E130: DeSantis's Twitter Spaces, debt ceiling, Nvidia rips, state of VC, startup failure & more

DeSantis’s campaign chose Twitter Spaces for his 2024 presidential launch, with Elon Musk and David Sacks co-hosting; Sacks said the first room crashed above 700,000 listeners, with more than a million trying to enter. The restart drew about 300,000 live listeners in Sacks’s room while parallel Spaces carried commentary. (CNN Transcripts)

A major data-center REIT’s CEO and CFO told Friedberg that recent demand exceeded the previous decade, driven almost entirely by GPU racks for AI infrastructure. Nvidia simultaneously guided roughly $11 billion of next-quarter revenue versus about $7 billion expected, and one major customer said it had to “beg” for thousands of GPUs.

Sacks described venture markets as “the best of times” for AI startups and the worst for nearly everyone else. Craft was approaching AI cautiously, while later-stage software companies were broadly missing forecasts and seeing sales cycles lengthen; larger funding rounds would again require revenue and conventional operating metrics.

One host described a $32 million-ARR startup whose founders may receive nothing after a $25 million cram-down round carrying a 3× liquidation preference. He estimated that cutting expenses to about $1 million monthly could instead have produced roughly $20 million EBITDA and supported a private-equity sale around $150 million.

Friedberg said he invested more than $30 million in Cana, the molecular-beverage printer, but returned customers’ money after two financing term sheets disappeared as markets deteriorated. Cana had a working, manufacturing-ready prototype, yet could not fund the production line once pre-revenue hardware became much harder to finance.

Sacks said Callin sold to Rumble after reaching hundreds of thousands of users but failing to achieve the millions—ideally tens of millions—needed for a durable consumer network. He called the acquisition roughly a break-even “base hit” for investors; Rumble’s distribution and aligned creator tools made the deal worthwhile.

Friedberg said the downturn’s psychological toll had become severe across Silicon Valley, including an acquaintance who ended up in the hospital under pressure. He and Chamath described repeated failures, declining portfolios and imposter syndrome as common even among experienced investors, not isolated founder problems.