Jeremy Giffon on the Billion-Dollar PDF, the Poaster Class, and the Next Era of Finance

Jeremy Giffon

I've learned a lot. You really realise that in long-term private markets, the great filter for funds is their storytelling ability, fundamentally, because their product — which is realised cash returns — takes a decade. So the thing you're selling in the interim, whether it's through a quarterly update, or your event, or just your one-on-one conversations with your LPs, is really just narrative.

A particular situation that's very interesting, and that we've seen a lot of, is twofold. One is that the business is kind of old but has started to do well recently. That's an interesting scenario, because merely because the story of the company is that it's seven years old — let's say the company has really started to inflect, maybe because of AI or maybe because of something else, but they're six or seven years into their life — it's very difficult for those companies to get funding, because the story is: okay, fine, you grew two hundred per cent last year, but in absolute terms you're only at eight million of revenue and you're seven years in. Whereas if you just changed the name, told a different story, and arbitrarily started the clock two years ago, that company would actually be really hot. So that's an interesting situation — the fix, I think, is just to be more flexible on narrative and story.

A derivative of that problem is the number of businesses where things are starting to go well, but they're faced with three choices: they're not going to raise a significant up round, so really they're staring down a bridge round, a strategic M&A acquisition, or cutting to profitability. Those are really hard situations. If you're in that spot, I think you really want to get creative with the cap table — if you have some cash, buy back your investors, convert everyone to common, spend more time on the cap table — because otherwise, I've been shocked at how hostile insider bridge rounds really are. I think this is an under-discussed part of venture: they'll have three-x liquidation preferences, or warrants, or ratchets, or other things. There's this interesting idea that if you're extractive to the downside, everyone boos you. But if you're extractive for the upside — where you say, I want the right to invest at the same price two years from now — they're both similarly extractive, but because one is optimistic-extractive, everyone loves that one.

Jeremy Giffon

We're obviously in a highly volatile, highly uncertain period right now. No one knows if it's the death of software — I think it's certainly the most unprecedented and uncertain time since at least the transition to the internet. And so what you want in that time is a lot of optionality, and the ability to be nimble, and the ability to really do what's right for the business without being constrained by the cap table. Maybe your business needs to become a services business. Maybe you need to acquire other companies. Maybe you need to run profitably for a while. Maybe you need to change your whole business model — maybe if per-seat pricing goes away you need to pivot to usage, maybe you need to fire a bunch of your customers. So in volatile times it's always useful to have optionality. I guess the general piece of advice is: unless you're certain that you want to try this one thing and it's going to be huge or zero, you should think about optionality — which usually means raising less, raising from investors with a wider mandate, not getting stuck in problems where you need to continue raising more money. If you don't, it's bad for employees, it's bad for recruiting, people's options go underwater, they start to leave — all those things reduce optionality.

It's funny, because in general I think commitment is a much better strategy than optionality. But in highly volatile times, where it's hard to tell the future, you basically want to control for being able to be super nimble, turn on a dime, do what you want, and not be constrained by your capital being set up in such a way that you can only really do one thing — which is also true for investors, by the way. Same problem.

Jeremy Giffon

This is an idea that you and I came up with in a joking way, that kind of turned out to be true, I think, the more we thought about it — which is that every once in a while, someone crystallises a notion right at the right time, in the right way, that becomes the foundational viewpoint or opinion of a certain era. Everyone's a little bit uncertain, everyone is a little panicked, they don't know what's going on, and someone just needs to set the story and set the narrative. It doesn't even have to be right — there's just a sort of confidence of, this is what's going on, this is happening, follow me, almost. When those come together, they set a new narrative that everyone can rest on for a period, really, until the next PDF comes along. And the billion-dollar PDF thing is this idea that you can form billions of dollars of capital, in one way or another, around simply setting a new idea. You can think of capital as like ten-year-olds playing soccer — they all just follow the ball around. Capital just follows the billion-dollar PDF around the field.

Jeremy Giffon

I think it's downstream of technological change — the technological change is really the uni-feed. What people don't appreciate about X is that everyone gets served the same five hundred tweets a day, and it's hundreds of millions of daily active users. The thing that people who don't post don't realise is just how enormous the poster-to-lurker ratio on these things is. It's really hard to feel the impact unless you're actually getting onto the feed and seeing all the people you didn't know were reading X all day commenting on your thing. I'm always surprised when I post a good tweet and whoever texts me about it — I had no idea they read Twitter all day, but everyone reads Twitter all day. So the uni-feed is the technological catalyst for this phenomenon.

It is X, by the way — it's interesting how X is sort of the Lindy social network. It's probably never going to reach the scale of the others, but it just fills this vital role. It's interesting to me how, after almost twenty years now, it's still more important than ever as a source of truth, almost, for the whole world. What that means is everyone is reading the same thing — it's the global newspaper. In the same way that people would talk about the latest article in the journal thirty years ago, now it's the latest tweet or the latest essay on X. What that creates is that all the most important people in the world — at least when it comes to capital markets, politics, journalism, entrepreneurship, technology — are reading their daily paper every morning, and these things form opinion, they price securities, they dictate where capital flows, and they certainly write policy.

So there's this idea that another great filter is whether your institution will only survive if it's timeline-native — meaning it is reactive to, and reflexive of, the timeline. Reactive, in that it's constantly monitoring the timeline; reflexive, in that its actions then affect the timeline, which it then reads and reacts to. The White House is obviously like this. Venture capital is like this. Certainly public equities are like this. There's this idea of what is the story.

It's funny — one of the things I get emails about the most is a comment I made somewhere, that posting is the last great meritocracy. I get emails about that because people say it really clicked in their head and they started posting, and posting changes your life if you're good at it. That's still true today, maybe more true than ever, and it is a meritocracy in a weird way. Now there's the algorithms and AI and all this stuff, but it's still, in some ways, a lot more meritocratic than it used to be — like everything, it's been lotteryified. In the old days you had to grind away and build a huge following, and then, by virtue of having a big following, you could post a really inane tweet and it would be very popular. That doesn't happen any more. Now you can be a new account, write a good post, and the algorithm selects you and displays you in front of five hundred million people.

