All-In's Best Ideas Pitch Competition: 4 Investors Present Their Top Trades Live
Think like Sam Zell when investing: Buy hard assets below replacement cost when future capacity will be needed. You'll acquire at a discount and sell at a premium when the market wakes up. This works across real estate, power infrastructure, and any scarce resource where demand is growing faster tha
1h 7mKey Takeaway
Think like Sam Zell when investing: Buy hard assets below replacement cost when future capacity will be needed. You'll acquire at a discount and sell at a premium when the market wakes up. This works across real estate, power infrastructure, and any scarce resource where demand is growing faster than supply can respond.
Episode Overview
Investment managers present their best ideas at an Ira Sohn Foundation event, pitching opportunities in gaming (MGM), power infrastructure (Talon Energy), and biotech (Actis Oncology). The presentations reveal systematic approaches to finding undervalued assets with catalysts ahead, from casino licensing in Asia to nuclear power for AI data centers.
Key Insights
Hidden Assets Create Asymmetric Returns
MGM trades at $48 but owns underappreciated assets worth over $100: a casino license in Osaka, Japan opening in 2030 (worth ~$50/share), Vegas properties ($60), and optionality on Dubai gambling legalization ($40-50). Barry Diller's aggressive buying (26% ownership) and his $48 bid signal he sees the value others are missing.
Power Demand Cycles Follow Technological Breakthroughs
Throughout history, power demand spikes when transformative technologies emerge (appliances, air conditioning), then normalizes, then enters an efficiency phase. We're now entering a new spike driven by AI and data centers. The PJM region alone needs 106 gigawatts of new power in 10 years—equivalent to Japan's entire consumption.
Data Centers Are the New Refineries
A data center functions exactly like an oil refinery: electricity goes in, and refined output (intelligence, tokens, photons) comes out. Both are capital-intensive ($50 billion per gigawatt), require massive energy inputs, and create value by transforming raw resources into usable products.
Replacement Cost Provides a Valuation Floor
Talon Energy can be bought at $25 billion enterprise value while replacement cost is $45 billion—a potential double just to reach parity. When scarce assets trade below what it costs to build new capacity, and demand is growing, the market will eventually reprice them at a premium.
De-risk Biotech Bets Through Margin of Safety
Actis Oncology represents a value-oriented approach to biotech: target proven receptors (nectin-4, B7H3), verify engagement through imaging early, maintain 3+ years of cash runway, and choose modalities (radiopharmaceuticals) with real moats that generics and China can't easily replicate.
Notable Quotes
"If you can buy an asset, a hard asset at below replacement cost for an asset that's going to be needed in the future where we're going to need to build new capacity of that asset. Then you buy that asset at the discount to replacement cost. You hold it and you sell it at a big premium to replacement cost when the market wakes up."
"We do not need AI demand to keep the power markets incredibly tight for the next 20 years. AI demand just turbocharges. That's all it does. And it creates shortages."
"If you believe that artificial intelligence is going to be responsible for scientific breakthroughs, you either have it or you don't have the scientific breakthroughs. If you believe that artificial intelligence is going to drive robotics, you either have it or you don't have that productivity from the robots. If you believe that artificial intelligence is going to be helpful for national security and military affairs, then you either have it or you're dead."
"I think this company is now in play. I don't know how it's all going to play out, but if you own shares, don't tender them. And the riskreward is incredible right now because, you know, I'm telling you, I think the stock could be easily worth over 100, could be worth 150."
"Generally speaking, investing in biotech companies is a horrible idea sandwiched somewhere between movies, wineries, and spaxs. In fact, our sector often feels a lot more like a casino than an actual financial market."
Action Items
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1
Apply Sam Zell's Replacement Cost Framework
Before making any investment in hard assets (real estate, infrastructure, commodities), calculate the replacement cost. If you can buy below replacement cost and future demand will require new capacity, you have downside protection and asymmetric upside when the market reprices the asset.
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2
Look for Hidden Assets in Public Companies
Study companies where management barely mentions valuable optionality in presentations—these are often mispriced by the market. Examples include future licensing opportunities (MGM's Osaka casino), unrealized real estate value, or technological platforms that could be applied beyond initial use cases.
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3
Follow Smart Money Aggressively Buying
When sophisticated investors like Barry Diller accumulate 26% of a company and make public bids, dig deeper. They likely see value the market is missing. Track 13-F filings and insider buying to identify where experienced investors are placing concentrated bets.
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4
Invest in Scarce Resources Before Demand Materializes
Position yourself in constrained resources (power generation capacity, rare earth elements, specialized manufacturing) before the market fully prices in upcoming demand. The PJM region needing 106 gigawatts exemplifies how infrastructure takes years to build while demand can spike quickly.
Full Transcript
Transcript of All-In's Best Ideas Pitch Competition: 4 Investors Present Their Top Trades Live from All-In Podcast. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.
Maybe you could tell us a little bit about how you selected our presenters and your vision for this. I mean for any of you guys who've been involved in Ira this is a gentleman that passed away from cancer far too young and his family created this thing called the sone foundation and they would host this event and it started in Lincoln Center and they would ask these managers and so at the time I was like a young venture investor and I got this invite and I showed up in New York at Lincoln Center in 2015 and I said Amazon's going to be a trillion dollar company and I was laughed out of the room.
Uh David Einhorn, who's a friend of mine, but who was totally wrong, said, "I know trillion dollar companies. This is not a trillion dollar company." Wrong. It turned out to be a great bet. I went back. I did Tesla in 2016. We picked the converts. And then in 2017, I was like, "All right, this is my this is this is it. This is my magnumopus." And I said, "AI is the future." And then I picked box. box. box. I was like, if I had just picked Nvidia, I would have been an Irish legend legend and I could have retired.
Anyway, so we wanted to recreate Iris and start to get these great managers who are making great picks, making a ton of money for their LPs. They don't get the distribution and so it's just a chance to like get to know some of these names. You don't have to see them on CNBC. You'll see them here more and more often. And we can just get to Opine. Roll the video. Yeah. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the best ideas pitch. Let's meet our contestants. contestants. contestants. Anyone should be able to trade any asset anywhere in the world, anytime, 24/7, with just an internet connection and a phone in their pocket.
We're building a new financial system from the ground up here. People are going to want to own equities, and it's going to be fun. In the next couple years, companies going to innovate and create products and applications, and that's where hopefully long short managers like us can make a boatload of money. My fund, Eco R1 Capital, which is based in San Francisco, thinks of investing in biotech in a slightly different way. We're looking for unfollowed, unloved, misunderstood biotech companies. It's an amazing moment in time for those types of companies.
There's been a structural and permanent perception shift where both sides of the aisle are going to be leaning into nuclear in a big way. big way. big way. I'm massively optimistic. You know, all of this leads me to just the maximum risk on. Thanks the besties for having me. And this is obviously a fabulous event you guys have put on. I'm happy to be here. Um, for those of you who don't know me, um, I run a $4 billion firm in New York called Serreta Capital.
Um, before founding my firm, I was, uh, I ran the equities business for George Soros. Uh, I was then CIO for Steve Cohen. Uh, and I've been doing hedge funds now for 29 years. So, um, definitely on the older edge of my my pure group. Um, so I was thinking about, you know, I run a generalist fund. Um, and you know, we own a bunch of tech stocks, but you know, given this audience here, for me to pitch a tech stock would be absolutely completely stupid.
Um, so I was thinking about what else. And you know, obviously the theme of this conference besides tech is poker. So I'm going to pitch to you MGM. Now most of you know MGM as uh you think about it as the Vegas um company. They own 13 properties in Vegas. Um they're one they're them and Caesars are the two largest owners of uh casino assets in Vegas. Um now if you notice um the other day um Caesars got taken out. Um and so we think Vegas is actually starting to improve.
