SPEAKER_00: hey everybody it's another amazing episode of this week in startups and the angel podcast so you can search for angel podcast as well and find a bunch of religious people uh talking about god and angels in the world or if you type angel calicatus you'll find this podcast it's season six uh and

SPEAKER_01: paige doherty is an amazing guest uh she uh runs behind genius ventures she just graduated two years ago in 2020 so yeah the world has changed people are coming out of college and starting

SPEAKER_00: their own uh venture capital funds she wrote a children's book demystifying venture capital i kid

SPEAKER_03: you not an amazing guest love everything about it but first we are going to cover the news because it was a big day at the stock store facebook meta's stock was down something like 24 at 1.26 after a rough earnings of which they project a 10 billion dollar loss jason by the way if you are not

SPEAKER_04: watching the video is just covering his eyes from the sheer murder that was just hard to watch i mean

SPEAKER_06: it's just watching somebody get just absolutely beat up is it though is it hard to watch no it's actually

SPEAKER_00: quite enjoyable for me it's quite just like yeah and then then we're going to follow up on our intellectual property conversation about respecting other people's work in the world and art with an absolutely insane

SPEAKER_01: nft project called hit piece uh that is accused and apparently is based on their apology stealing nfts

SPEAKER_00: based upon britney spears or taylor swift's music without permission and then selling it uh just more

SPEAKER_09: horrible behavior in the ip space and we're going to teach people in this quick segment how to be decent human beings

SPEAKER_10: it is going to be a great and very informative show stick with us season six of angel is brought to you by

SPEAKER_12: linkedin jobs a business is only as strong as its people and every hire matters post your first job for free at linkedin.com angel the embroker startup insurance program helps startups secure the most important types of insurance at a lower cost and with less hassle save up to 20 off traditional insurance today at embroker.com twist while you're there get an extra 10 off using offer code twist and our crowd our crowd helps you invest early in pre-ipo companies alongside professional vcs if you're interested in investing you can join our crowd for free at o-u-r-c-r-o-w-d dot com slash angel

SPEAKER_14: all right everybody it is a huge huge news day because wow we we expected this would happen at some

SPEAKER_16: point but we didn't expect it would happen this dramatically sometimes a company faces so many headwinds that you predict hey this is not the stock to own this is not the company to work for and i've been staying that for about i don't know two years now and everybody told me i was crazy and i told them you know these headwinds and these things pile up and that at some point it hits the

SPEAKER_17: bottom line but there is always a lag and this company molly has had uh negative pr it has had regulation issues it has had political issues from its advertisers because

SPEAKER_00: trust with advertisers yes and it has had competitive issues and slowing user growth and the inability to buy its way to success and that company is sadly that company named itself meta in

SPEAKER_03: a kind of embarrassing for all of us attempt to outrun all of those issues like i sort of feel like good point moment that you know things have really approached or reached perfect storm status is when you change your name to try to run away from them so yes meta or facebook has dropped over 25 percent oh i see as of this recording 26 oh my god yep just keeps going down since reporting earnings yesterday that was wednesday they projected a 10 billion dollar loss of revenue from apple's privacy features and for the first time negative user growth quarter over quarter the stock dropped from 323 dollars a share to 238 dollars a share as of 1 pm eastern on thursday this represents

SPEAKER_31: a 220 billion dollar loss in market cap overnight gone i mean it's like where do you begin um

SPEAKER_03: this is i do i want to begin with a fun fact actually this is pretty fun the largest single day decline in wall street history beating facebook's 119 billion dollar decline in 2018 got it so this is

SPEAKER_16: an example of i think in a way a bit of hubris here i love your observation molly that why did they change the name of the company and what did that represent now for zuck knowing him and how he thinks he has been obsessed with not being disrupted and being a disruptor that's why he had the philosophy move fast and break things and locking people down that's concept of a lockdown where they would just you know out hustle any other company stealing other people's innovations i don't need your unique ideas i need you to just whatever evan spiegel does and you know i was kind of talking about that years ago i was like you know if you're stealing evan spiegel's ideas and you're out of your own that's a really bad sign for your company's prospects of course you could steal your way for a while but this idea that they would change their name to represent a product that loses 10 billion dollars a year vr that has no value in the real world yet no revenue to speak of um i mean they sell some headsets but let's face it it's not this is a business the metaverse that doesn't exist yet

SPEAKER_03: and by the way is also a stolen idea also and everybody else who invented it literally by that right so it's not even it's not even like the moniker they sold the moniker and frankly the concept from like existing sci-fi there's not even like some kind of vision of it that's no spin no original spin no original spin and i really do think that from a pr perspective changing your name is usually a sign of desperation i really do like sure it could also be you know in the case of square where they're going with block it's like we're taking the company in a different direction right and and that direction is equally unproven different conversation here but like metaverse is at best a 10-year bet the headsets themselves are churning users right now as you have talked about on the show and we've talked about i was one of those users who bought one and is just like this is crickets now yeah but i i don't think we can sleep on a couple of different factors here one of course is that saying we're going to lose 10 billion dollars over uh the course of the year i think but 10 billion loss billion dollar loss of revenue because of apple's privacy features i want to dig into that a little bit because on the one hand and 100 apple came gunned for facebook with these privacy changes and a lot of bad behavior across the industry however i wonder if blaming apple isn't also cover for the fact that facebook is running into all these other headwinds real hard and that the biggest problem for them

SPEAKER_01: is that negative user growth quarter over quarter you know i think they build they built up such bad will and i've been saying this from the beginning since i thought zuckerberg was a bad actor because he kept stealing people's ideas yep um i think that bad karma has built up to the point which people don't want to work for the company um the fact that they you know all the election malfeasance and all that stuff it's just all this bad well then you know subverting the research on women or young women with body issues and eating disorders it's just like when all of this bad stuff builds and you don't take any responsibility and you steal people's ideas at a certain point people stop rooting for you and they want to see your demise i think that that's part of this but i think a lot of the people who are

SPEAKER_00: owning the shares are like you know what i have other places i could put my money and i don't want to believe that they can overcome these problems because there is a chance they could overcome these problems and apple did the right thing for their users apple said we want to be the privacy company we are not going to let you track that's well within apple's right and of course that affects google

SPEAKER_59: uh it affects snapchat twitter it'll affect tick tock uh when they get their ad business

SPEAKER_03: everybody right everybody anybody right it has affected the entire digital ad industry like every article in every digital ad publication right now trade pub is like how do you work around this and i'm sorry to say they're all pivoting to texting so like lock that down immediately

SPEAKER_01: yeah and listen at some point somebody had to say we need to protect the privacy of users and there's

SPEAKER_00: overreaching here and let's give the users some power in this and you know the governments you know they're trying and the eu has done some stuff there's california regulations as a backstop but

SPEAKER_01: that's pretty slow moving and what you see here is another private company that owns a platform can press a button and can execute instantly so again it's a huge deal it's a huge deal because apple does

