Spark of Ages
In every episode, we interview B2B Marketing leaders, executives, and innovators about their successes and challenges, asking them how they broke through and what spark in their careers took them to the next level.
Spark of Ages
Devising Investment Strategy for AI/Ashish Aggarwal, Akash Agarwal, Viral Tolat - 2024 vs 2025, IPO Market, Fake Companies ~ Spark of Ages Ep 29
The episode explores the investment landscape in both public and private markets, focusing on technological opportunities and insights for 2025. Key discussions include the importance of resilience against market volatility, the impact of AI on innovation, and an outlook on the IPO market.
• Highlights of recent economic performance and predictions for future growth
• Role of AI and technology in shaping investment strategies
• Discussion on the importance of preparing for black swan events
• Diverging opinions on IPOs and their focus on early investor liquidity
• Growing relevance of AI in venture capital decision-making
AI is reshaping our tech landscape, and we're here to dissect its profound influence. Google and NVIDIA are at the forefront, with Google's ventures like Waymo and Google Cloud setting the stage for future growth, despite antitrust challenges and fierce competition from platforms like TikTok and Instagram. As we discuss NVIDIA's leap into consumer-friendly AI, we also explore the compelling world of alternative investments, from Bitcoin's potential surge in 2025 to the emerging opportunities in private credit and early-stage venture capital. Diversification in high-risk investing and the potential of black swan events by 2025 are also up for discussion.
We'll also have our guest enter the "Spark Tank" and play a game of "Two Truths and a Lie," exploring some of the wildest, futuristic business ventures.
Roundtable Guests:
Ashish Aggarwal: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashishaaggarwal/
Ashish is a highly active investor in AI/ML, and a two-time founder with significant experience building and scaling products. Ashish is also a Partner at Chamaeleon, a VC firm that uses a proprietary AI platform for sourcing deals, showcasing his focus on the intersection of AI and finance.
Akash Agarwal: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aagarwal/
Akash is an accomplished entrepreneur and technology leader with a strong background in SaaS and AI. Last year he founded Agilitas, a CPG AI platform innovating the way food and beverage products are formulated.
Viral Tolat: https://www.linkedin.com/in/viral-tolat-a0b942/
Viral Tolat is a technology entrepreneur and investor with 30 years of experience in fintech, specializing in AI and crypto. With advanced degrees from the University of Miami and Stanford, he is currently developing a foundation AI model for finance at Neural Engines, Inc., and serves on the board of Quadency, a retail crypto trading platform.
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Producer: Anand Shah & Sandeep Parikh
Technical Director & Sound Designer: Sandeep Parikh, Omar Najam
Executive Producers: Sandeep Parikh & Anand Shah
Associate Producers: Taryn Talley
Editor: Sean Meagher & Aidan McGarvey
Website: https://www.position2.com/podcast/
Rajiv Parikh: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rajivparikh/
Sandeep Parikh: https://www.instagram.com/sandeepparikh/
Email us with any feedback for the show: spark@postion2.com
Hello and welcome to the Spark of Ages podcast. In our last episode, we closed out the year looking at go-to-market trends. Today, to start the year, we're doing another roundtable, but this one is focused on investing in innovation and how to manage an untraditional portfolio as a private investor. We'll focus the discussion on the economy and innovation, along with some thoughts and predictions for 2025 and beyond, so this will be a fun one. Let me introduce you to first Ashish Agarwal. Ashish is a highly active investor in AI and machine learning and a two-time founder with significant experience building and scaling products. Ashish is also a partner at Chameleon, a VC firm that uses a proprietary AI platform for sourcing deals. His MBA is at London Business School and Kellogg, and he's, of course, an engineer by training, as is just about all of us.
Speaker 1:Another Agarwal it wasn't enough to have one. I have two. I have Akash Agarwal, although he spells his name a little differently. Akash is an accomplished entrepreneur and a technology leader with a strong background in SaaS and AI. Last year, he founded Agilitas, a CPG AI platform innovating the way food and beverage products are formulated. His experiences also include serving as a chief business officer of Procyon and an SVP at SAP, where he developed his background, and his background came from originally being a security specialist. Like me, akash went to Harvard Business School and finally I have Viril Tolat. Viril is a technology entrepreneur and investor with 30 years of experience in fintech, specializing in AI and crypto. He co-founded a Forex trading platform and held senior positions at various fintech companies and investment banks. He has advanced degrees from thex trading platform and held senior positions at various fintech companies and investment banks. He has advanced degrees from the University of Miami and Stanford and he's currently developing a foundation AI model for finance at Neural Engines Inc. He's on the board of Quadrancy, a retail crypto trading platform. Viril is an active trader in futures equities and crypto and he's also presented various webinars on Bitcoin and CBDC. And, of course, viral is our one PhD from Stanford in neural networks, of all things.
Speaker 1:Welcome to the show. I'm so happy to have all of you, obviously with your amazing backgrounds. Any mom would want to have their daughters marry you, and I'm so happy to have all of you, obviously with your amazing backgrounds. Any mom would want to have their daughters marry you, but it is what it is, so welcome to my show. We're going to talk about a whole bunch of fun things today. This is unique for us. Usually we talk with one person and now we have a whole group and I thought it'd be great just to talk about the economy and where we're going and where is innovation going.
Speaker 1:And last year we were supposed to have a recession. If you all remember, 2023 was supposed to be the year, the down year. Then 24 was supposed to be a really down year, really bad year, but actually the economy did really well. It just didn't happen. We actually had GDP growth of 2.7% in the US. It was faster than most of the industrialized world. The rest of the industrialized world was at 1.5%, emerging countries at 3.9%. So it did pretty well. Inflation, of course, given the elections, was a big issue, even though the forecast it came down to about 2.4% after hitting a high of 9%. So the economy from a recession point of view, from a rate point of view, is better, even if the price of eggs and ham feel really expensive. From a monetary policy point of view, the Fed was supposed to go more towards a reduction of rates and it did some of that, but not as fast as people thought, and that's because inflation stayed a little higher than normal and all of us have seen how the stock market literally exploded, especially towards the end of the year.
Speaker 1:So I'll give you a couple of data points here Applevin up 700%. Microstrategy, the company that invested heavily in Bitcoin up 359%. Palantir up 340%. Nvidia up 172%. Tesla one of my early picks 63%. Amazon even at 44%. So just significant growth. So really interesting, like how the market has changed significantly. So here's my first topic for discussion. With market sentiment currently very bullish and valuations appearing pretty full, what are the key signals you look for to whether market rotation is imminent? What steps do you take to prepare for volatility in your public and private investments? So here I want to start with my friend Akash.
Speaker 3:Okay. So look, I know as much as everybody else does. You know how people interpret the information perhaps differs, so the data is the data. So I think that you know we're in a very unique point in time with the two major trends I think will influence the markets this year. In my humble opinion, you know, barring all these external things, which is, if you look at the US trade policy, I think that will play a big role, above and beyond inflation. I think inflation is going to get tamed. I think we're going to continue on what they call a soft landing. I don't know what that means, but it'll be softer than I think that people anticipated. And you know we will avoid a recession, as you pointed out, rajiv. So that's one.
