SPEAKER_00: all right everybody the number one most frequent guest on the program is back today zach coleus is here for ask an angel we did it live on youtube and we got a ton of great questions raising money on zoom post covid red flags to consider when reviewing syndicate and startup deals as an investor and uh concepts that early in our careers we believed in but maybe we think differently about now how you can form relationships with vcs before you build your startup and investor red flags what kind of people should you look out for as a startup founder that you don't want on your cap table and so much more stick with us it's gonna be a great show zach is amazing this weekend

Jason Calacanis: startups is brought to you by vanta compliance and security shouldn't be a deal breaker for startups to win new business vanta makes it easy for companies to get a sock to report fast twist listeners can get a thousand dollars off for a limited time at banta.com twist coda coda is the all-in-one doc for teams if you've got a stack of niche workflow tools or you're buried in docs and spreadsheets coda is the doc that brings it all together startups can sign up for free at coda.io and contra contra is a commission-free marketplace for freelancers and independent creators get 500 off your first hire at contra.com quest okay everybody we're live on the youtube right now

SPEAKER_04: with ask an angel this is a series uh that i've been doing for years with my friend zach coleus who's that coleus he's a serial entrepreneur he got into angel investing and early stage investing at the same time i did just about 10 years ago correct zach yeah yeah 2015. spring 2015. um he runs coleus capital that's his last name c-o-e-l-i-u-s you can follow him zach coleus on twitter and um you know as far as investors go i have a sign behind me that says do the work that signs there for me uh not for y'all but if you benefit from it i'm super happy but people who do the work in our industry tend to gravitate towards each other zach and i have a great collaboration here because we both do the work and man it's a lot of work what do you i'm going to start with welcome back for

SPEAKER_10: your 17th 18th 19th 20th whatever who knows i stopped counting uh but i think more than anybody

SPEAKER_04: now oh cool so what is if you were to draw a pie chart this is my question and then we'll get to the audience's questions here if you were to draw a pie chart in the life of an an angel an early stage investor uh in their you know getting you know towards the end of their first decade of investing now you got a book of business you got existing startups you got lps there's a lot going on here yeah yeah yeah and uh some of the major pie slices would be meeting new founders servicing existing investors and then doing the crazy mashugana associated with managing lps and administration yeah just those three pie charts how do you how do you break it up today rough percentages i would add

SPEAKER_17: a fourth one um which is being a free fun individual enjoying life like so when i was a founder you know

SPEAKER_19: my last company we started in 2005 and ran that for over a decade and and um it was non-stop it was 24 hours a day it was your entire life and soul and every ounce of your being was going into trying to making this work and and there was never a moment to be like i'm i'm not 100 um and i think one of my favorite things about being an investor is that there's a real 80 20 rule in this business at least that i found in my experience where 20 of my time provides 80 of the value and the rest of it has this very fast depreciating curve and so like you know the best founders are people i know or they come from people i know and you know and that's a really small slice of my time but it's where all

SPEAKER_22: the value is and so what i found really quickly in this job is that like i can spend my time doing

SPEAKER_19: the work and then there's always other time that i could go enjoy life and i was like oh my god i'm gonna do that because i spent a decade getting my head bashed in being a founder and god it's so good and i'm just trying to constantly do that and keep keep that that that sort of like i wouldn't say balance it's not balance it's more of just like joy in my life got like the the opportunity to go explore the world like i'm trying to go to every country in the world and wow and that's like that takes time and it's awesome and it's like super cool and so like how many countries have you been

SPEAKER_26: to how many continents have you been to are you keeping track i'm in antarctica yet uh but i've been to

SPEAKER_17: 90 something countries um and in a good year i'll get 10 new ones you know we'll see wow

SPEAKER_29: and you remote work there yeah which is great you can do this job anywhere right like yeah that's um

SPEAKER_04: another great thing about it uh the job has changed significantly everything used to be in the room yeah to take a meeting and then founders would fly in to see you so maybe you're obligated to take them to lunch yeah because just doing a half hour meeting with them would be a jerk move uh so now you're at three or four hours and basically it's the whole day if somebody flies into sea or at least half the day and you still feel like a jerk for yeah only spending half a day with them if they flew in from new york or la or whatever so this zoom thing has changed everything you can do a lot more meetings to be a lot more efficient and board meetings i have a meeting today but yeah the board meetings going virtual has been a godsend as well oh yeah i mean i don't sit on

SPEAKER_19: boards otherwise um it would really change a lot of parts of my business but um yeah no zoom and i was really worried early on when we first started investing via zoom and the beginning of covet i was

SPEAKER_17: like oh how's this gonna work but so far i mean the performance of that portfolio has been is very

SPEAKER_43: good so i'm what do you attribute that fact to so zoom doing meetings on zoom as opposed to in person

SPEAKER_04: is as good or better than it was pre-covered and people are sticking with that model what do you attribute better selecting uh and better picking and more efficiency what what is causing the uh lift

SPEAKER_22: from moving to zoom instead of the room um i have i mean i think one thing that's happening is that the founders are able because they don't have to go in person to sandhill they can they don't have to

SPEAKER_19: show up and run around san francisco to meet with people in person they can have more meetings and as a result they get to basically more rapidly kind of sort through who makes sense and who doesn't and as an investor on the other side you we get to do the same thing like i get to see a lot of pitches like and decide which ones i want to take uh and i think the so the volume of deal flow that i'm getting i think is up as like is significantly up and as someone who for me i really specialize in trying to find weird stuff like i like stuff that like nobody else likes and that like and so the the broader my aperture the higher the opportunity of finding something that is like is really kind

SPEAKER_22: of like gonna fit my style and so that that seems to be a big driver um the other thing is that like i actually don't think that my in person is substantially better than my zoom read on a person like so like think about a poker read like when i'm

SPEAKER_19: sitting with somebody in zoom and i'm sitting with somebody in person i don't think it's like order of magnitude difference i do think like phone call versus zoom big difference like right phone call versus like meeting in person big difference but zoom i'm it's not clear yet but i'm i think i'm

SPEAKER_09: pretty close like it's yeah my theory on this is is that the in room stuff creates a lot of obligation

SPEAKER_04: it creates a lot of reciprocation effect okay we've been in the same room so now there's like a relationship being built yeah uh and then that can drive people to make decisions based on the vibe the relationship which founders know yeah and investors know so investors really want to get in the room with a hot deal and try to build relationship fabric they want to go on a hike with you they want to take have dinner with you if it's a hot deal yeah founders know this as well that's why they want to get in the room with you or previously did because they want to use that time to build a relationship and have it be harder for you to say no ultimately yeah okay great those are sales techniques we get it person comes on the lot they want you to spend a long time on the lot uh and then the chance of you buying a car go up okay this is just known yeah so then if

