The "All-In Besties" are the hosts of the weekly All-In Podcast. In case you aren’t a listener, the four protagonists are Chamath Palihapitiya - venture capitalist and CEO of Social Capital, Jason Calacanis - entrepreneur and angel investor, David Sacks - co-founder of PayPal and venture capitalist, and David Friedberg - founder of The Production Board and former CEO of The Climate Corporation. Their podcast, while sometimes tediously political during the US election year, rarely fails to offer some of the best global insights on technology. The Pod, as they call it, has a huge and fast-growing following. The Besties are smart, politically incorrect, and at times great fun to listen to. Once a year they hold an in-person summit.

The All-In Summit 2024 wasn’t your typical tech event - it was part political rally, part think tank, and entirely a showcase for some of the most influential voices in the tech world. Held at UCLA’s iconic Royce Hall over last week, the Summit brought together the best and brightest, from household names like Elon Musk to up-and-coming movers and shakers. Their goal? To shine a light on the next generation of technology that is reshaping industries, economies, and the way we live our daily lives.

This wasn’t just a love fest for tech. The discussions on AI, robotics, and cloud computing were laced with sometimes angst-ridden discussions on the domestic issues facing the USA, and its struggles with a rapidly deteriorating geopolitical environment. From U.S.-China decoupling to regulatory overreach, many of the speakers recognized that technology's bright future could be dimmed by events beyond their control.

For the more cynical at heart, All-in Summit was also a supremely clever piece of brand-building. By the end of the Summit, it was clear that we, the 1,950 attendees paying US$7,500 each to attend, were the product. The Besties spoke about how All-in’s large and fast-growing following has lifted their profiles and their businesses. By the second day, they were trying to sell us US$1,200 bottles of All-in tequila (which the guy next to me commented might just cost $20 per bottle to produce). And none of us cared.

If the Big Dogs of the tech world go to Sun Valley to get deals done, All-in democratises Big Tech. Here’s our take on it.

Robots, AI, and Everything In Between: The Future of Automation

Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX and Tesla and owner of X, shared a vision of the future that was both thrilling and a bit alarming. According to Musk, the biggest opportunity in the coming years is humanoid robots. ‘Everyone will want a robot buddy,’ he quipped.

In Musk’s world, these humanoid robots could become as ubiquitous as smartphones. His companies are already making strides in robotics, and he predicts that robots will soon be walking our dogs, mowing our lawns, and even helping with childcare. (Although he was also quick to admit 'sometimes I'm a little optimistic with delivery schedules...')

‘The rate of improvement of AI is faster than any technology I’ve ever seen,’ Musk enthused. While he believes AI can usher in an era of abundance where the cost of goods and services trends toward zero, he was quick to temper that optimism with a note of caution: there’s still a 20% chance AI could lead to humanity’s annihilation’.

Musk then moved onto his ‘hardcore’ political views and economic concerns. ‘We're tied down by a million little regulations in the US today. This is a massive tax on consumers. We don't have a process for getting rid of Government bureaucracy and bad laws - we need a garbage removal process.’

On debt and spending: ‘the US defense budget is a trillion dollars per year. Interest payments on federal debt now exceed the defense budget. We’re adding a trillion dollars to our debt every few months. It’s like someone who has racked up credit card debt and can only make their interest payments. It’s not good.’

Then to his crusade for unbridled free speech: ‘the freedom of speech war is two years old and carries a $44bn price tag! Why is the first amendment such a high priority? Because elsewhere people are imprisoned or killed for speaking up. Which system is better? It's the one that doesn't need to build the wall to keep people in.’

And lastly, on a more inspirational note: ‘it’s incredibly important to have things that inspire us. To think that the future going to be better than the past. We have to look forward to stuff. The things kids get fired up about are a good indicator. You need things that move your heart. It can’t just be about solving one problem after problem.’

Eventually, when Musk moved off the serious stuff, he spent an eternity telling dirty jokes - before jetting off to Cape Carnaveral to launch a manned spacecraft. Such is the life of the world’s most disruptive person.

Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, returned to a day job at Google to dive headfirst into artificial intelligence, which he called ‘the most exciting thing I’ve ever worked on.’ Now working on Google’s AI efforts full-time, Brin discussed the company's push to develop new AI models, warning Google against becoming too conservative, urging the company to take risks - even if it means facing the occasional glitch in the matrix.

‘You need to take risks and face embarrassments to get it right,’ Brin said, echoing a theme that many at the summit seemed to agree on. ‘Every week there are new AI capabilities. I’m wowed that computers can actually do all of this. Writing code from scratch feels hard compared to asking AI to do it. The Google engineers don’t use the AI tools for their own coding as much as they ought to. We basically invented language models, but for whatever reasons we were too timid to deploy them.’

