SPEAKER_00: hey everybody welcome to sunday hey molly how you doing happy sunday sunday happy sunday everybody enjoy uh your day of rest and what i'm calling our day of learning because we have vc sunday school

SPEAKER_04: today awesome yeah we're gonna talk about uh conflicts for vcs how do you manage uh meeting with a dozen companies in the same vertical and some of them being competitors and then how do you manage uh when one company your portfolio then pivots their idea and then maybe becomes competitive

SPEAKER_05: with another company your portfolio and can vcs invest in competitive companies we're gonna hash

SPEAKER_06: it out for about 15 minutes yeah it's good stuff when do you have to put up that big big wall and then

SPEAKER_00: i explore i'm very excited about landing this interview with shale khan of energy impact partners he also hosts the pretty popular among climate nerds like me podcast called catalyst we're talking about the core challenges of deep decarbonization it's nerdy it's a nerdy climate

SPEAKER_09: tech talk all right it's gonna be a great episode stick with us this week in startups is brought to you by i trust capital did you know that you can invest in crypto through your retirement account and still get the same tax advantages as a traditional ira visit i trust dot capital slash twist to start investing today cyvatar implementing cyber security for your startup can feel overwhelming and expensive but it doesn't have to be that way cyvatar is startup friendly fully managed all-inclusive cyber security subscriptions twist listeners get their first two months free at cyvatar dot ai slash twist and lemon dot io need to speed up your product development without draining your budget hire vetted engineers from europe at lemon dot io go to lemon dot io slash twist to get 15 off for the

Chamath Palihapitiya: first four weeks hey everybody happy sunday molly and i we set our alarms for 5 a.m and uh we just made

SPEAKER_04: our coffee we did yoga we went to bikram uh hot yoga farmer's market hit the farmer's market and now here we are we took a got ourselves glowed up took a shower got the hair set and we're ready to do vc

SPEAKER_18: sunday school for you we give up our sundays for you no we tape it on fridays you have a day of rest we

SPEAKER_04: do not there's a really big fly in here um i'm just gonna keep it cool so everybody loves vc sunday school we're gonna make these into a super cut so you get them all at one time at some point put it on the youtube channel or something but well what have you been dealing with the past week or two molly what have you been thinking about as you're now in your fourth fourth month of investing you had your first climate syndicate uh the syndicate.com climate which was i think 2x oversubscribe yep great feeling great company real legit company great outcome great outcome that's nice for us to slide in a quick milli or two into a company and we have one of uh the companies you found in the accelerator so things are uh heating up here for uh molly in her first year of venturing into venture capital

SPEAKER_06: what's your question this week it's all happening and this is like uh now i have reached embarrassment

SPEAKER_00: of riches stage which gets me to this fundamental question of what the hell do you do when you're talking to competing companies and i know that this leads to especially in early stage this big question of like what do you how is it can you invest in or should you invest in companies that do the same thing and even more importantly and saliently where is the where's the line like at what point does it feel is it unethical to be sort of down the road farther with one company but

SPEAKER_26: talking to one that does the same thing and being like wait i know things about both your business plans

SPEAKER_04: and yikes yeah okay so um the feeling for a founder when you invest in a company that's directly

Chamath Palihapitiya: competitive is rightfully uh annoying so if you invested in uber you don't get to invest in lyft you invest in lyft you don't get to invest in uber has been how the valley's always worked and there's a very practical reason for this they're competitors right and if you're on at both board meetings or have information from both well it's sort of like you're seeing uh you know the pre-game coaching session for the warriors in the pre-game coaching session for lebron at cleveland like you have this information and then who are you rooting for to win and how do you manage that so in a venture capital firm you won't do this now sometimes in a venture capital firm you will have a pivot so some company starts they say hey we're going to make enterprise software another company says we're going to make consumer software but they're both addressing you know adjacencies you know both in education so one's doing an education startup where they teach people math the other one's doing a platform for teachers uh to teach math so they don't actually touch consumers okay two different

SPEAKER_36: businesses but they're kind of adjacent now what if one business works one does the other one pivots

SPEAKER_03: to the other one's model that is a unique situation and what you have to do in that situation is have

SPEAKER_04: a discussion with the founders and say molly's going to be on this board jacal's going to be on this board there is a uh what we call the chinese wall in the business a firewall chinese wall is an acceptable term by the way uh it is a tribute to the great wall of china the greatest wall ever

SPEAKER_40: built a wall a really big one it's actually legit you do not have to cancel me it's actually a

Chamath Palihapitiya: compliment i looked it up chinese people are quite uh delighted when you use the chinese wall to mean a strong wall between two locations uh so in this case you're saying the wall needs to be that big and

SPEAKER_42: that strong and that tall right yes it needs to be the best wall in the world yes it's a compliment

SPEAKER_00: did you see that it's the size of a hummingbird um so does that make sense it definitely does okay so sometimes but so then there is a point it seems like where you just sort of have to say like listen

SPEAKER_20: i was talking to both of you one of you moved to diligence one of you then we got to stop talking

Chamath Palihapitiya: okay so now before you've invested it is well within the right of a venture capitalist to meet with the 10 people doing mathematical education on the internet in this example so they met with brilliant they met with con academy con account is a non-profit but you get the idea they met with 10 different companies and then they placed the bet on the one they like most the thing you obviously would not do and would be career ending unethical and just silly would be to send the materials of one company to the to the of the nine companies to the one company who won sure yeah on a practical basis um there's probably nothing that proprietary these businesses most people want to believe that

SPEAKER_03: their business has some huge proprietary ideas that are not obvious the truth is smart entrepreneurs

SPEAKER_04: going into the business of math teaching people math there's a finite set of ideas and and features and they're all probably on a list somewhere so when people are like oh my god they stole my idea it's like number one you really think you're the only person with the idea that to have math tutors online there's probably nothing that major there and then also it's probably on your website your ex-employees are probably interviewing at the other competitor and telling them all your plans

Chamath Palihapitiya: anyway unethical but probably not illegal uh depending on their um uh non-competes and agreements so the fact is it's probably the information in those early stages is not that important the second thing that's not that important um the second thing that's practical is as a vc why would you risk it right how would you risk it if it's the information is not that important why would you risk it and there's ways to um to mitigate against this so what i've seen vcs do i'm not saying i would do this but if they met with a company and they let's say they met with the two mathematics companies in this and one of them had this great idea math teachers in america teaching math uh math students in china and they get to do it off hours and there's actually a company that does this i forgot the name of it where they matched american student i'm sorry chinese students who wanted to learn english and math with american teachers it was a really cool company um so you look at that company all you would have to do as the vc is to say have you heard of this tutoring company you don't have to send them the