Speaker 3:And then the second thing is, I think more importantly will be how trade, how US, presents itself to the rest of the world in terms of either triggering a trade war vis-a-vis with the introduction of tariffs, and then you know how the retaliation of those tariffs manifests itself with some other leading economies. I think that really is two key things I'd be looking at. And then, the last but not least, I think we have a very pro-business government. Two key things I'd be looking at. And then, the last but not least, I think we have a very pro business government. I think that people have probably underestimated Trump's ability to really understand the economy. I think he really does understand the economy and he's got a set of people that are very pro business. Now, pro business in government doesn't always solve all the problems, but it's certainly a step in the right direction.
Speaker 1:So you think market's going to generally go up, barring any other factors? So generally inflation is better that kind of stuff. All right, Ashish, what do you think?
Speaker 2:I think I spent less time in public markets as compared to Akash Directionally what Akash said. In public markets, as compared to Akash Directionally what Akash said. I would agree with that Overall going into 2025, there is a positive momentum in the markets. People are hoping for IPO market to open up, as well as for the M&A market to open up significantly, and I think that would drive liquidity. That would have impact on all sorts of assets that you are currently seeing, barring all sorts of external geopolitical risks that we are currently seeing in the market.
Speaker 2:And I think, from my perspective, I think the couple of things that I'm watching one, how everyone is taking into account the specifics of trade policy and what sort of impact it would have on different sorts of asset classes. And two, we are seeing a big bit of kind of like you know, things around when inflation is increasing and, at the same time, interest rates are also going up. So it's going to have some sort of impact where people are talking about the economies of two sides right. One side, if you have capital and assets to deploy, there are a lot of opportunities, but on the other side, the average consumer is facing a lot of inflation impact because of rise of all the stuff that you mentioned, increasing the prices of household items that everybody's feeling.
Speaker 1:So you still feel like inflation matters. That's still an issue. It's been persistent, right? It's one of those issues that hasn't gone away. It was supposed to be temporary and it didn't happen. Viral any thoughts here, and we are going to get to IPO in 2025. A lot of us care a lot about that. Some of us have money in various private companies and various funds and we're looking for getting some of that out. So we're going to get. We have a whole section on that.
Speaker 4:Viral. So, look, I think the market's going to do pretty well in 2025. You, you know, as Kosh said, we have a very pro business president coming in to the you know the office in a few weeks and it's interesting If you look at what's happened in the market recently. In the first few days of the year there's been a pullback, which I think is very healthy, because it went quite a bit last year.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it was crazy, right, I mean it just popped. You may see a pullback.
Speaker 4:Yeah, you may see a pullback a bit, but you're still over significant moving averages technically in the market. So I look at the technical analysis of the market we may see more of a pullback, but we're still in a very much of a bull market. There is no end to money supply. Just on Bloomberg the other day they were talking about cash still being on the street. There's billions of dollars sitting in money market funds and when people decide to want to invest that in the market, you're going to see that money pushed to market up. There's still a lot of money in the sidelines. Rates are high.
Speaker 4:So, yes, the 10-year almost hit 5% just the other day. Why? Because the data came in just today. Yesterday data came in positive. Job claims were down from previous month, services up, so the economy is roaring. Things are going great and you see productivity coming everywhere. And talk about that theme of AI. Ai is driving productivity up, will continue to drive productivity up in 2025. I think that's a theme of investing invest in AI, invest in tools that drive productivity and efficiency in companies, and I think that's going theme of investing. Invest in AI, invest in tools that drive productivity and efficiency in companies, and I think that's going to be a trend. There are a bunch of other trends we'll get to. I think crypto is still a great place to put money in 2025. We'll come to that in a bit.
Speaker 1:I'm sure you are a crypto pro.
Speaker 1:And a few other areas which I'll throw out when I get my chance. That I think are innovative areas to look at in terms of where things will go in the future. Let's do that right now. In 2024, financial markets concentrated around the Magnificent Seven, and I'm sure we all know who they are. It's like Nvidia, amazon, all these stocks. They all moved. Its share of the S&P 500 went from 30% in 2023 to 34.6% in 2024.
Speaker 1:So concentration amongst the big winners really has gone up, and so with that and a lot of that is, folks are attributing that to AI and an AI-driven growth scenario. We covered this in a previous episode. Most technologies take years before they hit 25% of US households using them. I recently saw that AI has actually hit about 40% of US households using the technology, and that's within a year of its introduction. So there's a concentrated group of winners in AI. They're driving an AI growth-driven scenario. So how do you think about the risks and rewards for investment decisions when you think about private and public companies? Go ahead, varel, go jump in, and I know Ashish is going to talk about this.
Speaker 4:All right. So, in terms of public companies, clearly the big guys are the clear winners. They have the money, they have the capital to invest and grow and just take advantage of all that technology that's out there. In terms of AI, I think, in terms of the big seven, google has probably been the lackluster AI company of the big seven. I think you're going to see more from Google coming in 2025. So that's one place I think there's an opportunity to put more into Google. Hopefully, apple will do more with AI and they've got such a great platform the iPhone and that technology to do more with it, and I don't think they've just started to touch on that. Siri's been around for a long time but it hasn't really sort of given what people want in terms of the tools.
Speaker 1:Yeah, do you think Google is impacted? Because, as the number one player in search, it drives $200-plus billion in revenue, so search is an interesting piece. And search is heavily impacted by ai, so is that why you think they took?
Speaker 4:the hit. They didn't grow as fast. Not bad so ai for compared to traditional google search, which, by the way, is machine learning and ai. But people don't want to talk about it because it's not generative ai, it's not llms, it's been ai.
Speaker 4:Google was one of the the early companies that really went into machine learning and their entire search mechanism is based on artificial intelligence, being much the work that was done back in the 80s at stanford and these guys came from stanford, as you guys know. So I wouldn't say I think they're not on the generative llm hype bandwagon and that's why they haven't had sort of the inflation of their price, unlike, unlike NVIDIA, unlike other companies that are really in that forefront. But if you look at what they're doing with Waymo and what they're going to end up doing and their platform with Search, I think they have an opportunity to come towards the top of that over time and they're doing a lot with Google Cloud. So they have the opportunity. But you know, I look at places where you can invest. You ask where you invest. So I think Google's got opportunity and headroom to grow, whereas some of the others are topping out.
Speaker 4:Now NVIDIA you look at what they just announced this week and they are now going right down market from enterprise to consumer with their new AI platforms and boxes that they're coming out with. I was just talking to my son today. It's like oh, dad, I'm going to replace something in my computer with this new box that just you know, they just announced, you know, at ces, so you might see another just great rise in nvidia, just because these guys are so smart and what they're doing and how they're applying that technology and going down market, away from enterprise, down market, to hundreds and of millions or billions of people that have computers and that want this technology at their fingertips, right on their desk, as opposed to in the cloud. So I think there's opportunities all over the place.
Speaker 1:Lots of really interesting places. That's right. Go ahead, go ahead, akash.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I was going to chat. I think Google last year and this year is sort of dealing with the overhang of antitrust regulation with regards to monopolization and their Chrome browser, so I think they've had some.
Speaker 4:That's going to go away with the next administration. I think they're going to get like what the heck? It's just a silly thing to go after these guys when there's so much competition out there.
Speaker 3:Actually, in my view, yeah, yeah for these guys when there's so much competition out there. Actually, in my view, yeah, yeah, and I think that that's been there. And then there's been some issues around. You know, search revenue being cannibalized by going directly to one of these LLM based suppliers. Now, you know, google has a platform called Gemini. I encourage people who haven't used it to use it. In fact, all their search results, are preceded by Gemini.
