Betting Early on Zoom, Canva, and Crypto: Inside the Playbook of Visionary Solo VC Bill Tai

Bill Tai: So all of this hype, all of this investment, all the hundreds of billions of dollars going into these AI data centers, you may not be able to turn 'em on. You really only have to do three things, right? You have to solve a really big problem and make it low friction. Make your solution low friction. Build it to be highly replicable and easily scalable.

Entrepreneurs. I'd say the common element is that you have to become a learning machine, and you have to be incredibly self-reliant, and you have to have a lot of grit. If we don't fix the medical payment system here, this country will go bankrupt and, and Bitcoin's gonna go to 10 million if that happens.

Sriram Viswanathan: Hi everyone. This is the Tech Surge Deep Tech podcast presented by Celesta Capital. Each episode, we spotlight issues and voices at the intersection of emerging technologies, company building and venture investment. I am. Three Ram with one-on founding managing partner at Celesta Capital. If you enjoy tech Search, now is a perfect time to hit the like and subscribe button.

And while you're at it, you can leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform. If you're just discovering us, visit tech search podcast.com to sign up for our newsletter and check out the archive of some very interesting past episodes. Today we have a very special guest, the legendary technologist and investor, bill Ty, who's been a VC and really investing the last couple of decades his own money, but has been in other famous Silicon Valley venture firms in his career and his early investments.

Uh, personal investments read like the Tech Hall of Fame that anyone would, uh, would die to be part of. And that is, uh, you know, you're the first backer of Zoom. I. You are the first or early investor in Canva.

Bill Tai: Put that team together. Yeah. You put

Sriram Viswanathan: the whole team, Melanie Perkins and the whole team together.

And you are an investor in tweet deck even before Twitter became what it became. And Twitter acquired tweet deck, uh, Cotopaxi and Dapper Labs and you know, tons of other things that you've done. You are a big pioneer in also crypto. In fact, I just, you know, pinch myself when you tell me what your enterprise on Bitcoin is, which we can talk about.

You're the chairman of Hut eight Mining, which is one of the largest, uh, crypto mining company in the us. And I also wanna actually, you know, uh, go back in time and talk about your early days as a technologist when you originally started at LSI logic and in fact you have this, uh, incredible badge. Which I wanna spend some time on, and that is employee number one, badge at TSMC, uh, which is, you know, pretty stunning given what TSMC is today.

And you worked at TSMC and of course before that you were at Alex Brown as a, as an analyst. And, uh, so really, truly just a remarkable wealth of experiences and ringside view of, uh, so many great innovations. And you've been part of and helping create. So, bill, it's truly a pleasure, an honor to, uh, to talk to you.

And, you know, I consider you as a dear friend and, uh, I, I'm looking forward to this conversation.

Bill Tai: Thank you. Honored to be here. It's, uh, it's always wonderful to interact with you and, uh, amazing to see the success of your podcast as well as your venture firm and everything else you've done.

Sriram Viswanathan: Well, it's all about the guests.

Yes. So this one I think hopefully will push our podcast further up. So we'll see.

Bill Tai: We're gonna make it fun.

Sriram Viswanathan: Alright. Okay. So tell us about your, your day-to-day life right now. You have so many projects and the one thing that I have not talked about, which I know is your passion is kiting. Kiteboarding Yes.

Of kite boarding. So, so tell us what your day looks like and what do you, what do you enjoy doing?

Bill Tai: Well, um, you know, I guess I'm a, I'm a, I'm a kind of a health nut. Um, early to bed, early to rise. I'm usually up with the sun, you know, so somewhere between five and five 30 or six, I'm usually up, uh, um, I'll flip on CNBC or Bloomberg.

And I, you know, I always like to be there at the market open because I've got positions in, you know, variety of things and I like to see kind of what's happening every day. Uh, I work out like a fiend and, um, you know, some people know that I do like literally hundreds of situps and pushups and pull-ups every day and run five miles.

And then, uh, you know, in interspersed with the workout, I'll basically clear out a bunch of email, answer a bunch of WhatsApp things, and then I'll go for a five mile run. And on that run I set my priorities for the day, and I generally try to narrow it down to getting three things done. That, uh, are important that, uh, will clear out, you know, there, there are always, there are hundreds of things in everybody's, you know, kind of forward view and I like to distill it down to just, you know, three things, get 'em done and it eliminates all the forward, you know, other stuff that has to get done out of the way.

Get it out of the way.

Sriram Viswanathan: Where does kiting fit in, in a day? Oh, uh, it depends

Bill Tai: on the season, so, so if it's, uh, summer when it's, you know, it's windy in the Bay Area from uh, kind of, you know, may through September, then in the afternoons, um, probably on the water, maybe twice a week. Um, you know, if I'm around, I do get a chance to travel quite a bit.

Um, this month in May, I'm gonna be on Maui. In June, I'll be kiting, Perro, Greece. In July, I'll be in Morocco, September, probably Bali, and then December Perth, Australia.

Sriram Viswanathan: Alright, well this is important because this is one of the things that you do, uh, which is, uh. A great magnet for young people who are also, as you said, you know, health fis and, you know, really work out, you know, intensely.

But they also happen to, you know, form a little community that you bring together. I know you had this, uh, community come together as Ma Tai Global and yes, that was a great, uh, fishing ground for great, innovative ideas.

Bill Tai: Unbelievable collaboration. Yeah. Talk about that. Uh, I had an annual trip on Maui, uh, in May every year with Ken Goldman, um, a famous tech exec.

And, uh, that trip somehow just grew and grew. I think there was a magic, uh, moment somewhere between 2003 and 2006, and I don't remember when it was, uh, Sergey, Brennan, Larry Page were taking lessons, kite boarding in the bay from a friend of mine and I think there was a picture in the San Francisco Chronicle.

And all of a sudden every young tech entrepreneur wanted to learn how Kite and I think, uh, I was already, uh, well known in that, you know, kind of that little in the community subculture. Yeah. And so they started coming to me. So a bunch of, which year was this? Uh, I think that was around 2006 and a bunch of, uh, the early Googlers started showing up on Maui with me, and then employee 13 of Facebook that brought that crowd.

And then we seeded Twitter and that some of those people came and we just ended up with this wonderful community of tech entrepreneurs from all major companies in the Bay Area. That ultimately became a nonprofit, uh, and that, uh, it was originally called My Tai. It's now evolved over the years. It's become this magic community of athletes, conservationists, technologists, artists and innovators.

Act. Acti. Acti. Yeah. So the acronym is Acti and we hold functions around the world. We do snow kitting in St. Maritz in January. We were on a private island in the Philippines in February. And then, like I said earlier, we have a full schedule where people will meet around the world. Entrepreneurs from everywhere, right?