SPEAKER_00: you move to zoom and people become a little bit more dish dispassionate a little bit more objective

SPEAKER_04: in terms of picking their investor and picking the founder to back and like you're saying you can see three times as many four times as many uh people on both sides of the table uh what that means ultimately is you find better matches for investors and companies and products and then we have more time to do diligence look at the numbers talk to customers and do things that are less performative less relationship building in the room so then what's lost is relationship fabric being built for when things go wrong so i have just instituted in our firm since we're so good at ripping through tons of introductory meetings and founders are so good at it now well after we make the investment we realize we haven't spent a lot of time with these founders in a room so do we have a deep relationship fabric we don't yeah and so now i'm like okay more zooms post investment more you know breaking bread having a meal so i'm just starting to think about that a lot more and i think people should so that when things

SPEAKER_68: get hard you got that relationship fabric to fall back on so it's uh it's it's really interesting how

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SPEAKER_11: twist for one thousand dollars off your sock two so servicing new deals versus existing deals yeah percentage of time yeah um so i probably spend

SPEAKER_19: third no more probably 40 to 50 percent of my time looking at new stuff um and then i'm probably

SPEAKER_55: spending 30 to 40 percent of my time helping existing companies and thankfully the admin stuff is not

SPEAKER_81: too bad it's all been abstracted now you have service providers like carta like angel list they've just

SPEAKER_82: taken all that back office and made it into a product so yeah you know i hired someone who's been

SPEAKER_19: amazing to like helping my my audit work um right and oh god we're doing the audit this year and compared to last year it's like a night and day she's a pro and it's like it's like watching a pro

SPEAKER_11: at work you're like damn that's good they've done it before yeah yeah um explain why what the audit is for venture capitalists why this is painful for us and what the purpose of uh an audit of your

SPEAKER_89: portfolio is every year yeah so i mean i have lps who give me their money to invest and um so every

SPEAKER_19: year we go through a process where we hire a effectively an accounting firm to go through and look at all the different companies all the positions in the portfolio where are they marked they basically they'll they'll google them all and they'll be like hey this firm announced a fundraise and we haven't marked changed the mark why or this firm did this and that so then we go through and we basically like answer all their questions provide all the supporting documentation and effectively sort of say that the portfolio is what we said it was and that it's worth what we said it was and that they you know hopefully um there's no bad going on and uh so the lps use that to basically feel comfortable with the fact that we're doing our job and that um when we call them for more capital that you know they should give it to us fantastic yeah and it's so it's an arduous process and then you

SPEAKER_11: have to get in touch with every single founder you've got to get all this information and you know it's important for founders to keep their investors up to date and the audit is like the ultimate backstop of that we have no choice but to get information from you so founders please let me ask

SPEAKER_96: you for that information make our lives easier please all right here come the questions first question

SPEAKER_04: comes from omar omar asks when reviewing an angelist syndicate startup investment deal

SPEAKER_00: what should we consider as red flags okay so when you're being invited to a syndicate uh what are the red flags you should look for okay now if it's one of zach's deals and it goes out

SPEAKER_04: to his syndicate uh or one of my deals at the syndicate.com i'm no longer on angel as we do it ourselves but uh angel is awesome uh what are the red flags in deals people should look for red flags are

SPEAKER_19: tricky um okay explain so uh one of the things that most investors on angelos do is they'll go in and they'll look for deals that are being led by well-known vc firms so sequoia or andresen or you know graylock or benchmark is leading around right and so usually if you were to be an lp in one of those funds you'd be very excited to be an lp in one of those funds and so being able to be

SPEAKER_22: invested alongside them is you know historically has been a very good deal

SPEAKER_104: one red flag that we've seen over the last couple years certainly since the last sort of called 18

SPEAKER_19: months is those companies that basically had been funded by a lot of fancy vc firms at incredibly high prices in 2020 and 2021 crazy prices uh stupid prices um they started to run out of money and so then the you know and those deals were not that the first deal that was not available on angel list they were those deals were like sharp elbow and everyone was fighting for allocation and getting an allocation on my initials only happened if you were already a significant insider in the company and even then you had to go to war like for instance i'm in mercury the bank and like i've been there since the beginning and i've had to fight like crazy to get my allocations in the subsequent rounds and i got i got by some good friends who led who led subsequent rounds who literally were like well bummer and they're like good friends oh yeah no not friends anymore in

SPEAKER_22: my book yeah whether we're that that that definitely threw a big damper on our relationship from my

SPEAKER_38: side of things um but anyway i have a simple rule with that by the way we're getting super inside

SPEAKER_04: baseball here but that's why people are listening i tell people yeah if you screw me like that and i'm a point guard when i bring the ball up the court the next time yep just be prepared i may not pass it to you i may pass it to your competitor so if you want to play sharp elbow games just be

SPEAKER_00: prepared that maybe i come up with the next uber and i you know it goes to your competitor totally i

SPEAKER_22: consider them personal friends still they're my friends i hang out with them i see them on a regular basis but the ball will not be past their direction and it's going to go to other people yeah no no yeah that's my job my job is to basically just like you it's like i'm bring the ball and and and then when the time comes to pass it to people who are going to pass it back to me

SPEAKER_40: yes people who are going to take it and you know hold it dribble it and off their foot into the stands

SPEAKER_109: okay so that was a red flag now they're coming back to angel list or syndication yeah so now all of a

SPEAKER_22: sudden these deals are suddenly getting bridge rounds because the vcs are trying to keep the companies alive they're not doing well enough and they probably never will do well enough to raise at an up round so we're getting flat rounds or we're getting bridge rounds we're getting notes especially if you're seeing a note going into an existing company that has a well-known vc who led a previous round that means it's a bridge round and the and suddenly if it's suddenly a bridge round a note and a well-known vc is in in the deal they say and it's basically happening um with a note that's a red flag because what that means is that they basically have said oh uh let's go get some dumb money from angel list to keep this company alive so that maybe the company can get to a next

SPEAKER_19: up round at which point we will basically go out and uh raise it funded ourselves that we won't give

SPEAKER_22: it to angel list so you get there's a lot of so there's two strategies that have worked well historical and angel list as a lead one strategy is sort of the long-term greedy strategy which is

SPEAKER_19: basically think about it like every deal you do is going to be on your permanent record and which is true it's public and permanent and you do a deal and 10 years from now people are gonna be like why did you do that stupid deal why did you do that yes and so that sets up your career

SPEAKER_22: as a investor to basically be to use angel list as a source of capital but to be very careful about

SPEAKER_19: your record the other strategy which a bunch of people unfortunately have done is effectively just a spray and pray do a ton of deals and get deal-by-deal carry because you don't care about the

SPEAKER_109: losers and the winners will pay you and just so who cares about who cares about your reputation and

SPEAKER_128: your track record you're just going to put as much you know as much food on the buffet as possible