Speaker 3:In fact, I get a lot of my answers directly when I do a search with what Gemini comes up with. In fact, I did four queries today on stuff I didn't even have to go to some of the links. Now you don't go to the links, you don't drive the search revenue. So you know Google's realizing some of that's going to happen with regards to some of the revenue being impacted, because you know you are forced to look at some of the links that are below the search. But now, with Gemini producing results in between those links and the search, it potentially cannibalizes some of that. So, but I think they've probably done the math there For people like me who would have not clicked the links anyway. I'm very happy with the results there because they're also building my loyalty to keep going to search versus going to an alternative to get that same answer.
Speaker 1:So you're willing to stay on Google search because you get the combination of the answer and you get to if you're like, well, I actually want to buy something, so then you can actually do that.
Speaker 1:right, you can actually go and get something and Google still has that, whereas, like ChatGPT, it's wonderful to use by the way, we've all used it right? Do you get directions? I fed in MRI results for my recent Achilles tendon rupture and I showed it to my doctor and she's, like you know, wow, well, at least I have a job at repairing your Achilles, so, anyways. So there's a lot of cool things you can do, but Google went down. There's a bit of antitrust and it's likely that with AI, it's still going to have a strong AI presence, because this is just the early part of the game right, has strong AI presence, the one thing Google doesn't have.
Speaker 4:It doesn't have the strength of like. If you look at what's happened with meta and then TikTok and short form video, right, think about YouTube. Where's the stickiness? Where do your eyeballs stay day to day? And we know from what's going on. It's like TikTok, tiktok, instagram. These different social media platforms are really going gangbusters and people spend all their day long there. So how does Google get inserted into that more effectively? I think is going to be a challenge for them. Yeah, I'm just saying, but I think there's an opportunity, right, whether it's a challenge and there's a white space for that, there's an opportunity. So I'm actually sorry, I jumped in and didn't mean to do it. I just stepped on you, akash, go for it.
Speaker 1:Go for it.
Speaker 4:No, no, it's all right, it's all right.
Speaker 1:Ashish has a thought here, go for it?
Speaker 2:No, I think I was just saying that. Youtube as well as for if you look at the amount of time spent on online streaming, they are ahead of Netflix. The people are spending a lot of time on YouTube.
Speaker 4:They need more short-form video.
Speaker 2:Well, I mean it depends on. I mean, the advertising dollars are moving a lot more and YouTube is actually doing really well as a business today. If you look at their advertising revenue as it's growing. I agree that they don't have a short-form video. That's definitely their opportunity, but in long form video and podcasts.
Speaker 4:They have clearly, I mean they are going the fastest among all of the players.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and I'll give you an example. I'll give you an example of the point that ashish made. So I got the short form video summary. I'm a big fan of nikki glasser. She was hosting the golden globes this week, so I got. I got all the snippets on all the short form video sites vis-a-vis Instagram, but I wanted somewhere to go and get all the jokes that she made, you know, the monologue, and then a clip of that. And, lo and behold, it was on YouTube. I shared that very liberally with people because the short form video wasn't, you know, meeting my needs to be able to kind of absorb all the jokes. So that is, you know a bunch.
Speaker 1:Right, and so you're still in it and, as a marketer, I can tell you that one of the products that Google offers is this notion of you literally put in your objective and it figures out where to put your content. You say, hey, this is the goal. I have cost of acquisition here, and because most people don't think about using brand as well or performance marketers don't think about using brand as well it figures out where to put it. So they're not stupid, they're really bright and they're really sharp. All right, I got another one. This one is for Viral. Looking beyond just the market trends and the numbers, what's the most significant shift in investor behavior that you observed over the last year and what is one unconventional strategy you believe that could give you an edge to those seeking real value in 2025?
Speaker 4:Oh, wow, that's a tough question. So I think the biggest shift in investor in 2024 was moving into money markets with the increase in interest rates, so much cash has actually left the market and gone into it. And look at where the rates are today I mean from a risk adjusted return perspective your money is safe in money markets and so the question will be in 2025, will that money come out of money markets? Will we see the 10-year drop back down to 4% or closer to 3%, or it's going to stay up because, as we discussed earlier, inflation is persistent, right Services inflation is persistent. Cost inflation is persistent. If we have tariffs, that's going to keep prices up. So you're going to see, in that case, money still staying into fixed income and bonds and money markets.
Speaker 4:I'll pitch Bitcoin here. I think crypto Bitcoin is an awesome place to invest in 2025. If you look at the price cycles after the halving we had last year, the Bitcoin halving in the next three to six months, we should see a peak in Bitcoin. I wouldn't doubt it if it gets $120,000 or $150,000 this year.
Speaker 1:There you go $150,000. So Bitcoin five years ago is up over 1,000% From five years ago. Today it's up over 1,000%. I think Viril, you got in around 400 bucks or something like that.
Speaker 4:I've been in since 2014 or 15, so I don't remember what it was back then.
Speaker 1:It was like 10 cents maybe.
Speaker 4:I should name my boat Bitcoin. There you go.
Speaker 1:It is interesting that nowadays you can get four and a half percent just in the straight money market, and if inflation is at two, two and a half percent, you're making money just having your money sit there, right, so that's something that's really interesting. And then there's all these alternatives. So, akash, what do you think?
Speaker 3:I think that you know I prepared my account slightly differently last year. I was anticipating like a lot of people were again reading the data Again I don't have any extra insights that interest rates would come down a little bit faster than they have. So I hedged and bought long-term treasuries, meaning that before I was in three to six-month treasuries, I moved it into 18 months to 24 month treasuries. So I have personally taken 10% of my portfolio and put it in treasuries right now that spanning nine months to 24 months. So that's what I've done. That's, in hindsight, not the best decision, because interest rates have stayed pretty high. Despite that, I could potentially be getting slightly higher rates in short term treasuries as well. But having said that, you know, perhaps you could lock in your money in bonds right now, longer term bonds. That's something that people should think about. You know, again, that depends on your own investment horizon and risk and things like that.
Speaker 3:I think gold is a neglected asset. I think gold did spectacularly well last year. It did a 20% gain. I think that's another hedge. You know, I think the dollar will continue to stay, you know, quite volatile depending on what happens with inflation, what happens with the tariffs. So that's another way of hedging. You know your money. I'm looking at doing gold myself. You know it's always been a store of value and now we have other stores of value vis-a-vis Bitcoin. I think Viral's right. I think one of the most significant innovations last year from a financial perspective was the ETF the Bitcoin ETF that came about. Now you know you've got that in every account you can utilize to invest in.
Speaker 1:I got a question. Great point, Okay, Viral. What yields are staking crypto?
Speaker 4:So Bitcoin itself doesn't have a yield in and of itself. But if you go, for example, into Ethereum or Solana, you can get anywhere from 2% to 4% yield by staking. I mean, without going into details, there's a protocol, a different protocol than proof of work for Ethereum and Solana. It's called proof of stake. Essentially, you make Ethereum or you make Solana by staking your Ethereum and Solana as part of the proofing protocol, so you can actually make revenue there. You can also make money in stable coins USDC, usdt, and now Ripple has released a stable coin and they pay yields because they invest the underlying money into treasuries, so you get some of the yield of the treasury. So it's, in a way, it's like holding money markets in a different form.