And venture capitalists and corporate people. And uh, it's kind of a hotbed for, uh, the sharing of ideas and the formation and funding of startups and the fertilizer. Upon which seed companies can plant themselves and sometimes a little funding and rain and, you know, sunshine comes down and they turn into companies.

Sriram Viswanathan: It's funny because I remember you and I talking about it during, uh, the time that you were at, uh, C rv. Yeah. I think when I think I said to you, oh, you're, you're, you're the vc that kites. And you said, no, no, no. I'm the ER that invests. Yeah. So that changed for you at some point. Well, my

Bill Tai: handle is kite vc, you know?

I know. So, yeah. 'cause it, uh, it kind of fits the lifestyle.

Sriram Viswanathan: Well, it's, it's metaphorically, I think it's also interesting because you're, you're catching the wave. Um, you know, symbolically, I think it's really what you're trying to do in these communities when you are actually bringing these young entrepreneurs and or technologies who have passion and some intensity about them, and you're able to sort of, you know, test them on.

What they're really made of, not just about the technology chops that they have, but you know, the, the grit that they have. Sure. Is, is that part of the calculus for you? Oh,

Bill Tai: absolutely it is. You know, so essentially when you're riding the gear and there's many styles of gear and lots of shapes and sizes that affect your ride, wind conditions are highly variable.

The kite design and dimensions change everything. So you're essentially processing a giant multivariate equation all the time, and you are effectively failing 99% of the time, in course correcting at every moment. And I think what happened is that the. Type of person that becomes an entrepreneur thrives in that environment.

They do not like static, boring, day after day doing the same things. Yeah. So they're drawn to that kind of a thing. You know, great entrepreneurs are not people that on a vacation can sit and lay in the sun on a beach. They have to be doing something. So when you capture them at the right, you know, kind of age range, uh, this sport, it gives 'em something that they're kind of used to in terms of stress level, but it's a fun stress and it unlocks them and it gives them meditative moments at the, at the same time.

Bill Tai: And I think, you know, entrepreneurs, I'd say the common element is that you have to become a learning machine and you have to be incredibly self-reliant and you have to have a lot of grit. 'cause like I said, you're basically in a controlled failure sequence.

Bill Tai: A hundred percent of the time, and you're going through all of these baby steps, all these foundational things, just grinding through to get to the point where you can kind of cruise across the water and you keep splatting and splatting and splatting every day in the hopes that there's that magic moment where you lock and load and you power up and you fly.

Yeah. And you land.

Bill Tai: So you're weightless that point. Yeah. And you know, starts are the same thing. You know, you're basically grinding it out every day for long, long periods of time. On on the brink of death and failure often.

Yeah.

Bill Tai: Hoping for that magic moment where it all comes together. And even if you've got that magic moment under your belt and behind you, you're just gonna go into another splat.

Yeah. So you have to want to be there. Yeah. And you have to have the desire and grit and the support system you talk about. And I think, you know, like, like startups. Yeah. You can't just read. A page of information and get out in Kiteboard. Yeah. You can't just read a page of information and start and run a company successfully.

You gotta talk to people. You've gotta build that support network and you're, you're always constantly interacting and exchanging information and pushing yourself. So I think the, uh, the underlying kind of fundamentals are, are perfect.

Sriram Viswanathan: Yeah. So I wanna take you to a very specific, uh, investment that you did, which perhaps is, you know, you can draw a lot of lessons from the experience of being a true, you know, hardcore athlete.

Like, like the way you're talking about being a cuter. You know, Eric, Juan, you know, you are the, you are the first investor Yep. In Zoom. Yep. And here's, you know, to paint the picture, here's a guy who works at Cisco and Cisco's got, you know, WebEx, I think at that time. Yes. Um, and you have Skype, you have all kinds of other video conferencing related technologies out there in the market, but you decided to back Eric, um, and which became an explosive company thanks to COVID when everybody was going virtual.

So talk to me about, you know, what was that thing that made you think this could be another great idea when you had all these incumbent big companies, you know, like Skype and others who've tried and they were all very successful at that time. What was the thing that drew you to that?

Bill Tai: Um, there was a structural change.

And so I think, uh, uh, going back to one of the topics you introduced earlier, like what is it I look for? I. Uh, it's a combination of a structural change in a big market as well as the right entrepreneur that can set the right culture and tone and with enough leadership charisma to build the team. When the cloud was starting to really get traction in kind of the 2006, 7, 8, 9, 10 period, it became apparent to me that, uh, that structural change and how, how things, how bits were.

Ingested and delivered. We're gonna change the economics and the scalability of everything. So somewhere around the 2010 to 13 period, I was funding basically cloud-based things. And uh, and you were doing

Sriram Viswanathan: it more as a individual family office investor by yourself. Yeah. Your own money.

Bill Tai: Yeah. Right. So like funding, you know, Melanie Perkins, uh, design on the cloud.

Yeah. Uh, as opposed to package software and Adobe. I would, I, I founded a, uh, co-founded as an investor, um, a Hadoop on the cloud company called Treasure Data that, uh, that ultimately SoftBank bought for $600 million down and some are out. And, uh, zoom, of course, cloud video. And so in discussions with Eric, one of the things that was mind blowing to me was, uh, we had a conversation about the architecture of something like WebEx.

And at the time inside Cisco, he had 13 teams. Software teams and I was, I was like, 13 team, why would you have 13 software teams? And he explained to me that when you went to webex.com, he had to auto detect one, are you a Mac or a pc? Along those two branches, are you on Vista? Seven 10 Windows, all that what, which operating system?

And same with the Mac of quite a variety. And then there's a third decision, which browser? Are you Firefox? Are you Chrome? Are you explorer? What are you in which version? And so there were literally 13 types of WebEx. And so when a call was lit up, somebody would have to light up a server, connect to all these things, and then the system would have to de-rate everybody to the lowest common denominator, the crappiest pc, the oldest browser, otherwise that person couldn't see.

So its scaling limitations. And so if you think about how a cloud architecture could work. As opposed to something like Skype at the time, or WebEx at the time, you had to generate, if I had a video call with five people on it, my PC had to generate five different streams and stick them in through your house at one and a half.

Bits up, uplink. Yeah. And then redistribute from there. Right. So you're jamming all this stuff in under the architecture that Eric built for Zoom, you had one hop in and then if you had 20,000 people on, not just five, you just lit up multiple servers on the inside of the cloud and then you could get to the end point.

Sriram Viswanathan: So essentially what you're really saying is that you took the concept of, you know, move the stuff over to the edge and you sort of reversed it for video conferencing and you moved all of the disparate support that you have to do onto the cloud. Yes. Which is far more efficient Yes. To do. And is, is that the primary difference between architecturally speaking between Zoom and.

WebEx and Skype.

Bill Tai: Yes. Uh, architecturally from a big picture. Yes. Yeah. And then there's Codex.