SPEAKER_04: and it's up to you to figure out if it's good or not you being the syndicate member these are really important red flags for people to notice and over time people have learned to know the difference one red flag um i'll point out is uh you know high valuations and not a lot of traction or you know a deal memo and we really put a lot of care into our deal memos but a lack of due diligence and a lack of data in the deal memo so you got a high price they want 25 million 35 million but they don't actually have i don't know quarterly monthly revenue spend charts in there now the company's been around it the product's been in market for six quarters and you don't know the revenue per quarter you don't know the growth rate if that stuff's missing then and they're talking about the product roadmap and it's a high valuation you have to ask well the people who have performance will share their performance the people who have a lack of performance will share road maps plans features you know events that they spoke at stories you know hires they've made press hits yeah so i really like um a focus on the business and it becomes very clear uh and you'll see it in when you get

SPEAKER_74: updates as well after you've invested if the updates include if if there's growth and revenue and customers being signed yeah their founders are gonna take credit for that it's at the top of the email

SPEAKER_138: first thing check out our 20 month over month growth yes and so founders are smart so you just have to

SPEAKER_04: understand if they're selling performance yep or promise well once you're selling the promise you know you're you're you've got to be careful to not have every single thing in your portfolio selling promise and you got to have some things that are selling the performance one thing i would

SPEAKER_22: say with with syndicates in particular is i've got 5 000 people in mind you've got 50 000 in yours not

SPEAKER_19: 11 yeah okay a lot but anyway so when you when when i talk to a founder and they're like oh what are you going to share with these 5 000 people that i don't know yes i'm like um you get to decide what you are willing to let me share so if you're can i put revenue numbers in i'd like to put that in there can i put in sort of like uh month-over-month growth rates but but sometimes they're like no i'm not sharing that information and so there are i've had deals where i've been like look i can't share anything i'm doing this deal my money is going into it so you can trust me or not um make your own decision but like i can't tell you any specifics about sort of where the business is at so that that

SPEAKER_147: does happen and so it's like it's a balance there it's a balance yeah 2023 is here and this is the

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SPEAKER_43: dollars in sign up credits right now all right from the youtube pre-show people got into the youtube channel youtube.com slash this week in uh sign up hit the bell so you can get notifications when go live but somebody asked while the show was up it leaves the show in the chat room up so you can get the questions in early for your portfolio founders who raised at the top and have no path to profitability in the short term other than cutting staff what other options are there besides closing

SPEAKER_154: shop wow uh what are the options here yeah you don't have a path to profitability and uh yeah i mean

SPEAKER_22: so i think in today's market i think there's a couple things going on um this happened to a number of my

SPEAKER_19: companies and i'm we're working through it right now which is like you you raised you got to a million in revenue the business was doing really well and then in 2021 some crazy vc firm came along and here here's 20 on 100 post and everyone's like woohoo 20 million dollars yay we're gonna be able to do a lot of with that and now they're at you know a couple million in revenue a few million revenue hopefully but the valuation the multiple that they're seeing in the market is not going to get them an up round and so then the question then becomes do you pivot like just change your business entirely which is dangerous and i'm in my last business i did that a number of times and it's like it's it's a non-trivial thing to do do you take more product risk which i'll come back to or do you basically try to sell or shut down the business and i my argument for all these founders today is like look we seem to be at a step change with ai changing the game on the field in a substantial non-linear way so like you can think of sort of like the last decade the technology is improving over and over and over again but we haven't had a major step change but since mobile ai appears to have done that and and i mean i i like

SPEAKER_22: to argue that ai probably is the real web 3. so the crypto fraudsters basically like web 3 web 3 oh we all know that but but ai appears to have totally changed the game and so i think for a lot of those founders this is the opportunity to take the capital that they have and this new platform and make a bet on it and try to figure out how to basically get a step change in their business and some of them will succeed and some will fail so for instance in my company we had raised like a million bucks in 2008 from reid hoffman and the google analytics founders and all these amazing founders and we had this business and literally lehman happened and we were like oh we're so and we saw this new technology at that point in time called real-time bidding which is

SPEAKER_19: what we had just gotten started and we were like well let's bet on this thing if it works

SPEAKER_22: like we'll survive and if it were anyway if it fails because like our core business wasn't going to make it through and so we we bet our entire business on this new protocol and it worked and

SPEAKER_04: and that became a success and i think it gives us logical decision making you have to look at the field the game on the field as you're saying and pick up make a plan and execute as well as you can against that plan and that that does sometimes mean cutting the staff in half retreating and extending the so i literally got an email third riff from a startup they finally got the message you know five percent ten percent twenty percent riff we should have just done a forty percent riff at the start or whatever it was and uh you know i think they're going to make it they have you know 12 plus

SPEAKER_68: months of runway and they've got a good plan and i think they can get to break even with the money they have but it was literally one year of having this discussion and so they could have made these

SPEAKER_04: cuts at the beginning a little more severe and had 24 months of runway but it is what it is sometimes founders are going to take their time on the cuts and um you know some some individuals do their best work when their back is up against the wall yeah and that's just human nature you know you see that

SPEAKER_22: down in a poker tournament like when i literally feel the best when i'm literally almost yes

SPEAKER_04: i'm like i got nothing to lose now i'm just gonna start fucking jamming it is a um it is uh something that builds your focus i have to say when i was doing this skiing and i they were like you have to get more speed or you're going to be buried under the snow and it was a whiteout

SPEAKER_170: condition and my guide when they got 10 feet past me i couldn't see them and i had to they had to use a whistle and i had to follow the whistle wow and i was like you know what i'm going to just go

SPEAKER_04: faster eff it and if i fall yeah i'm gonna fall on powder and literally i that's when it clicked for me that speed is your friend in the powder except for the one time when it was such whiteout conditions i

SPEAKER_176: didn't see the fact that there was a giant kind of like mogul or just like the whole hill just plow to do it i hit a mogul i kid you not i went five ten feet in the air i didn't see it so i was completely

SPEAKER_170: unprepared for it so now i'm go you know that thing when you're in the air and you realize i'm in the air i'm not gonna land on my skis i'm gonna land on my back and i'm like oh this is the end of my season moment and i'm in the air on my back and i land on my back one of the skis pops off and it was like

SPEAKER_00: landing in a pool i just landed in a five foot bank of snow and i was fine yeah and i was like oh wow

SPEAKER_180: this is different if you do fall it's not a big deal uh yeah listen your mileage may vary but the

SPEAKER_00: point is uh sometimes you got to take a leap of faith and you got to go for it and i think the investors would rather that than you going in a circle yeah uh or going so slow down the mountain

SPEAKER_182: that you get lost and eaten by wolves okay yeah from the youtube live chat here we go we're cooking