Speaker 4:So if you have a belief that the government and the banking system is not your friend, then the question is where do you want to keep your money? Do you want to keep it in the bank or do you want to put it in something else that is detached from the government and the banking industry and know where it's invested as opposed to not? Now we all know there's FDIC insurance up to, let's say, $100,000. So that's fine. But if you've got more than that, your money is at risk in the banking system. And look what happened to Silicon Valley Bank.
Speaker 2:All right, but no wait, nobody lost money on Silicon Valley Bank, but you're right no-transcript of the other ecosystem that could have gone into other asset classes, and I think gold definitely can.
Speaker 2:Like you know, people are looking at investing in gold and Bitcoin, so I'm not going to talk about that. I think, for me, as I look through the whole spectrum of things that are going into alternate assets, I think private credit is something where people are spending a lot of time and that's why you're seeing a lot of these asset managers launching their own private credit vehicles. I think, from my interactions with a lot of family officers and high net worth individuals, they have been deploying a lot of capital in private credit funds with individuals, they have been deploying a lot of capital in private credit funds and I believe, from that perspective, that early stage venture capital, because of the horizon of the liquidity that comes in, it's also, I think, you want to find asset classes that are not moving at the same pace in terms of risk, right I mean. So I think early stage venture capital is also very differentiated as compared to that because of the liquidity cycles.
Speaker 1:This is a great point. This is a great point. This is a great point. Right, there's ways of going in the stock market which is highly liquid, or at least for the larger stocks, not the smaller stocks. There's now this new alternative, basically computer-generated investments, blockchain investments, which are pretty liquid as well, but then there's the. We've all dabbled in the illiquid investment as angel investors in companies, and we've talked about venture funds. So if you had the ability to invest in venture funds, what do you think? So, Ashish, you brought up a great one like early stage venture funds.
Speaker 2:I think for early stage venture funds. I think it's if you have the capacity to do it. I think it depends, and there are a whole bunch of different ways you can do it. You can go if you have access to the right set of fund managers. Like similar to any sort of asset, right? I mean, there are good managers, there are bad managers. You have to have the understanding of how to look for a good venture capital fund manager and being able to access that fund and being able to get allocation to invest in that, of course, the minimums in some of those cases.
Speaker 2:One, you have to be an accredited investor and two, you have to deploy that capital which is going to be illiquid, which is a stark difference from investing in public stock markets where the money is always available to you. That same is also true for majority of the other asset classes. But along with that, it's high risk, high reward kind of thing. Right, I mean, you go in into the right fund managers, you will be able to generate significant higher returns. Like what? The higher returns can be anywhere from 3x to 5x net of the fee. So, for example, if you invest a dollar, you might be able to get 3x to 5x after 10 years, which, if you look on the IRR perspective, can be anywhere from 15% to 25% of IRR, depending on what numbers you're looking at as such, and that's why early stage venture capital is significantly high risk but, at the same time, very high reward, and I can think of it as on the other spectrum right. I mean you can have a barbell strategy, like where you are deploying capital into public stock markets and I know that many people can prefer to go into index funds but you can also go and stock the particular stocks, for example, if you have a good understanding of the tech market and you understand where things are going. For example, a bunch of people were looking going after Nvidia, of course, has already tapped out in terms of, and there's a lot of things that they're continuously innovating on. But if you look at below the stack, ibandwidth memory is something that people are talking about and that led to Micron stock jumping almost 15% in the past week itself. So if you are able to identify specific stocks and being able to understand the underlying trends, that would go a long way. And on the other side of the barbell, if you think about deploying capital into early stage venture capital. That is, of course, long horizon, much higher risk but at the same time, much higher reward on that front, and I think you can identify in any sort of asset classes these type of dynamics, based on what I've seen so far.
Speaker 2:But I operate in private markets primarily all the time, so I'm, of course, very bullish and totally agree with the comments that Viral and Akash have made, that when you see closely the impact of AI on every single part of things that we do as a consumer or as an enterprise, everything is going to get disrupted in ways where starting with, I think this year is going to be a lot of like service as a software is the theme that people are going after, where things that were previously being done by humans, either in some sort of labor arbitrage, or things that were being done where you were hiring people who are expensive, like $500 per hour majority of those things can be done with much less number of people required because of the productivity gains that we are able to get because of the advances in AI that is going from text to video to multi-model and now even you're going to start seeing a lot more robotics which are already operating and we're going to start to see a lot more of those come out.
Speaker 1:So we're shifting right. We're not just pure software, not just labor. It's labor augmentation, labor replacement, and we're even going into physical devices. I'm sure many of the folks here have done Waymo, have tried out Waymo or robot cars Some of you may have a Tesla and had a chance to play with full self-driving, but they're now robots. They've always used some form of AI, I mean the old classic analytical-based AI techniques, but now they're using more and more of the generative techniques and those sorts of things. So really cool. All right, I love the way you set this up. So, looking ahead to 2025, what is the most significant black swan event that you think could disrupt the markets and how are you proactively positioning your portfolio to be resilient to these unexpected shocks that may not be on anyone's radar? Are there any unconventional metrics that you're using to go beyond traditional economic indicators so that people in the audience can say, huh, I should look at this and maybe make a decision. We'll do this as a quick. You got to be quick on this one, akash.
Speaker 3:Buy treasuries, you know, as I said, put fixed income. Black Swan event could be anything.
Speaker 1:Trade war, I think, trade war to hot war, a lot of provocation, you never know. We've already had a couple of hot waters. Hopefully they diminish, all right.
Speaker 4:Viral. Massive tariff issues, with the economy and Trump coming in and bullying people could be, you know, raise prices up and cause serious inflation and that's going to drive interest rates back up, inflation back up, and we're going to have a revaluation in the stock market because all the valuations are tied to the 10-year rate. That bumps up to 5% to 6%. You're going to see a big revaluation. So what should you do? Well, you should actually buy more treasuries, take revenge of that yield, but the market's going to reset after that. I think other black swan events are wars. Look at what's happening in China and Taiwan. North Korea is destabilizing. The war in Russia and Ukraine is never going to end is never going to end, it seems, at this point in time, although those kinds of things drive economies up. So we're the beneficiary, because where do we buy all the weapons from? We buy them from the United States. So, even though we may be pumping money out, that'll be good for us. The last one is our debt load to GDP ratio is getting a bit wonky.
Speaker 1:Right, we're going over 100%, right, 100% of debt to GDP.
Speaker 4:So somebody was talking about a Liz Trust moment which happened in the UK last year, where there was the bond vigilantes came in and decided to sell bonds really hard. So if that happens here and people say I don't want more US debt, people aren't buying the debt, and the BRIC countries decide they don't want to buy the debt or whatever, then you're going to see a massive rise in interest rates and a massive issue of funding. You know our deficit spending. Those, to me, are the big black swan events for 2025.
Speaker 1:And how do you prepare for it?
Speaker 4:I think Bitcoin is a great alternative. That's where I'm hedging my bets, so I would say, yeah, put some amount of money in Bitcoin.
Speaker 1:How much? One or two percent, five percent?
Speaker 4:The big asset managers are saying four percent, two to four percent in crypto, I think the other places to put money are potentially smaller. Companies aren't going to have as much of an impact in terms of the high valuations. Nvidia's valuation is just way up there. What's going to happen with that?