SPEAKER_31: deck have you heard of this company and point to a story about them in crunchbase nothing illegal about

SPEAKER_03: that nothing unethical about that you're just pointing them in a direction right and there's much

Chamath Palihapitiya: better ways to get corporate information like looking at the job hiring board who are they hiring for that kind of tells the story right that's how people found out apple was you know confirmed apple was working on project titan because you could see all the people either changing their linkedins or uh the job descriptions so there's much easier ways to do a corporate smash now so those that's how it works in a fund yeah there are funding sources that are different uh and we can talk about those but any questions on that with the fund follow up on that when funds i mean it seems like definitely

SPEAKER_00: it seems very clear that you don't invest in competitors that's just obvious that would be a bad business call i think what is less clear is when you kind of go like listen i think i guess you just are giving a polite no in that case either way if you're like look i i like this one company bet you there's two of you they're virtually identical i like this one better or they're farther along or they meet our they're in our goldilocks zone and you're not i i think what i'm still a little unclear on is when do i say company a we picked company b or company i gotta bow out now because i don't want to put myself in a position where i might be thinking about this too much like a journalist but

SPEAKER_31: i think you just you it's always important to say we're not going to invest at this time

SPEAKER_04: you're not under obligation to say you pick the other company um because it's that company's job this is a great question actually i never even thought of it but thinking out loud here it's not your job as the investor to announce the fundraising for the startup you invested in some vcs get high on their own supply and they write their own press releases we invested in calm we invested in uber we don't do that some people are a little thirsty and they're just you know making these announcements and i've seen people make these announcements they invest in a company and they never thought well i wonder if the founder of the company was going to do a press tour about the announcement and they still the thunder or they write a i'm sometimes i'm the lead investor in a company and we're the lead investor we put in a million dollars and i know some other fund put in a hundred and they were the last money in and they just were filling in a hundred of the three million dollar round we led the

SPEAKER_75: round at a million and they write their own press release and they're quoting people about how great the

SPEAKER_76: companies and i'm like you barely have any skin in this game you're just following on you know you were whatever percent of the round two percent of the round like it's a little weird that raises

SPEAKER_79: actually a whole other question because i literally was thinking today there's a vc in my same space

SPEAKER_00: who's very effective at using linkedin and being like this is why our company invested in x yes i

Chamath Palihapitiya: used to do that i wrote the famous why we invested 378 thousand dollars in calm because i wanted to

SPEAKER_04: explain it and get them some press but i asked the founder if it's okay and i showed the founder alex uh you know the the post before i posted it off right do you think it's worth my time to like

David Friedberg: uh get a little magic assistant to write those up for me please you write it yourself you're a good writer molly you know who has time with this well you can i'm writing 400 words it wouldn't take very

SPEAKER_90: long for crying out loud i would do it i would think you should do it actually i think it'd be good

Chamath Palihapitiya: discipline cool because if you just do you know the com.com one you can see my and then people have on record my thinking which when you have the victory is pretty great but you do want to have the founder buy-in uh when you're speaking about their company because they have messaging they want

SPEAKER_00: to do if you are listening to this podcast i'm betting you already have some exposure to crypto certainly we all talk about it enough and it turns out you can now invest in crypto through your retirement account that's right with i trust capital you can buy and sell digital assets from a crypto ira this means you'll actually get the same tax advantages as a traditional ira and i trust capital has over two dozen of the most popular cryptocurrencies to invest in unlike the stock market you can actually buy and sell 24 hours a day that's part of the whole disruptive crypto thing if that's what you want to do just plan your retirement all night long i mean actually that makes me want to plan my retirement all night long i trust is easy to use and only takes a few minutes to create an account and setting up an ira is free and i trust fees are low just one percent per crypto transaction so visit itrust.capital.twist to start investing today that's itrust.capital.twist taxes and conditions may apply fees do apply and cryptocurrencies are speculative investment with a risk of loss itrust capital inc does not provide legal investment or tax advice consult with a qualified legal investment or tax professional i'm gonna say i'm gonna say in the answer to when you should cut it when you should give a no it's like if you move one company into diligence and you're talking to a

SPEAKER_68: competitor you gotta say no to the first one oh of course yes that's the moment that's like the point

SPEAKER_04: when you're just like this one's there this one's to diligence molly you're basically only moving to diligence if you plan on making the investment yeah um is the general hygiene so that's kind of another question into itself is when do you move to diligence and then if you do do diligence are you obligated to invest and when can you back out with diligence um and the answer is you can back out for any reason until you sign the deal you can leave bad feelings if you do a massive diligence it all turns out great and then you back out of the deal and you say well in diligence it wasn't what we felt and you don't have a really good reason if you go into diligence and they say we have these five customers and they have four by all means like they misrepresented 20 of the customer base or the number one customer or things aren't what they seem uh that's why diligence exists

Chamath Palihapitiya: right and so i think everybody understands that yeah if you move to diligence yes i think stop talking to other people because you're in all likelihood going to do the decision totally uh and then diligence we made a rule i love it well exactly oh just you know a heuristic you know you could be here that's a good word um some people give you all the information before you do diligence and diligence is like okay we just need to see your incorporation documents and your ip assignments and just make sure there are signed documents in a folder somewhere yeah so our lps are protected and we do our diligence other times like asking people to see their p ls for the last you know 24 months uh that might only happen in diligence right so what gets into the diligence folder and how quickly

SPEAKER_04: founders give them over is not a perfect science yeah uh as well now there are two exceptions or three

Chamath Palihapitiya: exceptions in today's world for funding if you run an accelerator there is no uh belief that you need to

SPEAKER_04: have exclusivity by category in any way and not have competitors because the companies are so nascent they're figuring out product market fit so why combinator launch accelerated tech stars they'll accept 10 different meditation apps 10 different airbnb you know swings at the bat with different flavors they might not want to accept somebody who just photocopies the site because that's kind of lame but not because of some rule and then there are platforms so angel list the syndicate our platform republic seed invest none of them are under the obligation as a platform to be non-competitive so with our syndicate and with our accelerator we don't have exclusivity but with our funds we do um and then there's just a practical basis of anytime there's any kind of conflicts you know i don't i will

SPEAKER_03: just engage from one of the two companies and then have you or ashley jackie savino kelly whoever take over the board seat for that other company totally if we have a board seat so anyway it's a