SPEAKER_180: with oil now from a founder's perspective what are the red flag personality types to be aware of

SPEAKER_11: when courting angel investors assuming the angel is relatively new okay great yeah so uh what are red flags with investors we see investor bad behavior all the time uh what are some early red flags i mean

SPEAKER_82: sometimes we see it with co-investors uh who are the people that you should avoid i think there's two

SPEAKER_19: that i'm really scared of having dealt with them myself a lot one is the i'm doing this angel investing thing to get rich um folks they tend to be very finance oriented they're going to talk a lot about valuations and portfolio construction and like and they're they're thinking about it like it's you know they're on wall street and they're like they're making bats um unfortunately those people get impatient very very rapidly yes this is a business where it's it takes forever and you have to be

SPEAKER_22: patient and forcing things to happen doesn't work in this business and those those folks can become really painful to deal with if if um okay so category one the impatient folks they get rich they

SPEAKER_191: think they're going to get rich doing this that makes them efficient yeah well and you know if you

SPEAKER_04: do have that outlook you better have a get rich slowly and get rich diversified with using the power law yeah and so i think it's fine to have the aspiration to do well investing in this category you know that's kind of the point yeah um is that you could have outliers but you better understand that it takes 25 investments and you have to be graceful in failure i have had a challenge with this in my early years because it would be very frustrating to find out a founder shut the company down three months ago and i've been trying to get updates from them for a year you know like oh yeah we shut the company down i'm like what oh three months ago yeah what yeah you didn't even tell me yeah no you didn't even try to get a bridge round wow okay interesting this is the wow west folks and so you just have to be prepared and i don't know when you first experienced outright fraud or malfeasance in your portfolio i didn't experience it for the first 50 investments but when you hit two or three hundred okay yeah somebody's going to do something veranos like right and i've had it happen painful once or twice we'll find out in the second case so you never know um it's really hard any other archetypes of investors to avoid yeah and then how do

SPEAKER_162: it how do i identify them i'm not sure how to identify the finance bruh who wants to get rich

SPEAKER_128: quick but yeah i would think the number of investments they have and their reputation

SPEAKER_19: with other investors how long they've been doing it maybe yeah i just look you should always do references on angel investors it's trivial to do it it won't take you more than like a few minutes to send out some emails like you're gonna know people in common with them like do do the work like yeah like if you're raising money from an investor and you haven't done references on them you are um so and you know i've had a couple situations where there are people i've worked with who just

SPEAKER_22: turned out to really suck and founders call me up and they're like hey and i'm like run for your life

SPEAKER_47: yeah exactly yeah it is uh i'll give you one while you think of your next one i got yeah yeah

SPEAKER_00: the investor who uh wants to run the company themselves and they have a lot of ideas

SPEAKER_04: yeah yeah uh is one and there is a kind of side archetype to this one uh where they want to send the

SPEAKER_11: management team on never-ending uh research projects analytics uh so they number one think they can run

SPEAKER_04: the company so they're like hey well why don't we do this or you should do this or you know they're not asking things like have we considered you know uh white labeling the product and what are your thoughts on that which is how i learned to ask questions from ruloff and bill gurley and other folks is like hey let's have a conversation about let's pose it as a discussion as opposed to an edict even if you think it's the right thing to do but man i'm on some of these boards and i'll see somebody come in and they haven't prepared they don't have a prepared mind as doug leone and michael moritz talk about you know having a prepared mind coming into this if you don't have the prepared mind and then you are sending the team on hey can i get a report on all the clients by you know their length and the churn and how many customers have it and it's like whoa whoa whoa we have four clients we can just talk about each of the four yeah we do it right now we don't need to make a extensive report okay so that's

SPEAKER_00: an archetype for me and the way i identify those early is they do they use non-standard documents and they argue over things that don't matter in those documents so i try to be standard documents

SPEAKER_04: standard documents let's just use the standard documents so we don't have downstream problems where investors are like oh you did non-center documents and even in our side letters you know we ask for very simple things if we own over five percent maybe we should have a board observer seat if we over ten percent we should have the option to join the board uh if you do choose to do board meetings at some point and can we get updates you know like really simple like requests and even putting them in there is more to a level set with the founder that hey we we just think there should be governance when this company hits a million in revenue or something and there should be some planning so when you're in the product market phase uh product discovery phase maybe you don't need to have these things but when you do get that to that one million like you mentioned earlier for startups

SPEAKER_03: yeah maybe we should be thinking how the one turns into three and the three turns into nine and

SPEAKER_180: that might take more planning yeah yeah it might take more planning have you have you made a plan do you want to go over the plan i mean that's literally what i said have you made a plan should we go over the plan hope is not a plan so why don't we make a plan even we can change it

SPEAKER_154: i mean i literally give all these disclaimers like uh okay you have any other archetypes yeah i was

SPEAKER_19: actually gonna busy body i was the busy body micromanager usually often like either a former former manager at a corporate those are the worst like if they're a manager at a corporate like they're just used to like like they're used to performative work and reports and decks and like being the smartest person in the 10-person meeting because they know something about the business correct and

SPEAKER_22: like yeah literally the the way i when i say to my founders is like look if i do my job correctly you don't need to call me because you don't need me because you're amazing and i'm here to basically be helpful if you need an introduction or whatever when you're trying to raise money but generally like that means i picked a good entrepreneur and and you shouldn't have me taking your time so i should

SPEAKER_19: never ask you to do something that literally you think is a waste of time and yep at the point that i ask you ever to do something that you think is a waste of time and it's a cost of the business please tell me that yes please tell me hey this is why i think this is a cost not a positive ad and then i can tell you why i think it's going to help the business or not but but my job is not to put costs some entrepreneurs my job is to stay the out of the way and let them go execute and perform and my job is to pick people who don't need me but the corporate people oh my god they just like they

SPEAKER_233: live in this like kabuki there's a time for them you know if you get to series b or series

SPEAKER_170: okay well there might be a time for somebody with not the busy body ones but somebody with deep domain

SPEAKER_04: expertise yeah in finance sure and you're thinking about doing a venture debt and you don't have a cfo and

SPEAKER_170: this person's an investor and they got a lot of cfo experience and you can put them on a mission to get four venture debt quotes and yeah you can like use their mutant strength yeah to not derail the

SPEAKER_04: management team but to do work for the management team and so that goes to how do you manage your investors and so you know that's a really great thing to do is to tell people like hey yeah no we we're good on the product side we the three features you came up with they're actually on the road map and uh two of them are low priority uh we already talked to our customer but the one you got there yeah that one is high priority you'll probably see that in q2 of uh this year you know

SPEAKER_74: what we could use your help on we really need a cfo would you be willing to help us find a cfo and maybe do the first round of interviews with 10 of them for an hour each and now all of a sudden that

