hey everybody welcome back to twist my name is alex today is july 15th 2026 and that means it's a wednesday and that means it's time for yet another venture capital roundtable and we're recording this right after news broke that stripe wants to buy paypal we're also going to talk about ai's next bottleneck how startups can build defensible software and more but to help me grok the market i have brought along two crackerjack vcs and they are eric bond one of the founders of hustle fund a super early venture capital firm currently investing out of its fourth fund hustle fund has backed companies like webflow agree.com boom charter space and others eric welcome to the show thank you so much alex happy to be here we also have jeff morris jr he's the founder of chapter one investing out of its third fund chapter one has backed companies like superbase mercury flex and uh metafly a company that i also love jeff welcome to the show great to be here alex thanks for having me we'll get to all the startup stuff and founder stuff in a minute but i want to start with this enormous possible transaction because it blows my mind the news is that stripe a private company may purchase paypal a public company for more than 50 billion dollars so just first reactions jeff let's start with you uh did this deal surprise you do you think it's smart what was your kind of first page analysis yeah i think it did surprise me the uh you know when you picture paypal and you hear the name you just think they're not acquirable right and you have this private company stripe who really is in world building mode and wants to um you know as a private company buy this iconic payments platform and it's just you know i think it's just a headline that's very surprising it shows i think some of the benefits of staying private though because stripe can do these things without the scrutiny of the public markets and presumably has a balance sheet to make it happen and so um yeah it is surprising i think it's you know it's like one of those things you hear about the paypal mafia and you think uh think of this iconic coming and now it's honestly it makes me feel old um it's like my my first reaction and um you know it's just a sign of the times everybody's out to to world building mna is obviously a great way to do that i was going back through very early stripe coverage and i think when they were worth like 20 million dollars both elon musk and peter teal two of the best known paypal mafia members also backed it so this is actually kind of revenge of the same team if you will jeff uh but your point about you know the flexibility of the private markets allowing you to do more stuff that to me implies that you think that if stripe had been public when they executed this transaction and it's not confirmed yet etc etc uh that it would have been poorly received by the markets i wouldn't say it'd be poorly received i think there's just more um considerations as a public company when you do anything mna related and you know stripe stripe being a private company just has flexibility to take a longer term point of view on what this acquisition might mean for their company going forward without impacting their uh you know public uh market market cap um in the near term and so i think when you're private you can just do things that are a bit more like yolo and uh this is definitely for me a sign of the times yeah all right eric i know you and your firm invest incredibly early so you're the person we should always talk to when it comes to super late stage unicorns buying public companies uh but i'm really curious what your thoughts were about this uh paypal's share price peaked above 300 uh back in the 2001 2022 era and they're going to go private maybe for 16 and a half bucks a share kind of a shocking decline in uh in worth you know i've been watching a lot of hamilton musical with my kids and king george is my favorite character and his you know song always has that course which is like oceans rise empires fall so you know paypal is just one of those canonical brands out of dot com 1.0 era really and um it's in some ways unsurprising this is just how the nature nature works in silicon valley you know you see these incredible uh rising stars and then you know at some point they become white stars and sort of fizzle out and so forth and you know this actually wasn't really surprising news i figured that paypal was going to be a target at some point because it seemed like they've been stagnating over the last couple of years yeah um the stripe thing is interesting as a private company doing this transaction or at least intending to do this transaction and the my suspicion is that paypal kind of calcified in its own within itself right so like you kind of find these company arcs where they're startup-y they do cool things they innovate they break things and then they professionalize you know a bunch of mbas start to join and then it starts to become about the employees trying to figure out how to get promoted for themselves innovation kind of stops and they know that they have a really good brand and asset for sure but my sense is the culture is totally broken so maybe stripe can do something really fun here with this asset yeah i was reading their last uh earnings call that's just the transcript because i'm i'm lazy and don't like audio uh the ceo the install the new ceo i think it was in february and he was like there are and i'm gonna air quote this is close enough like uh places where we can make large cuts and in the company so i think on the point of being kind of calcified internally that makes a lot of sense uh eric uh yeah i'll stick with you eric do you think that there's any way to build a large technology company that doesn't end up in kind of yahoo paypal territory given enough time microsoft kind of did it right they've been around since like the 1970s and they you know had their ups and downs but they seem to be seem to be generally trending in the right direction and i suppose like an oracle as well um i think it's been it's been done you know there have been enterprises even beyond tech that are sort of innovative i guess that have lasted a lot longer maybe like a ge and so forth so yeah certainly but uh at least within silicon valley you know the examples are admittedly quite few so you know i'm struggling to find more than five or ten and then jeff on the on the take private aspect of this you know it does seem that every time i talk to a founder they just have no interest in being public because they don't see any upside to it do you think that seeing a one of the latest stage highest value private unicorns take a public company out is just kind of a sign of the times or is this more of a starting gun to see more of this kind of a transaction happen i mean i think it's a uh there are two realities in silicon valley one is you have the spacex ipo and the rush of ipos that will soon follow um you know obviously open ai anthropic etc which will create i think a new class of entrepreneurs who really does want to go public and give employees for different reasons you know um in those cases maybe it's not private capital available to uh to fund their their infrastructure projects um but i think i think there's actually going to be more companies over the next year or two that view going public as being a great thing um whether those stock prices hold up you know spacex is now trading today below uh their ipo price for the first time since the ipo yeah and said going public doesn't mean that you're just going to have um you know an easy path going forward you still have to to perform um i do think there's been a uh kind of fear of going public over the past two or three years uh and you know stripe is famous for being one of the companies that really does want to stay private and so for a long time stripe has been one of the cultural kind of like north stars within the silicon valley for how uh you know like best practices for for how a company should should should see the future um so it's you know i think i think it's going to be uh a mixed bag there are going to be there's a ton of targets on the public markets uh especially within sasland that are going to struggle and whether they like it or not even on the consumer side like you hear rumors of snap going private again right um and so that's it's it'll be very interesting and and we'll see what uh what that means for a lot of companies and you know in the next year too i have a question for like both of you on this too so like what does it even mean to be private at this stage i mean like so i can go into my my salium account i have a little bit of stripe shares and actually there are places for me to trade you know and transact and get liquidity from from my equity at the at the same time and even things like anthropic and open ai they're producing some sort of vague quarterly reporting that's actually affecting public equities whenever they they announce right so it's this line seems to be getting so blurry so if there's liquidity available and actually uh i guess like some public sense of of uh performance then i i don't know what what the benefit is becoming for public companies maybe outside of like some fundraising opportunity well on that point we saw the the blow-up between usvc and andrel now a couple weeks back when they said hey you know we got series eight chairs and drill said no and they said well yes and then there's big back and forth about who was to blame for that and that to me is just an indication of why the private markets are different i mean they they don't have the same