This Week in Startups
00:00:00 · Jason Calacanis, D.A. Wallach, Elana Gold
[00:00:00] S0: Alright, everybody. Welcome back to This Week in Venture Capital. It's our venture capital roundtable for November 4, and we have a lot to talk about. Before we do anything, I have my applaud pin on. I'm gonna start recording so I don't miss a minute. If you are involved in a lot of conversations like I am, you can record all those conversations, interviews, meetings, calls. Check it out at plaud.ai/twist. Use the code twist to get 10% off, and they know that we sent you. Alright. Back for a second week in a row. My guy, D. A. Wallach, here. Co founder, General Partner, Time BioVentures. I'm an LP. How are you doing, D. A? [00:00:39] S1: I'm doing great. [00:00:40] S0: Awesome. Great to be here. Great to have you here. For the first time, Elana Gold from Two Roads Capital. Tell us a little bit about Two Roads. [00:00:49] S2: We're an investment syndicate, so we do deal by deal basis. We're in AI, infra space, robotics, defense and energy. Some companies we've done is General Compute. They just raised their Series A, Panthalassa, Aalo Atomics, ExoWatt, etcetera. Super excited to be here, Jason. Been a huge fan of you for a while. [00:01:07] S0: Oh, well, you. That's very kind of you to say. And you've done over 50,000,000 across 200 companies. Do you use AngelList as a platform? Is the syndicate over there if people wanted to check it out? [00:01:17] S2: Yeah. AngelList and Sidecar, but you can find me if you just look up Two Roads Capital AngelList. It should come up. That's my previous syndicate in this one. And, yeah, it's been super exciting.
00:01:17 · Elana Gold, Jason Calacanis, Thomas Tunguz, S4
[00:01:17] S2: Yeah. AngelList and Sidecar, but you can find me if you just look up Two Roads Capital AngelList. It should come up. That's my previous syndicate in this one. And, yeah, it's been super exciting. [00:01:26] S0: Yeah. SideCar is a great platform as well. And Thomas is back, the founder and general partner at Theory Ventures. Man, you you and I have been at this for a long time. You're you're on your second fund or third fund? [00:01:40] S3: Second fund. Yeah. [00:01:42] S0: And and mostly early stage series a seed? [00:01:46] S3: Seed and series a. Yeah. So anywhere from about 5,000,000 investment to about 50. [00:01:50] S4: This Week in Startups is brought to you by g two I. G2i has been recruiting software engineers for over a decade. Go to g2i.co/twist to find out how g two I vets engineers and can help you hire them in days, not weeks. Vanta compliance and security shouldn't be a deal breaker for startups to win new business. Vanta makes it easy for companies to get a SOC two report fast. Get $1,000 off for a limited time at vanta.com/twistevery. For all of your incorporation, banking, payroll, benefits, accounting, taxes, or other back office administration needs, visit every.io.
00:02:27 · Jason Calacanis
[00:02:27] S0: All right. We have a lot to get to here, and we gotta just talk about the most amazing forty eight Hours DA. We had a lot of folks hand wringing. Oh, the prediction markets are wrong, shout out to our partners, Polymarket. Oh, the polls are wrong. This is all made up. They're all fake news. But a blue wave happened. It wasn't a spritz. The Democratic Party's taking control of the House and the Senate. We now have a split government. And some of these issues are pretty significant for tech. Obviously, the data center trade being the number one trade. Overnight markets look like we were going to have the market correct two, three, 4% today, and instead we've had the opposite. And I think the theories there, D. A, are, hey, the war is gonna end. Oil be having a bar of madness, and that kind of chaos will go away. Great state of Texas was a clean sweep, shockingly, for the blue. So don't blame me for that. That's not just because I came here. But D. A, what's your take on what this means for the venture capital startup entrepreneurial community and just the wider country?
00:03:49 · D.A. Wallach
[00:03:49] S1: Yeah. Well, look. For the wider country, democracy works. It's a great thing. This is what we want. We want this vacillation between the parties. We don't want a monarchy. We don't want one party rule. We want there to be an active debate in the country that's happening on Main Street and that's happening in Washington. And I think that's exactly what we've got as it pertains to our worlds of venture capital and the capital markets. Look, I think it's a... It it it... It's got two sides of the coin. Right? On the one hand, obviously, the data center story is a big political winner, and it's probably gonna be a big political winner for both parties. So I think the narrative for the Democrats this time is we're gonna stop these data centers. And in a couple of years, the narrative on the other side, maybe we're also gonna stop these data centers. So, like what politician wants to get up there and say, we've got this great technology we need to support that's coming for your job. And whether it's intellectually true that AI ultimately displaces jobs and ruins local communities and takes too much power and too much water. Whether any of those things are true, what matters is that you have to jump through all kinds of hoops and contort yourself to make the counterargument. In other words, for Marc Andreessen to go through the whole history of technology and point out with exacting detail how every other wave we thought was gonna put out everyone to work, but then it didn't. That's a more complicated story even if it's true.
00:05:27 · Jason Calacanis, D.A. Wallach
[00:05:27] S0: You gotta read like five or six books. [00:05:30] S1: I mean, [00:05:31] S0: it's you to have two [00:05:31] S1: or Yeah. Now three the flip side, maybe why we're seeing the markets not be so negative even though that could really take the thunder out of AI is that Trump has been a chaos agent. And whether he likes that or it's just something he can't help but do, he sows this endless level of uncertainty. And capital markets do not like uncertainty. So I would maintain, we don't need to get too into macro. I would maintain what we've seen happen in long term interest rates over the past year has been much more about uncertainty and fiscal unsustainability than it has been about crowding out with AI borrowing or anything like that. And when the uncertainty around everything in macro goes up, markets just don't like that. So I think divided government, even if it means sclerosis, even if it means that nothing gets done in DC, what it does mean is that nothing crazy is likely to happen.
00:06:36 · Jason Calacanis
[00:06:36] S0: And that's good for good for business. It's like a little bit of indigestion there, and, you know, they're debating stuff endlessly in committee. It means they can't also start a war. It means they can't also start tariff chaos. Makes things a bit more predictable. Elana, one of the things that the Trump administration was great at the last few years was embracing the tech community, American dynamism, you know, defense tech, and supporting data centers, supporting the industry, perhaps even too much. At the expense of talking about, and optics do matter, the plight of the everyday American. Do you think will... How this might impact what you're doing in terms of defense tech, terms of American dynamism, robotics, the hardware? A lot of these things have government as customers and you might have a government that is less excited about having these founders to the White House.