It's this weird thing where you have the global newspaper that everyone reads and finds highly influential, and there's also this meta thing where you can see all the influential people reacting to the articles in the newspaper, and by reacting to it they make the thing more important — and anyone can post to it. People are still underestimating how much policy gets dictated from the timeline, how much venture rounds are done on the timeline, how much businesses are built on the timeline. I think increasingly everything will just become timeline-native. I think TBPN is a great example of this. Certainly, right — when we're recording this, every other day someone writes some sort of pornographic fanfic about AI and it moves the public markets dramatically. It comes back to this billion-dollar PDF idea: when there's uncertainty, people are just looking for what is the story, what is the most compelling story. The way it works on the timeline is it's not this well-considered book that comes out and everyone talks about for a year — it's what is the thing that sounds smart, feels good, has to be entertaining. Maybe that's another change — a good post has to be very entertaining, because people are on the timeline to be entertained. They can lie to themselves and say they're on it for other reasons, but it's just to be entertained, and that's obviously what the algorithms are selecting for. So the most entertaining, somewhat interesting, somewhat correct thing is going to set the actions and the consensus for everyone on a day-to-day basis, and this translates into their actions.

Jeremy Giffon

I don't know — everything's downstream of technological change. The reason your podcast followed a normal distribution was because the technology delivering it was an RSS feed, and now it's an algorithm, and it's clips, and — even the method, right, I'm sure some obscene amount of your viewers are watching or listening on YouTube, which is new. Even if you subscribe to a podcast on YouTube, it's not going to show you every episode in chronological order. So I think this is all just new, downstream of technology. I don't think something has changed in the content or the listeners — it's just how it's delivered. In that sense, maybe one place where the podcast world lags behind the YouTube world is that it's still highly naive about serving content to the algorithm. If you get deep into the Twitter group chats — especially now that they've published the algorithm — there are all these very specific things you can do around replies and likes and length, all these numbers that the algorithm is selecting for. I'd say streamers and people on YouTube understand that, and podcasts — I think maybe the reason it feels a little random is because podcasts still aren't into the meat of understanding that we are recording this video for an LLM to review and decide what it wants to show people, and then people will decide if they like it or not. That first filter we don't really think about, but it is the case.

Jeremy Giffon

I hear a lot of lamentation over the death of books, that people don't read any more, and it's so interesting to me, because I've read a lot of books, I like books, I've spent a good portion of my life reading books — but I don't see the big crisis that everyone laments about with books. The attention-span thing maybe is true — it's certainly way harder for me to read a book on pure focus — but I feel like the sum total of the interviews I listen to and the things I read are great, and I don't think I have an appetite for books just because they're harder to read; I think I'm feeling nourished from other sources.

It's interesting — if you think about porn, it's more obviously bad, because people don't have sex and they watch porn, and it's fairly straightforward that sex is better than porn. That seems like an obvious thing, but people will hold that up right next to books. I don't know — to me the book thing feels a little bit like a swan song for a technology that will still have a place, but it was the best way we had of delivering information, and now there are new ways that are more compelling and more interesting.

You have to caveat that, of course, with — I'm very sensitive to language, and the terms we use, like 'terminally online' or 'brain rot' — we recognise these are terms of death and rotting and destruction, and we didn't pick neutral or positive terms for these activities. I don't think anyone would ever self-conceive of reading a lot of books as being a very negative thing. So the counter-argument would be that, no, we actually have this deep sense that it is bad. And I think, maybe like everything, it's just less forgiving — if you're highly disciplined and motivated, the way you can use new media is better than ever, but if you're not, it's just going to be worse than ever.

Jeremy Giffon

Yes, I think it's the first modern administration, for better or worse.

Jeremy Giffon

It's just highly reactive and reflexive to the timeline. I think it's hyper-aware — maybe in the same way that past administrations would be addicted to polling, this one looks more at the timeline than at polling. Polling is about understanding the wants and desires of the median, average person, but the timeline shifts back to a more republican model, in that you're caring about whatever a few hundred thousand influential people think. Ben Sasse, the former senator, has this great notion that Washington is now mostly people who want to be TikTok and YouTube stars — that's mostly what congressmen and senators want to be — and he condemns it, which is true from a simple sense: you would hope that congressmen and senators are primarily interested in governance, but they're not.

On the other hand — and this is a shift I'm only just putting together now — maybe polling drives governance, whereas if you're only polling the timeline, you can think of it as: the people who do well in politics now are optimised for content, they're basically content creators, because the polling is the timeline. And that's interesting, because who is on the timeline? The readers are probably a more accurate sample of the median people in the country, but the posters who dictate what the timeline thinks of something are a really small group. It's almost like — if the original vision of who voted was white male landowners, maybe the version of people who matter for policy now is just the good poasters. I don't know if that's a good or bad thing, but it's a very different group, and one that doesn't correlate super tightly to any particular demographic trait.

Jeremy Giffon

I think it's not that dissimilar to writing. I do think being a little bit tortured, having a bit of a messed-up personal life in general — you can think of it a bit like comics. Maybe posting is a little bit like a writer mixed with a comedian. It certainly has the comedic element — you need a riff that resonates, that's a sort of instant hit, phrased in an interesting way. There's a blend of comedy, poetry, and writing.