Speaker 1:$4 trillion. What is it?
Speaker 4:It's just like 50, 53 times future earnings or something like that, some crazy multiple on the earnings. Right now it's hard to want to invest in that, but markets can be irrational. As the old saying goes, cash is king. Gold, I mean Ashish brought that up before Gold, bitcoin and gold to me are similar things. Commodities, right, that just have their store of values. Where do you put the money? Private credit may be a place to go, but I'm not sure how that's going to react. Any of these black swan events. Yeah, those are the places to do it. I mean, you can put money on your mattress. That might be a safe place.
Speaker 1:Well, this gets to the notion right of. We always talk about correlated and uncorrelated risk, and that's the Greek term beta. So, ashish, are you buying a bunch of gold?
Speaker 2:I'm not. I mean, yes, buying physical gold is something that people are doing in India and China. That's why you're seeing physical China is also buying an incredible amount of physical gold actually, if you track that. So I think from my perspective, I'm spending more time just investing in private markets, because that's what I understand. I think there are opportunities everywhere. Of course, I mean the Black Swan event. Viral and Akash have pretty much covered most of it. It's very difficult to predict one. That's why it's called a Black Swan event. If you can predict it, then it won't be called that.
Speaker 1:So I think one of the things you should be ready.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think you should always be ready and you should, I think, as they say, never put all of your eggs in one basket that can wipe you out, or take one risk that can take you out of the market, and I think all of us are sophisticated enough that we won't do that. Second thing is, like you know, one other thing that I would add. A black swan event is kind of the natural calamities that can happen, like the one that's going on in LA. Nobody expected that Like these type of things, that because of climate change or whatever the reasons are, if you look at it, the frequency and the impact of these natural occurring events have increased significantly over the past decade. It will continue. So it's going to come down to where do you want to live and how do you Because risks are there in all parts of things risks and where you want to call home and spend most of your time, versus when you talk about your assets.
Speaker 2:Uh, that's a different story. Specifically for me, I think I'm looking at primarily, I think between, as viril and akash said, combination of treasuries, private stocks and public market stocks. Um, from that, from that perspective and I think I still believe there are specific stocks that you can still pick, that can go up. And if you have a some sort of market understanding, like, for example a good example is FuboTV. That has gone down quite a bit, right, it was trading like a dollar or some change and then people were expecting because FuboTV had sued, I think there was some stuff going on. And then there was this big news came out and the stock almost jumped like 300% plus, right.
Speaker 1:So if you are able to identify these type of companies and can deploy and have access to those, I mean you, you can still do so kind of a combination, yeah, yeah, so kind of set some money aside for some of these companies that are languishing but have good assets and then you will. I don't think you're going to know that hulu. You know disney was going to combine it with hulu and it would explode.
Speaker 2:But you play with some of these and put some of your money aside for it yeah, I mean, but I think that the general trend over there is there's going to be an increased M&A right, increased M&A activity. So if you can think about that trend and spend more time on specific sectors, then it can help you generate. But I think, as you said, majority of the assets are either in treasuries or in gold or in Bitcoin or in some other sort of like safe assets. And then you take some percentage of this, like 5%, 10%, 15% that you want to play with, which you're okay to lose if it goes to zero.
Speaker 1:This is really helpful. Now we're going to go to talking about the IPO market in 2025. So, those who are in the innovation world, or those who have us, who are investors in various early or mid stage or late stage venture firms, what we're wondering about all the time is, like you guys promised me 10 years, now you're saying it's 12. Now it's 15. I mean, I'm you know, especially the seed funds or the pre-seed funds, and so 2025 could be the golden year, right, if there's more M&A, that kind of stuff. So I'm going to do a quick Q&A with you guys. I'm going to throw out a statement. You can agree, disagree. Give me one quick line about it. The majority of companies going public in 2025 will not be profitable. Companies are now going public to pay down debt and allow early investors to sell shares, and not necessarily to finance future growth.
Speaker 3:I don't agree with that. I think the market will not buy that. That's not a reason to go public. I agree with that point.
Speaker 4:I think those companies won't IPO and if they IPO, it'll tank right away.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and the bankers will be very silly to be presenting a thesis like that to a prospective investor. Investors in a company don't want to make previous investors rich. I'm in an M&A right now and the company that's buying us is not interested in paying any extra money to the investors. They're interested in the company now. No, no, no, they're not doing it for that.
Speaker 1:Hold on. Let me pose it in a different way. A lot of companies have stayed private longer because of the availability of secondary shares and continuation funds and those sorts of things other ways of staying private longer and avoiding public scrutiny. So now when those companies are going public, they're not going public necessarily to get a slug of capital to finance more growth. They're going public to get liquidity for their investors.
Speaker 4:Right, but the store. Well, that's understood, I think that.
Speaker 1:yeah, that's understood Before when Microsoft went public, they were much smaller, and when they went public, they were using that capital for future growth. Nowadays, some of these companies have had billion-dollar slugs of capital thrown into them.
Speaker 4:When they're going public, you get you have to reverse question If I'm an investor in public markets and this company comes to the public markets and for the specific purpose of cashing out the existing investors, why would I want to be in there? Why don't those investors stay? If they're not willing to keep their skin in the game, why do I want to be in there? Why don't investors stay Really, if they're not willing to put their skin in the game, why do I want to put my skin in that game? They're bailing out, so am I jumping on the ship that's sinking? What the hell.
Speaker 1:Good point, All right, Ashish what do?
Speaker 2:you think. I think from my perspective, you have to. I think, instead of like I'm going to look at the revenue growth for the company. If the revenue growth of the company is significantly higher, profitability can come in the future Because, if you look at, the majority of the company that get valued is based on the top line growth and not based on the EBITDA growth.
Speaker 4:I would agree. So if you've got a great return based upon profitability growth, then you will get to profitability. I agree with that Right.
Speaker 1:So, but where's the story that says I'm growing.
Speaker 4:Unless you're going to grow, we're not going to invest, because we all know that valuations are based upon the rate of growth and that second derivative of growth.
Speaker 1:Next question the focus for tech IPOs is shifting and I kind of touched on this rewarding early backers and not retail investors. So before when you would go public, a lot of these companies would go public much earlier. So before when you would go public, a lot of these companies would go public much earlier. God, when I was in sales in technology in the 90s, I was able to buy Intel and Microsoft at a 15 PE early in their cycle. Nowadays there's no way I can get into some of these companies because I can't touch them, because now they're multibillion dollar companies and private investors have made their money on that right Because they're the only ones who can access these companies at later stages. Do you see this as a long-term problem?
Speaker 3:No, I don't. I'll tell you why. One the world has changed. So, just to use your PE as an example, s&p trades at about 22% PE. The market will pay for companies that are growing. So you know I have to disagree with a few people here. That's saying NVIDIA is overvalued. I don't think so. I think NVIDIA is an amazing business from top to bottom. Their PE is 38, something which is very modest at the growth that they're encountering and they've got a pole position in the market. When you have pole position in the market, you do well. And I also kind of disagree with the statement that it's just growth that the market values. I completely disagree with that. In tech perhaps it matters, but you know there are companies in the consumer business and other industries where profitability matters.