SPEAKER_00: make some money through advertising they have it in their uh a de minimis amount in their app store and they have the search deal with google so in fact i'm guessing long term apple's moves here could have cost it some money on the margin with that google deal because when google renegotiates that deal maybe

SPEAKER_01: they make less money yada yada but when you have a money printing machine and this is when you talk

SPEAKER_70: about mob behavior you know to dovetail another story that's been in the news uh with people saying

SPEAKER_01: you know like all's fair and love in business and war and platforms uh this is that was the ultimate gangster move by tim cook he had had enough of the bad behavior of app developers on their platform that

SPEAKER_00: they get blamed for right and he just pushed the button and nuked 10 billion dollars in revenue

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SPEAKER_01: conditions do apply this is one of the most hardcore hits i've ever seen in business i'm trying to think the only other thing i can think of is like microsoft bundling internet explorer and you know

SPEAKER_78: killing netscape you know so viciously i mean it is a murder it really it is just a it's really bloody

SPEAKER_03: and it is you know and i like it i'm sorry well look it's good business for apple like at the end of the day it is and you are absolutely right to point out that apple was taking the hit for you know i mean i would imagine that this started brewing around the time of cambridge analytica but there was no doubt that facebook had been abusing access to apple's consumers for years lots of companies had and they finally just were like you know what this is we're seeing where the wind is going and we're seeing what consumers want we're seeing potentially the end of targeted advertising as a business model and yeah we don't i mean tim cook i think was like yeah i don't like him this is the most steve

SPEAKER_14: jobs move this is a tribute to steve jobs because this is the type of stuff that steve jobs would do

SPEAKER_16: yeah steve jobs when he had enough he had enough and he would take just you know decisive action uh to stop bad actors uh you know whether it was taking an app out of the app store or you know platform wars whatever it was um this is like 1984 you know commercial i wonder when you look at this i

SPEAKER_03: mean listen like the truth is that this is a big drop right for facebook to lose what was it they lost a shopify and uber and a coinbase from their market this is significant one day it's really significant however objectively the company is still making a crap ton of money and did make a crap ton of money revenue was up 37 year over year we were just gushing over google being up 41 right yeah 39 billion dollars in profit up 35 year over year uh facebook is now trading at about five and a half times revenue 16.9 and a half times profit some contrarians are saying this is now a value play but i wonder at the point at which you started decline like this and the sentiment problem that you've identified is so strong how much of this is i mean i asked you know when when francis haugen came forward as a whistleblower and revealed all this internal data all the stuff that facebook had been covering up then you have this sort of like drip drip drip of them constantly miss reporting numbers right like essentially telling like building an entire pivot to video in the the media world and then being like oh yeah it turns out that was a house of cards we were lying about those numbers all along and the regulatory issues like is there a ceo in the world of another public company let alone an entire leadership team that would still have

SPEAKER_14: their job um you know he has the super voting shares he is the company you know if he went away right now

SPEAKER_16: you know a ceo change i think would make the stock tank even more because at this point the reason is

SPEAKER_00: i think he is such a hardcore individual and they've already lost so much value that people want you know the guy who got his ass kicked in that seat in other words he's gonna fight

SPEAKER_01: and i think zuckerberg has a certain determination to him so i would not be surprised if you know he he this um i don't think this will break him i think this will uh strengthen his resolve it's obviously

SPEAKER_00: not the end of facebook but it's the end of them buying big companies because of regulation and when the stock goes down like this if you join the company in the last year or two and your stock compensation was

SPEAKER_102: based on you know a share price that was higher you know this is the kind of move that can uh cause a little bit of chaos inside the company people are you know thought they were worth a million now they're worth 600 you know worth 70 750 000 over the next two years that was going to pay for their mortgage

SPEAKER_16: it's going to get in people's heads and he used to be able to buy people off with the stock price and people silence you know the top employees etc you know and uh francis haugen like even those type of people used to get compensated so well uh that you would basically buy their complacency i think and you know this is going to be uh very hard uh a couple of years i don't think it's going to get better in the next year or two i think there's a natural audience for a lot of these products and they reach the natural audience in a lot of markets a while ago and now there are more options coming like tick tock and they can't buy tick tock right so they used to be able to buy the instagram

Jason Calacanis: whatsapp and avoid this problem yeah totally now i think is when we are going to find out you know because there is that mystique around zuckerberg who has or cheryl sandberg has right operated at an

SPEAKER_03: incredible level of execution for the last 15 years but i think now we find out if that mystique is is is valid right now because when you get into trouble not the kind of trouble where like a lot of people are mad at you and you can pr your way out of it but they've been doing it for a decade but the 220 billion dollar you know value loss kind of trouble that's when i guess now we find out you know nikita nikita buyer was tweeting about this as uh who was a former facebook employee summed up you know those big five headwinds but then said zuck is the greatest operator in the world and i wouldn't bet against him and i would not bet against him either yeah um i do think that nobody

SPEAKER_01: wants the metaverse i'll be totally honest i and we've had this discussion um i do think the ar glasses are going to be kind of cool um but i think it's we did an over under on this where we thought like what would be the time period where it would be a daily use case i think we said something like nine years or something yeah the renaming of this company is going to be looked at like um didn't

SPEAKER_16: netflix do a rename quickie or something what they call their yeah they were gonna try and then they

SPEAKER_113: were like remember the company and i was like uh yeah always a bad idea so and i don't you know i don't

SPEAKER_102: think vr is the win we talked about that i think ar is the win so we'll see but they're also on a

SPEAKER_16: collision course so this apple fight i would say this is round one and then uh round two is going to be the glasses ar glasses coming so when apple drops those that could let's say apple's ar glasses are iphones essentially and ipads they're just so delightful that it's undeniable it's the best product in the world okay what's that going to do to the stock right okay you bet the farm yeah on the metaverse yeah and you got your ass kicked again by tim cook and apple that's actually the probable outcome so then they're going to have been beaten down twice i mean then who really wants to own the stock if it's like apple owns you that badly i know paul graham had an interesting tweet time for facebook to get to work on that phone which is something chamath was working on when he was there uh human like humans like animals are most dangerous when threatened if i were tim cook i'd have

SPEAKER_120: thought twice before threatening zuck yc's always been a little bit in uh teams up camp for whatever

SPEAKER_03: reason do we have or did facebook break out their numbers with respect to their hardware operation because you know they have that kind of echo show competitor the little the gadget that you're supposed

SPEAKER_51: to like use in your house yeah facebook video calling on it what do they call that

SPEAKER_127: horrible what was that i know one person who bought it the muppets were yeah they had the muppets doing

SPEAKER_130: commercials for it right like i wonder portal portal which oh right it had the creepiest name ever on

SPEAKER_22: top of zuckerberg in your house with a camera and microphone exactly what people don't want like i

SPEAKER_03: sort of feel like however many people bought portal is however many people might be willing to buy a facebook phone not inclusive of international markets we shouldn't forget facebook has huge growth overseas right now its biggest growth areas are international so maybe they come out with like a low price facebook phone um in some countries but i also think that even internationally companies countries are waking up to the fact that they don't necessarily want facebook in town right i mean they have that facebook basics service that was like essentially a net neutrality nightmare from the second they even proposed it i was at that meeting at ces like five years ago where they were like yeah

