E43: Innovative venture strategies, Zymergen's implosion, Square acquires Afterpay & more
Chamath Palihapitiya (host), David Sacks (host), Jason Calacanis (host), Narrator, David Friedberg (host), Jason Calacanis (host), Chamath Palihapitiya (host), Chamath Palihapitiya (host), David Sacks (host)
In this episode of All-In Podcast, featuring Chamath Palihapitiya and David Sacks, E43: Innovative venture strategies, Zymergen's implosion, Square acquires Afterpay & more explores 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.
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.
Key Takeaways
Hyper-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. ...
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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.
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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.
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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. ...
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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.
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Fintech winners will likely be multi-product platforms that turn costs into revenue lines.
Using Amazon as a template (AWS, Prime, payments), they argue that companies like Square, Shopify, and others that keep adding adjacent financial features (BNPL, lending, trading, crypto, insurance) and convert internal cost centers into external services will compound value and be rewarded by public markets.
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Financial deplatforming by large payment platforms may become a major policy battle.
Sacks warns that PayPal’s and Square’s willingness to ban users based on third-party “hate/extremism” lists extends social-media style censorship into finance, potentially denying people livelihoods; he expects future political and regulatory pushback, likening the needed response to a modern Teddy Roosevelt trust-busting era.
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Notable Quotes
“For 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
Questions Answered in This Episode
How should LPs and boards structure governance so that deep-tech companies can pursue long, risky R&D without slipping into overhyped narratives and misrepresentation?
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. ...
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
At what stage and check size should investors demand rigorous, milestone-based proof instead of primarily backing a founder’s story?
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. ...
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
How can employees better protect themselves from tax and liquidity disasters like Zymergen’s, where option exercises and IPO hype leave them owing money on collapsing stock?
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. ...
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Will the growing consolidation in fintech—acquisitions like Square–Afterpay and eventual banking licenses—lead to healthier competition or dangerous concentrations of financial power?
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.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Where should the line be drawn between private platforms’ right to set policies and the public’s right to access speech and financial infrastructure in an increasingly digital economy?
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Transcript Preview
He's optimizing the view.
No, I'm optimizing for shade, actually. Trying to get out of the-
Oh, Jesus fucking Christ, you look like a moron. (laughs) Look at that fucking glass. (laughs)
I mean, this dipshit showed up. He showed up to my beach club yesterday, and it was basically like someone had taken a mummy and then wrapped the mummy inside of a white sheet, and then presented him at this pla- at this place.
Oh, was he lathered in his, like, SPF 500?
And so, I, I said-
Lathered?
... at one point, I said at one point, "Let's go for a walk." And this asshole had the nerve to grab his cellphone and a battery pack for the cellphone. I forced him to leave the phone. He felt naked. Then I made him take off his shoes and socks, and then I tried to get him to take his shirt off. We got almost all the way there.
Yeah. That, that makes sense. All right, everybody. Here we go. Three, two-
(upbeat music) We're going all in. Let your winner slide. Rain Man David Sacks. I'm going all in. And I said we open sourced it to the fans, and they've just gone crazy with it. Love you,
Hey, everybody. Hey, everybody. Welcome to everybody's favorite game show, Guess Who's Not in Italy. Do, do, do, do. With us today, David Sacks, wearing sunglasses, with a view of an ocean, clearly on a nautical vessel. And I am in an old apartment in the center of Florence. And Chamath is at his hideaway somewhere in the countryside. And Friedberg is f- in front of a abstract piece of art.
Two people high on crystal meth-
(laughs)
... trying to break into his car in San Francisco.
(laughs)
(laughs) I'm no- I'm no longer a San Francisco resident, I'm proud and sad to say, after 20 years of loving this city. I have relocated, still in a nu- to, uh, a nondescript location still in California, but, uh, no longer-
You're in the Bay Area.
... in the city of Berkeley.
Enough said.
I'm in the Bay Area. Yeah.
So with us again, obviously, Rain Man, The Dictator, and back from a week off, the Queen of Quinoa. What ha- tell us, uh, Queen, you had a big week. You had, uh, some nice ink come out, some press about the production board raising some monster round, and you took the week off. Give us the feedback. What, what, what was it like taking a week off from the pod? And, uh, now you're getting press and you're becoming a public figure. Uh, what's it been like for you the past week? And, and tell everybody what went down with this new fund.
You know, my strategy was to take a week off from the pod and then have the ratings go up, and then I could quietly and nicely exit, um-
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