Um but I'm not here to pitch MGM because of Vegas. What I'm going to tell you is there's a couple of things we noticed. One is this company's been very aggressively been stock's been aggressively acquired by Barry Dillard lately. Um Barry now owns 26% of the company. Um now I put this presentation together two weeks ago. Yesterday he actually bid for the company. Okay. So when I put the presentation together the stock was about $37. It's now high40s. He bid $48. Okay. I would not sell my shares to him.
When did we get this presentation? Did we get it early enough to trans? Uh I would not sell his I would not sell my stock to him for a second. And the reason is also besides him buying the stock, the company's also been buying the stock. Rarely have I ever seen a company in 6 years buy half their float back. So you have Barry Diller who's the legend aggressively buying the stock and it's also now 80% of his NAV. Okay. So you most people think of Barry Diller as the ABC producer.
He did I which owned assets like Expedia and now he's a casino guy. What is going on here? So we spent a lot of time um asking ourselves why um and why is MGM has two hidden assets. Okay. The first one first one first one is, and this is sort of our the punchline of what we think the stock is worth. So you add the Vegas assets plus China, you get about little low60s. So from $48 or 37 when I started this, great return. What is they what they have now is a license to open a casino in Aaka, Japan.
Japan a couple years ago went through a whole referendum around the country. They have prefixures. The prefixures voted. The only one that decided to own open a casino is Osaka. Now Osaka is and this is what the asset's going to look like. It's going to open in 2030. If you go to the company slide presentations, they sort of mention this, but they're not really talking about it. Um, Japan, just for you people, um, sorry, I don't know, this is very slow. Um, Japan actually has a reasonably large gambling market.
They have pachinko parlors and they have horses. That's about a $40 billion market. If you look at the market in Macau, that's $30 billion. And if you look at Vegas, it's only $10 billion. So, this could be a massive opportunity. Um, you know, we're estimating they'll do about $2 billion of IBIDA. They own 40% of the property. Um, they also get a management fee for this. Um, if you also look at where Osaka is located, it's a great, you know, so the Japanese like to gamble, but the Chinese really gamble.
Okay. So, if you look at where it is from Shanghai, it's shorter than Macau and Singapore, which are the two big gaming options in Asia. And from and from Beijing, about the same distance as Macau, and obviously much shorter than going to Singapore. So, if you want to go gambling for a weekend and you live in Shanghai, live in Beijing, Osaka is great. It's also a first world nation. Um, and if you think about as an investor, where would you want to have your money? Look, Macau has issues.
It's a low multiple business. This is Japan. It's a first world country. So, we think Barry Diller is understands gambling. He understands casinos. But what he's really doing is now trying to pick off the company to get the Japanese opportunity which we think is worth will more than double the stock. The final option and I'm keeping this simple. What I love about this pitch is it's really simple. It's not that hard to do the math. MGM is built somebody they're they're they're branding they're building a property in Dubai.
Okay. Now it's going to it's a grand complex. It has an Arya. It has an MGM and it has a Bellagio. Gambling is illegal in Dubai right now. Okay. But they have snuck in this building 300,000 square ft of cu of space. Well, one day if Dubai decides to legalize gambling, guess where it's going? Right there. Next year, two, sorry, two years from now, win is going to open a casino in a place called Ararjan, which is 45 minutes away from Dubai. Now, any of us who want to go gambling in Dubai, we arjan's a bit of a pain in the ass to get to, we're going to want to go here.
So, we think there's a chance that especially when win opens. Also look, there's a possibility of the war, you know, Dubai wants to reestablish themselves that they open a casino in um Dubai and you know what that would be worth. So when you take the Vegas assets, which we think are worth about 60, when you take Japan, which we think is worth about 50 bucks, if Dubai happens, that's worth another $40 or $50. So we think the stock is a triple. Bar remember Barry's bidding for the company.
Okay, he is not a strategic buyer. He is a financial buyer and he's doing it to get rich. So therefore, I think this company is now in play. I don't know how it's all going to play out, but if you own shares, don't tend to them. And the riskreward is incredible right now because, you know, I'm telling you, I think the stock could be easily worth over 100, could be worth 150. And now you have Barry Diller who is a has a firm bid owns 26% of the company basically at the same price.
So I think this is a cool idea. Well done. Well done. Well done. Okay. Uh anybody let's uh do two questions and uh yeah we'll put we'll give you both questions at the same time for efficiency. for efficiency. for efficiency. How much have you looked at like the monetization of the assets outside of gambling? I had heard from someone that Barry Diller was spending a lot of time trying to reinvent the entertainment piece of the properties. he was active on the board and they were trying to identify that the entertainment property is way the entertainment value is way undermonetized and they could be making a lot more per Okay, don't answer yet.
That's question one. one. one. And then question two is how when you expand internationally do you scale customer credit because that tends to be the thing that drives you know people to come back and well obviously MGM let me start with your question first. MGM has a massive database of customers, right? So, you know, I assume the Vegas properties have guys that come from China, they come from um Japan. They'll use that database to do it. They also have a loyalty program. Um I unfortunately made a bad investment in a company called Rio, the Rio, which was in Vegas.
Um which we bought when they separate when Caesar's merged with El Dorado. Um they had to shed an asset. Um that was that was uh the Rio. We I did an investment with a couple of friends and we were buying the thing at $200 per square foot. The thing we forgot was when you separated from Caesars, you lost the loyalty program and that ended up two quick questions from the audience. Wait, I got to ask Kyle's question. Hold on. Question and then from the audience. audience.
audience. Let me get his first. The entertainment question. I don't know the answer. I don't know the answer to that. If it's if he can make them better, it will help. But as I'm saying, this is not really a Vegas. This is an Asian casino play that the and if if you look at their presentations which is really cool. They are not they barely mention it. So what one of the things we happened besides we were hoping one of the cat so looked I worked at SACE and one of the things we focus on is catalyst path.
So what was the catalyst path? The catalyst path was they would have an investor day blah blah blah. Barry just showed his cards. So, um, but you know, Aaron, two questions. Caesars left Dubai waiting for a license. Why would this be different for MGM? That's question one. And then question two is the Osaka Casino was approved in 2023. Why was the market ignoring this hidden asset until the bid? Sure. Let me answer this. So, what's also cool about this idea was, so I've been doing this for 29 years.
um win um they opened Macau. So Win started as a Vegas property then opened Macau. The market started caring about it about 3 years before it opened. Um so that the answer is they should care about it. The reality is it's tends to be about 3 years before it opens. Well, we're almost in that time frame, which is why we think it's opportunistically the right period of time. Um I, you know, regarding the question with Caesars, look, this is an option. As I told you, somebody built this project for them.
They are running it for them and they were intelligent enough to leave 300,000 square ft of empty space in case they get a casino. Well, if that happens, great. If it doesn't, you know, you're still going to double more than double your money. So, you know, you if if it happens, you triple your money. Free option. You're saying it's free option. Well done. Big round of applause. Thanks, guys. Appreciate it. Nicely done, Aaron. Next up, Daniel. Long time no see. So, today we're doing talent energy.
Uh, but first, but first, but first, the anatomy of a power cycle. So, a power cycle typically goes like this. In normal times, power demand grows about GDP. So, if GDP grows 2%, power demand grows two. If GDP grows three, power demand goes three. And there's moments in time where we get technological breakthroughs and a lot of those technological breakthroughs are very power intensive. So power demand spikes spikes spikes and once everybody adopts that technology technology technology it trends back down to its onal algorithm algorithm algorithm GDP growth and then you go through the efficiencies phase where we say let's try to conserve and figure out ways to consume less power and then the cycle starts all over again.