part of transparency in terms of data um it's harder to get price discovery because the market's less liquid so you have less price efficiency so to me like a bunch of reasons eric are why they're bad and if you look at the most valuable companies today they they all grew you know their last 99 while public and so to me it's just it just it feels weird to see adolescents in the corporate world extend forever as venture capital firms get larger and also i can't benefit in my uh my index funds as easily so i think there's still a reasonable argument to be made for going in public but you know i think i think just right you know i think stripe set this north star and everyone's emulating them because who doesn't want to be a colson brother you know uh does anything break this this trend like what could happen jeff that would actually get people to want to list again like is there any like prestige to it our show is filled with helpful and practical advice for founders but there's another reason to become a regular twist listener amazing deals on essential products to help you run your company more effectively so i'm super excited to announce our new deal with agree.com the all-in-one contract to cash flow go right now to agree.com sign up and tell them you're a jcal listener and they'll give you 50 off for life agree is the number one fastest way to go from contract to cash that means gathering e-signatures invoicing billing payments and revenue recovery no more jumping between four or five different platforms just to write out a contract get it signed then set up billing and start sending out invoices 99.64 of all invoices on the entire platform are paid within just 10 days so if you want to stop chasing invoices go right now to agree.com and if you tell them jason sent you you're gonna get 50 off for life i mean i think the um capital markets might force that for some companies just in terms of the private markets being exhausted um and unable to finance those really expensive uh fundraising rounds the eric made a great point though which is the secondary markets really do blur the lines between what's a public and private company and you know as as eric was saying that i was thinking as a ceo maybe you want to become public just to get all the secondary noise out of your life because that's managing the secondary transactions if you're a private company ceo is a huge pain in the butt um and if you're anything in any critical industry company um doing anything you know selling to the government or anything similar the you actually have to control the secondary markets in a really efficient way or that can come back to bite you on the contracting side um when you're selling to the government so there's a lot of foreign um investors in uh uh countries that you know these funders would prefer not to have on their cap tables who um are desperate to get access to those names so just controlling the secondary markets is a huge huge challenge for these founders for for yeah excellent point too i mean like you could have like a chinese oligarch with a singaporean entity trying to invest in like a defense company in the united states right so all these like sort of shell company things so i'm sure like if the u.s government they're like why is andro taking this money right and andro's like we're trying not to we're staying private and we're exercising pretty strict control over their their equity what percentage of founders of companies that are later stage are actually okay with having their secondary shares trade relatively freely or is the andro position here the common point for most founders i think the andro position is going to become the more common point because you're going to see more and more stories of investors who um are there from uh who aren't welcome on the cap table getting access to that um that name or you know i think you'll just have founders who who who want to control this process because it's become uh and if you've seen the spv stories now where people just disappear like the manager of spv suddenly doesn't respond to emails they can't be be found and i think on the investor protection side you're going to have um a requirement to you know on the sec side or something similar to come in and clean this part of the market up uh because it's so i think crypto rug pulled to spc spv managers could flee i think that was really the uh the order of operations there you got to set some precedence um now just before we hopped on we were talking about flex the company that you guys have both back that just announced a series b one round 70 million 1.2 billion dollar valuation clearly in the fintech space um this is a major piece of fintech mna do you think that it's going to lead to increased interest from incumbent firms we just saw bank earnings come in really strong uh to buy what we might call the middle class of fintech startups eric oh that's a very interesting take um i don't know like you know i think the eye on a lot of investors i guess everyone's like just focusing right now on just like pure ai companies right now and like gross stage late and and so fintech has always been this category that i think in the last like two or three years has been slightly overlooked but it's one of those um i think going concerns there's models that have like really clear going concerns of how money comes in and goes out so um consolidation i think is always uh something that's happening uh in in the finance world like you know with these big banks i never really considered whether you know there's like a harvesting strat harvesting strategy taking place for modern fintechs because i always felt like that's happening more on like regional banking you know some of these like uh kind of classic roll-ups that are taking place but i think it's a pretty decent hypothesis i just haven't really put much thought behind it well i'm hoping it's the case because it'd be really fun to talk about some stories that are not just ai because i write a newsletter and i'm just always like good morning welcome to this week in alex thinking about stuff it's all ai again and that gets kind of boring um all right let's talk about let's talk about ai so uh one of the most interesting deals we've seen i think in the last couple of quarters was the exit of finn to salesforce finn previously intercom they famously kind of burned the boats and pivoted the company towards agents and renamed themselves after their agent and it worked out pretty well they're an example of a sas unicorn that was struggling fighting his footing in the ai era and having a pretty solid exit to a major company just kind of a win for everybody eric i was going through webflow's history and i know that the company went through a pretty big shake up i think it was this may cut some of the staff and really kind of re-architected for where they see the future going so i'm curious about like when should a startup founder know that it's time to kind of like let go of the past and be willing to set fire to kind of build values they can scale up to kind of the growth expectations we now see in the current era yeah i've been tracking webflow for a long time in fact it was the very first angel investment i ever made many years ago so vlad is a good friend from 2007 when he started this company and they really nailed it during the web 2.0 rise with uh just how they architected this like software within the browser it was kind of revolutionary and you know had all this wonderful control and what they're finding themselves is um kind of rug pulled by this ai era where uh there's a different kind of paradigm here now in terms of how people want to design they don't want to learn how to like put css together and so forth so it was really painful to watch that one because i think that the cultural web flow during its peak was really really cool but it did get kind of bloated and per what we discussed earlier about paypal's cultural class uh ossification or whatever they were experiencing something similar here too so it was somewhat of a brave call and one yet to be seen as successful that they had to do some pretty major cuts to try and make this company lean again so they can actually start to feel a little bit more of that startupy vibe once again so i think it was necessary uh for them to to go through this but um again to be to be said whether they catch up to some of the competitors at this point yeah when i was working at crunch space from pre-series b through after our series c i was amazed at how much the company grew in terms of staffing and then how much process got built almost like automatically or naturally as we scaled up in headcount and i don't mean to be a cynic here and i don't mean to be an ai doomer because i'm not but it does seem that whenever we see inefficiencies whenever we see cultural ossification to use your phrasing uh it's the humans that are the problem and so are we just kind of moving towards a world in which it's it's almost like the fewest like the highest revenue per employee is going to be the most efficient and least slow company as in humans should only be added when they're like so painfully necessary because otherwise you're going to end up with everyone going to meetings about meetings that's just that that is where this seems to be going eric i think so i mean you know the vision that i'm currently subscribing to is that all of us become some form of individual contributor as a key component of our jobs that's orchestrating all these agents in our work and that's kind of the life i'm trying to build for myself and the really neat