All-In's Best Ideas Pitch Competition: 4 Investors Present Their Top Trades Live

📋 한국어 요약 보기 →

Thanks the besties for having me. And this is obviously a fabulous event you guys have put on. I'm happy to be here. For those of you who don't know me, I run a $4 billion firm in New York called Serreta Capital. Before founding my firm, I ran the equities business for George Soros. I was then CIO for Steve Cohen. And I've been doing hedge funds now for 29 years. So definitely on the older edge of my pure group. So I was thinking about — I run a generalist fund, and we own a bunch of tech stocks, but given this audience here, for me to pitch a tech stock would be absolutely completely stupid. So I was thinking about what else. Obviously the theme of this conference besides tech is poker. So I'm going to pitch to you MGM.

Now most of you know MGM as the Vegas company. They own 13 properties in Vegas. They're one — them and Caesars are the two largest owners of casino assets in Vegas. Now if you notice, the other day, Caesars got taken out. And so we think Vegas is actually starting to improve. But I'm not here to pitch MGM because of Vegas. What I'm going to tell you is there's a couple of things we noticed. One is this company's stock's been very aggressively acquired by Barry Diller lately. Barry now owns 26% of the company. Now I put this presentation together two weeks ago. Yesterday he actually bid for the company. When I put the presentation together the stock was about $37. It's now high $40s. He bid $48. I would not sell my shares to him.

The reason is also besides him buying the stock, the company's also been buying the stock. Rarely have I ever seen a company in 6 years buy half their float back. So you have Barry Diller who's the legend aggressively buying the stock and it's also now 80% of his NAV. Most people think of Barry Diller as the ABC producer. He did IAC which owned assets like Expedia and now he's a casino guy. What is going on here? So we spent a lot of time asking ourselves why — and MGM has two hidden assets.

So you add the Vegas assets plus China, you get about low $60s. So from $48 or $37 when I started this, great return. What they have now is a license to open a casino in Osaka, Japan. Japan a couple years ago went through a whole referendum around the country. They have prefectures. The prefectures voted. The only one that decided to open a casino is Osaka. It's going to open in 2030. If you go to the company slide presentations, they sort of mention this, but they're not really talking about it. Japan actually has a reasonably large gambling market. They have pachinko parlors and they have horses. That's about a $40 billion market. If you look at the market in Macau, that's $30 billion. And if you look at Vegas, it's only $10 billion. So this could be a massive opportunity. We're estimating they'll do about $2 billion of EBITDA. They own 40% of the property. They also get a management fee for this.

If you also look at where Osaka is located — the Japanese like to gamble, but the Chinese really gamble. If you look at where it is from Shanghai, it's shorter than Macau and Singapore, which are the two big gaming options in Asia. And from Beijing, about the same distance as Macau, and obviously much shorter than going to Singapore. So if you want to go gambling for a weekend and you live in Shanghai, live in Beijing, Osaka is great. It's also a first world nation. And if you think about as an investor, where would you want to have your money? Look, Macau has issues. It's a low multiple business. This is Japan. It's a first world country. So we think Barry Diller is — understands gambling. He understands casinos. But what he's really doing is now trying to pick off the company to get the Japanese opportunity which we think is worth — will more than double the stock.

The final option and I'm keeping this simple. What I love about this pitch is it's really simple. It's not that hard to do the math. MGM is building a property in Dubai. It's a grand complex. It has an Aria. It has an MGM and it has a Bellagio. Gambling is illegal in Dubai right now. But they have snuck in this building 300,000 square ft of space. Well, one day if Dubai decides to legalize gambling, guess where it's going? Right there. Next year, two years from now, Wynn is going to open a casino in a place called Ras Al Khaimah, which is 45 minutes away from Dubai. Any of us who want to go gambling in Dubai, Ras Al Khaimah's a bit of a pain in the ass to get to, we're going to want to go here. So we think there's a chance — especially when Wynn opens — also there's a possibility of the war, Dubai wants to reestablish themselves, that they open a casino in Dubai and you know what that would be worth.