Jeremy Giffon

I think we are at peak guy. It's hard to say where to start with this. There's a pagan understanding of God as being in and around you everywhere — everything is animated, everything is controlled and dictated by the gods. Then in the Renaissance, you could say God lives above the clouds, but there's a guy up there you can talk to. And then when we discover what's past the clouds, we go, okay, there's no guy up there. And then we discover space, and so basically you have to keep going, well, maybe he's beyond space. Maybe we don't know it's a guy any more, or a distinct person you could address and talk to, but it's this conceptual thing. God just moves farther and farther away and becomes more and more conceptual. But ever since we've become an atheist society, we've been looking for things to look up to and worship. It's trite now to say everyone has to worship, or whatever — I think the more precise thing is that there's always a role for priests in society, and we've been looking for new priests. I think we tried scientists as priests — the scientific project has fallen apart a little bit, this is widely discussed, we looked to physics as hopefully providing us meaning, it hasn't, physics has largely stalled since the war. So I think we've moved beyond science as a source of meaning.

I think there's this billionaire class we've looked to as the new source of meaning. On its surface it doesn't make a lot of sense that we'd spend so much time caring what billionaires think about physics or theology or health, topics unrelated to accruing a billion dollars. But the reason we do, I think, is this is our new priestly class — we've said, okay, the values that are important in our society are being successful at business, and to be successful at business you generally have to be smart and hard-working, so these are the people who have ascended to the highest realm of piety in our value system, and so we're going to listen to them. We were willing to take scientific and medical advice from people who are either in the billionaire class or adjacent to it — which is the poaster class, which is like the new class, I think.

The peak-guy thing is this idea that I think we've had enough of the billionaire — there's been a lot of billionaire worship, and part of it is that they've gotten way less scarce. Billionaires, at least state-of-mind billionaires, have probably grown a hundred times in the last twenty years, probably more. We looked to them to provide us these answers, and it has not been satisfying. This notion that I want to catch every podcast with this billionaire and study his routines and habits and care what he thinks about these things has come to its full saturation.

There's also this secondary idea — that money is not as powerful as we maybe once thought it was, in so far as, certainly in our political landscape, we haven't seen the donor class be nearly as successful as they used to be, or as we thought they were. If you're a billionaire, you're quite limited on the things you can do compared to, say, an African warlord, or even certainly a robber baron. And there are these forces — inflation is driving down what it means to be a billionaire at all, and the evolution of power structures in society is also limiting: Andrew Carnegie could take up arms against his workers, but now if you post the wrong thing as a billionaire, you have to resign. So there's this sense that this whole class has become less important. And then, look, the media and the podcast thing is just saturated — you get it, you understand this thing, but we don't want to take life advice, we don't want to hear about what's happening from the billionaire class any more. That whole set feels very saturated — it feels unlikely there's a marginal billionaire I'm going to learn something very interesting from on a podcast, and I don't think that was the case six years ago.

So the logical question is, what is the next class, as we flail around looking for our next set of priests? I think it's the poaster. You can see this, because I think the billionaire class is a little bit deferential to the poaster. One clear way to see it is that the science class inherited the priesthood after the actual priests, and then you can always look at which class is subservient to the next to see who's next — the science class becomes subservient to the billionaire class, this is certainly the Epstein lesson, right, all the scientists clamouring around the money and glamour — and now I think the billionaire class has become subservient to the poaster class. You can see who society collectively chooses to be like, 'All right, this is the guy I want to listen to for two hours and, you know, base my life on.'

Jeremy Giffon

I was at this thing a while ago, and it was a bunch of billionaire investors, and they were all fighting over who could sit next to Tyler Cowen, because he's the most interesting person there.

Jeremy Giffon

Exactly. I think there's very much something to that. It's sort of that simple, and there's this line of subservience.

There's also this interesting point about scarcity, like always — the billionaire-inflation thing is the seed of their own demise. If, you know, Grant Cardone is a billionaire and so is Elon Musk, it just makes it so stupid, and we need a new class at the top — it's not a decabillionaire or a centibillionaire, that doesn't — who cares, it's something else that distinguishes. We need to reclassify the top hundred or something — robber baron — it just seems there are too many of them, so I don't care any more. It seems much easier to get a billion dollars than it does to gain the real estate in people's minds, or on the timeline, that the top couple of poasters can. If I could just have it by decree, it would be who is a liquid, inflation-adjusted billionaire — I think that number probably hasn't changed a whole lot.

I always find it useful to take this retrospective, historic frame. Net worth is a really new idea. If you read Pride and Prejudice, Mr Darcy — they're talking about how wealthy all the men are, and Mr Darcy is discussed as getting ten thousand pounds a year from his estate. That's his wealth — it's his cash flow.

Jeremy Giffon

Yeah — there's not a scene in Pride and Prejudice where they're asking, does he have a lot of margin loan against his estate, or, well, his estate's worth two hundred thousand — because he would never sell his estate, it's not viewed as an asset. It's this holy, conceptual thing — truly, just points on a leaderboard, because you can't spend it. I really think billionaire is kind of a state of mind, somewhere between private markets and net worth as a concept, and then inflation. Billionaire is now something you can just be dubbed — I think you'll come to see billionaire as this sort of political label that's only tangentially related. You see this on the timeline a lot, people getting referred to as a billionaire who aren't rich at all, but they have these traits and associations. This is similar to 'millionaire' — no one says that any more. It used to carry the same weight as billionaire, but now millionaire is just this — it's both irrelevant, but it also doesn't matter if you have five million dollars or eight hundred thousand, it's this looser class thing, as the currency gets devalued both in the literal sense and in the sense of what you can do with it. Time is fixed, so the new scarcity is just attention you can draw on the screen.

Jeremy Giffon

The distinction to draw is there are the people I want to get tweet notifications for, because I actually think each one of their posts is really good — that's a vanishingly small number — and then there are good poasters who have really made something of themselves because of their prolificness. The other problem with posting is it still rewards prolificness, which I'm sternly against — I always think Twitter should be dictated by followers divided by posts, but that's not how it works, it just rewards prolificness.