SPEAKER_28: we're just going to go into developing countries and offer them free internet service ourselves and

SPEAKER_03: we're going to choose all the websites that they have access to and i think india was the first to be

SPEAKER_16: like no thank you under no circumstances i'm going to quickly explain one crucial type of insurance that all startups need e and o insurance that covers errors and omissions and it helps you scale your business because any major customer is going to ask you hey do you have you know you need to have you know if we're going to close this deal if you want us to sign on the dotted line and you want to get the do re me you're going to need to have you know so if you don't have business insurance you've failed one of the first steps of being a founder and startups should look no further than our friends over at inbroker in brokers technology saves you time and money prices are up to 20 lower with better coverage than the incumbents you can go from sign up to quote and purchase in just 10 minutes when you work with in broker instead of the incumbents you're not dealing with these large slow corporations and the sign up takes days not weeks the process is totally transparent and there's no opaque pricing because it's 2022 folks you shouldn't be any opaque pricing right save us time save us money that's what a broker does and you get a better quality of service better faster cheaper that's what it's all about and that's what a broker does so instantly buy custom built insurance for startups go to inbroker.com twist while you're there you can get an extra 10 off by using my promo code which is twist twist twist twist and broker.com slash twist i'm just thinking through here like if they if they had in the smartphone world 10 years ago and chamath was there and he was supposedly working on the phone um and they had done i thought it could have been powerful for them to buy a handset manufacturer like htc maybe or something somebody who was loved and was doing like interesting new hardware cool hardware yeah but now you look at the lead that and the scale that apple has even google with an incredible product uh you know those pixels are just extraordinary and i think they've been selling well but even if he sold them at break even would people stop buying their iphones i don't think so so it's not a lot of money that they're going to make from hardware i don't know on this chess board what zuckerberg's best move is other than to say uh you can buy a subscription to facebook instagram

SPEAKER_01: whatsapp etc and turn off all advertising and tracking for six bucks a month 49 a year and you're going to get all these other features including photo sharing storage whatever and i think there's people who would like to have an ad free experience on these sites i would pay for it i know i know i'm in the you know slow single digit uh minority here but i think it would actually give them the air

SPEAKER_77: cover to say listen we have a free ad product and for 4.95 a month and 49 a year you can have no ads

SPEAKER_01: in your feed and you get you know a very ad free experience and we understand some people prefer that

SPEAKER_00: just like some people like hbo and some people like to not pay for tv and get free tv with ads

SPEAKER_03: on hulu or whatever it is i mean that's the power move it's probably the power move it stops their developing nation growth or at least it's not going to be a huge growth area in developing countries so you know if you think of that so a move to a more premium product puts them is a power move against apple but it also you know right now the thing that facebook has that that few other companies have is that it's a massive global free product and so in terms of a massive growth move

SPEAKER_121: probably not i think it would stop their regulatory issues like the politician issues it would stop

SPEAKER_53: that but it wouldn't necessarily stop the you know daily active user issue because it's not going

SPEAKER_03: to move the needle on an operation that has whatever it is 200 billion 2.8 sorry 2.8 billion people

SPEAKER_51: using it how many people are going to pay for that like 100 million 150 million globally yeah i mean

SPEAKER_01: listen it's it would be a small number of people that would be 10 almost 10 if 10 they have 3 billion

SPEAKER_78: people using their products i think across all products so they're three billion people could it be five percent no maybe two percent 60 million people so i don't think it would be like this crazy

SPEAKER_01: revenue driver it would be nice uh but it would also let them start every discussion we understand there's a group of people who want to pay and there's a group of people who want free and we offer both at the top of your feed we have the thing here where we upsell people on subscribers and they can say you know yes no maybe and here's the percentages so now you understand

SPEAKER_03: what the world is you know wants in our chat by the way 27 votes in so far producers wanted to know would you buy a facebook phone something that is your main consumer internet device uh currently that tally sits at 95 no 95 no 95 no that's a reputation problem let's do the numbers on the uh business the future business meta yes the reality labs segment uh of the business had the following numbers 800 i mean listen we've heard numbers like this before and it wasn't always a deal killer but i'm just saying this is what they bet the new company on 877 million dollars of revenue in q4 with a 3.3 billion dollar net loss okay so then yeah that's um that means they're 3.3 times 4

SPEAKER_109: is uh 13.2 so they've said they'll invest 10 billion dollars a year it's more and currently they're losing more money than they've said they're going to invest so they're losing that and they're losing

SPEAKER_16: the 10 billion a year so that's 24 billion dollars a year in losses between the headwinds of the apple

SPEAKER_163: privacy changes and this it's just a lot of money going out the door and yeah i wonder if apple do you

SPEAKER_16: think apple because they were working on the ar headset and saw facebook as their top competitors were like how else can we screw with facebook yeah let's take their core business let's take their high margin business and let's ankle that while we're going after their future very possibly

SPEAKER_03: a hundred percent like uh i'm i'm certain that development on apple's glasses has accelerated since facebook changed its name to meta and said that we're going to take because honestly i can

SPEAKER_65: even see tim cook philosophically being like there is no way in hell that we are letting this company

SPEAKER_175: this guy basically own the next world the next platform the world right if mark zuckerberg's goal

SPEAKER_03: is for all of us to live in the metaverse like reality player one style you know that tim cook from

SPEAKER_53: a business perspective and possibly a humanity perspective was like no no no no no no we gotta

SPEAKER_01: stop that in its tracks um i think this is a net good this is a net good for the world i am thrilled to see this i've never liked zuckerberg i think he's a bat he's been bad for our industry i think

SPEAKER_16: he pissed in the well and created so much the well that we all have to build companies from which is consumer trust and um i've never liked the guy i think he's a bad actor i think he's a bad human being i think he treats people poorly uh other companies um and i'm glad to see his demise i hope it continues uh and i hope other companies now look at facebook as a hobbled company and they don't sell their companies to suck and i've been saying this for a decade never sell your company to zuck keep building it go to venture capitalists raise more money compete with zuck this is not the person we want to have defining the future of humanity based on his track record based on what he says and based on how he views the world he's got a weird world view of how the world should work and uh he should not have influence the decline of his stock price is the decline of his influence is the decline of people wanting to work with him and if you are a talented person i implore you to go work on climate

SPEAKER_01: change go to tesla or go work for a world positive company in some way right any job but facebook meta is a better job this is the worst place you could go work if you're a talented person and if you are

SPEAKER_78: an entrepreneur compete with them just keep hammering and competing against them and if you're talented

SPEAKER_109: don't go work there i cannot have a single thing to that except for a man yeah i mean i just i think

SPEAKER_181: there's one interesting angle that you didn't cover um so regarding their hardware i remember zach coleus was on and he he was talking about how he got the facebook portal and he said it was i think

SPEAKER_182: he said it was better than any ipad he'd ever had but facebook's reputation for privacy is so bad that nobody wants it anyway so there's kind of an interesting take you could have where no matter how good their hardware is it has to be 50 better than anything else anyway just to overcome how bad

