Comments
Transcript
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TCI would like to have RV ask all guests what their daily, weekly, and monthly reading/listening/watching regimen is to inform their view of markets, world, tech.
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NWThis interview is brilliant. Both are fantastic!!!
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MOAt what point will Real Vision pull our memberships at the current rates? This interview makes has me thinking my membership rate is crushed on the RSI Monthly at like 4. Thanks for overdelivering, consistenly, guys and Justine. A real pleasure to hit play.
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CMWhat a fascinating conversation - from start to finish.
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AAWow! Amazing. I can listen to Mike and Josh talk for hours and never stop learning. This is like getting multiple masters at the same time. This is why I subscribed to RV. Thanks Mike!
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raneed a 0.75x speed option for this
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SAAnother brilliant Mike Green interview. As others have noted way to short. I especially found Mike's comments on wages interesting. A sample size of one, but I'm over 60, in IT and in demand right now and it's not worth the bother to fight for a "good" raise.
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JGZuck sucks!
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FDVery exciting to hear about new developments in technology and how creative the human mind can be, but I often wonder if embedded in this is our future demise as laws of physics informs us the the more a system evolves towards complexity, the more it becomes unstable. Maybe simplification is underrated.
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AKExtremely interesting, I think the passive indexation bust as crazy as it may sound will be fiats last grande stance. I think Mike indirectly touches on this when he says "there is no law of the universe that means the active manager gets to bid again" The end stage wont be that markets merely become a function of liquidity as passive has taken over, the end stage will just be hyperbitcoinization.
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ZHGreat interview as always with these 2. Bloomberg has no chance to win, he is the absolute worst candidate Democrats could pick, he’s exactly what’s wrong with this world; old rich white guy telling others what to do. No Bernie fan, but I think he will win now because people are so sick of the corrupt rich white culture and people want to something so far removed from that he is it. Just how Trump won in 16; now a market crash will pull more average votes away from Trump. I’m no MMT fan but this Central Bank Repo bullshit is just socialism for the rich, let’s do something different. Burn it all down and start again!
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TCWould like to hear more skeptics and timelines of full level 5 autonomous cars (car is 100% driven by computer on any public roads with no safety driver). IMO that tech has been over hyped in the short term. A lot average Joe's on the street who read a few web articles here and there thought by 2019 cars would be driving themselves all around NYC. When not even one single truly autonomous vehicle is even close to commercial operation on city streets from what I gather. To me this is much more complicated then some have been led to believe.
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KMJosh Wolf claim that Trump is not a billionaire is so dumb. A simple google search will bring up his net worth, Trump has a net worth of 3 billion. Why would Josh tell these dump lies? And what does he gain by this. Maybe Josh feels bad cause Trump is richer than he is ??? LOL
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GTMy guess for the famous investor that said he was meant to trade in the early 2000's, and doesn't understand how things trade today, is Druckenmiller - he said something similar in a RV interview with Kirl last summer:)
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SWStan Druckenmiller
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rkTesla is BS?? Really??
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DRMG mentions a paper by Mark 'Koriama' (?) about impactful industrial revolution era innovations. I've Googled but can't find it. Anyone had better luck?
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BAParaphrasing Mike Green: Global system is set up on a collateral basis. If the collateral contracts with reducing valuations, the debt becomes increasingly due. Dollar comes under demand; Stronger Dollar.
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CVBrilliant conversation. Loved every bit of it.
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FBBring these guys back soon. Josh is frankly one of the best interviewers that RealVision has. He has the talent as an interviewer and extraordinary knowledge of the subject matter to ask fascinating questions and engages in interesting conversation. My only criticism is there were too many topics covered in this interview. Would have loved to join these guys for drinks after!
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RAWow, double wow! One of the very best interviews to date (I’ve seen almost all of them)! This one had even more “breadth” than their Passive investing one which was excellent as well. Very, very impressive interview and, IMO, would draw some new subscribers in if it were to be released to a broad audience in say 2-3 months. A couple of interviews like this one and I feel like my subscription just paid for itself and I’m playing with “house $” going forward!