Speaker 3:I would invest in a business that's generating cash hand over fist in any day. I mean, who wouldn't? The company's got positive cash flow and is generating money, then that's generating cash hand over fist in any day. I mean who wouldn't? If a company's got positive cash flow and is generating money, then that's coming back to the shareholder. So you don't necessarily have to have pure growth to make a good investment, in my humble opinion. Look at real estate. Real estate generates cash on cash. It's a great investment. Look at our friend Trump. That's how he made his money. And look at all the other investors that are coming in, and yesterday there was an investor that is investing in hard assets in the AI wave, and that's this guy called Hussein Sajwani. He's one of the leading real estate investors in the Middle East and he's coming in and building data centers, so I would want to invest in that business.
Speaker 1:Picks and doubles just like Levi's All right, I'm going to invest in that business. Pick some troubles just like Levi's All right, I'm going to go to the next question. I love this Next one. Ai augmented venture capital firms will become the norm. I wonder who should answer this.
Speaker 4:What does that mean? Ai, augmented venture capital firms what does that?
Speaker 3:mean that's a layup for us.
Speaker 1:I'll give you more description. Funds that use AI to analyze deals will gain an unfair advantage, leading to a wider adoption of these methods. Most venture funds get their deal flow through their connections or maybe what they do for content, and they may have some event thing. They might have some private gathering situation. Most of them get their deal flow through their reputations.
Speaker 2:No, I 100% agree with you that that's the future, and I think, given where we are, we are at the cutting edge of using quant models, ai tools and tech augmentation platform for every step of the funnel of venture capital that we are using right, and because of that, we are able to see more deals.
Speaker 2:We look at around 3.4 million companies from our database itself. I mean the way that we are tracking we are able to identify top 1% of companies across all of those 48 different verticals right. So this gives us significant advantage, both in terms of how much deals we are able to see, how we are able to do much faster, much deeper diligence, as well as being able to automate a lot of help that we provide to different folks who are sitting with us, including portfolio companies, our LPs, as well as to our advisors, and I think that's where, when we're consistently talking to everyone, you would be surprised. Every single discussion with a potential investor in our fund is intrigued with what we have, and I think that's what the future is so does that become the norm?
Speaker 1:All right, Phil, does that become the norm I?
Speaker 4:think AI augmentation in 2025 is going to be the norm in all businesses, not just venture capital. You're seeing it. Look, did you hear? You should have seen that one of the CEOs of Samsung was talking about their smart platform. You know for a consumer and for you know cargo ships and how they're bringing AI and AI tools into every level of electronics and systems in all areas. So I think you're going to see, yes, ai augmentation across the board.
Speaker 1:Co-pilots are here to stay All right.
Speaker 4:Next Akash how about this? I'm going to start.
Speaker 1:The next question the long-term potential of most AI companies are overhyped. We just saw that Anthropic got a $60 billion valuation. Openai it must be over $100 billion valuation. Now I understand that OpenAI, I think, has revenue of like five or six billion, something like that. I mean these are getting.
Speaker 3:these are incredible valuations as a price to revenue. Multiple Overhyped, yes, no, maybe. So yeah, I mean a little. I mean, look it's, you know, new construction. It's. Potentially nobody knows you know who's going to which building is going to stay on the block. So you know there's a little bit of excitement there, but I think you know there will be a few. It's like finding the next Google. So one of these is the next Google and you know people are trying to figure out which one there is. So Anthropic is a legitimate competitor to OpenAI. Bunch of investors couldn't get into OpenAI for various reasons valuation, fund size, et cetera. So they're half or one third the valuation of that.
Speaker 1:So you're saying not overhyped.
Speaker 3:Really not really.
Speaker 2:Ashish not overhyped.
Speaker 1:Yes or no?
Speaker 2:It's not overhyped in a way where I think you have to understand, right. I mean, the markets they are chasing are in trillions. Right, the impact of these is basically going to be, I think, if you look at what Nvidia, what Jensen Huang said in his latest CES remark, every single industry, every single workload that consumers and enterprises are doing is going to get impacted, right? So I would agree with what Akash is saying in terms of, like, you know who's the next Google? Like it's very difficult to figure out.
Speaker 2:Of course, the moats of these companies is also very low at the moment. They have to keep innovating at a fast pace and that's where you are seeing these companies are also burning a lot of capital, right, I mean, openai is saying they're going to have $10 to $12 billion in revenue, but they're going to burn maybe $5 or $6 billion to get to that revenue. Right, so the quality of revenue matters and I think right now, nobody's asking that question because the gross margin for these businesses for Anthropix and OpenAI of the world is low. But the idea is that once you have right now it's the market share rate, similar to what happened in cloud, where Google and Azure spend a lot of money trying to catch up with AWS and if you look at it today I mean fast forward from 10 years now to today you're starting to see now you have three or four major cloud providers. Of course, aws is the number one and the market is massive for that. Similar things are going to happen in AI too.
Speaker 4:All right, vero quick. Hype cycle, hype cycle hype cycle. You will see a lot of the hype and then there'll be consolidation. Are we super hyped? There'll be consolidation. You know, when the internet hits in 2000, when all these other technologies came about, they're going to have the hype and they're going to pay for the opportunity to get that lottery ticket for one of these and for one of these, and some of them are going to win and some of them are going to lose. This is a normal cycle. There's nothing abnormal about this at all. It's not different than any other cycle hype cycle we've been through in the last 10, 20 years. All right. Next, question.
Speaker 1:I love this. This is awesome. So just like that. Right A thousand car companies before we settled on three. In the US, we had so many search companies before we settled on one. Google was actually number 50 in terms of the company that came out for that. Microsoft was way late in terms of its word processing system.
Speaker 4:We don't know who's going to be on top.
Speaker 2:So there's a lot we don't know who's going to win, and so this is part of the fun.
Speaker 1:Yeah Okay. Sustainable business models are not yet a priority for AI startups, and this could be any, because I know a couple of you are investors in them or part of them. Like not all of you are doing entropic or open AI type companies where all the money is going to Jensen Wang, so yeah, I can take that.
Speaker 3:We have a AI company. There's many business models that are floating around. One is obviously, you know, you know usage-based tokens and whatever demand you're driving for the infrastructure. You put a margin on top of that and pass it to the customer. Or you know it's value-based pricing based on what the output of the AI is and how that can, you know, impact the business. So you know things are still under development, at least in our business. So you know, we have just modeled our business's business model based on, you know, size of company and the value that we potentially think we can create value based pricing labor labor, labor savings.
Speaker 1:So you're not looking yet at your business model. You're driving adoption, you're getting people to use it and you're going to worry about it later.
Speaker 3:Yeah, just like again in any new market, you don't know absolutely what people will pay and what the ultimate value. You know that that if we can save a food scientist 10 hours a week, you can model that and say there's an efficiency gain and you can get that guy to be more productive. What's their time based and can you charge 5x, 6x that?
Speaker 2:Okay, Ashish that Okay, ashish. I think sustainable business models are yet to be built out. I think I would say some companies are more advanced than the others, and just that's because they've been longer in the market. But these practices, I think over the next couple of years, would become more clear as majority of these business models would move away. Like, for example, right now nobody wants to pay on a per seat basis, right, people want to move away from per seat basis to usage-based model. That happened and now from usage-based models to some other type of models. It's going to come up. We're starting to see some early headwinds but, yes, at the moment it's not clear what those models would be.
Speaker 1:That's awesome Viral, quick one. I know you're on the board of multiples of these AI interesting things AI crypto dancing. Pengu Dancing agents, nfts and things like that.