SPEAKER_78: their reputation is yeah i'm not in disagreement with you on that i think we i think we beat this

SPEAKER_00: one into the ground and i hope that they continue uh and you know what if you're working there we put facebook into the ground and just if you're working there it's just not worth it like when you go to your kid's soccer game where you're at the dinner party people like where do you work

SPEAKER_78: like i've been at these uncomfortable dinners and i i work in tech it's like oh really i was in check

SPEAKER_01: where do you work i work in social media in town oh what are you working on i'm working on like uh you

SPEAKER_102: know uh uh augmented reality oh really where uh in um silicon valley oh where is silicon valley

SPEAKER_190: yeah palo alto you know like in the water bay no no what company are you working at facebook it's

Jason Calacanis: basically like saying you work at a cigarette company it's like you work at jewel or you work

SPEAKER_03: in tobacco we have a nice little chart here showing by the way that one of i mean the point that jimath made on all in all right when the rot starts from begin from the from inside and you can't hire look at this the median tenure of employees at this point at facebook appears to be about 1.8 years yeah i mean our industry does churn but yeah it does but no matter what you want to build you can't build it if you're constantly training if you're constantly rehiring if you're constantly like having to you know re-download institutional knowledge into new drones like

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SPEAKER_01: until you decide to invest that's ourcrowd.com slash angel to sign up for free i really don't have a solution like if i was inside if like suddenly zuck called me on the phone was like jacal you're

SPEAKER_78: right be my professional coach and i he's like meet me we'll go for a hike or something go skiing or

SPEAKER_01: something i really wouldn't i i would be at a a loss i mean the only thing i can think of is maybe breaking the company up maybe spinning out whatsapp spinning out instagram and seeing if like they stand

SPEAKER_22: alone if those management teams could then make something better i don't know i think that they're all the all the founders of those companies are gone yeah maybe the fact that all those founders left

SPEAKER_16: too that's a big deal oh this would be the power move you give instagram back to kevin system and you you say hey we're spinning i'm making a public company we'll give you 10 ownership in it over 10

SPEAKER_03: years you can vest and you're the ceo you know what's interesting about facebook employees right now too and this tells you by the way like nothing's ever going to happen with and the name change is a sign nothing's ever going to happen with facebook the blue f like hardly anybody that you talk to who works at facebook anymore works on that product i mean that's the product that facebook does not care about it brings in the money but all they care about is using it to fund the other things and so you meet a lot of facebook people are like well i don't work on that product right i work on this over here i'm working on ai um like you know sure it sounds like a lot of people are in metaverse and that's true but most of them are working on machine learning and ai somehow within this company and they're they're allowing themselves to dodge the cigarette selling part of the business but also it shows you the level of investment they even have in you know the news feed like they don't

SPEAKER_213: care funny joke somebody just texted me or messaged me i'd rather have pornhub on my resume than meta

SPEAKER_190: like it's like mom's like oh you got a new job yes they got a new job bob i left meta to go work at pornhub i think a good career move in fact good call good call you know what

SPEAKER_00: you're a sex positive kid good for you good for you uh casey nice that one of my favorites too much

SPEAKER_16: video in my ig feed scrolling is stressful now i just want to look at pictures if i want video i will push the little video bit button video is different not better give me back my grams please what do you think

SPEAKER_03: of that take moment i mean that's the other thing right is that they're killing the products that they do own i mean if did you read the amazing bloomberg woman sarah fryer sarah fryer had that good book about facebook and the instagram acquisition and all of the ways that once facebook bought it they were trying to turn it into an ad machine they were starving instagram of the resources that it could have used right they didn't understand and embrace the creator part of that business early like facebook is in the process of very and then it was like then they had igtv and literally every

SPEAKER_212: every user was like nope and then it's like where'd that go stories they stole stories they stole stories and effectively i think worked for sure but they didn't steal tick tock right like it's sort of

SPEAKER_00: and then now tick now they're shoehorning tick tock in right and i don't want that tick tock is just

SPEAKER_01: you know what happens with tick tock it's like i go on tick tock and then 30 minutes of my life are gone and i can't remember one thing i watched

SPEAKER_16: and i'm like okay that was a bad use of my time i should go find a classic film or a book or anything would be better content than what just happened you know to that 30 minutes of my life but

SPEAKER_225: that's true but it is crushing it after an accidental hour on tick tock which does happen literally we're confessing to being heroin addicts right home of the accidental hour but the thing is like

SPEAKER_03: after i spend an accidental hour on tick tock i feel happier and this is because of my feed right which is all like howling huskies and cute animals but like i feel happy whereas when i look at instagram i feel sad like i feel fomo or everybody's got their perfect life or i'm like i feel like a failure somehow or i watch too many videos or there were too many freaking ads and i spent a hundred dollars and i'm mad about it whereas tick tock is a joyful experience and that is a big problem for facebook

SPEAKER_16: it makes you feel my contemporaries on instagram you know in other words men in their 40s and 50s put your shirts back on i mean sorry just stop stop

SPEAKER_03: mine is like this has to stop mine is like dwell and then somebody who's having a cute family vacation that i wish i was on and then an ad and then it's like some other thing that makes me feel bad and then an ad right like there's so many freaking and then a video that i don't want to click through and watch the rest of because it's on igtv which again nope no one wants that my instagram is now my

SPEAKER_00: friends who are divorced doing yoga or kiteboarding uh and then basically letting folks know they are now shooting themselves full of testosterone and hdh and they have more muscle and lower body fat than they did in their 20s and i'm like how'd that happen so fast and they're like i don't know and i just really worked hard a ton of testosterone to my leg and and like literally it just stopped

SPEAKER_243: i too follow jeff bezos i mean what is going on with bezos he's taking it way too i don't want to body shame anybody the guy looks he has a linebacker he has huge orexia yeah he literally looks like a

SPEAKER_03: linebacker and i'm just like game like children listen to my words you don't gain muscle mass after

SPEAKER_04: 40. that is not hard happening naturally i mean you could gain five or ten pounds what's his routine

SPEAKER_247: like his lat pulldown has to be out of control he it is actually he's all about tb12 he's on the tom

SPEAKER_244: brady plan yeah right he's doing resistance bands okay what no is tom brady the guy from the patriots

SPEAKER_113: who cheated to win the super bowls that's the guy who cheated to win the super bowls i just did that

SPEAKER_116: i'm r.i.p your mentions bro i do it all the time i do it oh the guy from the patriots right the guy who cheated to win the super bowl so many times and people are just like he didn't cheat i'm like no if you deflate the balls that's against the rules right that's cheating oh my god whatever

SPEAKER_16: he's doing they caught him cheating right they were taking the signals of the other people to cheat

SPEAKER_113: right my god i brought my brother guys from boston so much it's so great to do all right let's go

SPEAKER_102: on speaking of cheating let's move on okay there's an nft site uh non ironically called hit piece

