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SPEAKER_02: Hey, everybody, and welcome to the Pomp Podcast. I'm not your host, Jason Calacanis. I'm the host of This Week in Startups.

SPEAKER_04: But my friend, Anthony Pompliano, you know him as Pomp, and I decided we would try to do a crossover episode where the king of crypto and the prince of startups would get together and answer your question. So it's a crossover episode between the Pomp Podcast. Now, if you're listening to my podcast This Week in Startups, why don't you just stop what you're doing in your podcast player and do a search for Pomp, P-O-M-P, and find the Pomp Podcast and subscribe to it.

SPEAKER_05: It's awesome. And he talks about crypto. And he's very objective, and he's been on my pod, and he's awesome, and it's great to catch up with you, Pomp. How are you doing?

SPEAKER_08: I'm doing great. This is also the Pomp Podcast recording, which means that you have to go subscribe to This Week in Startups.

SPEAKER_09: I'm laughing because right before we started, Jason said that this is a collab episode similar to Nicki Minaj and Tekashi69, and we're still trying to figure out who is who in the episode of collaboration.

SPEAKER_10: But yeah, I mean, I think it means one of us has to take our top off and put pasties on at some point. Did you see the new video?

SPEAKER_14: Oh, I saw.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Yeah, I was like, what is going on in the world?

SPEAKER_16: Like, it's just like, people are just naked to get YouTube views.

SPEAKER_17: And I saw Nicki Minaj tweeted, like, this is the fastest to, like, whatever, 100 million views. I'm like, you're topless. Of course it is.

SPEAKER_18: My favorite thing is Tekashi69 keeps going on Instagram and making these videos that says, everyone said I was a rat because he, you know, basically worked with the federal prosecutors.

SPEAKER_21: He ratted on his friends. Yep. He ate cheese. And he still is under house arrest, actually. And he's like, and I'm still doing better numbers than everyone else in the rap game, so you guys are just mad.

SPEAKER_09: And it's kind of like, look, man, he's literally under house arrest doing these collabs and going viral on the internet. It's pretty wild.

SPEAKER_24: So basically, they sent a video crew to his house, painted the corner of it red or something, and made, like, a little tiny box for them to jump around in. I mean, that kid's going to get whacked. Based on my experience from where I grew up, if you talk that much and you poke that many people, it's just a matter of time. And it's not going to happen in the next two years. It's going to be, like, eight years from now. Kid's going to get whacked. Car's going to flip on a highway. Maybe the brakes were not so good. But he's got to be careful, man.

SPEAKER_27: Before he released this latest video, he actually went on Instagram and did an hour-long live stream beforehand and literally had a list of rappers.

SPEAKER_08: Everyone from Snoop Dogg all the way down and just went one by one and just basically talked shit to him. Really? And I was like, man. I mean, he's terrible. I was like, okay.

SPEAKER_30: I tried to sit through that song, and I was like, my God, I could rap better than this.

SPEAKER_35: And, I mean, I sound terrible. I have a terrible voice. He's horrible. Why do people like him? I don't get it.

SPEAKER_36: If you dropped a rap song, it would go viral for sure. Promise. 100.

SPEAKER_16: Would somebody take this episode and just sample something we say that's clever and make a pomp and J-Cow crossover video, whatever.

SPEAKER_39: But anyway, you know, it's interesting. You and I have debated crypto a whole bunch. We actually overlap a lot more than people probably think because people think I hate crypto.

SPEAKER_04: But I don't. I just hated the ICO scam, and you and I came to basic agreement on that. So my first question for you is about the ICO scams and that whole chapter of crypto. Is that actually over now, and did anything come out of that? Because I had the founders of Tezos on. I see they settled a lawsuit. And I'm wondering if any of the projects that we heard about, what is it, five years ago, four years ago, three years ago, when people were going crazy about this, did any of those projects ever result in an actual real company that provides products or services that's notable?

SPEAKER_27: So let me separate two things here.

SPEAKER_44: One is there is very few, if any, ICOs still happening in the form that they were happening, specifically in the United States and even internationally. I think that kind of came and went. We'll see if it comes back. But right now, that's definitely been kind of tampered down by a lot of the regulatory pressure. In terms of what has been produced, the one thing that I definitely will give credit to is if you take Ethereum, right? So it's not a company that has a product or a service. It's a protocol. That definitely has become the second most dominant network in the space. So they get credit for that. They did an ICO. It went well. They've been proven to not be a security. And we're off to the races there. In terms of most of the other things, people will disagree with me on this. But I tend to think that you're right in that there just isn't what you and I would expect, kind of measurable success. There's some things that may be interesting. Some people who have built a product and kind of are just now getting it out in the space. But if you're a business that raised $10, $20, $50, $100 million in an ICO, in the traditional technology world, you would expect a product. You would expect hundreds of employees. You would expect some of these milestones to be hit. And we're just not seeing that yet. And I think that really was kind of the concern all along.

SPEAKER_18: Why are you giving people $250 million and they have an idea and a pitch deck?

SPEAKER_04: Like, I don't know. That was another concern I had. And people were like, oh, you're hating. And I was like, well, honestly, I'm not hating because the second this becomes legitimate and legal, you can be certain I will be on top of it. And I have a big platform. So if ICOs turn out to be the thing, the syndicate.com will be an ICO token and we will go all in on it. And we just took a very cautious, like, wait and see because I have something to lose. Like, I've got a pretty great life. I don't want to go to jail. But looking down this list of ICOs, Telegram raised a billion seven. I'm just reading from a CNBC story. Dragon coin raised 320. And I don't know if these numbers are even legitimate anymore. Something called Huobi, 300 million. HDAQ, 258. Filecoin, I remember because my friend Naval was involved in that, 257 million. And that one seemed like an interesting one to me because I believe it was going to be cloud storage. You give your hard drive up and it's going to be some sort of cloud storage. I had some mixed feelings on that one, but that one seemed real. I had Tezos on the podcast. They raised 232. And they just gave some money back. They got sued. Siren Labs, 157. Bancor, 152.

SPEAKER_16: Of that list I just made, obviously, Telegram's a real product. So putting that aside, are any of those legit now? Or do any of them, like, do you hear about any of them?

SPEAKER_47: Do you get excited about any of them?

SPEAKER_44: Yeah, so I think that Huobi is a real exchange. It operates. It's relatively large. I don't know how much of that is because of the ICO versus it was already going to be a successful thing and they had the ICO. The other ones, for the most part, are either still kind of we're going to do mode, right? So we're going to launch this. We're going to do all of this. The one you didn't mention is there was an EOS that raised $4 billion. Brock Pierce's. $4 billion.

SPEAKER_48: Yeah.

SPEAKER_44: Yeah.

SPEAKER_21: And they paid, I think, a $25 million SEC fund on $4 billion raised. It's like the most profitable business in the world.

SPEAKER_51: I think that your credit card fees would be larger. I think it feels like a credit card fee, right? Two and a half percent on a billion. Pretty good deal.

SPEAKER_21: Here's what I will say, though. So you and I are definitely on the same page of like, I was yelling and screaming, this is all chaos and nonsense.

SPEAKER_44: And like, I can't believe this is all happening. And I actually thought that the regulators would be much more strict. So the thing that I probably was wrong on was they seem to have not been as stringent as I thought they would be. But this also happens in tech sometimes, too. So if you look at, you know, there's Magically, there's Quibi. There's a bunch of these companies, especially when SoftBank came into the market, that they raised hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars pre-product. And so I always go back to like, is that a sign of late stage economy stuff or is that a sign of like crypto stuff? Right. And I don't yet have an answer.

SPEAKER_58: Yeah, let me let me I'll take that as a question because unpacking it, if we just take Quibi as an example, there you have one of the most successful media executives in the history of media. Top five, certainly in Katzenberg, pretty easy bet to make even pre-product.

SPEAKER_16: And as much as they've been derided, I do think they have three million paid subs or something, which is from a cold start in a new brand, not insignificant.

SPEAKER_04: Right. Certainly they've gone further than Netflix did in their first 10 years, I bet, in terms of the number of subscribers. So that was interesting. Magic Leap actually has real technology and that is a groundbreaking space, AR, augmented reality. But it does seem crazy that people poured a ton of money in. But those were very sophisticated investors, obviously, Andreessen Horowitz and other people. So as much of a mess as that is, people I have not seen the technology, but people have. And there's something real there.

SPEAKER_16: So definitely part of it is late stage capitalism, but I would think these are two very different buckets of capital, right?

SPEAKER_04: Like an ICO investor was somebody who probably made a fortune on Bitcoin or Ethereum and was just rolling it over.

SPEAKER_59: That's definitely some of it.

SPEAKER_44: And some of it was actually people who missed kind of the early successful ones and then said, oh, well, what's the next one? Right. Because remember, Bitcoin didn't have an ICO, right? So Bitcoin was kind of what you would consider a traditional product. It was released to the world and kind of went that way.

SPEAKER_21: Ethereum had the ICO, but there's a lot of investors. I mean, I literally remember in 2017, there was a number of times where people would be like, hey, this company is raising $20 million.

SPEAKER_63: And all you do is you send crypto to a wallet and then just like fill in this Excel file with your name and the amount you sent. Wow. And it was like, this isn't going to end well. Yeah. That wasn't a hard call.

SPEAKER_66: Money coming in like that.

SPEAKER_39: I mean, with that, with a KYC, know your customer and all the money laundering issues. Yeah, that's just a recipe for disaster. But yeah, I mean, we do see some weird things where a company pre-product.

SPEAKER_04: And so I think on average, the ICOs were like the outliers in our industry. So I would freely admit that the outliers in our industry did look similar to some of those ICOs.

SPEAKER_02: But the interesting thing is Quibi did get a product to market. Magic Leap did get their product to developers, I believe. Developers have the kits now. So the hit rate is going to be very different, I think.

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SPEAKER_24: Okay, let's get back to this amazing episode. Why didn't they launch products, do you think?

SPEAKER_16: Was it just that the people who built these companies and who were willing to take the risk of being doing an ICO,

SPEAKER_04: which was unclear, were probably just not super qualified to build products?

SPEAKER_08: I don't know for sure, right?

SPEAKER_44: Each case is kind of case by case. But what I will say is I think you get – there was definitely some people who raised money through ICOs that couldn't have raised it in a more traditional kind of venture capital type model. So that would be signaling, right?

SPEAKER_77: It was signaling people or selecting – it was a selection issue. People who couldn't clear market in venture cleared market with anonymous global wallets.

SPEAKER_79: Because maybe that signals not as good of an executor.

SPEAKER_44: Yeah. So that was – and I don't know what percentage of them, but that was definitely 1%. Another part of it was people who believed in kind of the decentralization. So this whole idea of I don't want the venture capitalist to own a piece of my business.

SPEAKER_21: I want the people to own it. I can kind of bootstrap a network, all that.

SPEAKER_07: And then the third one is I actually think that there was a lot of people who literally just said, well, if somebody is going to give me $250 million, I'm going to raise $250 million. Right.

SPEAKER_77: Which I think was Tezos' position was, hey, let's do that. Awesome. Okay.

SPEAKER_33: Let me ask you this question. Okay, guys.

SPEAKER_21: What is the – what's the most money a company has raised in a seed round that you invested in pre-product?

SPEAKER_84: Okay. Great question.

SPEAKER_85: Seed round pre-product. Hmm.

SPEAKER_39: I am very much of the belief in investing in companies right after they launch their product and I can play with it.

SPEAKER_04: So I think a company like Superhuman, because Raul had done a company before, was able to raise a decent chunk of change in their seed round. It was many millions of dollars, but it wasn't over 10.

SPEAKER_39: And then looking at – let's see.

SPEAKER_04: I was in a later round of medium, but I think Ev probably raised a decent chunk of change. So serial founders like a Mark Pincus or Elon with The Boring Company – forget about me being involved in them.

SPEAKER_39: I'm not in The Boring Company, but I am a medium, but a later round.

SPEAKER_04: They tend to raise $10 million for 10%. That's what I see a lot of the times.

SPEAKER_60: And so it's an outrageous valuation when compared to the average. And probably the founders are getting a 5x, 10x premium on their previous experience for good reason.

SPEAKER_91: You know they're going to get the product to market. They've done it many times before.

SPEAKER_44: Yeah.

SPEAKER_08: It's just interesting how $10 million versus $250 million, right, is just such a wide gap.

SPEAKER_04: It's huge. And it's – the problem with raising that amount of money, I've seen it happen in later stages, is the whole team gets off their game.

SPEAKER_16: Entitlement goes off the charts, and you have so much money, you basically drowned in opportunity.

SPEAKER_04: It would be the equivalent of like putting a chef in a Costco or something, you know, like a giant warehouse and saying, turn it into a restaurant. And it's like, okay, where do I even begin?

SPEAKER_16: You know, like there's every single food item in here. It's just too much. It's too overwhelming to go that big that fast.

SPEAKER_60: And it distances the core team from reality so much, and reality is the customer, that they start arguing over things like chairs or the receptionist's desk or where the office is located or what the laptops are and, you know, how many gigs of RAM they have. Whereas in a regular company, you're like, holy shit, we're almost out of money. We better get this product to market. And you need to have constraint to be a great artist.

SPEAKER_04: Actually, a better analogy than a chef would be, just imagine you gave an artist a canvas the size of like a giant mural, you know, like the side of a building.

SPEAKER_16: And you just gave them, you know, giant, you know, oil containers, milk trucks of paint.

SPEAKER_39: And you're like, go ahead. They're like, there's a little bit of a big canvas here. You know, where do I even get started? That's why like constraint makes great art. Like Bob Dylan said, like, they were like, hey, you know, why did this album come out? Why didn't you make the album? He's like, well, I owed it to the record label. And people were like, oh, that's completely disappointing as an answer. It's like, yeah, my back was against overall.

SPEAKER_79: I had to get it out. I couldn't delay the record label anymore. So I had to, you know, get my term paper in. In Bob Dylan's case, it was the album.

SPEAKER_44: And it feels like now the tools are available where people can create products so inexpensively and so quickly that they can get something, maybe not even fully into the market, but to hand you that it's almost unexplainable. Unless you're working on something that's a really hard tech problem, why would you go

David Friedberg: raise money before that, right?

SPEAKER_02: This is such a great insight pump because I deal with founders all day long who tell me, if you give me $100,000 or $250,000, I can build this.

SPEAKER_04: And then I say, you know, that's great. And I'm flattered that you're contacting me. I have a long list of people who've already created stuff and who have 100 or 1,000 users who are asking me for $250,000 at the same valuation. Why would I pick you over that? And they're like, well, I have great potential. I'm like, you're telling me that. They're showing me that. And really, that's what I think a lot of young entrepreneurs don't understand is the people

SPEAKER_39: who get funded in today's market because of what you're saying. It's so cheap to build.