thing about that is you know when i have command over i guess all these agents you know i can i can feel a little bit startupy in terms of the work um you know just just because i have so much capacity to try different things or experiment even while i'm sleeping so i hope so but i don't know i mean like i feel like the ossification timeline has been a recurring thing since like modern white collar work has has happened so maybe we get to a new normal for how much throughput we're expected to produce and then it ossifies in a different kind of form so that's dead on um talking to my dad about his early professional days they had like a typing pool and they had all these people that carry documents around the office to their next station and today like we would think that's absolutely insane because everyone's down charge of their own email and scheduling and so forth and so i think we've already become more ic-ish but maybe this is the next iteration of this but jeff when eric was talking about becoming more startupy you were nodding your head so i want to get you to weigh in here i was just thinking we talk about burning the boats on the company level but i think every employee at each every company needs to burn the boats on what they think their job is and what they're going to be doing you know going forward um and kind of surprises me i think there's there hasn't been as much of a like a just a rush to learn all the new tooling amongst my peers as i thought there there might be i'm obviously a vc now so i think our jobs are relatively different than working at a startup but um you know i think there's a chance it's like pretty easy to become ai native within a company even today um where you you just need to be like the one who's most interested in ai amongst your peer group which is actually relatively easy yeah within most orgs the founders i'm talking to are shipping code faster than ever thanks to ai but one big important question remains if every feature you write and ship has to slow down for an overwhelmed database what's the point but fear not the solution is mongo db instead of wrestling with rigid schemas and painfully reworking antiquated data structures and formats mongo db's native data model perfectly mirrors the language llms are already speaking mongo db gives you the flexibility to ship at the speed of ai the acid compliance guarantees you actually get to sleep at night while it scales to handle massive fortune 500 workloads and the best part is developers swear by it literally i can't use the actual words they said in this ad so let's just call it a really great database start building at mongodb.com slash ai like i kind of think as on the individual level is like yes it's become easy to burn their own boats but so do so does every single employee in silicon value at this point and um and that's that's kind of what i was nodding my head out yeah do you think that vc needs to go through a similar evolution slash revolution because i know that some companies some firms i should say have been more data focused than you know hand sourcing focused over time but there's always seem to be the kind of the edge of venture versus kind of the core of it i do yeah i absolutely do and i think the newer firms it's very similar to like the paypal stripe conversation where you have the opportunity for your newer firm to really shift your strategy and become you know i think by necessity most emerging managers run pretty lean firms and so to we've over the past you know however many years become more software and data oriented just to compete i guess there hasn't been a choice it's like you have to do this um and now you know seeing the bigger firms like the big platforms i think the question is like how many people do they really need to be efficient and is is you know having a a 500 person org the right solution and i think there's just going to be a barbell adventure just like there is in in the private markets on the company side are you trying to imply that very large platform vcs that are multi-stage multi-focus multi-adventure might have some cultural ossification of their own because that would be a pretty reasonable point i think yeah i i okay i'll just you guys have to be nice i don't um when andreason announced their latest batch of new media partners i was a little bit perplexed it seemed to be a little bit afield of the uh the overall mission but if you have a lot of these i guess you can afford a lot of side quests eric your firm is uh seven people according to the website um how much automation have you guys put into place to keep that number of people relatively small because it's just a couple of partners and a little bit of finance looks like yeah i mean i'll uh admit that there's actually a bit more so seven full-time but 22 total and the majority of our team are contractors working on media and uh network and events uh but only four investors so we are building lots of software if you talk to my co-founders elizabeth and she and in particular they are ridiculously sleep deprived because they've been rushing with their fable access to ship tons of code and are they're producing code every day um so for you know i think uh jeff is making an amazing point which is for earlier stage kind of smaller aum funds that are resource constrained scarcity has a wonderful way of uh forcing innovation and uh doing more with what you got right and right now the best uh hammer that we have in our hands is like these are these ai tools where we could just like constantly vibe code things that we can do with our data outreach uh that's a little bit more automated even a little bit of deal assessment as well so it's a fun place to be there's a reason why i'm actually in my garage right now it's because i can't afford like a nicer office but um yeah it's a it's a cool place to be and i'll just make another comment too about some something that we're kind of dodging it's like it's amazing how ass backwards the vc industry is right now in the sense that most people as jeff is saying are not actually using these tools in a big way right like i think the majority of vcs have not touched cloud code once wait no no no no that's impossible no i i really do think so i mean they may have opened it and put like how do i like make a brisket or something like that but i think they're not actually committing anything to like github or versell or anything like they're not actually producing real software and it is crazy how much pen and paper i'm still seeing during these meetings with other vcs you know and versus and i'm not sure how any of this is getting transcribed into like you know institutional knowledge and data and so forth surely the people telling me that everyone needs to be ai native and move places fast those are the people who are leading the charge in their in-person interactions right they wouldn't yeah and also like without walking the walk my boomer parents like my dad was a smoker and he was a doctor she was also like you should probably shouldn't smoke you know and you know like you know the say what say what like do as i say not as they do kind of situation i don't even mean to to poke fun it just it surprises me that the people who are often writing very large checks into technology companies haven't it's like not test driving a car before you buy a ford it just feels a little bit do you do they have people that tell them what what's cool and what's not is that like a like a job in vc now like to be like a whisper or kind of an amanuensis to an elderly vc who doesn't want to learn is that what is that the renewed venture capital job path because i think that would be a good one maybe you should take that yeah i think to eric's point actually amazes me because using the software and the tools is actually a great way to win the deal and so that's happened to us we like better off which we invested in last year yeah we just built a simple web app and user authentication and went to the second meeting showed the founder what we had built with their infrastructure and suddenly you're on the cap table like it's it's like the and by the way that takes with clog code like five minutes now yeah it's not like that was a six-month project no it literally took us five or ten minutes and the founder is he was amazed right and and so it's like it's almost faster than reading the deck to actually use the product and um i don't know what i don't know why that is i think there's a rat race within venture where you stack your calendar and you have like zero time to experiment or or think and that's just sort of like the the culture that exists within most venture firms about going and using ai technologies one of the things that's come up quite a lot is what to do at the startup level regarding uh models and evals and i don't want to beat to death again the idea that yes open source models are improving and the gaps closing to closed source and all that uh but there's been some interesting commentary lately about how startups shouldn't just bring their own intelligence in-house but also design their own evals around it because no one knows their company better than them and that makes good sense to me but it also seems to be technically tricky and demanding quite a lot of startups that may not have those kind of in-house ai chops so jeff in your portfolio how are you guiding companies to not only avoid vendor model lock-in but also to ensure that they are doing the right evals for their use case and not just depending on some benchmarks that you know spacex ai or anthropic put out yeah i think this is a