So when you take the Vegas assets, which we think are worth about 60, when you take Japan, which we think is worth about 50 bucks, if Dubai happens, that's worth another $40 or $50. So we think the stock is a triple. Barry's bidding for the company. He is not a strategic buyer. He is a financial buyer and he's doing it to get rich. So therefore, I think this company is now in play. I don't know how it's all going to play out, but if you own shares, don't tender to them. And the risk-reward is incredible right now because I'm telling you, I think the stock could be easily worth over 100, could be worth 150. And now you have Barry Diller who has a firm bid, owns 26% of the company basically at the same price.

Q&A: How much have you looked at the monetization of the assets outside of gambling? I had heard from someone that Barry Diller was spending a lot of time trying to reinvent the entertainment piece of the properties. He was active on the board and they were trying to identify that the entertainment value is way undermonetized. — "I don't know the answer. If he can make them better, it will help. But as I'm saying, this is not really a Vegas play. This is an Asian casino play."

Q: Caesars left Dubai waiting for a license. Why would this be different for MGM? And the Osaka Casino was approved in 2023. Why was the market ignoring this hidden asset until the bid? — "Wynn opened Macau. The market started caring about it about 3 years before it opened. We're almost in that time frame, which is why we think it's opportunistically the right period of time. Regarding Caesars — this is an option. Somebody built this project for them. They were intelligent enough to leave 300,000 square ft of empty space in case they get a casino. If that happens, great. If it doesn't, you're still going to double more than double your money. If it happens, you triple your money. Free option."

📋 한국어 요약 보기 →

Long time no see. So, today we're doing Talon Energy. But first, the anatomy of a power cycle. A power cycle typically goes like this. In normal times, power demand grows about GDP. So if GDP grows 2%, power demand grows two. If GDP grows three, power demand grows three. And there's moments in time where we get technological breakthroughs and a lot of those technological breakthroughs are very power intensive. So power demand spikes and once everybody adopts that technology it trends back down to its normal algorithm of GDP growth and then you go through the efficiencies phase where we say let's try to conserve and figure out ways to consume less power and then the cycle starts all over again.

In history, the big technological boom that sent power demand skyrocketing was appliances and air conditioning. Everybody had to get their kettles and the aircon. Then in the 70s and 80s and 90s, demand normalized again. But then the 2000s were all about efficiencies. We had LED lighting, smart HVAC, tinted windows, smart electronics. And at the same time, we were ripping down all our power-hungry infrastructure like aluminum smelters and moving over to China. So we had two decades of effectively no power demand. And now we're just coming out of it and starting a technological cycle again where power demand is going to really start to explode from these sort of high 2% numbers you're seeing on the screen.

Now, I want to say something right now. We do not need AI demand to keep the power markets incredibly tight for the next 20 years. AI demand just turbocharges. That's all it does. And it creates shortages. Early in my career, I was on a panel with Sam Zell. Interestingly, it was a panel on opportunities in Mongolia. I was looking at a copper mine and he was looking at real estate. There was one thing he said that stuck with me for the rest of my career — "If you can buy a hard asset at below replacement cost for an asset that's going to be needed in the future, then you buy that asset at the discount to replacement cost. You hold it and you sell it at a big premium to replacement cost when the market wakes up. That's exactly what we did with Equity Office properties. Sold it at the peak of the market but bought it at a discount to replacement value."

Talon Energy is a power producer. They have 2 gigawatts of nuclear power and they've got 6 gigawatts of natural gas base load power. Today in the stock market, as a good speculation, you could purchase this company at a $25 billion enterprise value. The replacement cost is 45 billion. And because they've got debt, the equity value just to get to replacement cost is more than a double from where it's trading today. And if you follow Sam's playbook, then we ultimately end this cycle at a big premium to replacement value.

So when I see this, I say the plan for America on the power side has to be this: Make America great again. Copy China. If you look at what China did over the last 20 years, we started out this cycle with having 2x the power generation that China had. Fast forward to today, China has three times the power generation capacity that we have. If you believe that artificial intelligence is going to be responsible for scientific breakthroughs, you either have it or you don't. If you believe that artificial intelligence is going to drive robotics, you either have it or you don't have that productivity. If you believe that artificial intelligence is going to be helpful for national security and military affairs, then you either have it or you're dead. So this is an absolutely mandatory buildout — otherwise we're going to fall behind. At the end of the day what is a data center? In my world in the commodities world I look at a data center as the exact same thing as a refinery. In a traditional hydrocarbon refinery you put oil in, you refine it into jet fuel or gasoline for your car. With a data center, you put electricity in and out comes photons or tokens or intelligence. Big capital intensive asset, $50 billion per gigawatt and power just like electricity, just like oil is the input to that refinery.