SPEAKER_04: If you wanted to build Clubhouse or if you wanted to build a podcasting app or whatever it is, you could build it in a weekend. Sweat equity, two, three people. You don't need all that money. And so you've basically signaled to the market that you are a permission asker. You're somebody who needs permission or validation in order to build. Whereas other people, they're going to make their album. They're going to tell jokes if they're a comedian. They're going to make a short film if they're going to write their screenplay.

SPEAKER_02: They don't need permission to do it. Right? And that's where founders get tripped up a lot is that they ask for, you know, they're looking for some validation from an investor, you know, and really they should look at the investor as somewhere between a checkbook or ATM and a coach or, you know, a close friend who can give them candid feedback. Right? That's really what you're getting when you're getting an angel or seed investor.

SPEAKER_60: Somebody who can be candid with you with advice, maybe introduce you to people, just be a good friend. And on the margins, a little bit of money to spend on marketing or hiring that third developer. But you really want to be a developer, which is why Combinator says you have to have a technologist on your team. You need to have a developer, a designer, somebody who can actually build. And if you can't build, well, what's your goddamn excuse? Like, go on YouTube and type in how to build a website, how to write code. And people are like, oh, you know, that's ridiculous. So it's not actually ridiculous. There's freecodecamp.org. I had them on the podcast. We made a small investment in Lambda School.

SPEAKER_02: There's Lambda School if you want to pay money. And you can do it on the come, right?

SPEAKER_100: You don't have to actually pay them up front. You can pay it on contingency with an ISA, income sharing agreement. So ISA. It's like so much interesting stuff out there. You really have no excuse.

SPEAKER_44: Well, and I think part of what we've seen happen, at least over the last three or four years, is, you know, you had way more experience kind of early 2010s when people were just figuring it out. They're trying to build companies.

SPEAKER_21: And the game of Silicon Valley wasn't yet identified and kind of popularized across all

SPEAKER_44: these media platforms. Now, literally, you'll get people who pitch you.

SPEAKER_21: And it's just like, I know what you're doing. I know you read a blog post that said you're supposed to send this email or you're supposed to do this. I don't believe you, right?

SPEAKER_10: It's literally, it used to be opaque and you had to figure it out.

SPEAKER_04: Like that was the game. You had to figure out what a term sheet was. You had to figure out, you know, how to get a lawyer in Silicon Valley. You needed to have to figure out how to get an office space or a lease or, you know, all the stuff was like the first year was just figuring out the blocking and tackling.

SPEAKER_02: And now you can just go onto a website, trademark, incorporate, set up a cap table all in

SPEAKER_39: a day and get a WeWork space if you feel the need to have an office and an address. And it's all done in a day for $1,000 or something. So you're exactly right.

SPEAKER_04: And it's actually, I've had this blowback because I've been doing the podcast for so long and unpacking entrepreneurship. People pitch me and they know better what I'm looking for than I do because I don't remember all the things I've said and all the advice I've given over a thousand episodes. So they're like, they literally know you need to have the problem be personal because Gary Camp and Travis couldn't find a cab in Paris. So they created Uber.

SPEAKER_39: So they come up with some fictional story of, you know, oh, I had this itch. I had to scratch. I had this frustration in the world. And I've had people who are like, I've literally had somebody who's like, my dog got killed because he got hit by a car and I'm making something to protect against that.

SPEAKER_02: And I was just like, oh my God, like, and it was true in this case, but literally that making something personal as one example of how to unpack startups and pitch them is there. So then what's left, what's left is actually traction. So I've changed my game, all the things people know I'm going to ask, that's fine. But, you know, the secret weapon is to just talk to the customers, right? You talk to the customers, it's very hard to fake customers.

SPEAKER_24: People can, there are techniques to fake customers, but we know them and we figure them out.

SPEAKER_44: Yeah. And it feels like the reduction of friction is a net positive, right? It's better that people can get started faster. They can get office space, whatever. But there's just like this level of authenticity and you almost can smell when somebody's pitching you what they want.

SPEAKER_112: They think you want to hear rather than just doing it. 100%. So it's pretty interesting.

SPEAKER_02: Well, think about like a sport like golf or tennis, like to just even understand how the

SPEAKER_39: scoring works in tennis or how to get a tennis court or how to, you know, get a tea time, right?

SPEAKER_04: Like these are very hard things to do. If you're wondering why you don't see a large number of people doing those sports or skiing and you don't see diversity in those sports, it might be because it's really hard to even get started. Whereas, you know, playing baseball or basketball, you know, it's really all out there. Like all you need is a basketball, you know, and a hoop. Like it's accessible to people. And I think that's why the NBA wound up winning and became such an amazing sport is because people in China or Africa or Europe who wanted to play just needed a basketball. And you see all these videos of them playing with like a bucket pinned against the side of a wall, but they've got a basketball. And that's why I think the NBA became the world sport, right?

SPEAKER_02: And soccer as well, because it's just so accessible. You just need to have a soccer ball in a field.

SPEAKER_115: Yeah, absolutely.

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SPEAKER_04: What else you got? Oh, yeah. So, explain to me why Ethereum was able to do essentially a token offering, an ICO, if it would be considered that. But they did a token offering, and they did not get in trouble with the SEC, but other people did. I've never understood this.

SPEAKER_02: And the times I've said it, people got very defensive on the social media, on the Twitter, because I think people are concerned because they probably made a lot of money off of doing

SPEAKER_04: it. And I had people in the industry who were like, hey, pump the brakes on that.

SPEAKER_16: You know, your friends are in that, you know. So, why is that not considered an ICO? Didn't they sell all that and take all that money?

SPEAKER_123: So, obviously, I'm not a lawyer. I'm going to give you my layman's understanding of where regulators came out on this.

SPEAKER_44: Yeah. And it really comes down to the decentralization of an existing network before or after the sale. So, there's some people who fell into the category of, hey, Jason, give me money. I'm going to go build this product. And at some point in the future, I will launch it, and that will be decentralized. Regulators have said, no, you're essentially raising capital, right? You're taking money, and that is going to be considered some sort of security, and you'll get in trouble if you didn't do everything you're supposed to do. In the case of an Ethereum, what it sounds like is regulators said, look, Ethereum, we are not going to make a decision on the time at which they did their token sale. So, actually, the regulators have not said whether that was, quote, unquote, legal or not. But at this point, it is decentralized enough where it is not going to be deemed a security today. Got it. And so, part of the big question there is something that previously hasn't been an option is, can you actually have a security that's offered that then transitions to a non-security? So, in the case of Ethereum, was it a security when it was sold? But then once the network is built and decentralized, could it transition to now be considered not a security? It sounds like regulators are open to that idea. I'm not, by any means, well-versed enough to kind of tell them where they're going to come out on that. But it is interesting because that's something that doesn't exist in traditional companies.

SPEAKER_58: It seems to me like the SEC is doing a reasonable job at balancing innovation and protecting consumers from scams. Would you agree with that? Or do you think that they've been slow?

SPEAKER_21: I think that they've been slow, which means that they've been doing a good job, right? So, both of those things are true. And what I mean by that is nobody knows, right? Like, I mean, literally, people are experimenting. And so, naturally, regulators are going to be slower than the innovators. But there's some things that are just outright scams. So, if I say, Jason, give me $100,000.

SPEAKER_44: You know, I've got this great product. You give me the money. And then it comes out that I didn't have the product, right? Like, okay, that's just a scam. And I ran off with the money. Like, everyone agrees that's a bad thing. You know, go after those people. So, I think that they've done a pretty good job given how tough the situation is. There's plenty of people that wish that they would come out with more clear guidance and all this kind of stuff. They just don't know, right?

SPEAKER_112: And so, I think that it's going to take time to get clearer guidance.

SPEAKER_16: One thing that I didn't understand that they didn't do, and I'm wondering what you think

SPEAKER_58: of my idea, which is, in the world I live in, when we do what's called a special purpose vehicle at thesyndicate.com, or AngelList does it, or Seed Invest, or other places that do SPVs.

SPEAKER_02: This is, they said, you can have 250 people, but you're capped out at $10 million per investment. And somebody's got to be on the hook for managing all this. And that happens to me, me, in this case, the syndicate lead. And they have to all be accredited investors. So, there was kind of a, you know, and if you have 100 people, you're not capped at the

SPEAKER_39: 250. So, they were basically trying, I think that's, I think I got it right. People can look it up and correct me if I'm wrong.

SPEAKER_04: But ballpark, what they said was, let's make, if there is a crater, if this thing does blow up, let's make it not create huge collateral damage, right? What I would have done if I was the SEC is, I would have said, anybody who registers at this website, sec.gov slash crypto, if you register your project here, you can go through a quick registration process, which says you can have any number of investors capped at a million dollars. You can have up to $5 million capped at this number and 10 million at this number. And as long as your project stays within those bounds, you're good for five years. And if you want to go above that, then you got to kick into securities mode or whatever it is. So, you can, I don't know what the number is, but it seems to me that if a bunch of people

SPEAKER_02: are limited to, non-accredited investors are limited to $1,000 each, well, what's the harm there? You know, like even if they were paid minimum wage, they could get out of that hole in 100 hours of work, right? It wouldn't be what we call in poker and gambling, the risk of ruin, which is playing with your entire chip stack in one game and you get a bad beat and somebody hits quads against your, you know, boat and you lose it all. So, what do you think of that kind of approach? And do other people take that approach in other jurisdictions? I don't know the global jurisdiction reality these days.

SPEAKER_110: Yeah.

SPEAKER_44: So, the first thing that I'll say is people have to remember venture capitalists are professionals, right? You've got funds, I've got funds, everyone's got a fund and our job is literally to take limited partners capital and go find the best deals that we can possibly find that are going to drive a return. And so, that is the day job of these investors. And so, naturally, they're going to find, quote unquote, the best companies and projects. Do they miss sometimes? Absolutely, right? So, there's definitely some selection bias for people who choose not to go that path. Doesn't mean it's for everybody, but for sure, I think that's kind of, we have to remember that that's why venture capital exists for projects that want to grow very big. Now, there is a subset of companies that have chosen to go through something like, let's call Reg A+. And again, I don't know all of the details, but as far as I understand-

SPEAKER_31: It's like the mini-IPL, basically. They have to do a little bit more.

SPEAKER_44: And you can raise up to like, I think it's a million .07 dollars or something, right? So, there is some things that are kind of trending in the direction you're talking about.

SPEAKER_21: But the reason why I brought up the venture capital model to begin with is, it's actually less of a headache for the entrepreneur to go pick, if you have a good product, right? And you're believable in the sense that you can actually go execute what your plan is.

SPEAKER_44: It's easier just to go pitch the venture capitalists to raise the money than it is to go and

SPEAKER_126: jump through all these hoops to use Reg A+, or do an ICO, or do all this other crazy stuff.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah. And what that does is, it sends the best deal flow to the most qualified people who have the biggest chip stacks.

SPEAKER_58: And it sends what should be, on average, the weaker deal flow, the deal flow that VCs didn't

SPEAKER_04: buy into. Now, again, you said perfectly that they may not always get it right, but maybe they get it right two out of three times, which means the deal flow that makes it to these other sites might be, you know, the apples at the bottom of the bushel, let's say. Maybe they couldn't clear market. Maybe the return profile is different than them. And that works actually against the spirit of the law, which is you're trying to make

SPEAKER_137: this more equal and fair. And so, the unintended consequence is troubling.

SPEAKER_44: And the other thing I'll say, too, is if you talk to younger entrepreneurs, first-time entrepreneurs, the one thing I've noticed is there's a lot of focus on the economics of the deal, right? They want to squeeze out every last economic advantage that they can, and so they're constantly trying to optimize for the highest valuation, the most money raised, all this kind of stuff. If you go talk to kind of serial entrepreneurs and things like that, the numbers are important, right?

SPEAKER_57: They're not going to give away the company, but who they partner with is way more important. They understand that the right investor can move the company, can introduce them to customers, can do all the things that they need help with.

SPEAKER_44: And so, I do think also what you get is you get some selection bias of if you want to take money from retail investors at the highest possible valuation, is that entrepreneur the same entrepreneur that can walk into the best, you know, Sand Hill venture capital fund and raise from those investors?

SPEAKER_57: I don't know. Maybe in some cases, yes, but my guess is that more times than not, it's not that type of investment or entrepreneur.

SPEAKER_141: I've literally had people in the industry, let's just say another accelerator that maybe

SPEAKER_137: the launch accelerator competes with.

SPEAKER_04: I've heard stories of people saying you explicitly don't want sophisticated investors in your first round and advise founders to go after the dumb money that will not read the documents, that will pay the highest price, and that will have no governance concerns, and that you can roll over in later rounds. So literally, there's a group of people in Silicon Valley who would be advising startups to go to the dentists, to go to the naive investors, and say, if you're going to raise the million

SPEAKER_02: dollars, instead of doing $500,000 from, you know, Aileen Lee at, you know, Cowboy Ventures, or Hunter and Satya from Homebrew, instead of getting those sophisticated folks who are going to want good provisions, protective provisions, proper governance, eh, screw it. Just pass the hat and do what's called a party round in our industry.

SPEAKER_39: And so that is, you know, you may not see this out on the East Coast, but I see it out here where people actually do that as a strategy, like literally to try to get the dumb money to have less controls. And you know what?

SPEAKER_04: They wind up regretting it. I mean, the founders do. Because you want the smartest people on your teams. And the incremental 20% on valuation, when your company does have trouble, and the most skin somebody has in the game is $50,000 versus somebody like Aileen Lee, who might have $500,000 in, or I have $500,000 in, we're going to go to war with you. We're going to try to solve the problem.

SPEAKER_39: The person with $50,000 who's a dentist is like, yeah, got to do like one more set of veneers, and I'm good. I can make that money back, you know, just over time. Charge somebody for veneers, and you're done.

SPEAKER_147: Well, one of the frameworks I really like is you can optimize for the economic advantage

SPEAKER_44: that you get out of a fundraising round, or you can optimize for the intellectual advantage. And again, it just goes back to this idea of like, you want the smartest people and the most experienced people running into the fire with you, right?

SPEAKER_21: Kind of your point of like, hey, if the investor knows what they're doing, like, that's who you actually want. And so giving up 1% more, 10% more, whatever the number is, those investors, if they are

SPEAKER_150: actually good, will make that back for you, you know, tenfold later on down the road.

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SPEAKER_39: in my studio. Look at these gorgeous 4K monitors I have here in the studio. They are so crisp. They are so beautiful. They're so bright. It is unbelievable. Look at my gorgeous laptop that has tons and tons of ports. Listen, you know what they were telling you in 2010? Get rid of all the ports, get dongles, and you got this big stupid bag of dongles you're carrying everywhere. Get rid of all the ports. It looks better. You know what? It's annoying because when you need those ports, you don't have the dongle with you. Guess what, baby? Ports are back. Look at all these amazing ports. I love them.