I think there's this idea that the most important media property won't be watched, the most important author isn't read, the most important philosopher is not understood, the most important stock has no fundamentals. In a world of fiat currency, everything becomes this weird fiat thing. Certainly it's true about philosophers and authors — does anyone really read the books these authors write? I don't think so. A small amount of tastemakers read the books, and then other people look at books as idols, and if they're blessed by the right people, there's this mimetic celebration of the thing. Even podcasts — like you said, clips do a lot better than the podcast episode. I pride myself that I can tell if a podcast, or a blog essay, or a book, is good or not without having read it, just by triangulating it — I know which of your episodes do well without listening to them, because I can feel it from the reception. To some extent that is the thing — you can imagine a world where there are a few clips from a podcast but no one ever listens to the podcast, but I don't actually think that would diminish the value of the property. Everything is being processed and packaged for catching attention while taking the least amount of that person's time.

Jeremy Giffon

I think my takeaway from that would simply be that one should not fool themselves that they are looking for anything other than entertainment in all the media they consume, because it is produced to be entertaining, it's selected to be entertaining, it's edited to be entertaining. The job to be done of what's on the screen is to entertain you. That's the big lesson — I'm not going to tell people how much entertainment they should have in their life, but that's what it is, fundamentally. Rolex or Nike can convince you their thing is an investment or an asset versus a liability, so you'll spend way more money on it — podcasts and posts and essays can convince you that what you're reading is useful and productive and anything other than watching TV all day. Whether I want to spend an hour a day on the timeline or eight hours a day on the timeline, it's just about how much I want to be entertained. Anything else I'd say about it is fairly milquetoast, in the sense that you don't really miss anything if you're not a complete hermit — you hear about what's important, it gets filtered through you. Probably the most enlightened way to consume this media is to not read it yourself, and just get the filtered takes from people around you at dinners and lunches — let them expose themselves to the radiation first, and then come back and tell you what's interesting or not.

Jeremy Giffon

Yeah, that would be my takeaway.

Jeremy Giffon

I think it's real. One of the things I'm always interested in is various classes, archetypes, genres of guys, whatever. There seems to have been a type of person that's largely gone extinct — and, unfortunately, I think this is probably just explained away by technology, which is a boring but maybe accurate explanation — the Theodore Roosevelts, the Andrew Carnegies of the world, who were able to spend a lot of their time in leisure, a lot of time away from their business. What's so interesting, for Carnegie for example, is he's arguably still the richest person, or very close to the richest person, who's ever lived. But I'm fascinated by whether that's necessarily true — does the idea that you have to be working twenty-two hours a day to get these world-changing outcomes actually hold? I think Larry Ellison is the contemporary figure who bucks this trend — he claims to have started Oracle very much with the intention of being able to disappear for two weeks to sail, or whatever, and still, by all accounts, drops in and drops out. Can you still be a player and not be jacked in twenty-four seven? It's unfathomable that the president of the United States could be off the grid for a month, but is that true in business? I don't know. Is a lot of hard work performative?

Maybe in Carnegie's case it's interesting, because he was self-conscious his whole life about joining society — maybe the poasters of his day. He knew that for him money wasn't going to be enough, and he wanted to be accepted into society, be well read, be a man of letters, do writing. There's nothing new under the sun. I firmly believe that the end state is just posting — the amount of billionaires and founders who turn to Twitter after they accrue their wealth, or start a podcast, or start a business, start a YouTube channel — it sort of is the end state. One way you could look at that is that once you accrue wealth you want to accrue fame. The other way of looking at it is that wealth is less valuable, and you actually realise the scarce asset is attention and influence, so you're almost hedging against the rapidly devaluing nature of your money, trying to switch to what is actually scarce. I find it very interesting that the seven or eight people you and I are most interested in are not poasters — there's some interesting opposite there, like they've resisted the temptation, and that makes me wonder if it's almost a trap.

Jeremy Giffon

The short-to-medium-term prognosis is hard to speculate on, and could very well be bad. A friend of mine told me he has kids in college and a ten-year-old, and he's very worried about the kids in college but not the ten-year-old. I think that's directionally correct. From the ten-year-old's perspective, look, I think it's great — I think anything that can be automated should be automated, it's really hard to argue against that when you really think about it. The notion that I might be in the last years of my life where I ever have to sit down in front of a computer and do things with it is tremendously liberating.

I don't really understand this idea that we're at peak jobs, or we're going to run out of jobs. It's very obvious to me that every white-collar job — obviously there are exceptions — is totally fake and made up, in the sense that most jobs are not contingent for shelter, food, medicine, and other necessities, or if they touch those, it's in a very derivative way. What is your job as an allocator? Well, capital is inherently inflationary, you can't just leave it alone — this is one of the great evils of money, that once you get it you can't leave it alone, because then it goes away, so you have to do something with it, and that creates this whole thing. My job is: when you have money and you don't want it to go away, you give it to someone, and I take it and put it into things that are productive, and hopefully you don't lose your money, you get more money. Is this useful? Is this good? Sure. But it's not real — it's fun and useful, but not in a direct way. And there are unlimited amounts of jobs you can create in those sorts of scenarios — we're going to have unlimited wants and desires, our economy is solely driven by our unquenchable desire to consume things, so we're going to come up with new things to consume.

Now, in the short and medium term that might be volatile, there might be a lot of job loss, and that's not good, there could be a lot of despair. But in the long run we're just going to invent new things to do — we've already solved all of our problems, so the worry that we're not going to have more jobs just doesn't resonate with me, because I feel like we make up stuff for us to do, and that's the whole point of it. And that's good — it's better than being idle, though maybe more people should be idle. But there's all sorts of ways this shows through the cracks — the work-from-home thing is a strong indication that actually most people don't have forty hours of work to be done, they maybe have forty hours of meetings to sit in, or forty hours they have to be on standby. I think the reason work-from-home wouldn't be that important if — imagine a version where you work on a factory line and you could set up a microcosm of the factory in your backyard, but you still had to be on the line ten hours a day — you'd have lunch at home, no commute, but it wouldn't be this huge improvement. The reason people are so attached to work-from-home is because they actually have two or three hours of work to do per day. Work-from-home Fridays is a soft launch of the four-day work week. I think this is all fine — the fact that we can continue paying people to work from home, or do four days a week, is a sign that we need less labour time out of people than we used to, and we're still able to be just as productive.