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JEI wish I could share the breathless optimism he has for this dystopian future.
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HKI always learn so much from listening to both Mike and Josh. Thank you RV!
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PCIt's truly incredible how good an interviewer and teacher Mike Green is. I have learnt more from him than both my STEM degrees combined...
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NvI feel confident "There is NO WAY Zuckerberg will be a good person in future" Pity Reardon fell for it
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NIThe Mike Green interviews are excellent. Thanks RV.
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HKGreat interview! One minor comment ... I may sound like a Sorosesque conspiracy theorist, but NOT comfortable with giving Facebook access to technology that imputes decisions from aggregation of nerve activity.
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AMGreat Interview! On a side note: RV, if possible please find a way to remove the commercials at the end of the videos, for the people that have already seen them (many, many times). I think it's great that you're advertising your services, but I think it's counterproductive to make people re-watch the same commercials over and over again, I'm not an expert but I'm sure you can use cookies or something similar to track which commercials people have already. Thanks for all the great content.
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PANew subscriber here for few months. This is awesome content RV is producing and Mike Green was excellent as usual in interviewing. First time seeing Josh interview and was really impressed. A Question: Mike G mentioned "Michael Mobizen" who has written books etc and have opinions on today's market structure. Tried to google him and twitter him but no luck . Any pointers ?
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JKThis is unbelievable stuff, not sure about you guys, but I was extremely impressed by this interview. My extended family and also myself are in the medical space professionally and wasn't really aware of a lot of this. Keep these coming!
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DMthis could have been hours longer - no need to cut such great content short
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JLYou don't need to do genetic research or a drug to combat type 2 diabetes/obesity. You can already reverse it with a low carb/ketogenic diet, we need to change the dietary guidelines. https://www.virtahealth.com/
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KTJust give these two their own topic category! It's less like an interview and more like the most information-dense yet relaxed and enjoyable conversation between old friends.
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CBExcellent video. These two guys deliver 1+1=5. Josh articulated a framework (impossibility and inevitability) that makes me look at disruptive investments in a new way.
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DKLiterally mutants? Why can't I watch this further....extremes in a normal distribution bell curve are still normal. Sherpa's with superhuman ability? Transplant human infants from middle class US suburbs to the parts of Tibet where walking mountain trails >everyday< is normal, and then train them to be Sherpa's. Sherpa's aren't mutants either. Technological innovations are always a double edged sword, GHO humans will be no different.
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NDTalk of mapping genes of indigenous people to tackle obesity and in the same interview advocating robots to automate our lives. The irony!
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aDAlways amazing these 2 guys! If they ever decide to sell tickets for the live show, count me in!
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GWthat was superb, no need for time constraints on RV I could listen for hours
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BRToo short - these are two guys that I could watch for 90 min
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TMGreat interview.
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ARPressed the Like button 5 times.
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JLYou don't need to do genetic research to combat type 2 diabetes. You can already reverse it with a low carb/ketogenic diet.
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NSA little bit too much faith in the 1% and a little too little appreciation of just how amazing 'ordinary' people are (except when they marry their cousins in which case he'll study them to make money 35:20). Kinda condescending. I'm used to hearing about "wage pressure" (what the rest of us call a raise) but supporting Bloomberg? The guy who won't let his news outlet write anything negative about China for fear of losing terminal contracts. He thinks that guy is the one who "can't be bought"... Interesting. And mark zuck saving us from alzeihmers...I guess it would be fitting considering zuck will remember ever last detail of your life long after you've forgotten them.
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LCMG for Prez! Let’s do this!!!
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AWWOW! I could watch these two speak to each other for hours...
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NRExcellent interview and fascinating discussion
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IDMore of this in my head face please. Thanks in advance.
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STThis guy is trapped in his mind which means he's not connected to reality.
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JHFantastic interview all around. Mike’s comment towards the end, “No, I’m interviewing you!” made me chuckle. Brilliant, self-effacing and gentlemanly. Please get these guys back soon!
