

My only question, I love the idea, but what are we going to do about Bitcoin? We could buy Grayscale. But Grayscale, I mean, it's like, that's a weird... Maybe buy Grayscale for now and then when... We'll just do it in Robinhood and that way we can buy Bitcoin right in Robinhood. But can you share your portfolio of Robinhood?

Probably not. I don't know if you can just link to your portfolio. I might have a private pick later that might work, but if we wait a couple months. Oh! All right, great. Let's table this. For the moment, there's going to be some way that we're going to track this, and then we're going to be able to rib each other later when I make stupid picks. Packy, what's your pick? Sure. I like the New York Times, if only because it...

One trillion divided by eight billion is a huge potential multiple. So if we're going with the dreams all the way up valuation, I really, really love that room to run. But I'm going to just be as on the nose as I possibly can here. We're here tonight in Twitter spaces. I wrote about it a couple of weeks ago. I could not be longer Twitter. And so a couple of weeks ago, when I was coming in,

A couple of weeks ago when I read about Twitter, my idea was they were reporting the next day, no idea what was going to happen in the short term. But this company has been absolutely asleep for the past five or so years. The stock has totally dragged. And meanwhile, all of us are on this right now at my time, 9.19 p.m. If we weren't doing this Spaces talk, I'd be on Twitter anyway. There's this group of people who increasingly kind of like control the conversation who are on Twitter all

of the time and yet the stock has done absolutely nothing now obviously over the past year I think you're to date it's up or not you're to date over the past year but like to the day it's up 100% so finally Twitter is moving it's doubled it's trading at 57 billion dollars Facebook for context is in the highest six range seven range seven hundred billion dollar range is like 65 68 I think so it's less than Spotify

Less than Spotify. Pinterest is like right, if you're looking at enterprise value, like right neck and neck with it. Snap is double what Twitter is. And I love Snap too. And I love the bold use of investor day to say that we're just going to grow 50% for the next X number of years. Amazing. But Twitter, so the thesis there is that finally that narrative is changing. The day after I wrote the piece,

Twitter reported pretty good earnings. They beat on revenue. They beat on EPS. They missed a little bit on monetizable daily active users, which is an important number for Twitter. But what I really think is interesting is that they're valued at like 7.6% of what Facebook is. They have about a 10th of the users that Facebook does. They have a lower ARPU than Facebook does. But I think over time, what needs to happen with them is that you view Twitter as kind of

Apple and iOS in this war. And you view Facebook as Android, where they have everybody in the world. They have the less valuable people. And Twitter has 192 million people, a good amount of which are super high value people who you can monetize at a high level. And so we're here tonight on spaces. That's part of the ecosystem. They bought review. The product needs some work for sure, but that's part of the ecosystem. Twitter, if they wanted to could pull, uh,

no joke, $10,000 plus out of me a year between subscriptions and revenue shares and all sorts of things. It is the number one tool that I use to grow Not Boring. And so I think as they are able to figure out that that's the kind of company that they are, that they need to monetize the shit out of their people who build businesses on top of it and want power tools, want better DMs, want better search, want better ways of connecting with their audience, subscription and payments and all of that stuff in-app, I think that's a huge opportunity for them.

It's interesting. Do you have any sense that they're doing that? Or are you like activist investor style, like you're building your toehold and you're going to storm in on the board and make them do that? No. So, I mean, it seems like the way that they're building spaces is different than kind of what they've done before. They're building in public. They're being intentional about it. They're smart. Review was a smart idea. Yeah.

much faster because they're building on top of Periscope. So they have this like kind of legacy stuff. You can bring back Periscope. I saw somebody using Periscope today. So if you want the video piece of it, you can still bring back video. Periscope is like a kind of front and center type of thing where all of a sudden you have this huge kind of center with a bunch of tools where all the kind of people who are creating content hang out anyway. So...