So, you know, in history, the big technological boom that sent power demand skyrocketing was appliances and air conditioning. Everybody had to get their kettles and and the aircon. Then in the 70s and 80s and 90s, demand normalized again. But then the 2000s were all about efficiencies. You know, we had like LED lighting, smart HVAC, tinted windows, smart electronics. And at the same time, as I said earlier, we were like, you know, ripping down all our power- hungry infrastructure like aluminum smelters and moving over China. So, we had two decades of effectively no power demand.
And now we're just coming out of it and starting a technological cycle again where power demand is going to really start to explode from these sort of high 2% numbers you're seeing on the screen. Now, I want to say something right now that is incredibly important. We do not need AI demand to keep the power markets incredibly tight for the next 20 years. AI demand just turbocharges. That's all it does. And it creates shortages. So just remember that. Early in my career, I was on a panel with Sam Zel.
Interestingly, it was a panel on opportunities in Mongolia. I was looking at a copper mine and he was looking at real estate. There was one thing he said that stuck with me for the rest of my career is he said, "If you can buy an asset, a hard asset at below replacement cost for an asset that's going to be needed in the future where we're going to need to build new capacity of that asset. Then you buy that asset at the discount to replacement cost. You hold it and you sell it at a big premium to replacement cost when the market wakes up.
That's exactly we did with Equity Office properties. Sold it at the peak of the market but bought it at a discount to replacement value. Talon Energy is a power producer. They have 2 gawatts of nuclear power and they've got 6 gawatt of natural gas base load power. Today in the stock market, as a good speculation, you could purchase this company at a $25 billion enterprise value. the replacement cost is 45 billion. And because they've got debt, it means that the equity value uh just to get to replacement cost uh is more than a double uh from where it's trading today.
And if you follow Sam's playbook, then we ultimately end this cycle at a big premium to replacement value. So when I see this, I say the plan for America on the power side has to be this. Make America great again. Copy China. If you look what China did over the last 20 years, we started out this cycle with having 2x the power generation that China had. Fast forward to today, China has three times the power generation capacity that we have. Now, if you believe that artificial intelligence is going to be responsible for scientific breakthroughs, you either have it or you don't have the scientific breakthroughs.
If you believe that artificial intelligence is going to drive robotics, you either have it or you don't have that productivity from the robots. If you believe that artificial intelligence is going to be helpful for national security and military affairs, then you either have it or you're dead. And so this is an absolutely mandatory buildout that we have to do otherwise we're going to fall behind because at the end of the day what is a data center? You know in my world in the commodities world I look at a data center as the exact same thing as a refinery.
In a traditional hydrocarbon refinery you put oil in crude oil in you refine it into jet fuel or gasoline for your car. With a data center, you put electricity in and on the other end instead of gasoline or jet fuel out comes photons or tokens or intelligence, whatever you want to call it, but it's the same thing. Big capital inensive asset, $50 billion per gawatt and power just like electricity, just like oil is the input to that refinery. So, here's Jensen Jensen Jensen and uh he was just recently quoted that we need a thousand times more power than we currently have.
Now, if that's remotely true, we need every single source of power that you can imagine. We need hundreds of gigawatts of nuclear, we need solar, we need orbital, we need it all, if this is even remotely true. But the challenge as we spoke about before is the supply chain, right? All of these, you know, a data center competes for the same supply chain of the critical minerals that space launches and orbital data centers do. Power plants need all the same nickel super alloys that it takes to launch rockets and the silver that goes into these photovalttaic cells.
And so and so there's going to be shortages of everything and delays everywhere. And my point here is we are just going to need every solution that we can throw at this for the foreseeable future. So here's a little region in the US called the PJM, Pennsylvania, Jersey, Maryland. Uh this is a forecast from the grid operator where they say that over the next 10 years we're going to need 106 gawatts of new power in the PJM in just one little area of the US. Now in 10 years in geological time that's like tomorrow morning right we're all so used to internet time you press a button and you get your food delivered to you or your car picks you up in two seconds you know building infrastructure happens in geological time 10 years to build out 106 gawatt is literally a nancond from now and you know you see that thermal coal retirements we ain't retiring those coal plants because there's no world where we're going to be building 100 gawatt in 10 years that's the size of what Japan consumes today for one little part of the US.
And you know what I'll say is those that understand the supply chain and what goes into building all this, everybody's in panic mode because we know that we don't have the raw materials to meet this level of demand that's coming our way. So that's going to keep existing capacity and power prices very tight. Now the data center and the hyperscalers are in a panic. They're trying everything they can to source as much power as they can under long-term PPAs power purchase price agreements at fixed prices for 20 years.
There's a famous example, you know, I thought Microsoft was a green company, but they went and convinced Constellation Energy, which is a company that owns the 3M island nuclear reactor, you know, the one that melted down and created, you know, the nuclear meltdown that gave nuclear a bad name for 30 years. It was Microsoft that told them they needed to start it up. And in order to incentivize to stimulate their hand to wallet reflex to start this thing up, they said, "Power prices stay $50 a megawatt hour.
We'll pay you a hundred a year for 20 years minimum price for you guys to start this up." And so here we have it. Uh 3M Island brought to you by Microsoft Azure. So, you know, it's getting harder to do these deals because the regulators are saying, "Wait a minute. If you're taking all this power off the grid for your data center, how are we going to heat the homes of our customers?" And so, uh, you know, it we're getting ourselves into the moment of what I call crunch time.
So, just to finish up, uh, here are the numbers on Talon. Um, the stock today is sort of in the high 300s. If they just do absolutely nothing, just absolutely nothing, just sit there and run the business, let their Amazon data center contract roll up, these guys will be generating $50 a share of free cash flow per year. Again, the stock is in the high 300. So, it's about seven times free cash flow. Good infrastructure assets in the US, traded about 15 times. So, that's pretty good.
You get a double for basically management just sitting around and doing nothing. But if they continue to figure out ways to sign contracts with data centers at premium prices or if power prices go up. I mean the amazing thing right now is in the PJM where these guys operate, the power price is still too low to stimulate new capacity. The math still doesn't work, which is really mindboggling. So if power prices go up a bit, they do more deals, you get to $70 a share of recurring annual free cash flow, put a 15 multiple on that, that's,50.
But then if they get into building power plants, right? And right now the regulator is telling these companies to go sit in a room, power producer, data center, come in a room, make a deal so that you build power and get a good return on it. And the data center gets their power gets a good return on it. And Talon is in a pole position to be able to do this. If they just build like 4 gawatt of the 100 gawatts that we need, you could get up to, you know, over $100 a share of free cash flow.
The stocks in the high30s today. So, uh, go and buy the shares. It's a good speculation and, um, we can chat. All right. Not financial advice. Gavin, go. go. go. Gav and go. I just, just very curious like how do you think about regulatory risks here? Nobody likes their electricity prices going up. AI is an increasingly political issue just like how do you think about that risk? We need AI and we need to figure this out. And so there's different ways to skin a cat here, right?
My personal view is during peak hours, right? If you go drive down a highway at 4 in the morning, you know, you would sit there and say, "Why do we have all this highway capacity? This is crazy." But then you go on that same highway at rush hour, you're like, "Oh, we don't have enough highway capacity. There's not enough lanes." Power is the same thing. There's only a few hours a day where you really stress the system. And so I think the working solution to get around this regulatory issue is you do the PPAs with the data centers.