Chamath Palihapitiya: pretty pretty pretty straightforward approach um and communication is important and this is why ryan breslow's uh claim that stripe collected all those investors in order to block them from investing another one that was the most um uh honest piece of that uh you know and some of it was a little bit of silliness but that actually is direction correct i mean uber uh airbnb and others collected investors and it was very clear if you invested in uber you weren't going to invest in lyft and vice versa if you had invested in lyft you were never going to be on team uber uh and and

SPEAKER_03: rightfully so right it's a good lockup strategy yeah it is a brilliant lockup strategy a brilliant

SPEAKER_00: lockup strategy all right i love it well there you go vc sunday school learning together once again uh and now it's time for this week in climate startups and have an interview with tell me i'm

Jason Calacanis: pretty excited about this one because again like i'm in this tiny world where there's these big names jason jacobs we had on and the other big name in this space is shale khan who's a partner at energy

SPEAKER_00: impact partners and also hosts a podcast called catalyst which is really deep climate stuff specifically around this car he invests and talks about this concept of deep decarbonization so it's

SPEAKER_02: very like frontier of climate tech it's a really hard carbonization as opposed to decarbonization

SPEAKER_03: yes deep decarbonization deep decarbonization as opposed to just plain old decarbonization exactly that

SPEAKER_00: plain old decarbonization fine hydrogen fusion total systemic transfer transformation this is energy these are the hell marys these are the super impacts yeah and this is a fun energy impact partners with

Chamath Palihapitiya: the two billion dollars to put behind i like that you know it's like some people are trying to do the blocking and tackling some people are looking to do incremental and some people are looking to go swing for the fences in your opinion yeah um what's the best strategy or do all strategies uh have

SPEAKER_128: validity to them i you know me to be a fan of every possible solution what i would say and i like

SPEAKER_00: to see climate tech investors talk about is avoiding the fomo effect like just because and i think shale sort of mentioned this like just because everybody is into hydrogen right now doesn't mean they shouldn't still be looking at i don't know wave energy right or something that's somewhat less popular so don't nest because if we all follow the crowds to the same exact solutions we'll miss

SPEAKER_65: something yes there is a marketplace of ideas best ideas win but sometimes you do get a lemming like

Chamath Palihapitiya: effect and then you get a category that's overfunded and then other ones are underfunded but the great thing about capitalism is then that's an opportunity for somebody to then go find that vertical without

SPEAKER_00: any competitors exactly so so be the one who notices you know the budding vertical off to the side over here while the lemmings are over there there's like a nice on juicy slug or whatever lemmings ate no

SPEAKER_03: blinders is what i would tell people don't put any blinders on you know you want to you want to never underestimate anyone or any idea you know give give each idea a little bit of uh bought and give every

Chamath Palihapitiya: founder uh you know your full attention because man i've seen people you know just meander for years and then all of a sudden it's like oh yeah by the way i i found a gold mine and i i you want to be partners on the gold mine and i'm like yeah okay yeah sure you've been wandering in the forest and you found a diamond mine okay let's go all right great job happy sunday everybody happy sunday

Jason Calacanis: shale con is a partner at energy impact partners and host of the podcast catalyst one of i shouldn't admit this considering the industry i'm in but one of the very few podcasts i listen to regularly i'm excited

SPEAKER_137: to have you on oh thank you so much for having me and that is uh that's high praise thank you very

Jason Calacanis: much you know time is a precious resource in the world and it's a really it's a great show so i'm thrilled that you're here thank you thank you um i guess i want to start by with with sort of two basic questions how how how did you come to this how did you come to this world of climate tech and how long have you been leading these efforts at energy impact partners yeah well so i've i came to what

SPEAKER_142: we now call climate tech but back when i first got into it was definitely not called climate tech yet at

SPEAKER_143: that time it was i don't know clean tech or this is possibly even before the clean tech boom so i i first got into it in college actually um i was a psychology major and i i was studying all sorts of unrelated things but i ended up randomly taking a couple of courses one uh that was called strategic natural resources that was like an introduction to the global energy ecosystem and we read dan juergen's books and i just like learned how energy worked and found myself weirdly fascinated with it and then what really cemented it is i i took this evening course that was taught by a former southern california edison the utility uh government affairs executive who was like moonlighting as a college professor for whatever reason and he was teaching a class on public utilities regulation and he would walk into class uh it was like a 7 to 10 p.m once a week thing he'd walk into class he would chug no duels slam it on the ground and then spent three hours talking about public utility regulation and like i was the only person in that class who was interested in it uh but i found it super fascinating so i just discovered this weird fascination initially just with energy uh that has then like expanded beyond that into all these complex markets and ecosystems that drive uh 50 gigatons of global emissions that we create every year and uh early in my career i was like well i don't know what i want to do with my life so i will try this because i know i'm interested in it uh but someday i'll probably get bored of it and want to do something else and then fast forward it's been 15 or so years and i've never gotten bored of it and in fact i find it more interesting uh as time goes on so it's all i've ever done is what we would now now deem climate tech but i've done a bunch of different things within it um and the eip version of it where i am now uh on the investor side i'm four years into that journey so i joined eip in early 2018. here's a problem a lot of startups

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Jason Calacanis: this book because i feel like you must be one of the few people who has read the energy and civilization

SPEAKER_149: yeah yeah yeah yeah as you can see i made it like this far yeah it's not the easiest read i will say

SPEAKER_143: dan juergen's stuff is at least more readable and there's some other ones that i really like that are like big compendiums that are actually easy to read a lot of stuff is like very cerebral i think and also uh it's very it's very historical i feel like he doesn't actually appreciate the pace of

Jason Calacanis: change that we are seeing now okay i appreciate that i feel let off the hook with respect to that particular book um so you currently lead i want to i'm going to sort of like start with the firm and then come around to the podcast we'll go all over the place a little bit here but so you're currently leading these efforts at what you're calling deep decarbonization investing at the frontier of climate tech and and i read a good post where you sort of defined that as five core challenges talk to me about what you mean when you say deep decarbonization and then we can dig into some of

SPEAKER_156: those challenges yeah so the fundamental premise here is um that globally we need to achieve net zero