I think they're doing it there. They've talked about subscriptions. They've obviously like Professor Galloway has been in there. You're about subscriptions and like a kind of dumb way. And but they said you hate him. So I don't. I don't. I actually think he's incredible at what he does. And the fact that I'm talking about him right now is like a testament to his thing, his thing working. But

We got to take it aside here. We didn't talk about this on the Acquired New York Times episode. I really debated it, but Paki Meyer, you guys probably know, Professor Galloway ran what his first, like what put him on the map was being an activist shareholder campaign against the New York Times company. And then he got on the board. No way. No way. I did not know that. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, no surprise I'm a bull pick then on the Times and taking the other side of Galloway. No, this was like at least 10 years ago, I think, if not longer. Yeah. But he's long Twitter. He owns $10 million worth. Like the day after the stock popped, he made a million dollars. So like, fuck me. But...

I hope he sent you a bottle of wine. Sent you some Michelle Schlumberger, at least. Three cases. There we go. There's the plug. All right. So, Pecky, I have a question on the monetizable daily active users. So a couple of years ago, I think they switched from, they were counting MAUs and that was like,

pretty flat. It was 300, and then four years later, it was 330. And you were like, great, guys. Okay, you figured out how to make a product for this market. And they love it, and they retain. But it's for this effectively niche global market or collective set of niches. Because I think that's why the best way to describe Twitter is it's this series of niches. And

Then they decided that was no longer the way that they wanted to report their numbers, which is always a little fishy when a company decides, oh, we shouldn't be reporting this way anymore. So they switched to MDOW. How has the MDOW sort of tracked over the last year or so? I haven't really followed. Yeah, so over the past year, I'm glad you asked. So in the middle of the pandemic, I think it was Q2, they were up 34% year over year after, for a while, traffic.

tracking kind of in like the low kind of Facebook percentages, but off a much lower, a much lower base of users. This quarter, they did 26% year over year growth. So assuming they can keep kind of that 26% year over year growth up while improving ARPU, I think that's a win. They're also, and they talked about it in their earnings call recently too, they're really focusing a lot on topics and like that's

onboarding experience which has always been their problem which is if I don't spend 17 hours a day on Twitter and follow the right people and all of that kind of stuff how do I even experience this app and so they're focusing a lot on making topics more discoverable I think stuff like spaces will make things more discoverable I've seen either mock-ups or actual kind of live things of where there's a topic a spaces will pop up pop up on top of that topic and so it's hey there was a bombing in this place let's all hop in a room and talk

about it oh interesting so I think there's some really interesting things that they're they're doing there as well that's yeah can I ask oh go for it so

I'm a hundred percent with you. Um, I, at the beginning of this year, I had like 10 picks for the year and among them was Bitcoin at a hundred K plus and Twitter at a 70 billion plus. And that was, they were at 38 when I wrote the piece. So like, it wasn't crazy, but like a good amount. Um, and I, I, the only piece that I feel like in your article, um,

I had a question mark over is like whether Jack is still the right person to lead this. So that is a big question. Convince me. I'm actually going to be...

I am actually going to be looking at this with Mark Rubenstein this week a little bit, just on like the how does Jack run Twitter versus Square? But if you look at Square, Square had this like the same exact thing. It happened a little bit faster, but this like long doldrums where people didn't think they had their shit together and things weren't working out. And they tried some big partnerships with Starbucks and whatever, and it didn't work out.

