VC markup dynamics, Russia/US tensions over Ukraine, Altos Labs raises $3B, Stripe mafia & more

The episode opens mid-banter rather than with a topic. One speaker says he does not want to talk about "Andrew" and pivots to calling Palmer Luckey, the founder behind Oculus, fascinating, prompting a mock argument over why anyone would want to discuss that company. A speaker says Palmer Luckey hates him and refuses to come on his other show, This Week in Startups.

The talk slides into a joke about cosplay, with one host teasing another for dressing up like superhero characters at conventions, countered by a jab about dressing like an old Italian woman. From there a host spins out a bit about Italian "matrona" figures, describing an old-world idea that a country's real decisions were made in living rooms after dinner, with the powerful wives of powerful men acting as the architects of those choices. The exchange is loose, overlapping ASR banter, and the speakers cannot be cleanly separated.

The running joke lands on one host being cast as the "matrona" of the group, and the formal intro follows: a welcome to another episode of the All-In podcast, a note that they are "still publishing" and have not been canceled, and the usual mock honorifics for the group. The segment is pure comic warm-up with no analysis.

Asked how everyone is holding up as the market falls, one speaker says he has stopped checking his portfolio because he is not a fan of the color red. Another host describes using the downturn to desensitize himself, reviewing four or five specific trading moments from the past decade where he asked himself why he had acted as he did. He draws two lessons. The first: confusing an investment with a trade is a fatal error, because investments are things you want to own for a long time while trades are speculative bets on short-term moves.

The second lesson is emotional: he says he used to panic and sell at the lows. He recounts that in late November or early December he wrote a letter on Twitter, sold a batch of holdings and raised cash after noting that "Jeff" and Elon were selling, giving himself a buffer so that further declines would not force emotional decisions. His half-joking litmus test is whether he comes home and acts like an asshole to friends and family when the market questions him; the others rib him about his mood at poker games.

A lighter aside ties market sentiment to wardrobe: a host recalls that during the COVID-era collapse one of them stopped caring about nice clothes, then by December was extolling an expensive alpaca sweater, and now defends a cashmere rib sweater from Loro Piana. The point is made as a joke about sentiment, not a serious indicator.

To test the trade-versus-investment framing, a host asks whether Bitcoin was and still is a trade or an investment. The speaker answers that he invested around 2010 or 2011 at roughly $80 and wrote a Bloomberg op-ed that year arguing people should hold about 1% of their net worth in it. He says it has remained an investment ever since.

He adds that he deliberately does not hold Bitcoin personally, to avoid the pressure and risk of managing keys, coins and wallets, but says he still believes in it over the long term. The specific entry price and date are his own recollection and are not independently verified here.

Turning to a host described as running an avoidance-acceptance approach to the red screens, the discussion moves to how the public-market correction feeds through to venture. One speaker frames an inverse relationship: when exit prices are great, entry prices are lousy, and vice versa. With public markets having corrected sharply, those lower price levels have finally trickled down into venture, so new deals are starting to price at more reasonable levels.

He explains that harvesting gains from older investments is less attractive than three months earlier, but making new investments is much more attractive. For a relatively young firm, only four or five years old, most activity is still new investment rather than harvesting, so he is not especially worried. A host restates the idea as a maxim: fortunes are made in the down market and collected in the up market.

The speaker is careful to add that founders should not misread this as VCs trying to extract sweetheart deals. In his view the VC role is to be a price taker of whatever the market sets rather than to negotiate below market; the real job is to pick the right companies, not to haggle. A joke follows comparing it to trying to talk down the price of bananas at Whole Foods.

On why prices are falling, the speaker says that what he has heard is that crossover-style investors such as Tiger and Coatue, who had been deploying large sums, have slowed down sharply and are "licking their wounds," so the money that had flooded into venture is on pause, pulling price levels down. He flags this explicitly as something he has heard, not a confirmed account.

A host describes his own year: his public portfolio turned over hard in the fourth quarter and took large losses, and after accounting for every public holding he essentially broke even for the year, with some early sales up and much of the rest down by year-end. His private book, by contrast, was marked up by about a billion dollars, which he told his team was not real.

He explains the mechanics: because other venture firms priced those deals and his firm receives audited K-1s, he has to carry the billion-dollar markup, which lifted reported returns to roughly 15%. He told the team to treat the year as, at best, breakeven and probably a loss, even though an entire fund complex lives on such marks. He says the markup does not feed his compensation, but he still has to book it.

Another host calls this an important point. He says venture firms face a strong disincentive to take markdowns or to raise a company's new round below the prior price, because a lower marked value drags down the portfolio and makes it harder to raise the next fund from LPs, since it can look like poor investing. As a result, every round carries pressure to push the valuation higher even when business performance fell short of what the prior round assumed.

He argues this creates artificial pressure in private equity and venture to always drive value up or walk away, rather than fund a company at an honest markdown. Pointing to public markets, he notes that every successful company, from Apple to Google, Facebook, Amazon and Netflix, endured long, deep stretches of a falling stock while remaining a sound business. The takeaway is that founders should resist the venture mandate to always raise up rounds and instead focus on the right valuation and the right partners.