E14: Salesforce acquires Slack, DeepMind’s AlphaFold breakthrough, Trust Fund Socialists & more

Social Capital’s original Slack thesis was not revenue growth but “intercompany edges”: Slack channels crossing company boundaries could replace email. Chamath Palihapitiya said he and partner Ray Ko built the investment memo around that single idea, treating cross-company communication as Slack’s deepest network effect.

David Sacks argued Slack’s biggest strategic miss was delaying enterprise sales, leaving a bottom-up product without enough machinery to close large organizations. He recalled his former Yammer CRO interviewing at Slack around 2014, while Salesforce later offered the cross-selling capability Slack lacked.

Sacks disclosed that Salesforce explored buying Yammer for about $250 million around 2010, but internal engineers pushed to build the product themselves. Salesforce then put roughly 300 engineers on Chatter; when it ultimately made Chatter free, Yammer chose to sell to Microsoft for about five times the earlier Salesforce price.

DeepMind’s AlphaFold breakthrough had reached protein-structure predictions roughly within experimental measurement error, turning a decades-old biology problem into a tractable machine-learning task. Friedberg emphasized the practical chain: DNA can be ordered in about 48 hours and microbes can produce encoded proteins in roughly a day.

The episode’s more consequential AlphaFold point was proliferation: DeepMind said the model used only about 100–200 GPUs over a few weeks, making replication plausible. Friedberg predicted copycat systems within a year and roughly 50 protein-design startups funded 12–18 months later, while warning that easier digital biology would expand biosecurity risks.

Coinbase’s sharpest response to a New York Times investigation was to announce the story before publication, changing the information battle before the article appeared. Sacks said reporters complained this was unfair and threatened to stop calling if Coinbase kept front-running stories; the panel believed the tactic blunted the piece’s impact.

Sacks called selling winners too early one of his biggest investing mistakes, using PayPal as the example: it sold for $1.5 billion in 2002 and was worth about $250 billion during the discussion. His practical takeaway was not “never sell,” but keep a lasting stake—he floated retaining at least 20%.

Palihapitiya connected his defense of capitalism to a stark childhood memory: in Sri Lanka, he said his family used well water, an outhouse, and even coal to brush their teeth. That background made inherited-wealth critiques personal because he saw market opportunity as the route out of deprivation.