SPEAKER_00: person's like oh no i just wanted to throw bombs into the management team to waste time and i put 50k into the company and now i'm creating 150k in cost costs like don't be that person it's hard enough to run these companies uh you know and if you are going to be that person you better bring more value

SPEAKER_55: than the the chaos you're causing just don't think you nailed it you like you nailed it it's like you got to win the question game with your investors when they ask you a question you got to ask them

SPEAKER_22: for help you got to be like and not help about their question because they're going to run tangent on that be like what's the thing that i can use this person for to actually move the business forward and put the onus back on them and then they can they can their costs can be basically balanced by the

SPEAKER_19: value they add and the the posers they will just run away very rapidly um when you do that yeah i mean

SPEAKER_00: how can i be helpful is a meme uh for a reason yeah some founders do need help some founders do not some founders need you to just say high five that's awesome keep going travis yeah good yeah nothing

SPEAKER_11: to add uber's doing just fine and if you do you know want to talk about something that's in my wheelhouse let me know and you know what travis would call me when there was a pr crisis or there was the public didn't understand search pricing or something like that and we would you know a handful of times have a really good talk about communicating search pricing to the public you know or you know elon and i we had a talk because i knew about affiliate programs and uh i wasn't an investor

SPEAKER_154: uh in tesla but he i helped him architect the um referral uh the the referral program if you remember

SPEAKER_11: for model three and we just talked about it for i don't know maybe an hour one time just we're having dinner or something or flying somewhere and we just had an hour long conversation about the strategy it was too successful he had to turn it off if you remember people sold so many model threes somebody got too free cars because you got five thousand dollars in credits okay so that's a good deal that's a good

SPEAKER_15: program it was yeah too successful is a good yeah that's a good outcome that's awesome that means you

SPEAKER_09: win otherwise it's literally two outcome that's great um and so you know the these kind of discussions

SPEAKER_04: where you can be helpful and it's in your wheelhouse is i think what you have to be self-aware of

SPEAKER_162: as a potential investor and then yeah you know you have to manage these people and i have a new technique if i am not being helpful and you don't want me as an investor um i am more than willing uh to sell my shares in a company you know so if if if you don't want me around i get it like and i've literally had two instances in 350 where i said you know i think we philosophically differ here yeah uh maybe i shouldn't be an investor anymore and you know in one case it was because people were

SPEAKER_04: doing stuff that i didn't consider uh ethical and i just wasn't comfortable you know just from a legal perspective and um i exited that investment and then in one case you know they didn't want a founder didn't want to share with us the information that was driving the business and i was like okay that's odd uh and this is normal information that you would share with people with this percentage ownership and they they just were like we're not sharing any information it was just a huge red flag for me and i was like this is a trust issue like if you don't trust me we shouldn't be in

SPEAKER_277: business together just and it was like a million dollar investment and we exited so in these situations

SPEAKER_04: i don't have you ever had that happen where you wrote off an investment we just saw that with citizen in sequoia there was the ft story yeah um where there's a cram down around that's not too

SPEAKER_03: uncommon but um have you been in it where you have to separate from the founder and and how did

SPEAKER_19: you handle it yes abstract it abstract it you know so i had one um where they they were just doing a really poor job communicating and um and i i literally you know i called the founder up and i was like look just to let you know i've asked multiple times for these things you've chosen not to do them i'm not asking for a lot um and so like i'm stepping back they didn't have the money to buy me out and i wouldn't have asked for them to but i was like look i'm writing this to zero and as far as i'm concerned good luck now i i subsequently actually just recently found met the guy who um went in and helped turn around that company now the company's doing great and there was like a leadership change and they they turned around everything and that so i met the the the vc from the bigger vc firm who went in and did the worked like helped him rebuild that business and he was like oh my god and i was like you did god's work my friend thank you because it was it was bad um i mean listen people can

SPEAKER_70: disappoint you in all relationships this is a business partnership customer employee founders

SPEAKER_162: management team investors service providers people can disappoint each other there's so much opportunity my best advice is if it's not working out to just say hey for the sake of just being

SPEAKER_04: professional no this isn't working out for me no i'm guessing it's probably not working out for you

SPEAKER_00: why don't we move on to this type of relationship right listen we all know hiring world-class freelancers is a game changer for your startup or even if you're working in a big company you want to have a great talent marketplace where you can find these people but then you're always worried oh my god is all my money going to go to commissions well we found a new solution for you it's called contra c-o-n-t-r-a contra is a commission-free marketplace for freelancers and independent creators that's right commission free and there's no percentage-based upcharge when you hire somebody how does that sound well that's great and if you're on the other side of the marketplace let's say you're a laid-off tech worker you got a lot of experience well now's your chance join contra and start getting freelance gigs that pay well and don't have the marketplace taking the money that you're earning you get a hundred percent of what you make no fees what a fascinating way to disrupt the market contra specializes in design engineering social media video writing and ai it really is the easiest way to get solid talent quickly if you need project-based work you have to check out contra listen we have great success with freelancers we're hiring them all the time and contra is the best way to do that you're going to get 500 off your first hire at contra.com slash twist c-o-n-t-r-a dot com slash twist think about how much you can get done with 500 worth of designer or developer time contra.com twist right

SPEAKER_04: now go get that 500 okay from the live chat vicky asks what's a concept you thought was true early in your career and that you followed uh and that you now think about differently you have a credo uh or an assumption a heuristic zach that you believed early but you now changed your mind about

SPEAKER_291: or you've evolved on i don't know it's a really good question because it makes you think yeah yeah

SPEAKER_176: one thing that came to mind was you know that i could read founders uh like a poker player and

SPEAKER_04: i really thought i i could look into people's eyes and know if they're going to be a winner or not

SPEAKER_170: yeah and i do think i do that better than the average investor yeah but i think that i may have over indexed in my belief of my ability to do that because so much of my deal flow came from my network and my network was filled with so many amazing people so my attribution was early on look at how great a picker i am and it was like yeah this is like things that are floating around your immediate circle and your immediate circle yeah is well you know people i'm friends with yeah these are all you know high-end entrepreneurs who are doing incredible stuff in the world and capital

SPEAKER_11: allocators of course it's going to be like high-end stuff right yeah it's like you know bob dylan's

SPEAKER_00: like wow you know i can pick people to sign for my record label who are really smart it's like well just everybody's hanging out with bob dylan in the 60s 70s and 80s you know like yeah they're all in his

SPEAKER_11: orbit so yeah now i have moved to let's look at what the customer has to say in addition to what i

SPEAKER_170: think so because and i i know what i'm finding frequently the p i'm able to read people and how

SPEAKER_11: good they are at building a simple product that solves a problem in the world and being obsessed with customers and when i talk to customers it's clear they're obsessed with them and it's clear they're building stuff for them yeah so here we go right yeah um yeah you have any yeah you know i've just