SPEAKER_01: wow uh and it's been accused of selling i kid you not artist songs without permission according to the new york post in an interview with the business builders podcast co-founder ryan felton explained

SPEAKER_77: how hit piece worked hit piece was built on spotify's api giving them access to the catalog of music that's on spotify which is everything the goal of hit piece was for users to show off that they had

SPEAKER_01: owned their favorite songs artists got royalties from the initial auction and when the nft was traded the article noted that hit piece didn't give any details on how these proceeds would be divided

SPEAKER_77: the new york post reported quote each nft offering gave buyers ownership of a unique song recording according to hit piece people who purchased nfts were also promised accompanying real life perks

SPEAKER_00: including access to experiences with artists the band the human fly dove into ryan felton on twitter

SPEAKER_26: you can pick it up from here molly did a deep dive on the guy below writes this band's twitter account

SPEAKER_03: somebody in the band the human fly did a deep dive on the guy below ryan felton the co-founder of hit piece i don't think we totally know what we're dealing with here and i'm actually a little alarmed first off they point out the guy is not a rando he's a legitimate music industry player via linkedin he ran the militia group a sony music acquisition for 12 years he's also a former billboard 30 under 30 exec but they go on to say this manifesto that he published on linkedin which was titled how to win the music industry of 2019 to 2025 is absolutely terrifying they say a lot of it is tech jargon but there are pieces that provide clues to where these folks heads are at and where these folks heads are at is that in the future ai will analyze songs to predetermine their quality not to mention evidently they will just take them and sell them without permission as nfts okay we're now in crazy land

SPEAKER_113: i'm trying to oh yeah it's rory felton okay just not ryan um oh sorry rory felt like yeah which i think

SPEAKER_272: people do this if they don't want the person who is doing an ego search for them selves or has an alert yep to find out you're talking to them because people did that to me yeah they would say apologies

SPEAKER_78: to ryan rory felton is the guy we mean well anyway no apologies to this guy because obviously from what we're looking at here um he's a thief uh and lost his mind this is a serious problem um i've had this

SPEAKER_77: happen a ton of times now where people are like hey i want to create nfts for all in for this weekend startups yada yada and they're like we're launching them tomorrow can we send you 10 of the proceeds i'm like no they're like you don't want the process i'm like no you i'm not giving you permission

SPEAKER_273: to do this and they're like why not we're fans and i'm like okay it's great that you're a fan if

SPEAKER_77: you're a fan buy the album buy a ticket buy a t-shirt from the merch store great don't steal people's ip intellectual property a meme is different if you make a meme and you make a joke that's different if you make a business where did the ip come from and that's the difference here and people are taking the behavior of fans like fan fiction or like i don't know i'm going to draw a

SPEAKER_01: picture of bezos looking buff because i'm a bezos fan and i want to have you know my own fan fiction

SPEAKER_16: of jeff bezos as the rock or he's going to be the new lead in fast and furious 17. that's fine you're not selling it if you want to make a fan film about darth vader you can actually do that if you don't make money because star wars has actually said we'll be okay with some fan films yada yada that's not this that is not this and that's not the pod clips thing i was talking about the other day where they were taking every tim ferris episode every this week in startups episode every all in print without permission and building a business on it not you have to ask first you can't ask after you have to ask

SPEAKER_03: first yeah well and this is i mean it's very interesting because what it appears to be happening is two separate things here i mean we had this conversation yesterday right about how sort of the aggregation model of the internet has led to this idea and frankly when it gets combined with nfts has led to the idea that you can make yourself into a creator and then make money off of anything including stuff that other people have created and that there's of course going to be plenty of scenarios in which that goes too far this seems like maybe a double whammy where hit piece or as people in the comments on linkedin are calling it obviously piece um has used possibly machine learning and ai to pull in songs that it thinks are going to be a hit and then resell them as nfts and it almost feels like it's this automated process and then basically musicians are discovering that the music has gone up on the site without their approval i may have mischaracterized that but that's my understanding of putting those two things together the linkedin piece with what's actually

SPEAKER_212: happening here yeah and they're not happy like short version they are also i'll give you a little

SPEAKER_01: piece of advice if you're going to pick an industry or a person to steal from the mob and the music

SPEAKER_116: industry you're going to be in the top like five of people you do not steal from kind of same same on the

SPEAKER_292: hit piece you said it not me like yeah you don't steal from them also hollywood don't steal movies from

SPEAKER_77: hollywood they have a lot of lawyers they live for this and what they will do is they'll make an

SPEAKER_16: example out of you which i hope they do here i hope they sue this person and make an example of him and shut his company down because he needs to be some examples where and listen i'm a startup investor but i guarantee you this person knows they're breaking the law this is a person who's in the

SPEAKER_293: industry you must make an example if you're in the industry you know it yeah yeah and then there's

SPEAKER_16: this other thing of making tools by the way i'll just finish with this yeah if you make a tool

SPEAKER_102: that is designed explicitly to facilitate copyright infringement you know and it's not canva like so sure somebody on canva could steal somebody's photo or somebody with you know i don't know adobe premiere

SPEAKER_16: you could steal people's movies and then edit them and you know like those are generic tools that

SPEAKER_01: the primary use is not stealing but here the primary use of this tool if it is in fact designed to pull from spotify where all the music is copyrighted like that's not the bastion of right um creative commons now if you were pulling from the creative commons library and saying make an nft and it said hey you pulled from the no attribution section of creative commons here's what you have to do hey you

SPEAKER_00: pulled from the attribution make sure you put an attribution on it or we're going to do that for you that would be thoughtful right right that would be fine public search engines aggregate it all yeah

SPEAKER_16: yeah there was literally a search engine of um creative there's a creative commons search engine so if you want free content start there and make nfts from creative commons stuff yep on the hippies twitter

SPEAKER_03: account they responded to the allegations by saying clearly we have struck a nerve and are very eager to create the ideal experience for music fans to be clear artists get paid when digital goods are sold on hit piece like all beta products we are continuing to listen to all user feedback and are committed to evolving the product to fit the needs of artists labels and fans alike causing the son of eddie van halen

SPEAKER_301: wolfgang van halen to respond ha ha ha ha ha ha ha quote ha ha ha ha ha ha and effort and then he

SPEAKER_03: responded to himself by saying oh you can also mint this interaction auction it and then shove it up your

SPEAKER_130: you have my full permission he's definitely a van halen that was it yeah he's definitely on that

SPEAKER_16: family line great that's the sound of a nerve of a nerve being struck here's i mean and then there are some other musicians who are not going to respond to you on twitter they're going to meet

SPEAKER_03: you outside your house with a pipe like be careful dude like what's that movie where they talk about the vig the movie about the music industry that's just like don't touch the vig or something yeah i mean it's

SPEAKER_165: just look up like mom do that music industry like crazy you know people with i have a friend in the

SPEAKER_113: music industry who told me like you know somebody had sampled something and i'll i'll abstract this

SPEAKER_16: so it's not identifiable anyway somebody had you know basically showed up with their crew with guns in their belts walked into the musician this is like artists who you know some people listening would know and this happened long ago literally showed up knocked on the door the person opened the door to the recording studio and they just bashed it in and showed up and literally pulled out a gun pointed it at the artist and said sign this piece of paper

