This Week in Startups
01:17:24 · D.A. Wallach, Thomas Tunguz, Jason Calacanis
[01:17:24] S1: I mean, look at... Jason, you gotta pull up pull up the Kalshi Perpetuals markets. People need to see this. I mean, what Thomas is talking about is crazy. And if you pull that up, you're gonna see... You can bet on anything and the price ticker... I'm sure you've seen this, Thomas, and and Elana. The price ticker's moving in real time. I mean, this is catnip for a gambler's mind. [01:17:48] S3: Well, and then Jason just had the Anthropic, pair up. And what's amazing is two or three weeks ahead of an IPO, you have price discovery happening on these exchanges, which means as a retail investor, can say, like, oh, I think the right valuation for this business is 1.75 or two, and I can make a bet. And all of a sudden now, I have access in a way that I didn't have before. So it's... I think it's a really exciting phenomenon. [01:18:11] S0: Wow. You can put on whatever leverage you want here. [01:18:14] S1: Yeah. You you see that little purple slider over there? [01:18:17] S0: Uh-huh. [01:18:21] S1: Okay. You can just you can just put on a bet, and you're just voting up or down with up to almost seven times leverage. Wow. And they're doing this in real time and you're going to have this at least outside of The US on virtually every asset, including any derivative you can make up. So I think there's a good chance that this just eats a lot of the capital market if it were left to its own devices. Of course, regulators are not going to let that happen. This is going to be heavily regulated in The US. But, you know, we'll see how much they tighten the screws on it.
01:18:21 · D.A. Wallach, Jason Calacanis
[01:18:21] S1: Okay. You can just you can just put on a bet, and you're just voting up or down with up to almost seven times leverage. Wow. And they're doing this in real time and you're going to have this at least outside of The US on virtually every asset, including any derivative you can make up. So I think there's a good chance that this just eats a lot of the capital market if it were left to its own devices. Of course, regulators are not going to let that happen. This is going to be heavily regulated in The US. But, you know, we'll see how much they tighten the screws on it. [01:19:03] S0: And if you're not buying the underlying asset and enough capital moves to perpetuals, then that would make the existing assets go down in value if too many people move over here, this is just crazy No, for
01:19:03 · Jason Calacanis, Thomas Tunguz
[01:19:03] S0: And if you're not buying the underlying asset and enough capital moves to perpetuals, then that would make the existing assets go down in value if too many people move over here, this is just crazy No, for [01:19:21] S3: it's like, I mean, okay, the history of the options market is you had farmers who wanted to buy insurance so they could sell their corn a And year from now at a particular you look at the derivatives markets, which are options or futures on top of corn or stocks, those tend to be about five to 10 times the size in terms of total trading volume compared to the underlying. So if there's a billion dollars worth of corn that's sold every day, there's probably 5 to 10,000,000,000 of derivatives that are sold on top. And, anyway, so those markets tend to be significantly bigger, and it actually makes the price discovery of the underlying asset much healthier, going back to D. A. Point about how there's no... There's a lot less active trading except for hedge funds in in public markets. And so you should actually see a significantly healthier overall private market as a result of a
01:19:21 · Thomas Tunguz, Jason Calacanis
[01:19:21] S3: it's like, I mean, okay, the history of the options market is you had farmers who wanted to buy insurance so they could sell their corn a And year from now at a particular you look at the derivatives markets, which are options or futures on top of corn or stocks, those tend to be about five to 10 times the size in terms of total trading volume compared to the underlying. So if there's a billion dollars worth of corn that's sold every day, there's probably 5 to 10,000,000,000 of derivatives that are sold on top. And, anyway, so those markets tend to be significantly bigger, and it actually makes the price discovery of the underlying asset much healthier, going back to D. A. Point about how there's no... There's a lot less active trading except for hedge funds in in public markets. And so you should actually see a significantly healthier overall private market as a result of a [01:20:09] S0: These are getting very popular in Korea, I understand. People love to bet with this massive leverage and they have stocks. So you can buy an actual stock that's trading at 10 times. So here, if you bought... This, I guess, is The US tech 100. If you buy this at 11.8 times leverage, a 1% move feels like 11.8%. So you're just getting much more action. This is like caffeine to meth. Like, no stopping at cocaine. You're just going straight to breaking bad blue meth. Don't recommend, folks. I don't. I mean, I guess if you just want the stock to move in the next two days, I guess you could. I mean, it's interesting. I'm very good at calling bottoms.
01:20:09 · Jason Calacanis, D.A. Wallach
[01:20:09] S0: These are getting very popular in Korea, I understand. People love to bet with this massive leverage and they have stocks. So you can buy an actual stock that's trading at 10 times. So here, if you bought... This, I guess, is The US tech 100. If you buy this at 11.8 times leverage, a 1% move feels like 11.8%. So you're just getting much more action. This is like caffeine to meth. Like, no stopping at cocaine. You're just going straight to breaking bad blue meth. Don't recommend, folks. I don't. I mean, I guess if you just want the stock to move in the next two days, I guess you could. I mean, it's interesting. I'm very good at calling bottoms. [01:20:56] S1: Well, we've got all kinds of levered ETFs right now, by the way. I mean, look, this is all sort of a symptom of wealth inequality in a way. I mean, people are just... As Charlie Munger used to say, the world's not run by greed, it's run by envy. And the numbers that people are seeing in terms of how rich these Anthropic founders are getting and even the employees who were hired last year, this kind of thing drives a mindset of rabid risk taking. And if that Postmates driver who's trying to figure out how to escape from that life and you like a stock, it's really tempting to go buy the 3x levered ETF in Hynix or whatever. In your mind, you go, look, I I mean, if if Yeah. If I lose 2,000 [01:21:45] S0: who cares? If I hit, I do care. So it's like putting on a parlay. It's like, I need to have, like
01:21:45 · Jason Calacanis, D.A. Wallach, Thomas Tunguz
[01:21:45] S0: who cares? If I hit, I do care. So it's like putting on a parlay. It's like, I need to have, like [01:21:52] S1: And we're... And we... And we've told people, you know, I mean, this is, again, going back to the beginning of the politics, the tech guys have told people that they've got three years to make all the money they're ever going to make. [01:22:03] S0: And after that, [01:22:04] S1: the world ends or you're forever frozen in your place in the economic hierarchy. And so people are just throwing caution to the wind. They're doing crazy stuff, and that's not gonna be a good formula when their retirement rolls around. [01:22:16] S0: All right. Another amazing episode this week in Venture Capital Roundtable. Can people find you, Tomas? Where can people find you online if they wanna to follow you and your missives? [01:22:27] S3: Oh, tomtunguz.com or theoryvc.com. [01:22:30] S0: There you go. Elana, where can people find you? Maybe even if they were interested, participate in your syndicate, join your syndicate and see what you're investing in.