And then over time you see these pieces start to come together. So the charitable interpretation of Jack is that he's just like incredibly Zen doubt is taking an incredibly long view. And like all of these pieces are finally starting to come together. The less charitable, but still fine interpretation is that he is a figurehead that people still can kind of rally behind. And if you're going to make some bold product moves,

it's probably better to have him in there than whatever kind of shit professional CEO you bring in from the outside. I think the most important roles for them are on the engineering and the product team and on the, the monetization side. And so it seems like, you know, Kayvon's doing a good job there. And like they're, they're,

building spaces, like I said, in the right way. So I think as long as those are good and he's kind of this just like face of Twitter, it's a shitty role right now, right? Like you're just going in front of Congress. You're talking about defending your actions with the president, all of that. If he can be sanguine and do all of that stuff and then other people inside are running product and engineering and all of that, then... And we haven't even talked about engineering, but they rebuilt their ad products from the ground up. They seem like they might not actually be terrible anymore, which would be a huge win. So...

there's just a lot of things going in the right direction. And whether that's because of Jack or because of the absence of Jack, just letting people do kind of their thing, it feels like it's finally all coming together and he's the leader. So when it was bad, it was his fault. And now that it's good, his fault also. I will say in defense of Jack too, he's definitely not a good executor. There's definitely something where it feels like they've been, their product velocity has increased.

For sure. And in a variety of areas, like in a variety of areas that feel like low-hanging fruit that they could have missed but then woke up to suddenly. I mean, newsletters and spaces are two obvious ones. To your point on like something happened, like a topic, and then there being a space for it, like Twitter, Twitter,

Twitter has long been the town square for certain communities. Like it's been the tech town square for eight, nine years. And yet these little tweets, like they're not actually the best format for a lot of the town square type behavior. And like, I think a lot of the stuff that we're doing here, like Paki, when we did the emergency pod on Slack, like that's the sort of thing you would want in the town square. You want AM radio, you know, you want conversations and, um,

you know, fleets was like a half step in that direction. Cause it let me put something out there that felt more, I mean, it was more ephemeral, ephemeral, like my, you know, your tweets are sort of reserved for like, I really feel confident about this. And like, I know it's, it's not too jokey dripping with snark. Like there's real substance to it. Whereas fleets, I think where this attempt of like,

Hey, well, it worked for Instagram, so maybe it'll work for us to offer this format, too. My opinion is that it didn't, but I like that they tried it. I sure hope they sunset it and then figure out a way to make, what are we doing here? Spaces. Sort of like the, you know, fill that void instead. They should give that real estate. Totally. Yeah.

I love fleets. Really? There's two ways to look at fleets, right? One is as the exact way that you said, which ties also back into topics, which is there's some people who are out there and use the product, but don't want to tweet. Maybe a fleet's an easier way to do it. And maybe they're coming from Instagram or somewhere else where that's a kind of behavior that they're used to and they feel less pressure and all of those types of things. And so if it can increase the amount of people who are actually creating content on the platform, great. The other is they knew Spaces was coming. They wanted to build that bar.

They had like a few months gap and it was pretty easy to roll out something like fleets. And so they took that few month gap, threw it up there and knew that spaces was kind of going to come in and take that real estate anyway. And so they were getting us used to looking up there.

Did they start working on spaces before Clubhouse? No, probably not. But I do think like, you know, even now, if there's a space that's going on, that shows up to the left of all the fleets. And so they're clearly prioritizing spaces over fleets. The one thing I hate is when you click on somebody's profile and they have a live fleet and you click on their profile picture and you're like,

Do you want to do a fleet or do you want to see the profile picture? It's like, dude, this is what I do when I want to see a profile picture. Get that out of there. But otherwise, I think it's a harmless thing that sits up to the right of spaces and is fine. Should we make our voyage across the great capital divide into the into the private markets, public markets, private markets? What's even the difference these days? It's a big gradient. So true, man. I love that.

um yes should we do the same order or should it be like snake draft style uh let's keep going in the same order because i can't listen to packy talk anymore i think i think for these we give ourselves like a three minute limit for each because we've just gone over the the hour mark for people so and and packing being uh and miami is uh you know needs to go to bed

No, no. The clubs are, they close at midnight here. So I could get there. Yeah.

