E84: Markets update, crypto collapse, Russia/Ukraine endgame, state of the podcast

After a month-long hiatus, the four All-In hosts formalized the podcast as a 25%-each partnership rather than Jason Calacanis’s media company. Calacanis had asked for 10% more equity to act as de facto CEO; the others declined, and they agreed to keep it essentially a weekly podcast.

The sharpest startup warning was that “three to four years is the new two years” of runway, based on a Coatue forecast that venture-capital availability could fall about 75%. Sacks said founders understood the recession intellectually but still resisted major cuts, often returning months later with only routine 10% reductions.

Private-market discipline had already returned: top SaaS companies growing 3× annually were being discussed at roughly 20–30× ARR, far below the 200–300× revenue environment founders had recently expected. Calacanis said even seed and angel investors were suddenly asking about valuation and burn multiples before investing.

Chamath’s strongest market signal was Meta falling on a broad up day: institutions were no longer treating its low P/E as cheap, but assuming the earnings denominator was too high. He argued similar earnings revisions would spread through equities, meaning profitable companies could reprice lower even after speculative technology stocks had already collapsed.

The hosts treated crypto’s collapse as a leverage-and-governance failure, not evidence that the underlying technology was worthless. They pointed to 5–10× leverage, Three Arrows Capital’s distress, Terra/Luna’s collapse, and a Binance investor reportedly struggling even to identify the entity to sue as signs litigation and regulation would follow.

The strongest concrete evidence behind the hosts’ argument that Russia had blunted Western sanctions was its $95.8 billion current-account surplus in January–April 2022, more than triple a year earlier. Higher energy-export prices and collapsing imports drove the surge, which the hosts used to argue sanctions were failing to force rapid economic capitulation. (euronews)

Sacks identified Lithuania’s restrictions on sanctioned goods transiting to Kaliningrad as a dangerous escalation point because Lithuania is a NATO member. His argument was that the restrictions offered little battlefield benefit yet could turn a Russia–Lithuania confrontation into an Article 5 crisis, giving a narrow transit dispute much larger stakes.

Friedberg’s institutional criticism was unusually specific: inflation policy still relied on sampled, delayed data while payment networks already observed prices at transaction scale. He proposed structured feeds from Visa, Mastercard, banks and Stripe to estimate inflation faster, even suggesting software-guided one-basis-point rate adjustments; the others agreed on better data but disputed daily rate-setting.