SPEAKER_19: been continually impressed with just how deep the learning curve is for this business i mean capital allocating it just there's just so much to learn and i'm learning new stuff every day and um you're a decade in exactly yeah not counting your entrepreneurial career i know and i would you know i you know i agree with a lot of time helping companies raise money and advising and doing this

SPEAKER_22: work before i did this work so it's just it's great it's it's this the self-actualization of learning and

SPEAKER_19: becoming better at the job is still very very alive i think if that ever went away i would be probably sad probably just immediately retire but yeah no it's it's really i'm really enjoying it it's

SPEAKER_324: really fun i'm learning a lot too one of the recent learnings i had so i'll rephrase this question any

SPEAKER_11: recent learnings or you know in the last year or two and one of the recent learnings i'm having is what a profound impact we can have on founders post-investment uh and i i think i under indexed to

SPEAKER_68: this again my own ego thinking i could pick people and that did work early in my career but once we pick

SPEAKER_11: people i've realized when we do a great job of teaching them how to do a board meeting teaching them how to make a two-year plan teaching them um how to think about customer acquisition teaching them about accounting silly stuff or seemingly silly stuff but founders don't know accounting necessarily they haven't done accrual versus you know cash-based accounting these are concepts that

SPEAKER_04: they may just not have run into yet um and so getting them focused on things that can build a stable scalable business i was like yeah everybody will figure that out but sometimes they figure it out and takes them a year and we could have them figure it out in 10 days with the help of a service provider with the help of another founder and so that i underestimated and maybe under indexed on as well so i'm really thinking about supporting the founders post-investment a bit more and then identifying hey where where is that where is the zone of excellence for this founder and where are their blind spots and so my ability to say this founder is so good at product but they're not good at hiring and and finding you know people that'll level them up oh this person's great at hiring incredible people and spending money they're just not focused on the customer or whatever it is right and that's something where every time we invest more in it we see greater outcomes so you know they get to their next round of funding so i've just been thinking about that and then also as your portfolio gets larger identifying when the inflection point is and that's something i'm really starting to study

SPEAKER_162: and i have a new rule it's 40k a month in revenue okay all right that's when you that's when my eyes

SPEAKER_04: going is for you yeah because here's the thing can't be my mistake yeah when you hit 500k around 5 10 15 20k yeah you know you could just get one customer you could get a whatever you know you get a little bit of traction maybe you're spending two dollars to make one you know it's

SPEAKER_337: just in an early stage startup it's a sign of life but when they get your friends doing that yeah it

SPEAKER_04: could be all kinds of things happening um you know people just trying a product but it's just doesn't have market pull yeah when i see them hit that 40k a month i times it by 12 hits 500 i'm like yeah they figured something out that's where you get excited and then i say hey should we have a board meeting maybe make a plan and see if we can triple it yeah yeah yeah people are like yeah you know i was told don't do board meetings until series a or whatever i'm like yeah but you have 500k and you

SPEAKER_74: want a series a do you want to make a plan to get it to 1.5 because if you get to 1.5 you're going to get a series a 500k you're not yeah no likelihood yeah not right not not these days i don't think so

SPEAKER_68: i think i think that bogey what do you think the bogey is now to you know lock in a series a

SPEAKER_347: i mean 3x plus annual growth you know uh over a million in error that's i think that's lock in

SPEAKER_22: like when you start to and and not being in a crowded category that's full of a bunch of and

SPEAKER_19: actually having a viable path to being a big business all the things that are normal but a lot of people seem to forget um yeah you got okay em it has a question would you recommend building

SPEAKER_04: the relationships with vcs and angels months before deciding to build a product or company

SPEAKER_22: how would you go about doing that so sure yeah like if if you have a natural way to build relationships with vcs natural meaning you do the things that they enjoy doing and you get to hang out with them not in a professional transactional setting but in a you know you kiteboard with them you ski with them you hike with them you cook with them you do yoga with them whatever these things are for sure i

SPEAKER_19: mean one of the best things that ever happened to me in my career in silicon valley was i started playing poker with the vcs when i just moved here and all of a sudden i'm hanging out with a bunch of vcs as a you know 25 year old kid just you know at their sandhill offices and and god it was so powerful like i got to learn by osmosis i got to build a lot of long-term lifetime relationships these are still my good friends that's yeah if there's a way to do that it's a superpower you

SPEAKER_09: should you should don't watch into that but the only way not to do it is to say can i get your feedback on my ideas because if they're doing well they're just like well just go build something and

SPEAKER_04: then let's talk about what you built it's not my idea to help you come up with an idea this this ideation obsession it's like um i i feel like when you're in that ideation phase that's up to you like unless you have a great relationship with the person you're at the poker table anyway and you're or you're you're kiteboarding and you're you know drinking some coconut water on the beach you got nothing to talk about anyway you're like and i'm thinking about ai i wonder if it would

SPEAKER_00: apply to sports in some way and you could have a brainstorm there but the activity is first and

SPEAKER_04: this is second you know can i get coffee with you to go over my ideas is like really selfish um it with a busy person it just shows that you're not considering what you talked about enjoying your life maybe they have a family maybe they've got obligations people get busy when they're older when you're young you have time not money uh and when you're older you have money and not time and so

SPEAKER_360: you're you're you really have to i know people who will just give people an angel investment to get them

SPEAKER_361: out of their hair no i wouldn't do that but like i'm just saying somebody in their life who's a

SPEAKER_358: relationship and they're like yeah no i'll put 5k in you know whatever yeah i want to support you

SPEAKER_366: whatever but yeah all right og bob okay one thing i would add is twitter yeah um oh my god that's

SPEAKER_19: great one i've built a lot of relationships with people on twitter um people who just engage in in my comments and i engage in their comments and we built a relationship over the years where um now if they were to reach out and basically be like hey i'm starting a company here's a deck i would immediately read that because i i've built respect for their thinking and the way that they engage and the way that they approach the world as a result of a natural organic twitter interaction which which leads to me prioritizing the way that i interact with them when they reach out with a pitch as opposed to you know the dozens of cold emails i get every day i mean i literally go through and just read it real quickly no this is not my thing archive archive archive archive but if you're clever

SPEAKER_04: intelligent and maybe on the margins you're a little spicy but not a jerk uh and you're that reply guy

SPEAKER_08: as they say it could be a gal obviously it could be a they them it could be any gender you like but reply

SPEAKER_154: guy kind of rhymes a bit uh the reply guy uh archetype is a real thing right and there are some people who

SPEAKER_11: have built massive relationships just replying to people who are powerful and twitter uniquely allows

SPEAKER_04: you to do that and so keep it intelligent keep it respectful don't be a jerk but you can be spicy on