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SPEAKER_39: You're going to get better products, and they're going to finance it for you. What could be better? And I'm so happy that Dell for Entrepreneurs is offering Twist listeners that additional 10% off any of the best offers out there, and that means up to 48%. But you have to go to dell.com slash twist, dell.com slash twist. It's amazing. Great products. Let me ask you a question about, you know, we were debating, you and I, having a fun time on the Twitter, talking about like all the speculation in crypto. And, you know, you'd come at me about like, hey, what about Theranos and the outliers? Great. Now, and people love to gamble. We have Wall Street bets. We have Robinhood day traders. And full disclosure, I was an early investor in Robinhood.

SPEAKER_79: And it's probably my third biggest, right now on paper, it might be the third biggest return I have after Uber and Com.

SPEAKER_39: And that's really not a disclosure as much as a flex, to be clear. But they had 3 million people, I think, during the pandemic, I read. And Wall Street bets is going crazy. El Presidente from Portnoy is going crazy. Okay, so we have crazy speculation, crypto, crazy speculation in startups, and now we have crazy speculation coming to the public markets. What do you take from what's happening at this very moment? Any general hot takes or observations about what's going on?

SPEAKER_160: And that little crevice of Reddit.

SPEAKER_161: Three things.

SPEAKER_21: One, anyone who thinks that Dave Portnoy is not performing and entertaining and creating media content, they're confused as to what he's doing. He's the best in the world at it, right? And that's not a knock against him at all. Actually, it's a complete tip of the cap of he has literally gone from this guy who ran a sports site that was highly successful, $450 million valuation. And on literally the flip of a coin, pivoted into an industry that prides itself on the suits and ties and the Wall Street finance, all this kind of stuff. And he's just taken it by storm. I mean, they literally can't avoid talking about him, right? Like he is dominating headlines. And so I think that when I see what he's doing, one, it's incredible. But two, he's not doing it from a, I'm just trying to make money.

SPEAKER_44: He's obviously got larger kind of entertainment-driven ambitions, which is important to remember.

SPEAKER_21: Two is on the Robinhood traders and kind of the retail speculation. It's all the same. Like everything you just mentioned from ICOs to sports gambling to public marketing gambling, everyone is chasing easy money, right? And what you can quickly identify is what's the strategy? And literally people will tell you kind of all kinds of crazy stuff in the ICO boom. They'll tell you all kinds of crazy stuff right now. But if you've been around and paying attention, like buying a bankrupt stock and having, you know, 150,000 people owning hurt stock after the bankruptcy, it's kind of just like, okay, that's where we are. Like, sure.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah, it makes no sense. And the people at Hurts, it makes no sense to them either. But if you're looking at it as gambling and entertainment, it makes total sense. Because people are just doing this like they might bet on the Knicks to, you know, beat the spread.

SPEAKER_39: They know they're going to get demolished by, you know, whatever team LeBron decides to be on, you know, for this next three-year sprint.

SPEAKER_16: We know we're going to get crushed. It's just a matter of do we even, can I entertain myself during being crushed like that? I mean, I think Dave is just amazing at, you know, entertaining people. I mean, he literally makes eating a slice of pizza entertaining. And he understands who he is as a character, which is obnoxious and successful and does not care about anybody's opinion.

SPEAKER_60: He's like the classic ENTJ, you know, if we were to use, you know, horoscopes for men, the Myers-Briggs. He's like that classic ENTJ leader. I know better than everybody. I'm obnoxious. I don't care about your opinion. And I'll tell you what the pizza is. It's a 7.2. It's an 8.2. And it's kind of fun to watch. But yeah, it's not serious.

SPEAKER_04: The thing I love about it, I think there's something great about this. Because when I invested in Robinhood, Vlad and his partner walked up to me in a bar called Antonio's Nuthouse.

SPEAKER_39: And they said, you're Jason Calacanis. I said, tell me about your startup. He said, how do you know we have a startup? I said, you recognize me, right? This is the ultimate tip-off. Like, I'm not famous. I'm only famous with founders. And he said, we want to create a trading platform for millennials on their phones. And I said, let me stop you right there. You do know that they're on their parents' Netflix accounts. They will not buy a car.

SPEAKER_04: They only take Lyft and Uber. And these are the most commitment-phobic people in the world. They will not sign a lease. And you want them to buy stocks for a future 50 years from now when they're retired? It's just not going to happen. And by the way, all retail investors went away after 2008 and the dot-com bust. Like, we've demolished them twice in recent memory. And they said, but Jason, that's the opportunity. What if we do? And I was like, that's the right answer, actually.

SPEAKER_39: They said, all right, fine. Tell me how you make money. And they said, well, that's the kicker. We're going to make it free. And I was like, okay, I'm in. And it makes no sense in one way. But if you're saying, if it does work and it's a long shot, what happens to the world? And I just said, what if they get a million people doing this?

SPEAKER_04: And now here they are with 13. If all these kids are taking their money for what they would have bet on sports and the NFL and the NBA and they're just putting it to stocks, well, I think they've got a better chance of winning

SPEAKER_71: and they're going to learn about finance.

SPEAKER_04: I mean, these kids know more. I've never done a put or I've never done like puts and calls and shorted stocks. I've never done any of that stuff. I buy stock, I hold it until I don't like it anymore. Then I sell it. I'm not buying futures or anything. You know, my nephew, you know, Director Nick over here, he's explaining to me calls and puts and how to use Robinhood. I'm like, I don't have any. I just want to buy Uber and hold it for 20 years. Like, that's it. So I think that that's the silver lining, which in a way is what the crypto speculation did as well, which is in order to speculate in crypto, you at least have to get a wallet. So you have to know that. You have to know your hash. You got to know your password. You got to know all this stuff, right?

SPEAKER_44: Well, I'll take it a step further, right? You respond to this how you want. But what you just described about low probability, but high potential of Robinhood when they pitch you on that is, I think, exactly why people are so excited about Bitcoin. Because right now, maybe people would say, you know, five years ago, the potential for Bitcoin to reach, let's say, global reserve status, right? Less than 1%. Now, I don't know, maybe we're 3% to 5%, right? Still incredibly low odds.

SPEAKER_21: But if it gets there, you're talking about an asset that's, you know, $150, $200 billion in value that would eventually get into the tens of trillions of dollars.

SPEAKER_79: So there's 100x from here.

SPEAKER_44: Oh, easy. I mean, just look at the global monetary supply, right? So 100x from here is only $15 trillion. And I think global money supply is, you know, in the $70, $80 trillion range.

SPEAKER_172: So you're actually talking about $400 or $500x.

SPEAKER_39: The thing that I think is super fascinating about also Barstool, and I'll just wrap that up, is I think he's creating Barstool Finance.

SPEAKER_04: Like, you know, you have finance.yahoo.com. He's just creating Barstool Finance. And so, you know, he's got sports. He's got finance. I think with Call Her Daddy, he's got kind of his own love line or romance or sex kind of property. Like, what else is a property that Yahoo had back in the day? Movies and entertainment. So does Barstool do movies and entertainment yet?

SPEAKER_24: No, but he'll back some movie at some point and be a producer or director, and he'll be like, I'm going to be a producer of movies. I'm giving money to these movies, and then those movies will actually work.

SPEAKER_177: You'll love this. So March 31st, 2017, this is right after Peter Chernin and his team bought a little over 50% of Barstool for about $7-8 million, right?

SPEAKER_44: I wrote a blog post that said, this is going to be a billion-dollar company. And at the time, people were like, you're nuts, all this stuff. And I laid out, you know, here's what I think happens. And one of the key points was they're going to get outside of sports. And I didn't know if it was politics or news or kind of how they would do it. But I think you're dead on in that once you have the attention of the audience, it's very easy just to add another personality that touches in a new area, right? So whether that's finance, whatever, what I do wonder about Barstool is they have been a very non-traditional media company for a long time, right? In terms of the way that they've built it, it's highly profitable, all this kind of stuff. But they sold a third of it to this gaming company, Penn National, which on the face looks super interesting. Now Penn National's kind of got this great marketing arm through Barstool. Barstool's got exposure to the public markets, all that kind of stuff.

SPEAKER_57: But what I do wonder is, would they have been better off if they were the ones buying a gaming company? 100%, yeah.

SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I mean, that's probably just Dave doesn't have a ton of experience, you know, in big

SPEAKER_137: business, and he's just got this asset, and he just wanted to cash his chips in, and mission accomplished. He got $100 million, right?

SPEAKER_31: But he didn't cash in.

SPEAKER_44: So to his credit, this is what's pretty crazy, is he, $100 million, I think he took more than half of it in stock. Smart. So he still is betting on himself, I think. But the whole model of just, as you look around businesses, right, and this kind of gets into just early stage companies today, they used to build the product, and you would invest, and then they would go try to find customers. Right. Right? And that's the risk you were taking, was kind of, can they find the customers? What I do see more and more companies starting to do now is they go build the audience,

SPEAKER_57: and then they say, hey, I already have the customers. Now I'm going to build products for them. Yeah. Right? And that switches. Instagram did that.

SPEAKER_137: I mean, that was like, Instagram's like, hey, we're a tool for making photos look better.

SPEAKER_04: And now, you know, they finally are, they've turned on the ability to buy stuff inside of Instagram. Like, it's literally an Amazon competitor, a Facebook advertising competitor.

SPEAKER_02: So it's going up against Google and Facebook for ads. And now it's going up against Shopify, or they're in partnership with Shopify, they'll eventually try to kill Shopify, because that's what Zuckerberg does, is slit the throat of anybody he partners with. So, Toby, if you're listening, be careful.

SPEAKER_186: You know I worked at Facebook, so I'm biased.

SPEAKER_187: Are you telling me he's not the most cutthroat person in business?

SPEAKER_04: Name somebody more cutthroat than Mark Zuckerberg and how he approaches competition.

SPEAKER_169: If you had to pick Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Bezos, who's more cutthroat?

SPEAKER_39: Yeah, I got to go with Zuckerberg, and I'll give you my rationale.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah, it's because he has absolutely no moral compass when it comes to stealing other people's innovations. And he literally does not care what anybody thinks about him. So he told the Instagram, the WhatsApp founders, hey, just copy Snapchat, just do exactly what Evan Spiegel is doing, just copy it, do not even think for yourself. You know, that's all on the record. And I don't think Bezos thinks like that. I think Bezos wants to think like, hey, it's day zero, let's really think about this product, how would we do it? He's not looking, Bezos isn't looking at the competitors and saying, whatever innovation they do, go do it and kill them. Maybe on the margins for Amazon Web Services, they do that. They look for, you know, Twilio or something and try to compete.

SPEAKER_02: But I just think Zuckerberg has a cutthroatness that is just unbelievable.

SPEAKER_44: So the one thing that I will say is I think that those two generalizations are probably more PR than not. And the Zuckerberg stuff, you know, I'm not going to change your mind on that. But like, if you take Bezos, for example, like didn't he with diapers.com, all these

SPEAKER_21: things, like he basically would go to them and say, hey, your margin is my opportunity. I'm literally going to sell items at a loss. And try to run you off the, you know, the competitive field.

SPEAKER_44: And then when you're literally bleeding out, you'll come to me and I'll buy you for, you know, pennies on the dollar.

SPEAKER_04: I think that's implied. Yes. I think that is implied. I think that's the, that is, and this is actually an interesting discussion for us just to have to take it away from the personal.

SPEAKER_24: Because if you told me who are the two most cutthroat people, I would have picked them and just in a different order than you. You probably would say Bezos, then Zuckerberg.

SPEAKER_17: Got anybody else you'd put in there?

SPEAKER_123: It's scarier to go up against. Yeah. I would say at least out of the people who run big businesses, those are the two. Yeah.

SPEAKER_108: I mean, you don't feel like Apple's going to come in and do, Apple would never do what,

SPEAKER_04: no, I don't think Apple might have their own interesting anti-competitive approaches, but they would never do what Zuckerberg would do with Snapchat, right? Which is, we're going to copy that product until we kill the company and just keep going on it. But what I think is really interesting about Amazon, and I'd love to hear your thoughts

SPEAKER_24: on it is, do you think Amazon should be stopped from creating Amazon basic products and why?

SPEAKER_208: Meaning what?

SPEAKER_04: Do you feel that anti-competitive? People are now, there's investigations going on with regulators in the United States and the EU around this concept of Bezos and the Amazon team study what's selling from third-party

SPEAKER_60: sellers who are half of the, I think roughly half of what's sold on Amazon.

SPEAKER_16: And if you make some great, amazing, charging, you know, power strip, they're going to make

SPEAKER_04: an Amazon basics one. Should they be, should the government interfere and stop Amazon from both selling third-party and creating their own products or not, and why?

SPEAKER_21: I think that's the wrong trade-off to look at. I don't think the problem is that they make a competing product. I think it's when they promote their competing product above yours in the search results, or they take away your distribution and hurt you in exchange for promoting their own.

SPEAKER_02: Okay, so let's, like Google does with their search box, right? They move Yelp down and they put Google local above Yelp, literally.

SPEAKER_44: If you're the third-party reseller on Facebook, or on Amazon, and I'm Amazon, and I see that you're, you know, you're selling microphones and they're doing really well, and I go make my own and I put it into the marketplace and we're on completely equal footing. So I get no advantage in the search rankings, all that stuff. I don't think that's as big of a problem. I think where they get kind of in the murky water and people get really upset and probably where they end up getting in trouble is if then I say, hey, Jason, I'm no longer going to send you traffic. I'm going to promote my microphone above yours. Now, all of a sudden, you're playing a different game, right?

SPEAKER_02: So placement is the issue, and this is where Google got away with it, because Google had Matt Cutts, who was in charge of search spam or whatever, go out and lie for them over and over again, where he said, we have not changed the organic search results.

SPEAKER_04: And he's such a liar and so insincere. It was incredible. He said, and while that is true, they moved the first organic search result 400 pixels down

SPEAKER_24: the page and put a box at the top for shopping, a box at the top for travel, a box at the top for your stocks, a box at the top for, of course, Google local.

SPEAKER_04: So they're so smart, right? And Matt's such a clever guy that they had convinced themselves that they were not just absolutely lying and evil. And what they did was they moved everything down 400 pixels, so it's below the fold, and then put their widget up top. And this is why, you know, they really had a chance of getting sanctioned, because they did exactly what you're saying, which is gave preferential treatment to themselves. But they said, oh, no, no, no, no. We didn't change organic search. Organic search is the same. It's like, yeah, but if you, everybody knows 90% of the clicks are above the fold. The first 400 pixels, 90% of the clicks, then they moved it down. Amazon is not doing that. The thing they actually have concerns about Amazon is that they're studying which products are selling well, and then creating products like those, which, by the way, Amazon puts that in from, this is why I think Amazon, I would argue Amazon shouldn't be stopped from doing this. I agree with you. They shouldn't get preferential treatment.