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GFAt about 4:10 Mike says, "Nobody cares what I have to say." WRONG!! Please, PLEASE get these two on camera again much sooner than "a year". And for a lot longer than an hour. You would probably want to break it up into a series of 1-hour or so episodes, but we need to hear their perspectives and insights more often and at greater depth.
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SSFabulous intelligent interview by very well spoken depth of knowledge skin in the game gentlemen. Didn't really care for the Bloomberg plug and regarding the "looking up to the President" by the way he behaves comments. The rear view mirror is dark and deep on that shite. This whole theme of tech innovation, massive change dynamics, as generated by our super smart guests, will almost guarantee future leaders, statesmen and officials will have no clue how to act, how and what decisions to make and will become the puppets of those who do. Mark Zuckerberg was asked, during the Senate investigations, if Facebook was like what Twitter does? Really---WTH? The future leaders better be the smartest guys in the room, or forget it. Politics is about compromise and making deals and that's what Trump is good at. He finds the smartest guys or "You're Fired". The food for thought of this interview and banter back and forth, was first class!
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KBUsually I just want to hear the guest speak and not hear the questions; or I find the interviewer highly distracting and annoying. This interview was quite the exception. I found the interaction to be highly interesting and engaging. The respect each has for the other despite some differences in opinion (or thesis) is inspiring. Well done.
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MIYou can’t have these two talking for 45 minutes. Just not enough. Need at least a two hour segment. Now we have to wait for a year to hear them speak.
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JSJosh are there publication(s) where we can keep learning about these type of innovation enterprises and/or projects? Not in particular your portfolio, but emerging technologies and trends. In many ways they are histories of hope (ex-FB acquisitions). Thank you both.
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SSWhat is the limiting factor here? Why stop these two from talking? Always leave them wanting more? Well, it worked. This is the content I am here for but I want more of it. Thank you Mike, Josh and RV!
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SSA pill to fix obesity epidemic. Ok...
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DBWay too short!
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BKInconceivably good! Bravo to Mike, Josh, and the team. This one interview worth the price of annual RVTV subscription.
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DSConcerning the discussion of managers showing a 0-10% reduction in liquidation versus a much larger value before in past market crashes, this may be behavior. Many of the current managers have not seen first hand a market in a liquidity crisis. They are more use to 10% declines, except for the Christmas Eve decline which quickly recovered after the Fed changed course. The Fed cannot always have the market's back. DLS
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RGPlease do not ever put a time restriction on a conversation between these two guys. Just let these guys talk until they're too exhausted to say another word. It would be worth multiples more than the cost of the subscription!
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AM#underlyingdynamicsquad
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WBFFS Mike, go another 30 min! You have to catch a flight or something? That ended like one of my middle school papers... Abruptly and incomplete.
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RMWow, so so good! This is really why I signed up to RV many years ago - truly enlightening conversations in a convivial atmosphere that you just don't want to stop. Please have them on again in 6 months to update and delight again (and increase to maybe 2 hours in length!).
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SSMike Green is the best interviewer on Real Visions, hands down. These two have such great chemistry that only best friends can have. A real privilege to listen to.
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JAHoly cow! Didn’t know it was possible to disagree on the state of current politics without bullets flying! Kudos to both of you. Great conversation. Mind. Blown.
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NRSlick. I wonder what Taleb would say to this level of hubris relative to technology and human capacity. People with access to cheap capital and good intentions. A bit frightening, frankly.
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TBThis needs to happen more than once a year!
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JWGreat conversation. So many topics that would benefit from further discussion. One of the things I was interested in is the Machine Learning aspects of the new developments that Josh discussed in the areas of autonomous driving, neuro-technology. He seems to be involved in some cutting-edge companies and it would be great if we can do a deep dive into these aspects of his business. Mike indicated he is starting to get involved in this as well. Much to talk about for sure. Thanks to both for the fascinating conversation.
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DPCan we tokenise these guys already so I can buy a little piece of each of them? I think I'd go about 60:40 Mike:Josh
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DNWhen I saw this on the docket for the week, I instantly knew this was gonna be good
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PJBrilliant, but far too short, next interview Josh interviews Mike? Soon?