SPEAKER_162: the margins um that's fine that'd be fun yeah clever i think i like clever and fascinating those are words if somebody's clever and fascinating yeah insightful you know often insightful great if you

SPEAKER_22: basically like you somebody is talking about something there's a thread going on about something and then you're like oh what about this here's another way to think about it here's a link to

SPEAKER_19: something interesting you're adding to the conversation like you know i when when people do that to me i enjoy reading those things being like oh that's a cool way to change my thinking um

SPEAKER_11: austin al red um and he wound up getting austin a usten he was like a reply guy so go look at his

SPEAKER_154: replies from the early days all he did was like when he was building his business is reply reply reply um and i think that's and he's got a i'm looking at it right now he's got a quarter million followers so that's that's a thing that's a thing all right x auntie asks how hard oh wait there's one more from

SPEAKER_324: bob g bob g asks what startups og bob g is back what startups that you invested in faced the most difficult

SPEAKER_384: early challenges what did you personally learn from it wow okay good zach you gotta um

SPEAKER_386: i gotta anybody i mean there's a myriad right like it looks startups is a rocket ship ride into the

SPEAKER_19: walls of your own personal incompetence and so like whether you're like literally elon or the the youngest freshest entrepreneur on the streets you you go into the market and when you're elon day one it's a multi-billion dollar business and you hire a thousand of the best people in the world but like

SPEAKER_22: you're you're and because your confidence is so high your bar is so high you crush but you will

SPEAKER_19: immediately hit your limitations and you will just get your face ripped off and it will just be in a continual process of getting your face ripped off stitching yourself back together solving the problem hopefully repeat over and over and over again and it doesn't matter where you are in the life cycle of entrepreneur and so i mean honestly every company that i've interacted with from start to finish it's just a never-ending series of challenges and the question is just like can they

SPEAKER_22: work through them and yeah you know are they good at figuring out who's the right person to ask for help how do i solve this problem and then rinse repeat rinse repeat rinse repeat i mean look at look at look at elon over at twitter you have personal experience with that i mean god the guy

SPEAKER_392: just his level of incompetence is way higher than any of us ever but i mean he literally just jumped

SPEAKER_162: into the shark pit and said let's go i mean it's a very astute observation he's built some of the most legendary companies in the history of commerce and now he has to do a turnaround oh my god with a

SPEAKER_09: company that's at scale who all hate him and yeah maybe a certain percentage of the people there hate

SPEAKER_119: capitalism yeah and profits yeah and we're working for a living and working yeah and doing work or

SPEAKER_176: coming to an office and doing work i mean it is crazy when you think about it like a lot of companies

SPEAKER_04: got hijacked by the employee base uh google probably the number one example where oh yeah you know they

SPEAKER_11: just all of a sudden the company became a miserable place to work and the people who were running

SPEAKER_68: uh the place and you know the you know defining the culture are the people who larry and sergey would least like to have dinner with or go kiteboarding with or have coffee with and it's like how did that happen you know and it's like they need to go in there literally uh and you know sergey's back in town according to many reports hanging out i don't know if larry's going to come back but they need to

SPEAKER_11: just start firing people who are not there to do work like zuckerberg is it has to be he's getting done you know uh the people who want to manage work or you know have theatrically do work take credit for

SPEAKER_68: workers work yeah they're gonna have to rethink that and that might mean letting go of people who yeah have some amount of notability or notoriety whatever it is inside the organization but you know when you look at what they're actually doing the output that's the problem um and i'm pretty happy with myself that i've built organizations you know the small ones that i

SPEAKER_11: operate where everybody's actually doing work uh not just sitting around taking credit for everybody else's all right we'll do a last question here i think uh because we are and meta did you see metas

SPEAKER_68: doing thousands more layoffs in their efficiency thing i'm like whoa i bought that stock at 94 dollars in my day trading good job uh it's like whoa i don't even know what it's trading at and i wonder what meta's trading it let me look it up here meta stock i mean when are they going to change you're an addict i'm not oh 181 whoa i literally uh pretty close to doubling my money

SPEAKER_324: here whoa that's nice uh what a crazy trade that was uh all right job good job good job everybody okay here we go how hard do you negotiate on terms during your early stage deals is your preference to fund on a fairly standard safe rather than an equity round with lots of terms of course we want to do standard terms so let's just go to the first part of the question this is from

SPEAKER_19: xante how hard do you negotiate our terms i kind of live by the warren buffett school um i try to live by the warren buffett school for everything that guy's just like he literally just he he sent so many examples i'm just like just re-follow the book um if they set a price i take it or leave it and that's it i'm not i'm not negotiating it's like like you can give me the price and i will say yes

SPEAKER_366: what else i know to it um will you tell them that you're passing based on valuation yeah yeah of

SPEAKER_147: course yeah yeah me too and then they're like they're like whoa and i'm like at that point like

SPEAKER_19: that we did we didn't come together in the right way and thankfully that doesn't seem to happen too often usually it's like if i want to do the deal i think the price is fair um you know then then i'll say yes um and then if i'm setting the price you know let's say they really don't want to set the price you know i come up with a fair number and i'm like this is my number and i'm not negotiating because this is the number and and yeah now now there are situations where it becomes competitive um and that gets a little more dicey um and they're just like i i come up with the number that i want to pay and pay it or i lose a deal um but it's not about um it's not about negotiating oftentimes

SPEAKER_11: yeah my i have an exact the exact same philosophy um if you are asking us to make an offer we will ask you two or three times what what is your target valuation is the way i like to phrase it they're

SPEAKER_00: like well we want you to tell us and i'm like well what would be a valuation you think is fair and they're like well we want the market to tell us and i'm like okay what would be a valuation minimum that you would accept literally i've got like seven ways to ask this yeah if an investor is

SPEAKER_11: asking you to come up with a valuation i suggest you just come up with one that you think is fair if you want that investor because then you move the conversation along if you're over optimizing on valuation in a market like this my lord what are you doing um i could understand that technique if you don't need money in 2021 and you're trying to see if somebody will do some stupid valuation at a fomo sure you know oh you want to invest in stripe yeah our last round was 50 billion um we don't need money but you're free to give a term sheet and i have a fiduciary responsibility to

SPEAKER_180: review it with my board you can take that approach yeah and i'm sure they did and i'm sure people

SPEAKER_11: lobbed in term sheets that were absurd and you know fascinating but in the early stage well what how much money do you need to make it to the next level and how much dilution do you want so okay you need three million dollars okay you want to dilute no more than 20 okay so you got a 15

SPEAKER_04: million valuation a 20 million valuation somewhere in that range and then you just test it with the market and if you're happy with that valuation and you think it's reasonable but then both sides of the table can feel like they you know did a reasonable transaction and you can get back to work if you're optimizing for that extra 5 million the most talented investors will say okay you know what maybe i'll invest in the next round so let me know and then you get some sucker at the table who's trying to and we talked about it before maybe you're getting you know uh the finance guy or the you know send you on a wild goose chase mission uh gal who you know you don't want as investors yeah now you just