SPEAKER_02: If your podcast microphone, pumps, podcast microphones are better selling and better reviews, they should go up in the search and Amazon should go down.

SPEAKER_04: I agree on that. The people think that they're using the data to pick which products. Well, I don't have a problem with them doing that either, if that data is also shared universally, because they have it for the public, right?

SPEAKER_219: You can see the reviews. All the reviews are right there.

SPEAKER_44: I'll even go a step further. I don't want to say the companies because I don't know if this is known or not, but there's literally a business that's based in New York. Their whole model was they would go hit the APIs.

SPEAKER_21: They would pull all the search traffic. Basically, what they were looking for was items that had big margins that were not owned by one single product and where they felt like they could get the supply chain.

SPEAKER_44: These are physical products that they could build the supply chain quickly. And then they would, because they're technologists, figure out how to win that search term on Amazon. So thinking of Amazon as a search engine and they had, I don't know, 50, 75, 100 products, whatever it was. Yeah. But when you saw it, it's like, look, that's what Amazon's doing. So the fact that a third party could use data in a similar manner, again, as long as there's not preferential treatment, I don't have a problem with it.

SPEAKER_221: What do you think about the Apple and Hey email thing?

SPEAKER_137: So just to put a pin in the, or just to wrap up the Amazon one, I think we always have to

SPEAKER_04: think about what's good for humanity and society.

SPEAKER_16: It's pretty great for society that you can buy a $4 lightning charging cable that goes to USB-C from Amazon basics, as opposed to giving Apple $30, right?

SPEAKER_04: And so it's just, as you lower the price of goods, people's lifestyle goes up. Even if, and this is the problem I think we have as a society with how people perceive how they're doing. Everybody sees Bezos or whoever having a private jet, a private Island, whatever it is, that's just seems so otherworldly that it makes you feel small. But as your dollar goes further, even if your wages were stagnant, if dollars go further,

SPEAKER_16: in other words, you can stay in an Airbnb for 50 bucks in Kyoto or Tokyo, a person who is a barista who could never in their life ever imagine going to Tokyo on vacation, well, now their hotel is, you know, $500 for 10 days, they can actually conceive of it.

SPEAKER_04: Whereas they previously would have been in for $3,000, $4,000, $5,000. So it's an important thing for society that we actually have rabid capitalism. Like how amazing is it that there's that company that's studying where can we lower prices massively and take over a search term?

SPEAKER_24: Like that's good for consumers. In terms of the hey.com, go ahead.

SPEAKER_121: Real quick on that.

SPEAKER_44: So there's this guy, Jeff Booth, who you should bring on the podcast. His whole, he wrote a book on the idea of technology being deflationary and the fact that actually the capitalism and the competition ends up over long periods of time driving prices

SPEAKER_229: lower, which is a net good for society, right? Exactly what you're talking about.

SPEAKER_170: The fact that being driven somewhere in a car used to be only for the elite to be driven somewhere,

SPEAKER_04: to show up and get out of the backseat of a car was, you know, like there were cabs,

SPEAKER_02: but, you know, to get out of the back of a car and have a private driver was like, oh, you must be really wealthy and live on the Upper East Side somewhere in a townhouse.

SPEAKER_60: And then it's like, no, I work at, you know, McDonald's and I'm taking an Uber and it's or it's a Lyft line and I got two other people in the car. Getting a point-to-point driver even to come to your house and wait for you outside is incredible win. And if you, I remember that my neighbor when I was in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn bought a Mercedes at some point with a sunroof and he would take us for a ride in it over the Arizona bridge and let all the kids stand up and stick their heads out the sun, the sunroof. It was like something from Mad Men, but I was just amazed at the power windows and that he

SPEAKER_02: had like this incredible cassette tape and it had air conditioning.

SPEAKER_04: And I just think like power windows, like you can't buy a car without power windows. Like all of these things are just standard now because of the power of capitalism. But it really is an interesting thing with Hey.com.

SPEAKER_02: Um, um, if you look at the, the, the reason why Apple wants to control the ecosystem is because they want to preserve. And I, and I actually do believe this. It's not just to put a 30% tax on everything. They want to preserve the quality of that phone by having things go through an approval process.

SPEAKER_04: Unless you increase the quality of the phone and you'll have less spyware, you'll have less crashes. And overall the, the product will trend towards a better user experience because there's uniformity.

SPEAKER_02: Now, if there were five app stores, you could get lower prices, you could get crazier stuff, but you can also get your phone hacked and you could also have your phone crashing and

SPEAKER_60: need to be rebooted. Which by the way, is what happened on the windows operating system for a long time and happens on Android. If you're on Android, the chances of you getting hit with spyware. And I think Android now has like a preferred partner program or something where they actually review stuff. So the review process was always intended to make things work better, but it was also used for nefarious reasons. Like you couldn't have a third party browser in the beginning. You couldn't have a third party, uh, video player.

SPEAKER_02: And now you can get those things.

SPEAKER_39: So even Apple knows they can't overplay their hand and what they've run into with, you know, Jason and DHH over at, uh, base camp, uh, over at 37 signals with his new product, Hey.com, which is just, you know, I actually started using it today. It's, it's kind of a clunky looking email client. It's not very good looking.

SPEAKER_04: Uh, it's got a great domain name and it has really one killer feature, which is the first time somebody, uh, asks you to first time somebody shows up in your inbox, they put them in the, uh, screener, just like you might screen a phone call. And then you decide, should this person be allowed to email me or not? And you give them a thumbs up or thumbs down. So for somebody like me, it was a super router.

SPEAKER_02: That's just a killer feature. So we're investors in superhuman. And I was, I told the superhuman team, like, this is the feature. This is the killer feature of, Hey, it needs to be in superhuman yesterday. And it needs to be Mark Zuckerberg. I'm like, absolutely. No, I mean, it's just a feature, um, of that, of that platform, but it is a really killer feature that people do need to pay attention to.

SPEAKER_60: But, uh, the 30% tax is reasonable if you compared it to selling something in Amazon or selling something in a store, right? What's the markup in retail? So when people used to put software in retail, the retailer would get half the money, right? You would give them Photoshop or, you know, some video game chess master for $50. They'd sell it for 50. The store got 25 and they got 25. So that used to be 50% markup.

SPEAKER_24: So 30% is reasonable unless it's subscriptions. And then it becomes meaningful. So they dropped, I think the second year subscription goes down to 15%.

SPEAKER_02: So people renew, you pay 30% on the first year subscription, 15. So what I tell my startups is pay the VIG to Apple.

SPEAKER_04: If you play nice with Apple and you let them make money from it, they can invest in the app store and then they might promote you or they might write a feature about you, et cetera. So com.com, you know, has people pay for subscriptions in the app store. And, uh, if you do that, then you're on the paid ranking list as well.

SPEAKER_02: Which is why they have a list of the top paying top revenue generating apps. If you don't, and like Netflix and Spotify no longer allow you to subscribe to the app store, you subscribe on their website and then you go there. That's actually an interesting, you know, debate.

SPEAKER_79: But I think people should be allowed to make that decision for themselves. The, the app providers like Netflix and Spotify had, have.

SPEAKER_237: Yeah.

SPEAKER_44: Again, everyone should just be treated the same. So if you're going to say, Hey, anybody who you want to sign up off the app store and they're going to pay you there, we're not going to take anything. Okay, fine. If they pay in the app through the app store, we're going to take a piece of it. Okay, fine. Um, I think where it gets kind of, again, little gray area is when you say, we're going to treat you one way, but Netflix does the exact same thing.

SPEAKER_188: They get treated a different way.

SPEAKER_16: And I just give credit to DHH for knowing that this would happen and then creating a brouhaha. And he was on CNBC today and see it, but I saw him tweet about it.

SPEAKER_04: But I mean, he's just so good at fighting.

SPEAKER_79: Every time he comes on the podcast, it's like a double, triple. I don't, have you had DHH on the pod yet? I haven't. You get him on your pod.

SPEAKER_44: But I did see that. He's, he's good. Austin from Lambda, uh, said literally, this is a, a chapter out of their book. And then he screenshot, it's like chapter six of rework. And they talk all about fighting literally pick, yeah, pick an enemy, right? That's bigger than you make a big stink, have people pay attention. So what I do think is interesting is, uh, do you think it was intentional that they

SPEAKER_248: picked the fight or do you think they, oh, really?

SPEAKER_16: Yeah, no, he, and he had pre-picked the fight with superhuman because superhuman has the

SPEAKER_04: tracking pixel that tells you if people opened it and when they opened it, you know, just like every other piece of software has, every Gmail plugin has, Outlook has, but he's made

SPEAKER_39: that like, oh, we're going to stop the evil superhuman from, you know, you know, tracking you. And, uh, yeah, here's the quote actually from Austin. It's literally a chapter out of their book.

SPEAKER_24: Having an enemy gives you a great story to tell customers too. Taking a stand always stands out. People get stoked by conflict. They take sides, passions are ignited, and that's a good way to get people to take notice.

SPEAKER_60: And, you know, it's, I, I have them on my pockets just so we can debate venture capital versus not venture capital. Um, you know, uh, and in fact, us having a debate about crypto or not crypto, the fact that we largely agree now just kills our ratings.

SPEAKER_02: I mean, if we were at each other's throats, it'd be so much better.

SPEAKER_254: Um, but it's, did you, have you bought Bitcoin since last time I was on?

SPEAKER_39: You know, I had bought Bitcoin when it was in the early, very early, the, the, whatever

SPEAKER_04: 10 Bitcoins I had got hacked because the back then there were no exchanges. Really? There was no, uh, you know, there weren't a lot of exchanges. So that got hacked and I probably lost 10 Bitcoins. Uh, and then my wife had bought a bunch when it was at $300 or $800. So we're massively up on that. I haven't bought more. Um, and the, uh, I've actually thought about just putting 1% of my net worth into Bitcoin. Um, because of the hedge you talk about the thing I've been impressed about and has evolved

SPEAKER_16: my thinking on Bitcoin is that it has not been hacked or had like, you know, a 51% attack

SPEAKER_04: or any, I mean, I know it's been manipulated.

SPEAKER_02: I know it's anonymous or pseudo anonymous. So there's all these, you know, edge cases, but the fact that a government hasn't been

SPEAKER_04: able to either shut it down, um, or, uh, you know, uh, hack it explicitly.

SPEAKER_39: I know they can hack, you know, your wallet or hack Coinbase or spoof you.

SPEAKER_58: But the fact that the core has not been compromised to me is just extraordinary.

SPEAKER_04: Why there's so much at stake in hacking Bitcoin. The fact that it hasn't been hacked to me is phenomenal.

David Friedberg: It's the number one target in the world. Correct. So I would separate this in two pieces.

SPEAKER_44: One is there is an argument that hacking the actual protocol itself would ruin all the value, right? So the second that somebody goes and hacks it, like the $200 billion of market value goes to zero, right? Cause it's no longer, um, unhackable. Uh, but with that said, um, I've had a lot of success talking, especially to institutional investors about this. Uh, but I think a lot of tech technology investors get it as well. So if I said to you, uh, Hey, I want to own part of Google search algorithm, right? You would say, go buy Google stock. If I said to you, I want to own Facebook social network. You'd say, go buy Facebook stock. Correct. If I said to you, I want to own the strongest computing network in the world, which is the Bitcoin network. You wouldn't say go buy, but there's no corporation to go buy. There's no equity. And so what you have to do to get financial exposure is you have to buy Bitcoin itself. Right. And so part of what I think is really interesting here is there was a very long period of time where maybe a couple of people in Silicon Valley were into this, but really for the most part, a lot of people missed Bitcoin in terms of the amount of capital that could have been put into it. Right. Some people got personal exposure or whatever, but when you think of it as just the strongest computing network in the world, and I ask people like, what's that worth? I don't think you and I are going to be good at putting a future value on that. But if it remains the strongest computing network in the world, I think it's worth trillions

SPEAKER_57: of dollars at a minimum. Right. And so to put some exposure into it, I think just is generally a good practice.

SPEAKER_263: Yeah.

SPEAKER_16: My thesis was, this is what I came to over the last couple of years, since it did not get hacked and it's still stable.

SPEAKER_39: I said to my, and we had people on this podcast talking about Bitcoin when it was under a dollar. So just to be clear, I mean, I've been tracking this forever. My belief the last couple of years has been majority chances it goes down to zero or low

SPEAKER_04: hundreds of dollars and gets replaced by a better technology because that's what always happens. Almost universally, some technology gets replaced. Now, there are some that have not, that have become built to last. Email, as an open protocol has, and the web. RSS kind of got deprecated because Google gave up on reader. And so it doesn't always happen that way.

SPEAKER_02: And FTP and Gopher and Send and all these, Usenet, other things that were open protocols haven't gone away or just are not used all that often. But it feels, it felt to me like the second somebody made something better than Bitcoin,

SPEAKER_04: you know, really better. And that also had the increase in value. Then it would be game over for Bitcoin because the people who were hodlers and were hodling, hodlers, they would say, you know what? I want to, I want to do what I did with Bitcoin. I want to go 10x. I want to go 1000x. So I'm going to move my exposure over here. And that would start this, you know, degradation of the price. Right.

SPEAKER_02: And nobody would buy it because there was no upside.

SPEAKER_170: So why hasn't that happened? Because I still think that's, I would put it at 50-50 that that's what happens.

SPEAKER_44: That analysis would be dead on, except for one thing. This isn't a technology problem. It's a money thing. And so what you have to remember is money is a belief system. Like why would you take dollars from me and I take dollars from you? It's because we both believe that dollar has value. Now, the best way to highlight the difference in what you just said and what I think Bitcoin provides is if you're in a country where your nation state currency fails, like it literally hyperinflation, the whole nine yards, and then the government comes to you and says, hey, Jason, sorry that that happened, but we got this new currency that we created. Just use this one. You are very, very unlikely to believe them on the second one. Right. They violated your trust. And so when I think of Bitcoin, what I think of is we, we being the citizens of the world, get one shot to separate state and money. One shot at it. That is Bitcoin. If it happens, tens of trillions, if not hundreds of trillions of dollars in value. If it doesn't happen, Bitcoin goes to zero and there will not be a replacement because it has too much momentum and too much buy-in at this point. It has kind of the mental kind of capture. This is the shot to separate state and money.

SPEAKER_21: And so when I think of it that way, it's if Bitcoin was to fail, I actually don't think people would buy into the next one mentally because it would say, oh, you can never separate state and money. Right. There's too many people who are seeing this for the first time.

SPEAKER_44: And so it's like we get one shot, you know, hey, all you speculators that are speculating the public market stuff. Don't go put 100% of your assets into Bitcoin, but also don't get caught having zero exposure.

