Jason Calacanis: Welcome to Angel. This is episode three of our sixth season of Angel. And today's guest is Paki McCormick of Not Boring. That's what it's called. He runs, and you already know this, by the way, because you probably subscribe to his newsletter. It is one of the largest newsletters in startups. Paki just invested his first $10 million fund over the last six months, and he is now raising fund two. So we're going to talk about his fund structure, the fact that it includes some of his most dedicated readers as LPs, how he uses his syndicates, and a lot more. It's fascinating. And then after that, we check in with producer Rachel, who went down to Miami. Yes, in person for Hack Week and spoke to one of the organizers of Tap House. Yes, in person. It's going to be an amazing episode. Stick with us.

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SPEAKER_04: All right, everybody. Welcome to episode three of the sixth season of Angel. This is a podcast we

SPEAKER_05: started when I wrote my book Angel. And it's kind of like a sister podcast of This Week in Startups. We candidly post it to two different feeds. There's the Angel feed if you want to go look for that and just geek out to those pods and download them all in your player. Or you just listen to This Week in Startups. And we started thinking of seasons and doing 10 episodes at a time to talk about a theme. And so we did the three comma club, people who had over a billion dollars in assets under management in a recent season. But for this season, we thought so many people are starting

SPEAKER_08: venture funds, micro funds, SPV, syndicates, and they want to figure all that out. So why don't we start season six with first time funds? And you know, sometimes people will be on their second, maybe they've got a little experience previously. But that's the general idea here is people are starting

SPEAKER_05: their own brands in the venture community. So first time funds is our season six theme. We started with Molly two really great interviews, maybe you could catch people up on episodes one and two.

SPEAKER_14: Yeah, Mac the VC with rare breed ventures, which is just a must listen, go back and check that out. And

Jason Calacanis: then I got to sit in on the second one, David Rosenthal with kindergarten ventures, great story about how he came up with that name. Those are both excellent listens and kind of come at a couple different directions, right? One is just like sheer brute force work and hustle. The other is, hacking the system a little bit to build the fun that you want. And I sort of feel like you, Paki are gonna split the difference between both of those things. So super interested in this conversation. Today's guest Paki McCormick of not boring, one of the largest newsletters in

SPEAKER_14: startups. So taking that media approach, which we are oh, so familiar with.

SPEAKER_19: Yeah, and from the best. Well, it is a playbook. And it does work because you are pretty honest about the fact that

SPEAKER_08: I kind of think it's like one of your best editorial devices is like, hey, I don't necessarily know anything. I'm trying to figure it out like y'all. And so let's figure it out together through the newsletter, podcasting, you know, and so and social media. And that, I think is kind of refreshing, because one of the things that I find incredibly obnoxious is VCs who think they know everything, especially when they've done nothing. So somewhere along the lines, people are like, well, Fred Wilson is blogging, and Mark Seuss is blogging, Brad Fowell is blogging. Therefore, I need a blog, but they might have been like associates or somebody very new. And they're definitively giving advice. And I'm always very careful, even 11 years in as an investor to giving advice, I like to have a dialogue.

SPEAKER_05: So maybe you could talk a little bit about your editorial, your editorial angle, your editorial philosophy of how you tackle new subjects. So I think it's kind of interesting.

SPEAKER_24: For sure. Yeah, I mean, first of all, thanks for thanks for having me back here. And, you know,

SPEAKER_27: as I think we talked about last time, my last experience before writing this newsletter was working at a startup that raised $120 million and sold for $3 million. So if I came out of that experience, and then came into this and told people that I knew what to do and what they should be doing in something that I, you know, I that failed when I was very involved in it and something that I wasn't involved in, like that would be fairly presumptuous of me to come in with that kind of previous experience and tell people that, you know, I know exactly what they should be doing. The other thing is, after being in one company at Breather for six years, I wanted to come out and explore. And the whole reason I started writing in the first place was just to explore different areas and learn new things. And my memory is kind of terrible. And so actually just kind of writing after I read a bunch of stuff was really useful. But again, if I'm going to be writing about a bunch of industries where people who are reading the newsletter spend their whole entire lives working in that industry, and then I come in from the outside after having read a few things in a week and say, this is how you should be doing it, of course, I'm going to get something wrong, and often get a lot of things wrong. And then on top of all that, obviously, you know, on the venture side, people get things wrong all the time, you have to get a few right in a really big way, but people get things wrong all the time. My friend, Lenny Ruchitsky, who's also an angel, has a small fund, released his findings on his first 140 angel investments. And he said that the ones that he that ended up doing best for him so far, are not the ones that he would have expected would have done the best when he made the investments. And so I think even when you do well, it's it's, you know, impossible to know how you do how you're going to do well in a way that's that's kind of

SPEAKER_28: repeatable. As far as I can tell so far, maybe if you're much smarter, you can figure that out.

SPEAKER_14: Yeah, talk to us a little bit more about this sort of like learning in public, and then also opening

Jason Calacanis: the curtain, as you go into fund two, right? So you're true, your technical first time fund manager was the initial not boring fund. Tell us a little bit about how much you raised, what were some of your big wins and how it's going with fund two?

SPEAKER_27: Sure. So fund one, I raised back in April of 2021. After, after doing about 25 SPVs before that, and on the SPV side, have a bunch of wins like Main Street on deck composer,

SPEAKER_28: you know, ramp was was an investment stitch, which just raised at a billion dollar valuation. So a bunch of really good ones, kind of out of that cohort of 20 to 25 SPVs raised a fund out of that have some really interesting ones. I mean, it's so early the average life when I when I wrote my kind

SPEAKER_27: of fund update a couple of weeks ago, the average life of companies in that portfolio is five and a half months old. So it's very, very early here. But companies like, you know, sound XYZ,

SPEAKER_28: which is doing music NFTs, brain trust, which actually had its token launch, which is a web three talent network that's growing really, really fast and doing really interesting things. Companies like market to hire rare circles, which just raised kind of ramp again, and in fund one, there's a bunch of companies that are doing really, really well out of the gate, and then a bunch more that, you know, are in the middle of fundraising now or, you know, getting marked up as they should.

SPEAKER_37: I don't think this market's going to derail the good ones. Hopefully not. But so far, so good on fund

SPEAKER_38: one. Well, that's a great place to pick up you the first one was 9.9 million 79 companies, you I

SPEAKER_40: believe, did you raise that fund in public? Did you use the 506 C designation to be a public fundraise?