Here's Jensen — he was just recently quoted that we need a thousand times more power than we currently have. Now, if that's remotely true, we need every single source of power that you can imagine. We need hundreds of gigawatts of nuclear, we need solar, we need orbital, we need it all. But the challenge is the supply chain. All of these — a data center competes for the same supply chain of the critical minerals that space launches and orbital data centers do. Power plants need all the same nickel super alloys that it takes to launch rockets and the silver that goes into these photovoltaic cells. So there's going to be shortages of everything and delays everywhere. We are just going to need every solution that we can throw at this for the foreseeable future.

Here's a little region in the US called the PJM, Pennsylvania, Jersey, Maryland. This is a forecast from the grid operator where they say that over the next 10 years we're going to need 106 gigawatts of new power in the PJM in just one little area of the US. Now in 10 years in geological time that's like tomorrow morning. We're all so used to internet time — you press a button and you get your food delivered in two seconds. Building infrastructure happens in geological time. 10 years to build out 106 gigawatts is literally a nanosecond from now. We ain't retiring those coal plants because there's no world where we're going to be building 100 gigawatts in 10 years. That's the size of what Japan consumes today for one little part of the US. Everybody's in panic mode because we know that we don't have the raw materials to meet this level of demand.

The data centers and the hyperscalers are in a panic. They're trying everything they can to source as much power as they can under long-term PPAs (power purchase agreements) at fixed prices for 20 years. There's a famous example — I thought Microsoft was a green company, but they went and convinced Constellation Energy, which is a company that owns the 3 Mile Island nuclear reactor, the one that melted down and gave nuclear a bad name for 30 years. It was Microsoft that told them they needed to start it up. And to incentivize them, they said, "Power prices stay $50 a megawatt hour. We'll pay you a hundred a year for 20 years minimum price for you guys to start this up." So here we have it. 3 Mile Island brought to you by Microsoft Azure. It's getting harder to do these deals because the regulators are saying, "Wait a minute. If you're taking all this power off the grid for your data center, how are we going to heat the homes of our customers?"

Just to finish up — here are the numbers on Talon. The stock today is sort of in the high 300s. If they just do absolutely nothing, just sit there and run the business, let their Amazon data center contract roll up, these guys will be generating $50 a share of free cash flow per year. The stock is in the high 300s. So it's about seven times free cash flow. Good infrastructure assets in the US trade about 15 times. That's pretty good. You get a double for basically management just sitting around. But if they continue to figure out ways to sign contracts with data centers at premium prices or if power prices go up — you get to $70 a share of recurring annual free cash flow, put a 15 multiple on that. But then if they get into building power plants — right now the regulator is telling these companies to go sit in a room, power producer, data center, come in a room, make a deal. If they just build 4 gigawatts of the 100 gigawatts that we need, you could get up to over $100 a share of free cash flow.

Q&A (Gavin): How do you think about regulatory risks here? Nobody likes their electricity prices going up. AI is an increasingly political issue. — "We need AI and we need to figure this out. There's different ways to skin a cat. During peak hours, you stress the system only a few hours a day. The working solution to get around this regulatory issue is you do the PPAs with the data centers. You force the data centers to throw a ton of battery behind it and some peakers just to get through that really intense period. Human ingenuity is going to win here."

Q: Does your thesis actually need behind the meter collocation to clear or is it just a bet that clean firm base load is scarce enough? — "It's the latter. The $50 a share of earnings — nothing has to happen. You just sit, and you double your money. If you get more behind the meter or front of the meter, that's how you get up to the $70 a share. If you start building new capacity, then you get to the $100 plus."

Q: How do you think about competition from fuel cells, gas turbines, aeroderivative turbines, orbital compute, other IPPs? — "We need all of it. Fuel cells and Caterpillar solar turbines are fantastic bridge solutions but the LCOE is through the roof. To build a $50 billion data center you don't want it to sit idle for 3 years waiting for your base load CCGT, so you don't give a crap what you pay for that bridge solution."