Jeremy Giffon

I think there's something even just aesthetically bad about waste, and one of the worst things you can waste is your gifts — your skills, attributes, things you're uniquely good at, things you can do for others that others can't. For me, one of the great challenges has been trying to understand how to best use those skills — first of all, figuring out what they are, which is easier said than done, and then figuring out how you can use them. There are kind of two modes. One is that you use them in a very pure, unadulterated way, and you don't try to integrate your work with how you use your gifts — this would be the person who has a day job in order to support their craft. The other, perhaps more ambitious, version is trying to integrate commerce and their work with their gifts. This gets into the should-you-pursue-your-passion question, and I think it's really difficult, but you said something to me — that the thing you're spending most of your time on ought to spark and utilise your genius and gift, and if you're not doing that, it's obviously not the thing you should be spending most of your time on. There are proxies for this — are you having a lot of fun at your job is a very strong indicator that you've combined the two.

Jeremy Giffon

The founder is incredibly important, and the founding act is incredibly important, in any business or country or organisation, really. I do think it's notable that the current paradigm — the largest and most important finance firms come out of a culture of leveraged buyouts, which, first of all, is a debt-driven idea, it's financial engineering, it's extractive in so far as the primary goal is to make a thing more profitable. I'm not trying to disparage leveraged buyouts, I don't think they're as evil as people say, but the core idea behind it is using debt and financial engineering to make a lot of money in a way where the quality of the business itself is maybe ancillary to the core trade. Those are the founding acts of these large firms today. Now, the Apollos and Blackstones and KKRs of the world — I think in a lot of cases the leveraged buyout is a very small part of what they do today, but it's still in the core culture.

One thing we've pondered before is what does the next twenty or thirty years look like when the largest financial firms in the world had a founding action that was seed investing — it's equity-driven, it's power law, it's hugely optimistic, it's largely qualitative. What would a Blackstone or an Apollo look like if that was the core seed at the inception of the firm? I don't have a great answer, I just think it's notable — in the same way that equity financing is a far newer idea than debt financing, and equity financing is obviously a far more optimistic idea, it's uncapped to the upside. There are all these philosophical ideas around equity versus debt — debt is far more ancient, and debt has a very controversial past about whether it's morally good at all. So I think there's this idea of what if the crux of finance shifts to these kind of wildly optimistic people, versus people who might be more conservative, more concerned about the downside — maybe one way of looking at it is a shift from the quantitative to the qualitative.

Jeremy Giffon

There's truth to the caricature, which is East Coast is extractive, pessimistic, downside-oriented; West Coast is naive, stupid, unsophisticated. I think that's true to some obvious extent, and I think they're merging now. It's no coincidence that the West Coast is definitely eating the East Coast — venture capital has created the biggest businesses in the world, and private equity has not. Where private equity has, it's largely been through acquisition and financial engineering. It's inarguable that venture capital is this much better force for the world — it's this tiny little asset class that has produced all the most important things in the world. It's also this civilisational technology — you're willing to give young people millions of dollars to try a very speculative idea with basically no retribution or downside if it doesn't work. It's clearly this amazing force.

I think there's been a very interesting flip in compensation between East and West. When I was growing up, my understanding was that Wall Street is where you'd get paid huge amounts of cash on a yearly basis — you'd have no enduring equity value, but you'd get paid a lot of liquid cash on a fairly regular basis. The West Coast was this idea where you'd be rich on paper, you'd have equity that would be this enormous payoff in some distant future. What's interesting is those have started to flip now — Wall Street, because all these businesses have gone public, you're comped on RSUs, you're thinking like a firm, and especially at the top end of the firm you're less worried about the carry in any one fund and more worried about the stock price and performance of the firm as a whole. And interestingly, Silicon Valley has almost moved towards an annual cash basis — given how these markets, companies staying private, create these mature secondary markets, and the sort of de facto yearly tender is becoming almost a parallel liquid marketplace, you're actually paid huge amounts of cash in Silicon Valley. We've seen that with the AI stuff, even venture capital firms getting acquired and GPs leaving their firms — it's becoming more liquid, more mercenary. I'm always interested in these structural shifts — the Valley is a place where you're liquid, getting cash out yearly, jumping from firm to firm, and Wall Street is a place where you have a bunch of RSUs and you're thinking more about the long term and the enterprise value of the firm.

Jeremy Giffon

We've largely sat on the sidelines. We're very fortunate to have such a wide mandate in what we can do and look at. Maybe the only consensus view is the niche, apocalyptic vision held by some of the core zealots at the labs, but outside of that I think it's really a jump ball, so it's hard to say. The one thing I could say in general is that markets lack a lot of nuance. SaaS is a business model — it's literally just a business model, the idea that you pay usually per person, per month or per year, for access to a tool that helps you use your computer. In that sense SaaS is in a lot of trouble. But I don't think for a lot of these businesses being sold off today out of fear, that that's actually what's important to the business at all.

I wrote a post recently about the idea that a public manager being long the Magnificent Seven, without taking a specific view on the trade, is probably good capital allocation, because sometimes you just have to do the really obvious thing and follow consensus — consensus is usually right. One of the pushbacks I got was, well, these are the biggest companies in the world, they're priced to perfection — but I think it's underrated that the fifty-two-week variance on these things is nearly a hundred per cent for the biggest companies in the world. So they're not priced well at all, and the market lacks extreme nuance.