SPEAKER_28: I did. So for both funds, I kind of got the anchor checks in, and then opened up the last little bit for not boring readers. In both cases, I did it again for fun to one to I wanted to raise 25 or 25 to $30 million. I had 25 committed from kind of first fund LPs and one or two other big checks, opened it up on Angelus on Substack when I wrote about it. I think something like 1470 people have come in and expressed $130 million worth of interest for that last five. So I'll raise that to probably

SPEAKER_05: Now it's important for people to understand that there are limits to how much you can raise from accredited investors. So when you go public like this in a really hot market, you'll have a lot of people who are interested, there'll be accredited investors, but maybe you could talk about the 250 LP $10 million cap on accredited investor limit. Sure. So if you and this is what happened to me on on

SPEAKER_28: fund one, if you raise from accredited investors, and that's somebody who has, you know, a million

SPEAKER_27: dollars in assets, or it made what $300,000 as a household for the past couple of years, or 200,000 personally, for the past couple of years, they're accredited, which is, I guess, in the eyes of the SEC, fairly sophisticated, but not obviously, as sophisticated as someone with $5 million invested, which is a qualified purchaser. And so qualified purchasers, if you have people with $5 million or more invested in the market, you can kind of go to, I think, 2000 people, unlimited amounts of money,

SPEAKER_50: kind of uncapped, practically with 2000 slots. Yeah.

SPEAKER_27: And 2000 slots and people can put in, you know, $100 million checks each if they if they wanted to, on the accredited side, you can have, I think, 249 people, up to $10 million. I think if you're under 99 people, you can actually go above $10 million. It's very confusing and needlessly confusing and patronizing and all sorts of things. Any anything that ends in an ing, it's that. Hopefully, these rules change. Some DAOs will be pushing the envelopes, but they also are kind of, you know, restrained by the same rules, unless they really want to, like, push it and get in trouble and see

SPEAKER_28: where the SEC enforces. So hopefully something changes, because I do think that, you know, as more people are investing, the fact that they don't have access to the private markets in, you know, through a good vehicle, is a shame, because I think it's a good piece to have in your portfolio.

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Jason Calacanis: Just one more technical question about that before we move on to the philosophy behind it, which is so, I think, compelling and revolutionary. But you did this thing where you created a parallel fund structure, right, for fund two, so that you could have those qualified purchasers in one fund, and then maximize the room for the accredited investors who are your fans.

SPEAKER_28: Exactly right. So in fund two, you know, all the kind of bigger checks get to be put in one pot,

SPEAKER_27: they don't count against that $10 million cap, which means that I can really go right up to the 249 people and $10 million cap just with the accredited check. So I have $2,000 checks like somebody, a founder that I backed via an SPV, just wrote her first LP check into the fund and did a, you know, a small check into the fund, people writing $5,000 checks, $10,000 checks into the fund. And that really gets as many people in as I can, obviously can't let, you know, everybody in, which is a bummer. I would love to be able to do that.

SPEAKER_05: That is the real challenge, isn't it? It's like, we literally, we didn't do a public raise on our last fund. But we had at the time, maybe 5,000 people as members of the syndicate.com. And we said, if anybody has interest again, and those are all accredited investors who have invested with us before. And we had to basically have a lottery. So we're like, tell us how much you want to put in the match you can put in is 50k. So we had to put a max on it. And then you think about capital

SPEAKER_08: formation, Molly, you know, in this country, if we want to really try to put more money into startups,

SPEAKER_63: we basically are saying, rich, we're not even talking about the 94% of Americans who are not accredited, they are not allowed to participate. Like, forget that top 6%. You gotta buy crypto,

SPEAKER_04: you're on your own. Yeah, go buy crypto or go to Vegas or go play, you know, go bet on the horses,

SPEAKER_63: or scratch off lottery tickets. The 6% will have a lot of money. We're in the top 6% of the country. We're limited in how many of those we could have, which then takes people like Paki or myself, or now you Molly. And we can't do our best work. And so I think a very reasonable, I don't know what you think about this Paki, but I think a reasonable concept here would be to just add a zero. So let's go from 10 million to 100 million cap. And let's go from 250 to 2500. So yeah, it's 10 times as much. But what's happening now is we're having 10 times as many funds, maybe more, which is good, I think, arguably, but there's no reason to not let more people participate in this part of the economy. And then maybe we could actually say to non accredited investors, hey, you could be 10% of those slots. So you could have 250 non accredited, and you can limit them to, I don't know, $5,000 each. So we could just have like a little tiny onboarding for I don't know, the next five years. So for the next five years, non accredited kids can put in 5000, you can only have 250 in a fund. So the SEC can feel like, which I think is their goal, like, we just don't want to have to deal with people losing their

SPEAKER_05: money. And having complaints. Yeah, so maybe we just look at what is the potential risk and damage Molly, and just say, Well, let's, let's look at the potential damage because the damage right now that we're seeing in crypto of people buying ICOs or putting all their money into a Bitcoin

SPEAKER_40: and being the bag holder NFTs is arguably massively greater.

SPEAKER_14: Well, and then we should say that with respect to something like your fund, part of the reason

Jason Calacanis: that we're haggling over how we handle this going forward is because this is kind of this new model, right? It's like Patreon on steroids. You're in a situation where you're a media first fundraiser, and you literally have I mean, I got an email the other day from somebody being like,

SPEAKER_72: how can we get involved as an LP? And I'm like, I don't even evaluate this sold out. Do I ask you how much money do you have? Like what happens now? But like, that's pretty new, I would think.

SPEAKER_28: I think it's, it's fairly new. It's certainly not, you know, the first time that that as Jason pointed out, VCs have written some, you know, very famous VCs started out as writers and then became VCs. But I think this idea of kind of raising a fund on the back of a media entity is relatively new. And it wasn't, you know, something that was intentional by any stretch of the imagination when, when I did it. So you can see where the SEC is coming from, right? Like you could imagine

SPEAKER_27: someone like me who has a newsletter with a lot of people following it, who has less qualms about just taking as much money as possible and taking high management fees. Like I have management fees only out four years instead of 10 years. Like it's, I think a very like kind of generous structure. And obviously I'm trying to generate the best returns that I possibly can. You can also imagine combining media and venture with just a wide open kind of general public

SPEAKER_28: fundraising and that going wrong. So I understand why the SEC wants to do something about it. A credit investor, I think probably that that limit needs to needs to change. I like Jason's idea. I like the fact that they introduced, you know, people who have taken their series 65 or, you know,

SPEAKER_78: 60, 63 and 63, right. It was the one people were using for series 63 can become accredited, which,

SPEAKER_27: you know, shows, I think a higher level of financial sophistication than a bunch of people with a million dollars have. I would like to see a more approachable test than the series 63.

SPEAKER_79: Wait, what is some way to just a higher level of financial sophistication than I have? What is it? Series 63.

SPEAKER_80: All right. So it's, yeah, you had expanded package.