Sriram Viswanathan: Yeah, of course. So he was just, yeah, whatever. Yeah. Yeah.

Bill Tai: Eric had a team of specialists building really just great superior audio and video codex to make the system incredibly efficient. But, you know, even with a better technology now, as we've all learned, the best technology doesn't always win a lot of its marketing.

And, uh, uh, often after, after I did that seed and tried to get my venture friends interested, the amount of pushback I would get if I had to paraphrase the common answer and roll it all up into one ball, I'd be like, what the f are you thinking? Yeah. You know, you're gonna compete. With free products from Microsoft in t, in Skype and teams and from Google with Hangouts.

How do you ever win that battle? And the only other, uh, notable private company at the time was BlueJeans. Yes, of course. Which had raised tens of millions of dollars.

Sriram Viswanathan: Amazon, uh, Amazon bought it.

Bill Tai: no. Verizon.

Sriram Viswanathan: Verizon border.

Bill Tai: Sorry. I'm sorry. Yeah. Yeah. But, you know, they had raised tens, tens of millions of dollars and literally every major venture firm had had some kind of a bet somewhere in video conferencing that was a loser.

So they were all basically conflicted out and there was no money available from the standard VC crowd. Yeah. Uh, and I, that, that first launch that, uh, the company did, we managed to get Wal Walt Mossberg to cover it in the Wall Street Journal. And the, uh, it was a great article, but we had 60,000 downloads.

Only 20,000 people ever opened it, and 50%. It never came back. Mm. The numbers were awful. This was which year? Uh, 2013. 2013. Yeah. Yeah. And, uh, I had, uh, uh, I, so in founding, co-founding Treasure Data, Jerry Yang was one of our backers too. I wrote an email, Jerry Yang. Of Yahoo. Of Yahoo. Yes. Who is a ME Cloud Ventures.

Sure. And so I sent, I sent Jerry a note, Hey Jerry, you ought to look at this company, zoom. And then there was one interchange where the, uh, uh, the engagement numbers, what, you know, that the set of numbers I told you about, you know, were apparent. And he didn't even reply to me. He sent it to one of his associates, I think, to turn it down.

And that was Nick Adams. So Nick sent me a note back saying, bill, the engagement numbers are horrible. Why should we even look at this? And I wrote, I, I rarely write long emails because it's kind of a waste of, but I, I literally wrote a three page email laying out the case for it. Exactly why, and, and literally everything I wrote in that email happened.

It's, uh, I talked about the transition from cloud, uh, to a cloud and mobile, uh, the new form of endpoint that you would need to service. I talked about what the revenue flow was like, the, uh, the amount of time it would take for people to kind of slough off of WebEx and GoToMeeting and, and it it played out.

Yeah. One of the things that I push on my companies in the kind of the digital interface thing is you really only have to do three things, right? You have to solve a really big problem and make it low friction. Make your solution low friction. Build it to be highly replicable. And easily scalable. And if you do all of those three things against a big problem, you end up with a Canva or a Zoom or you know, any, any of these companies.

If you think about the big companies, that's what they've done. And so I think that approach to virality and low friction, uh, onboarding, adoption, yeah. Really worked.

Sriram Viswanathan: Yeah. Talk to me about Canva, because I know that you met Melanie in one of your trips, onboarding, onboarding trip on a boarding trip in Australia.

Yeah. And, uh, talk about that. What, what happened there?

Bill Tai: Yeah. That this is, I, I think, you know, this is one of these things which is a, a serial set of moments where truth is stranger than fiction. And any one of the things that led to the formation of Canva, if they hadn't have happened, the company may not exist.

And it's mind blowing because it's executing so well. Now, you know, canvas. Now the second most used AI application. A billion times a month, uh, to chat GPT ahead of Google and, you know, uh, anthropic and all these other things. And, uh, I met her when she was, I think 23 years old. Yeah.

Sriram Viswanathan: This is Melanie.

Bill Tai: Melanie Perkins. Perkins, uh, in Perth, in Perth, Australia. Yeah. And her business at the time, fusion books. She was basically making high school yearbooks out of her mom's living room. And she was, uh, she had dropped out of UWA, was teaching Adobe, uh, classes on the side to fund her little company in existence.

And, uh, and she described to me her vision for what the product she wanted to build, that she was trying to build inside Fusion books. She just said exactly what she wanted and it's the product that exists today, exists today. And, uh, after I heard that, because I was so focused on cloud related things, uh, and there's a second side story I'll get into as to why I like that particular market.

But, um, she described it to me and I said, can you build that? And she said, no, I'm not technical. And I said, well, if you can find a CTO that can build that, I might back you. And then, uh, I, I invited her to come out to California to seem, I say, and if you ever, you know, are in California, drop by, maybe we can, you know, talk about this some more.

And so, uh, over the next couple of years, it, it literally took three years to put the whole seed together. Um, she eventually did come over to, to visit me. Actually, she came to visit her brother and then, uh, she sends me a note that, you know, she's here to find a, can you help me find my co-founder? And so, uh, she tells a story on the NPR podcast with Guy Raz, how we built this.

Yes. So I'm sitting in a cafe, university Cafe, right? Yeah. On uh, university Avenue. She has a paper pitch deck and she's going through her thing. She's in a suit in a white suit. And I, I don't really wear suits clearly. Anyway, so, so she's, uh, flipping through the stack with me and I was using a Blackberry at the time, and I'm looking down, like typing on my Blackberry and she thinks I'm not paying attention.

I was making introductions to about seven people that I thought could lead to a tech co-founder. One of 'em was Lars Rasmussen.

Yep.

Bill Tai: And another one of these crazy truths. Giant, brilliant mind. Brilliant mind. That, but another moment that was. Truth is stranger than fiction.

Sriram Viswanathan: I, these are strange set of circumstances all coming together.

You sitting in, I can almost picture it. You're sitting in University Avenue, you know, sipping your tea and you've got all these people on your fingertips, and this is kind of the support that you are giving people like Eric and Melanie. Yes. That leads to sort of great outcomes. Yes. But did you, at that point, was it more a case of ensuring that you preserve the excitement that Melanie had with sort of, you know, lack of a better word, you know, adult supervision with people like Lars and, and the other guys?

To support her. That is that what made the difference in making, uh, Canva into what it is? Because today it's like a powerhouse, as you say.

Bill Tai: well, it's always about team, right? I think, you know, Melanie always had the, the spunk and the grit and what I call healthy disrespect of the system, right? And, uh, I think a healthy naivete.

Because literally the deck that she showed me is exactly what she did and the competitors she put on there, like, you know, imagine you're meeting a 23-year-old gal from Perth and she has on her deck that she's gonna compete with Microsoft and Adobe. And Adobe and Google. Yeah. Right. And that's pretty bold.