really new conversation and um quite frankly like over the past two or three years there hasn't been a ton of startups who focus on evals like it's really just about keeping up with your the competition and showing revenue and growth um and so there's been like this is this is like a more recent um conversation just frankly due to the number of startups who've gone absolutely destroyed by um open and and anthropic and so um you know i can count maybe on like one hand how many how many teams in our portfolio that are like pre-series a are are building their own evals it's a really small number of companies but there is i think a new conversation around um having more openness to using things like open source models just because you don't want to um to be destroyed by giving your data to to the larger uh foundation model companies so but i would say it's it's a very small number of companies at this point who who build their own or do their own evals in house i want to get eric on this but uh jeff on the point you just made about you know seeding your data to the major ai labs i went through every major ai labs data use policy and they all say we don't trade on your data we don't train on your prompts we don't train on your outputs um but then satya nadella the ceo of microsoft said that even how frequently you're doing tool calls can be information that is useful so to me this conversation is less about seeding your data to the alfs but really the meta data is that correct i just i'm literally just trying to understand this whole problem better that was exactly it's the tool calls and being able to see even the customer spend within um uh your platform like you you can tell who's inflecting within um within your customer segments and it's pretty easy to without ingesting their data for model training purposes to to kind of have directional data to uh to where you should spend time internally so what you're saying is that stripe's going to become the world's best vc firm in time that's what i just heard all right they're pretty good they are in fact because what if you don't go public you can do whatever you want uh eric uh custom evals and how your portfolio companies are approaching this i know that hustle fund has like 65 000 portcows so just uh maybe kind of a pastiche if you will just blend it all together don't be hyperbolic we only have 700 portfolio companies right um no one gives a shit at pre-seed it's such a zero to one thing like the only thing that these companies are trying to do is get to product market fit and they'll use any model that's cheapest and available to them so open source is becoming more of a common thing that they're discussing just for the sheer cost of it yeah i'm constantly being like begged for like do you have any anthropic credits or open ai credits or whatever they'll use whatever they can right now i think this problem starts to become real after product market fit and you actually have like a true business uh and and a real sense of like we have to now create like boundaries and emote right so i can i can understand why like at the enterprise level this is like an acute issue but at least in the precede world it's uh ain't no thing no one's really talking about this in our portfolio but you invest at the precede level and the companies keep growing so i presume you have some visibility into what the same cohort are doing at series a and beyond most ai tools can give you business insights but they can't actually do anything about it that's the difference between ai that talks and ai that acts but rippling ai is built differently it's the only ai built on your live global workforce data so hr it and finance are connected from day one that means it's not just surfacing insights but you can actually take actions across your entire organization let's say you want to focus on talent retention just ask rippling ai who are my top performers this year you'll instantly get a workforce report comp ratios performance reviews engagement metrics all the data you need then rippling ai will recommend a retention strategy including a 10 spot bonus for your top performers so don't settle for ai that's all talk head to rippling dot ai twist and get the only ai built to give you full visibility across your startup and take complex actions across your entire organization that's r-i-p-p-l-i-n-g dot ai slash twist sign up for exclusive access today yeah yeah yeah and and barely having these conversations but they are starting to happen you know so the the way that i'm sort of trying to wrap my mind around this and i think alex you're a formula one fan right oh yeah indeed zim zim yeah exactly so spa this weekend so um i kind of view it like this which is you know all the cars right now if you think of each car as different kinds of frontier models are within like percentages of each other right so you got like your your red bull you got your ferrari whatever mercedes and maybe someone's a massive martin in the back right and so you know they're all kind of close to each other but what the team and that's fine and that's sort of publicly known but what the teams don't want to share is like their pit stop strategies for the next race like the racing line they're going to take like tire management and so forth and like that's kind of how i'm viewing like these evals which is you know once you get to that level of like high end like the pinnacle of motorsport that's the stuff that really starts to make huge differences i guess alongside of the car which is probably the biggest one um and you know the the the companies that we're sort of dealing with that pre-seeded hustle fund are still like in their entry level miata spec racing thing where like you know none of this stuff is like that relevant um but it's starting to happen you can start to you can start to see around series a too just like whether we should use some of the capital that we have now to invest in more of a boat around like evals and that's barely starting to happen okay so we're hitting this one right when it begins but going back to your f1 analogy i think the argument about the need for custom eval is not really in a protective sense but in a way to better understand how a model applies directly to your business case it's not like we're just talking about their pit stop strategies i think the cars are running on different tracks and that's why i think the the scores being one percent off between the leading models sticking to the analogy uh don't matter as much because if if something is much better for your company or you can tune it post train it fine tune it whatever then you can move a lot faster i guess i i thought this was going to become more quickly a requirement to survive given what jeff said about the number of companies that open ai and anthropic have either accidentally or purposely stepped on and that seems to be happening pretty frequently so to me any defense sounds like the right way to approach this jeff but am i being alarmist i think when you're an early stage founder as eric said you're one if you start a company you view yourselves as being different than open and anthropic for a variety of reasons like there's nobody in in like a accelerator cohort who is a you know ai native application or company who's starting coming and saying hey like anthropic or open ai is going to beat us if they want to um and so there's a like a naive it's almost like this like blissful uh naive approach to to building a company that you have to have and then you know secondly i think eric you can convince yourselves like when that does happen we'll have enough scale or defensibility that they won't be able to compete with us and so uh i don't think like the early stage founder psyche just isn't geared towards worrying about this problem until it until it actually is a problem um which is normally when you do have some product market fit okay so it sounds like this is more of a late stage point that it'll be curious to see or interesting to see how far down the startup age this goes in terms of what people do it but i think we're going to need just better and easier tooling i looked up there are companies that will help you with you know internal ai evals but they seemed much more enterprise tuned so maybe someone should build that for like series a companies or earlier i think that'd be super interesting uh yeah jeff you and i can uh vibe code that this weekend that's a good idea yeah let's talk about that for a second you had a funny tweet eric that was like everyone in silicon valley staying up to the glow of their laptops until they run out of fabled five fabled five access um how much better has fabled been for you and elizabeth compared to preceding models for vibe coding work because it seems about the same to me but i'm not doing difficult work with it so i'm not quite sure that i'm getting full bang for my token it's great i mean like the the stuff that's doing right now is going across all of our code bases refactoring things showing like where we've been inefficient and so forth and you know opus is was insanely good too but i think just a level of sophistication of just like oh you know this is not very refined code you know here's here's what we're noticing and things like it's it feels like the exact same kind of feedback that a senior engineer used to give me when i was working at some of these big tech companies so this is agi i think it's actually happened within coding uh at least in this domain it's amazing what's the next sector where we reach an agi-ish level of performance jeff i've never heard someone say