Q: What is the right terminal multiple for Talon if the business mix shifts from merchant IPP to contracted infrastructure? What percentage of EBITDA needs to be contracted? — "I only had six minutes. The 15 multiple is a blended multiple. The contracted stuff will get a big premium because it's a bond-like cash flow stream. Bond-like cash flow streams trade at a small spread to treasuries — if treasuries are at 5%, should trade at 20 times plus growth. The uncontracted merchant stuff that has spot market exposure is more volatile, less visible, should trade at a lower multiple. The more contracts, the higher the multiple."

📋 한국어 요약 보기 →

My name is Oleg Nelman. I'm the founder and managing director of Eco R1 Capital, a San Francisco based value-oriented biotech fund that I started about 13 years ago. Thanks a lot to the besties for having me here. I'm a huge fan of the pod and I know how challenged Science Corner can get. So I wrote this in a way that even David Sacks would appreciate and pay attention to if he were here. (Well, paradoxically, he's taking a nap, which is what he normally does during science corners. Exactly.)

Generally speaking, investing in biotech companies is a horrible idea sandwiched somewhere between movies, wineries, and SPACs. In fact, our sector often feels a lot more like a casino than an actual financial market. And most of the tourists who are investing are playing — of course, at Eco R1, we consider ourselves poker players in a sector where virtually everyone else is a momentum investor betting on science. We focus on margin of safety. We're one of the few funds not managed by PhDs or MDs, and that's by design because we don't want to fall in love with the science. We fall in love with the risk-reward. And like the slide says, we want to monetize other kids' science projects.

This is my 25th year investing in biotech. I started my career with an 11-year stint at another fund and launched Eco R1 in 2013, humble beginnings with 13 million. Since inception, we've 10x'd to our investors and annualized at 20%. And today we have about two and a half billion under management. We're lucky to have long-term partners, many of whom are biotech entrepreneurs themselves, and have been with us since day one. We recently reopened for new capital.

Today I'm going to tell you about a company that's on the front lines of the war on cancer. Military terminology has been used when describing treatments for the disease since the early 70s when President Nixon signed [the National Cancer Act]. The warfare analogy is actually perfect for cancer because both domains are trying to accomplish the exact same thing: find the enemy, figure out the best weapon to kill them, and have minimal unwanted casualties along the way.

First, a quick history of how this war has evolved. Early surgical cancer treatment and radiation was akin to a medieval siege — level the entire castle, burn the surrounding village, and hope the enemy was left somewhere in the rubble. Chemo actually evolved from an accidental observation during World War I that mustard gas killed rapidly dividing tissue. Tumor cells divide fast, so doctors would flood a patient's body with chemo and hoped it killed the enemy faster than it killed allies. Unfortunately, hair, skin, gut, and marrow cells also divide quickly, and the poison doesn't discriminate. First generation targeted therapies were next, like a GPS guided munition. Instead of carpet bombing every dividing cell, you identify the enemy's command and control center and destroy it. The problem, like with any weapon, is that the enemy adapts and hides — in cancer, these are called resistant mutations. Immunotherapy was first introduced to patients a decade ago. With IO, you don't send in your own troops. You recruit local allies, also known as T-cells, and let them do the fighting for you. Spectacular when it works, but highly dependent on the terrain or the tumor microenvironment.

This brings me to the reason we're here today. Modern-day radiopharmaceuticals. Like a swarm of micro drones small enough to navigate the bloodstream and find their target by molecular recognition, then detonate a precisely sized warhead with a blast radius of 100 microns or the diameter of a single cell. An autonomous assassination with the force of a bunker buster and minimum collateral damage.

The company I'm going to tell you about today is Actis Oncology. The ticker is AKTS. The company has a billion dollar market cap, a $500 million enterprise value, and a stockpile of cash, which should last them over 3 years. Long past critical milestones that are coming next year. Actis was started five years ago, but recently went public with a $300 million IPO that was 18 times oversubscribed and backstopped with a $100 million order by Eli Lilly, the folks who bring you all the weight loss drugs. The company has designed a platform that can carry any radioactive payload, is complex enough to go after a variety of targets, and small enough to clear your body with minimal side effects. The beautiful thing about this approach is that physicians can verify target engagement in early clinical trials with imaging. This significantly de-risks clinical development because you know the drug is getting to the tumor.