Very bold. You know, and, and you know, she wasn't, she didn't have a tech background. Yeah. And, uh, I think a lot of people would've just dismissed that. Yeah.

Sriram Viswanathan: Because yeah, you're, as a seed investor, you really have not much to go with on the business. Right. But just a belief on the founder that is actually saying, I believe gonna happen.

Yes. And I'm willing to sort of delay gratification. I'm gonna work my ass off and, and, and go with it. Are you with me for that journey? Is what they're asking you.

Bill Tai: Well, and talk about delayed gratification. The Canva journey has already been 15 years. Right. And they're not even public yet. It is, it has been profitable for eight years.

Yeah. Uh, and it took us three years to get it off the ground, but, uh, maybe it's a 20 or 30 year ride.

Sriram Viswanathan: So what's, what's Canva's plan? When, when, when do you think it goes public and Well, the

Bill Tai: CFO of Zoom, um, three months, four months ago, joined as CFO of Canva. Okay. And she's basically re rebuild or building the finance financial fp and a accounting, all that infrastructure to make a completely bulletproof Yeah.

Before they go public. And yeah, I think a

Sriram Viswanathan: PitchBook or, you know, the media would sort of peg it at about 40 plus billion dollars already. Uh, so far. So it's a pretty, pretty amazing,

Bill Tai:  I think it has a shot of being a cent. Acorn. Oh, f fantastic. Yeah. Amazing. Because if think about, you know, a high growth rate, it's still growing 30, 40% a year at many billions of revenue.

Right, right. Second most used AI application. It's, it's, that's remarkable.

Sriram Viswanathan: Congratulations on that. That's, that's fantastic. Knock on wood. Well, you know, knock on wood. Yeah, exactly. I, I do remember that you and I sitting and talking about Zoom Yeah. At the Starbucks on Sandhill.

Yeah.

Sriram Viswanathan: Uh, and you know, that's one that I, I missed.

But, uh, there are others that, uh, you and I have had parallel stories about. Sure. So let's talk about blockchain and crypto, because as you know, you know, I'm, I'm a big believer in, in blockchain. Yes. And I think it has a pretty amazing. Huge effort, opportunity.

Bill Tai: Great company in Orine that you've put together,

Sriram Viswanathan: right.

Orine is remarkable. And they're powering the, the next generation infrastructure for ai. Yeah. And also for crypto and all of that. They're all related. They're all related. But I want to go back to, because I know that you wrote a very, uh, insightful article about just the financial system and the whole notion of decentralized ledger.

Mm-hmm. Talk about that, because I think to me, I think, you know, whether it's a, you know, Bitcoin or, or, or Ether or whatever, it, that almost doesn't really matter. You have to buy into this basic notion of the decentralized nature Yes. Of the web. Yeah. And that has some profound implications as how inference gets done.

Yeah. In a decentralized way. So tie that together for me.

Bill Tai: Uh, in 2010, I stumbled upon Bitcoin. And, uh, uh, there's a tweet out there, which I can also, which I remember that I

Sriram Viswanathan: think that that tweet would be a good tweet to show. Oh, you wrote what? 10 cents?

Bill Tai: 7 cents. So 7 cents Bitcoin. So I started to, uh, you know, try to find ways to get involved and, and I was looking for people to, you know, kind of.

Transact with it, what have you. And so I tweeted out Yeah, to Twitter. Twitter sphere. Yeah. Um, you know, is anybody using this P two P, you know, currency, uh, Bitcoin. It has fascinating potential. And that started my journey into the whole, you know, Bitcoin thing.

Sriram Viswanathan: Did you see the connection between what Bitcoin infrastructure or blockchain as an infrastructure

Bill Tai: Absolutely.

Sriram Viswanathan: And how that could actually, you know, become relevant in the world of ai, and if so, how?

Bill Tai: Uh, the, the AI part didn't come till a little bit later.

Sriram Viswanathan: Yeah.

Bill Tai: In the beginning, I think because of the debt levels of the United States, even in 2000 8, 9 10, uh, that led me to instantly gravitate to the kind of the, the starting concept of Bitcoin as a store of value.

Now at, at the beginning of Bitcoin, I think people thought it would be an easily transactable universal currency. And it actually was in the beginning. People could just, you know, you could, there were many apps in the iPhone app store before they got banned, where you could just send people Bitcoin back and forth and people could use it as a currency.

But I think because of the, uh, you know, the pushback from the government, uh, starting around 2013, there was. Just this crazy clamp down. I had funded a couple companies where, uh, they'd be operating and then one day they couldn't pay, make payroll because the money was frozen. Yeah. And then we were getting notices saying, um, you know, I'm sorry, we are not de banking this term de bank, this is

Sriram Viswanathan: de banking.

Bill Tai: Yeah. Yeah. You're not allowed to, uh, or we found out you're a crypto company and so I'm sorry, but your account is frozen and you're gonna have to take your money out and go elsewhere. Uh, and it was just, you know, mind blowing that you couldn't operate these companies because of government policy, but, uh.

As we started to build, um, bit Fury, many of the things Bit

Sriram Viswanathan: Fury was, was was a mining equipment, hardware company. Yes. Uh, and they were also holding Bitcoin on their balance sheet.

Bill Tai: Yes. Right?

Sriram Viswanathan: Yes. Um, and, uh, and they were mining it, uh, purely as a, as a business to sort of, you know, uh, to

Bill Tai: build piles of Bitcoin, buys of Bitcoin, basically.

‍Sriram Viswanathan: And they were not really, uh, you know, doing more stuff in trying, in terms of trying to move to a transactional model and, and become more of a financial services company or were they,

‍Bill Tai: uh, there, there were, I think it was so early at that time. Yeah. Uh, and we had our hands full. Doing, you know, designing silicon, building servers, building data centers, and running them at very high performance levels.

So, bit Fury, uh, did a lot of things that are now really just now, uh, 10 years later, 12 years later, coming into the mainstream. So we, we had immersion cooling tanks. Yeah. Running to, uh, you know, the whole circuit boards or whole, the innards of their custom compute devices immersed in fluid. That was, uh, electrically non-conductive, but thermally.

Very conductive. Yeah.

Sriram Viswanathan: It's like a dielectric of some sort.

‍Bill Tai: Right? Yeah. We had those running 10 years ago. Yeah. You know, and so a lot of the things to do with, uh, ultra high density delivery of electricity, um, ultra powerful cooling technology. Yeah. Those things were running in the Bitcoin mining companies 10 years ago.

‍Sriram Viswanathan: But this is the important part as it relates to AI and inference in the data centers. Right. Because one of the biggest costs in the data center, as you well know, is energy. Yes. And to the extent that you can drive the, uh, energy utilization much lower with much better cooling and all of that is, you know, pretty significant.