SPEAKER_143: greenhouse gas emissions by mid-century or earlier i mean i think anybody in this sector would agree that that is the bare minimum that we need to achieve to mitigate the calamity of climate change in any significant fashion getting to net zero means there's a lot to do to get there right as i said we were at whatever it is 50 gigatons 50 billion tons of annual emissions of greenhouse gases uh this year and we need to get that to zero on net um so there's a bunch of stuff that we could do today using technologies that are commercial and mature and have been deployed at scale and just need to be deployed at much greater scale take wind and solar for example is the the clear obvious examples of that um but that's not going to get us nearly all the way there for a variety of reasons so deep decarbonization to me is solving the next set of problems what are the things that once we've solved the very first challenges of decarbonizing our global economy that are then going to be faced after that and that can be both you know kind of solving the rest of the problem in electricity wind and solar can get you a good chunk of the way there what happens how do you get the rest of the way to 100 clean reliable ubiquitous affordable electricity but it's also how do we solve the problem of decarbonizing all of these other sectors you know electricity is uh 25 of end-use energy demand what do we do with the other 75 percent and energy itself is not all global emissions there's emissions from other sectors too so deep decarbonization is just you know the simplest version of it is like solving the biggest thorniest problems of climate change right and then how big

SPEAKER_161: just as a level set how big is energy impact partners are there other parts of the energy puzzle that other partners are trying to solve or is it just you no yeah so uh we're bigger than just

SPEAKER_142: this effort so energy impact partners in total is a venture capital firm with a little under 3 billion

SPEAKER_143: dollars under management in in total across a number of different funds with different strategies both in north america and in europe um and the thing that makes eip kind of unique and that unifies everything that we do across strategies is our lp base which is we have about two-thirds of our capital comes from a coalition of over 40 large strategic investors big industrial companies basically energy companies mobility and transportation built environment technology etc and so eip has this kind of unique model that we've we've honed over seven years to work with these big strategics and use our investing capabilities and the visibility that we get through the work that we do to try to help them move faster toward decarbonization and digitization advancement of their own technologies um so we have a number of different funds with different strategies within that and my little chunk of that is this deep decarbonization effort got it can you tell us who some of those

SPEAKER_142: strategics are sure yeah a bunch of republic um not all of them but you know many of the largest

SPEAKER_143: utilities in north america so companies like excel uh which is in colorado and minnesota generally southern company which has territory in the southeast of the u.s uh avista alliant mg and e uh you know fortis which has like 10 utilities some big ones in europe like edf uh and a bunch of others in europe and then in a separate from just the utilities we've got uh you know big real estate companies we've got microsoft on the technology side we've got enterprise the rental car company so it's actually a fairly wide array of different strategics gotcha so they serve as obviously like a

Jason Calacanis: built-in customer base for some of these investments but presumably not the only yeah that's exactly right

SPEAKER_142: i mean you can think of it as like we we try to bring the value as if you when we invest in a company

SPEAKER_143: we're bringing the value as if you had 40 strategic investors in your cap table but without any of the burdens that having a strategic investor puts on your cap table right so we're not driven by strategic demands but we can deliver all the value that uh that a corporate vc would have awesome does that

Jason Calacanis: change any of your otherwise traditional lp structure like do they have a longer timeline do you get any flexibility there are you still trying to operate within that 10-year horizon

SPEAKER_142: we're operating in a traditional venture capital model you know everything about us is is traditional

SPEAKER_143: financial investor the only exception to that is in my fund the deep decarbonization fund we have a 15-year fund instead of a 10-year fund um and that is specifically has nothing to do really with our lp base and much more to do with the types of things that we want to invest in and how long we want to be able to ride with them as they as they come to market some of these things are going to take a long time others will happen sooner but we think that the real sort of big magnitude impact is more on a 10 to 15-year horizon so most of our investments we don't expect to hold nearly that long but we wanted to give ourselves that kind of flexibility so that we can make investments in things like nuclear fusion and decarbonizing steel and some of these really big categories yeah totally um how big is

SPEAKER_142: your fund the deep decarbonization fund yeah so we're uh we launched it a little over a year ago and we'll do the final close on it in a few months so the target size of the fund is 350 million dollars

Jason Calacanis: and we're most of the way there now gotcha i so sort of double congratulations are in order on your new fund and your new baby right like not if you don't want to talk about that we'll take that out but

SPEAKER_06: i just remembered as you were talking i was like oh you've got these two big you're birthing two

SPEAKER_142: things right now oh man oh i didn't i personally didn't birth either of them which has made my life

SPEAKER_151: certainly easier but yeah thank you i we have a two-month-old son uh and i have a 15-month-old fund

SPEAKER_138: and both need roughly equal amounts of attention i mean currently it leans toward the sun over the fund

SPEAKER_137: but i would hope that that changes but not a lot of sleep either way yeah that's exactly right they

Jason Calacanis: both caused me to lose sleep for very different reasons um well let's talk about the five core challenges because i think this is it sort of it seems like what it does is double as your thesis right or at least your sort of set of operating funnels which is um to sort of quickly sum up low cost abundant reliable ubiquitous zero carbon electricity tackling big industrial emitters solving transportation no pressure building a carbon management industry from near scratch and then decarbonizing maslow's basic needs is it fair to say that this is sort of like your operating thesis

SPEAKER_155: yeah i think so i mean the other way to think about it in some ways uh those four five core challenges are

SPEAKER_143: really just a fancy way of describing the big buckets of greenhouse gas emissions so you know climate change in my mind and climate tech this category that we've decided as a category is in some ways really really complicated because it's not a sector in the way that lots of other sectors are it is actually just a problem that we have across most of the big sectors of the economy and there's not a lot in common with the solutions across a lot of those sectors except that they're solving for the same problem which is tons of co2 equivalent um but in some ways it's also relatively simple because the emissions that we have globally basically come from five sectors which is energy transportation buildings food and agriculture and industry uh and so those are the five problems we need to solve and then you can just add a sixth which is we need to build this carbon management ecosystem capture removal sequestration utilization from scratch so i think of those as being the sort of five and a half strategies within our fund uh

SPEAKER_162: and each of one of them represents sort of a different problem set that you can tackle

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Jason Calacanis: me a little more about carbon management industry because it it sounds like you're defining it as capture and storage and utilization are you also talking about marketplaces and offsets heaven help us

SPEAKER_142: uh yes i mean i think all of that yeah the what i mean by that is that uh carbon has been you know co2