SPEAKER_269: Right.

SPEAKER_272: I think that's, I think that's a pretty good analysis, actually. And maybe I'll just, after this podcast, go put 1% into Bitcoin. What is it?

SPEAKER_39: Wasn't this supposed, this is a question I have for you.

SPEAKER_58: Wasn't a world changing event, a world shattering event supposed to be the moment where Bitcoin shined? Well, we just went through this crazy pandemic that I think is the definition of that. A global shutdown that like none we've seen. And there was supposed to be this massive flight into it.

SPEAKER_04: And then there was this other reason that y'all kept saying was, oh, you guys are printing so much money. Right. Money printer goes burr or whatever that meme you guys have. And you fight your wars in memes, which I think the VC community needs to learn from.

SPEAKER_16: We got to get better at meme warfare in the investment community here in Silicon Valley. But why didn't Bitcoin spike over the last, you know, year?

SPEAKER_39: I mean, I know it was at like 6,000 and went up to whatever, seven or something. Or actually, maybe it's at nine. So shouldn't it have gone crazy or no?

SPEAKER_44: So let's go back in history to understand what's happening now. In 2008, when the financial crisis hit, gold, which is widely considered a store of value, it went down 30% over the summer of 2008. And the reason is there was a liquidity crisis. So people looked around their portfolios and said, the world's ending. All chaos is broken loose. I want to sell any asset that's got a liquid market to it. And so they sold everything, right? They sold stocks. They sold gold. They sold everything.

SPEAKER_275: Scared people.

SPEAKER_44: Yeah. And so in response to that liquidity crisis, the Federal Reserve printed at the time hundreds of billions of dollars, right? And then gold 2x'd in value from there, ended up hitting an all-time high in 2011. What we just saw so far and are still in, I would argue, is there was a liquidity crisis starting in March where people looked around the room and sold everything, right? I mean, Bitcoin went down 50% in one day at one point, right? Stocks went down 30%. Gold went down 15%, all this stuff. But if you look from the beginning of this year to now, Bitcoin is up 30%, 35%. It's actually the best performing asset of all the asset classes, right? It's better than most commodities, better than stocks, et cetera. And so what it's doing is it's hyper-volatile. And the best comparison, I think, is if you look at like Amazon, right? So Amazon's been one of the best performing stocks since it went public. It's gone down double digits. Every single year it's been public. And the average intra-year drawdown of Amazon stock is 30 plus percent. One time it went down over 90% in a time period. And so when you look at that, Amazon stock's been hyper-volatile. But it's also led to incredible growth, a lot of innovation. It's been one of the best performing stocks. Bitcoin looks very similar in the sense that it's hyper-volatile. When there's times of liquidity crisis, all assets trend towards a correlation of one. Bitcoin went down. But on the rebound, where we see the Federal Reserve printing all this money, Bitcoin has performed all of their assets. And so if you look at somebody like a Paul Tudor Jones, his argument is, look, I believe central banks are going to continue to print trillions of dollars and inject liquidity into the global economy. I want to own what he called the, quote, unquote, the fastest horse. And he believes that to be Bitcoin. So he put 2% of his assets, a couple hundred million dollars, into Bitcoin and said, I think that this is just going to outperform everything else as central banks just pump these assets to the moon.

SPEAKER_148: When will Bitcoin hit a new all-time high? And what would be the likely scenario that would cause it to do that?

SPEAKER_44: So, because what was the high, 20? 20,000, yeah. All-time high is a little hard. What I will say is, and I've said publicly a couple of times, is in 2017, all of these kind of models, right? If you think of how is price determined at supply and demand, the advantage Bitcoin has over all other assets is that you know with 100% certainty, you can verify how many Bitcoin exist and how many are coming in in the daily supply. So gold, for example, you kind of sort of know how much exists, you kind of sort of know how much is being produced on a daily basis, but with Bitcoin, you know it's 100% fact. So really what you've got to be able to do is model out or forecast demand. And if Bitcoin's demand continues to grow how it has for the last decade, it was supposed

SPEAKER_57: to hit $10,000 in 2017, and it's supposed to hit $100,000 by the end of 2021. In, obviously, 2017, we saw it go from over $10,000 to $20,000. It went from $10,000 to $20,000 in 18 days in Q4 of 2017.

SPEAKER_17: Yeah, that was like the holidays, like Thanksgiving and December. I remember my wife was like... It's a blow-off top. Yeah, it was incredible. And I was like, sell it.

SPEAKER_04: I spoke at that crypto conference down at the Santa Monica airport, and I said, listen, I know a lot of you bought this nonsense for $100,000 and you tried $20,000 now. Please sell half. Because this never happens in the world that you have a 10x, 20x, 200x in this period of time. I know you think it's going to go 200x from here. Please sell half and buy a house. And nobody did it.

SPEAKER_35: Maybe some people did it. I don't know. Well, I guess there had to be somebody on the other side of the trade, right?

SPEAKER_44: Yeah, what I think happens is it went to $20,000. It was there for like, I don't know, 24 hours, right? It's not like it hung out there for a while. Crashed all the way down to around $3,000. I think what will happen over the next 18 months is we're going to see another massive bull market. So we're going to see Bitcoin go hit $100,000 by the end of 2021. It's going to be the same thing that you saw in 2017. It's going to be mass chaos. People aren't going to sell. They're going to be piling in and FOMOing and doing all this stuff. And so what ends up kind of happening is like, look, markets are markets, right? We've talked about how many markets today where people FOMO in and they're speculating.

SPEAKER_57: So it's just kind of like, you know, you can warn people as much as you want, but they're still going to speculate, right? Human nature takes over and greed takes over.

SPEAKER_134: Yeah.

SPEAKER_24: Well, why are people not making purchases with cryptocurrency? Like, why did that? Because that was everybody seemed to think 10 years ago, we'd be buying pizza with crypto. It would be so easy. Is it just that the other credit cards and everything is just too good and there's no real advantage to paying for stuff in crypto? Is it because people don't want to, they want to hodl their crypto?

SPEAKER_291: Let's play a game. You ready?

SPEAKER_21: Who do you think has more annual volume last year, Venmo or Bitcoin on chain? It's not exchange traded volume, but actually on chain transactions.

SPEAKER_292: I have no idea.

SPEAKER_170: Good question.

SPEAKER_24: I mean, but aren't the transactions on Bitcoin, those include speculation, that's just people trading Bitcoin back and forth, not buying something from a store.

SPEAKER_21: So not trading on exchanges, all the exchange traded volume is not accounted for here. And also it's something called an adjusted on chain metric. So also all the transactions to and from exchanges is taken out.

SPEAKER_268: Right.

SPEAKER_21: So this could be, I could be trading with you or I could be buying from a merchant, but they're generally much smaller.

SPEAKER_79: I guess it's got to be Bitcoin because you're asking. Okay. Because the nature of you asking the question, but I am shocked to hear that it is Bitcoin if it is.

SPEAKER_21: Who do you think had more annual volume last year, Apple Pay or Bitcoin?

SPEAKER_79: Well, Apple Pay is brand new, so it's got to be Bitcoin, right? But I wouldn't, I don't know if I'd say that in 10 years, but yeah.

SPEAKER_44: Who do you think had more annual volume, PayPal or Bitcoin last year?

SPEAKER_79: I would go, I would go PayPal on that one. It was Bitcoin, huh? Wow.

SPEAKER_09: And so when you look at that, right?

SPEAKER_02: Do you think any of that is fugazi and like people are just shipping money around to paint the tape is the term for creating volume when we've talked about this before, I think on previous episodes, but painting the tape is occurring or some automation is occurring to, you know, kind of make it seem like these exchanges are more vibrant than

SPEAKER_164: they are.

SPEAKER_21: So this is important detail on the exchanges. Absolutely. That's happening, right? All the wash trading, all that stuff is absolutely happening, especially on exchanges outside the

SPEAKER_44: United States. The metric I'm specifically referencing is adjusted on chain transaction volume. So this is, I literally sent it to you, right? And it doesn't include the exchange volume, which is important because that's very similar to like sending Venmo, PayPal, Apple Pay, whatever. But I think, look, at the end of the day, where I come out on it is I have been shocked at how global Bitcoin is. Like we're so spoiled in the Western world. We just look at what are people doing down the street? We forget that, you know, take Lebanon for right now. I just did an episode with Suna from Volt Capital. Her family lives in Lebanon. Their Lebanese lira has collapsed 75% against the dollar in the last couple of weeks. And so what do they all do? They want dollars. They can't get them. So the next best thing is Bitcoin, right? Because you only need an internet connection. And so I think that'll continue to happen over time. And, you know, again, look, it's a speculative, very binary outcome for Bitcoin. But I think my message more is just have exposure to it. Don't have zero exposure.

SPEAKER_79: All right. We made it to 70 minutes. I know that you got a lot of questions for me and I got a lot of questions for you. Let's do lightning round of the questions. All right.

SPEAKER_161: Ready? I go first.

SPEAKER_79: Okay.

SPEAKER_161: If you were president, you get three days. What are the things you do?

SPEAKER_73: Wow. What a great question. I hope you answer it as well. I want to be thoughtful about this. But assuming I could get things done, assuming I could get things done, hmm, let me think

SPEAKER_302: this through. Huh.

SPEAKER_16: Well, if I could do an executive order to get rid of unions, police and teachers unions,

SPEAKER_02: this seems to be causing a massive amount of injustice in the world. And there's a really big debate to be had of what's causing more damage to people of color

SPEAKER_73: in the country, the absolute horrible state of education or the fact that people are being

SPEAKER_02: murdered for being, you know, asleep in a drive-thru at Wendy's. And that seems to me to be something very easy to fix. I think resetting the relationship with China and demanding that they do things to help human rights. And if not, we're going to move our changing our dependency on China is the way I would phrase it. Um, that would be a really good one. And then, yeah, so there's something about education and, you know, those unions that I think are the blocker, something about the relationship with China.

SPEAKER_16: Uh, and then I would also make, uh, I would decrease, uh, spending on military and I would

SPEAKER_58: increase spending on colleges and trade education specifically.

SPEAKER_02: And I have been thinking about reparations and trying to read up on it and understand this issue since we're talking about a timely issue.

SPEAKER_79: Uh, and it's very hard to understand that there's a big debate in the, in the whole reparations, uh, community and people who are pro at,

SPEAKER_02: of how you would actually execute it, uh, and, and how you would give money to people. What if somebody is mixed race, do they get half as much if, you know, your father was black and your mom was white? What, how would you even execute on this?

SPEAKER_16: I think a very easy way to do it is to create, uh, an ability for people who have gotten a bad deal in America, a horrible deal, and give them a really great deal for education, trade schools, and small business loans.

SPEAKER_39: We are really good at spending money in this country, we, we, we, we can't get masks on people, we can't even get testing going, but we were able to pour money into PPP at a rate that was just obscene.

SPEAKER_02: I mean, I was talking to somebody, you know, and everybody's got Trump derangement syndrome and they hate Trump and I hate Trump and I consider it like the existential, biggest existential risk for the planet, even more than like global warming is Trump because, you know, he could literally start a war.

SPEAKER_39: Uh, and it just seems to me, uh, yeah, I, the whole thing is super troubling, but anyway, that something there, I said to them, you know, you, you look at how quickly he got money to everybody, like we can solve for that, but we can't solve automatic weapons.

SPEAKER_04: We can't solve teachers unions, we can't solve police unions, we can't solve the college debate or healthcare, but we could ship 500 billion, you know, trillions of dollars to the other markets.

SPEAKER_02: It's, it's obvious we just need to have the wherewithal, so I also would state that I think the two-party system needs to be cracked in this country, and I think the only silver lining I could ever see with Trump's presidency is that it inspires people to forget about Republican versus Democrats since he's a demagogue and he doesn't fit, you know, he's destroyed the Republican Party for all intents and purposes. There might be something there that we could do to do a crossover ticket. I think that it should be Biden and Condoleezza Rice, you know, something like that that brings America together.

SPEAKER_170: We say, hey, let's take somebody from the right side, let's take somebody from the left side, and let's try to meet someone in the middle.

SPEAKER_60: So that's mine.

SPEAKER_164: I don't know if you want to answer that one as well, now that you've heard mine or react to it, but I have one for you.

SPEAKER_44: I think the two things that jumped to the top of my head, and I should have thought about this, knowing that I was going to ask you, is criminal justice reform, that all kinds of nuances in there, but basically like we shouldn't put as many people in cages as we do.

SPEAKER_102: Three million people, it's crazy on a percentage basis, yeah.

SPEAKER_44: Yeah, just absolutely nuts. And then the other thing I would say is, I don't think that I would abolish the Federal Reserve, but I would definitely make material changes, and really with the idea that inflation is the largest driver of wealth inequality in America. And so figuring out a way to address that, probably not going as far as just absolutely getting rid of the Federal Reserve, something in there.

SPEAKER_148: Selu asks you, not including your investments, which five startups, IPOs are you most excited for?

SPEAKER_310: What startup IPOs that you are excited for?

SPEAKER_44: I think DraftKings is going to be super interesting in the sense that that whole space around sports, to include eSports, et cetera, is going to be really big. Wagering. Yeah, I think that'll be big, especially if they can crack into like financial betting, right? You start getting into all that kind of stuff, I think will be interesting. Prop bets, right?

SPEAKER_313: Like, what do they call those trading markets? They call them-

SPEAKER_315: I mean, imagine when they start betting on like, how long is Jim Cramer's monologue going to be at the start of whatever TV show? Yeah.

SPEAKER_79: Who's going to win the- Yeah, or who's going to be president of the United States, right? Who will be vice president? Absolutely.

SPEAKER_317: Yeah, those prop bets are really interesting.

SPEAKER_319: So I think that space is interesting.

SPEAKER_44: Definitely the cannabis space, I think, is still very, very underappreciated by a lot of people. I don't necessarily have an individual company there. A company that I think actually doesn't get enough love in the United States, we're investors, so I'm definitely biased, is Robinhood. Robinhood, or not Robinhood, is a Robinhood competitor eToro in Europe. And so for everything I know, eToro is actually a bigger business, but much lower valuation. And so they've just done it in Europe, Robinhood's done it in America, and now they're trying to like switch places, right? Where eToro's trying to come to the US, Robinhood's trying to go international.

SPEAKER_02: So this could be like the Uber-Lyft kind of competition or, yeah.

SPEAKER_44: Yeah, but it's interesting because Uber and Lyft both started in San Francisco and then went through global domination at the same time, right? Two different strategies, but still same type of rollout.

SPEAKER_325: Sounds like these two could merge, yeah, and create it.

SPEAKER_44: They could merge, and also there's a question of Uber and Lyft, you could put both on your phone and just see who's the cheapest, who has the fastest car to get to you. I don't think you do that with a brokerage account.

