E158: Global trade disrupted, Adobe/Figma canceled, realtors sued, Trump blocked

About 30% of all ocean container traffic flows through the Suez and through the Red Sea. ... So you're talking about a 20, 25% cut in shipping capacity on the 30% of all containers.

the really significant impacts are downstream to Europe consumer prices. So I think like European inflation has more chance of upticking again than America does

the fact that the insurance companies won't insure the ship anymore means that now that ship can't travel and that's tens of millions of dollars of commerce that gets shut down off of a few thousand dollar investment. ... there are many other groups like this that may get emboldened and you start to see more activity in other regions as well

Here's how you'll know that the monopoly has ended, is when the buy side commission goes away.

if the monopoly breaks on the marketplace, then the business model will get competed away, and there will start to be a change here. And I think that this lawsuit and the settlement ultimately leads to a shift in the industry that could certainly benefit consumers, but could have a negative economic impact because of the number of people that depend on brokerage fees as their job.

The settlement is likely to be that when you hire a broker, they will give you a form and you'll pick what percentage you want to pay. ... keep an eye on this one folks, because it's going to have a massive impact.

the Suez Canal is too valuable, in my opinion, too valuable to civilization, to the modern world, to believe that a group of rebels, no matter how well-funded they may be, is gonna be able to disrupt that for any long period of time.

So I think this has the potential to be a black swan in 2024, meaning that somehow the Israel-Hamas war spirals into a larger regional war that pulls the US in. ... And I think that if that does happen, there could be the potential for an oil shock.

there is no viable M&A path for early stage venture capital businesses. So if you can't have a 20 billion dollar merger or a 40 billion dollar merger or a 15 or 20 billion dollar M&A with a high degree of confidence, then the path to liquidity through M&A is less than 20% of the outcomes

One is if we put in more conservative, Republican, Libertarian, etc., less regulatory regime in Washington that could open up M&A as soon as 2025, perhaps.

the fact that regulators took 15 months to analyze the deal only to come to the conclusion that they basically weren't going to allow it, and then Adobe finally killed it, is going to have a chilling effect on M&A and Silicon Valley ... when you take half the potential exits off the table, you're absolutely making it tougher for VCs and founders to get a good return. It's that simple.

I don't know if I'd take the antitrust regime as being the core driver of M&A not being on the table. ... The biggest driver of concern is just all the return on capital metrics that the big buyers are having to face. Return on invested capital is becoming more important than it's ever been

the asymmetry of the warfare that the hoodies can launch a drone or a cheap missile that costs thousands of dollars and it costs us millions of dollars to shoot it down. ... That is just not sustainable for the US.

you can really do incredible damage to very expensive airplanes with hypersonic missiles that go incredibly fast or like Mach 5 or something insane, and they're cheap. ... So $100 million or $20 million fighter jet can just be annihilated by a couple of $100,000 in hypersonic missiles.

I think the positive take on this is that it actually puts the Middle East in a position to resolve all of these things. ... I suspect that both of these two hot wars get resolved quickly because the larger multi-decade implications for the Middle East are too big to let it be subsumed by the Houthi rebels or Hamas.

The problem they have is that the Houthis aren't going to stop doing what they're doing until Israel's war in Gaza stops. And Netanyahu, just in the last 24 hours, made it clear that Israel won't stop fighting.

There are a group of people with an agenda, which is to modernize the economies there, to move off-petro and to move into technology and to move into hospitality with the Neon Project ... And that's not going to get derailed. And those are the most powerful, deep-pocketed influential forces there.

now I think that they've basically made his winning the Republican nomination a foregone conclusion and he is the overwhelming favorite to win the presidency after this.

I said, I think it was like last year, that all of this lawfare, all these tactics, its shenanigans that the Democrats were trying, it's either gonna put Trump in the big house or the White House. And I think he said it for the White House on this basis right now.

that family office or that endowment who can rip in a check as an LP to a fund can still get five, six, seven percent, can get corporate bond at corporate yields at like eight, nine, 10 percent. ... Why take on 15 year illiquidity for oftentimes funds that return less than the S&P, which is the dirty little secret of Silicon Valley? It makes no sense.

It's true that smaller funds do perform better and larger funds become more of an index and achieve more average returns. When you got a multi-billion dollar fund, it's way harder to achieve a outsized return.

they are not expecting to raise like some giant seed or Series A. They're raising just the amount of money they need. ... And they're keeping their expenses absurdly low. The biggest trend I'm seeing is outsourcing of talent.

the economic impact of AI is so massively deflationary. It may be an order or two orders of magnitude more deflationary than AWS was ... That's all I'm saying is the effective break-even goes way down in a world where AI proliferates. I think that's positive for founders.

I just think your typical SaaS start right now is spending the money on more prosaic things.

the capital markets in the United States are not ready or not in a position to support all this IPO liquidity. Why? The banks won't underwrite. There aren't enough researchers, research analysts that will cover these stocks.

we've seen all the companies that went public, whether it's Airbnb or Uber, are now focused on ringing the cash register and being profitable.

let's say that this blockade of the Red Sea continues for all of 2024 ... What does that do to global prices? Because I think right now, the market is pricing in rate cuts next year on the theory that inflation is coming down and is a solved problem.

a lot of businesses that raised a lot of capital at a very high valuation, and then you have this multiple compression that's just happened in the last two years, their valuation effectively, if they were to go public today or get sold, is less than the capital they raised. And that's the most extreme scenario where suddenly all the common shareholders get wiped out in terms of their return.