Another de-risking strategy for their first few programs — Actis chose known valid targets like Nectin-4 and B7H3. Nectin-4 is critical in bladder cancer and the company's second program targeting B7H3 is even more ambitious, expressed on every major solid tumor including the big three prostate, colorectal and lung. Actis started clinical trials last year and is publicly guided to initial clinical data in both of these lead programs in 2027 with Nectin-4 coming as early as Q1. So you won't have to wait long. If either program shows a signal, the company is likely to get value not only for those programs but the entire mini-protein platform. This is the holy grail in biotech, getting value simply for the promise of what could be.

What's even more compelling is there's an amazing amount of interest in radiotherapies from pharma. The big ones including Bristol, Novartis, Bayer, and Lilly who backstopped the Actis IPO have been building radiotherapy capabilities and they're hungry for assets to add to their pipelines. There's been 15 billion in M&A and dealmaking in radiotherapy in the last few years and we're very much in the early innings. The neatest thing about this modality is that it's very hard to replicate. Generics generally don't traffic in radiopharma and because the class involves radioisotopes it's off limits to China. So unlike most of biotech there's a real moat.

It's notoriously challenging to value biotech companies because when you risk adjust and discount back, you pretty quickly get to zero. For earlier stage opportunities like this, we like to triangulate. We think Actis could be worth 10 billion or $200 per share if even one of their programs makes it to market. And in this case, you have a lot of outs.

Q (Friedberg): I'm not familiar with why radioisotopes are off limits to China. — "Actis' radioisotope payload is actinium and actinium is manufactured from radium-233 which was used in our own nuclear programs in the US in the 50s and 60s. So it's a waste product from there. Actinium is not even available in other countries like China because they had a completely different program with enriched uranium and plutonium."

Q: But the risk for a lot of biotech and China replication came from that Amgen-Sandoz Supreme Court case — you could change one amino acid, get around the patent, and attach the radioisotope. — "With radioisotopes you have to have a manufacturing supply that you have to source locally in the US. We haven't seen any competition coming from China at all. I'm sure they can do it for the Chinese market, but in terms of transferring that over here, we haven't seen any wind of it at all."

Q (Gavin): I ran a biopharmaceutical fund right after the human genome had been sequenced and there was an expectation it would lead to this explosion in personalized medicines. I don't think we've made as much progress over 25 years as people thought. AI is going to unlock revolutionary therapies. My selfish question — what are the odds that in the lifetimes of everyone in this room, the average human lifespan in a developed country extends well past 100 to 125, 150? — "I would take the over on that, in no small part because we already have one of the best longevity drugs out there and folks don't even realize it in the GLP-1s and the obesity drugs. One of the only things that's ever been shown with actual data to extend life is caloric restriction and that's literally what all the obesity drugs do. So I'm sure half the people in this room are on one of them. And that's just the beginning."

Q (audience): As launch costs per kilogram continue to fall, is there a credible pathway to use space and microgravity as a therapeutic variable? — "That is a great question that's probably not applicable to this." Q: What technological breakthrough could disrupt precision radiotherapy as a result of AI at scale? — "There's a small skunkworks project within Actis — an AI project. With all these biotech companies, they have their little proprietary data sets that they hope to leverage."

(By the way, somebody just YOLO'd into the stock while Oleg was on stage. It's up 6%. Don't do that while we're all trying to buy as well.)

📋 한국어 요약 보기 →

Morning everyone. My name is Kyle Samani. Thank you for being with us at the All-In Liquidity today. Thanks to the besties for organizing. Today we're going to be talking about a little known asset, a little crypto asset called Geonet — which is building the rails for AI. Quick bit about me: I founded a firm called Multicoin Capital about eight and a half years ago. I stepped down a few months ago. In my time there, I was probably most well known for leading all three rounds of investment in Solana prior to Solana's network launch in 2020. I've been deep in the crypto space for a very long time. Big shout out to David Sacks. Unfortunately, he's not here, but David did seed Multicoin back in the day. So thank you, David, for believing in me very early.

