E3: Modern Cold War, politicizing the pandemic & more with David Sacks & David Friedberg

David Sacks said Craft Ventures had already closed four or five investments entirely over Zoom, without meeting the founders in person. The firm’s existing Zoom-and-Yammer workflow made the transition easy, proving remote venture deals were workable even though Sacks still expected teams to value an office.

David Friedberg said the shutdown split his portfolio sharply: lab and hardware companies stalled, while food-supply and human-health businesses were thriving. He also reported consistent mental-health strain across roughly a dozen boards and said his own sleep and mood improved after creating a daily routine outside the house.

Friedberg conceded that he had badly overestimated the lockdown’s effectiveness, after predicting an April 7 return to work and fewer than 20,000 U.S. deaths. Seeing maskless fraternity parties across Berkeley convinced him that formal shelter orders could not substitute for targeted measures such as masks, nursing-home protection and screening.

Chamath Palihapitiya argued that the stock-market rebound was not an economic recovery but a liquidity-driven concentration in large software companies. With about 30 million Americans unemployed, he pointed to the gap between market-cap-weighted and equal-weighted S&P performance as evidence that Fed-supported asset prices were diverging from the physical economy.

The group saw remote work as a threat to Silicon Valley’s location advantage, not just an office-policy change. Sacks said tech jobs were the main reason people tolerated San Francisco’s costs; Jason Calacanis estimated remote hiring and smaller offices could cut 30–40% of a company’s cost base, weakening the region’s network effect.

Palihapitiya said he had gone roughly three months without investing and returned with a credit deal rather than equity, reflecting a deliberate shift toward survival. He described his horizon as 50 years and said his ideology had to remain fluid enough to adapt to markets—“don’t go out of business” was the governing rule.

Friedberg argued that full reshoring from China was unrealistic without reinventing manufacturing. He cited roughly 112 million Chinese factory workers and said copying that labor system in America could multiply costs; automation, 3D printing and biomanufacturing were, in his view, the plausible route to reducing strategic dependence.

Friedberg highlighted a then-new paper reporting that 40–60% of people never exposed to SARS-CoV-2 already had reactive T cells, apparently from prior common-cold coronaviruses. He offered cross-reactive immunity as a possible explanation for widespread asymptomatic infection, while stressing that it would not prevent people from becoming infected and spreading the virus.