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NHJust phenomenal! Thank you
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DFBest of the best, thanks RV, please Mike green update on china soon,
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ASThis brilliant discussion should be available to everyone asap i.e. beyond a paywall!
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DSJust excellent. There are so many nuggets that passed by so quickly I will need to listen several times. The transcript will be very helpful. Vast quantities of money chasing fewer and fewer stocks passively will run its course. I hope I live long enough to see the paradigm shift and that some of our hedges worked. DLS
MIKE GREEN: The market is no longer the market as people think about it. There are exploitable phenomenon, but it requires a complete rethinking of how you approach the problems.
JOSH WOLFE: The skill level is rising, and so the variation between investors is increasingly attributed to luck. Then, like you say, the undulating landscape changes and suddenly the game that you thought you were playing, you're no longer playing. Something like 95% of companies that are now reporting non-GAAP earnings, they're making up funny metrics. Now, we saw this in WeWork on the private side when you had community adjusted EBITDA, Tesla is like ground zero of like ridiculous terms like, what are delivery sales? What does that actually mean? There's a lot of companies that are just using funny language because in a bull market, people are less scrutinizing and so I think that's really a ripe situation where you have lots of non-GAAP accounting terms that are signifiers of risk.
ED HARRISON: Hi, Ed Harrison here for Real Vision. Now, in today's interview, we have two Real Vision favorites. We're going to have Mike Green interviewing Josh Wolfe. They're going to be talking about elevated valuations in the private markets, but they're also going to be talking about public markets as well. With the liquidity risk that comes alongside private equity and passive indexation to wide ranging conversation that addresses politics, the labor markets, Tesla, and what they call the first mover disadvantage, it all makes for a fascinating conversation that you won't want to miss. Enjoy.
MIKE GREEN: Well, you can tell by the smile on my face, I'm happy to be here. I'm sitting down with one of my best friends, Josh Wolfe, so excited to be back here in New York and chatting with you. Welcome back to Real Vision.
JOSH WOLFE: Symmetrical happiness. Always thrilled to be with you.
MIKE GREEN: Every time you come on the show, we get to talk about a new success. Last time, we talked about the magic. You were so excited about CTRL-labs, and pushed you on the idea that maybe you were falling in love with something and where's my sales commission?
JOSH WOLFE: Man, we got to do these interviews more often. It's been a streak of good luck.
MIKE GREEN: With CTRL-labs, now, you sold it to Facebook. Remind people what CTRL-labs is, remind me why you're begrudging in the sale. What do you think Facebook wants to do with something like this?
JOSH WOLFE: The thesis behind CTRL-labs which led to three nights of sleepless nights in pursuit of this entrepreneur, Thomas Reardon and Patrick Kaifosh, his co-founder, was premised with this intercepting phenomenon that I call these two arrows, one of inevitability, and one of the perception of the impossibility. Inevitability is this directional arrow of progress where it doesn't necessarily tell you who the entrepreneur is or what the company is but there's this inevitable high probability that this is the way that technology is trending. The impossibility is when everybody else in the field, peer VCs, just don't see it. They think, oh, that'll never work. It's impossible. Impossibility ends up dictating low prices or less competition and inevitability raises our confidence and conviction.
In this case, the arrow of progress, the inevitable, was the idea that something we call the half-life of technology intimacy. This buzzword that we coined but basically 50 years ago, you had a giant ENIAC computer, you physically went up and pulled some plugs and buttons. First half-life, 25 years ago, you have a personal computer and you're tickling the keys, you're touching the monitor, you're flipping the power switch on the back. 12 and a quarter years ago, the next half-life, you have a laptop, physically touching your thighs, becoming a little bit more intimate with you, you trade the mouse for a trackpad.
Six and a quarter years ago, now you've got your phone cradled in your hand. First thing you touch in the morning, last thing you touch tonight, separated from your body only by a thin film of fabric. Three and a half years ago, your iWatch. 24 hours a day on your hand or 18 hours a day. A year and a half ago, AirPods with a computer inside for voice recognition.