The way to understand Geonet first is to look at GPS. Probably everyone in this room has been in the situation where you're using your phone and your phone is in the wrong spot facing the wrong way. Right here you can see this guy looks like he's facing a wall according to his phone. Geonet fundamentally uses a technology called RTK or real-time kinematics where you can localize your location down to about 2 centimeters. For context, GPS roughly the precision is about 2 meters. So you're getting about 100x accuracy for very precise geolocation. As you can imagine any form of robotics can make use of RTK — drones being the very obvious example.

Today Geonet is the world's largest RTK network in the world and it's also the fastest growing. The three companies — Trimble, Hexagon, and Topcon — have all been building RTK networks in some form or fashion for call it 20 to 30 years. All of them combined have roughly 12,000 base stations deployed around the world. Geonet was founded in 2021. Began building out the network in 2022. And today they are roughly twice the size of the next three guys combined. Today Geonet is live in 150 countries around the world, more than 11,000 cities and covers roughly 80% of the global population excluding some sanctioned countries.

You might say, how did these guys build this network so fast? The key is really this decentralized crypto model. Here we're looking at literally a photo of a Geonet base station on the roof of someone's house. The global Geonet network — those 22,000 nodes — are not being built and deployed by something that looks like AT&T or Verizon. Those base stations are being deployed by any random guy or hobbyist or professional or small business owner who wants to make some extra money. You can go on the Geonodes website today. You can buy one of these base stations. They're a few hundred bucks. You put it on your roof. It broadcasts radio waves. You make money. You actually get paid in Geode tokens, which is the really cool part about this incentive system to bootstrap this thing to get it off the ground.

Let's talk about some of the customers and use cases. We'll start with agriculture. The USDA actually launched a couple years ago a program to encourage farmers and ranchers to use precision ag technologies including RTK networks. Today the USDA is now actually subsidizing many farmers and ranchers all over the country to adopt high precision ag, most of which is powered by Geonet. Here we're looking at what's called a robotic mule, made by a company called Burro — transporting some grapes. With the advent in computer vision, GPUs, batteries, all the other AI stuff, these things are growing like hotcakes, all of them are going to be powered by Geonet or something like it.

Here we're looking at John Deere. They have a new service that they rolled out recently called Global Unmanned Spraying Systems or Gus. These things drive around. They literally spray plants with pesticides. I did actually confirm this morning there are wineries here in Napa that are actually using John Deere Gus vehicles. So if you have some wine tonight, maybe it was powered by Gus, which is powered by Geonet. Obviously autonomous vehicles has a pretty obvious application — TomTom is one of Geonet's customers. TomTom is a supplier to basically every AV program in the world. TomTom is using Geonet's data to update their maps.

One of my favorite use cases are the next wave of consumer robotics. The most obvious one are robotic lawnmowers. Robotic lawnmowers are now rolling out at pretty good scale. They're estimated to sell 1 million robotic lawnmowers this year, made by companies like Yarbo, Sunseeker, and others. All powered by Geonet. The world's largest drone manufacturer DJI is a Geonet customer. As DJI winds down in the US and you have new American drone manufacturers pop up, I'm going to venture to guess that most if not all of them are going to end up on the Geonet network as well.

What I love about Geonet is it's a very obvious network effects business. This thing looks like a natural telecom — you have base stations all over the world. Telecoms naturally form monopolies historically. Today, Geonet is the world's largest and fastest growing network with also the lowest cost structure by a very wide margin because of this decentralized nature. In terms of where the business is at, the business just crossed about $11 million in annualized run rate a few days ago. And it's growing more than 3x year-over-year. I think it's going to probably more than triple over the next 12 months.

What's really cool about Geonet is how capital efficient it is and how they're actually returning capital to token holders. The Geonet network is taking — of that 11 million in revenue — roughly 80% of it is being used to make open market purchases of Geo tokens. This is all visible on the Solana blockchain. The addresses are published, so it's all verifiable in real time. That means $8.8 million right now per year is going into buying Geonet tokens on the open market. The last 20% — they're covering all their R&D costs and scaling out their business development team. With a business like this, customers tend to ramp up their usage. Once someone starts rolling out Geonet in the first year, they're usually spending about $60,000 per year. After two years though, they're usually spending about $170,000 per year. So the average Geonet customer is growing their revenue with Geonet about 3x in that second year.