SPEAKER_79: No, that's a little hard, yeah. And nor do you need to, right? I mean, these things are – I think it's an and not an or, too. Like you might have Netflix and Disney. If you see value in both of the platforms, they do something slightly different.

SPEAKER_04: Unless they're not commoditized and they have the same offering, you might have two, right?

SPEAKER_39: I could see people – as people – as the gamification of finance continues and people have – what is it? Coinbase is the big app for crypto trading.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah, you'd have like Coinbase, Wealthfront, Robinhood, eToro.

SPEAKER_02: You might have like six or seven of these apps eventually, and you might have Bank of America or Morgan Stanley, some old ones that have these janky apps. But, you know, I think that they're going to have these like super refined set and people might just bounce between them.

SPEAKER_331: All right, my turn. Okay.

SPEAKER_126: What's the – what's your best Elon Musk story that no one's ever heard before?

SPEAKER_39: Oh, okay. Wow. You know, I try not to talk about Elon all that much because we're obviously very good friends.

SPEAKER_272: And, you know, he's so famous that it is – people are obsessed with him. So, it's really crazy. But I'll say the one that I think is kind of interesting is I had a birthday party for a friend of mine.

SPEAKER_16: And Elon came, Jeff Bezos came, and Sam Harris was there. And I introduced Sam and Elon to each other.

SPEAKER_02: And then I think Elon and Bezos had maybe met once before or traded emails, but I basically introduced them to each other again.

SPEAKER_24: I reintroduced them at my house, which was, you know, I think Blue Origin was just getting started. It wasn't really that big of a deal.

SPEAKER_02: But that was a very interesting circle to be in, you know, 10, 12 years ago when you're sitting there with Sam Harris, Bezos, and Elon. And it was really before Elon has got this, you know, ginormous reputation he has here now, right?

SPEAKER_60: He had just started SpaceX.

SPEAKER_61: And I don't know if he was CEO of Tesla at the time, but I thought that was a pretty – you know, being in my garden at my little house in Brentwood with those three people.

SPEAKER_161: What was that – what was their conversation? Did they just stare at each other like competitors, you know, like gladiators in their arena?

SPEAKER_39: I think actually people were most interested in Sam Harris who, you know, was really talking about at the time, you know, consciousness. You know, where does consciousness come from was a big discussion we used to have back then. And we used to talk about AI a lot because Elon was very into AI and Sam was very into consciousness.

SPEAKER_79: And then also talking at the time about religion. And, you know, Sam is obviously a very well-known atheist. Then he became very interested in AI and, you know, psychedelics, meditation. He's got a really interesting range.

SPEAKER_02: And those were some of the funnest conversations I've been involved in in my life. And, listen, I've been involved in a lot of great conversations. But Sam, myself, and Elon would go get dinner on a pretty regular basis and just shoot the shit. And, man, you want to feel like you're outgunned at a dinner conversation.

SPEAKER_35: Imagine, like, sitting there with, you know, being me with Bezos, Elon, and Sam Harris. I think it's probably my best story.

SPEAKER_161: Did you ever hear Joe Rogan and Naval's episode on the Rogan podcast?

SPEAKER_31: Yeah, yeah. I think I heard, like, the first hour of it. It's kind of hard to get to hour three of Joe Rogan.

SPEAKER_21: Well, so what's so funny is I remember watching one time and being like, Joe probably has held his own with every single guest that I've ever heard him with,

SPEAKER_09: except for Naval at one point. I felt like it was a Ferrari and, like, a Toyota Camry. Like, Naval was just, like, on another level. And it was so interesting to kind of watch Joe just be like, yeah, okay. It's like, what else you got for me? Like, just keep the insights coming.

SPEAKER_04: Naval's a really cool cat. You know, Naval and I were – I think we were good friends, you know, in the early days,

SPEAKER_02: 12 years ago, when we were both, like, seed investors. He was doing venture hacks, and I was doing something called Open Angel for him. And Venture Hacks became AngelList, and I was the first syndicate on there. And then we had, like, a little mini falling out because I left AngelList and started the syndicate.

SPEAKER_39: But not like we're not friends falling out. I think we're so friendly. But it's kind of a bummer for me because he became a bit of a recluse, you know. He doesn't socialize anymore, and he's pretty upfront about that.

SPEAKER_02: He doesn't really do a lot of podcasts. I invite him on the pod, you know. And when he was doing AngelList, he was on the pod all – he used to speak at every event because I think he had something to sell and something that he needed to promote, and I was good at that.

SPEAKER_39: But, you know, since he made all his money and AngelList kind of hit the high notes, he doesn't want to come on the pod or talk or – he said he stopped doing pods except his own. And he just wants to be quiet, and he's kind of a recluse now.

SPEAKER_02: Like, he doesn't go out. He doesn't – you know, even pre-pandemic. So I was kind of bummed about that. You know, I used to really like hanging out with him. It was, like, one of the more interesting people I knew, but I think he's just gotten too philosophical, too introverted.

SPEAKER_348: Well, I mean, look, part of it is we probably get the benefit of him doing all of that, but also the people that knew him and hung out with him the most, right?

SPEAKER_44: Like, you're saying, hey, you know, maybe you can't go to dinner with him or whatever, but I don't know.

SPEAKER_161: People tend to – I'm a fan.

SPEAKER_02: I remain a fan, and I think, you know, the thing I loved about San Francisco before this kind of, like, you know, polarized country with Trump and the left and the right being at each other is one of the things that attracted me to our industry was how independent and free thinking and tolerant people were. San Francisco used to be the ultimate tolerant place in terms of people thinking differently, you know?

SPEAKER_16: And, you know, somebody like Naval or Tim Ferriss, just it was, like, a really interesting, eclectic group of people who did not agree with each other and loved to debate.

SPEAKER_02: And then something happened, and I really pinned it on the Trump presidency, where just people felt powerless or whatever. Things got so charged, and everybody wanted to cancel everybody. And social media certainly has added to this, where people don't feel they can float an idea without getting canceled, without, you know – and I feel like that whole kind of thing has moved to podcasts, right?

SPEAKER_16: And the intellectual dark web or whatever, you know, where people feel very nervous about talking about race or religion or atheism or psychedelics or whatever, you know?

SPEAKER_02: Put the item on the list that's hard to talk about, and people are really scared to have conversations.

SPEAKER_44: Do you think that that will lead to people leaving San Francisco and that changes the way you've got to invest?

SPEAKER_02: I don't know if it changes the way I've got to invest, but, you know, Tim Ferriss left. Kevin Rose left. Chris Sokka left. A lot of that early interesting cohort, which, you know, all did very well, made a bunch of money, which, you know, if you're here in Silicon Valley for a decade and you don't make money, as an investor, you know, like, you've really either timed the cycle totally ridiculously or you're bad at your job, right? Like, this is a money-printing casino that is unlike anything that's ever existed in the history of humanity, I think, legitimately, because these are real companies getting built. It's speculation on top of a real base of change in the world, but I'm just saddened by it, I'll be honest.

SPEAKER_60: Like, it just doesn't feel – it's kind of like, I guess, after the 60s, New York felt like, oh, yeah, Bob Dylan's not playing on Bleecker Street, and the folk movement's gone, and, you know, it kind of feels like the 70s or something where it's like, oh, yeah, it used to be really cool and innovative, but now it's not, right?

SPEAKER_24: Like, something's been lost, and that's why I'm actually – I think the pandemic will be a silver line that comes out of it is it's a reset,

SPEAKER_02: and people are leaving and not seeing the reason to live in New York, not seeing the reason to live in San Francisco. Well, that'll make all this office space and all these apartments super cheap, hopefully, in the coming years, and then you start the cycle anew, right? Where another group of people is like, yeah, you know, there's some really smart people there, and there's capital there, and maybe we get a reboot. Or maybe it's Austin, you know? It seems like a lot of people are picking Texas and Florida, which are places that, you know, have low tax, and they're much more classic America, more right-wing, probably. They've typically been red states. I guess Florida's a purple. Would you move?

SPEAKER_356: Would you leave San Francisco?

SPEAKER_02: Yeah, of course. I mean, I'm not, like, particularly tied to here. I think it's the best thing for my business, but I'd consider it. I mean, I would really love to move back to New York and buy the Knicks. That's kind of my long-term goal right now, you know? And I loved living in L.A., but I would consider living in Austin. I like Austin. I was kind of looking at houses there, you know? If the pandemic were, like, going to become a permanent situation, my accelerator moved to virtual. So, you know, it's not like I have to be physically here anymore. And now the podcast is virtual, so not by choice. You know, I want people – you came to the studio, right, like, when we did our first podcast. And I told you probably, like, yeah, when you can – I'd love to have you on the pod. When you're here next, or book a trip around it, and it's excuse to come out.

SPEAKER_79: And you did a bunch of meetings when you were out here. But I insisted on people be in person. I would never do a remote.

SPEAKER_148: And now I've only done remotes.

SPEAKER_44: I was the same way. I literally would not do it pretty much unless people were there in person. And now it's like, ah, you know what? Maybe I'll just go 100% remote.

SPEAKER_351: Do you feel like – what do you feel you've lost and gained in the interview process in doing the pod? You know, remote versus in person.

SPEAKER_44: The consistent quality of guest is much better remote because, obviously, you don't have to worry about people being physically in New York City. Correct. So you can always get people to come on. Now, it sounds weird to people who have never done it before, but you'll get it. Like, the quality of the conversation, maybe you just lose 5% or 10% of the quality. I agree. Because there's just something about being in person, sitting across from somebody, and looking them in the eye and having a conversation. So, you know, is it better to have higher quality guests with a 5% less valuable conversation? Probably.

SPEAKER_04: And they all have set up their podcasting studio now.

SPEAKER_02: So it's not like asking them to turn on Zoom or get a microphone or put an Ethernet cable in their computer is a hard thing because they're like, yeah, you know, I need to do that. I need to get a green screen. I need to get lights for my Zoom meetings. Yeah, this is an excuse for me to do it. I feel like my edge was in person. And I got maybe 10% to 20% more out of guests. But I'm not sure that my audience notices that, right? So I feel like I'm so good in person with a person that I would only do it.

SPEAKER_61: And now I feel like I may have gotten 10% better at interviewing. You know?

SPEAKER_373: Yeah, yeah. I'm actually surprised. I saw somebody tweeting about it.

SPEAKER_44: I forget who it was, so I can't give him credit. But somebody was like, hey, we should create a work-from-home box, which basically you pay, you know, $500 and a microphone, a light, a green screen. Like all this stuff shows up and it's just like, hey, get set up. I'm pretty surprised that no one, at least that I know of, has tried that yet because it just feels like in this remote world, you know, there's four pieces of equipment everyone needs.

SPEAKER_21: And there's a business there. I don't know how big it is, but there's definitely a business there that somebody is going to create.

SPEAKER_79: We, and this is something you can copy for your podcast if you don't do it already, we do a tech check. You know, I got resources here. Obviously, the podcast is a big business for us. But, and we don't do it for the business. We do it for the deal flow.

SPEAKER_02: But, and I just, because I personally love doing conversations, I love talking to people like you who are interesting. We actually now, when we do our tech check, we just send the person a microphone. We send them a proper headset and, you know, and we'll send them an Ethernet dongle.

SPEAKER_137: It may cost us a hundred bucks to do that. And it may cost us an hour or two of the producer's time. But F it.

SPEAKER_02: It's such a great flex that we take it seriously when a microphone shows up. And actually here is on the screen our remote AV checklist that we created, which is here's the MPOW 071 USB headset. Get a 50-foot Ethernet cable, get the USB-C anchor, USB-C Ethernet hub, get this USB adapter. And here's the agenda of what we're going to do. We're going to do an Internet speed test. We're going to do a screen share. We're going to run through your deck. We're going to do it all quality. And the fact that we, in our accelerator, because we have, you know, the authority over the people in the accelerator, we say, if you want to be in the accelerator, you have to have an Ethernet cable in.

SPEAKER_60: You have to have a proper headset.

SPEAKER_137: Like, we won't let them use AirPods like you're using because we know there's a chance the battery will die, right? And we know that sometimes the fidelity comes off.

SPEAKER_79: So we make them buy the stupid headset, you know, and it's really been an unlock for us because we don't have technical issues because we just eliminate them. Or we have very few, maybe one in 50 presentations.

SPEAKER_77: How much do you spend, here's a question from Oliver, how much time do you spend on content creation versus your work at Morgan Creek Digital?

SPEAKER_44: I spend more time on Morgan Creek than content for sure. We're actually pretty similar in the sense of all the content to me is deal flow stuff, right? Like, it just, you know, for all reasons that you do it as well. I would say that it is probably one-third content, two-thirds investing. And out of the two-thirds of my time that's on investing, like, probably half of that is spent with existing portfolio companies. Half is looking at new companies.

SPEAKER_79: But people also don't realize about that third, yeah, the third of the time where you are doing these interviews, I don't know if you have this experience, but I consider this, you and I doing a strategy session, right?

SPEAKER_04: Like, there will be some outcome for you and I.

SPEAKER_02: Hundreds of thousands of people between our two pockets will listen to this conversation and get great value out of it and hopefully some entertainment. You and I will get out of this and I'm going to look and go. So, I'm going to go home today and say, maybe we should put one, two, or three percent into Bitcoin and make a big trade, right?

SPEAKER_137: Because I've been sitting on that trade. I've been sitting on the Bitcoin trade.

SPEAKER_147: Listen, I'll tell you right now, if you go home and you buy one to three percent Bitcoin and you tweet out that you did it, I promise you, you will take 50 percent of your haters and turn them into the biggest Jason fans in the world.

SPEAKER_58: Here's the reason, because I just thought this thing is, I thought it would have much more volatility than it's had.

SPEAKER_02: The fact that it's traded in a range to me is a very promising side. You were talking about the volatility. For me, I don't consider 5K, or it went down to 3,500 and up to 10,000 in the last two years is probably the range. I think I'm right.

SPEAKER_388: Yeah, generally right.

SPEAKER_16: Yeah. And so it's probably been around six. Like, that to me is success for Bitcoin.

SPEAKER_02: The fact that it's only been a, you know, a 3X range, that feels pretty good for something that has no central authority.

SPEAKER_24: It feels like a tight range to me. And it feels like a confidence builder that it hasn't gone.

SPEAKER_02: If it went back up to 20 and to 3,500 or went to 40 and then back down to two, that would be very concerning. I would stay away. But am I right about that, do you think? That the tighter range is good?

SPEAKER_21: Well, one, for sure. But two, also, like, imagine if the first three years of Uber, there was a public stock price.

SPEAKER_98: Ugh. I mean, it would be chaos. Hue conducing, yeah.