SPEAKER_190: like this is like crazy you know who knows if this is true or not but this is somebody in the music industry who's in the know well i'm literally like sign this and the person literally signed it

SPEAKER_00: like i don't know and like to this day i think that that is a binding legal agreement wow and that

David Friedberg: person was like yeah i don't feel the need to report this crime even like setting aside the guns

SPEAKER_03: and the mob behavior look at how artists have had to fight for pennies since the since music is right because the music industry the recording industry kept such a freaking stranglehold on cds for so long that then when music really did start going digital they weren't profiting then streaming came along and you would get like a million streams on youtube for like a quarter of a penny and then they had to fight so hard to get paid through spotify at all so musicians are out here finally figuring they had to sell concert tickets for 300 like musicians are out here finally figuring out how to make a living from the digital music economy for which i blame record labels and so do they but still and then along comes this freaking guy or nfts or whatever just being like we're just gonna take it

SPEAKER_00: and turn it into a token this apology was so terrible was it written in notes like it's this feels like one of those apologies that was written in notes and then screenshot is it a screenshot apology

SPEAKER_323: just it's it's a cut and paste apology i think for sure no i think it's great yeah confirmation from

SPEAKER_78: the producers oh it is a classic notes about if you're writing your apology not on twitter natively or

SPEAKER_00: instagram natively but you're taking the time to do it in the notes app and edit it and share it with

SPEAKER_141: your crisis team yeah you did something really bad that's when you notice when you're that's when you're

SPEAKER_00: effed you're seriously when you're fracked when you're screenshotting notes that's the point in life

David Friedberg: where you need to reflect molly and possibly change the name of your company and maybe

SPEAKER_190: that's what you're saying yeah good call back yes his apology to shareholders and to government officials in the apple notes in the apple notes totally

SPEAKER_329: oh oh beautiful beautiful all right everybody let's get to our interview with page hey everybody

SPEAKER_141: welcome to angel season six episode number four this is the season of the angel podcast where we're talking to first time fund managers yes people who have raised their first fund and they're finding their way in the venture community and making those bets with the hope that you if you're interested

SPEAKER_01: in either getting their money as a founder can understand how they're placing their bets or perhaps you're thinking about raising your own fund and you want to hear from somebody who's fresh in the game who's just closed their first fund really great lineup so far and today will be no difference in our first episode we had mac the vc nice 10 million dollar tight fund i see that he announced

SPEAKER_141: he's going to raise a 75 to 100 million dollar fund now he's with rare breed uh david rosenthal a friend from acquired the podcast he is doing kindergarten vc nice three million dollar uh fund his my first fund trial just to see if he could get it done and he's done great with that and then we had paki mccormick from not boring a great email newsletter content creator who is uh let's face it taking a playbook that some of you may have heard from podcast plus fund equals interesting and today on the firm i think the youngest venture capitalist we've ever had page van doherty is from behind genius ventures she just graduated in 20 wait for it 20 and she has her own fun previously she was an on deck angel fellow in 2021 we'll hear about that and uh she graduated from san diego state in 2020 worked at tvc capital vcic and northrop grumman during college she's the author of seed to harvest a simple explanation of venture capital published in may of 2021 it's a children's book made to demystify

SPEAKER_70: venture capital and she's got her own podcast uh called seed to harvest and it's based on the book welcome to the program paige how are you thank you so much for having me jason it's an honor

SPEAKER_141: to be here oh thank you for saying that and uh congratulations on the success when uh i i'm guessing you're 22 or 23 years old if i'm guessing 23 let me ask this question when did you first hear

SPEAKER_339: the term venture capital how did you become exposed to this and then we'll get into how you very

SPEAKER_341: quickly figured out how to start your own fund sure um the first time i heard venture capital was probably in 2018 i had been selected to compete on our school's first ever venture capital investment competition team at san diego state i previously thought that venture capital was something that old dudes like sat around in mahogany libraries smoking cigars and picking companies and i just came from

SPEAKER_344: the mahogany library and i just put out my uh macanudo so yeah i'm we're not in person so i can't

SPEAKER_347: smell the cigar so um but i ended up binge watching silicon valley over my winter break of my junior year

SPEAKER_341: and through seeing strong female characters in venture capital roles i started to understand that there was a place in this industry for folks who didn't come from generational wealth and had different backgrounds and so started to build a playbook around what my role in venture might be ended up

SPEAKER_347: taking second place to the reigning national champs our first year about two months of cramming and uh i remember sitting in the partner meeting at google where we competed being absolutely grilled by all these venture partners and loving it there was a spark for me that i had never felt before and i just felt at home in that mock partner meeting yeah so that's what sparked my interest originally and now it's it's fun it's come full circle now i'm coaching the vcic team at sdsu so cool to get back

SPEAKER_64: in that way that's amazing that your college actually had a venture capital club basically that competed

SPEAKER_141: and uh what an amazing way to get exposed to all this now you're you watch silicon valley one right you binge watch it now there are two very specific female venture capitalists on this show one of them i was told is a little bit aspergery and was based on a hybrid of maybe peter thiel and marissa mayer and

SPEAKER_102: marissa i don't think is aspergery but they said a little robotic uh and then there was one who was a little more more heartfelt and who was a little closer and who was the boss who was the junior to the the senior female which one did you identify with more i think i resonated with both of them in

SPEAKER_347: certain circumstances i think my journey being an empath and like uh no is where do you say a lot in

SPEAKER_341: this industry which is very difficult i resonated a lot with the character journey of the second one

SPEAKER_347: yeah the more junior one who was the heartfelt one you see her start very starry-eyed and super excited and you watch her learn more about how the venture ecosystem works and develop what i like to describe as the whetstone and like um basically sharpening your decision knife i think that's been one of my

SPEAKER_350: biggest learnings becoming a fund manager um is like how to make those sharp decisions and communicate

SPEAKER_01: them with warmth and warmth and empathy so let's let's double click on that sharpening the knife and making decisions when you first started investing and making those decisions what did you think was the proper framework to make a decision and you know whatever 12 months later what have you learned and

SPEAKER_09: what do you think is the best practice what is your methodology for picking a founder and a company

SPEAKER_341: to invest in so there's a couple parts of that question i'll start first on the question about developing an investment process one of my mentors and investor in our fund andy weisman told me during our first call that the investment process is just that a process you're not going to know if you're good at it for another seven to ten years so you might as well chronicle the journey do the best that you can ask lots of questions from founders operators investors along the way and try and hone into what your intuition is saying about the types of founders that you like to work with venture can be done a thousand different ways whether that's portfolio construction or thesis and it's really about

SPEAKER_347: a process of self-discovery of what you want to invest in the types of founders that you want to back and so the first deal that i did was a company previously called cardea now called palette might have seen it on twitter their community oriented job board platform and when i met the founder i was working at work west which is api first startup had never made an investment but i was introducing different investors and founders to each other and i remember getting off the phone with