You force the data centers to throw a ton of battery behind it and some peakers just to get through that really intense period. And then uh that's a good band-aid solution until we build more power. So there's ways to do this. Human ingenuity is going to win here. We're going to get our data centers and consumer power bills are going to be, I think, relatively under control. They're going to go up, but they're going to be under control. Okay, Dan, I have three questions from the audience.
Really good ones. Number one, does your thesis actually need behind the meter collocation to clear or is it just a bet that clean firm base load is scarce enough that it doesn't matter whether power flows in front of or behind the meter? It's the latter. And that's why I gave three scenarios, right? The $50 a share of earnings per share. Again, a high $300 stock, right? $50 a share of earnings. Nothing has to happen. You just sit, right? And you double your money. Now, if you get more behind the meter or even front of the meter, that's how you get up to that $70 a share of earnings from 50.
And then if you get up to the 70, but start building new capacity, then you get to the $100 plus. plus. plus. Okay. Question two from Brad. How do you think about competition for power from things like fuel cells, gas turbines, aerodyit turbines, orbital compute, and other sort of IPs, independent power producers. producers. producers. We need all of it. We we you know fuel cells and you know the Caterpillar solar turbines these are fantastic bridge solutions but the cost to run these things the LCOE is like through the roof but you you know look to build a $50 billion data center you don't want it to sit idle for 3 years waiting for your base load CCGT so you do whatever it takes you don't give a crap what you pay for that bridge solution and so we're finding ways through fuel cells through uh you know Caterpillar solar turbines hopefully through orbital data centers where we can alleviate this because I want AI to happen in a really big way and we're going to need all the above.
Okay, question three. By the way, great questions guys. Thank you for these. What is the right terminal multiple for Talon if the business mix shifts from merchant IP to contracted infrastructure? infrastructure? infrastructure? Fabulous question Fabulous question Fabulous question and and and the addendum here and what percentage of EBIDA needs to be contracted before the market should rerate it? So, that's a great question and and I only had six minutes to do this and I think I blew through my time so I couldn't get into this kind of detail, but it's something I would have really wanted to get into.
So, whoever asked that, thank you. Uh, I just use the 15 multiple because it's sort of a blended multiple between the contracted stuff, which will get a big premium multiple because, you know, it's a bond like cash flow stream and bond like cash flow streams trade at a small spread to treasuries and so treasuries if they're at 5% should trade at 20 times plus some growth or whatever, plus or minus. the uncontracted stuff, the merchant stuff that has spot market exposure is more volatile, less visible, that should trade at a lower multiple.
We can get into the minutia, but just suffice to say, the more contracts, the higher the multiple, the less the lower the multiple. Use 15 times as a good rule of thumb, and you'll probably get to the right answer, which is what I used. That last question from Daniel Sherer. Thank you for that, Dan. Thank you. That was great. Great. Thanks. My name is Oleg Nelman. I'm the founder and managing director of Eco1 Capital, a San Francisco based valueoriented biotech fund uh that I started about 13 years ago.
Thanks a lot to the besties for having me here. I'm a huge fan of the pod like I'm sure all of us are and I know how challenged Science Corner can get. So, I wrote this in a way that even David Saxs would appreciate and pay attention to if if he were here. Well, paradoxically, he's taking a nap, which is what he normally does during science corners. science corners. science corners. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Generally speaking, investing in biotech companies is a horrible idea sandwiched somewhere between movies, wineries, and spaxs.
In fact, our sector often feels a lot more like a casino than an actual financial market. And most of the tourists who are investing are playing the slots. Of course, at Eco1, we consider ourselves poker players in a sector where virtually everyone else is a momentum investor betting on science. We focus on margin of safety. We're one of the few funds not managed by PhDs or MDs, and that's by design because we don't want to fall in love with the science. We fall in love with the riskreward.
And like the slide says, we want to monetize other kids science projects. projects. projects. This is my 25th year investing in biotech. I started my career with an 11-year stint at another fund and launched Eco R1 in 2013, humble beginnings with 13 million. Since inception, we've 10xed to our investors and annualized at 20%. And today we have about two and a half billion under management. management. management. We're lucky to have long-term partners, many of whom are biotech entrepreneurs themselves, and have been with us since day one.
And we recently reopened for the first time in four years. Today I'm going to tell you about a company that's on the front lines of the war on cancer. Military terminology has been used when descri describing treatments for the disease since the early 70s when President Nixon signed the National Cancer Act. The warfare analogy is actually perfect. The warfare actually is actually perfect for cancer because both domains are trying to accomplish the exact same thing. find the enemy, figure out the best weapon to kill them, and have minimal unwanted casualties along the way.
way. way. First, a quick history of how this war has evolved. has evolved. has evolved. Early surgical cancer treatment and radiation was akin to a medieval siege. Level the entire castle, burn the surrounding village, and hope the enemy was left somewhere in the rubble. Chemo actually evolved from an accidental observation during World War I that mustard gas killed rapidly dividing tissue. Tumor cells divide fast, so doctors would flood a patient's body with chemo and hoped it killed the enemy faster than it killed allies. Unfortunately, hair, skin, gut, and marrow cells also divide quickly, and the poison doesn't discriminate.
First generation targeted therapies were next, like a GPS guided munition. Instead of carpet bombing every dividing cell, you identify the enemy's command and control center and destroy it. The problem, like with any weapon, is that the enemy adapts and hides. And in cancer, these are called resistant mutations. Imunotherapy was first introduced to patients a decade ago. With IIO, you don't send in your own troops. You recruit local allies, also known as T- cells, and let them do the fighting for you. Spectacular when it works, but highly dependent on the terrain or the tumor micro environment.
This brings me to the reason we're here today. Modern-day radio pharmaceuticals. Like a swarm of micro drones small enough to navigate the bloodstream and find their target by molecular recognition, then detonate a precisely sized warhead with a blast radius of 100 microns or the diameter of a single cell. An autonomous assassination with the force of a bunker buster and minimum collateral damage. The company I'm going to tell you about today is Actis Oncology. The ticker is AKTS. The company has a billion dollar market cap, a $500 million enterprise value, and a stockpile of cash, which should last them over 3 years.
Long past critical milestones that are coming next year. Actis was started five years ago, but recently went public with a $300 million IPO that was 18 times oversubscribed and backstopped with a hund00 million order by Eli Liy, the folks who bring you all the weight loss drugs. The company has designed a platform that can carry any radioactive payload, is complex enough to go after a variety of targets, and small enough to clear your body with minimal side effects. The beautiful thing about this approach is that physicians can verify target engagement in early clinical trials with imaging.
This significantly derisks clinical development because you know the drug is getting to the tumor. Another de-risking strategy for their first few programs Actis chose known valid targets like nectin 4 and B7H3. Nectin 4 is critical in bladder cancer and the company's second program targeting B7H3 is even more ambitious expressed on every major solid tumor including the big three prostate, colurectyl and lung. Actis started clinical trials last year and is publicly guided to initial clinical data in both of these lead programs in 2027 with Nectton 4 coming as early as Q1.
So you won't have to wait long. If either program shows a signal, the company is likely to get value not only for those programs but the entire mini protein platform. This is the holy grail in biotech, getting value simply for the promise of what might come. What's even more compelling is there's an amazing amount of interest in radiotherapies from pharma. The big ones including Bristol, Novartis, Bayer, and Lily who backs stop the Actis IPO have been building radiotherapy capabilities and they're hungry for assets to add to their pipelines.