SPEAKER_83: Yeah. So it, when you go into, uh, into finance, you know, in the beginning of your career,

SPEAKER_27: I started my career in investment banking and I needed to get back then. I think it was the series seven for sure. And then I think also the series 63, I think now it's just maybe the 63 or they combined something, but it's a test that you take to become essentially a licensed financial

SPEAKER_28: professional, uh, and let you do things like advise clients or trade funds on behalf of clients and all of those types of things. And so it's just like very long in-depth tests on like really boring, arcane details. So if you can pass that, no matter how much money you have in the bank, you should be fine, you know, committing as an LP to invest. I would like to see a test, a level kind of more

SPEAKER_19: approachable that people are able to pass. And the craziness about it is, you know, so the, the SEC

SPEAKER_08: was charged with, Hey, um, let people become accredited based on like their knowledge as well. Right? So that makes sense, right? If you were an economics professor at NYU who made 150K a year,

SPEAKER_05: you would not be accredited, but you would be teaching economics and, or an MBA professor. It was just weird. Right? So then they, you know, said, okay, well, what if you took these tests? So they already had the test set up. So it was kind of like a punt for the SEC, like, okay, just get a series 63, seven. You go read the questions on that test. It has nothing to do with what angel investing or private market investing has to do with. One of the reasons we created angel.university was, Hey, let's train people who are already accredited on how to do it just based on like pragmatic stuff of how to do diligence, how to interview a founder, how to think about, you know, diversification,

SPEAKER_91: whatever. And my hope was that at some point, somebody would say, Hey, can you make a 30 question test? That would be like a driver's license test or a gun test,

SPEAKER_92: buy a gun in this country without a test in some states, that would make more sense. But yeah, the

SPEAKER_63: SEC hasn't gotten there. And I think one of the problems is the SEC is charged with not having, avoiding people losing their money. So they don't get rewarded for increasing participation. So their mandate is to protect people. But that mandate is like, protect them from losing money, I would argue that the mandate should not be to protect people from losing money, it should be to educate people on to be more financially literate, and to make money. So just flip the lens at which the SEC gets judged from stopping people from participating to protect them to increasing participation. If their mission was increase the number of people

SPEAKER_92: participating in equities, private and public, that would be very freeing for them, wouldn't it? I just thought of that.

SPEAKER_27: I mean, this is something that I think is true, even more broadly in society. And I'm seeing it now as somebody who's writing about companies that I invest in and all of that. And so, on the if you're saying anything good about a company that is tradable, you get labeled chill pretty quickly. If you're dunking on companies that end up doing really well, you look responsible, and like you're doing people a favor by calling out, you know, the bad things that you see in a company, if you prevent people from investing, you know, over the past decade, over the past 100 years,

SPEAKER_28: over the past any timeline you look back at, if you've prevented people from investing, by scaring them away, or making them believe that like, you know, this is something that is too complicated for them to understand, or that these companies are bad, or whatever,

SPEAKER_27: you've lost people a hell of a lot more money than if you've told them to invest in, you know, the market kind of more broadly. So I think you're absolutely right on the SEC front. And this is a

SPEAKER_28: bigger thing, kind of societally, is that we shouldn't make it seem like it's this very scary thing that, you know, only certain people have the ability to understand. And then I think that's particularly true when you're talking about LP into a fund as opposed to making kind of individual investments.

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Jason Calacanis: Tell us about your goals for fun to so you know, picking up on that theme, one of the things you specifically say in your blog post about raising fun to and sort of updating people is that you did want to increase that number of LPs, which we've now covered a little bit, you had your first liquidity event in fund one, like, what's, what's the moonshot for fun to hear?

SPEAKER_27: Oh, that's a really interesting question. So I think, you know, fun one, I was dipping my toes in in web three. There's a whole nother if we just want to make this whole podcast about the different rules

SPEAKER_62: that make investing a little bit annoying, we can go into the non qualifying.

Jason Calacanis: I was hoping you would say if we want to make this all about my blog post on like responding to property about web three, we can do that too. I actually had a lovely conversation last night with

SPEAKER_62: somebody who works on his team who happened to be at an event that I was at. And I mean, I think that

SPEAKER_27: is a very good example of someone who looks like they're being responsible by dunking on things that could make people money if they approach it responsibly, and don't write the whole thing off as as a scam. So I do think that that is, you know, one of the things that I had in my mind when

SPEAKER_28: I when I said that, the back to back to fund two, so really, you know, I think if fund one, I invested about 15% in in web three startups, this fund is about a third in web three startups, and really trying to make bigger bets and kind of back companies with more force and get more involved, you know, certainly will be kind of a similar size portfolio as fund one. So about 100 investments in fund one about 100 investments in fund two, but the check sizes, and hopefully the, you know, even the impact that I'm able to drive in this one are even bigger, really, you know, spending a lot of time, hopefully this year, telling the stories of the companies in my portfolio and helping to kind of translate and say, you know, I don't think that web three is all good or a panacea. And I also don't think it's a scam. And like, let's look at each one of these businesses on a case by case basis, and understand, are there things that tokens or DAOs or NFTs, let them do that are actually advantageous to the core product that they're trying to sell. And so that's kind of one of my big goals with this is for everything that I'm doing, get a little bit weirder, I'm doing, you know, more kind of the intersection of web three and healthcare or web three and climate, get a little bit weirder with that and then explain why and explain the thinking behind it and explain how these tools can be useful.

SPEAKER_38: Well, and if you did 79 names in the first $10 million fund, on average, you're putting 100 and

SPEAKER_08: change into each company, maybe you're putting 150 to 100 in the initial bet, and then a little bit more on some of the winners, possibly as a strategy. If the next fund winds up being 40, 50 million, you'll be doing 250 to 500k checks, which then puts you into major investor rights and responsibilities, correct? Maybe you could talk a little bit about how you have to change as an investor

SPEAKER_05: when you become a major investor.

SPEAKER_28: Yeah, absolutely. So I haven't really I've done a few 500k investments so far, I think the average out of this fund now is climbing up towards 250. You know, as a major investor, I get things like prorata in certain cases, which, you know, I've had to either negotiate a side letter for or give up before. So prorata is just this idea that I'm able to kind of invest the proportionate amount to what I invested in the last round the next time. And the idea there being obviously that if your winners keep raising money, the best way to make money is just to keep doubling down on your winners. And so you're contractually able to do that. You can fight back and forth on that. And there's all sorts of things. That's why I don't care super too much about the docs there because either I'm helpful and founders want me to come back in, or I'm not and I don't want to get in a legal battle over the fact that I do have prorata rights. I think it's, it's a little bit gross. But yeah, writing 250 to 500k checks, I just actually committed to my first million dollar check earlier today. And really, you know, that means being the second, third, fourth, depending on the

SPEAKER_27: round largest check on the cap table, which means that I need to be, I mean, ideally, the most helpful person on the cap table. And I've had, you know, the nice thing here is I've had a lot of founders

SPEAKER_28: tweet over the past couple of months about just the impact that me writing about their company has had on their launch or their client list or interest from investors for the next round, or all of that kind of stuff. I can't write a full piece on everybody. But how can I be maximally helpful to the ones particularly that I'm writing, you know, checks to get me to the top three on their cap table?