SPEAKER_437: added somebody to the cap table because you're optimizing for yeah valuation and it's a red flag for

SPEAKER_147: me like in fact the point that the entrepreneur is more focused on the valuation than our relationship

SPEAKER_19: and the business that that's going to be built there that for me is like probably not a deal i

SPEAKER_180: want to do yeah it's kind of weird it would be like going to like a great restaurant and they're

SPEAKER_00: like trying to get you to buy it's like that guy who uh drops salt down his dirty arm and then expects you to eat a gold steak for a thousand dollars like that's not the steakhouse i want to go to

SPEAKER_443: by the way that guy's brilliant though i mean he didn't mean like brilliant you're an idiot if you

SPEAKER_04: pay a thousand dollars for a mistake from him because you could go to an incredible yeah

SPEAKER_170: there's suckers born every day but like i'm not going there to see you in sunglasses in a dirty white t-shirt drop salt down your greasy sweaty arm onto my steak and i i don't want gold leaf on the steak

SPEAKER_119: salt bay it's the dumbest thing i've ever seen come on it's brilliant

SPEAKER_176: brilliant but that's insert do me a favor insert zach doing salt bay and like a meme of it right

SPEAKER_00: here um it's just not what i'm interested in yeah like that's the equivalent of like optimizing for your valuation you look like an idiot right or me trying to grind you down on valuation you know if you ask me what the valuation is i'm like well public comp is four times revenue yeah you're a private

SPEAKER_74: company growing faster so eight times revenue ten times revenue whatever you think is fair um and

SPEAKER_11: you can get to this range pretty quickly so don't over optimize is the broad-based answer it's an amazing job let's um let everybody know if you want to get in touch with zach and you got a great idea best way to do that is to get into his network meet some of his founders or co-investors and get an intro but you

SPEAKER_446: could always be reply gal or guy pay them if you're non-binary and just reply to him we really need

SPEAKER_22: to come up with a uh twitter a gender neutral um reply guy no no no no a general neutral uh uh singular like so we have he she and we just need a we because they is plural like so like it's it's a plural word

SPEAKER_364: i'm trying to evolve here and make sure i get it right i think like v i like y'all i just use y'all y'all when i come in meetings i'm like y'all gotta work harder yeah i just bill girly it yeah y'all

Chamath Palihapitiya: are not hitting the standard that we need to hit at this company y'all need to work harder i just go

SPEAKER_457: with you and i like typing it i like a y apostrophe a l l y'all yeah it just rolls a good tongue

SPEAKER_461: it's not gender specific howdy y'all howdy y'all do you guys want to wrap the show with uh salt bay

SPEAKER_462: decorating 150 burger at his restaurant oh please show me show me this show me this this is gonna be

SPEAKER_467: painful no no oh so gross look at you're too close to the food this idea that he's getting so close to

SPEAKER_470: the thing you know and there's no way that burger's worth it you're such a gold leaf is stupid oh you're a

SPEAKER_472: hater you're a hater no i'm not a hater it doesn't add to the food if you want of course this shows

SPEAKER_476: a disrespect for cuisine the the yeah it's just garbage this is someone recreating it with a big

SPEAKER_393: mac oh he just he's putting gold leaf no this is like a joke this is genius so the gold leaf oh this

SPEAKER_176: is so great and then he's gonna squeeze it no you know what i went to shake hack yesterday

SPEAKER_143: burger's 12 bucks double double maybe 13 bucks i don't know i tipped 14. i mean that even i mean

SPEAKER_180: i was like whoa 14 bucks and i was like you know what worth it it was delicious i guarantee that truffle

SPEAKER_11: burger i had uh at shake shack is better than that monstrosity covered in gold leaf just you know what

SPEAKER_77: you put gold leaf on a burger what you're telling me is the burger's not good enough respect the game

SPEAKER_484: the man's got game i mean he's a performer he's a performer i think he's a performer and you know

SPEAKER_11: what that's the point i'm not looking for formative i'm looking for a great burger great snake all right

SPEAKER_485: listen great job that's all up to me you too uh and uh just follow zach coleus interact with him

SPEAKER_89: go hella skiing with him go actually it was funny that we were hella skiing with one of the owners of one of the the football teams some of the nfl teams and i didn't even know until like halfway through

SPEAKER_353: someone was like oh that guy owns this football team i was like oh that's pretty cool he's actually a really cool guy like so uh yeah that's like that's a good way to get to know people tell jed

SPEAKER_177: york i said hi uh it wasn't it wasn't that wasn't it believe it yeah uh jets a cool cat from the 49ers uh cool cat nice guy yeah all right everybody uh keep it joyful oh there he is

SPEAKER_72: there's zach sprinkling that salt on his portfolio there actually fixed a good picture for it it

SPEAKER_334: like it's like that you look great that's so handsome i don't i mean i don't want to make this a hurrah i don't want you to call this one startups hr but you look great oh thank you so

SPEAKER_17: yeah right yeah you know it's it's um you know they use a special facial mister um oh nice i'll have

SPEAKER_366: to add that to my yeah yeah yeah you have a mister well one of my companies um uh tell us this is a

SPEAKER_22: miss for mister oh mr mr no no it's it's way better than that so basically they is it a non-gender mister no come on now no so basically it turns out if you're going to add uh chemicals to your face they have to get to the pores of your skin and your skin is actually very thick and it doesn't like things to go into your face right and so if you want to look young and healthy and basically you know you want to be um you want to be beautiful um you've got to basically use nanoparticles to

SPEAKER_46: basically add nanoparticles nanoparticles yeah well what's the name of this startup we're all pins and needles here and i know um you've got to keep you on uh um for your for your your skin you got

SPEAKER_511: nanoparticles um incredible um is this one of these korean uh i think it's one of these korean beauty

SPEAKER_513: products that's like my wife's korean so i am i'm very up on all these now no the company's called

SPEAKER_19: droplet um i don't know about nanoparticles nor do i know anything about facial stuff but the founder is amazing and uh that she reached out and i've known her for a long long time and and other investors are smart and so i was like okay whatever i'm along for the ride and so then i got one and i started using it and it makes me look pretty so awesome they have a droplet for your skin

Chamath Palihapitiya: drop lit dot i have droplet d-r-o-p-l-e-t-t-e dot i-o use the promo code zach uh for 50 dollars on your

SPEAKER_85: droplet look at that yeah but anyway nanoparticles uh they they do seem to work um i don't gotta make

SPEAKER_522: myself look ready for your show jason i gotta your unpaid talent has got to look pretty absolutely you look handsome all right everybody we'll see you next time bye bye