Great, great, great. All right, Rosenthal, give us your best three-minute private pitch. First off, can you guys hear me? Oh, we're having some audio issues with David. For our friends at home, this exposes something that we've been doing. We're on a Zoom call, so we are dual wielding here with Zoom and Spaces, and we can see that David is trying...

to express his incredible value that he has found, but it does not seem to be working. All right, Keith, I'll give you a minute.

Well, maybe. Do you want to jump in? Well, he tries it. Yeah, why don't I jump in and I'll bust up our order here. Can you guys hear me on this account? I sure hope David doesn't have to leave and come back because I think that would actually close our room if he did that. So anyway, all right, I'll go. This is another required episode, but it's from a little while back and I wanted to bring it back up. So my private pick is SpaceX. SpaceX.

And this is a company that you might be saying, but Ben, this week they achieved a $74 billion post-money valuation while still private, making it one of the top five most valuable private tech companies in the world. How does this really have running room from here? Are you serious? Yeah.

Well, here's sort of my investment case. The other issue with this one is I'm not sure this will ever be a public company based on Elon's luck with Tesla. If I'm him, I don't know why the heck I would ever take this thing public as long as I can find some way to get my closed-end fund shareholders some liquidity. And...

I'm curious how their sort of like capitalization has gone in the last decade. I guess they've only really been taking tons of capital in the last decade. But in the last, especially three, four, five years where Sequoia led their last two rounds, like obviously they do need liquidity at some point. But maybe they figured something out where they're like, look, we can sort of stay illiquid in this for a long time. Anyway, SpaceX, it's two businesses. Yeah.

The first one is a private launch company. They are a taxi to the stars. They can do that 100 times cheaper per kilogram than we could in the space race. So, you know, think about the, you know, we will go to the moon. It costs 100 times more for any given unit of weight than it costs SpaceX. It's like shockingly cheap. It's like $100 million to send a...

a Falcon 9, a set of cargo up there. So it's pretty impressive. It's really cheap. So that's business number one. They've also gotten like $10 billion in revenue contracts for that business. So unlike Blue Origin or some of these other companies that have bootstrapped the company with investor dollars, SpaceX has done a lot of it with customer dollars. So anyway, Taxi to the Stars is number one.

Business number two could be way bigger, and this is Starlink. So the way that these manufacturing businesses work is there's a high amount of R&D required to get you to sort of minimum viable scale. There's also a high amount of sort of just like mechanical overhead, manufacturing, transportation, the launch pad, things like that.

And SpaceX has managed to basically burn through all that with their government contracts, with their private contracts, but basically shipping stuff up for people, satellites, rovers, things like that. And what that lets them do is then use the sort of capacity that they have on top of their overhead for quote unquote free to be their own first and best customer.

And they have now shipped up over 1,000 satellites for Starlink out of the 1,400 that they'll require for their initial constellation that will provide high-speed internet access to anyone, anywhere on the globe. And to just...

I know I'm going long, so I'll give you a couple quick stats on this. Morgan Stanley, who just upgraded their bull target on SpaceX to 200 billion, thinks that they can capture over 360 billion subscribers to Starlink by 2040. So that's 5% of the global population. Wow.

They think that Starlink, at maturity, will bring in $21 per month per customer, which is actually a little cheaper than it is today. That's $91 billion a year in revenue to be the ISP for 5% of the globe. And if you don't think that a company doing that scale, or with the potential to do that scale, is worth... That would be...

That revenue alone would be more than the value that they're worth today. I think they have so much room to run, not to mention their whole taxi to the stars business is going to be the thing that gets us to Mars.

there's also they're so far ahead like at this point they're already serving customers they already have revenue from Starlink no one else is going to successfully chase them and build this constellation so this dream that everyone has had for decades you know these Teledesic, Terrastar, Iridium, Globalstar, OneWeb like SpaceX finally achieved it and I think there's a huge sort of first to scale advantage that they have there so my private pick is SpaceX.