SPEAKER_143: has been sort of an exogenous problem generally speaking historically and we need to make it endogenous to everything and that is going to range from just better accounting of it and visibility into where the emissions come from and how they how decisions that we as consumers or we as businesses make will affect them uh so there's a good chunk of that it's just what i've called carbon transparency but then obviously there's uh the actual emissions themselves that we need to debate uh and as many folks will tell you you know the reality is that there's almost no scenario where we get to true zero emissions globally in time and so we're going to need to remove probably billions of tons of co2 from the atmosphere as well so i consider all of that within this big bucket of it's an industry that if you added it up in aggregate today all of the tracking and management and actual physical removal and sequestration and so on sub a billion dollars probably full scale market today and if we are to achieve one and a half degrees celsius of temperature rise then there's kind of no way it's not like a trillion dollar market in 2050 so it's you know getting from here to there is building that industry

Jason Calacanis: from scratch how um well actually before i move on to check size i want to ask you about maslow's needs decarbonizing maslow's basic needs food and housing yeah i mean it's a yeah again it's a

SPEAKER_142: one of the things that's daunting about mitigating greenhouse gas emissions is that we um we produce them

SPEAKER_143: in order to do the very most basic things that we need as humans and this is why i think framing it as maslow's basic needs is good you're probably familiar with maslow's hierarchy of human needs the bottom of the pyramid are the things that we need the most we absolutely cannot survive without and two of those needs represent big chunks of global greenhouse gas emissions one being food and the other being shelter and it turns out that as i said of the five sectors that produce most of the emissions food and ag is one of them and buildings are another and so it just gets to the like the root of the climate change problem is uh the very basic underpinnings of our modern society and so that's

Jason Calacanis: what makes it so challenging to overcome yeah so really as you look at this you're sort of in everything

SPEAKER_197: it sounds like i think about that sometimes well this is one of the reasons so you haven't narrowed this

SPEAKER_143: down at all well yeah i mean the the um the thing that's so tantalizing about climate tech i think one of the reasons that it's so hot now within silicon valley is you know in the same way that like mark injuries and coined the term software is eating the world long ago uh you can easily imagine uh greenhouse gas emissions mitigation eating the world over the next few decades because you add up those sectors every single one of them that i mentioned is you know globally a multi-trillion dollar sector so it's it's not hard to get to massive total adjustable markets for any significant climate mitigation technology and so it's you know it's tantalizing from that perspective just because it's there's such big opportunities the i i think about it sometimes the only like big economic sectors that i think are kind of orthogonal like not really related to to climate tech or like health care basically pharmaceutical

SPEAKER_173: industry and health care but name another really big sector of the economy that isn't going to get

SPEAKER_143: touched in a substantial like a transformative way by decarbonization i think it's actually kind of tough

Jason Calacanis: i'm sure that there are massive scope three impacts when you come to pharmaceuticals too there must be like there's chemicals and they all use little plastic tubes and i mean there's yes we may have just spawned a startup i hope well no and it's true

SPEAKER_156: true and in the process of producing chemicals uh you know there's we use we use a lot of petroleum

SPEAKER_143: to produce chemicals and also the actual process there's process emissions you know we tend to use like natural gas boilers to create steam and stuff like that so yeah maybe it is literally the entire

Jason Calacanis: economy a lot of little like what do they call them clay clay claves the little little ovens yeah yeah exactly stuff in right um all right so if you're out there founders

SPEAKER_162: yeah hit me up with your health care plus climate deep tech ideas i mean is it really is it i know

Jason Calacanis: i mean i sort of keep saying in an only slightly joking way that this is actually a total addressable

SPEAKER_149: market of an entire planet so why are we around with so much crypto yeah basically yeah crypto is

SPEAKER_142: going to be affected i could tell you that for sure um yeah no it's true i mean that's but that's

SPEAKER_143: again why uh why it's sort of a weird sector because again it's not um it's not a single market it's not

SPEAKER_162: a single sector it's just like a common challenge faced by basically every sector yeah i wonder too

SPEAKER_06: then as as we look at these as investable opportunities there is some debate about

SPEAKER_00: what parts of this are venture scale and what aren't and what can be accomplished with capitalism

Jason Calacanis: versus governments for example um and i wonder how you think about that i think there's two different

SPEAKER_143: questions in there right one of them is this question of can we do this stuff with venture capital dollars and the constraints that venture capital places on things and that i think you know that's a remnant of the what i view as um sort of misguided lessons from the first clean tech boom and bust a decade ago which a lot of people the lesson that they took from how that all went down was one this stuff is too capital intensive and isn't a fit for venture capital and two that it takes too long and it's not a fit for venture capital and i don't actually think either of those two things are true inherently um for reasons we can get into if you'd like i would love that okay well we we could do that uh in a second the second question is exactly part two the second question is is uh can this be done through pure capitalism and i think nobody would say it can be done through pure capitalism like there's uh the role of government in particular uh cannot be overstated as it pertains to global climate change mitigation it should be the layer that underpins all of these technologies that enables them to come to market that partners with the private sector to to accelerate their adoption and there's you know i think equally no realistic path to one and a half degrees or two degrees celsius that doesn't involve like substantial government intervention across the board um with that said it also is true that it's not going to be it can't be government alone um and that there's an enormous amount that needs to be done by the private sector so i don't know i the those debates about uh about is this a capitalist enterprise fundamentally or anything like that i sort of feel like are just beside the point like it's this is all hands on deck and wherever you sit um you have a role to play

Jason Calacanis: here yep everybody in the pool well then let's break down these there's these sort of two historical arguments which i think you do sometimes still hear that that yeah you know i mean you have a 15 year time horizon for example um although i i often find myself arguing like why are you worried about a 10-year time horizon because we need solutions to happen a lot sooner than 10 years we do we need to do

SPEAKER_143: there's some things we need to do yesterday yeah uh and there's some things that we're going to need to do in five years right and there's some things probably we're going to need to do in 10 or 15 years as well but yeah so timeline and capital intensity those are the two big lessons first of all timeline um you know things take a long time in lots of sectors like pharmaceuticals another good example of it could be a really long drug development can be can be a really slow process and can take a very long time for a drug to come to market uh the reason that it's investable and that everybody's fine with it is uh that the promise on the other side if the opportunity is big enough and the risk profile is well understood enough the pathway to commercialization is clear enough um then you can do a risk reward calculus and you can say well it is going to take a little bit longer but uh if it works it's worth it um and i think that that is increasingly true in the you know big swaths of this climate tech arena too where you use some of these solutions at least the ones that are tackling really big problems the prize is big enough that it justifies the the time that it's going to take to come to market and the second thing is it can come to market faster now than it used to be able to for a bunch of reasons one is technological like we just have tools we didn't have a while ago so you know we can iterate faster we could scale faster we can do design on a computer rather than having to iterate physically on everything all the time and the second is that there's just a ready and willing and salivating buyer universe for basically any technology that is a decarbonized alternative to a traditional solution or process as long as it is cost competitive or better for some other reason so if you can check those boxes you know everybody will line up to buy your stuff today and that's much more true today than it was than it was a decade ago so i think for those reasons you know timeline is important but um i don't think i think that we can we can make significant enough change at a global scale with the the technologies that are going to be coming to the market over the next couple of years within this decade that it should meet a venture capital timeline what about capital intensive so this stuff is capital intensive generally yeah like that part is true