SPEAKER_341: him after our first conversation and just having such table thumping enthusiasm and the idea he was

SPEAKER_347: building i was like i need to be involved i want to be a part of what he's building and so i ended up asking for allocation and with no idea what i was going to do with that allocation um i woke up the next morning i was like okay cool so like got to find 50k somewhere and i'm a recent college grad i definitely

SPEAKER_341: don't have that and so i ended up raising 50k from 17 investors for those of you familiar with spvs

SPEAKER_347: that's a lot of small checks um and it's been really fun over the past year because a lot of those folks that invested in my first syndicate were first-time angel investors people like david wong and jamie melcer and to see their journey as investors has been really rewarding but my first decision came from having that feeling of conviction in the founder their team the size of the market it was a creator oriented company and so as a creator myself i felt deep empathy with the problem that uh kai was describing so that's how my first decision was made and so uh let's step back for a second you um

SPEAKER_01: decided you wanted to start a fund as opposed to go work for one or did you consider hey maybe i'll apply since i won this competition and i'm enthusiastic about it maybe i'll go work for somebody or a firm

SPEAKER_141: and learn from them as opposed to say the boldness of just starting your own fund yeah i think about this

SPEAKER_347: theme of creative constraints a lot i was talking with heather harnett at human ventures who's one of our lps about the decision to start a fund versus join one for me one of those creative constraints was when i was a senior in college i was exploring opportunities in venture and i had gotten an offer from a firm in boston to be their youngest partner track associate but when it came down to the day to make the decision i was mulling it over and i really wanted to stay in san diego where my family is and i remember just being like all right universe if you want to give me a sign on what the correct decision is to make i really appreciate it and that next morning kobe bryant died and my entire timeline was flooded with like you know pick your own agenda and spend time with your family and think about your legacy and for me it was such an overwhelming sign that i should make the decision to stay with my family that was february 6th 2020 a month later we were in lockdown my senior year effectively came to an end and went online and i kind of tucked away that dream of working in venture i got a great position early stage startup saw it from the inside but in 2019 i conceived this idea that in 10 years i wanted to run a fund it just ended up happening on a shorter timeline so let's get

SPEAKER_01: into that you make this decision uh your heart tells you i gotta stay with my family i gotta make my own fund uh how did you decide and and who kind of taught you and how did you figure out how to start

SPEAKER_339: your own spv and then start your own fund and and how did you find the first lp yeah it's really funny

SPEAKER_347: because no one talks about it this is like something i would google and be like how to start an spv and there was all of these clickbaity seo articles and that had no i no real insight into how they worked and so i was i was going through my journey of creating spv actually my business partner josh slisserman and i were introduced the same week that i gained allocation into this deal so i was drilling him with questions about the logistics of an spv at its core uh an spv or special special purpose vehicle is a group of investors that you gather together and act as the pass-through vehicle to invest in a startup what a common misconception is is that people need to have legal entities in place before they make the investment in my experience it's actually the other way around where you should have the commitments and allocation in more of a handshake form before you go through the

SPEAKER_341: process of legally forming a syndicate it is around two thousand five hundred dollars i believe i went

SPEAKER_347: through assure for forming my first spv and that's what we use yeah and we're actually investors in the company yeah so thank you for your uh patronage absolutely i'm big fans of assure i actually dm'd landon who's the managing director of bisher syndicates and i was like hey i got allocation of this deal have no idea how to set up a syndicate heard you were good at it and he helped me through the

SPEAKER_141: whole process so so basically you're on twitter you're meeting people on twitter yep you're sliding into their dms and saying how do i do this yes and lo and behold people wanted to help you yeah

SPEAKER_01: it's amazing that's how you met the yeah how to do an spv that's where you met the startup you wanted to invest in and that's where you met your lps yes and my business partner we got introduced by

SPEAKER_387: someone that followed both of us on twitter yeah see this is the thing people look at twitter and

SPEAKER_01: they're like well twitter's kind of a waste of time and what you're telling me is you built your

SPEAKER_64: entire professional network from zero to having your own fund at 20 you say you're 22 or 23 yeah 23 and

SPEAKER_141: you did the fund where you're 22 you went from like zero to hero like on twitter definitely not there yet but i mean i would say raising your first fund is a very significant moment in time for anybody who

SPEAKER_01: wants to there's plenty of people who've been working in venture capital for 20 years who haven't started their own fund so you get that first spv under your belt you start going to people and

SPEAKER_141: saying i have an allocation would you like to put money in tell us about the first deal in terms of

SPEAKER_393: how many people how much money etc yeah as i mentioned before my first deal i had 50k in allocation and

SPEAKER_341: i ended up having 17 folks invest david wong who's the director of design at webflow ended up being one of

SPEAKER_347: the first folks to invest we had previously been editing a lot of each other's writing he was one of the largest i raised a gofundme to illustrate seed to harvest because i also was a broke college student at the time when i was writing it and so that's how david and i originally met i had no idea who he was and randomly donated 500 to this project and i was like hey

SPEAKER_393: what's up would love to get to know you thanks so much for uh you know donating to this project i

SPEAKER_347: really appreciate it and have built a friendship over the years he sent me such a incredible card last year and one of my favorite quotes from it was thank you so much for setting my dreams into motion and that for me has been one of the most rewarding parts of my journey is i'm trying to write about how to set up an spv i'm writing this is going to be a much longer article but you know how to go about raising your first fund and things you should be aware of and sharing that information so that one day other people's journeys can be shorter than mine was yeah like they could actually raise their

SPEAKER_141: first fund when they're a senior in high school i mean it's really they there's really not much earlier

SPEAKER_01: you can go um no but i think well you know it's interesting it's kind of like a joke but it's not we started investing earlier and earlier in founders and obviously the people dropped out of college famously zuckerberg and um elizabeth holmes and uh bill gates like that was kind of a tradition like yeah if you're that good quit uh in two or three of those cases and then before that

SPEAKER_64: then we started to see high school students start companies and we had a situation where we had a heist uh we accepted somebody into our accelerator and one of them was 16 years old and we're like

SPEAKER_330: uh do we need to get a permission slip for this do you have classes and we like literally had to double click on that and figure out hey is this uh yeah yeah it was copacetic uh so you then decide

SPEAKER_01: you're gonna start your own fund and uh how does that come about you were talking to a shore about funds or angel list or quarter or something and they said hey you know you could start your own fund or

SPEAKER_64: you just decided i should have a fund to invest out of so i don't have to fire up an spv every time

SPEAKER_393: yeah so the joke is on me because one of the running motivations for starting a fund was doing less paperwork but now putting together taxes for 120 investors yeah i'm definitely not doing less paperwork

SPEAKER_330: um admin in venture and back office is like uh 10 years ago it was incredibly arduous it's become a

SPEAKER_09: lot better because of card assure and angel list and other services but it's still

SPEAKER_347: intense 100 so to give a quick bit of context one of my other creative constraints was i wasn't um an accredited investor and so that meant that i couldn't raise on angel list which was a bit um