Probably someone smarter than me could draw a much clearer picture, but there's something to do with passive flows and the marginal price of a security, and what's informing the marginal price of securities is the posts in the group chats that random people are writing, that the algorithm has chosen. In this way — I've actually never thought of it before — the algorithm, the AI, frankly, because that's what's driving most of the algorithms now on Twitter and YouTube, is pricing the market in some very real sense, because it's choosing the narrative it wants to show people, and then those people are pricing off that. It's another lesson — markets are not efficient, there's no nuance. That's the big thing we're seeing today. I think there's a lot of delusion in either direction. The most honest thing for a lot of managers to do would be to sit it out, but they're structurally unable or unwilling to, so they hope for the best and put capital out the door, and it's a problem for tomorrow. A lot of things are still getting priced irrationally in the private markets, in ways totally unrelated to the quality of the business, but more a function of the incentive structures of the funds.

Jeremy Giffon

One way you can look at this — we were really in the late innings, let's call it 2016, 2017, of, okay, returns in venture capital have been very high, we've now seen twenty years of venture returns being very good, so logically capital is going to flow into the asset class. The problem is that the venture market is largely constrained, in that the amount of great businesses that get started is relatively fixed — probably downstream of how many great founders there are, I think there's just a finite amount. As more and more capital flows into venture, there's basically a finite amount of companies, so you have to put more money into the same amount of companies. This was becoming a real problem right before AI came along — there's only so much money you can cram into a B2B software business, especially when, annoyingly, the companies are getting cheaper and cheaper to start. So what you saw, and what you still see to some extent, was that all this capital was just flowing to landowners and to compensation packages, basically. It was a real problem — capital hates getting blocked, it's like water, it wants to find the most efficient path, and it was getting blocked, because it wanted to flow into venture, since there were backward-looking higher returns, but it was constrained.

That was a lot of what inspired me to start my fund — seeing this problem, that the amount of money these companies are raising is unrelated to the amount of money they need. And then, almost as if by deus ex machina, all of a sudden there were two great categories that could soak up this capital, and I really do believe, in some sense, that businesses and assets are sponges for capital, and that the excess — back then we had negative interest rates, the capital has to go somewhere, and if it has nowhere to go it will create somewhere for it to go. I think there's a fortuitous arising of these high-capex businesses — AI, the ultimate high-capex project, and all the hardware stuff. In some sense the capital markets were desperately looking for a place to go, there was no place, and these companies almost got created downstream of capital, which is a little bit different a narrative than most people would look at. That's the philosophical view — the economic view.

I think part of the reason SaaS is getting punished so much today in the market is because it was this idea of selling a copy of a string, fundamentally — that's what a software product is, and the marginal copy of a string is very close to zero. With zero marginal cost, the thing you're selling should be highly profitable — the vision was you'd have high upfront costs and then very high gross margins, and hopefully one day very high net margins, although the net margin never seemed to materialise until private equity got their hands on things and forced the net margin out. That era was largely a downstream coincidence of selling strings, and now I think we're in an era where we're selling compute, and selling compute — you can't write the prompt once and sell copies of the output, you have to do the compute every single time, so the marginal cost obviously isn't zero. I think this is a fundamental change to software, and it means this era of high gross margins being the norm is just going to go away. What's going to make up for it, I think, is lower gross margins, much thinner net margins, and just much more scale. That's what you're seeing — capital is flowing to the top-end providers of scale. It would have been unthinkable that we'd talk about companies with three-to-four-trillion-dollar market caps ten years ago. A big part of that is inflation, I believe, but another part is just the scale dynamic — it's uncontroversial to say we're going to have ten-trillion-dollar companies, and so on. Because margins are going to drop, all the returns are going to accrue to scale, because low margin, low scale is not a very good business. It's a bit of a Walmart effect in software — the future looks like low gross margins, razor-thin net margins, huge scale, and this is probably a problem for the SaaS provider that's the mom-and-pop shop — Walmart's coming to town.

Jeremy Giffon

I'd take two different cuts at this. One would be that Buffett and Munger were my main teachers on investing. Buffett says he wants his estate outside of Berkshire to be put in the S&P — that's his advice to the general public. I think people take that to mean Buffett's saying you can't beat the market. I don't think that's what he's saying — I think he's saying, for the average person, you shouldn't try to beat the market, and implicit in that statement is leaving out any sort of active investor. Maybe the anecdotal side would be Buffett saying you should put all your money into the S&P, that's the most rational thing you should do. On the other side is the empirical argument — most professionals don't even beat the market after fees, and this is this one-two punch, the godfather of investing says don't try, and the seemingly smartest people, with the best incentives in the world, can't do it.

The other thing is I just think, for a professional money manager — and this is the paradox with the Buffett thing — it's really hard to beat the market, because you have all these other factors that the average person doesn't have. This is the Peter Lynch argument — I increasingly think Peter Lynch was just kind of a genius about this — as a professional manager, by and large, you have all these mandates, you're running a business, you have customers you need to keep happy. I actually think it's more difficult for the professional money manager to beat the market than for the average amateur. How many people do you know who bought Bitcoin and did really well, or bought a Tesla and then bought the Tesla stock, or bought an Apple computer and bought the Apple stock — you can't run a hedge fund that way, but they've outperformed just by doing that. There's this weird thing where, in isolation, none of the advice is wrong, but it's not as difficult as people think to outperform, or do better than average — there's a notion that gets caught up in all sorts of other things that sullies that view.

Jeremy Giffon

I get asked a lot by LPs where they should put their money, what managers are good, should they invest in this fund. One thing that struck me is you have to take a somewhat cynical view of these things — or maybe it's not actually cynical, maybe it's the more realist view — that these are businesses first, and their product is returns, but they're a business, so you have to recognise what sort of customer you are. The question of where should I put my five-hundred-grand cheque — you probably shouldn't put it into a marginal five-billion-dollar growth fund, but I actually get asked that a lot, should I put one or two million dollars into this fund. The answer is, well, it's probably going to be a good fund, but could you find something much better to do with that million dollars? Probably. It sounds obvious, but in reality it's not. What people don't understand is that if you're a principal who can't write sovereign or institution-size cheques, you're a totally different customer, and the businesses are not designed to serve you. The growth fund is probably a great place if you have to park a hundred million dollars somewhere — it's probably a very good place, but it's not a good place to park a five-hundred-grand cheque. If your business is set up to service sovereigns and large endowments, your product is just so different from what you're going to serve for someone smaller. This gets into, well, okay, if you have a small cheque, what do you do — and I think this is where the emerging-manager stuff is really underrated, looking for places where the manager is actually most tightly aligned to returns, either because returns are critical to future funds, or that's actually how they're going to make all their money.