SPEAKER_142: but the question is is that inherently a problem again there are other things that are also capital intensive too the reasons why yeah turns out turns out that really absolutely like an app-based

SPEAKER_06: marketplace phenomenally capital intensive yeah yeah and just look at you know tigers writing you know

SPEAKER_142: multi-hundred-million-dollar checks into software companies literally multiple times a day it's not like

SPEAKER_143: that stuff is not capital intensive um the you know so what you need in order for that capital intensity of a an early stage opportunity to be attractive nonetheless is one you need to have some measure of certainty that the capital will be there that was something that wasn't true last cycle right we had there's been an absolute flood of late stage capital into the climate tech space over the past couple of years whether it be these massive growth funds that like tpg rise has a seven billion dollar fund they have to deploy focus on climate there's a bunch of those so that stuff all the way through infrastructure capital um so you can be pretty confident that if your if your technology is proven and it pencils uh and you know there's a buyer on the other side of it you can capitalize it even up to really big amounts of money commonwealth fusion systems raised a 1.8 billion dollar round right that's for a fusion reactor i'm just sorry i did not have this job in time yeah exactly um so you know the the capital will be there um and then the size of the prize needs to be big enough because if you are going to raise a lot of capital and especially if you're going to raise capital at an up round every single time at the end of the day it is true that you're going to have a uh you can have a preference stack that is pretty big and you know your investors are going to demand a really really high outcome uh exit valuation and so you you've got to be i think what what it has done for me is it has refocused me on if this is a capital intensive business the opportunity set needs to be huge you can't compromise on that because otherwise those two things will end up

SPEAKER_161: mismatched so you're saying if you're doing deep science it better be able to solve something at the

Jason Calacanis: gigaton scale or if you're you know or it better be fusion where it changes everything kind of uh

SPEAKER_156: it better be i think it better be a gigaton is a good um is a good proxy for you know multi-billion

SPEAKER_143: dollar scale which is really what you have to be thinking about you're going after a really big sector the the tam is huge uh as long as that is true and the thing that you are doing is going to transform that sector if it really works then it's a big enough prize that it justifies a you know something that basically is going to have to build manufacturing capacity and so it's going to be

Jason Calacanis: expensive to do right we're talking at a moment when our industry is starting to consider whether valuations are going to come down whether there's going to whether it's going to be harder to raise money and i was having a conversation the other day with a friend about climate investing and and my hopeful view at least is that this will not be seen as optional in a downturn um i wonder how you imagine lps and investors though thinking about this going forward like if things tighten up what are

SPEAKER_156: we going to stop funding and hopefully it's not climate i think that both things can be true i think

SPEAKER_143: that you know in an environment where there is tightening generally that obviously will affect this sector as it will affect others i also think that there's a specific thing that is not exclusive to climate tech but the climate tech is probably disproportionately affected by it which is uh climate tech companies were among the biggest beneficiaries of the brief but wild spack boom and uh you know i've just for fun have this like uh google finance tracker uh that i monitor that i call spack track that's like 35 climate tech companies that have despacked right it's a big that's a big number for this sector um that window has largely closed although not entirely closed and so and those companies many of them though not all of them were still you know pre-revenue pre-product pre-commercial and so some of what was happening in the private market during that time was sort of you'd see a lot of companies for a little while who were saying well we're raising a priest background which was usually a red flag for me in the first place but it did happen in a bunch of cases and so these companies that were expecting a relatively near-term public market outcome despite not having a product yet those are the ones that are probably going to be hurt the most um with that said you know climate tech is a relative unfortunately because we this problem isn't going away anytime soon it's a long-term secular trend and if you believe that the world will first of all get worse before it gets better and so the the problem will become more apparent and second of all that we will we will remain become increasingly serious about uh adopting solutions then you probably will see some ups and downs in in valuation along with the broader market but

SPEAKER_162: uh you won't see the kind of collapse in the sector that we saw in clean tech in 2012 2013 yeah i mean

SPEAKER_160: i think that might be partly what i'm alluding to like it's not all going to go away that's not going

SPEAKER_143: to happen again i mean i would be incredibly surprised if like the world just sort of if investors got turned off by climate tech two years from now because valuations started to get shaky right it's we're not investors not going to turn away from enterprise software just because valuations are down there too

Jason Calacanis: right well the weather alone not to oversimplify would suggest that that wouldn't be a good plan yeah right um what is before i ask you about the podcast what is what are the nuts and bolts what's your check size like what kinds of companies you know what what stage are you looking at yeah so within

SPEAKER_142: this this fund which is our frontier fund um the focus is you know sort of the intersection of deep

SPEAKER_143: tech and climate so we're looking for revolutionary technologies that can meaningfully contribute to climate change mitigation uh we're investing early stage from a technology development standpoint so we're looking for something that you know is not just an idea on paper we'd like there to be some technical validation at least at small scale in the lab uh but not yet fully commercial and mature and at scale in the market so if you're familiar with like the trl scale um which it was popularized by nasa a very long time ago and now it's been adopted by the scientific community as like a proxy for how advanced the technology is it's a one to nine scale one is basically an idea on a napkin nine is at scale in the market fully commercial um we're sort of three to eight right uh so there's some proof but it's not ready yet for the market from a venture capital stage perspective that can vary it tends to mean we invest at seed or series a but we've made some exceptions to go uh both earlier and later uh depending on the situation again we care more about technology maturity than anything else but seed and series a is sort of the sweet spot uh check size uh can range sort of anywhere from initial check anywhere from like two to fifteen million dollars uh depending on the situation and we uh reserve a fairly large amount for follow-on so we intend to follow on with uh with companies that we think have continued promise and you know we we recognize that it's gonna particularly in this kind of deep tech world these are as we said capital intensive enterprises generally and they take some time and we recognize that we think it's worth it so we want to continue to support the

SPEAKER_161: companies as they develop what are you super into right now or you know what what's in your portfolio that you're most excited about are you in that fusion company i can't remember