Yeah. Yes. Now bridge it, bridge this back to Hut eight because you started Hut eight also. Sure. Um, and you're the chairman of it. Mm-hmm. And more interestingly, I wanna understand, you know, now with this new administration, obviously the US Bitcoin Corp has been created and mm-hmm. Hut eight is recently announced a merger and.

And you're very actively involved in, in Washington. So, so talk about, you know, what is that all about?

Bill Tai: Well, okay, so, so, uh, hut eight started as a unit of Bit Fury. Yeah. Okay. So back even it, it doesn't seem that many years ago, but 27, 20 18, the Bitcoin mining companies still didn't have access to public capital easily.

Correct. Right.  

Sriram Viswanathan: Some would argue even today, I mean, yes. There's not that much capital available for, you know, public capital available. It's a hard Yeah. 'cause

Bill Tai: it, you know, it's a cyclical, it, it, uh, it had been a more cyclical business. Yeah. That cycles are starting to even out a little bit like semiconductors.

I, I Sure.

Sriram Viswanathan: Which we talk about. Yeah. Yeah. I

Bill Tai: told the guys at bfi, I said, you know, this is a lot like the DRAM business. If you remember Micron technology like a public company in the early eighties, and because the production capacities constrained, when the demand went up, the prices of memory would go like this, and Micron stock would.

‍Bill Tai: Go to the moon and then the Japanese would build another couple plants and then over production and then be negative, you know? So the bitcoin mining industry had those characteristics in the early days. It's a little steadier now because it's bigger, but, uh, there were no public companies and raising private capital was hard.

'cause you, you had this sort of religious separation of either you believed or you didn't believe. Yeah. And you could either just buy Bitcoin or you could invest in the miners. It could make it at a, at a little bit of a discount if the cycle was right. Yeah. Or make it at a big discount if you were at the right part of the cycle.

So it was a hard to get capital. And so we took, uh, one division of Bit Fury, which is Bit Fury Canada, and we carved it off. And we took it public as HUD eight. And that, that's, that was, I still, that's the, that's the minor. That, that was the beginning. Beginning that, the beginning of HUD eight. And then we have ultimately, I, I think, uh, five or six years ago, we were NVIDIA's single largest customer in Canada for GPUs because we were using those to do crypto mining of Ethereum, which we would then convert immediately to Bitcoin, you know, 'cause you could run either Bitcoin dedicated miners or run GPUs.

And we started to get exposed to the world of high performance computing with ultra good cooling technologies and lots of things that people call, you know, HPC, high performance compute. We bought a web hosting company that was primarily, uh, the customer base was primarily game companies that did rendering.

So we were using GPUs for that, and we started to build a little AI unit. And, uh, over the years, I think what we've, oh, and then we, we merged with uh, uh, another bitcoin mining company called us Bitcoin.

Sriram Viswanathan: Yeah.

Bill Tai: That got folded into HU eight and more recently. Uh, you always, as a venture person you wanna move to, it's kind of like the, that hockey phrase, right?

Puck where the puck is going. Yeah. You go to where the puck is going, not where it is now. And so what I see and our team sees is that the shortage is gonna be electricity. Yeah. And I'll touch on some of that with comments from Eric Schmidt. But, um, uh, so what we have today is a world where, uh, right now, okay.

This is Eric Schmidt's, um, wording, which I think he's on the high side of estimates. Um, he testified in Congress. Yeah. And I think he said that today data centers use about 3% of America's energy. If all the data centers that have been announced. By end of 2027 are built, it'll be 97% of America's energy.

If, uh, if you wanna service that need, we need 27 gigawatts, which is 27 nuclear power plants. Yeah. Till in two years. Yeah. If you wanna go to 2030, the data center bill then gets to an incremental 63 gigawatts. So you need 27 nuclear power plants in America in two years. Yeah. 63 more in the next three is unsustainable.

It's, it's, it's a hindsight. So, so all of this hype, all of this investment, all the hundreds of billions of dollars going into these AI data centers, you may not be able to turn 'em on. Yeah. So we gotta solve the electricity thing. And so I don't know if Eric's estimates are right. I see lower estimates that make sense to me too.

Yeah. Um. If the data centers that are announced to be built in the next five years are built according to more conservative estimates, that's 40 million American homes.

Sriram Viswanathan: Yeah.

Bill Tai: On a base of about a hundred million American homes. So what I see happening is that, uh, we have to do something, the economics and the incentive system in the power industry resemble the economics and incentives of the phone industry.

Sriram Viswanathan: In the eighties when you had to build the infrastructure, when you didn't have the devices, there were not enough people buying, you know, mobile handsets or whatever, but you had to pour in billions of dollars into building the radio infrastructure. Yes. And or even the telecommunications

Bill Tai: infrastructure.

Yeah. The, the landline infrastructure. Yeah. And so the, uh, the, the method for the, but this

Sriram Viswanathan: is probably an order of magnitude larger than I think so,

Bill Tai: right? I think so. And so the, uh, the. The old system in the USA for people that are old enough to remember there was only one really big land bell phone company.

Yeah. LL at t. Yeah. The telecom act basically cut that apart into a long distance carrier, which was still at and t that could charge you a dollar 10 a minute for long distance calls.

Mm-hmm.

Bill Tai: And a bunch of regional bell operating companies. So here it was PAC Bell, there's Amer Tech in the Midwest, uh, Southwestern Bell covering the southwest, you know, all these different little baby bells.

And it also provisioned the creation of competitive local exchange carriers. Yeah. Cex.

Yep.

Bill Tai: And I, Lex and also competitors in the long distance, uh, areas. So you might remember, uh, pictures of trains running with diggers, uh, you know, along trenchers to lay fire. So, so you're,

Sriram Viswanathan: you're drawing the analogy to the, the AI infrastructure.

Going, you know, coming back to that kind of a build out that happened in the old telecommunication area. Uh,

Bill Tai: so now there's several layers to the, to the AI infrastructure. So of course the power part is foundational. Yeah. There's gonna be the data center builds themselves.

Yeah.

Bill Tai: There's the training model of thousands of GPUs in clusters.

And I think there's gonna be an edge network too, which we'll talk about. Sure. But I think the, uh, the power thing is fascinating because I think without the telecom act, the world that we know today with internet wouldn't exist. Yeah. You know, so there there was this big switch from packet switching, so for circuit switching to packet switching.

Switching, yeah. Which allowed the, the dumb I

Sriram Viswanathan: IP traffic to go.

Bill Tai: Yes. And dumb telephone lines suddenly became a context to where cloud. Yeah, where the network itself had awareness of all of the endpoints and how to route traffic between any two points at any time with resiliency. Mm-hmm. So I think the power grid has to become that too, because we've got now a structural change from what used to be a centralized set of power sources pushing to the edge.