Marc Benioff, the founder and CEO of Salesforce (and arguably the world’s greatest salesman) took the stage to share his vision for how AI will completely transform enterprise software. He introduced Agentforce, Salesforce’s new AI tool, which he claims will autonomously connect different applications and solve complex problems for businesses without hallucinations.

What’s truly groundbreaking, Benioff explained, is that AI agents are already sounding like humans. "We are at the precipice of the greatest moment ever for enterprise software and cloud," he proclaimed. For Benioff, the future of software lies in automation, and he’s placing all of Salesforce’s chips on Agentforce.

While Nikesh Arora, Chairman and CEO of Palo Alto Networks, didn’t share the same exuberance for AI’s world-changing potential, he did offer a more grounded perspective. He noted that while everyone is chasing large language models like ChatGPT, the real winners in the AI race will be those who can build economically viable models that actually solve problems. "The cost to train models will come down as economic rationality prevails," he said, suggesting that only the best products will survive in the end.

Autonomous Vehicles: On and Off the Roads

Tekedra Mawakana, Co-CEO of Waymo, provided insights into the company’s quiet success in autonomous driving. While Tesla grabs the headlines, Waymo has been operating driverless vehicles in Phoenix, Los Angeles and San Francisco for several years, completing over two million paid rides and 22 million miles without human drivers. ‘We aren’t building a series of good drivers - we are building the world’s best driver.’ The safety statistics are impressive - 83% fewer airbag deployments and 73% fewer injuries than human-driven cars.

When asked why Waymo vehicles are more frequently seen in urban environments than on highways, Mawakana explained that chaotic city streets provide a much better training ground for autonomous driving than predictable freeway conditions. ‘We drive in a week more than a human drives in a lifetime,’ she added.

Waymo’s next big challenge is scaling the technology globally while working with partners like Uber to create an ecosystem around autonomous vehicles. Ultimately this tech will be sold to the major vehicle manufacturers, so your own car will become autonomous (where’s the fun in that?).

On the theme of autonomous vehicles, next came a panel of EVTOL CEOs - Brian Yutko, Adam Goldstein and Joeben Bevirt from Wisk, Archer and Joby.

Like autonomous cars, autonomous aircraft are coming down the runway at speed. The progress behind hangar doors is surprising and encouraging, notwithstanding the challenges of financing an EVTOL business (it's expensive to build aircraft and VCs don't like financing them).

EVTOLS should be a quiet, time-saving alternative to land-based travel solutions. At 120 mph in a straight line, EVTOLs can theoretically get you from A to B much faster than Uber or Waymo. Airports are the ideal place to start. 30 million people go from Manhattan to three local airports every year. That is a market to cut your teeth on. Joby CEO: ‘The dream is to be able to pick up people from their homes’.

EVTOL payloads are currently an issue because their batteries are so heavy. The real-world range of these aircraft is currently 20-50 miles however they are being designed for 200 miles. The amount of energy in battery cells has doubled in 10 years. Battery life has extended as well to 10,000 x 25-mile flights.

And safety? There are multiple layers of redundancy with these machines - multiple propellors and all of the systems that drive them have high redundancy and can handle all sorts of weather conditions.  

And noise? EVTOLs aim to stay below city background noise, which runs at around 55db. By comparison, jets produce 110db and helicopters 80-100db.

How long until consumers can use this technology readily?  Autonomous EVTOLs are about to be manufactured at scale for selective public launch in 2025. Money is mobilising and commercial deals are being done. Car manufacturer Stellantis has invested, Delta and Southwest have entered commercial agreements, and the military are buying aircraft.

However - they still cannot launch in the USA due to regulatory capture. This was a key theme of the conference. Even if the EVTOL companies are ready, the US government isn't. So other countries like New Zealand and Dubai are jumping in. New Zealand is a tiny market but a great testing ground, and the Middle East is providing regulatory and capital support. And as we are coming to expect, while the US is stuck in regulatory molasses, China is edging ahead.

Geopolitical and Regulatory Headwinds

Amid the starry-eyed tech optimism, there was no shortage of sobering geopolitical realities discussed at the Summit. Peter Thiel, the contrarian co-founder of PayPal, founder of Palantir and an early investor in Facebook, offered a grim take on the rising tensions between the U.S. and China, predicting that we’re sleepwalking into a conflict. Decoupling from China, he argued, is inevitable, but it will be a painful and inflationary process.

On AI, Thiel proclaimed: ‘AI in 2024 is like the Internet in 1999 - it'll transform the world in 20 years but it’s super unclear who will succeed. Nvidia is making >120% of the profits in AI, is currently the clear leader and the only path to monetisation’, then, hilariously, ‘AI is quite good at the woke stuff. If you’re clever and funny as a person there's no risk that AI will replace you!’