Jason Calacanis: Um, one more question on fund mechanics, because one of the other things you do is when you get more allocation, you spin up the not boring syndicates, where you've done $4 million in investment. Is that right?

SPEAKER_59: About 4 million out of the out of the syndicate.

SPEAKER_14: And tell us more about that are the syndicate, I would assume at least some of them have also got to be packy readers.

SPEAKER_28: So most of them are packy readers. The idea behind the syndicate in the first place was, I was writing, I wrote about a friend's company, they were raising money. And so I wrote a memo on them, sent the demand to somebody else's syndicate and realized that I could do that as well. You know, I have a lot of smart readers in the audience who have money who want to invest in the things that, that I'm writing about. And so spun up a syndicate that each time I had the opportunity to invest, they would come in, we were doing kind of 100 to $200,000 checks out of that. Now, you know, if I want to keep largely in the 250 to $500,000 range, unless I really want to make a big bet on something, anytime I go over 500k, or the founder is willing to give me more than 500k. I'll spin up an SPV for both LPs in the fund. And then the people who've just been in the syndicate, I think there's probably 1500 people in the syndicate, people in the syndicate to kind of come in and participate in the deals alongside the fund. But the fund always, I think, you know, contractually has to get kind of first first bite at the apple. And then anything above that goes to the

SPEAKER_38: SPVs. You know, when you do those, there's always this natural tension with your LPs and your fund,

SPEAKER_122: why didn't we take more? So how do you manage that? Or how do you think about that? Yeah, I think

SPEAKER_27: I'm hopefully pretty clear about the the kind of range of investment sizes that we're that we're

SPEAKER_28: going to make. So that's the first thing that if it is just, you know, two times as big as I'd normally write, it would make sense to do an SPV on top. The other is that I offer to fund LPs first, and then open it up to the rest of the syndicate. Exactly our playbook. That's how we that's how

SPEAKER_05: we basically got through that issue. I was like, Listen, if there's more available than the fund, betting size makes sense for right, because you have a certain betting size for that initial bet. And the follow on, we'll just offer it to LPs get priority. So we put that in our deal memos, launch LPs go first, and then everybody else gets put in a lottery. And that's it. And it seems like

SPEAKER_27: nobody complains about that. I mean, you're giving people choice, right? Either they, they love the investment, and then they're happy to actually just get the direct exposure, or they don't love the investment. So they're probably actually happy that you have less of it in the in the fund. And then they don't have to participate there either. So as long as I think you're giving people choice, and I mean, you know, this as long as you're being as honest and open as humanly possible with everybody involved about what you're doing, and why people are fairly

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SPEAKER_05: broker.com slash twist. Molly and I had a conversation about did she start investing at the wrong time because it's the top of a market and then the market's correcting a little bit. You would be the perfect example of starting at a market top. All of your investments are under two or three years old, right? Maybe the SPVs are a little older. I'm not sure. But so

Chamath Palihapitiya: all under three years old. And let's face it, a lot of markups, I'm sure because the market has been so

SPEAKER_05: ridiculous. Let's be honest, it's been absurdly hot. And it doesn't make a lot of logical sense. Sometimes the jumps. And now I'm guessing you haven't had a ton of exits because the companies are

SPEAKER_37: so nascent. I've had a couple, you know, a couple of coin offerings, which is the interesting thing

SPEAKER_28: about investing in my three projects, so you get liquidity, you're locked up still. But you kind of get

SPEAKER_05: a sense for what the actual market prices on those. So you haven't done distributions yet. And now you're going to find yourself in a very weird position, which is, hey, you send investor updates, you have markups, and now the market bottoms, and so you get kind of get caught in this valuation trap. How are you thinking about just the communication to LPs of like, yeah, we invested at the top of the market. And things might have pulled back a little bit. But here's our operating philosophy for investing

SPEAKER_27: in a volatile market, let's say. Yeah, I mean, I, I don't know when this happened, because I'm also kind of like, you know, when I look at my portfolio or whatever, I'm an addict to looking at the numbers all of the time. Yeah. And at the same time, I've been very calm about this pullback. I mean,

SPEAKER_28: one, I don't think has hit private market valuations yet, it will remain to be seen, I'm sure, particularly in the growth stage stuff, it will hit the private market valuations. But I'm really and I know everybody says this is a 10 year fund lifecycle. Do I think that these companies are going to be worth much,

SPEAKER_27: much more than the top end of the range will be much, much higher in seven to 10 years than it is right now or than it was two months ago? I 100% believe that. And so certainly, you know, there's a communication issue in the middle where it's like, yeah, to your point. Oh, the last time I said that we were at, you know, 70% ROI, and now our IRR, and now we're at actually at 30% IRR, sorry. So there is that communication challenge. But I think, again, if you're open and honest through the whole thing, I've said throughout the fund that, you know, that I am going to be investing

SPEAKER_28: kind of through bull markets and through bear markets. So I think as long as you're kind of following through on the strategy that you set out, that's totally fine. And 10 years will be, I think, golden, we have some great companies in there. Yeah, I mean, you have questions about that,

SPEAKER_149: Molly? Well, I do. You've even published your risk appetite. I wonder how you think that the risk

Jason Calacanis: gap appetite might change or wobble as market conditions change. But you're like 75% is core with the potential to return the fund in the bull case. 5% is explore and 20% is growth. So you, much like institutional investors, almost have a portfolio split in terms of risk. Totally. I mean, that you tell us about, I mean, by the way, that you tell people about, like, when I first started covering venture capital as an industry five, six years ago, being like, I want to try to untangle this black box. I certainly wish your newsletter had existed, right? Because it was like, invisible then.

SPEAKER_27: This is the same thing as a philosophy when I write about a company is, I also don't know what I'm doing here. And so LPs know this, and I feel very good telling people upfront before they invest their money that I don't know what I'm doing. But part of it is I'm learning in public too. Because when I

SPEAKER_28: worked at the last place that I worked, one, we had a board that wasn't particularly helpful and was probably actively destructive in some cases. And so that was one lesson. And the other lesson was,

SPEAKER_27: I really thought that there was some magic that these VCs knew that I, as an employee of the company, like, couldn't possibly understand. And I'm like, it sounds overly self deprecating. But like, legitimately, I remember our, you know, exec team before I was on it.

SPEAKER_14: I'm right here with you. I'm right here with you on this bag.