Now on all the endpoints you might have, solar, wind, hydro, you, there's all kinds of different things now Yeah. That are now flowing back in. And a variety of endpoints with loads that go like this. Very recently there was a massive, several nationwide blackout. Yes. In Portugal, Spain, parts of France. Right.

That was caused because you didn't have the right frequencies. You need a carrier frequency, basically.

Right.

Bill Tai: And then all the other things have to ride along with that. When you have a distributed network, which we need to have to handle the generation, you have all kinds of, you know, yes. Just, you need load balancing, you need synchronization, and you need that context word clout.

Yeah. And, uh, the, the word LLM uh, applies to language and word, so it doesn't really apply to electrons per se, but I think there needs to be something like an energy LLM, but it's not calling. This is, this is actually

Sriram Viswanathan: fascinating because I think most of the, most of the conversation around. Data center and AI inference centers around compute.

Yes. And it centers around the language models and how large they're gonna be and how efficient, you know, you know, token dollar per token per user, per megawatt or per kilowatt, uh, that you can deliver. But it never really talks about this analogy that you're making, which is the telecommunications infrastructure really drove the internet and today the energy infrastructure is woefully behind.

Yes. So do you see a regulatory framework in the works in, in Washington that can actually drive this? I am

Bill Tai: working on that in background with some people that were, uh, advisors to the Trump one administration that are not in the administration now.

Yeah.

Bill Tai: But I think, uh, um, there, you know, I have so many wacko concepts.

So if you think about current, so back to cryptocurrency and Bitcoin and other things like that, um, if you think about the nature of the US dollar today. And it has the name, the Petrodollar. Yeah. Why is that? Right? So if you think about societal constructs and money, what is money? Money is basically stored productivity.

If you produce more than you consume, you have this chit. And depending on what form it is, you can trade that because you stored your productivity for something else, right? So it's really stored excess productivity. Before oil and machinery in the first industrial revolution really took a hold of this e economy.

You basically had tribal little pockets of, of economic development and not a lot of stored excess productivity because it was human labor based. Once you got machines running on oil. The productivity model changed a lot, and you suddenly had machinery in which you could pour a bunch of oil to turn it into marginal productivity.

Yeah. And so oil became the source of incremental productivity. So nation states to preserve their economic future, needed to store oil. So you can look at the US dollar as a token. Yeah. It's a petro dollar, right? Yeah. So, okay. Now we are in a world where the productivity model has changed completely because oil's pervasive now, but all marginal productivity comes from this.

Sriram Viswanathan: Yeah.

Bill Tai: It's software, it's electrons. So we are now in a world where, because all productivity is moving to electrons, Bitcoin is stored productivity. Yeah, so is, you know, all of the things that we're working on, they all rely on that. So I think we're going through a foundational change where the nature of stored productivity and currency are flipping.

Sriram Viswanathan: Yeah, it's, it's interesting you, you make that analogy because I think in, in a sort of a parallel, uh, model, if you were, if you were to trace the evolution of the value creation that's happened as a result of technology, you could make the comment that it was compute. There was lots of value that got created because of compute as the driver of the value.

Absolutely. The case. And then there was a phase when there was lots of community related value creation, social media, networking, right? All of that. And then the, now we seem to be entering, this is the

Bill Tai: combination of the two.

Sriram Viswanathan: The, now we seem to be entering into the third phase where cognition

Sriram Viswanathan: Or inference.

Yeah. We can call it any number of things, but it's queued to have three Cs, you know? Yeah. Compute, community cognition. Right. Uh, as the methodology for value creation. Yes. And it almost sort of parallelly, you know, uh, reflects on what you are talking about. Yeah. Which is, you know, at the end of the day, it's productivity.

Yeah. And, you know, instead of looking at Bitcoin as a, as a, you know, another, you know, fancy little, uh, you know, cryptocurrency, what you're really coming to grips with is that this is a model that actually can reflect how people, you know, trade with each other. You know, conduct the, accelerates

Bill Tai: your productivity, the acceler productivity, the tutorial productivity,

Sriram Viswanathan: and really use it for inference and all kinds of things.

So this is, this is all pretty fascinating. So, so I know that you are now, as part of HU eight, you are working closely with the Trump administration, or at least. One of the Trump's sons. So can you say anything more about it?

Bill Tai: Yeah, so what that's about is, uh, given all the talk we just had about energy, okay.

So, you know, electrons, chips, servers, data centers. I kind of wrote all those waves. Now it's the expression of the data centers, which is either, uh, bitcoin or things like, you know, digital asset production and record keeping, which is, it's a, the production of Bitcoin is really a function of storing, uh, the information of all the transactions, right?

It's kind of a distributed database and that's the output to pay for that, uh, that function. Uh, separately, there's the AI data center. So what we're doing with Hut is we're making hut into an energy infrastructure company. Uh, people may not know that last year the best performing stock on the market was not.

Nvidia, it was Vistra.

Sriram Viswanathan: Vistra, yes. Which is

Bill Tai: an energy company. Right. And so as I think about what's happening now, you gotta go to where the puck is going. Yeah. So I'm, I'm and the team are moving to where the shortage is. We effectively wanna become kind of a RA without the CapEx.

Yeah.

Bill Tai: Okay. So Hut is becoming an energy company with two subsidiaries.

One is a Bitcoin mining operation, one is a GPU data center company, the Bitcoin mining operation. 20% of it was taken by the, uh, Trump, uh, Trump affiliates of Donald Jr. And Eric.

Yeah.

Bill Tai: And, uh, they had a little data center company that they had set up. So we put those together. That is going public separately as American Bitcoin Corp.

Yeah.

Bill Tai: It's gonna be doing, we took all of our mining assets, stuck them in there. That's gonna be a separate company. It's gonna raise a ton of capital.

Sriram Viswanathan: I can imagine.

Bill Tai: And it's gonna do both, some mining, but also the MicroStrategy plate. So it's gonna buy a bunch of Bitcoin and manage treasury and acquire with other financial instruments to pile up the Bitcoin.

The, uh, the data center company that's called highrise.ai. That started with about a thousand H one hundreds and we're now gonna turn that into a separate, uh, entity that ultimately will get spun off and taken public to. HUD eight has gone from about a year ago, we had about 600 megawatts running with about a gigawatt in the pipeline.

We're now at, at 1.3 or four gigawatts running with around 12 gigawatts in the pipeline. Wow. 12 nuclear power plants worth. Wow. So we can And what's

Sriram Viswanathan: the, what's the blended cost of power that you see steady state as you, uh, build to scale?

Bill Tai: Uh, you know, I'd have to calculate that 'cause there's many different sites, but the idea is basically we have managed contracts to provide the electricity and managed services to both of those units.

And so the bitcoin mining stuff will be able to basically light up parts of our little grid. Cover the costs with the Bitcoin mining, and then as we develop more and more customers and infrastructure on the GPU side, then we can transition 'em off. Understand,

I understand.