David Friedberg: Talk about a distraction. And by the way, 50% of the early investors would sell because humans suck at timing markets.

SPEAKER_44: And so there's almost like an – it's almost like you had an advantage, right? And so did every other investor. You basically invest capital in an early-stage company. It's super volatile. You don't see the volatility. And you get to the other side of it, and either you made a bunch of money or it went to zero.

SPEAKER_137: Well, that's what I tell people who are getting into this game because they have so many new angel investors because of my book, Angel, that one of them today was like, I'm in 18 deals, and so many of these deals are going to zero.

SPEAKER_58: And I was like, you also invested in the $4 million and the $250 million round of Calm.com. You hit an outlier in 18 investments.

SPEAKER_24: Most people, it takes them 50 to 100 to hit an outlier. And he's like, well, I just find this all so depressing. Like, why can't we pick winners? And why are there no singles and doubles? I'm like, by design.

SPEAKER_02: I told everybody with the Syndicate.com that I'm swinging for the fences, and I want the top two or three deals to be the absolute 90% of the portfolio.

SPEAKER_24: We're not playing for singles and doubles. You can get singles and doubles all day long in the public market, right? You time it right, you hit something that doubles your money in two years.

SPEAKER_406: Time it wrong, you lose half your money.

SPEAKER_405: A lot of people don't know this, but there's actually in the kind of more traditional finance world, the absolute best returning institution.

SPEAKER_44: Have abnormally large allocations to venture capital. So obviously, you look at Yale, they're kind of top five always. But there's two, GMO, which is Jeremy Grantham's thing, and then this thing in Pittsburgh, which is the Dietrich Foundation. And so Jeremy Grantham was recently on Patrick O'Shaughnessy's Invest Like the Best podcast. And he said that he's got, I think it was 60% of his assets are in venture capital, which I thought was just incredibly high for somebody who's not in technology, is not a venture capitalist.

SPEAKER_407: I mean, that's bizarrely high.

SPEAKER_142: And then the Dietrich Foundation is over 80%.

SPEAKER_351: So they're swinging for the fences. And, you know, that might be that they understand. See, this is the thing people have to understand.

SPEAKER_04: When you make these bets on venture funds, what I try to explain to people is, you know, if you look at the history of it, you might, on average, have the same returns as the public markets or a little bit less or a little bit more.

SPEAKER_24: But if you had the money locked up for that period and you had a chance of getting into a benchmark for a Sequoia fund, where it 5x or 10x, it's almost like, you know, you're playing at a poker table where every once in a while, you can make 10 times the money that's at the table, right?

SPEAKER_60: You have this, like, crazy outlier. And that's what I try to train people when I'm training them on how to be an angel investor.

SPEAKER_02: I say, listen, you got to get to 30 investments, and you should only invest the money you can afford to lose, which I say is 5% to 10% of your net worth for a high net worth person.

SPEAKER_79: That's where I like to tell people, you know, to live, because if you lose it all, you lose half of it, you're probably not going to feel it.

SPEAKER_39: You shouldn't feel it, right? But if it does go 5 or 10x, oh, my Lord, you're going to feel it because you're going to double your net worth, right? And so I think it's the same argument you make for Bitcoin, which is what if it does go 100x? Well, that's generational wealth, right? Even if it was, if it goes 100x, and it was 1%, you've doubled your net worth.

SPEAKER_79: If you put 3% of your net worth into it, I don't know what you tell people should be in the percentage of net worth into Bitcoin. I'm interested to hear that. And it goes 500x? Oh, my Lord, you have what happened to me with Uber or what could potentially happen to me, hopefully, knock on wood, with Calm.com. What percentage would you tell a high net worth individual, i.e. me, to put into Bitcoin? Because right now my Bitcoin exposure is well under 1%.

SPEAKER_412: I think most people are going to end up in the 1% to 5% range.

SPEAKER_413: What would you tell me, somebody who is a crazy gambler? What should I do? Tell me right now. You want me to tell you what I've done? Yeah. Over 50%.

SPEAKER_58: You're 50% in a single cryptocurrency. Over 50% in a single cryptocurrency. I'm just trying to get my head around that. How do you sleep at night looking at it go up and down like this?

SPEAKER_417: I don't look. Oh, okay. Well, that's a good answer.

SPEAKER_319: It's the same thing. Again, if you had a stock price on Uber, at one point, Uber was probably way more than 50% of your net worth.

SPEAKER_21: And at that point, if there was a public stock price and you were staring at it, you would have sold it.

SPEAKER_419: You'd just been like, look, I can't sleep.

SPEAKER_02: Let me tell you something. Those years were a couple of the, I wouldn't say anxiety producing because I'm not like an anxious guy. But those were some of the, I wouldn't even say nail biting. But I would say I was on high alert about it because people kept trying to buy my Uber shares for me at $5 billion, $10 billion, $20 billion, $30 billion. And I did liquidate some at $50 billion and $60 billion, something in that range. And then I still have a lot left. And yeah, that was a little gut check moment for me when it went down to $15 or $16 during the pandemic. But I just looked at it and I said, well, this pandemic is not lasting forever. If it is, I got bigger problems than Uber stock because we're never going to leave our houses again.

SPEAKER_148: And so do I see a world where Uber doesn't exist or isn't the number one company and the lead? No, I don't. So I'm sticking around, right? And quickly rebounds.

SPEAKER_80: The other thing too is I'm 32, right?

SPEAKER_77: Ah, I'm 49. So I do have a different window than you.

SPEAKER_412: And so the way I look at it is if it all went to zero and I lost 50%, that's the equivalent of somebody at 50 losing 10%, right?

SPEAKER_423: Yeah, that's probably right. It's pretty similar.

SPEAKER_39: All right. So let me get it. I got a couple more questions for you here.

SPEAKER_04: Chris asked, considering he shills from Bitcoin 110% of the time, how deep in debt is he with Bitcoin? You're not in debt with your Bitcoin position. This is money you have. Come on. You're not. Come on. Come on.

SPEAKER_39: That would be the definition of insanity to lever yourself up with a cryptocurrency.

SPEAKER_44: The craziest stories that I've heard of people, and this is like 2012 or 2014, there were definitely people who sold all their possessions.

SPEAKER_21: I didn't hear about people like going in debt, but I've definitely heard stories of people who like sold their car or sold their house or whatever, took the money and put it in Bitcoin. That alone was insanity. Now, it played out, but still doesn't mean it was a good decision, right, in terms of the way they made the decision. But I haven't heard too many people going into debt to buy Bitcoin.

SPEAKER_406: Oh, in the last podcast with Pomp, you asked him this question, what company is most likely to be the Amazon of crypto is a great question.

SPEAKER_60: Will it be within decentralized finance, perhaps? We still don't know the answer. Does he have a better idea?

SPEAKER_44: So I'm going to answer this in a little bit of a weird way. One of the companies that we invested in very early, we definitely didn't invest enough, and we've continued to invest pretty aggressively in this company called BlockFi. And the reason why I bring them up is if you think of the U.S. dollar as a unit of account in the legacy financial world, one of the most valuable types of companies is financial infrastructure, right? So banks. And so what I think Coinbase and all the other exchanges are doing is they're acting more like brokerage type accounts, whereas BlockFi has specifically said, look, we want to look and feel more like wealth management. They can't use the word bank in their marketing materials because of regulatory reasons, but wealth management services. And so they can give you a U.S. dollar loan against your crypto collateral. They have an interest bearing account where you can earn up to 8.6% interest, all this stuff. And to me, what ends up being really interesting is in the legacy world, like if you're anywhere outside the United States and you want to participate in U.S. dollars, you got to go to a bank. Like physically walk in, show them papers, like do all this crazy stuff that the technology world forgets about, right? Because we just have Stripe and whatever. Crypto changes that. Like now you just need an internet connection, right? And so if you can just sign up for an account and then Jason can send me money and I didn't have to actually go get like a traditional bank account. To me, that is a Trojan horse because the wallet is the equivalent of like Amazon's Prime membership.

David Friedberg: All right. Hit me with another one. Hit me, Pom.

SPEAKER_412: How has your target percentage ownership changed in companies over time?

SPEAKER_04: Great question. When I was a scout for Sequoia 10 years ago, I was putting in 25, 50K checks.

SPEAKER_02: That generally was well under 1%. Then I had my first fund, Launch Fund 1, like whatever, seven years ago, started to own 1, 2, 3%. So for something like Superhuman, we own 2%. Then we had the syndicate.

SPEAKER_04: And for something like Calm, we did a little bit from our fund and a bunch from the syndicate, put in 378K, own 5%. And so 5% of a billion dollar company, $50 million. Well under 1% of a $50 billion company, hey, $100 million. Like you can see that owning a larger percentage does better. Now we have our accelerator where we get 6% of the company in a company like, let's say, FitBot, which has been a breakout company for us, which is a subscription app that's doing over $10 million a year.

SPEAKER_137: So that would, you know, generally these companies get 10 times, 20 times top line revenue if they're high growth.

SPEAKER_04: Could be as little as 5, could be as high as 30 in our world. But let's just put it at 10. And then we will put in money from our syndicate and our fund. And we're on our third fund now. So we'll put a little more money in. And target now is 10% to 20% in the winners.

SPEAKER_351: And so we are acting more like a seed fund slash venture fund. But we will be totally fine with 5% and we'll be totally fine with 20%. And so you never want to miss that in a great company. And we now will make regularly five or six bets because the syndicate, a lot of the members keep wanting to bet. Keep wanting, they want to keep betting.

SPEAKER_02: Even if the company is at $100 million or $150 million or $250 million, we had a lot of the Com.com investors not want to sell at the $250 million. We did sell 10% when it hit $250 million. We had other ones who wanted to buy. And those people who bought, you know, maybe they did 4x their money or 5x and maybe ultimately they'll do 10x hopefully, maybe even 20.

SPEAKER_137: But they're not going to do $200, right? It's not possible. But when you get into those later stages, you're obviously reducing risk massively. And so it's a balance. It was a great question.

SPEAKER_39: And I also like to have a board seat too. Do I have any more here for Pomp? Let's see. Who is actually interviewing who? You guys should make up your mind.

Chamath Palihapitiya: That's a good observation. Tim asks, this is a funny one. Which one of you is more confident?

SPEAKER_39: That's interesting. Do you feel confident in what you do? Do you feel like at the age of 32, knowing what you know? Do you feel on a scale of 1 to 10? How confident are you in your ability?

SPEAKER_366: I'm going to separate investing from the content stuff. Great. The content stuff, much more confident in the – really because it's my personal opinion.

SPEAKER_441: So just the fact that like I know how I think now.

SPEAKER_442: You feel like you have clarity of your own thought.

SPEAKER_441: Yeah. And I know what I'm good at and what I'm not good at. And like you're just more self-aware, right? Right. Investing, it's very much like the more you learn, yeah, you're improving there. But you also realize the less you know type situation.

SPEAKER_444: Right.

SPEAKER_270: And so I think that different things call for different level of confidence. But definitely investing is – every day you're just like, damn, there's people out there who are really, really good at this game.

SPEAKER_441: And I'm improving and they're still pulling away, right?

SPEAKER_137: Well, you've only been – how long have you been doing it? A decade or half a decade, five years?

SPEAKER_446: Oh, no. Four and a half, five years, you're saying.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah. I think when you get a decade under your belt and you get a couple of big wins, that's what really tips over for you. And then you start to realize, like you're saying, who you are. You have that self-awareness. You realize things are out of your control. And that the way you get good at this is by consistently showing up and doing the work. So I feel supremely confident just on the investing side of the business. I feel supremely confident because I'm so aware of the randomness of it that I am at

SPEAKER_58: peace with never hitting an Uber again, knowing that I can make an exceptional career out of

SPEAKER_04: hitting Robin Hoods and comms, thumbtacks, Trellos, Wealthfronts, whatever, desktop medals. I don't need to have grand slams or three-piece. I could just win a championship every two years, right? And that's a great career, right?

SPEAKER_16: You don't need to be Michael Jordan. You could be Kobe. You could be Shaq with four. You could be the Warriors with three rings, right?

SPEAKER_128: And on an interview basis with the content, I feel like I could sit with anybody and interview them and my blood pressure would not change. And I could sit across from Trump or Obama or Putin or Kim Jong-un. And I don't think my blood pressure would change, and I would have absolute fearlessness in asking them any question. So I feel like I'm probably slightly more confident in you, but I'm 17 years older than

SPEAKER_433: you, so I should be.

SPEAKER_449: Yeah, that's fair.

SPEAKER_433: But it feels like you're very... See, I don't think I had the self-awareness that you maybe had at 32 when I was running my first Media Empires, my little mini Media Empires with Silicon Eye Reporter and Weblogs, Inc. That's a super important observation I think you're making, which is you have to be aware

SPEAKER_02: of your own limitations, right? And that's what I've learned is when I see Sequoia and I worked with Sequoia, I was like, oh, so in awe of them.

SPEAKER_58: And then I realized, oh, you know what they do better than everybody? They show up for fucking work. And I see all these people I know in my contemporaries who don't go to work anymore. They're fucking around and not actually showing up at the office. Putting the pandemic aside, I would go to Sequoia and I would just be like, there's Michael Moritz, there's Jim Goetz, there's Doug Leone, there's Ruloff, there's Alfred Lynn. They're all in the office all day long. And you know what they're doing? Meeting with founders. That's it. There's no big secret here to their success other than they just work harder than everybody

SPEAKER_148: else. And they do it consistently and it compounds and it compounds and it compounds, right?

SPEAKER_79: I mean, in a way, if you look at Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger, and I know Dave Portney is doing his like, you know, I'm smarter than them or whatever. You know what? It's completely possible Dave is.

SPEAKER_04: Will Dave do it for five decades? Will he show up for work for 10 years and do it? I think Dave's out in three weeks. I think he's had fun.

SPEAKER_351: How long you think he does daily day trading?

SPEAKER_270: Well, daily day trading is different than, and I'm at an advantage here because you probably don't know the backstory for him.

SPEAKER_177: So he started Barstool. So you'll love the story. He started Barstool, I think it was 2003, 2004. And he started actually as a physical newspaper.

SPEAKER_454: No, I didn't know that.

SPEAKER_441: Azeem. Oh, yeah, yeah. And here's the best part is he literally went and stood at the trains in Boston and was like handing them out like a paper boy.

SPEAKER_35: That's literally what I did with my magazine. So I got a reporter.

SPEAKER_351: I used to hand it out at parties and I put in my masthead, it said Jason Calacanis, CEO, editor, publisher, and paper boy. I literally put the word paper boy.

SPEAKER_270: That's hilarious. So he did this, eventually started the online like blog, right?