pass before with such a special confidence all right jeff you tell me i mean i think it's going to take a while but it seems like the model companies are shifting their focus towards physical ai and in some ways that's a recognition that they're pretty close to agi on the coding front or on you know kind of on these more digital native um use cases so i think i think that will be interesting because those new domains whether it's robotics or anything physically i require you to spin up whole new teams opening already has a robotics team um and so i think that's the next narrative is going to be hey we conquered coding and now we're gonna um you know focus on the physical world okay well we'll see i i'm very bullish on that uh we had we've had the ceos of um one x and a lot of the humanoid robotic firms on and some also some purpose-built robots like dusty robotics and so forth and i they all seem to be making such quick progress that it seems to me we're going to get to that being not solved per se but to maybe a modern self-driving level of sophistication in the next couple years and that's going to be just super duper exciting uh all right i want to talk about startup clusters uh a company called oak oak.id just announced um 60 million in funding and they came out of stealth and they're working on essentially a shared identity layer for agents and humans which a couple of companies are working on and so one thing i'm seeing eric it seems that there's a lot of capital chasing newly discovered problems that we run into like oh now we have agents we're going to need to integrate them into identity oh we have a lot of agents now we need to orchestrate them and then like six to ten companies get spun up to work on that they raise money they all seem to kind of go pretty quickly in prior cycles did we see this level of intrastartup competition for new possible problem spaces uh because it seems to be more crowded and faster than before i think you're framing it the right way which is these are vcs in some ways are offering a solution for a problem that they're trying to find right so if you're like this large this is my interpretation what you're saying like you have these mega funds so you raise like billions of dollars and uh your lps know that ai is hot right now so now you're finding like this very niche set of areas on the ai stack that you want to invest in um i'm not even really paying attention to this specific space that you describe what oak is doing so i don't have any real knowledge of it but what i suspect is happening is that you know you're trying to put money to work uh and there's just so much capital sitting in these mega funds so i hear about this news like all the time it's just like a crazy amount of money i have no sense of like what the tam is or whether this is going to be um like subsumed in some sort of like broader kind of governance model or whatever um but like it's it's a funny thing because i just this feels almost like driven by just like i have all this money like how i'm going to put it to work at least in the venturer side of it so maybe not answering your question no no that's close enough jeff um sending over here do you agree with eric that we're seeing maybe more startup clusters form with higher levels of funding strictly because higher AUM firms need to get that capital to work i think it's primarily because there's so many no problems that exist and it's really um i think once any company has traction that's known faster than ever and so then the cluster forms it's like um you know it's it and you kind of like repeat and rinse that that cycle um so i don't know if it's necessarily like vc driven it's just like there's like such obvious problems especially within software that people spend time on it's actually to the physical ai conversation i find the clusters are slower to form within physical ai than software which to me is an advantage these are harder companies to build there's normally a hardware and software component and often they're within very kind of like old traditional industries and so there's an advantage if you actually like look outside of silicon valley to find companies where um often this this kind of like fast follower effect doesn't exist uh which is if you look at like we've done eight investments over the past year and i think one of them has been in in silicon valley um wow i think six of them have been in los angeles and so um we as a firm believe that like you know some of these like uh old sayings are very true and the one that always comes to mind is peter thiel competition is for losers right and if you believe that what's true there's a lot of losers out there who are you you know who are who are other capitalizing companies or starting companies that um and so so i think that's kind of like uh uh something we just think about a lot is we don't we don't want to be existing you're investing in categories that are easy to to follow into yeah uh one of your partners wrote a post um uh talking about this and they said you know agent decoding doesn't make software less valuable but instead it quote moves the value to software solving the hardest problems it can reach and it sounds like you're saying that to get to a point where you don't have instant fastball or competition you have to either go pretty far afield or literally get some wrenches out that's fair uh and the partner in question uh mentioned general intuition alfred and erebor as examples of places where they're working on solving data friction iteration friction and uh deployment friction so uh applying that jeff to the companies you backed down in la why were they the right choices uh for chapter one right now yeah i think starting with airborne so they're obviously building a new bank and to the earlier fintech conversation it feels so obvious to us that fintech and banking is one of the categories that you can't fast fall into um and because there's regulatory reasons and also trust and security reasons why fintech should be a uh i guess like a a hotter category today and so when we when we see a company like airborne get their banking license fastest ever in the us um they have palmer lucky they have you know this amazing cop table to kind of like consolidate um a um into very quickly it's that's like a pretty easy investment for us to make and then if you look at general intuition um and if you guys have followed their journey but they had this company called or it's called metal tv if you're a gamer you probably know what it is but you use it to clip your uh your video game highlights and they've found a way to use that data to train physical world use cases around defense drones etc and that's just like a a data that is you have this really unique data set that they have access to um fairly unobvious and then you have a team based in primarily the uk they can recruit really well out of deep mine um they're not within this silicon valley think tank and so you have people who are doing really unique things with unique data sets um offer was another kind of hardware software bet teams being out tesla um working a fairly unobvious solution to um to helping car manufacturers integrate software more more efficiently so uh yeah they all i think it's a combination of of data regulation and team that we look for and often that exists within regulated industries or really difficult industries to build within chapter one is based down in la right yeah i think it's a pretty generous uh term because it's we have a distributed team but i'm i'm based in los angeles i grew up i'm actually today in menlo park and it's funny because people think of me as being like this la investor where i really i've spent a lot of my life in in the barrier but i i live in los angeles now and um and spend my my most of my time there yeah but you say the silicon valley think tank to me you're describing in very polite terms essentially an epidemic of groupthink um i think i think there's a uh culture that exists within the barrier which becomes very insulated and um you can just like i actually like to just compare it like what billboards do you see when you drive on 101 um versus any other city and you know if that's what's staying at your face when you're driving to the office every day then you get to the office and you're talking about i don't know um uh like different ai ai topics all day long and that becomes all you think about and to me like that can for work there's a uh a cost to your kind of like originality of thought that exists in that environment um and so i'm careful i i love the barriers so i don't want to i'm like there's all these twitter wars it's like barrier versus la or barrier versus new york i truly don't care like i just think that's like people do that for clickbait on twitter um but for me i do my best work when i'm not living in the barrier at least at this point in my career yeah yeah eric i'm curious what your thought about is about this because on one hand people say you know if you have ambition you have to move to the bay area but we are we are seeing a lot of cool companies being built not just around the united states but also around the world and i could i could list off some names that i like but um how do you avoid that kind of like poison thinking by supping too long and too deep at the communal well of thought well first of all jeff is totally wrong the real answer is miami right everyone should be there right you're otherwise you're a loser all right wait wait wait i have a take about that before you actually give your real answer my thought about the miami thing is