Bill Tai: Yeah. So, and, and you know, it's a fascinating world.

You mentioned this, you know, cognition thing.

Yeah.

Bill Tai: So when I look at this world that's sort of like, you know, Google organized the world's information,

Sriram Viswanathan: right?

Bill Tai: And it was the organization of the information to make it readily accessible. That was one thing that created the value. Yeah. Yes. Now we're moving from access to information.

Yeah. To access to knowledge. Yeah. So it's kind of the abstraction layer. Yeah. Above that. Yeah. And that obviously comes from all these GPUs. Yeah. So I think, you know, the productivity model stored productivity in Bitcoin and then the knowledge base Yeah. And the access to that. Will have high value. And I think that's, that's what we wanna do.

Sriram Viswanathan: this is great. Let's, let's, let's get back to the last section, uh, pretty much where you started. You know, you are, you know, you started your career at LSI Yeah. Uh, you know, deep roots in semiconductors. Uh, and as I, as I noted in the intro, you know, you have the, the badge number one at TSMC. So tell us that story,

Bill Tai: you know?

Yeah. So, so Woody Allen, there's a quote attributed to Woody Allen. I dunno if he actually said it, but it's like 80% of life is just showing up. Yeah. You know, and so I use that phrase, but I also say, but you have to show up at the right place at the right time. And I don't know how I have that instinct, but somehow I'm showing up at the right place at the right time.

It's happened like many times in a row. So the LSI logic story's fascinating to even, to me, it's like one of these happy accidents where, uh, so my dad was a PhD chemist. And he ran research from Alco Chemical Company. He had 26 patents, just kind of very inventive guy. Our, our house was like, what you would imagine, like the kid in the back of the future hit lived, you know?

Yeah. We had like all kinds of junk in the house and the basement was full of things. And, and he did tell me, uh, he said, you know, the thing about you is I don't know if I should buy you birthday presents anymore because I buy you something and you don't play with it. You take it apart.

Bill Tai: You know, and I couldn't always put it back together, but, you know, I always wanted to see how things work.

That's one way to ensure that you keep getting new things. That's true. Uh, but uh, when, when I was about nine years old, he bought me a Radio Shack a hundred in one electronic projects kit. You know, I don't, people don't even know Radio Shack now 'cause it went out of business. But it's basically a car, a, a wooden box with a.

Piece of cardboard with a bunch of springs, resistors, capacitors, a relay, uh, you know, all kinds of little parts in a book. Each of the springs on the board had a number and the book had these instructions like connect wire six to wire 10, wire 11 to wire 15, you know, and then you could basically make a transistor radio, or you could make really anything you know, of, of these a hundred kits.

So, uh, I built that, uh, I built lots of things with that, which got, that was my exposure to electronics. And somewhere around seventh grade I read an article called Secrets of the Little Blue Box. And you can still find that you should link to that too. Yes. And it's the story of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.

Bill Tai: In their first company, they didn't make computers. They made a little frequency synthesizer. Um, I. Unbeknownst to most people, except for this guy named John Draper, who now lives in, uh, in Las Vegas, who's a friend. Yep. Um, he goes by the handle Captain Crunch. Yep. Wacky In a Captain Crunch cereal box, there was a plastic whistle that blew a frequency of 2,600 hertz.

If you blew that into a payphone at the end of an 800 number call and could get everyone else to hang up, you could control the switching system and make calls anywhere in the world for free. So a bunch of kids from MIT

Sriram Viswanathan: that is so funny and other

Bill Tai: places create this hacker network that would basically trade designs on these little things called phone freaking devices.

Yeah. Or blue boxes. That was their first business. So Jobs and Wozniak made those things, sold them until they got arrested. And then somehow Ma Bell figured, you know, got the law to say that's illegal. And so they gave up and started a computer company. Yeah. But that got me interested in electronics. I ended up with a double E degree somehow.

I ended up at Texas Instruments, uh, my junior year I used to do contract work to pay for school. And I got put on this project during the Reagan administration where, uh, they, I think somebody saw the movie Firefox or maybe Firefox came after, I'm not sure. But they had built, because TI had speech speak and Spell, and they had these DSP things.

They were the leader in that area. Um, somebody had built a seven board computer system that would take your voice, digitize it, store it in memory banks, and then in real time you could say something to it. It would compare it across all those 40 patterns and then match it and then put output signals.

But this was like two desktop PCs in one box and they wanted to shrink that into a two by four by six cartridge for the F 16, so you could fly it by talking to it. And so I got assigned to that project. And so through that, in 1983, I found a bunch of startups because big companies TI couldn't do it. And so that they were California micro devices.

You probably remember them, of course. Uh, there was a MI Gould. There was LSI Logic and VLSI technology, and so I got exposed to LSI logic and then I joined them. And so, uh, and crazy enough, Jensen was there too. Jensen Wang, that's right. So, yeah. Jensen, and you

Sriram Viswanathan: were, you're actually related to what, Jensen and Lisa?

Yes.

Bill Tai: Yeah. Crazy. We're all from Ka our, our, our, uh, parents are all from K Taiwan. Yeah. Yeah. Which is totally wacko. But, um, yeah. So Ellis, I Logic was started by the CEO of Fairchild Semiconductor. Yeah. From which Intel in National a m DD all came out. National's VP of Sales was Don Valentine. Yeah. Uh, one of the guys that split out the

Sriram Viswanathan: iconic investor Sequoia, started, started Sequoia.

‍Bill Tai: Sequoia, yeah. So, and then Tom Perkins, who teamed up with Jean Kleiner, Tom Perkins and Don Valentine. And IVP funded Ellis Logic. Yeah. So, uh, I ended up joining IVP through the nineties before taking time off to Kite, and then C rv, uh, Don Valentine was on the board along with Tom Perkins, and he was my early mentor.

Yeah. So back to the very beginning of your podcast about what do I look for? This is from Don Valentine's. So I, I, I was at a board meeting with him at a dinner after a board meeting as a very young man, and I said to Don, I said, Don, how do I get good at this? And he said, there's only three things you have to get right.

Sriram Viswanathan: In a classic Don Valentine's way of speaking very, if I might add very tight.

Bill Tai: Yes. Yeah. There's only three things you have to get right. Markets management, don't overpay. Yeah. If you do those three things right, every, you'll make money every time, but if you get the market wrong. Doesn't matter who your team is.

Yeah. You can have the best team in the world and infinite of capital and you will lose money every time. So over the years, that led to me looking for big markets undergoing structural change. Gotta get that right kind of gritty founder that's gonna go through everything.

Sriram Viswanathan: The 23-year-old from Perth as it were.

Bill Tai: There it is, you know, or

Sriram Viswanathan: Eric, Juan or people like that.