SPEAKER_147: And then eventually social media comes along, all this kind of stuff. And it wasn't, so she started 2003, 2004. And if I remember the story correctly, it wasn't until I think 2015, maybe when Churnin made the first investment. And, you know, they valued the company at 15 million bucks. They bought over 50% of it. And the way that this current CEO, Erica Nardini, tells it, she like shows up to work for the first day as the CEO. And she's like, there's like checks laying around the office that are uncashed.

David Friedberg: Like these guys had no clue what they're doing, right? But they were great at content. So, you know, look, it's somebody who sticks it out for now almost 20 years.

SPEAKER_39: All right. So then I'll give more credit. Here's the thing about him or about that story that I think is, you know, super important.

SPEAKER_04: What you don't know about business, you can learn, but being able to create a great product is the true gift and skill in the world. And if you can make something that is a transcendent product, then whatever you think about, you know, call your daddy or barstool sports or whatever. I don't even know what their products are besides those two. Whatever you think about them, they have connected with a very large audience in a very deep, meaningful way. He is a savant at making content.

SPEAKER_266: They have, again, captured the one thing that I think people are just now catching up

SPEAKER_44: to, which is, I said all the time, he who holds the audience has all the power now. Yes. Because, you know, I mean, Elon's actually a very good example of this. You cannot, quote unquote, cancel Elon Musk because Elon Musk has a bigger audience than

SPEAKER_468: every single media corporation.

SPEAKER_170: Right. He's got 30 million followers, right? No, he can route around anybody. He can just route around the press. And if he gives access to the press.

SPEAKER_319: And by the way, that's what Trump's doing. Right. That Trump has the same thing.

SPEAKER_465: I mean, there's many people, both political, not political, across both aisles.

SPEAKER_471: Joe Rogan falls into this category. Yeah.

SPEAKER_137: It's just they have a bigger audience now. On a very small percentage, you know, I reach more people in my podcast than when I

SPEAKER_04: go on to CNBC. Right. I still do CNBC because it's a different group of people. And I just love the challenge of going in there and dunking on everybody and having fun with it because it's entertaining for me and fun.

SPEAKER_58: But that's the other thing is people forget fun. Like you can see we're having fun in this conversation. Dave is having fun. Elon is having fun.

SPEAKER_43: Chamath is having fun. That is important. You have to love the journey. And this has been quite a journey. Oh, there's another question. Okay, here we go.

SPEAKER_79: It's not about my persistence versus privilege tweet that they tried to cancel me on. Speaking of being canceled, they didn't cancel me on that one.

SPEAKER_270: No, you ready? Yeah. I saw you go on CNBC. I think the last time you were on and you had the one of the fieriest hot takes and segments I've seen in a while.

SPEAKER_477: Oh boy, here we go.

SPEAKER_270: What is the one thing if you went on tomorrow, you would bitch and complain and yell and scream about what's like the one thing that's top of mind right now that you would just go crazy on television over?

SPEAKER_433: That is a good one. Yeah, it's interesting. I forgot what I went.

SPEAKER_445: I think it was Zuck in Facebook.

SPEAKER_170: Oh yeah, that's just infuriating to me. Yeah, that was just the fact that people don't get it after how many years he's been doing the same thing.

SPEAKER_479: Right now, I am particularly upset at the lack of leadership in this goddamn country from

SPEAKER_60: top to bottom.

SPEAKER_04: Now, you'll see some great moments like Cuomo doing his daily briefing and the reason that Cuomo doing a 20-minute briefing with 20 slides seems so extraordinary and it's not. I consider that table stakes. You and I do that every day. But the fact that he does that and the fact that Trump or London Breed here in San Francisco who gets credit for some things but this city is a disaster or the governor of this state,

SPEAKER_128: Gavin, they just have done a terrible job communicating and leading. And leadership is absolutely critical in a crisis.

SPEAKER_58: And when there's a crisis, that's when you find out if you actually elected somebody who has any fucking idea of what they're doing. And I'll go off on the right right now.

SPEAKER_16: The fact that Trump or Pence and these dipshits can't walk up to the microphone with a goddamn mask on and say, I'm wearing my mask right now, but everybody's six feet away from me. I'm going to take it off.

SPEAKER_24: You should wear your mask too because there's zero downside to it and it costs 10 cents for these and they're available free everywhere at every post office. Every cop has a bunch in their car. You can get them for free. And why wouldn't we do it? Because, man, people losing their job sucks and not being able to go out and have our lives and go to school sucks. So just wear this mask, please. And if you don't wear it and you see somebody not wearing it, you should just all say shame on you and just say shame like they did in Game of Thrones. And if we all do that, we'll be fine. I just did a better job off the top of my head than nine out of 10 politicians. Right. And then the fact that nobody can go on TV and say, listen, not all cops are criminals. And we have a serious problem in how policing is done. We need to sit at a table and we need to just look at the hundred calls that come into a police precinct every day and decide who should respond to them. Because trust me, the police do not want to come to a domestic dispute that could be resolved by a social worker. They do not want to go to an addicted person or a mentally ill person who could be handled by a counselor. We all are on the same team.

SPEAKER_58: Let's make a new plan and start fresh today. And for the love of God, please do not resist arrest. And for the love of God, please do not take your gun out of the holster and shoot somebody who's running away. Both parties need to stop this immediately. And we have to realize we're all Americans and we have to be on each other's sides. And nobody wants to go to a funeral, whether it's a cop's funeral or it's just somebody who had a couple of drinks and is eating a goddamn chicken sandwich in the Wendy's fucking drive-thru. Does not need to fucking die. It's fucking infuriating. And that's what I would say if I was allowed to curse on CNBC. I'm sorry, I'm getting a little emotional about it.

SPEAKER_04: But, you know, I come from a family of cops. My brother was a cop. My cousin's a cop. My uncle's a cop. My grandfather's a firefighter. It's a hard job.

SPEAKER_58: And then on the other side, you have these sadistic, insane people kneeling on somebody's neck and just torturing them to death or shooting somebody in the back who you just had a 40 minute conversation with. I mean, let the guy run away. You have his driver's license. You know who he is. And we don't have leaders who can do this. And that's the goddamn problem is you need to have a leader who can come out and say it the way I said it, which is be a goddamn human being. And understand that we're all on the same team. It's called humanity. We're all on the same rock. Planet Earth. We're all in the same country. America. We're supposed to have some common decency and some common thread amongst us to get through these problems together. And leaders are so self-absorbed and clueless and incompetent that they can't just say what I just said, right?

SPEAKER_319: Oh, they definitely, one, aren't saying that. And two, you know, what did they say? Common sense isn't so common anymore, right?

SPEAKER_441: It's this weird thing where you get the retweets and what are perceived to be votes by having a very black and white view of the world. And obviously, the world's not black and white. But the idea that nobody should die, either a cop or a civilian, is not or should not be a controversial, wild idea. Like, that sounds like pretty simple objective to me.

SPEAKER_487: Right, but, you know, there's somebody who'll take this clip and say, cancel Jason, because he says not, all cops are not, you know, criminals.

SPEAKER_04: And then somebody on the other side will say, like, well, you know, you ran from the cops and you stole their taser. You deserve to get shot. Like, literally, those two statements will get more likes and retweets than what you and

SPEAKER_58: I would say is just, nobody wants to die. No mom and father wants to bury a son or daughter. Nobody wants to go to a funeral. We all want to die of old age in a, you know, playing checker somewhere and shitting our pants in a diaper at 92.

SPEAKER_16: Like, how great would it be if the two of us, I'm 92 and you're 82 and we're sitting here in a, you know, chopping it up on a podcast playing chess, you know, or our brains are on some pedestal.

SPEAKER_475: And you're a gazillionaire because of your Bitcoin.

SPEAKER_04: Well, and the Knicks have three rings, you know, three championships, you know, trust me. You want to see me cry? The Knicks in a ticket tape parade, I'll be balling. I'll be balling.

SPEAKER_492: That is one interview I would pay to watch is you and James Dolan going at it.

SPEAKER_58: You know, here's the thing about James Dolan. He wants to play music. And being the son of a billionaire and inheriting a bunch of money and a bunch of responsibility is a big burden.

SPEAKER_128: He doesn't want to do this job. He wants to play music. He should sell now. The market couldn't possibly be at a bigger peak.

SPEAKER_58: He can get a ton of money for it. And you know what? God bless. Go play the blues. When you see him playing the blues, he is smiling. I saw him play. Go find a church with Jewel and a bunch of other people.

SPEAKER_16: Now, people, it's easy to make fun of somebody, you know, who's not a professional musician and who's a trust fund kid, but he's got pure joy.

SPEAKER_58: And then I see him sitting at the garden and he looks utterly depressed and sad. There's a message to James Dolan. Pursue your life's work, which is singing the goddamn blues. And you love it. I see it on your face. And you know what?

SPEAKER_24: He loves to go to a club of 10 people or 20 people and just play the blues. There's a video of him online where somebody was yelling at him, sell the Knicks while he's playing some music festival. He's playing a music festival in the afternoon with 20 people in front of a stage, and he

SPEAKER_58: is loving it. He's a billionaire. He owns the Knicks, the Rangers, Radio City Music, all the Beacon. He's not happy about that. He's happy being the opening act to the five other opening acts. And he's humble and in pure ecstasy. Do that, James. Do that, Jim.

SPEAKER_347: Sell the Knicks to me.

SPEAKER_494: Give me the goddamn Knicks. Just give them to me. Please, just give me them Knicks. Let me do it. I will get it done. I promise you I'll get it done. And I will give you all the credit in the world for having the foresight to pick me. That's the next owner of the New York Knickerbockers. Thank you, James Dolan.

Chamath Palihapitiya: What's your dream? What's your dream, Bob? Giants. The Giants? Yeah.

SPEAKER_498: Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_39: Come on. You know, my dad's season tickets, and I used to go to Phil Simms and Lawrence Taylor.

SPEAKER_272: I was at all those games.

SPEAKER_499: I watched Lawrence Taylor.

SPEAKER_272: He'd come out of that halftime.

Chamath Palihapitiya: He'd done three or four lines of blow, and he would just run through the line and just, he'd get two or three sacks in a game. You sat there watching it, and Phil Simms was just like, we would just be doing the prevent

SPEAKER_39: defense. We would run the ball. They would never let Phil Simms throw it. But we won.

SPEAKER_122: We won. The underdogs won.

SPEAKER_502: And, man, you watch Lawrence Taylor, oh, my Lord. That was like watching an alien.

SPEAKER_16: Like, it was literally like watching a predator playing with a bunch of humans. You know the predator of the movie I've watched on my daughters? They're like eight feet tall? Imagine you had a predator in the middle of a football game.

SPEAKER_24: What would happen?

SPEAKER_16: And that was what Lawrence Taylor did.

SPEAKER_17: Has anybody ever done anything equivalent to what he did in terms of sacking people and just being so incredibly intimidating?

SPEAKER_270: Probably not. The only person I could think of, a different position, but maybe like a Sean Taylor if he had gotten to play a little more. But other than that, I mean, there's just not that many people that are that disruptive.

SPEAKER_122: He broke that guy's leg. Remember that? Oh, yeah. I mean, when has anybody ever gotten sacked and broken their leg?

SPEAKER_39: Is that the only time that's ever happened in the history of the NFL? I got to think it is.

Chamath Palihapitiya: All right, listen. You've been listening to the Pomp and this week in Startups crossover.

SPEAKER_39: Everybody who's in my audience, go subscribe to Pomp. You heard him here today. He's awesome. He does what he does.

SPEAKER_436: And he's a Pompolano. Pompolano on the – you can't get P-O-M-P on Twitter. Who's got that?

SPEAKER_270: Somebody – Literally, no, a radio DJ in Texas, and he keeps trying to sell it to me, and I keep telling him to kick rocks.

SPEAKER_39: What does he want? A grand? Two grand?

SPEAKER_511: No, he wants more than that. But it's the – I'll tell you this.

SPEAKER_351: For five grand or less, you should buy it. I wouldn't buy it for 10. I would buy it for five.

SPEAKER_512: I think that's what he wants. I think he wants 10.

SPEAKER_39: All right, listen. Come on, man. DJ guy. He'll give you five dimes, five dimes, and he'll give it to you in Bitcoin. You want to know the best part?

SPEAKER_106: No, listen. This is the best part. People obviously tag him all the time. They tag at Pomp.

SPEAKER_229: Right, right, right, right. And so his only way to fight back from that is he blocked me.

SPEAKER_170: Here's what you do. Find out what his name is. Before we publish this episode, find out his name, and then go.

SPEAKER_24: And – oh, he's protected. Go find out his name, his full name, and buy every domain name possible, and on every other service, get his full name.

SPEAKER_60: And say, listen, I got all your full names for you right here. You can have all your full names. I'll trade you those. You give me that. Right?

SPEAKER_04: It's not a bad idea. It's not a bad idea at all. But don't publish the show until he does it. So get his full name. Get his last name. Go buy hislastname.net.org.com. Say, listen, I got a collection of 300. I got the Instagram name for you. I got everything. And then you trade him those for what you have. Because I've had people do that with me before.

SPEAKER_79: And, you know, it's a compelling trade sometimes. You know, sometimes somebody needs, like, a couple of draft picks or they need a point guard.

SPEAKER_413: And you trade for the point guard knowing that – You know what I heard? You know what I heard you have?

SPEAKER_493: I heard that you have at Fortune.

SPEAKER_02: I have at Fortune and at Libra. And Libra, they tried to buy it for me.

SPEAKER_79: And we couldn't get a consulting agreement done. You're not allowed to sell these things. But I was going to do a consulting agreement with them. And we just couldn't get it done because they wanted to talk to me on the phone, the Facebook people. And I just like to tell them, I was like, listen, if you want it, I'll break bread with you. We'll talk about it. But I just – please stop calling me on the phone. Just send money. I'll do a consulting gig for you. And then you can have the domain. That's the way to do it, right? Is you can't sell the handle, but you could sell your consulting services.

SPEAKER_02: So you could – he could be a consultant to you and you could pay him in Bitcoin for something else and throw in the domain name or whatever.

SPEAKER_530: How you got at Libra, I don't even want to know.

SPEAKER_04: Well, no, in the early days, somebody on my team got all the signs of the Zodiac for me.

SPEAKER_60: I also have contests. I have contests. I have – I also have autos. I got a bunch of handles. We use them. We have at video games. I have at Santa Monica. I got a bunch of weird ones on the Twitter.

SPEAKER_100: All right. Listen, everybody. We'll see you next time on the Pomp podcast and This Week in Startups. Pomp, you got to say goodbye to your audience.

SPEAKER_188: Go subscribe to This Week in Startups. Jason knows what he's doing. There you go. Go invest in the –

SPEAKER_02: Go invest in the – yeah. We're not giving any investment advice. Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. But we love to gamble. The end.

SPEAKER_540: Great job, Pomp. All right. See you all next time. Bye-bye. Hey, sir. Back kicked ass.