Jeremy Giffon

It's probably similar to how I look at everything, but especially for an emerging manager, when you're truly just underwriting the person, I think people still fail — in my view they overweight the investing thesis and track record, and underweight just the facts about the person. You and I are both big believers in the idea that how you do one thing is how you do everything, and the more you can probe — I think the personal financial situation of a manager is an incredibly underrated thing to ask about. If you have a couple hundred million dollars in your bank account and you're raising a thirty-million-dollar fund, that's very different from someone who has a million dollars in the bank raising a hundred million to go do a thing they're trying to make the most money from. Those are two very different places to start underwriting from.

One notion I have about this is whether someone is looking up or looking down at something — take the same two fifty-million-dollar funds, one from someone who has five hundred grand in the bank and one from someone who has five hundred million in the bank, those are just going to be treated very differently. For the five-hundred-million person, the fifty-million-dollar fund is going to be like a plaything — and 'toy' isn't meant to be pejorative, the toy might very well do better, because it's held with a looser grip, it's less on the line, you're going to be less paralysed by the sheer quantity of dollars. I feel like that's generally not super recognised, and you see it all the time in new ventures — if you're helming something that's two or three zeros more than you have, there's a monumentalness to it that's a bit intimidating, and you can scale this all the way up — is the hustle worth a hundred million with a ten-billion-dollar fund, it's just a big, scary thing. I don't care who you are, when you're taking bets an order of magnitude larger than any amount of money you've ever had, there's a psychological factor there, versus when you're taking bets that are negligible to you. I think this also gets back to why it's easier for individuals to outperform — it's easy to take a flyer on a stock with a very marginal fraction of your net worth that you don't feel you need to explain, and you're not going to be judged on later, than it is to do with a dollar amount that's more money than you have, that's going to affect your track record and that you're going to have to explain — and all these other factors that aren't related to whether you think it's a good investment.

Jeremy Giffon

There's this funny notion — it's sort of specific to the labs, but it's a broader thing as well. I suppose we're recreating the feudal system from first principles, where there are the lords — Elon, Zuckerberg, Dario, Sam — and they can make land and gentry by giving out allocations, because these allocations are the best example of generational wealth. You get this allocation in SpaceX, or in Waymo, or whatever, and you get to charge huge fees on it, and it's this wholly synthetic product — someone gives you an arbitrary number, and, again, they know you don't have the money, so they know you're going to go fill it, and then you get to go out and basically say, I've been given a deed on — literally like the king has given me five hundred acres in his country — Elon has given me a hundred million dollars to allocate in SpaceX, and you get to go out and charge fees and make a bunch of money from it. There's this thing of, do you have allocation? I'm interested in it because it's this purely relational, wholly synthetic thing that I'm not sure has ever existed before, or certainly not at this scale and magnitude, where you can, due to your relationship, basically get this landed estate and then take it to a sovereign or a foundation, and they will pay you for that access, like a pure paid-for access. Maybe where it's different is — you could say that's just brokering, but the difference is that brokering is a one-time transaction, whereas these allocations live on forever.

Jeremy Giffon

No GP commit, ten per cent one-time upfront fee, with some carry structure generally, where you're just demanding, basically, that you get paid life-changing amounts of money with zero risk, and you also get a huge amount of upside. The other thing is they often don't have — I've seen a few that don't have a term limit. I know there were famously some SpaceX ones — people were doing that ten years ago, and I know there are certainly some that just collect the fee forever. But, to their credit, you're very happy to be paying that two per cent on the SpaceX thing you did fifteen years ago — so it's sort of a win-win. It's not to say these are all bad, it's just funny, because it's not investing, it's not strictly brokering — it's this very different thing that's a wholly insider access game. And then, of course, there's all the fraud and bad behaviour that comes with all the bubble and stuff.

Jeremy Giffon

I certainly care about productivity. For me, by far the most generative thing is conversations, which are downstream of relationships. I think part of the reason my book reading has gone down is I'm friends with a lot of people who read a lot of books, so if I could only keep one thing, it would be conversations with people I find interesting. I also think I'm uniquely tolerant of distasteful and weird people — I get asked a fair amount what my media diet is, and conversations are my answer, and it always feels like the answer falls flat with people, and I think it's because they're not friends with weirdos the way I am — a lot of my friends are people who others would largely find strange at best, distasteful at worst. If I can't predict what a person's going to say after knowing them, I like them a lot, which is obviously a very high-variance thing.

Old books are good, I've read a lot of old books in my life, but I think YouTube remains underrated — there's a lot of really obscure things on YouTube, it remains the library of Alexandria of our time, maybe of ever. But YouTube doesn't feel generative — I think the only thing that's generative is conversations. So far, in early 2026, I'd say chatbots can lull you into feeling generative, but if I actually look at the actions I've taken, you can feel really productive after a good two-hour session in a chatbot, but I actually don't think they're that ultimately generative.

Jeremy Giffon

I really do think people value complexity for the sake of complexity a lot. A lot of investors are in the feel-clever, look-smart game more than the money game. Personally, this has been a big area of self-development for me — the clever thing is not always the thing that makes money. You either have to say, I am looking for investment ideas that are so complex no one is going to do them, or it should actually be quite simple. I'm a bigger and bigger believer in simplicity — you probably want to be long Elon Musk, that level of idea. I actually think the gift is being able to sell that idea — a lot of the investing media serves the people who are really good at dressing up those ideas in a way that makes them feel differentiated and smart, when it's actually just long Elon or long Bitcoin. I think of a guy I know who exclusively does bankruptcies, and he makes a lot of money, but that's very complex and very difficult, a tremendous amount of work, it's grimy, it's difficult, there's a lot of risk and interpersonal stuff — that's an example of getting paid for complexity. Whereas a good example of simplicity is, you should just buy big companies when they're at their two-hundred-week moving average — I love that idea, because it's just so simple.