that people just like sun and partying and so they're like we'll just take our laptops there and buy nice houses and then it'll be just as good because we're the people that matter blah blah blah anyways you were saying okay first of all i'm gonna uh roll that back that joke which is uh you know one of our best companies that jeff and i share is flex this uh this uh bank that we we so briefly touched on they're based in miami they're doing real work you know there's there's a mantra within our fund that we see at hustle fund which is that great hustlers look like anyone and come from anywhere full stop and i really just truly believe just like jeff does which is you know you can build great companies anywhere there are multi-billion dollar businesses built in wisconsin you know or in indonesia like you know markets with very different kind of parameters and so forth so i guess when it comes to groupthink you know it's hard to escape this bubble i live in silicon valley i've been here for 26 years and all my friends all my neighbors work in silicon valley companies right but i think one superpower i do have is i'm not from here i grew up in detroit and a lot of uh i think my friends are you know still based in the midwest these days and i catch up with them so there's an element of touching grass but this is kind of like the fun part of the job as a vc is like now i'm realizing it is a necessary part of the job to touch grass you know to get out of this bubble like travel a little bit or go to some of these exciting hubs like chicago or atlanta they're a little bit more overlooked because you surely do find founders who are less kool-aid if that's a verb into like a very specific way that companies should be built uh have a very different kind of approach for how they're building or burning capital and so forth and they can build great businesses too so yeah i subscribe to what jeff is saying yeah i kind of came of age in the chicago tech scene uh back in the early days of uber and kind of during the the groupon boom and it was so cool but then it didn't seem to have that staying power then everyone kept moving to silicon valley and it seems like such a missed opportunity to build something with a different perspective a different lp base a different you know local industry focus that what could have been it just didn't quite quite bear out that way and if you're listening to eric talk and you're thinking overlooked man we should build adventure capital from called overlooked ventures too late someone already did that so that brand is that was james fund yeah it's taken uh okay but let's let's leave the bubble talk about something else now uh jeff you're maybe best known for your time at tinder during which it became the number one uh grossing app on the ios app store which is legitimately an amazing accomplishment and eric you just put some money into sage haven which is a play on i think safe haven which is a texting company uh for kids and it struck me when i was just thinking about this that you guys have kind of more consumer bona fides than most vcs that i talked to and i'm curious if you think that there is maybe right now a dearth of consumer-facing startups just because everyone wants that that sweet sweet b2b ai markup and jeff let me start with you yeah i think it's probably been the biggest surprise of this ai wave so far that we haven't seen more consumer companies that actually leverage ai in interesting ways i think um i caught up with josh allman last week who obviously joined a16z and is a long-time friend and him going to a16z i think is actually just a great catalyst for more people to build it's um it's funny i think the natural incl you know you flock to like building a vertical ai company and then you realize two or three years later that maybe that's not easier than building a consumer company and um and so i think i think it's just go it will happen and um i've been i personally like i've been spending a lot of time trying to think about what the form factor might look like that actually makes because the first iteration of consumer ai companies was like let's take instagram use the feed put some like generative content in and hope that humans like to to just like 100 consume generative content i think that's just so far from what people want every day and even the the x algorithm change yesterday was interesting as a everyone's clapping but like that to me was a sign that people actually do want to connect with real people and real content um and so we got away from from kind of like what the core value of consumer should be because ai was it felt like this new superpower that um people were trying to experiment with and now i do think we're going to get more consumer startups and there's also a lot of really cool things happening within um consumer hardware now as well i i was literally just going to ask do you think these next breakout consumer companies are going to be hardware or software first i think both and we had talked about how much easier it is to iterate within hardware today than it was many years ago and um you know i think the wave of consumer hardware startups that have actually succeeded over the past several years is off is very understated so if you look at whoop or or anything kind of like health base that category has been awesome um what hasn't been as as great as is consumer social consumer marketplaces but if you look at consumer health i think there's been really amazing examples of companies that have really broken out over the past couple years and now um you know we'll see what the next wave looks like is that because the incumbent companies in healthcare were so going back to the word ossified that you could just move around them pretty quickly whereas the companies in social and other parts of technology are a bit more quick moving like i'm not saying that meta is nimble but meta has managed to give a pretty strong lock on a big chunk of consumer social for ever i think it was to me like companies addressing a new zeitgeist that incumbents weren't paying attention to and so if you look at um consumer health like that's a big chunky category that people are willing to spend money on and you have a lot of income that's aging um who want you know want better products and so yeah to me it it's you know it's more so like hey there's health seems like such an obvious category if you just look at like miles's hierarchy of needs where which that's like the most basic way to find consumer startups where uh and that was why i actually joined tinder a long time ago i was like dating you know that's pretty high up on that list and all these companies are are really terrible it seems like this is a pretty good place to to to build a consumer company and we're just getting back to that now i'm actually really excited about like ai native fintechs or ai native like anything that involves money and ai i think is going to be awesome and if you like there's been some great examples of of companies who are you know like giving your agent a bank account and letting them yep basically be your financial manager i think is is going to be a really it's like someone's going to nail that um i don't necessarily think it's going to be robin hood too just because their product stock is so um you know so busy at this point so yeah i'm i'm pretty i'm pretty pumped about everything that's happening right now eric uh first of all just give us the quick tldr on why sage haven and then um the broader question about creator sorry consumer focused startups being possibly the next wave yeah so um i don't do a lot of investing in consumer and i'll be also really clear that sage haven wasn't the deal that i led within my team but i do have good context about it i was a product manager at facebook and instagram for several years so you know had some some experience here you know sage haven think of it as like a very safeguarded way for parents and those in your community to message your kids right and uh and it's sort of like a parallel stack for for i message that's designed for safety for your children so as i have a 11 year old i have an eight year old you know i'm really worried about like who and who's able to communicate with my kids and this is like a really nice solution to create those kinds of guard rails so um i'm also really bullish on consumer ai too even though we don't invest as heavily in this space sure uh i like the maslow's hierarchy uh framing that i think jeff is putting together here because you know i've been thinking a lot actually about the x algorithm change that happened a day or two ago and like how suddenly so joyful the feed feels like like all my old friends i see i can see alex's shit posts and no i'm i'm it's so true i've had more fun on twitter in the last 24 hours than i've had in the last six months correct yeah i think like it's almost coming back to like pre-elon days in terms of like how the feed feels and as i've sort of been processing this like just just taking like that example just social networking i think people like it you know when when from like 2005 to 2015 let's call it um it was a much more joyful experience to be on all these kinds of platforms but then it kind of turned into this extraction phase post 2015 where especially tools have accelerated the company's ability to you know rage bait you into like you know getting more doom scrolled into the content like like extracting more of your data to do all sorts of interesting monetization and so forth and we're starting to find that kind of pushback and uh with the x algo change yesterday i