Bill Tai: And then you set the right culture with them and you still build up. But wait,

Sriram Viswanathan: you still didn't tell me how you ended up getting ETSC one.

Bill Tai: Oh yeah, so this is wacky too. Like another one of these things I was at, uh, so I was just finishing Harvard Business School and uh, I was looking, I was reading EE times in my cube.

Uh, so I worked, uh, so I, I didn't stop working. I still held my job when I was at Harvard, uh, Wolf Corrigan. We, we had an office in Waltham serving all the mini computer companies. I had a wise terminal connected to our mainframe in my dorm room, and I kept working at LSL Logic, but I had this cubicle and looking at E times, and I see this thing that the country wants to start, uh, semiconductor industry.

And back in Taiwan and in Taiwan, and I Taiwanese by Heritage. Yep. And I hadn't been there for a while and I was like, you know, that might be kind of fun. Was

Sriram Viswanathan: going, going back from TI and Yeah. Yep. Yeah.

Bill Tai: He was running something called like the National Science Council. That's right. And they had built Century Science Park that was kind of empty.

Nobody was really using it. And the government had allocated some budget to incentivize companies to come in. And, uh, a lot of the companies in Taiwan that were electronics makers, so Umax, MI Tac, uh, Acer, all we're asking for money to build little fabs. And Morris, given his background at ti, he's guy that thinks scale.

He said, it's dumb to have 10, $10 million fabs. Let's build one big one. And so he hired Jim Dykes, who had been president of ge, RCA semiconductor, to come in and kind of figure all that out. And then, uh, I contacted the reporter from E Times, um, sent Jim my resume, and next day I was on a plane and, um, back to Taiwan.

Back to Taiwan. And I did a market study for them to try to figure out how big do we make a fab. And the plan that I kind of centered on was a 60,005 inch wafer a month factory to be built in four 15,000 wafer start modules. Uh, and, uh,

Sriram Viswanathan: sounds very quaint now, doesn't

Bill Tai: it? Like, unbelievable. Well, this is in an era where two micron was state of the art, you know?

‍Sriram Viswanathan: that's right.

‍Bill Tai: Yeah. So that, uh, anyway, so they gave me this little contractor badge, and that's A-T-S-M-C badge. That's the number one TS 0 0 1 and 0 0 1. Yeah. Should

Sriram Viswanathan: we should put it up on the link as well. Yes. And, uh, but, uh, listen, uh, bill, this is such a, such a fascinating conversation. I think you've, you've just covered such a breadth of topics.

Um, you know, I can keep talking to you about, you know, so many anecdotes and stories and we have lots of common friends and, you know, we've been ringside views of, uh, many of these trends that have happened. But I have to ask you a few real rapid fire questions Sure. As we close this. So, what is, um, the one startup that you wish you had invested but you didn't?

Bill Tai: Uh, in the early nineties.

Sriram Viswanathan: I assume that by asking that question, I obviously imply that you had the ability to do it and you didn't. Yes. Yes.

Bill Tai: Well, everybody did. So Steve Jobs ran outta money Yes. In the early nineties, right? Because he had next computer. Correct. Sold all his Apple stock is up the share and then, uh, and also bought Pixar from Lucasfilm.

Yeah. He went looking for money and everybody turned him down, including me. Yeah. But Pixar would've been an amazing one. Pix. He, he did invite me later to the premiere of Toy Story. That's a good one. Just to shove it up my mind.

Sriram Viswanathan: Yeah. Pixar is, that's a great story. Alright, so Bitcoin, you are, you've been a bull of Bitcoin for a long time.

2030. It is your prediction for Bitcoin price

Bill Tai: five years from now it's gonna be around a million dollars a coin.

Sriram Viswanathan: Okay. Alright. Well, you know, many people will be happy and you know, lots of companies that are. Working in that area that you and I are involved with will be extremely happy. Yep. Um, TSMC or nvidia, which is more critical to the future of tech.

Bill Tai: Whoa. That's a tough one because, and arguably NVIDIA could not exist without TSMC. True. TSMC could exist without Nvidia. But the future of what society and technology looks like is probably more a function of both of them surviving, but dependency on Nvidia delivering.

Sriram Viswanathan: And, um, the next technology trend that you think is being highly overlooked today?

Bill Tai: Ah, that's a tough one. I don't know that it's overlooked, but I think it's underrepresented and underrated, which is the intersection of generally AI and semantic AI in particular, and healthcare. So we are in a world now where, uh, in a country now where. 19% of GDP here is healthcare. CEOs of insurance companies are getting executed.

That tells you something. Yeah. That tells you something. Right. You know, and, and this country, the expenses around Medicare and Medicaid are so over the top that even without the issues that we have with interest on the national debt being greater than the defense budget or social security getting outta control, if we don't fix the medical payment system here, this country will go bankrupt and, and Bitcoin's gonna go to 10 million if that happens.

But, you know, but I think, um, uh, AI and healthcare, it's transformational. Yeah.

Sriram Viswanathan: Finally. Your ultimate kite boarding destination.

Bill Tai: I have to say Western Australia is

Sriram Viswanathan: for more reasons than one.

Bill Tai: It's just awesome. I mean, the variety there, it's like, you know, the, so Australia in general, it's a beautiful unpopulated country that the land mass is about the same as the continental United States.

There's only 27 million people that, there's 40 million or 35 million in California. It's just empty except for a few places. Right. And, uh, I think only 6% of the population of Australia lives out on the west. 40% of the landmass the coast, up and down. It's unbelievable. Uh, unbelievable. Get out of the airport in the northern part up there.

We, we had a car. We rent this car. We're leaving the airport. We had to stop. Because there was a flock of a giant flock of emus. Oh my gosh. That wouldn't move. You know, and there's dingoes and kangaroos and whale sharks in the water, and you see turtles like sea turtles breeding, like, there's like hundreds of them.

It's just, it's, it's transformational to be there.

Sriram Viswanathan: Well, bill, this has been just a remarkable conversation. I've enjoyed every bit of it. You are just a, not just an amazing, uh, technologist. You're a great storyteller. You have all of these anecdotes and you seem to, and, and I think you summarized it well somehow.

You seem to be finding the right way to be in the right place at the right time. And it's, uh, it's a remarkable journey. And, uh, I'm really thankful for you to have, uh, shared that with us. So thank you so much for being at the podcast.

Bill Tai: Thank you for having me. And don't forget, in the word fund. Yeah, there's three letters.

FUN. Yeah.

Sriram Viswanathan: Thank you so much. Thank you. That's fantastic. Thanks Bill.

Thank you for tuning in to the Tech Search Podcast from Celesta Capital. If you enjoy this episode, feel free to share it, subscribe or leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform. We'll be back every two weeks with more insights and discussions of all things deep tech. Bye for now.