There's been 15 billion in M&A and dealmaking in radiotherapy in the last few years and we're very much in the early innings. The neatest thing about this modality is that it's very hard to replicate. Generics generally don't traffic in radioarma and because the class involves radioisotopes it's off limits to China. So unlike most of biotech there's a real moat and now the obligatory safety warning. Axis is not for everyone. You should consult your biotech analyst before purchasing access. Initiating a position may cause increased anxiety reduced sleep through the night.
Serious sometimes drops in stock rates occur in biotech. Immediately after investing may experience sudden volatility due to lang competitors. If stock declines are experienced no fun reason. Call your broker immediately to increase your position. Remember serious safety concerns have risen in other companies local development programs. While no safety concerns occur with any access program date, they may in the future. The use of many proteins delivered for sales has not been proven. Access is no market products and thus no referring revenue solution for equity offerings may occur.
In the event of a secondary offering, immediately schedule a call with access management team to discuss placing an order. It's notoriously challenging to value biotech companies because when you risk adjust and discount back, you pretty quickly get to zero. For earlier stage opportunities like this, we like to triangulate. We think Actis could be worth 10 billion or $200 per share if even one of their programs makes it to market. And in this case, you have a lot of outs. of outs. of outs. I'm not familiar with why radioisotopes are off limits to China.
So in this particular case um Actis' radioisotope payload is actinium and actinium is manufactured from radium 233 which was used in our own nuclear programs in the US in the in the 50s and 60s. So it's a waste product from there. So actinum is not even available in other countries like China because they had a completely different uh their own program was completely different with enriched uranium and plutonium. But the but the the risk for a lot of biotech and China replication came about that Amgen Sophi Supreme Court case, didn't it?
Where they could you could make a small because it basically said all patents are composition of matter patents. So you could change one amino acid get around the patent and China's basically done that with a lot of biologics that are patented in the US and Europe. They just rip them off and then you attach the radio emmitting uh radioisotope to the molecule and you can kind of chase it. That's kind of why a lot of biotech's been depressed. Is that not true? Yeah. So with with with radioisotopes again because you have to have a a manufacturing supply that you have to source locally in the US.
Um we haven't seen any competition coming from China at all. And if if they have a successful readout though, would it not be like the case that someone in China would say, "Hey, let's go get some of the necessary radioisotopes." And radioisotopes." And radioisotopes." And they're they're I'm sure they can do it for the Chinese market, but in terms of then transfer transferring that over here, we we haven't we haven't seen it or kind of any wind of it at all. And so then my last question, I'm sorry for monopolizing.
Why do you think the markets discounted the value so much since the IPO? Oh gosh. Given the return in biotech valuation, it's pretty classic biotech. So it's traded flat since the IPO. uh biotech investors are so insanely short-term oriented that even though we're now call it eight or nine months from data that's still way too long and so our expectation is the folks will start accumulating this in the second half in anticipation of the data coming in the first quarter Gavin you had a question yeah sure so I in in in the distant past I ran a biioharmaceutical fund uh and you know it's a very hard job congratulations on those numbers but I ran that fund right after the human g genome had been sequenced and there was an expectation that the sequencing of the genome was going to lead to this explosion in therapies personalized medicines etc etc and I don't think broadly speaking we've made as much progress over the last 25 years as maybe people thought in the early 2000s and my hypothesis is that the genome is too big of a problem space for the human mind or software written by humans and AI is going to unlock a lot of kind of revolution utionary therapies.
So my question to you, I will just admit it's a selfish question. It is not about your stock pitch, which is great. It's what do you think the odds are that in the lifetimes of everyone in this room, the average human lifespan in a developed country extends well past 100 to 125, 150. I would take the over on that uh in no small part because we already have one of the best longevity drugs out there and folks don't even realize it in the glip ones and the obesity drugs.
So one of the only things that's ever been shown in act with actual data to extend life is caloric restriction and that's literally what all the obesity drugs do. So I'm sure half the people in this room are on one of them. Uh and that's just the beginning because it's trained people that you can inject yourself with something and have healthy living through pharmaceuticals. So I I think that's only going to continue. Oh, I got two questions from the audience. First one, as the launch costs per kilogram continue to fall, is there a credible pathway to use space and microgravity as a therapeutic variable given that cancer cells appear to behave differently in lowgravity environments?
That is a great question that's probably not applicable to this. Okay. And then the second question, what would be a technological breakthrough that could disrupt precision radiotherapy as a result of AI at scale to drug development and precancerous screen? screen? screen? Yeah, another awesome question. There's a a small skunks work project within Actis AI project. So with all these biotech companies, they have their little proprietary data sets that they hope to leverage with various insights. So a company like this with their many proteins and everything else they're trying to accomplish, they have their own little tiny group of PhD data scientist nerds who are seeing if they can leverage that in a pretty decent way.
Is it so it's been really hard to get CARTT in solid tumors? Um is it the case that these kind of personalized uh uh peptide based imunotherap uh therapies are showing some efficacy in some solid tumors and is that uh a space that's going to expand and kind of intersect here? intersect here? intersect here? What's most promising that I think a lot of folks have probably heard of is uh uh a new drug for pancreatic cancer from a company called Revmed was just another targeted therapy.
So for now there's not a huge amount of progress from from peptides. And have you looked at Droins before? These kind of right-handed proteins that seem to be able to penetrate solid tumors. Well, so one of the neat Well, so one of the neat things about these mini proteins is they're hopefully of the right size to be able to deliver their payload inside of the tumors. Incredible. Oleg, thank you. Thank you. By the way, by the way, somebody just yoloed into the stocks while Oleg was on stage.
It's up 6%. like the L. Don't do that while we're all trying to buy as well. Please come on. Morning everyone. My name is Kyle Samani. Uh thank you for being with us at the all liquidity today. Thanks to the besties for organizing. Today we're going to be talking about a little known asset, a little crypto asset called Geonet. Uh which is building the rails for AI. So let's jump in. Quick bit about me. Uh I founded a firm called Multicoin Capital about eight and a half years ago.
I stepped down a few months ago. Um, and in my time there, I was probably most well known for, uh, leading all three rounds of investment in Salana prior to Salana's network launch, uh, in 2020. Um, I've been deep in the crypto space for a very long time. Uh, and I thought this would be a very natural forum to talk about a very interesting investment at the intersection of crypto and AI. Uh, also big shout out to David Sax. Unfortunately, he's not here, but, uh, David did seed multicoin uh, back in the day.
So, thank you, David, for believing in me very early. All right, let's get into geoet. So the way to understand Geonet first is to look at GPS um probably everyone in this room has been in the situation on the left where you're using your phone and your phone is in the wrong spot facing the wrong way. Right here you can see this guy looks like he's facing a wall according to his phone. Um, Geonet it fundamentally is a new is it uses a technology called RTK or real-time kinematics where you can localize your location down to about 2 centimeters for context.
GPS roughly the the precision is about 2 m. So you're getting about 100x accuracy for very precise geoloccation. Uh, as you can imagine any form of kind of robotics can make use of RTK drones being the very obvious example. I'll touch on a few more just in a couple minutes here. Um, today Geonet is the world's largest RTK network in the world and it's also the fastest growing. Um, the three companies you see on the left here, Trimble, Hexagon, and Topcon, have all been building RTK networks in some form or fashion for call it 20 to 30 years.
Um, all of them combined have roughly 12,000 base stations deployed around the world. GeoNet was founded in 2021. Uh, began building out the network in 2022. Uh, and today they are roughly twice the size of the next three guys combined. Uh today's geoet is live in 150 countries around the world, more than 11,000 cities and covers roughly 80% of the global population excluding some sanctioned countries. Um so this thing is really growing quickly. Uh you might say, how did these guys build this network so fast?