SPEAKER_143: we're not in commonwealth fusion but we are in a fusion company yeah we're in a company called zap energy which is a really cool approach to nuclear fusion that is probably not worth getting into what's different about it now but um yeah i mean so we've invested we've got uh 10 companies soon to be 12 in the portfolio now equally excited about all of them obviously yes um but you know if you want to name a couple that i think are are particularly cool form energy is a good one to talk about

SPEAKER_224: batteries batteries i'm obsessed with batteries okay yeah lots of reasons to be obsessed with

SPEAKER_143: batteries most of the reasons to be obsessed with batteries have to do with lithium ion batteries uh but there's a few use cases where lithium ion lithium ion batteries are incredible and they're going to take over the world um almost entirely but there's a few use cases where they will not take over the world and specifically the main one that that we've been focused on is uh you know as you add more and more renewables to the grid you face all these challenges to do with their intermittency um the obvious one is what happens on a daily basis when the sun sets that's what lithium ion is well suited to helping to solve uh but you also start to face challenges on longer time horizons so what happens if you have a cloudy week when you are on a very solar reliant grid or if you take it to its extreme uh we generate three times as much solar in the summer as we do in the winter here in california so if you're in a very uh solar heavy grid like you have seasonal challenges you face as you get to really high penetrations and so uh you're going to need a different kind of battery to solve that sort of thing batteries that last hundreds of hours not not four to eight hours which is typical for lithium ion form energy uh has a technology that is going to do that and the way the economics work out if you're trying to use a battery for hundreds of hours at a time it only makes any economic sense if the capital cost of the battery is about an order of magnitude less than lithium ion so about a tenth the cost that it has to be that cheap from a capital

SPEAKER_167: perspective for it to make sense um wow so that's what form is doing so their batteries are incredibly cheap relative to lithium ion that allows them to operate them for super long durations and are they

Jason Calacanis: iron based or is that am i thinking of a different company they are right no you got it's iron air

SPEAKER_143: yeah so the iron is the anode material air is the cathode i did a documentary podcast series called

Jason Calacanis: how we survive about lithium extraction and battery technology um digging into some of those no pun intended mining projects and the geothermal stuff in the salt and sea and we oh cool geeked out pretty heavily toward the later part of the season about different kinds of battery tank yeah battery world is

SPEAKER_160: totally fascinating it is completely like it's weirdly everything yeah um i don't want you to diss

Jason Calacanis: any sector but i wonder like there are there are a lot of new brand new myself included climate tech investors like a lot of people coming to venture to do this job and and i've sort of been asking everybody in this series like what should we not waste time on honestly i think i'm gonna get so

SPEAKER_142: much hate for this so i have to word it carefully sorry um i wouldn't it's not that i think this is a

SPEAKER_143: total waste of time but i think you can wait a year before you start trying to figure out what the hell's going on in the crypto climate nexus uh i don't think there's any reason unless you're already you know like deeply embedded in crypto world i don't think there's any reason that you need to deal with it today um because it is you know there there's a bunch of interesting projects going on there that some of which you know have the potential to to do something new particularly around carbon markets but it is a mess it's it's you know it's not that hard to spin up one of these projects there's so many of them they're all tackling different versions and every early iteration has like a lot of hair on it um and so i would wait for that to shake out a little bit before i really dig into it because it's a it's a heavy investment to try to get involved in that stuff

SPEAKER_160: i mean and to be fair most of them i consider to be almost like an anti-offset

SPEAKER_143: so certainly some of the earlier i mean there's actual evidence carbon plan had this good report recently of um what we've seen through klima dow which is like the main the one that's probably garnered the most attention so far and and you know for i think they they had a good idea in in part which was we will we'll use this protocol and this dow to basically buy up the floor we'll sweep the floor of the carbon market um of projects that are verified in the vera standard so we'll take all the bad stuff out of the market that'll raise prices in the market which did kind of happen for a bit uh and then that'll make the the buyers have to pay more for higher quality stuff but instead that's that was assuming there's a fixed supply of offsets um but instead what happened is that a bunch of projects that were not generating offsets because it wasn't worth it to them suddenly started generating offsets and these are projects that are like a hydroelectric project that's been operating for 15 years and doesn't need the credits right and so it turns out that it's actually and i'll say i have strong opinions about this because um early in my career i was doing origination and trading of carbon credits and like the first wave of that stuff so i have an appreciation for how complicated it is like really complex market really difficult to make it robust and transparent and all the things trustworthy all the things you really need and so the projects the crypto projects that just come in and think like oh i can i'm gonna i'm gonna put this in a ledger and make it tradable and fungible and transparent and hey i've solved all the the carbon market problems i think they're just like missing the bigger picture

Jason Calacanis: yeah totally well i will not bait you anymore on that topic even though i want to um what so then tell me about the podcast i got very excited to see two climate focused podcast launch effectively at the same time carbon copy and then your show catalyst um what was the what was the genesis of that and how are you enjoying it were you a podcaster before yeah i was so the catalyst is sort

SPEAKER_142: of the new incarnation of a podcast that i'd been doing for six or seven years before that even that

SPEAKER_143: was called the interchange the the backstory has to do with sort of my career uh trajectory which was prior to eip prior to being on the investing side i ran a firm called gtm research which was a market analysis firm part of a company called green tech media we were focused on sort of tracking and forecasting the future of of clean tech at the time what became climate tech um and you know so our job was to sell our expertise and we were sort of a combined digital media company and and market analyst firm and so we had a whole media platform um as part of that we launched podcasts and one of them was this one called the interchange that was sort of intended to be the like you know the way that i think about it is like our target audience knows what a kilowatt hour is already um so it's not for the lay person and we don't shy away from getting into the wonk because i can't avoid that hard as i try um but uh but that you know sort of explains the complexities of what's going on in this whole space so i've been doing that for a long time uh we sold the company gtm to to wood mckenzie in which is a big scotland-based energy data and analytics firm and in 2016 kept doing the podcast for a few years after that but eventually it was time to move on but fortunately most of the team from the media side of gtm had since left and joined canary media which is um owned by the rocky mountain institute and is this cool non-profit newsroom focused on this space so we teamed up with them and basically just relaunched a new podcast that with a new name but doing a similar kind of thing

SPEAKER_162: trying to get into the kind of nuances of climate tech gotcha well it totally worked because i

Jason Calacanis: discovered your pre-existing podcast for the first time that way um i mean look however you discovered