SPEAKER_27: Like coming back from board meetings, and I was like, Oh, my God, like, okay, like, tell us, like, what did the board say about the business? Like, how are we doing? And it's like, how do these guys come in for a day and know what we're doing better than we know, but it does like there's just a mystique around the whole thing. And so a big part of this is like, just demystifying this whole thing. Because like, if an idiot like me can do it, like, it is not rocket science to do

SPEAKER_28: this.

SPEAKER_05: It's not rocket science, you're an ATM, you're picking companies, you're placing bets, and you're trying to be helpful. And the interesting thing is, because I'm kind of between this new group of people who are raising and doing really innovative things like 506C raising publicly, which I never did, because I was part of that tail end of traditional VCs where they're like, don't do that. But I also had syndicates and was already used to kind of talking about what I was doing. So I was like, one foot in both places. As an LP and some of the top firms, they don't send

SPEAKER_08: these like frequent quarterly updates, you get an email once a year with your audit, you get a distribution and they explain to you your cost basis, your cash in cash out, you're done. I'm talking about the top most elite firms in the world. Then I start LP in some of these new funds, Molly, and I'm getting emails, like every time one of their companies gets marked up. And then in real time,

SPEAKER_63: they're like, all right, now that this got marked up, our IRR is this and I'm like, just remember Bill Gurley in the back of my head, Bill Gurley in the back of my head saying you

SPEAKER_05: can't eat IRR, like IRR doesn't put food on the table. And I was like, what does that mean? And so I was like, you know, when I was starting investing, it's like IRR, your internal rate of return, what percentage you make every year, you know, when you look at the total cash in cash out. And then I realized like, there is a maturation that occurs as a capital allocator. And the people who've been doing it for decades, they're just like, how much cash did my LP put in? And how much cash did I put in their pocket? Now that I'm in year 11, and my first fund is over the original

SPEAKER_91: hurdle was a $10 million fund. And we've returned over that amount. So I'm getting carry now. I'm just

SPEAKER_63: like, it's just about cash in cash out. But for the youngins, they're sending these like colorful updates with icons. And this is up this one's up, you know, we're 17x on this 5x on this 4x and this and I'm like, on paper, you know, and I just thought to myself when I started getting these, like, what happens if the market corrects? And these things go down and you told people you were

SPEAKER_91: at 120% IRR, you were double more than doubling the money every year, like not sustainable. I mean,

SPEAKER_27: the other fun thing about IRR is that it degrades over time. So if the valuation stays the same, and you just sit there, it gets lower and lower and lower and lower. So even if nothing bad happens, your IRR just naturally drops until something good happens.

SPEAKER_08: Explain what that means to people who don't understand the math here to be a good chance to educate folks.

SPEAKER_27: Yeah, so the the internal rate of return is essentially looks at like kind of the annualized rate of return on the money that you've invested. And so if I put $1 million into a company today, and like tomorrow, you know, the old Instagram story where, you know, I think thrive invested at 500 million, and then it sold for $1 billion in like a week, the IRR on that is absurd, because you annualize that. And so it's essentially like, wow, if you play out that double over the course of the year, and it just keeps doing it at that rate, like this is a trillion percent IRR. I just in my last, in my last update, talked about an investment that I had that was a 15 billion percent IRR at the time, it is both it was a token. So it's both gone down since. And there's just been more time and particularly early on, it's very sensitive to every day. So now it's probably, you know, a million percent IRR or something, something low like that. But put that in there as a joke, like no one is expecting me to return literally a joke. It's a joke. Yeah, no one's expecting me to return 15 billion percent there. But IRR is just a good way to kind of measure on

SPEAKER_28: like a fairly normalized basis, how your fund is returning over time, and it then normalizes for how long you've been around. Obviously, you know, a fund that is less than a year old, like my fund, will not have the same return on invested capital that a fund that's been around for seven years might have. But our IRS could be consistent, and I could be kind of pacing towards that.

SPEAKER_05: And the average just so people know, an IRR, a 20% IRR might be average in venture 25 30% if

SPEAKER_63: you're early stage, because you have a larger acceleration. But in a market like this, Molly,

SPEAKER_91: where, you know, you'd have a company that was worth 10 million become worth 100 million in the same year. I mean, all of a sudden, the IRS get out of whack. When I had the Uber investment, at a certain point, when I went out to raise whatever my second or third fund, my IRR of the Scouts Fund, which were 600 invested 120 realized for 110 million realized was over 100%. And I just said pretty jokingly, I can assure you of one thing, my IRR only goes down from here. Yeah, right. This is not sustainable. It's like, you know, just getting lucky. But go ahead,

Jason Calacanis: you had a question. Well, I actually feel like this conversation to gets to sort of two, two things that you pointed out, Jason, that are really interesting. One is that it's a lot easier to be a media forward venture capitalist when you're still super excited about the mechanics. Yeah, because you're kind of right, like, I'm in the same boat where I'm just like, everything I'm doing is fascinating. Yeah, but two, or B, if you are in a situation where you're wooing LPs in public on some level, right, or you are engaging with a fan base that's excited about what you do, it is the tendency of maybe people who are old, like me and Jason, to be like, transparency can be dangerous. And I just wonder, especially if we do enter a correction period, is there a point at which you could start to get worried? And I'm certainly not arguing for sharing less, but it's like, you know, as we know, transparency can be a double-edged sword.

SPEAKER_183: A hundred percent. Right. So I think a few different ways to think about this one,

SPEAKER_27: I really don't share company details in the newsletter. So like the last thing in the world, I w the, the last thing in the world I would want to do is be like, you know, what company just like got marked down and is doing really is like this company in my portfolio.

SPEAKER_28: So I think that's one is that I'm never good or bad disclosing particulars about a company, uh, that aren't mine to disclose.

SPEAKER_186: You're not allowed to, and it's considered bad. Oh, it'd be awful. It would be terrible for him.

SPEAKER_28: So one not doing that. And so it wouldn't just be like, oh man, the market turned and like, look how bad these companies are doing. That would never be the case.

SPEAKER_27: But if this market is turning, and I've said ahead of time that I have like almost a mini tiger strategy where, you know, I'm, I'm trying to get as many bites of the apple in like the top 10% of deals that I possibly can, and then help those companies as much as possible. It essentially starts to look like an index. And so anybody who's reasonably smart as an LP will say like, he has an index on this market that is doing horribly. I wonder how, how he's doing. Um, and so, you know, I, I think it's better to be transparent and open about the whole thing, and, and give more information, uh, than, than not. Otherwise, you know, I, I think people can come to the conclusion on their own and you might as well be honest. Uh, I guess the worst case scenario for this and where, where it would be tougher for me to be, uh, honest, but we'll, you know, hopefully it built up the muscle is in year three or four, if the market's doing well, and I'm not like, that is going to be a spot where it's very weird, uh, to, to disclose, you know, kind of returns and, and all of that.