Speaker 4:Sustainability Everybody wants sustainability at the end of the day. But I look at startups in a different way. You look at the team. Can the team adapt and figure out how they're going to take that technology, deploy it and how to use it? You go through six or seven different business models in the life of a startup. I mean, I went through many in my company. So where is it going to be tomorrow from?
Speaker 1:where is this?
Speaker 4:today. Don't worry, just bet on the team and bet on the idea that they can actually figure it out and win the race. It's a foot race out there right now in AI, and the fastest, the most agile, the smartest are going to win, so that's what you bet on.
Speaker 1:Okay, here we go Next question. I love these answers. Ai agents will significantly impact financial markets, increasing efficiency and speed, but also introducing new risks. The rise of AI-driven trading, just like, remember, high-speed trading, could lead to increased market volatility. Ai trading has been here for the last 10 years, this crap.
Speaker 4:It's been around for 10 plus years already.
Speaker 1:Okay, so I'm sorry but now you have ai agents that's just another.
Speaker 4:That's just another nice term to use for, like, different kinds of software. It's been around for a while, right? The risk, the risk are the same, uh, you know, and there's still people behind all the machines watching what's going on. It's all about risk management, by the way, right? So give me a good risk management agent, and that's what I want.
Speaker 1:All right, Viral's building the next risk management agent, Ashish. Any thoughts on this?
Speaker 2:No, I think I would agree with Viral that I mean you look at the likes of Millenniums and Renegar Technologies, right, I mean, they have been already using versions of that and much more advanced than a lot of these things. That's why, specifically on that, I think you wouldn't see that. But I think if you look at it from the consumer perspective, on the financial side, or not just the financial markets in itself, in terms of trading, but if you look at how can you invest, like the rise of robo-advisors, I think people are going to do a little bit more of that to kind of automatically. Based on that, I mean, I'm already starting to see a lot of bots being used for crypto trading, also at scale, and then you can define your own bots.
Speaker 4:Right and markets are efficient. And when these bots all pile into the same thing, what happens? Somebody else takes the other side of that trade and wins. You know, buyer beware.
Speaker 1:Okay, here you go. That relates to this next one, about alpha. It'll be difficult for investors to generate alpha using AI alone.
Speaker 4:What does that mean? Ai alone.
Speaker 1:Because the ability to use AI to rapidly digest information may be short-lived as algorithms become ubiquitous and the market becomes, as you talked about, highly efficient and homogeneous.
Speaker 4:There's always opportunities to make alpha. The question is what data is your AI consuming and where does it get the data from? Is it the same as everybody else? So you need that edge. You need to find that data that's different and differentiating to give you the edge to create alpha.
Speaker 1:Thank you, okay. Next we are going to move to the Spark Tank. We're gonna have some fun here. This is. This is the part that you guys get to compete against each other. So here we go. Akash ashish viril.
Speaker 1:Welcome to the spark tank, where ai pioneers go head to head. This is where three leading innovators and investors in the ai space are forced to leverage their strategic insights and battle for market-defining ideas. They're not just talking about the future of AI, they're building it Tonight. They dissect the current landscape, expose the hype and debate the real opportunities. Get ready for the battle of intellectual firepower as they explore the cutting edge and challenge the status quo. This is the ultimate AI disruption challenge, where only one emerges as the champion of the AI revolution.
Speaker 1:Tonight, we're not only talking about the future, we're witnessing it being forged in real time. So this is like it's going to be like two truths and a lie. So I'm going to read you these three statements. Two of them are true, one is a lie. You get to pick out which one is the lie. I'm going to count down three, two, one, and then you're going to put up your hand with a finger at the same time, so that none of you can cheat and tell me which one you think is a lie. You ready, okay.
Speaker 2:All right.
Speaker 1:We're going to do three rounds, okay. Round number one a publicly traded company offers a service to name newly discovered stars after customers. Number two a publicly traded company offers a service to name newly discovered stars after customers. Number two a corporation specializing in developing and selling personal jet packs for civilian use had its IPO in 2022. And number three a company that produces and sells synthetic dinosaur meat created through genetic engineering is publicly traded. Three, two, one. Dinosaur meat created through genetic engineering is publicly traded. Three, two, one. Okay, so the winner of this one, the lie, is number three a company that produces and sells synthetic dinosaur meat with genetically genetic engineering is publicly traded. There you go. Guess what there are. There is a publicly company company.
Speaker 1:Yeah, jet packs and names Newly discovered stars.
Speaker 4:Yes, that's why Interesting.
Speaker 3:Interesting.
Speaker 1:Number two a, a company that sells scented candles designed to smell like your favorite celebrities, went public in 2023. Number two a publicly traded company offers a service to launch your pet's ashes into space as a memorial. And number three a corporation that manufactures and sells invisibility cloaks based on metamaterial technology, had a successful IPO in 2024. Ready Three, two, one which one's false? All right, the Agarvals lose this one.
Speaker 2:The Tolat wins.
Speaker 1:So it was number one. While a celebrity scented candles exist, there's no public company solely dedicated to this. The other two are true Celestis offers memorial space flights for cremated remains, and metamaterial develops metamaterials with potential applications in visibility technology.
Speaker 3:Why did you guys say number three wasn't true?
Speaker 4:Clearly the IPO market was very good last year I mean all of these are all public companies that I'm not aware of, not the public, not the Santa Kendall one. Come on, dudes.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean, clearly I was short that baby all hands down, all right.
Speaker 1:For number one, two of you picked three right Ashish, Ashish and Vero. Okay.
Speaker 3:I'm in the losing spot, yeah. Vero's one, ashish two and I'm three, yeah.
Speaker 4:Exactly, we can call it quits. So we have two points. Ashish is won, right? Well, what is?
Speaker 3:it. What is the incentive?
Speaker 4:What is the incentive here? What are?
Speaker 3:we getting what gift? Yeah, there's no incentive Opportunity to-. Kind of bogus companies out there.
Speaker 1:Here's number three. Number one a company that claims to extract gold from seawater using a proprietary nanotechnology process is listed on the stock exchange. Number two a corporation that develops and sells smart socks with built-in GPS and health monitoring features had a successful IPO. Number three a publicly traded company offers a service to cryogenically freeze people's brains for future revival. You ready? Three, two, one, go, guess what? None of you are right. While smart socks exist, there's no public company solely focused on this product. The other two are true Ocean Gold Company claims to extract gold from seawater, and Alcor Life Extension Foundation offers cryonic preservation services and is publicly traded. All right, all right. Do you want a fourth one for Ashish to potentially catch up? Number one a company that produces and sells mood-changing chewing gum infused with FDA-approved chemicals is publicly listed. Number two a corporation specializing in developing and selling robotic pets with advanced AI capabilities had its IPO in 2023.
Speaker 1:Ready, three, two, one. Okay, they have conviction. All right, ready, the winner is virile. You got three right. I got three wrong. You got all wrong, but hey, this was fun. Here's what it is lie. Number one is, uh, mood altering foods exists, there's just no public company selling chewing gum. So, gosh, you got to get on that.
Speaker 1:Sony develops and sells ai powered robotic pets and messaging extraterrestrial intelligence, or medhi, is a publicly traded company that sends messages to potential alien civilizations.