That directional arrow of progress, the inevitability was computability was becoming more and more intimate and close to you. We shared that thesis with a lot of people and then we ended up meeting this researcher at one of our other companies, Charles Zucker, who's a PhD neuroscientist. He said you got to meet this guy, Reardon. Reardon was the inventor of this technology that we use called Internet Explorer when he was at Microsoft as a young guy.
He was one of 17 kids, 10 biological, seven adopted. Just insane family situation. Bill Gates taps him, he goes and works at Microsoft for a decade from '90 to 2000. He's also Bill's right hand guy during the monopoly DOJ trial. Then after making a lot of money and being technologically renowned and reasonably wealthy, he does what anybody would do in his shoes, he starts another company, Openwave, which ends up creating a mobile browser that we all use and then goes back to college and gets a degree in Classics in Latin.
Then spends the next near decade getting a PhD in Neuroscience, where the thesis he was working on is this myoelectric response. The idea that you could detect from the surface of your skin, the roughly 15,000 neurons, that innervate roughly 14 muscles in your hand, which is important because if I'm typing, my brain is telling my fingers to do something. If I am turning a knob or switch or a lever or doing anything, my brain is subconsciously telling my hand to move.
He figured out how you could take that signal, detect it and map it to the technological devices we use. Instead of having to type on a keyboard, instead of having to type a switch, instead of having to turn a thermostat, I could effectively either do that motion in free space, or, and this was the crazy part, think about making that motion and I can control the devices.
MIKE GREEN: We talked about this last time. You highlighted that even if we go back and look at the Tom Cruise film, Minority Report, where he has this dynamic and he's moving this, he's wearing gloves, he's making the gestures, et cetera, what Thomas Rutan figured out was that that subconscious thought was actually sending a signal that they are then restricting and so the process of learning how to type on Mavis Beacon is actually just your brain sending those signals to your fingers, your fingers then figuring out how to do it, and you're training that interface back and forth. CTRL-labs basically shortcuts that process.
JOSH WOLFE: In fact, they had a maddening demo, which we may have talked about, where you try to hit the button before the device knows that you intend to hit the button and you can't do it.
MIKE GREEN: That's amazing.
JOSH WOLFE: It can detect your intention to fire your muscle and move it before you actually move it, which makes that, because if you have 1000 neurons that are activating a single muscle, if there's 100 of them, and if you were to do this now and you think about just moving a finger, you get the sensation, this feeling of that finger, and it can detect that. I became obsessed with the entrepreneur, I lost sleep in pursuit of the deal for three nights. My wife, when she finally met Reardon was like you, you're responsible for this household duress.
It was an amazing experience, but it was too short. It was too short. It was about a year and a half, almost two years and Facebook made an entry on the company, which we rejected. Zuckerberg came back and made a more persuasive entry. These founders, some of whom, unlike Reardon, had never made money before. It was very compelling, the amount of capital that Facebook was going to invest into the company on an ongoing basis, as well as the liquidity that people were going to get now.
I wish we would have held it longer. I truly think this would have been a $10 billion business instead of something a little under a billion dollars, but it was a great outcome for our investors and a thrill to be part of what I think is going to be a historic technology that we will all be using.
MIKE GREEN: Now, I want to come back to this but this also brings up another topic that you and I've discussed before, which is basically the concentration of capability inside companies. What we have very clearly seen are companies like Google and Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, have become very acquisitive. They have an extraordinarily low cost of capital and have been able to buy these. Do you think for Thomas Reardon as he thinks about going inside Facebook, that that creates a limitation or that that changes the trajectory of the technology versus its original vision?
JOSH WOLFE: I'll give you two answers because I tried the no answer. I tried the moral suasion. I tried-- and this was at a time when Zuck was in front of Congress being lambasted as a poster child of technological excess and election meddling. I'm trying to make the case, my God, you are going to take a technology that can capture your neural intention and give it to Facebook? You're going to spend the next two years in front of Congressional committees yourself. I tried emotional suasion with my kids, saying don't sell, sending videos to the board. We don't trust Facebook. I tried financial suasion to do a secondary in capitalized business.
In the end, I think Reardon actually had a very rational view of this. Again, he worked for Bill