Uh and the key is really this decentralized crypto model. Um so here we're looking at literally a photo of a geoet base station on the roof of someone's house. The the global geoet network, those 22,000 nodes are not being built and deployed by some one that looks like AT&T or Verizon. Those base stations are being deployed by any random guy or hobbyist or professional or small business owner who wants to make some extra money. You can go on the Geonodes website today. You can buy one of these base stations.
They're a few hundred bucks. You put it on your roof of your house or your small business. It broadcasts radio waves. You make money. Uh you actually get paid in geode tokens, which is the really cool part about this incentive system to bootstrap this thing to get it off the ground. So the Geonet network started about 4 years ago doing this. Today it's now the largest fastest growing in the world by a pretty wide margin. If you want a sense of scale, uh here we're looking at their coverage in United States.
Obviously, every single major metro is covered, but even if you look at most of the rural parts of the country, you're covering actually the vast majority of even the rural areas. Um let's talk about some of the customers and use cases for this. We'll start with agriculture first. Um the USDA actually launched a couple years ago a program to encourage farmers and ranchers to use uh precise a technologies including RTK networks. Um today actually geo the USDA is now actually subsidizing uh many farmers and ranchers all over the country uh to adopt high precision a most of which is powered by geodet.
Um getting into some specific examples of that here we're looking at what's called a robotic mule. Um this is made by a company called Burrow. Uh obviously this is transporting some grapes. You could put anything on this. Has pretty obvious application for bas almost any farm or ranch you can imagine. With the advent in computer vision, CPUs, batteries, all the other AI stuff, these things are growing like hotcakes, all of them are going to be powered by Geonet or something like it. Um, here we're looking at John Deere.
They have a new service uh that they rolled out recently called Global Unmanned Spraying Systems or Gus. Um, these things drive around. They literally spray plants with pesticides and other things of that like that. I did actually confirm this morning there are wineries here in Napa that are actually using John Deere Gus uh uh vehicles. That was pretty cool. So if you have some wine tonight, maybe it was powered by by Gus, which powered by Geonet. Um, obviously autonomous vehicles has a pretty obvious application for this.
Um, TomTom is one of Geonet's customers. TomTom is a supplier to basically every every AV program in the world, uh, excluding maybe a couple. And today, TomTom is using Geonet's data to update their maps to get them more accurate and precise as they need to cover every square inch basically around the planet. Um, one of my favorite use cases are kind of the next wave of consumer robotics, which are getting a lot of hype these days. I think the most obvious one are robotic lawnmowers. I don't think anyone loves to mow their lawn.
Um, robotic lawnmowers are now actually rolling out at pretty good scale. They're estimated they're going to sell 1 million robotic lawnmowers this year, made by companies like Yarbo, Sunseeker, and others. Um, all of those these guys are all powered by Geonet. Um, Um, Um, next up, let's get to drones. Um the world's largest drone manufacturer DJI is a Geonet customer. Uh it's not in all of their models, but it is in a lot of their models. Uh and so obviously DJI is sending a ton of traffic now over Geonet.
Uh in the coming uh you know months and years as DJI wounds down in the US and you have new a wave of American drone manufacturers pop up. I'm going to venture to guess that most if not all of them are going to end up on the GeoNet network as well. Uh the Geonet team is based in the US has deep roots here. What I love about Geonet is it's a very obvious network effect networks effect network effects business. Um this thing looks like a natural telecom, right?
You have base stations kind of all over the world. You got to cover the whole planet. Um telecoms naturally form monopolies historically. I think the same is likely to be true here. Today, Geonet is the world's largest and fastest growing network with also the lowest cost structure by a very wide margin because of this decentralized nature where people just put these things on top of their house. their house. their house. In terms of where the business at, the business just crossed about $1 million in annualized run rate a few days ago.
Uh, and it's growing more than 3x year-over-year. I think it's going to probably more than triple over the next 12 months. Um, what's really cool about GeoNet is how capital efficient it is and how they're actually returning capital to token holders. So today, uh, the Geonet network is taking of that 11 million in revenue roughly, uh, excuse me, 80% of it is being used to make open market purchases of Geo tokens. Uh, and this is all visible on the Salana blockchain. they have all the addresses are published and stuff.
So, it's all verifiable in real time. Uh that means $8.8 million right now per year is going into buying, you know, Geonet tokens on the open market. Uh what's amazing is that last 20% is they're they're covering all their R&D costs and scaling out now their business development team. With a business like this, of course, like it's a pretty small network of customers. The guys who work at John Deere know the guys who work at DJI, who know the guys who work at TomTom. And so, this thing is now growing virally amongst this kind of core community of of customers.
Um, and as you can imagine with customers who sign up for a service like this, they tend to ramp up their usage of that service over time. So once someone starts rolling out GeoNet in the first year, they're usually spending about $60,000 per year. After two years though, they're usually spending about $170,000 per year. So the average Geonet customer is growing their their revenue with GeoNet about 3x in that second year. Um, obviously then we look at their just their customers. They've signed up in the last two years.
You can see they 5x their customer base last year. Those are that net new customers. So applying some pretty simple math here, you can see they have a very clear path to more than 3x this year as this thing ramps up. Just to wrap things up summary, um Jonet is the world's largest RTK network, growing the fastest. It has really obvious network effects and is is likely to be a very natural monopoly growing 3x year over year with a bunch of flagship customers and brands that you all know.
Obviously, we have this huge physical AI tailwind behind us now, robotics and all the other amazing stuff happening. Uh and they're returning capital to shareholders. Uh the token does trade on the Salana blockchain. Uh if you want to buy, it trades 247. The ticker is geode geo d. Um so if you want to actually get some geo tokens, I encourage you to sign up for a crypto wallet, a salon wallet, and you can go ahead and buy geode tokens from there. And with that, I think we are ready for some Q&A.
some Q&A. some Q&A. Awesome. Um what's the market cap? Oh, sorry. It's trading about 150 million on a fully diluted basis. If you were to go look at any of the crypto price websites like coin.go require market cap. They're going to show you something like 60 or 70 million. That's because not all of the tokens are floating yet, but the fully diluted number is about 1 million. Is there a corporation behind it or is this just like a project in the Cayman Islands in Panama with a board that nobody knows who's on it?
Tell us about governance. governance. governance. Uh so the Geonet team is uh US-based corporation. There four teams in San Francisco. The CEO's name is Mike Horton. Uh really, really good guy. He's been building in this kind of IoT smart, you know, device space for a while. the relationship between the corporate entity and the token and which one should we own? Uh you should own the token because I own a lot of the token uh as as you might imagine. I don't own any of the equity.
Um the relationship is geoet the c you know the company is facing John Deere DJI all these companies and they have a contractual relationship with the Geonet Foundation to use 80% of their revenues to buy tokens off the open market. And that's that corporation raised venture capital or anything? Uh yes uh my prior company Multicoin actually led around in Geonet previously. previously. previously. Okay Kyle I have I have many questions from the audience so bear with me. Question one do you like Helium as much which is Geonet for 5G signal.
Uh yes I actually led multicoins investment in Helium six or seven years ago uh and continue to be a very big long-term believer. They actually had big news go out this morning. Uh but yeah I'm a big Helium fan. Question two. There's a long list of deepin projects that have failed because people just don't value the token rewards. Why is this any different? I mean, they're returning capital to shareholders. This thing is, you know, returning $8.8 million to shareholders. It's trading at $150 million valuation and it's going to grow 3x this year.