Q: What's the market cap? — "It's trading about 150 million on a fully diluted basis. If you go look at any of the crypto price websites, they're going to show you 60 or 70 million. That's because not all the tokens are floating yet, but fully diluted is about $150 million."

Q: Is there a corporation behind it or is this just like a project in the Cayman Islands? — "The Geonet team is a US-based corporation. There's a team in San Francisco. The CEO's name is Mike Horton. Really good guy. He's been building in the IoT smart device space for a while."

Q: The relationship between the corporate entity and the token — which should we own? — "You should own the token because I own a lot of the token. I don't own any of the equity. The company is facing John Deere, DJI — they have a contractual relationship with the Geonet Foundation to use 80% of their revenues to buy tokens off the open market." Chamath: "So it's a securitized interest in the cash flows from the customers." Kyle: "Correct. It's a revenue share token. 80%."

Q: Do you like Helium as much, which is Geonet for 5G signal? — "I actually led Multicoin's investment in Helium six or seven years ago, and continue to be a very big long-term believer."

Q: There's a long list of DePIN projects that have failed because people just don't value the token rewards. Why is this any different? — "They're returning capital to shareholders. This thing is returning $8.8 million to shareholders. It's trading at $150 million valuation and it's going to grow 3x this year. It's an unbelievably cheap asset. People aren't paying attention because it's crypto bear market right now."

Q (Sam): What accrues value, the equity or the token? How does the value accrual mechanism square with current securities laws or what's contemplated in the Clarity Act? — "The tokens are the ones accruing value because they're taking 80% and buying. The Clarity Act passing is certainly very good for Geonet. I'm not a lawyer, but I'm an optimist and I've been very involved in the Clarity Act, and I'm not too worried about it."

Q (Friedberg): John Deere makes their own RTK systems. Why would John Deere want to rely on this system as a different — why is it better than the systems they're already using? — "Capex versus opex. These networks are all over the world now, running at very low cost. Geonet is probably a third to a quarter the price than buying up your own capex. It's just available everywhere. So it reduces the sales cycle time for John Deere."

Q (Friedberg): There's another big push right now for microsats to be an alternative to GPS in a way that they can actually provide sub-cm resolution effectively replacing both GPS and RTK using a mesh network. Doesn't that ultimately wash out the need to have all these earth-based base stations? — "There's no chance they can compete on cost because just sending things to space with satellites — these Geonet base stations are a few hundred bucks. You're just not going to compete on cost with Geonet. Also energy use — going to space just consumes way more energy than going to a base station that's on the ground. For a drone or for any battery sensitive application, ground is always going to be the preferred solution."

Q: What about other tokens — distributed training, distributed inference? — "There's a whole bunch of people trying it. I'm pretty skeptical. I don't think any of it's going to work. The distributed inference stuff is possible although it has not worked as well as we would have hoped. I did put some money behind that a few years ago. It's working but not A+."

📋 한국어 요약 보기 →

Before we vote, Chamath, give your feedback. Here's what I like. I apply the Stan Druckenmiller school of investigate — I really believe in it. If you don't have any skin in the game, you don't care. And this is the kind of stuff that I love. I love hearing ideas like this. I love all four. My difference is in sizing. There's certain asymmetric alpha that each one of these exhibits and then there's very different downside risk for each of them. And then there's also liquidity issues. For example, I love Kyle's idea. The problem is I could not get enough working for me — I don't even think I could get a million dollars in today. It would move the market. So I would have to probably be like 10, 20, 30,000 and then maybe start to buy into it. Talon — I think they could absorb tens of millions and people wouldn't bat an eyelash. The biotech company, the issue there is that there is this discontinuous illiquidity, zero risk but then there's the 10x upside. Lily will bid for it. MGM and Talon are the ones you could have huge sizing in. The other ones I think you have a piece because they're like lottery tickets.

Gavin, you rank them. Well, no, even before you rank, just tell us what you think of the format and then assess the companies. I thought the pitches were great. I thought the format was amazing. I would for sure expand it next year. As far as the pitches, I think it's important to disaggregate what was a really great entertaining pitch versus what I think is a really good risk-reward. I thought Oleg and Kyle did a great job with the pitches, but I'm not a healthcare investor, nor am I a crypto investor. I thoroughly enjoyed the presentations. I actually thought GEOD was very interesting. I'm happy to learn from Oleg that I might live well into my 100s.