kind of like discovered that i i really needed that of just like oh i can i there's a place where i can have fun again you know because uh you know that's just something that i need so who knows whether x is going to be the ultimate platform for that but there's got to be better tools with this current environment that can be created by some startup or some company uh to do that joyful thing but hopefully in a way that balances extraction in a way that isn't like harmful right and i'll just like leave this last caveat to you of just like maybe the need in in terms of like a new socials in this ai world thing is yeah i think the majority just qualitatively of xpms i know from meta are really militant about not letting their kids use social media including with my kids just because like we saw like what these tools were doing and like the addiction and all stuff so that's always like the the crazy irony of these kinds of products you don't you don't you get high on your own supply the the most insane and uh radicalizing thing for me and self-critical point was watching my children discover what a phone is and then their interest in stealing mine from my pocket and running away right there because we're that's everyone we try to have a low-screen household the children don't have ipads they watch very little video content usually during a tough diaper change they can watch brock and toad for a minute but like not much and they're just desperate for it and it's made me really look in the mirror and ask myself why am i so plugged in and the answer is twitter and you know the industry that we live in because i don't think technology has ever evolved faster in terms of what we need to stay on top of them right now so i feel the need to be plugged in but i mean i don't want my kids to live a life on a digital treadmill like that and you know i'll just ask this because we're here now eric what's your take on the the restrictions on social media access we're seeing both at home and abroad the right move yeah i mean i think the uk or some like european country said like at least 16. yeah i support that i think even 18 potentially i mean if if we're not allowed to give our kids cigarettes because we think it's harmful for their health i think actually that should be allowed that should be 100 yeah exactly yeah exactly uh the true child of the 90s uh you are over there um but uh yeah i mean 1989 baby there you go five months ago oh yeah yeah yeah so yeah i remember the 80s very vividly actually so um it's harmful usually i mean i really do think that um you know brains are developing especially for men until we don't stop developing until we're like 25 or 26 and then maybe women a little bit earlier and you know this is the reason why like like marijuana is like sort of dangerous like you don't you know it's fine i think if you're a fully formed adult because your neural pathways are mostly mostly there but like i'd be really frightened if my my son started taking like gummies pretty regularly now because i think it's going to up his mind and i think it's just a similar kind of snow crash moment where like something about these data that and this this consumption is really messing with with human brains and there's probably enough evidence and scientific support for that at this point so that's all pretty reasonable i didn't think though of cannabis gummies as the prompt injection of young minds but there you go um jeff i want to extend this point to somebody else there's a lot of talk right now about ai regulation trying to get this right and i don't think we need to argue about the exact last one or two things that have happened but directionally from where you said slightly outside of the silicon valley zeitgeist which i think kind of leans in one particular direction when it comes to this point um what do you think we should do at the national level which is i think the real question today to ensure that not only do we have a non-cyber security destroyed world but also ensure that startups don't end up regulated out of the cutting edge because that's my real concern is that we're going to end up just granting too much power to incumbents and squash the little guy yeah i think it's a huge big question to unpack um look i'm like i'm the most pro-america person um you can you can probably meet and i my biggest concern is that you have people especially today with a lot of the the data center build outs that do not have the right information and um there's just going to be you know the somewhat self-inflicted to be to be clear um being there's been a lot of kind of like scary visions of the future that the biggest companies have been portraying around job loss and um it hasn't felt very productive for the industry um i think it's uh and so and that's just you know i was actually pretty shocked that um dario and anthropic like a lot of their early comms to me even being in the in the industry were really scary and so now you ask the kind of like general american public to support ai and you already shot yourself in the foot twice repeatedly yeah uh and so but i think it's important to look at the bigger picture which is if we don't figure out how to create a more positive narrative around ai and to take on these big infrastructure projects we will fall behind and um that does come at the expense of national security and um ultimately i think i don't know how it's going to play out because it doesn't seem to be making a ton of progress um and you read this in the news every day or or you talk you just talk to young people right people graduating college and their views on ai are really negative yeah but they're also enormous hypocrites there was a recent study from brown which is up the street from where i live here in providence and uh a professor gave out a midterm it was take home everyone did really really well they didn't believe it they gave an in-person midterm nearly everyone failed and so to me the there's there's an irony to the college kids saying you know we want authenticity in life we really want to be real humans we want to paint on our hands and then they they cheat like mad on their homework and and don't learn anything and i think that points to just people are going to use ai a lot because if even the haters are using it then it's going to be ubiquitous but more on the regulation point uh i want to pin you down on this i'm curious what you think is the right way to decide what counts as a a model that we might want to have some oversight of or if we should even have that at all um because i think we're seeing china possibly restrict open way models from release and there's rumblings of an executive order on open source ai here in the states all this has to be pretty worried so where do you stand yeah i mean i'm i'm pretty anti-regulation across the board um mainly i don't trust that the people who have uh decision making over which model model should be available to the general public um you know at least going forward how do you how do you keep continuity um kind of like over multiple administrations um with different political beliefs when you have committees who are determining which ai models should it should exist um and if you meet if you go to washington dc and you spend time with the people making these decisions um they often are pretty far from the metal in terms of what's actually happening uh and and so not to get overly political but i think the last administration um was having to deal with a lot of a lot of new innovation and um that oversight actually cost us a lot of time in terms of the amount of time that that went into educating that um group and and ultimately the policies that they were trying to uh enact were were you know by their nature very into a anti-ai in many cases haven't we ended up though exactly where everyone thought biden was going to take us with the federal government having unwritten rules about restrictions of ai um opaque standards a lot of having to go kiss the ring to get stuff out the door open ai being told they can't release certain things anthropic fighting with the government it seems like everyone's like if we have biden 2.0 i'm not trying to say they're right or wrong then we're going to end up here and i feel like we've ended up here anyways and so i i what what could the current administration have done differently because the only thing that i can see is they'd have to say like we're not going to have control over mythos level models and i don't think any administration would say that so to me i wonder if it's less partisan and more just the technologists are too far from the government jeff i think that's totally fair uh and you know if you do go to dc you see the you know anthropic and open a have huge huge teams in dc now yeah um like massive teams i don't think this is discussed often enough but you have um you know what would look like big headquarters in dc now um trying to work with with both parties to to create new policy and it's one of those actually obviously pretty impossible questions to answer sitting where i am in in menlo park today just as a a venture capitalist but the you know i think this should be a uh bipartisan topic where we all come to the table and have some you know shared point of view on doing what's right for the country and i hope that happens i hope so too because it would be really unfortunate if um tech's recent shift to the right kind of since the the last presidential election a little before um ends up turning ai into something that is inherently partisan because then we're just going to make very little progress