Thiel closed with a cracker of a line: ‘extreme optimism and extreme pessimism are really bad attitudes. They’re both excuses for laziness. I believe in human agency.’

JD Vance, Vice Presidential candidate and Trump’s running mate, echoed many of Thiel’s concerns about China. He argued that America needs to become more self-reliant by manufacturing more goods domestically and reducing its dependence on foreign countries. Vance believes that America is ‘massively overregulated’ and that cutting red tape and deregulating key sectors must be done to clear a path for growth in the U.S. economy.

Vance didn’t hold back when discussing Lina Kahn, the chair of the Federal Trade Commission, who has been blocking tech mergers and acquisitions in an effort to curb the power of Big Tech. While Vance acknowledged that Big Tech poses a threat to free speech, he argued that Kahn’s hardline stance on M&A has gone too far. ‘We need exits,’ Vance said, echoing the zeitgeist of the event.

The Venture Capital Crunch

Thomas Laffont, co-founder of Coatue, one of the world’s largest venture capital funds, delivered a sobering overview of the VC world at the end of the Summit. Laffont painted a bleak picture of the venture capital ecosystem, where exits have stalled with the IPO market largely closed, and regulatory overreach stopping M&A in its tracks.

‘Venture capital will remain in deep trouble until there's a wave of exits,’ Laffont warned. Coatue’s research shows that the number of unicorns - private companies valued at over $1 billion - has now surpassed the number of public companies, but many of these startups may never see a public listing.

Today we are witnessing the lowest level of employee growth across the tech sector in a decade. 63% of capital raises are down rounds and 40% are bridge rounds.

Public market performance looks great but if you look a level below NVidia, Alphabet, Apple etc. the performance isn’t so strong. The index may be up 120% since 2019 but unprofitable tech companies are down by 61% and SaaS is down 51%. The IPOs since 2020 we have destroyed $225bn of value offset by $84bn increases in the value of the major tech stocks.

Since 2022 we have had fewer IPOs than since the GFC and the tech wreck - there were more IPOs straight after the GFC than there are now.

Laffont was clearly softening up his audience. ‘Great publicly listed tech companies don’t always trade on ritzy multiples. Private tech CEOs need to understand that. But without a return to a healthy IPO market, and without M&A, the industry will face an existential crisis’.

Despite the current challenges, Laffont remains optimistic about technology's role as the greatest change agent in business. He encouraged tech founders to take their companies public, arguing that the public markets serve as a great disinfectant. "We must take companies to IPO," he insisted.

Sound Bites

But wait, there’s more!  Other speakers deserve their own article. For now, here are some sound bites:

Travis Kalanick, founder of Uber now CEO at Cloud Kitchens. CK has built kitchens in 30 countries, with its software and robots preparing food with little human intervention for hundreds of thousands of restaurants. It sees 18% of all food home deliveries in the USA so knows where the demand is.  Travis told the story of his ejection from Uber with some emotion but he’s back - don’t write this man off!

Ingo Uytdehaage, Co-CEO at Adyen, the global payments company of Dutch origin. Adyen has had one billion humans on its platform, processed one trillion Euros in payments last year and delivered a 46% EBITDA margin on 24% YOY revenue growth. All with a typically Dutch humility. The Besties quite rightly proclaimed Adyen ‘one of the most successful tech companies of all time.’

Michael Ovitz, the driving force behind Creative Artists Agency, the world’s most successful talent management agent, has been deeply involved in the tech sector for decades. You get the sense that the rise of the tech titans to celebrity status comes straight from his playbook. Make no mistake, this man understands the technology industry.

Megyn Kelly, the TV presented and journalist who set up her own show when she left Fox, displayed her razor-sharp wit and interviewing skills, taking the Besties to pieces.

Bari Weiss, who left the New York Times where she was a journalist and editor to set up The Free Press, spoke of her perspective that the NYT operates within an environment of censorship and has a lack of intellectual diversity.

Researcher Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte, a person of undoubted substance who is developing therapies to reverse human ageing, sadly delivered the most lacklustre speech of the Summit. Ironically, his breakthroughs are among the most profound.

Professor Jeffrey Sachs added a dose of reality with his warning that nuclear war has never been closer.

The Near Future of Everything

I went to the All-In Summit to get a fix of big-picture thinking, and it didn’t disappoint. The confluence of so many new technologies on the cusp of changing our daily lives - all at the same time - provided genuine shock value.

Amid the excitement there was no shortage of acknowledgment that we face a bumpy road ahead. Social division and angst, unsustainable debt burdens coupled with profligate spending, geopolitical tensions, Big Government and venture capital’s challenges all loom large over this bright future.

Weighing all of that up - I hopped on a plane heading Down Under with a renewed sense of why we do what we do, and a sense of wonder for what can be.

Roger Sharp, September 2024

Note (1) paraphrased