From a pure risk-reward perspective, I thought MGM was the best. Your downside is really capped because of the Barry Diller bid and then you have Japan and Dubai as very valuable future sources of value. I do think Talon is also a very compelling risk. I just think everything in AI is going to need to grapple with increasing regulatory risk. The big negative externality for Talon is nothing to do with Talon — it's like something over the top from the US government caps prices, nationalizes the lab, a change in administration, a change in Congress. Outside of that, Talon was super compelling. I thought Actis was very compelling — they're trying to do something different. If you ever get a biotech company that can become a platform and they have a mechanism — whether it's of drugging, whether it's targeting — that is when you can get these really big hundred billion dollar plus outcomes in biotech which are rare. I don't play crypto, but I thought the entire Geonet discussion was fascinating.

Is there anything that would get you off the bench and make you jump into the crypto game? — "I feel about crypto exactly the way I do about snowboarding. I'm not a very good athlete. I've spent a lifetime learning how to ski and I'm okay. Just the idea of getting on a snowboard, having thousands of hours of ski instruction... I have 25 years of lessons, learnings, pain, scars from investing in equities and public securities. Crypto's a little bit like snowboarding for me. Everybody who wants to snowboard, that's great. Just please don't go sideways down the mountain and ruin the powder."

Friedberg: I look at the return upside, the downside and the timeline. MGM's like probably a 3x. I think it's also missing this point that you can actually upgrade the monetization on these Vegas properties. We were talking to a friend of ours in Vegas. They're making a million bucks a day in incremental EBITDA every day that they have a show at the Sphere at the Venetian hotel — an unbelievable statistic which tells you that when you have the entertainment draw, the gambling revenue just flies. Barry Diller I have heard separately has been spending a lot of time on trying to reinvent the entertainment at these properties. I do like the floor on the bid and then you got call it 3x in 2 years even if this bid goes nowhere.

Talon is maybe 3x upside, 5x upside, but it's eight years out. And I think one of the other challenges with Talon is it's more interest rate sensitive than MGM is because the PPAs really are where a lot of the revenue comes from. So you're going to get a discount rate that's a function of where interest rates are sitting. If interest rates shoot up, you actually get margin compression from that 15x outlook. Actis — I do worry because I'm an investor in a company that's got a D-protein conjugate that shows really strong efficacy in solid tumors. I think there are new modalities for therapeutics for solid tumors that may put this at risk. I think the China risk is legit because I've seen it across the board in biotech. Everything gets ripped off and people go to China. But they could have a hit and Lily could bid on it in 6 months if they get a good readout. So the downside's probably 50-75% if they get a bad readout. So my ranking is MGM, Talon, Actis, and then Geodet — I just think the space thing is likely the path. It's going to replace all RTK and all GPS in the next decade. It's an inevitable piggyback on systems that are already going up.

Jason: For me, I put them into two buckets. AKTS and GOD — those are like lottery tickets, could be crazy returns but there's a big probability of a zero if they don't actually work. Then MGM and Talon obviously got the downside protection — people will always gamble and leave the lights on. So I kind of like both of those. I put 200K into each in real time. Gamble and leave the lights. Did you actually buy? I'm just day trading. (Gavin: I bought half of his action and I don't have a Robinhood account. I have to call my office. So I was like just I'll take half your action. Jason: I'm up 7% across the portfolio. So I don't think I can include you here.) I'll go MGM, Talon, GEOD, AKTS.

Audience award. Based on 150 votes from the audience — fourth place with 5% of the vote was Kyle Samani. Third place with 21% of the vote, Oleg. Second place with 24% of the vote, Aaron Cowen for MGM. Number one with 50% of the vote, Dan [Sherer / Talon Energy]. Wow. Unbelievable.

Now the bestie award. 4-3-2-1. It's relatively similar here. Fourth place was Kyle Samani. Third place was Oleg. Second place Dan Sherer. First place Aaron Cowen. Big upset. Flip the audience vote. All right. So MGM wins. Thanks guys. This was amazing. Thank you all for participating.