The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
00:19:51 · Harry Stebbings, Thomas Sohmers
[00:19:51] S1: Do you think we should have export controls? [00:19:53] S0: I am very much a strong believer in free trade and and free exchange of ideas. The the exception to that is a little bit, I think, China has been a free rider of all of the benefits of, you know, a liberal free trade order for the rest of the world. Well, they get to keep everything closed off. I am very very happy and and think that any government societies, people that want to embrace free exchange of ideas and trade and everything else, we should have a very vibrant economy and ecosystem, but totalitarian regimes should not be able to participate with that, especially in the case where they get all of the benefits of that and get to export themselves, you know, things that make them better able to have that totalitarian, system keep up. [00:20:37] S1: Can I ask? We we mentioned, you know, the pacing the frontier and, you know, the different people who supported it. You had Zuck and Jensen say nothing. Well, Zuck actually come out in opposition to it saying that we should continue as planned. What should we take from those two seemingly silence and opposing it?
00:20:37 · Harry Stebbings, Thomas Sohmers
[00:20:37] S1: Can I ask? We we mentioned, you know, the pacing the frontier and, you know, the different people who supported it. You had Zuck and Jensen say nothing. Well, Zuck actually come out in opposition to it saying that we should continue as planned. What should we take from those two seemingly silence and opposing it? [00:20:53] S0: I I I would say based on my overall beliefs right now, as probably evidenced by the the conversation so far, I would say I'm overall opposed to, you know, the pace of the frontier direction it's going in. And so I appreciate anyone that is adding to the discussion that is, I think, being realist about the benefits and risks, but you always have to take that with a a grain of salt of what are the motives of of anyone that's that's discussing in it. And I would say I probably appreciate Zuck or Dario's comments infinitely more than a random politician and not just random. The the quote unquote leading politicians that don't actually understand the technology. The scariest thing to me on on the political spectrum and the way all of this being treated is that it's now become a almost unifying issue on left and right about being anti data centers. I think that is almost entirely a Chinese SIOP.
00:20:53 · Thomas Sohmers, Harry Stebbings
[00:20:53] S0: I I I would say based on my overall beliefs right now, as probably evidenced by the the conversation so far, I would say I'm overall opposed to, you know, the pace of the frontier direction it's going in. And so I appreciate anyone that is adding to the discussion that is, I think, being realist about the benefits and risks, but you always have to take that with a a grain of salt of what are the motives of of anyone that's that's discussing in it. And I would say I probably appreciate Zuck or Dario's comments infinitely more than a random politician and not just random. The the quote unquote leading politicians that don't actually understand the technology. The scariest thing to me on on the political spectrum and the way all of this being treated is that it's now become a almost unifying issue on left and right about being anti data centers. I think that is almost entirely a Chinese SIOP. [00:21:48] S1: Can I ask why is it a Chinese SIOP being anti data centers? Because, like, it does increase. I... I'm totally with you in the benefits of them. And, you know, Gavin Baker said it, how is that the greatest economic kind of needle mover for large parts of the country? I guess they see increased electricity prices, increased water prices, and ugly data centers in their backyard. Why is it a Chinese sub? What what am I not seeing?
00:22:09 · Thomas Sohmers
[00:22:09] S0: Well, just on the ugly and all that, I I totally am in support of a... We we we need to have beautification campaigns and and really turn them into, centerpieces of of our society. I think if thousands of years in that from now, you know, future history looks and they should see these massive data centers, the the really, really massive impressive ones should have, you know, be like the Great Pyramids or or something like... They've we we need to dress them up to be the the world wonders that they are technologically. The thing from water usage and, like, the amount of power they consume, etcetera, like, so much of the early information that went out by unsophisticated writers or things that are just patently false. Like, you know, a single In N Out uses, you know, more more water than, you know, the largest data centers in The United States. And, like, it's... Golf courses are orders of magnitude more. Like, it's... It... The meat... Like, these are closed loop, you know, liquid cooled systems that that, you know, you don't even wanna use water in a lot of these cases even. So from the Chinese SIOP perspective, they're not... To your your point, they're not pacing the frontier. They're adding, you know, gigawatts of, you know, new electricity generation capacity, most of it being dirty. They're building massive new data centers, horribly displacing people. Like, it just irks me so much that we have the freedom in the Western world to criticize companies, governments, everything based on false information. And I I love the freedom elements of that. But it is a strategic disadvantage when China can just say, yeah. We're going to just bulldoze all these people's homes and and do rolling blackouts wherever in order to, serve the greater good of new new training capacity.
00:23:49 · Harry Stebbings
[00:23:49] S1: I mean this with the greatest of respect, but I don't understand how anyone thinks The US or Europe can beat China when they have no regulatory or policy restrictions. And, I mean, The UK, you can't, you know, put up a paper airplane without getting a permit. So, like, we're we're fucked. But you are getting there, and you're getting... You're becoming a European state in terms of the regulation and policy requirements. Am I wrong? Am I being overly negative? I I didn't get it.
00:24:15 · Thomas Sohmers
[00:24:15] S0: I I... You're right. I think the greatest advantage The US has in that regard is that there's still a lot of land, a lot of places that do not have all the same levels of restrictions. I don't agree with a lot of things of most, you know, administrations of my lifetime, But the the current administration gets attacked for saying, like, they're destroying our our environments and and, you know, destroying national parks, etcetera. The vast vast majority, 90 plus percent, I don't know the exact numbers of national federal land is just open empty desert in in the West that is not part of a national park or anything. And the fact that there are so many restrictions to utilizing, you know, BLM land for building data centers where it's literally hundreds of miles from from any, you know, populated area. My great state of Nevada has plentiful geothermal, solar, all these green energy technologies, and we could, you know, build, you know, nuclear and other things in the middle of the desert where it won't impact anyone. And that there's restrictions to that is completely absurd to me. And I will say, there there has been some political will and and push to solve these things. But literally just in the past year, you have, you know, Republican governors and and other politicians that at least had part of their platform to be pro growth and all these things backing away because they see from their own, you know, political base being anti data center based on completely false premises. And and one of the points I wanna go back to that you brought up was, like, that people would have higher electricity costs. Like, this is the most basic supply and demand. If we increase generation capacity and no one's saying we wanna be taking energy from what's reserved for people's homes. Like, one of the regulatory problems I see is is power companies have to have this offer of of energy availability that is baked into cost and and capabilities for everyone. There there is absolutely zero cases where a data center could be potentially pulling power from anything that's already been allocated. So that's just impossibility. And all these data centers that are getting built right now are coming with generation capacity that covers their own use and beyond that.