Love it. Love it. Yeah, no disagreement. All right, we got David back. Yeah, can you guys hear me now? Yes. You want to jump in? I've been switching between the acquired account and my account trying to get this to work. Clearly, Spaces is still a beta product. I think you love you, Spaces team, if you're listening. Yeah. All right, why don't I go next in case I lose...

talking ability and before we wrap up here, okay. Mine is I'm talking my own book. One of my recent angel investments company called kettle, which, uh, diligent acquired listeners might've heard me talk about on the show once or twice before. Um, but, uh, it is a reinsurance company for climate change risk. And I am so excited about these guys. Cause one of my, uh,

I was going to go through this earlier, but like one of my kind of like five main sort of themes that I I'm prosecuting in the public and private markets. One is just the like we're seeing. I was in Texas last week, like climate change is impacting everybody's daily life and like

we are going to need solutions to like, it's happening. There's no, there's not a question of like, of course we want to stop climate change. Of course we want to reverse it, but like it's happening. We need to address it. And, um, so what kettle does, so like primary insurance, like state farm, all state and the like, um, that covers like,

basic primary risk, your house and stuff like that. But they don't, they aren't really equipped to cover tail risks. So like earthquakes, fires and the like. So what they do is they offload the tail risk stuff to reinsurance companies. That's what Kettle does. So they are, and the reinsurance companies

business the whole insurance business is a actuarial stochastic stochastic model based business based on past data to predict the likelihood of disasters occurring in the future but obviously with climate change like look at look at uh oh we're getting some listeners are not able to hear me

can you guys hear me can you hear me yeah i can hear you guys okay oh interesting we can hear david but uh listeners uh do like a thumbs down emoji in the little um spaces thing uh if you cannot hear david and it's been dead air this whole time that would be rough let's look for for some emotes here uh i'm seeing some peace signs so i think people have give me a thumbs up if you can hear david

We're seeing so much peace signs. I'm loving this. Okay. I assume peace signs are good and, and laughy faces are good. So I'd say David, keep going. Okay. So I'll, I'll, I'll wrap it up quickly, but, um, the, uh,

So what Kettle does, so like basically the whole industry is based on past data, but obviously that's not going to work with climate change where, you know, in the past hundred years there were a handful of devastating fires in California, but in the past three years, every year it's happened. So they are built from the ground up with ML based technology.

prediction based primarily on satellite data that they're making predictive risk models. David, I just realized something. People, there is no thumbs down thing. So I think everybody, that was the closest we could get to thumbs down were those stop and... Oh, man. Okay. We just had someone leave and rejoin. Well, this is crazy. David, we can hear you. But unfortunately, the audience cannot hear you.

We've literally broken Twitter. Oh, no. Peggy, are you going to change your public market bull pick based on this bug that we have found? No, I love it. I love it. Twitter is moving so fast that they're breaking things. It's like a young lady's bug.

I love it. All right. Okay. Anyway, they raised the C round last fall. You'll hear more about them. Ben, you want to give me a quick recap for people who couldn't hear me? Yeah. For folks who couldn't hear David, it is... Remind me the name of the kettle, right? Yeah. Yeah. It's a company called David that David invested in. So he's talking his own book here about really cool sort of reinsurance company for...

basically recovery from things like wildfires and things in the sort of disaster space that is unfortunately more and more common among us. And Kettle helps families who are adversely affected by one of those events in a way that traditional insurers sort of haven't because the models haven't been able to, you know, the future looks so much different than the past and the future things that we're insuring against are so much different than the

in the past. David, I'm guessing here a little bit since I don't know that much about this company, but I've heard you talk about them, but I hope I just did it enough justice. Yeah, yeah. The big thing is they use predictive and they're built from the ground up with predictive ML models, not stochastic models like the whole rest of the industry.