Speaker 4:God, god help god help us on that one. That's the takeaway. Yeah, the takeaway for me is the ipo market is really robust that's the takeaway the yeah.
Speaker 3:The takeaway for me is the ipo market is very robust. I don't think we need any changes in 2025 that's the learning for me, why?
Speaker 4:don't we just come up with another come up with another front point, exactly.
Speaker 1:Imagine this roadshow, anyways, Exactly. I'm going to give you each one quick thing that you're going to answer to close out today. Okay, and I'm just going to go around the horn Viril, ashish and Akash, and I'm not even choosing for any reason. Viril, what's the biggest surprise you've had over the course of 2024?
Speaker 4:reason, viril. What's the biggest surprise you've had over the course of 2024? The robust growth in LLMs generative AI in 2024 was tremendous. I didn't think it would be as massive as it was, so that's the biggest surprise for me in 2024.
Speaker 1:Awesome, All right Ashish. What are you most looking forward to in 2025, whether it's business or personal?
Speaker 2:I think travel more.
Speaker 1:Travel more. I love it. Okay, Akash, what's your secret to staying motivated over all these years? What keeps you going?
Speaker 3:Learning new things. I love that. I love that.
Speaker 4:I would agree 100% the desire to learn.
Speaker 3:And we're fortunate there are new things happening. Like Viril said, and you know, some people like traveling. Traveling is also learning.
Speaker 1:You know you're learning about new cultures, new places, each one of you give me one stock that is in your anti-portfolio, One company that you wish you invested in, company that might have hired you or a company that you might have founded. Google Google Gosh, it's Google Viral Right now Anthropic. You wish you invested in Anthropic. I love that.
Speaker 2:Ashish, I knew about Cloudflare since 2012 and I tried to get you know. I spoke with them. I was not an investor at that time. I wish I would have invested in them or I would have worked there, because I knew about Cloudflare since 2012.
Speaker 3:So, ashish, my advice to you on CloudFlare invest now. It's one of my big holdings. We're just getting started. It's very highly valued. So on the PE basis you're going to run to the hills, but you're an early stage investor. You don't care about that. You take risk. My view of all of these companies is at least, from investing, you know you're going to get.
Speaker 1:The market presents you lots of opportunities all the time, every year, whenever you think it's over. I'll tell you my anti-portfolio one company I've invested in I can't believe I'm down the street from this company and I missed it which is nvidia. So I got a bunch of good ones now.
Speaker 3:I took new positions in NVIDIA this week.
Speaker 4:It's getting to the point where it's going to be very good. It may go down a little more before it goes up, but I think it's going to be great, I agree with that Sell calls on it.
Speaker 3:make some money while you're waiting for it to come back up.
Speaker 1:That's great. Okay, I'm going to give you one quick question, which none of you are going to say quickly. So here we go. One statement what is your personal moonshot?
Speaker 4:Urban air mobility.
Speaker 1:Oh, I like that.
Speaker 4:We are going to transform the airspace. The age of the Jetsons are here. You're going to see the launch of EV tolls take over, because building new roads and transportation is just too costly and the infrastructure is too slow and hard to maintain. So we're going to have to move up into the air and, with the new AI and technologies, batteries and materials, we're going to have lightweight flying vehicles permeating the skies in the next five years. Watch out, and I'm getting mine. I should get mine this year, by the way.
Speaker 1:I'm sure you've already put a deposit on it.
Speaker 4:I did two years ago.
Speaker 2:I would say personalized medicine, because with the ability to also being able to grow synthetic organs, because if you are able to live healthily for a longer period, you can do anything else that you want, right? I mean, science is going to advance. All of that stuff is going to happen. The number one reason people like health is the number one thing. That is my North Star. I love it. That's great, yeah.
Speaker 3:Akash, you know I think I would. Mine is similar to Ashish's, which is, you know, live. I don't want to live forever. I mean, some people want to live forever. I don't want to live forever. I want to live for the time that I am going to be living, living as healthily as I can vis-a-vis, with my mind and body operating in a high performance way. So, whether it's medicine, whether it's assistance in doing that, where you know you're relying on less people, I think is a moonshot. That, you know, is something to aspire to Tell them a reason.
Speaker 4:We need more tell-emers. Tell them yours.
Speaker 1:Here's mine Keep meeting amazing people like you and spending time with amazing friends like I have around the table and all the people I've met. I've been very fortunate, so my personal moonshot is to keep meeting and hanging out with fantastic people. All right, I want to thank you guys today for doing just a fantastic job talking about the markets, talking about your favorite investments, talking about AI. We talked about crypto. We hit so many different types of things. Talking about your favorite investments, talking about AI. We talked about crypto. We hit so many different types of things and you were good sports about this our two truths from the lie game. So I really wanna thank you guys for being with us today and lending your ideas and expertise, and please come back so thank you Thanks.
Speaker 4:Rajiv.
Speaker 2:It was great. I had a lot of fun. Thank you so much, Rajiv Cheers. Yeah, thanks for having us have a great 2025, guys.
Speaker 1:Now that was a lot of fun. I mean, we got to learn from some of the smartest people I know about how they look at the markets, how they invest in the markets. It wasn't your traditional. Here are my favorite three stocks, although you got some of those too. You got a sense of what are important black swan events, what are situations that make them think a bit differently, the methodologies by which they go through them, and I think what's most amazing to come through at this is that there's always going to be an interesting investment you can make or a way to rejigger your portfolio or rejigger your life so that you can take advantage of the latest in innovation, and we're in one of those times where it's just a boom and it's not too late to come and play, and that's the big message I took from it. So thanks for listening. If you enjoyed the pod, please take a moment to rate it and comment. You can find us on Apple, spotify, youtube and everywhere podcasts can be found.
Speaker 1:This show was produced by Sandeep Parikh and Anand Shah, production assistance by Taryn Talley and edited by Sean Maher and Aidan McGarvey. I'm your host, rajiv Parikh, from Position Squared, an AI-based growth marketing firm based in Silicon Valley. Come visit us at position2.com. This has been an effing funny production and we'll catch you next time. And remember folks be ever curious. All right, here's number two. Fartcoin, a meme-based cryptocurrency on the Solana blockchain, was launched on October 24th 2024. Fartcoin's initial distribution was carried out through a system of submitting fart-themed jokes or memes, not a lottery system. So here are the truths or lies. Number one fart coin was created by Elon Musk as a joke response to Dogecoin's popularity. Number two fart coin was created by Elon Musk as a joke response to Dogecoin's popularity.
Speaker 4:That's the same as number one response to dogecoin's popularity. That's the same same as number one same one who wrote my freaking script. All right, is that? Is that number three too?
Speaker 1:number three fart coins. Unique gas free system generates a digital fart-themed sound effect for each transaction. Okay, it looks like we had a little error here, but anyways, we're going to do it. Anyways, you know what I'm going to do this again. All right, for fun. Which one do you think is a lie Number?
Speaker 4:three.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Three, two, one.
Speaker 1:Three. Actually, it was number two. Fartcoin was created by an anonymous developer, not.
Speaker 4:Elon Musk. You didn't say number two before, Rajiv. You said Elon Musk for both one and two. You didn't give me the right one, dude.
Speaker 1:That's why we Alright, we're now going to go to.
Speaker 4:I think it was. I think it was the zombie on Musk, but you know.
Speaker 3:I know, I didn't know about the gas.
Speaker 1:Thing.