It's an unbelievably cheap asset. It's just people aren't paying attention because it's crypto bare market right now. now. now. Okay. Uh from Sam, sorry, let it's a securitized interest in the cash flows from the customers effectively. Yes. It is a revenue. It is a a a It's a revenue share token. Correct. 80%. Correct. 80%. Correct. 80%. Okay. So, the more John Deere pays Geodet the company, the more you basically deprecate the tokens, which should cause the token, they're buying tokens to open the market. Correct. market.
Correct. market. Correct. Yes. Yes. Yes. Okay. From Sam, what acres value the equity or the token? Similar to question, how does the value acrruel mechanisms square or not with current securities laws or what's contemplated in the Clarity Act? Uh, yeah. Um, so the one answer to your question is the the tokens are the ones acrewing value because they're taking 80% and buying. The other 20% is obviously funding operations. They have engineers, salespeople, all that stuff. Um, so that's all there and being funded. In terms of securities laws, uh, the Clarity Act, uh, passing is certainly very good for Geonet.
Uh, I'm not a lawyer, so I'm not going to tell you that, you know, it it passes the bars set in the Clarity Act, but I can tell you I'm an optimist and I've been very involved in the Clarity Act, uh, and I'm not too worried about it. Okay. Can I can I ask about the business just real quick? So John Deere, I know this space somewhat well. I used to manage a company called Precision Planting in Agriculture and um there was John Deere makes their own RTK systems.
So when you like run a a piece of equipment that relies on RTK, you're buying in the construction industry, Topcon or Leica or Trimble or John Deere and you install the RTK base stations and you run your equipment. Why would John Deere and others want to rely on this system as a different like why is it better than like the systems that they're already using? It wasn't quite clear to me. I mean capex versus opex, right? Like right these networks are all over the world now.
They're running at very low cost. GeoNet is is probably a third to half sorry a third to a quarter the price um than buying up your own capex and doing it. And it's just available everywhere. So now it just reduces the sales cycle time for John Deere when they just say buy the tractor. It's good. good. good. There's another big push right now for microats to be an alternative to GPS in a way that they can actually provide subcm resolution effectively replacing both GPS and RTK using a a mesh network from SpaceX launched or actually SpaceX.
I don't know if SpaceX has looked at doing this, but um I know that there is a very wellunded company that is trying to put up microats to basically replace GPS and RTK. Doesn't that ultimately kind of wash out the need to have all these earth-based base stations? I there's no chance they can compete on cost because just sending things to space with satellites that's so I mean these geoet uh base stations are a few hundred bucks. Like you're just not going to compete on cost with with geoet.
geoet. geoet. Do you think that this is a viable replacement at scale and saturation for GPS itself? GPS itself? GPS itself? No. GPS is definitely very different. Uh and the SLA is different. You've got to you've got to have ubiquity for ubiquity for ubiquity for Yeah. for GPS um for GPS alternative which is why you have to have the satellites everywhere. You got to have enough but if you get enough satellites you can actually get to RTK precision and you don't need to have the big expensive GPS.
expensive GPS. expensive GPS. You'd have a hybrid situation where you have a bunch of GEO and LEO plus a bunch of base stations all over the place. That hybrid situation probably you could actually the Leo the LEO alone can replace all of the the geo stuff. That's the goal. And then um if you get enough of them which SpaceX unlocks. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And um Kyle, what what about like other tokens when you think about other compute tasks like work to be done for example? There's a bunch of tokens that have emerged in distributed training.
How did you hone in on this and exclude the others? the others? the others? I mean, not meaning prefer this over that. that. that. I mean, I met the GeoNet founder years ago. He pitched us and I've gotten to know him and followed it. The distributed training stuff, there's a whole bunch of people trying it. I I'm pretty skeptical. I don't think any of it's going to work. Um the distributed inference stuff is is possible although it has not worked as well as we would have hoped.
I did put some money behind that a few years ago. It's it's working but not not A+. Um one last thing actually David on on your prior question I want to highlight is also energy use. Going to space just consumes way more energy than going to a base station that's you know on the ground. Um and so yeah for a tractor maybe that doesn't matter but for a drone or for any other battery sensitive application ground is always going to be uh the preferred solution. solution.
solution. Super interesting. Well done. Thank you. Thank you so much. All right, guys. Before we vote, Timoth, give your feedback. feedback. feedback. Here's what I like. I I I apply the Stan Ducken Miller school of invest investigate. I really believe in it. Yes. Yes. Yes. Um if you don't have any skin in the game, you don't care. And this is the kind of stuff that I love. I love hearing ideas like this. I love all four. My my difference is in sizing. So, you know, there's there's certain asymmetric alpha that each one of these exhibits and then there's very different downside risk for each of them.
them. them. Uh, and then there's also liquidity issues. So, for example, like I love Kyle's idea. The problem is I I could not get enough working for me where so you I don't even think I could get a million dollars in today. It would to scale in it would move the market. Um, so I would have to I'd have to probably I'd be like 10 20 30,000 and then maybe start to buy into it. talent. I think they could absorb tens of millions and people wouldn't bite an eyelash.
Um the biotech company the issue there is that I think that there is as you said Freberg this discontinuous illi liquidity zero risk but then there's the 10x upside. So there's just like huge like huge like huge Lily will bid for it and then MGM I think is just so I think MGM and Talon are the ones you could have huge sizing in and then the other ones I think you have a piece because they're like lottery tickets. I think your point on MGM. Okay. Wait, hold on.
Let me just review. So, company number one was MGM was MGM was MGM and that was Resorts. Okay. Resorts. Okay. Resorts. Okay. Company number two, Talon. Talon. Talon. Talon Energy. Talon Energy. Talon Energy. Company number three, Actis Actis Actis Therapeutics. Yeah. Therapeutics. Yeah. Therapeutics. Yeah. And then And then And then Geodet. Geodet. Geodet. Geodet. Not company, but I guess token. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Company number four, Geodet. And you're buying the token, not the company. Do you think the um maybe for you too, Gavin, like the Gavin, you rank them.
Well, no, even before you rank, just tell us what you think of the format and then assess the companies. We'll do ranking at the end. We're going to do 4 32. We're going to do 4 3 2 1 on stage, but give me your general ideas about the pitches, what you liked, what you did. I thought the pitches were great. Um I thought the format was amazing. I would for sure expand it next year. There are platforms that you guys could have a all all-in basket or ETF that people could trade in.
So like maybe that's something. something. something. Will you do it next year? Will I pitch next year? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Jake, I'll do anything. He's locked. He's locked. Actually, here's what I would ask Gavin to put you on the spot. Next year I would we I think we would all learn and benefit if you would do um silicon and memory super cycle. Sure. Would you be willing to do that for us? for us? for us? I'll do it. Sign me up. Perfect. Great. Sign me up.
Oh, thank you. So, keep going. Well, no. As far as the pitches, I do think um I think it's important to disagregate like what was a really great entertaining pitch versus what I think is is a really good riskreward. Um I thought Oleg and Kyle did a great job with the pitches, but I'm I'm not a healthcare investor, nor am I a crypto investor. I thoroughly enjoyed the presentations. I actually thought GET was very interesting. Um I'm happy to learn from Oleg that I might lift well into my 100s.
That was good news for me and everybody in the room. I enjoyed all the um the military um terminology and analogies. analogies. analogies. Yeah, that was really great. Huh. That was great. Really great. Really great. Really great. I do think um from a pure riskreward perspective, I thought MGM was the best. um your downside is really capped because of the Barry Diller bid and then you have uh Japan and Dubai as I think very valuable future sources of value. Uh and and I do think talent is also a very compelling risk.
