E15: “The Besties” All-In’s inaugural award show covering the best, worst & most memorable of 2020

Airbnb survived a 67% quarterly revenue collapse and reached an $88 billion public valuation roughly five months after major cuts. It laid off 1,900 of 7,500 employees, cut $800 million from marketing, and the panel said it also spent about $250 million cushioning cancellations for guests and hosts.

Chamath Palihapitiya said he sold only a small portion of his Virgin Galactic stake to fund nearly $2 billion of planned 2021 investments. He framed the sale as liquidity and tax management, not a retreat from the company, saying he remained a significant committed shareholder.

The sharpest crisis trades discussed were Silver Lake’s Airbnb financing and Bill Ackman’s credit hedge. The panel said Silver Lake’s $1 billion, 12% debt-and-warrants package grew to roughly $4 billion of value, while Ackman turned $27 million of credit protection into $2.6 billion and then bought stocks near the bottom.

Moderna entered COVID without a marketed product and, according to the discussion, rose from roughly a $4–5 billion 2019 valuation to about $60 billion. Friedberg’s broader point was that mRNA technology had existed for years; the emergency compressed regulatory barriers and finally pushed the platform into mass-market use.

Jason Calacanis, a former Slack board member, said he would have bought the company rather than sell it to Salesforce if given the chance. He argued Slack’s network effects were unusually valuable and that its equity should have been used to acquire adjacent companies instead of surrendering independence.

David Sacks singled out Jim Clyburn’s late South Carolina endorsement as the strategic turning point in Joe Biden’s 2020 primary comeback. Biden had finished fourth in Iowa and fifth in New Hampshire; South Carolina revived his campaign before Super Tuesday, while exit polling found Clyburn’s endorsement mattered to many voters. (NPR Visuals)

Friedberg’s strongest institutional criticism was that congressional tech hearings drifted into partisan content complaints while lawmakers struggled with ad networks, targeting, and monopoly mechanics. His point was not that scrutiny was unnecessary, but that Congress lacked enough technical understanding to interrogate the problems it had convened the hearings to examine.

Calacanis’s 50th birthday was overshadowed by the death of his friend Tony Hsieh the day before, after Hsieh had spent about 10 days in a coma. He connected the loss to the podcast’s emphasis on friendship, urging listeners struggling through 2020 to call someone rather than isolate.