SPEAKER_143: it i'm happy exactly is it related to eip at all i mean i i it's interesting like i eip is my job like i'm i'm of an investor in deep tech climate stuff for eip that is what i spend 120 of my waking hours thinking about and so the podcast is naturally aligned with that and that you know the topics on the podcast are the things that i am thinking about day to day which are what the exactly the things that

SPEAKER_162: we are investing in so it aligns perfectly for that exact reason but the podcast itself is uh

Jason Calacanis: sponsored by canary media right and i would imagine i mean for the same reason that we do this week in startups and this weekend climate startups i would imagine it is useful for you in terms of deal flow

SPEAKER_142: like everyone has to be a brand yeah for sure yeah and the other way that i think about it is like um the i don't know how you do this but the way that i generate uh topic ideas is it is literally

SPEAKER_143: like um i'm looking for the perfect episode for me is something that i know is important and i just have not had the time to like fully understand i couldn't walk through the narrative of it like we just recorded an episode on on battery minerals uh this morning where i got into like the nuances of oh what's going to happen with nickel demand when we if we shift from nmc batteries to lfp batteries and it's the kind of thing that has been bouncing around in the back of my head for a while but i just haven't dedicated the time to and so the podcast is just a perfect way to project to the universe like a thing that i am interested in and what comes back to me is a whole bunch of stuff deal flow for sure but in addition to that just other people who are smart and who know more about me or more than me about that topic so i i love it as a just a learning mechanism in addition to being deal flow it's

Jason Calacanis: really like it's the best way to instead of sitting around reading white papers just get somebody to tell you in addition to reading white papers in addition to reading white papers of course yeah i want to go back to as a quick follow-up before i let you go is there room for more of the eip model in terms of um corporate lps like that sort of feels like it sort of feels like every every company should be doing a version of that like they all need this why aren't they all just spinning up funds

SPEAKER_142: like crazy or are they some of them are um a lot of them are finding opportunities to work with with folks like us to you know sort of collaborate with each other and get a bigger platform yeah i

SPEAKER_143: mean i think that i think that um investing is one thing that every large corporate should do there's a variety of other things too right it's becoming clear that if you are a big corporate you need to figure out how to do really good emissions accounting you need to set science-based targets you need to have a clear roadmap for how you're going to achieve those targets you then need to like operationalize that within your organization and you need visibility into the next generation of technologies that are going to help you achieve those things and so there's like a portfolio of stuff that should be falling under the how do we deal with climate change within our

SPEAKER_151: organization bucket uh that i think of eip or whatever other equivalent being kind of one one spoke in

SPEAKER_161: that wheel shale where can people find you uh they can find me uh how much would you like them to

SPEAKER_156: find you yeah that's a good question depends depends what they're doing um if they're super cool they

SPEAKER_143: can they can definitely find me on twitter i'm at shale con uh they can email me if they really have

SPEAKER_151: something awesome going on in the deep tech plus climate nexus my email address is my last name at energy impactpartners.com i i may or may not regret that i know that was really bold of you you can

SPEAKER_126: email us later if you want and be like i changed my mind i regret that yeah i mean i'm not making any

SPEAKER_151: promises to respond to everything but i want to see cool stuff um yeah those are the places you wish

Jason Calacanis: someone would email you about what's the like if you could order up the cool company that doesn't

SPEAKER_20: exist yet but you want it to exist other than the pharmaceutical startup yeah um i might have to put

SPEAKER_143: more thought into it i can't give you a specific answer i mean i can say the type of thing that i get really excited about is when somebody emails me or gets introduced to me or something like that and says like look i have been uh i've been thinking about this problem as it pertains to climate for a really long time because it is thorny and nobody else has solved it and i and i've put all the thought into it i've done all the customer market discovery that i need to do and i think i found the solution and here's what it looks like um what i don't like is people who are like hey i uh i don't know i think that like this technology is cool and it should seems like it should have a big impact on climate but but i don't know yet um that's that's less exciting i like people who've really done the

Jason Calacanis: legwork shell con also just in his copious spare time host of the podcast catalyst thanks so much

SPEAKER_151: for coming on thank you for having me i'm a big fan of your uh your show as well so it's nice to

Jason Calacanis: nice to swap notes on it totally and we can swap companies now that we know yeah let's let's do it yeah totally i got i got i got a couple super nerdy things that i need to yeah okay smarter about

SPEAKER_206: there's another way to there's another way to put the stuff that really gets me excited it's like uh a combination of super nerdy and like oh my god that would be like that's wild you know like

SPEAKER_00: the like but what if it works metric which would have been called like whoa that is ambitious like

Jason Calacanis: i like that kind of changes everything yeah there's this weird company that i've been bouncing around that's trying to genetically engineer bacteria to consume carbon dioxide and excrete textiles like thread yeah you know yeah that that appeared the consensus seems to be there headed for a scientific cliff that they're just not totally aware of but i just can't get them out of my

SPEAKER_142: head because i'm like yeah but whatever it works yeah i mean a lot of the like co2 to value stuff is

SPEAKER_143: kind of like that yeah uh like one of them's gonna hit yeah maybe probably maybe there's an interesting question there as to do we need to be turning co2 into value or should we just be like or or do the from a climate perspective the size of the sink the the total amount of co2 that you could use to create textiles may not be that big from a global emissions perspective this is kind of the argument against the like uh co2 cured concrete stuff for example um but it's true but then is it

SPEAKER_20: offset by the amount of by the industry you could replace yeah maybe right that's what makes a bigger

SPEAKER_143: difference right like if it's a big solution for that sector then it could still be a big business

SPEAKER_140: yeah are you do you know the magrithia metals guys yeah that's a you know alex right so funny that's

SPEAKER_138: exactly who i was thinking of when i was like the ones that i love are the ones where you're like whoa

SPEAKER_00: yeah i was thinking of alex really that's hilarious yeah i love so alex i met through the pie he was a

Jason Calacanis: source on how we survive and sure yeah and i literally was like i'm so close to putting my own

SPEAKER_162: money into that company but i'm gonna wait for their series a it's it's bananas bananas but it's

SPEAKER_79: pretty interesting yeah i agree with you yep okay cool all right good i see the thesis yeah i will

SPEAKER_286: i will be in touch hey everyone producer nick here i want to tell you about the sas syndicate if you're a founder of a sas company with a product and market our investment team wants to talk to you head over to the syndicate.com slash sas s-a-a-s to apply to raise from the sas syndicate and you can join jason syndicate of over 9 000 accredited investors at the syndicate.com producer justin

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