I just think everything in AI is going to need to grapple with increasing regulatory risk which we talked about last time um that that I was on the pod with you guys and I don't know how to dimensionalize that and um you know I've been like the big negative externality for talent is nothing to do with talent. Nothing to do with talent. It's like something over the top from the US government caps prices something something. something. something. Yeah. You have nationalizes the lab. You have a change in administration.
You have a change in Congress. There's laws that are passed that I think it terrestrial computes the utility supply demand. But I actually think outside of that, Talon was super compelling. And so you got MGM, you got Talent. Now the other two. other two. other two. I I I I thought they were both great pitches. I can I tie them for third just Well, no, don't even give the score. just any feedback on those two ideas or those are just a little bit lottery ticket for you or No, I thought Actis was was very compelling.
They're trying to trying to do something different as Oleg said if you ever get a biotech company that be can become a platform and they have a mechanism whether it's of drugging whether it's targeting or if you have something that is broadly applicable that is when you can get these really really big hundred billion dollar plus outcomes in biotech which are rare so I thought that part of um activis was super compelling super compelling super compelling and um and um and um you don't play crypto I don't play crypto, but I thought the entire go Geonet discussion was fascinating and I'm happy.
Is there anything that would get you off the bench and make you jump into the crypto game or it's just you're why are you not playing the crypto game? I feel about crypto exactly the way I do about snowboarding. Okay. I'm I'm not a very good athlete. I've spent a lifetime learning how to ski and I'm okay. Um, and just the idea of getting on a snowboard, having, you know, thousands of hours of ski instruction, you don't want the pain for the game. Yes. And I have 25 years of lessons, learnings, pain, scars from from investing in equities and public securities and just crypto.
It's a little bit like snowboarding for me, but like, you know, everybody who wants to snowboard, that's great. Everybody wants to do crypto, that's great. Just please don't go sideways down the mountain and ruin the powder. David, David, David, I think your assessment of MGM Talon, I think I think MGM uh I look at the kind of return upside, the downside and the timeline. MGM's like probably a 3x. I think it's also missing this point that I've heard a lot about on you can actually upgrade the monetization on these Vegas properties.
We were talking to a friend of ours in Vegas. They're they're making a million bucks a day in incremental ibita every day that they have a show at the sphere um at the uh at the Venetian hotel which is an unbelievable statistic which tells you that when you have the entertainment draw the gambling revenue just flies flies flies flies and so Barry Diller I have heard separately has been spending a lot of time on trying to reinvent the entertainment at these properties and thinks he has an idea on how to do it which will cause the gambling revenue to fly.
So, I think even if you discount the upside on these new locations, there's probably a lot of work to be done. And I do like the floor on the bid and then you got call it 3x in 2 years even if this bid goes nowhere and they keep the thing running and they're like we're going to reject the bid and keep running independently. Talon is maybe 3x upside, 5x upside, but it's eight years out. And I think one of the other challenges with Talon that I would kind of use as a valuation metric is I think it's more interest rate sensitive than MGM is um because the power purchase agreements really are where a lot of the revenue comes from.
So you're going to get a discount rate that's a multip that's a function of where interest rates are sitting. So I think if interest rates shoot up which some might argue there's there's risk there you actually get margin compression from that 15x outlook that he has for Talon. So that would be my kind of downside scenario on Talon. um in the in the time ahead and Actis I do worry because I'm an investor in a company that's got a D protein conjugate that shows really strong efficacy in getting solid tumors.
I think that there are new modalities for therapeutics for solid tumors that are being discussed that that may kind of put this at risk. I think the China risk is legit because I've seen it across the board in biotech. Everything gets ripped off and people go to China, but they could have a hit and Lily could bid on it in 6 months if they actually get a good readout. So there's certainly upside, but the downside's probably 50 75% if they get a bad readout or China or some new modality comes out.
So I think the ranking is probably MGM Talon Actis and then the for me the geodet piece uh I I just think the space thing is is likely the path. It's going to replace all RTK and all GPS in the next decade. Um it's an inevitable piggyback on systems that are already going up. All right, great. So I think I've got everybody. Uh for me, I put them into two buckets. Um I think uh AKTS and GOD those are like lottery tickets could be crazy returns but you know there's a there's a big probability of a zero there if they don't you know uh actually work and then MGM and Talon obviously got the downside protection and those feel like um people will always gamble and leave the lights on.
So I kind of like both of those. I put 200k into each in real time. Gamble and leave the lights. Uh, so that's just like my I don't have a public vehicle. public vehicle. public vehicle. Did you actually buy? I'm just day trading. I I bought half of his action and I don't have a Robin Hood account. I have to call my office. So I was like just I'll take you lose, buddy. I'll take half your I didn't see you with your thumbs. I'm up 7% across the portfolio.
So I don't think I can include you here. Steps to buy. I did. I I waited the three in the order I said on my So anyway, I I'll just give mine really quick. I I will go MGM, Talon, uh, G, AKTS. Gavin's only gonna make trillion. Let's bring the Let's bring our four pictures out. pictures out. pictures out. We have $1,000. Please get the two men hugging statue. Wait, wait, no. Before you announce it, I need the extremely alpha male heterosexual trophy. The all-in heterosexual alpha male trophy, please.
And I need our four pitchers to come on stage. It makes it more exciting. It's like makes it uncomfortable when like they show the five people for best actor. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. You put those on the table. But wait, where's my award doing? The award. You guys have the award. Please bring me the extremely heterosexual alpha male award. You'll see why when I show you the award. Pass me this. Over a little more. All right. All right. All right. Bring me that award. Let me show you how we 3D modeled this.
No one wants to see this. Look at this. This is two men uncomfortably hugging. And the way we did this, it's the best. Come here, Freeberg. I'll show you. I'm not doing it with you. Come on, Freeberg. You do it tomorrow. Free. Okay, fine. He's extremely comfortable. comfortable. comfortable. That's David and I. It's David and you. But let's show them how we modeled this. We just did a long This is uncomfortable. And we hold it for five extra seconds. At 2 minutes, you get the release of oxytocin.
There it is. Okay. So, gentlemen, this is it. Do you guys have the results? Go ahead. Audience award. Audience award. So, So, So, based on 150 votes from the audience, uh, do I just go four to one? Four to one. Four to one is more exciting. Okay. Fourth place, uh, with 5% of the vote was Kyle Sani. Okay. Well done on the board. A very close second place. second place. second place. No, third. Third. Third place with 21% of the vote. Oleg rock rock rock leg.
Oh boy, we're closing in here, guys. Very dramatic. And with 50 50% who's number two. I'm going to go to you. No, you say number one now. Okay. Okay. Okay. No. Okay. Well, sorry. Yeah, you're right. With 24% of the vote in second place, Aaron Cowan for MGM. NUMBER ONE WITH 50% of the vote. Dan Drafus. Wow. Unbelievable. Give it up. Nicely done. Now the bestie though. Wait, hold on before we do the bestie. How do you feel right now having won this? Pass him the award.
You guys look so uncomfortable. so uncomfortable. so uncomfortable. You guys are really It's very But pass him his award for a second and let him hold it. Give it academy award. Thank everybody how you got to this place. place. place. Say a few words. I got my award. I got my tequila. my tequila. my tequila. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. There you go. All right. Well done. Okay. Now Okay. That's the award. 4 3 2 1. It's uh relatively similar here. Uh fourth place was Kyle Simmani.
Okay. Third place was Oleg. Second place Dan Drafus. First place Aaron Cowen. Big upset. Flip the audience vote. audience vote. audience vote. There you go. All right. So MGM wins. All right. All right. All right. Thanks guys. Thanks guys. Thanks guys. This was amazing. All right. Thank you all for participating. participating. participating. Thank you very much. Thank you so much for coming and we'll see you next