SPEAKER_08: The trowel of despair, right. J curve is, you know, uh, a real thing. We, and I think a lot of

SPEAKER_05: the funds now, Molly, haven't had to experience what's called the J curve, which is you deploy

SPEAKER_08: capital and your portfolio is valued at X. Now years three, four, and five, a bunch of your companies go out of business, right? Cause you get the bad news first. So now, because they went out of business, they're zeros. The value of your portfolio goes down. You're below. And then you slowly years, five, six, seven, eight, nine realize, oh, oh, you got a Robin hood. You got an Uber. You got this, you got that. They're going public. You're sending money out. And then you get out of that J curve, that trowel of despair that happens for investors. And, you know, I think that's why the old school folks are muted in their enthusiasm. Cause they've seen this movie before.

Jason Calacanis: Um, and there's something that theory, you Paki will have been honest all along. You all have been learning those mechanics. You will have been preparing even your newsletter readers who are accredited investors who are LPs or the fact that this reality exists. So hopefully it won't be so

SPEAKER_79: shocking. I mean, I know they're going to be pissed. Yeah. Nobody wants to, nobody wants to lose,

SPEAKER_73: to lose money. Obviously. I mean, I think in the last, the last update, I talked about one of the companies

SPEAKER_27: that I invested in, in fund one had a recap, which means essentially, you know, they can go to a lower valuation and then go all the way down to, you know, I think they went all the way down to something like $50,000 or something. And I talked about the fact that I was really excited to re up in, in the recap, because I still believed in the founder. I still believed in the thesis. It was an opportunity

SPEAKER_28: to own more of the company. Uh, and it, it gave them kind of a renewed focus and energy. So again,

SPEAKER_201: that's kind of an opportunity to explain a recap. Um, I don't know if you, have you heard this term Molly before or aware of it? I have heard it in Paki's newsletter, but yeah, let's do it. So

SPEAKER_202: here's what happens company. I also am learning in public. Yeah. Well, let's say company raises

SPEAKER_05: that 15 million. They come out of YC or something. They're really hot. They don't have the product market fit. They raise, you know, $3 million at $15 million cap. Then they, the product fails,

SPEAKER_08: but they learn something and then nobody wants to invest because they burned through the 3 million in 15 months. And all it is, is bad news. But then the founder says, you know what, uh, there was one thing we were working on this, like skunk work projects. It's like this ODO podcasting software didn't work with this Twitter thing did. And like, it's kind of simple and stupid, but it just, you say you're what you're doing and what you're up to. And then it shows you what everybody else is up to.

SPEAKER_05: It's like literally what happened. And then Evan Williams recapped ODO or what was obvious cooperation, I guess. And then Twitter came out of that. But a bunch of people were like,

SPEAKER_08: okay, I lost my money. I don't want to participate in the next round. So I can't raise at 15.

SPEAKER_05: I'm going to take all of the shares, put them into common and then start a new fresh, basically

SPEAKER_63: refresh the cap table. Anybody who's an existing investor is moving to common. And then we're raising a million dollars at a 10 million. So now you're left as the investor. Okay. My previous shares, I own 1% of the company are worth five basis points. I've lost 95% of my value there,

SPEAKER_91: and they're common. But I do have the ability to put 100K and own 1% again. So I own 1.05% of the company if I put 100. So that's called pay to play. So if you don't pay, you don't get your

SPEAKER_63: stuff. That is like an extreme thing that happens in companies. And it leaves a lot of bad feelings.

SPEAKER_91: Most people say, if you're going to do that, you might as well shut the company down and start a new company. But what happens sometimes is the IP was created in that previous cap table. So you have

SPEAKER_63: this conundrum and a recap occurs, but in your recap, you were like, I am going to put what you think is good money after bad. The first bet was a bad bet. Didn't work. But the second bet was a great bet in your mind.

SPEAKER_27: The first bet was a, you know, it was a one out and couldn't kind of raise the next round kind of thing with millions, like, you know, low single digit millions in ARR that stuck around after the recap. And, you know, there were a lot of good things, it just like, kind of needed an organizational shift from more kind of sales led to more product led. And so, you know, that's a, and I really like the founder and nothing changed, you know, the intervening months between when I invested and, and when, you know, they were unable to raise the round. And so if that is all still the same,

SPEAKER_28: and I'm still betting on the founder kind of that early in the game anyway, and I can get in at a lower valuation with a more focused product and a bunch of lessons learned relatively cheaply, um, you know, that's, that seems like a bet kind of worth taking to me in that case.

Jason Calacanis: Good money after evolved. I just want to ask you briefly about the newsletter part of your business. Um, which, you know, how, how is it manageable? Like these are really in depth. This is good journalism you're doing here. And I wonder how your time split works between these two, like, is it sustainable to be a media personality and a VC at a high level?

SPEAKER_79: Yeah, it is. I, I mean, no reason for that question, by the way, Jason,

SPEAKER_40: it, uh, it takes, you have to have a certain fortitude to be, you know, task switching is hard. I think that is exactly, exactly right. That it's the task

SPEAKER_27: switching. Like I will start writing Monday's piece this afternoon. Right now it's two o'clock Eastern. So in two and a half hours, I'll be done calls. And then I'll start writing Monday's piece. And then I'll spend most of the weekend writing Monday's piece. It, it's almost, you know, it has to be sustainable because again, I'm not the smartest or best investor. And the newsletter is a, you know, a big help. And the only reason a lot of people are willing to either give me money to invest or to take my money, uh, in their companies. And so, you know, they have to work together. I

SPEAKER_28: think probably where I need to do some work is just, you know, I blocked out a whole day with no meetings the other day. And it was so lovely. So like figuring out how to just give myself those days to not just write, but also read and read more broadly. And like, think beyond the topic that

SPEAKER_219: I'm thinking about. That's the hardest part about writing. Isn't it Molly? Like, you need to have

SPEAKER_08: that white space and that dead time. And then all of a sudden, you know, like, if I go for a,

SPEAKER_05: uh, ride on my electric bike or I go for ski, all of a sudden I'm on the mountain and I'm skiing. I'm like, I'm stopping turning on Siri and trying to use her to do dictation. She's terrible. I got to bring my Android phone with me because it's so much better. And I start dictating a couple of thoughts and it's like literally a chapter in my next book or a deal memo or something. I just, something

SPEAKER_63: crystallizes. And that's the problem with writing is you really need to have a little bit of that reading with companies is no downtime and slacks and DMS and emails. It just never ends. And they are very, the task switching and the mind switching is very hard. I think the way you're doing it is exactly right. You have to block out time. So if your schedule doesn't say block for three hours,

SPEAKER_05: if you're a writer, you're doing something wrong.

