‘COOPERATION?’: Investor says China talks could RESHAPE AI race

Added: 2026-05-14

[00:00:00]The big news of today, of course, President Trump landing in China. This high-stakes talks with President Xi and well, Trump brought a few friends along with him on Air Force One. And here's the thing, right? Although the combined net worth of these guys is well over a trillion dollars, we know they could have flown on their own. Nevertheless, these are the most powerful business leaders. They're all founders, many of them visionaries. And I love it because they continue this tradition of American exceptionalism, uh pioneering businesses, even creating whole industries out of whole cloth. So, listen, a billion a trillion dollars means if you're worth that, you've created a lot more wealth for others.

[00:00:34]And that's just another reason why this visit is so important for you, the investor. I want to bring in now Founders ETFs partner, also portfolio manager Michael Monahan. And Michael, uh you know, lots of these CEOs are ironically enough companies in your top holdings, right?

[00:00:50]You've got I looked at your top holdings and many of them are Jensen and Musk are represented there.

[00:00:56]Yeah, we've got two-thirds of or three out of five of these we own. Yeah, you got Nvidia, Oracle, Meta. Zuckerberg's not there, but there's a representative there. You you got Larry Fink there and I mean, so talk about this, right? Why Why Why is this, you know, the that these founders are so much more important? What What is it that they bring to the job that a for-hire CEO doesn't? So, founders tend to be very different than a for-hire higher CEO. They bring charisma, they bring vision, and they bring relentless execution that allows them to build these very high-scale, mission-driven companies.

[00:01:34]What do you think these guys obviously didn't go over there for just for kicks, you know, they want something in return.

[00:01:40]What do you think? What kind of goodies do you think they'll return? So, what we hope they come back with is is greater cooperation. We're sort of in the camp with let's um let's cooperate more with China. So, we want to watch some of those policy.

[00:01:52]Like, we want to see good policy so that Jensen continues to lead the AI race.

[00:01:57]So, again, this is a just so the audience can understand, this is from your website. Founder-led companies versus other companies, it's not even close.

[00:02:05]No, it's not. And as as you show up on the screen, Bain & Company did this research and released it in 2014 that from 1990 to 2014, founder-led CEOs in the S&P 500 outperformed by three times.

[00:02:18]So, the factor is very strong to help with your investment performance. I got a feeling that number's even higher now.

[00:02:23]Let's talk about your sort of your your your philosophy for for your fund. For your ETFs, rather. Yeah, so absolutely focus on the founders. We're long-term investors. We look at the mosaic and try to ignore the short-term noise to have the best chance of long-term compounding.

[00:02:40]I notice that you you focus on these companies that are making the investments in CapEx and and a focus on high return on investments. A lot of folks have done the exact opposite.

[00:02:49]That's been frowned upon with these hyperscalers that they've gone too far, that they've made these bets are too big, and there won't be a return on investment. We don't see that at all. I think Elon renting out his Colossus data center to Anthropic for $6 billion sort of shows you can get a two- or three-year payback on these facilities.

[00:03:08]So, we don't think we're they're over-investing in infrastructure. If anything, we think there's continued to be under-investment. We think there needs to be more. I want to ask one more thing about your your ETFs, the FFF the ETF.

[00:03:20]What does it mean when you say the investors are limited have limited exposure most ETFs but 100% when you So, we own 100% founders. If you look at the S&P 500, only 17% of the market capitalization is led by a founder. And in the Nasdaq 100, only 23% of the market capitalization is led by a founder. So, if founders drive innovation, we believe the Founders 100 is the most direct and most pure way to invest in that.

[00:03:46]So, there's one area that even founders haven't been able to avoid pay paying, and that's of course software.

[00:03:53]Now we're coming back here a little bit.

[00:03:55]I'm not sure if I'm if I'm ready to believe this although I'm getting hammered in so many stocks. I hope this is real, but you you say there's going to be a post a sort of a post world a post SaaS apocalypse world and and and that world there will be opportunities.

[00:04:08]We think there's going to be a renaissance in enterprise software. We think they're overdone. We've been through the multiple compression phase and we've sort of gone through the phase that everything will be vibe coded.

[00:04:17]That's not going to be what's going to happen. These traditional enterprise software are going to be the trusted endpoint into the enterprise with which the AI models are hooked into. So we're not going to have less enterprise software. We're going to have more. And and and with that in mind there two names that stand out. Founder led company Salesforce Marc Benioff who's a celebrity CEO people love him and Palantir Alex Karp. I'm a huge fan of Alex Karp.

[00:04:44]Both though have been under a lot of pressure particularly software.com.

[00:04:48]When does the turn come? When does it happen? So the numbers out of Palantir were fantastic. You saw the rule of 40 move from 127 to 145. What we think is going on in Palantir it's a shareholder turnover. So some of that rapid retail base that was investing in Palantir is now chasing the socks in the semis and we're going to have to see institutional flows come back in which we think as Alex continues to print numbers will happen. Before I let you go Sarah Bros founder led company IPO on tomorrow the CEO.

[00:05:16]It seems like he's someone that you would like >> [laughter] >> right? The path to build something new out of nothing and make it great is part isn't part time work. It's every waking minute.

[00:05:26]Is it a name that you may entertain buying tomorrow? It's a name that we're definitely looking at. It's in our zone.

[00:05:33]It's founder led and certainly they have a huge advantage in inference and AI. We think they'll do very well. Yeah. I got to tell you it's just really something to watch these companies you know come out of nowhere and just create the wealth they have. You got a front row seat. You've been making people money for it. Good stuff. Great thanks.