One story I absolutely love, cutting through the mess and getting to complete clarity on how to evaluate an investment, is from Richard Rainwater — there are these stories about him, that you would basically come into his office with a yellow legal pad, you'd write out your thesis on one page, and then you'd tell him what percentage of your net worth you were going to put in the deal, and based on your one-page thesis and the percentage of net worth, he would say yes or no. I think that's genius. People don't do that now, because it's really hard — it makes things way harder. First of all, it's hard to write a compelling thesis in a page, much easier to do it in a four-hundred-page slide deck. Second, no one wants to say, well, I'm only putting three per cent of my net worth in this. To me, that's one of the most simple, clear examples of really cutting to whether this is a good investment or not, that I've ever heard.

Jeremy Giffon

Maybe the most practical thing, which is very low-hanging fruit, is just the job description. I think job descriptions are one of these things that are written for nobody, to be read by nobody — it's more this token document, it's more about whether the job description exists than what's written in it. I tried to write one that followed a very simple rule — I was going to post it on Twitter and LinkedIn, so I think anything you post has to be a good standalone post, it can't be something you wouldn't share if you didn't know me. And then, second, I think what's so important in any sales pitch, which is what a job description should be, is disqualifying who you don't want. The nice thing about a divisive statement is that when it resonates, it deeply resonates with the person. So I tried to think, okay, what are all the traits I'd want someone to have, and try to make them — going back to how you do one thing is how you do everything — the type of person I was interested in. Obviously the skills and experience were going to be table stakes. I tried to write out traits and ideas that would really be inspiring, that would make the right person think, whoa, this person really gets me, understands me — and would make people mad.

One of the things I posted, the one that got the most reaction, was, 'you're an ideological minority at a top-ten school.' What I love about that is it's entirely open to interpretation. I'd get people who'd be angry that I only want a top-ten school. The nice thing about 'top-ten school' is it's a fully ambiguous statement — there are some schools that are uncontroversially top ten, so I get those people, but you can also just assert that your school is a top ten, and I had a few people from schools I would not say were anywhere close just assert that, and I thought that was great. I had people select out because they thought, oh, I don't know if my school is — I'm not going to apply — that's great, because I don't want those people. And 'ideological minority' was really interesting — I had a certain idea in mind, but people gave me all kinds of answers, because I didn't necessarily mean political, there were all kinds of answers about how that person stood out at their school. Those statements are great because they're highly ambiguous, there's a bit of an inherent test of confidence in them. I'd even get a few posts that were like, 'hey, I think this is bullshit, you should hire me, I didn't go to a top-ten school, you're an idiot' — and I love that person too. I think the more you can do statements like that, that get this sort of reaction, the better — you sort of imagine what you'd have to do in an interview to get at all of those various traits, and statements like that are very much underutilised in job descriptions.

Jeremy Giffon

I'm interested in mispricings in qualities and attributes about things and people and places. I don't know if this has always been true, but it's true today — there are some qualities and attributes that are widely recognised and priced efficiently, let's say, height, IQ, résumé, and so on, and then there are other traits and characteristics that we've just decided collectively not to price. In Silicon Valley, people sort of underrate the philosophers and thinkers and mimetic ideas that underpin the whole thing. I think there's a real philosophy — some sort of neo-Buddhist utilitarianism — that underlies the technological developments in Silicon Valley. It's interesting, you see it, like, Will MacAskill gets involved with SBF and FTX — there are these thinkers like Nick Land, whose ideas percolate underneath the surface in the Valley and are influential on everyone but not necessarily named — now they have been. You could say the same thing about Curtis Yarvin — I thought it was remarkable for years how you could hear Curtis's ideas coming out of the mouths of the big tech leaders without him being named. There are things like Leverage Research and all these intellectual characters — in the same way that people's religious beliefs are generally underrated by secular people, in terms of how important that is as a guiding light, I think in the Valley, in the development of these technologies, these cultural and philosophical ideas are underrated. Like it or not, the models are highly utilitarian, they have this weird mix of religious ideas from Judaism, from Buddhism, and this utilitarian bent that turns into effective altruism, and people think, okay, this is just cultural, whatever, but these things matter. It feels to me that this whole cultural epicentre has been highly underrated in general, in informing why these things get built, and what the inherent worldviews are in the people who build them.

It almost feels to me that what Wall Street was in the eighties was sort of vain, almost pagan — the strong and the beautiful, what's most important, there's a hedonistic aspect to it, there's an openness that's a little bit nihilist because it's all just about getting money. It's not the same notion. I think at the crux of that is that technology views itself as totally self-righteous — the thing they're building is not nakedly sin-driven, or driven out of greed or ambition, it's driven out of this nominally altruistic idea that we're building this product the whole world uses, it's positive-sum, which is true on the surface, but I do think it's almost pathological, to the point where there's no recognition of all the other factors — it's almost shadow-esque. There's none of this notion that, well, if you work in finance, you need to translate the gains from finance into something worthy, into art, into architecture, into philanthropy, into culture in general, or into the place you live. None of that exists, because I think tech views itself as, the ultimate philanthropy is the business you're building. I don't think Silicon Valley today has the same reflexive need to justify or document or even launder what they're doing through going to book parties and arts and all this sort of stuff. I think it's this interesting difference, and I wish more people would try and document this stuff, because it's all there — all the crazy, all the sex, drugs and rock and roll is there, in its own nerdy, autistic way, and the culture, I think, is just vastly underrated, and religious beliefs, whether literally religious or sort of pseudo-religious, but filling that void.

Jeremy Giffon

Thanks for having me.