Jason Calacanis: Yeah. Yeah. Any time for input, you know, like everybody thinks that content creation happens in some kind of vacuum, but it takes input to get output. And if you don't have the space to either take that in, like literally I have to be like, I haven't been to a conference or had a meeting with somebody who I don't work with in three months. I don't have an original thought right now. Sorry. Like there's

SPEAKER_37: nothing to build on. There's no seeds. I think if you went back and looked at, look at my post, you could tell when I've had periods of, you know, exploration and not because

SPEAKER_28: the ideas are a lot more creative when I've had time to think about something other than what was

SPEAKER_227: right in front of me. This is the role of travel for me. I think it's one of the reasons why the pandemic

SPEAKER_05: was just screwed with, candidly screwed with my mind and my ability to produce really well is because I would travel somewhere. I do a speaking gig. I get some culture, hit some restaurants, meet some new people. And then all of a sudden, like Molly saying, all of a sudden,

Chamath Palihapitiya: the ideas start building and you're ready to go. But listen, Paki, great job on your second appearance. Fund two is closed or you're raising a public is still open.

SPEAKER_37: It's still open, but only because I am literally so overwhelmed by trying to figure out how to

David Friedberg: pick among them. Who do you use to do your funds? Is it a shore? Is it AngelList? Is it

SPEAKER_62: a private attorney list? And I always, I always want to give a shout out to gender dash on the team

SPEAKER_37: over there who's kind of my person there who is, it's like having all another team. I got there's

SPEAKER_230: no sponsor or anything with them, but I mean, it makes it, it makes it possible, frankly, it makes

David Friedberg: it possible. I think, you know, Carta, AngelList, Assure, there's like three or four of them now.

SPEAKER_05: And they're all competing, better prices, better service. And it's really one of the reasons, Molly and Paki, I think that this revolution is happening is when I started, you know, the back office was like, I'm calling my friend at Sequoia and like, can you explain this to me? He's like, yeah, come over. And you know, it's literally four hours of me meeting with their team trying to get all this education. And then they put it in all these like, platforms have put it in a box. And like, they just fill out these forms, boom, press the button. We made it software. They made the capital

SPEAKER_79: formation software, right? Yeah, I mean, this is David Rosenthal to how it's basically AWS for

SPEAKER_37: raising a fund. I mean, kindergarten ventures at the size that they did fund one just wouldn't work

SPEAKER_141: if you were even just paying for legal fees outside. Yeah, you'd be at $250,000 in legal fees to 500,000.

SPEAKER_63: It would be 2.5% of your fund would go to the legal fees and formation. But when it's 100,000 or 50,000, it's palatable, you know, it's 1%. It's okay. Yep. All right. What? Let's do your plugs. Where?

Jason Calacanis: What are you doing? Where can people find you? They should know by now, at least from the start

SPEAKER_242: of the show. But I know it's Pachym. P-A-C-K-Y-M on Twitter. What else? I know that.

SPEAKER_27: At Pachym on Twitter, not boring.co. I should probably there's not boring.com has like a stick figure on it. And that's it. I should probably just try to buy that but not boring.co. And those are really the two you can normally kind of find. You're in the world. You're in the world.

SPEAKER_63: That's it. All right, Pachy. Great job on the pod. Great second appearance. And let's have you on for like a news roundtable at some point. Great job. Great to be here. Thanks for having me. See you

SPEAKER_08: on the internet. All right, everybody. I told Rachel that if she had the audacity and the fearlessness to take out a zoom recorder, not Z-Zoom, X-Zoom, the proper zoom for NPR public radio folks, if she took that out and she did some Vox Populi man on the street, interviewed people, I would pay for her ticket to Miami. Did you understand the assignment?

SPEAKER_253: Definitely did last minute. Yeah. I will say that this is the part where I should take some credit

Jason Calacanis: for telling Rachel to go buy a zoom recorder. I was like, yeah, no, if you're a woman on the street, you need some gear. I'm pretty sure we're gonna pay for that. So hope that's cool with you.

SPEAKER_255: What does that zoom recorder cost? That looks like 500 bucks.

SPEAKER_256: You hit the nail right on the head. It was right around that with the insurance.

SPEAKER_257: You invested 500 bucks in your career, Rachel, to buy that?

SPEAKER_258: Don't fire me. You really bought that on your own?

SPEAKER_262: No. Oh, I was a bank, Heidi. I'll pay for that. Yes.

SPEAKER_266: I will say I went full boss on this one. I was like, Rachel, go buy a recorder. Yeah. Put it on our credit card.

SPEAKER_268: Yeah. The renting you need. You need to already be in their system for like a few days or a few weeks in New York to rent one. Don't rent. If you use it 10 times, it pays for itself. So you

SPEAKER_08: started interviewing people live and in person. I watched it. It was good. It's a good start. Thank you. So tell us who you interviewed here at Hack Week in Miami.

SPEAKER_273: So I got to interview a ton of people and the one with the audio came out the best because this

SPEAKER_268: is my first time using a Zoom recorder. His name is Eric Button. He is the co-founder of TAP. If you want to check out their website, that is TryTAP. TAP builds low-code tools for businesses to offer crypto as a payment method. And I honestly, I met him because I mostly worked out of the TAP house. They had a really cool house and it was free to just go and co-work over there. And Eric will be on the show today. And we talked about why TAP actually sponsored a house for Miami Hack Week and the Gen Z tech people meeting each other in person after multiple years of just online Twitter interaction.

SPEAKER_07: Why do I get the sense, Molly, that we're going to be hosting a this week in Startups Hack House

SPEAKER_201: in Miami and Austin and Rachel's going to be running for us. Look out. Look out.

SPEAKER_279: If it can coincide with the F1. Yeah, right, right.

SPEAKER_268: I don't see why not. I got the inside scoop for the next event. It's ETH Denver on February 11th. So maybe I'll catch catch me out the East Denver recording. Catch me, catch me outside with my instead of these hands. I got a Zoom recorder.

SPEAKER_08: Well, this is okay. Boomer certainly turning into a vibe. So good on you. This one hit different. And you understood the assignment. How many of these TikTok memes do I have to drop in one sentence? Molly's like, what is it? You hit all of them.

SPEAKER_288: Should we clap? Like, no, that's good.

SPEAKER_266: I mean, honestly, what could I add? That was so juicy.

SPEAKER_270: I think I used all of those colloquialisms correctly. Okay, Boomer. Here we go.

SPEAKER_295: Okay, Boomer. Hello, everybody. And welcome to the first in real life recording of Okay, Boomer. This is Rachel reporting straight from Miami Hack Week. Today, I am joined by TAP co-founder Eric Button. I met Eric on Twitter like I met every single other person here.

SPEAKER_298: Let's go. Eric, let's talk about Miami Hack Week. Where are we right now?

