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…things you go down the list of what constitutes a bubble and you can check some things like massive debt, massive debt-fueled investment just like people were building— What else is on that checklist? Valuations, and bad companies trading at crazy valuations. I would tell you, NVIDIA is… We can have a debate about what the earnings are going to be in a few years, but it's not expensive. NVIDIA trades at 20-something times multiple. That's I think within reason and I don't think there's anything I see in the public markets which is bubble-like from a valuation standpoint. I think if you look back in history, 70% of the time that you have this major breakthrough technology, there is a stock market bubble. And maybe what you're seeing right now in some of these retail stocks like where Opendoor goes from one to 10. Maybe that is things starting to bubble, but we haven't seen large cap… I don't think the large cap AI stocks are trading at crazy valuations at all, so we're not seeing that yet. So maybe it's 1997, 1996 and by the time that we're in the equivalent of 1999 and NVIDIA will be three times higher and it's possible. Someone said to me recently as well that for a proper crisis you also need things that people thought were safe to not turn out to be safe. In 2000 when the NASDAQ went down 85%, it's like, well that's a real bummer but we did know that we were buying these highly gassed tech stocks, whereas it's when the debt actually turns out to not be safe. The debt turns out to be equity. Exactly, yeah. That's when you get real issues. It's very different from 1999, though. There were horrible companies which had no real economic prospects trading crazy valuations. I'm just not seeing that in the public markets now. Well I am, just not in AI. You're a huge fan of SpaceX and a big holder. Why are you so excited about this? Everyone understands Elon is an amazing inventor and amazing entrepreneur. I think people underestimate how good of a business person he is. It's like okay, yes, does he invent great things? He does, but he is ruthless about bringing down costs to a point where his business becomes a natural monopoly because it is a low-cost provider. With SpaceX, the whole problem with space in general, doing anything in space, historically was that it was very expensive to launch anything into space. Because one, the rocket blew up and therefore it better be really high value if you're going to send it up[ there because it's like it if you're going to take a plane from New York to LA and every time you do it, the 747 blows up the plane ticket's going to be really expensive. You better really want to go to LA, right? So the first thing is the idea of bringing down the cost dramatically by making things reusable. He was five to 10 years ahead of everybody else. expensive. You better really want to go to LA, right? So the first thing is the idea of bringing down the cost dramatically by making things reusable. He was five to 10 years ahead of everybody else. I totally agree on the underappreciated aspect of Elon being business savvy. Let's not forget Tesla invented a new mode of selling cars directly to the consumer. They had to get the laws changed in certain states because the current dealership system was enshrined. Similarly with SpaceX, for what they do, it's actually a very capital-efficient business and they've run it—they've built it with profits rather than venture funding or they've built it with revenues, customer revenues rather than venture funding. And so I think that's really underappreciated. I think he's a better business person than he is an inventor. He's amazing at both, but people don't understand. He just naturally understands—just get the cost down, get the cost down, get the cost down, and that's very hard to compete against. Do you want another? Sure, I'll have another. Great. You keep going there. They say Stripe is actually controlled by an Irish mafia behind the scenes… Did you actually, I mean it's quite interesting. I didn't realize until you said it that D1 is mostly privates now by size. Yes, by size. Did you expect that to happen when you started? No, I did not. I did not expect that to happen. It's actually just more a function of how things played out than a deliberate strategy for us to grow the private business at the expense of the public business. Our public business went through some big ups and downs and I think our public business we are, and look, there is a limit to how much we can manage on the public side. We announced a few weeks ago that at the end of this year we're going to be closing the hedge fund. We may replace redemptions, but the most important thing is, in our business returns are negatively correlated with size. And especially on the short side. Because you just own too much of a company to—like you move the stock when you try to trade it and stuff? It's not so much on the long side, it's on the short side. You turn things over and it's like if I'm $30 billion, you can't really short $5 billion companies— Could you not grow AUM and be more long exposure? Probably what you'd want to do is, and what we may do in the future, is what other funds have done is you have your hedge fund which does long-short, and then you have a separate fund which is just long-only and that can scale quite a lot. We tend to hold them longer and you can buy very large cap companies. So privates. What was your first private position for D1? a separate fund which is just long-only and that can scale quite a lot. We tend to hold them longer and you can buy very large cap companies. So privates. What was your first private position for D1? That's a good question. I think our first private position at launch was, I rolled a stake… I had taken a stake starting in 2010 in a company called Lineage, which is a cold storage warehouse company that I rolled off of my personal balance sheet into the fund. And then we made subsequent investments and then in the first couple years we did a variety of different things. Some, I think, worked out not as well. JUUL was like a—I'm not quite sure if that was, it was good and bad at times. I think it's going to be good now. And then we did Ramp really early. That was good. John was nice enough to allow us to invest in Stripe. How did you underwrite Stripe? Because again, we weren't profitable at the time and, I don’t know, what does the process look like for something like that? I actually started out my career as a financial service analyst so I had looked at all the card networks, all the processors. It was pretty clear to me that the competitive set in merchant processing was very mediocre at best and that their technology was not conducive to most internet companies. Nor did they have the tech stack that would allow them to adjust to what was happening in terms of e-commerce. And look, at the end of the day, I think that there's going to be one, maybe two companies that actually can provide the technology for companies to enable e-commerce, or any online transactions, and you guys seemed pretty smart. We do a lot of work on management teams. Huge market, great management team, weak competitive set is a perfect recipe for making a lot of money. So you've got Ramp, Stripe, SpaceX and maybe one day, of course, all these companies go public, but it would seem as if there's a lot of later-stage private companies now. Why do you think that's happening and where do you think that's going to go in a couple of years? Are public markets just going to be the laggards and all the new hot stuff will be private? Or will it rebalance one day? I mean if I ran a private company like Stripe, I wouldn't go public. I think the public markets— It's kind of ironic because you're a public markets investor. Yeah, I think the public markets are kind of problematic at this point. Let's just take Stripe, for example, and I won't speak for John, but basically Stripe grows earnings cash flow at some amount. Value compounds and they do tender offers and the tender offers are relatively in line with the value creation and therefore the people who are working at the company, and they're creating that value, get paid for that value because the stock price goes up in line with value creation. Now what we see in public markets is you take your company public and depending on what the retail crowd is doing that day, the stock may trade at some insane value and most people are high-fiving, “This is amazing! Our stock is trading two X where it should be. This is great, we're all rich.” The problem with that is that— It goes both ways.…

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