All-In PodcastE43: Innovative venture strategies, Zymergen's implosion, Square acquires Afterpay & more
At a glance
WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT
Venture Studios, Deep Tech Busts, and Fintech Power Plays Unpacked
- The hosts open with updates on their own investment vehicles: Friedberg’s Production Board venture studio raise with Alphabet and top institutions, and Sacks’ $1.12B Craft Ventures fund focused on SaaS and marketplaces. They debate the merits of the venture studio model, concentration versus spraying capital, and how incubating companies fits into LP agreements.
- A major segment dissects Zymergen’s IPO implosion as a case study in deep-tech hype without product–market fit, comparing it to Theranos, Nikola, WeWork, and Quibi, and emphasizing the importance of milestones, honest metrics, and governance. They explore how frothy capital, SoftBank-style mega-checks, and narrative-driven investing let deep-tech stories outrun reality and hurt employees.
- The conversation then turns to fintech consolidation: Square’s $29B all-stock acquisition of Afterpay, the economics of “buy now, pay later,” and how players like Square, PayPal, Stripe, and Shopify can convert costs into revenue lines and build multi-product financial super-apps. They also flag growing concerns over financial deplatforming, with PayPal and Square’s policies raised as potential threats to access to finance.
- Throughout, they weave in personal war stories (Theranos, Tether, Robinhood, Tesla, Virgin Galactic) to illustrate how investors should think about diligence, fraud risk, and the difference between early-stage narrative bets and massive capital allocations.
IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING
5 ideasHyper-focused venture studios can be attractive if they combine domain expertise with patient capital.
Friedberg’s Production Board focuses tightly on synthetic biology and deep tech, using a holding-company structure and long-term institutional LPs (Alphabet, BlackRock, Cascade, etc.) to support a small number of hard companies through long R&D cycles without being forced into premature venture rounds or artificial markups.
In deep tech, product–market fit and unit economics still trump platform stories.
Zymergen spent years as a services platform and then pivoted to products, but never achieved compelling economics or customer demand; the hosts argue that no amount of robotic labs, SoftBank money, or synthetic-biology rhetoric compensates for not having paying customers and viable gross margins.
Narratives are useful at seed, but dangerous when attached to massive checks without proof.
The group distinguishes between small, early “narrative bets” (where uncertainty is expected) and writing $100M–$500M checks or IPO-ing companies without milestones; they see SoftBank-style mega-rounds and self-markups as inviting governance failures, excess cash, and eventual blowups.
Disciplined, metric-driven diligence can prevent many high-profile investment disasters.
Sacks emphasizes always seeing core SaaS metrics (ARR, churn, NRR, CAC) and product demos before investing, while Calacanis notes that 20–30% of seemingly strong startups fail basic diligence (cap tables, accounting, IP, recurring vs. one-off revenue), underscoring that simple checks catch a lot of risk.
Massive valuations without skin in the game and real governance increase fraud risk.
Chamath stresses that when investors deploy other people’s money without personal downside, they are more likely to overlook red flags (Theranos, Nikola, Zymergen); robust boards, diverse investors, and founders with meaningful personal capital at risk reduce the chance of narrative-driven fraud.
WORDS WORTH SAVING
5 quotesFor me, it’s not about how many businesses you start; it’s about absolute value creation.
— David Friedberg
I think the best venture firms shouldn’t give a shit about any one company… their job is to pound money in, raise more money fast, and return market beta plus a little alpha.
— Chamath Palihapitiya
In deep tech you can’t just say, ‘I’m going from zero to one with billions of dollars over decades’—that’s a government program, not a startup.
— David Sacks
Humans want to believe. When you have a compelling narrative and a compelling deliverer of that narrative, you want to write a check.
— David Friedberg
Square just acquired a $30 billion company for free—the market cap went up more than the purchase price.
— Chamath Palihapitiya
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