SPEAKER_302: Yeah. So I'll just give you a little bit of an introduction to what Miami Hack Week is. So it's a little bit different from a standard hackathon in that all the houses are spread across Miami. And each house has maybe 10 to 50 hackers working on different projects. It's a very low key hackathon in that there's no rules. A lot of people are here to meet each other rather than win prizes.

SPEAKER_305: So that's what Miami Hack Week is.

SPEAKER_307: And we are sitting right now in TAP House.

SPEAKER_295: Like I said, he's the co-founder of TAP. So this is their house. It is absolutely gorgeous. I'm going to try to get a tour of it after our recording. Can you explain to us how you were actually able to get a house this beautiful and how many people are here right now?

SPEAKER_302: Yeah. So Miami Hack Week, the first Miami Hack Week was actually last August, 2021. And that's actually where I met my co-founder. So needless to say, I appreciate the value that Miami Hack Week brings. So that's why we were like one of the first startups to go ahead and sponsor a house. We are definitely in an employee's market. So this is a way to send a message that we are a place that values having a good time. And yeah, it's essentially courting employees.

SPEAKER_305: And it's part of our 18 to 24 month top of funnel game plan to attract great talent. Awesome.

SPEAKER_307: So what does TAP do exactly? I know you guys are looking for people to hire, but what do you actually do?

SPEAKER_302: Yeah. So we are actually a New York based fintech.

SPEAKER_295: Very cool. I've met so many fintech founders here, more fintech founders than I ever have before that are around our age, which I think is incredible. I think it's a really interesting field that not a ton of young people generally gravitate to because it's not a consumer product as much as like creating, I don't know, like a new workout brand or an app that deals with communication, which we've met like a ton of people here that have had apps doing that. So very cool that you're doing fintech. Do you think in the next Hack Week that you could see people from more established startups or even maybe like corporate companies, like fang companies coming here and searching for talent? Or do you think that this is going to kind of stay within our little Twitterverse? How low key do you think this is going to get? Do you think this is going to blow up?

SPEAKER_302: Yes. So I think that's two different questions. One is whether fang is going to look for talent here. And the other one is, will this blow up? I think fang may not actually find the best talent here because people often come to Miami Hack Week. There's a lot of fang employees actually here this week, and they're here to maybe find their next slightly higher risk, higher reward step. So that might not be the ideal fang employee. On the other hand, I am very bullish on Miami Hack Week. If this trend continues, it's going to be a massive event going forward.

SPEAKER_305: Whatever the next one is, it's going to be huge.

SPEAKER_295: So considering New York City is feels like two degrees right now. I am also very bullish on Miami any weekend. And New York feels like two degrees. I would love to be here. I think this would be an incredible opportunity. I personally would love to see startups that have a disposable income that are looking to hire kids come here. Because one thing that I've noticed is there are a ton of kids that didn't have a college education, whether they dropped out of school, chose not to go to school. I think most kids actually don't have the traditional path going from like college to corporate to maybe then a startup. I think most kids dove right in here, which is really awesome. But that also means I feel like they are stuck, like I mentioned before, in our little Twitter scape. So we all know that Tech Twitter is a really small community, especially within Gen Zs. We all know each other. It's kind of difficult sometimes going to this stuff because some people have JPEGs as their profile picture. But other than that, it has been a really cool meeting everyone. How do you feel about the overlap between Gen Z Tech Twitter and Miami Hack Week?

SPEAKER_302: Yeah, first of all, Gen Z Tech Twitter is amazing. I think there's some interesting dynamics at play. The same people that love to kind of have a good time on Twitter, maybe love to get together in real life and have a good time in Miami. So I think from also like a hiring play, what we're seeing here is interesting because everyone here, this event actually filters for young talent that appreciates human interaction. And also maybe is either good enough at their day job that they can make that work with a week in Miami, or they're at a transition in their career

SPEAKER_305: where they might be open to work, like they're fun employed or something.

SPEAKER_295: I've had a ton of fun employed people here. They're all like, I'm doing consulting for startups, and they're absolutely killing it. There is one person that comes to mind. His name is Ami. I hope to have him on the show. I've never met somebody that has been so influential in our space that is, quote unquote, fun employed right now, I believe. He was really, really cool. And I definitely think you're right. I personally really missed going to in-person events. And I hope that we can continue going to these because not only is our community spread between SF, LA, New York, even Canada. I've met a lot of people from there as well in Texas, but meeting people in real life, I feel like just has such a different connection because we are so plugged in all the time. Like just sitting around and having dinner with people and talking about something that's not tech is so refreshing. And, but then at the same time, like being able to, like during my nine to five, asked somebody a question about our career, I feel like is really cool. And like, that's really unique. I don't really meet a lot of people in the tech space. So hopefully I get to keep coming to these and making these kinds of connections.

SPEAKER_302: Absolutely. Yeah. I have a friend who's actually thinking about building an electric motorcycle. Wow. Yeah. And he mentioned that to me this morning. And I said, oh, you got to talk to Zach. He, he's built, you know, a hard tech startup and he actually worked for a company building electric motorcycle. Now this evening, he's going to go say hi to Zach. So this is the kind of connection that you can't really replicate online, right?

SPEAKER_295: You really can't. As much as I love online connections, like being able to meet everyone for the first time in real life, it just is so it's so it's even helping me with like my job because it's kind of difficult to dictate like, oh, well, I have a good conversation with this person off of their tweets versus like, do we vibe in real life? You know what I mean? So, um, this is definitely something that I hope continues. I know the pandemic is still here, but everybody here, we, so for Miami Hack Week, everybody had to get tested. There's a lot of tests hanging around this house. There's a lot of tests hanging around everybody's house, but hopefully when the pandemic gets a little bit later, um, everybody will be able to continue doing these maybe even more frequently than just like once every blue moon.

SPEAKER_299: You know what I mean?

SPEAKER_305: A hundred percent. Yeah. And I'm in, uh, there's still active group chats from the first Miami Hack Week. Yeah. So these are long lasting relationships for sure.

SPEAKER_299: Well, really looking forward to having a long lasting relationship. Hopefully we can grab a coffee in New York City.

SPEAKER_295: I'll also catch you in your, uh, Airbnb that you guys are working out of right now. Right.

SPEAKER_322: Let's do it. Absolutely. Yeah.

SPEAKER_295: For sure. Awesome. Well, this is Rachel reporting.

SPEAKER_302: And Eric Button. Find me on Twitter.

SPEAKER_295: What's your Twitter at?

SPEAKER_302: Uh, it's Eric Jacob Button.

SPEAKER_295: Awesome. Well, I'm underscore Rachel Braun, but don't follow me. You should be following this week at startups. That is TWI startups. Yeah. You should be following this week in startups instead. I hope to see you guys over at the podcast. Bye. Bye. Bye.