Awesome. This is going to be a good reason for folks to listen to the recorded version to get it from the horse's mouth. If you're good, I'm going to jump in with my pick. Great. And I'm going to keep it snappy and quick, which is Reddit. Reddit is undervalued.

like crazy. I did a great piece with Greg. Well, Greg did a great job. I almost speak for myself, but I was very proud of the outcome. Talking through why that's the case. It's valued at 6 billion. Daily active users are growing faster than many of the other social platforms we look at in the public markets and are valued at 10 times as much. And I think of it similarly to Paki, which is like...

You know, Reddit is almost like where Twitter was two years ago or something like that, where they're kind of like finally wandering out of this woods and making some really interesting content.

product plays. So I think $6 billion is a steal. I think this is a $60 billion company in two years at the most. But yeah, that's my quick pitch. I remember when Sam Altman led the financing round in Reddit in 2014 or 2015 or something. I think personally, I was like...

That is a heck of a bet. And also, wow, Sam Altman did very well. And it is like, I don't know what he owns because I'm not looking at PitchBook, nor is it public information. But imagine being an individual who led a round previously in Reddit now. It's crazy. The true solo capitalist. Mackie, you want to bring us home? Yeah.

I will bring us home. I'm going to go incredibly on the nose again. So tonight we're here doing an idea dinner in a public place on Twitter, you know, taking this thing that was kind of something only available. You can't be a bull on Clubhouse and Twitter simultaneously. Oh my God. No, no, no. I'm...

that Twitter will eat Clubhouse's lunch over time. So we're taking one kind of traditional hedge funds institution and opening it up. My private bet is a company that the Not Boring Syndicate invested in.

This was over the summer, so valuations weren't crazy. The sub-$10 million range, a company called InvestComposer.com. What they're doing is building a tool that essentially gives regular investors hedge fund

kind of quality tools in a drag and drop, no code way. And so the way that I can describe this is like, instead of just saying I'm buying, you know, Twitter, I'm buying the New York times, I'm buying Bitcoin and I'm buying whatever SPAC Mario recommended. I like the,

Ben's pick a lot better, but I think that we're all kind of smart. So I'm going to put those in. I'm going to wait Ben's at 40. I'm going to wait Mario's at 30. I'm going to wait David's at 10. Then I'm going to wait Paki's at 20. And then it'll automatically readjust. So it lets you build a regular portfolio, but then gives you the power of automation in the background in the way that it does. And I think it's really, really interesting.

All of this one input, they disaggregate all the brokers so that you can execute with any broker and where their power is in this logic that they've built in the middle that lets you run back tests on strategies and essentially just lets you build these really sophisticated portfolios that can adjust in real time.

with no code. Right now in the private markets, Robinhood is somewhere between $15 billion and $30 billion. Public just raised it $1.2 billion. I keep pushing the founder to go out and raise because I think there's going to be an absolute feeding frenzy now that I've seen the alpha-alpha of this product. I think there's going to be a feeding frenzy in the markets for this. I think

Get in now. There will be a markup at some point this year that I think will be pretty mind-blowing. Boom. No one has ever talked their own book better. Love it, Paki. And less unabashedly. Totally.

I think this is a night, guys. I think Packy's got to hit the clubs and Rosenthal hasn't been able to speak for hours now and you know that's got to be killing him. So I think we're going to call it a night. Thanks so much for everyone for joining. Any, like we, at Acquired FM, we appreciate your feedback. Packy, do you have a not boring account or you just, what's your Twitter?

I am the F1 account. So yeah, at Packy M. Any and all feedback, more than welcome.

Awesome. And Mario? Mario D. Gabrielli. I actually don't really like feedback, but the praise is very welcome. Feel free to tell me why I was probably dumb at several points tonight. But thanks everyone for coming. This was super fun. Yeah, it was. We'll have to do it again. As long as the spreadsheet doesn't get too embarrassing for anyone's picks, then we'll keep the party going.

Amen. Sounds good. Awesome. Later, everyone. David sends his regards. David sends his regards.