as a country and you know we're going to have president aoc and then we're going to have president i i don't know um yeah ping pong ping pong and that's not good neither extreme is probably the correct place to be all right um why don't we end on something a little bit more fun than making jeff explain his politics live to the entire internet why don't we give him why don't we give him a slight break yeah thanks for doing that jeff yeah so eric i have your uh your criminal record pulled up here and i wanted to go kidding um uh so some fun things to wrap up with one eric charter space uh this is a startup as far as i can tell that is providing insurance for launches and in orbit activities i don't know this is one of your deals per se but i thought it was an incredibly cool company so i'm just curious what is the hustle fund thesis on backing space related companies and do they fit into your pre-seed formula yeah well first of all thank goodness for the american laws that juvenile records get expunged at the age of 18 so there's nothing for you to look up at this point um so charter space right this is a insurance underwriting for space missions right um i like to think of this company as lloyds of london so back in like the 17th century uh this company formed for maritime insurance because there's these ships that are going on these crazy excursions of discovery and trade and if cargo was lost or the ship got lost you know there's a way for these businesses not to lose all their money through this insurance product right and you know our our bet is that more people are going to want to do more things in space that there's going to be more payload that sent to space or uh maybe habitats or something you know like data centers whatever it's going to be uh it seems like the the chart is moving up and to the right in an exponential fashion in terms of like what is being launched into the space every day and also we have seen so many catastrophic videos on on twitter on reddit whatever of uh payloads being lost from like wonderfully huge uh explosions like on the launch pad or something like that you can say blue origin out loud jeff business won't come by and slap you in the head it's okay yeah but you know i i applaud like this this early days of like brave explorers trying to do this kind of stuff oh yeah i also i also want them to continue to be in business to make these kinds of risks so you know we're really excited about charter space and that we think that this is the right time for a company like this to be formed and we're well it's yet to be seen whether we're too early or charter space is too early in this bed wasn't lloyd's originally a coffee shop lloyd's of london yeah when people aggregated and met to talk about this stuff and then i think it became a business after that yeah so my understanding of the history was that it did like there was meetings taking place at the coffee shop i didn't know if it started as a coffee shop but all the underwriting was taking place just like a startup would you know like starting their company drinking coffee at like uh pete's coffee or whatever it is right so uh i know that was where originally the work was getting done and then you know off into the races yeah i was thinking if it was like you know old school cafes to lloyd's maybe it's like group chats today to uh it's the original koopa cafe there you say to the bay area reference 10 points for that all right uh and then jeff i was going through your portfolio and one thing i noticed is that the number of crypto infra and usefulness bets you have is is pretty cool so the graph starkware moon pay lighter layer zero and others um you've had a pretty good foot in the crypto world and i think that as we've talked about ai and like just ad nauseam for the last couple years it's really fallen off people's radars so what's the state of crypto today what are people building that's cool and um when is the next crypto boomlet going to come to make us all feel guilty about not loading up on bitcoin now that it's about 60k per coin yeah i think crypto is one of those really misunderstood industries where you have you actually do have real great founders still building within the category but um the markets you know on the liquid side are depressed and frankly i think there's just been a lot of founders who have found other places to spend time as well with ai and deep tech and everything else um yeah if you look at if you look at the road map to most big fintechs stable coins have been for the past three years a huge part of the um of the focus and that's going to keep keep happening going forward the things that are most interesting right now are bringing you know there's been a lot of it's called rwa but real world assets so um bringing new equities and new forms of assets on chain which enables global access 24 7 trading gives you the ability to lend and borrow against those assets um which is is pretty cool if you um and that's been a big focus for robin hood if you if you've seen the road map as well what what hasn't happened in crypto what's not happening today are like these big you know like society changing projects if you if you look at things like dows or you know like the the ownership thesis i think a lot of that has has changed quite a bit um and so there's a a move towards more institutional use cases which for a lot of people building crypto especially younger people is frankly like really boring even though that's that's probably where the most value will be created but if you're if you're like hey you're gonna go build better you know financial technologies for the top 10 u.s banks that's a very different pitch from um hey we're gonna change the way that society thinks about owning companies or um uh kind of like the so so that i think a lot of the enthusiasm for crypto um has gone away despite the fact that there's been a lot of progress being made can i just say that i think it's really really funny that for a while dows were a venture backable category because dows are and correct me if i'm wrong here decentralized autonomous organizations right yeah the funniest part about dows i don't know if you remember or signing this but there were vcs and this was like a totally real thing you would go on uh like a call like this and you'd have like 200 members of the dow and the vcs would have to pitch the entire dow on why they should take the vcs money for the next funding round and it was just like the it was the funniest thing seeing vcs have to have to like explain what they do to people who hate vcs and uh man and it's like this yeah it's like a public it's like a public forum it was so funny and proof of love obvious proof of love uh have you realized how inefficient dows are or any organization where there's like 200 decision makers who have loud online opinions right right that's what i'm saying like what what has been the pitch since snaps ipo when they went out and gave zero vote shares to the public it's founder control centralized decision making we call it founder mode now but i mean a dow is the opposite of that like if you think about it it's literally like everyone gets a like oh man that's that's that's a historical quirk the idea though of vcs pitching 200 furry avatars to get allocation though and thus requiring them to have actual riz that's funny to me because not every capital allocator is funny alex has an excellent sound bite by the way i do what i can um we i've actually had a lot of fun today you guys were great thanks for coming on um but let's give you guys some some time to do some plugs uh eric where can people find you and their firm online and is there a startup you're looking for to back that you haven't get found yeah so uh my website hustle fund dot vc uh you can follow me at at eric bond e-r-i-c-b-a-h-n companies that i'm hoping to see you know i think that we're generalists by design so i think about founder archetypes i love uh teams that hustle hard we define hustle as great execution meets high velocity you know chasing after a large market and they're actually really biased towards founders who are good friend of the house people who know how to sell so you know moats are difficult but i think the ability to sell and close is the best moat especially at the early stages so uh come check us out hustlefund.vc is good place to begin all right jeff sending over to you where people will find you online and uh is there a company you're looking to back and haven't found it yet yeah i'm jmj on twitter chapter1.com is our uh firm's name i'd say companies were looking back would be um you know we're obviously doing a lot within deep tech and and and that world um we still do a ton within fintech we still do do some crypto investing and ai tends to to make its way into every pitch so there's uh there's ai and everything but um yeah one company we had talked about earlier that i'm very interested to find in back would be this like agentic finance future company um which i'll explain to himself maybe alex is building oh no no i was quite literally itching my face i oh you were i thought you were saying me i thought you were saying me no no that was not a signal that was literally i was trying to i was trying to be demure about it and not bother you sorry um but yeah i would say you know on the whole we want founders who are building serious companies solving serious problems and um and would love to meet yeah all right well guys this has been this week in the startups my name is alex wednesday's beauty venture capital round tables we're back on friday we'll see you then goodbye