SPEAKER_09: frustrating and and to explain to people an accredited investor is somebody who makes 200 000 a year at school and you were a person who had internships but never a job i was working full-time at work west

SPEAKER_347: but i definitely wasn't over that line yet got it and i actually think that has to be your last two years of income yeah it has to be last two years but the thing is you can organize a syndicate and raise a fund without being an accredited investor and i think that's something that a lot of people don't know is you can be the connecting node you just can't invest directly it has to be like through the

SPEAKER_341: entity that you set up that is a partnership so that's a that's a fun fact for anyone listening

SPEAKER_64: that is wondering it is fascinating when you think about it you're not qualified according to these regulations which are evolving in fairness um and people know they need to change and that's in process but you're not in theoretically a person is not good enough to invest in a company but they

SPEAKER_345: can help other people invest in companies yes this is strange yeah it's really weird it's there's this

SPEAKER_347: there's a theme that i call the trust coefficient and i feel like that's a big part of it is having accredited investors trust your decision making skills so the genesis of the fun really was me meeting uh my co-founder at behind genius ventures josh through the process of doing my spv

SPEAKER_341: ended up deploying personally around 300k and early stage syndicate deals over the course of three months

SPEAKER_347: and at that point i was working full-time requests i was doing this on nights and weekends i was writing a book it was getting a bit overwhelming and then i was like sure it'll be great a point

SPEAKER_206: on the side did your boss know you were doing this on the side or you're doing this on the side okay

SPEAKER_347: so you cleared it with them i told him when i signed my offer i was like hey just let you know i'm gonna

SPEAKER_345: raise a venture fund in the future and that's probably gonna be my next path i don't think that he was expecting it to be six months after i started but that's how the cookie crumpled um so i i met josh

SPEAKER_347: and he was really close with two folks that were very instrumental in our fund so arjun seth the tribe capital and smith gajri who's the ex-dso of carta and so and arjun had previously worked at social capital which month yes exactly um actually we invested in a founder who's ex-social capital justin archetype really enjoyed working with him he said great things about his time there um so josh had had this interest and he was a bit on the fence about pursuing it full-time um and was just kind of thinking through that and when we had met it was funny we had both told our friends when we got off the first call that we had i have this intuitive feeling that i'm supposed to work with this person and neither of us could place it and so we ended up meeting in halfway between san diego and la where we each live in laguna beach and this was peak covid in december 2020 time frame so we sat six feet apart outside with masks on notebooks out and just running through what would it look like to build a venture firm of our dreams and that was the genesis of behind genius ventures from there we started fundraising in march and just wrapped up so took us about nine months start to finish ended up raising five million and 17 cents we were oversubscribed by 17 cents thank you um and one of the interesting things is we were actively deploying as we were fundraising so that was quite a time of actively deploying fundraising working full-time and publishing a book and i just started working full-time on buying genius in july of last year so it's been quite a ride and uh the book i think probably

SPEAKER_141: showed people that you're creating stuff in the world and you're passionate that must have kept

SPEAKER_01: coming up when you talk to lps right like oh what a clever idea yeah talk about this concept of instead of talking about doing stuff you just had the chutzpah the gall you know the drive to actually

SPEAKER_141: do stuff in the world and how that changed how people looked at you over time for people who are listening to this saying well maybe i just need to get somebody to give me permission or maybe i need

SPEAKER_102: somebody to give me money to do something explain to them this different mindset that you obviously

SPEAKER_347: figured out very early in your life absolutely i would say one of the words that defines me is i just have the audacity sometimes like i had no right to do what i did i was just like i agree no one's telling me no so i'm just gonna do it and see what happens and that was such a big part of uh of my

SPEAKER_433: journey so far where did that come from is that like some of your childhood is your dad or mom a rebel

SPEAKER_102: did you have a friend in high school we just did whatever they wanted and you were like that seems

SPEAKER_347: like a good plan i was like the most rebel street as the most straight-laced kid i might say that it comes from my love of books i've read at least a thousand books um used to come home from the library with like 20 of them and so i feel like i've lived a thousand lifetimes through what i've learned there and there was a couple books that were really instrumental in my framework of how i think about the world so one is mastery by robert green in that book he talks about these phases of your life where you go through kind of like the new phase the creative active phase and the mastery phase that made me have a lot more patience with what i was doing and appreciate that i'm gonna stuck at a lot of things when i get started but if i just take the first step and continue you talk about this a lot with content of just you know consistently doing it over and over again um and just talking to people i would cold email artists so i wanted to manage rappers originally but financially venture

SPEAKER_393: made a lot more sense yeah yeah i think it's very similar because you're working with people

SPEAKER_347: with large creative visions and building businesses and strategizing around media and messaging strategies so it is relatively similar but through my conversations with other people people the ones that are in positions that i a admired and b really enjoyed what they did all had this common thread of asking for what they wanted even if other people thought it was you know kind of shameless of them to do that you'd be surprised the worst thing someone can say is no and there's this is a lot of times people surprise you this is a reoccurring theme of this season

SPEAKER_70: because um mac from rare breed if if you listen to the first episode anybody out there you did okay

SPEAKER_433: he just was talking about how many meetings he did and he did like a thousand meetings and he just kept

SPEAKER_141: asking people hey support me hey support me hey support me and if you get comfortable with getting a lot of no's you need but one yes to get the ball rolling and once you get one lp and you're like yeah you

SPEAKER_64: know i'm talking to these 30 people and talking to those people could have mean they said no by the way it's not intellectually incorrect to say i'm talking to these people even though they're not

SPEAKER_70: investors and you uh landed one or two all of a sudden now people are going to take the meeting right and you kind of build on previous success what are the books i'm fascinated by this thousand

SPEAKER_01: book idea yeah other books or autobiographies or other genres that kind of mind virused you into thinking well screw it i'm just going to go my own path this is something i've been thinking about a

SPEAKER_393: lot i feel when i was younger i felt a lot like a ball play-doh and i would just like pick up anything in my path and i'd be like oh like let's try this let's try this and as i've gotten older i'm like read the book critically think about whether or not you want to apply it you don't have time to apply

SPEAKER_388: everything i'm looking at my bookshelf right now oh yeah i do the same thing i pull up my art

SPEAKER_64: and be like what books are you reading what do you like i like i pull up my audible and i start scrolling through the library i'm like oh this one's good this one's good i i got a lot out of

SPEAKER_393: biographies yeah i really enjoyed fiction honestly i felt a lot of business books kind of said the same thing over and over again and a lot of them were written by writers they were written by non-classically trained writers so i really enjoyed communication and repetitive ideas i i just i i love books that left me with a sense of longing about some existential question instead of the same answer to the same question around how do i get successful a lot of people give a prescription for success that looks strangely exactly like how they did it um and so that is i got the core of

SPEAKER_59: you know a great autobiography is like here's how i did it yeah i don't know if that applies to you or not

SPEAKER_01: and almost universally some portion of it is correct and then by definition if they've already used that path it kind of gets burned it's like a marketing technique or something like i got successful this way it's like yeah and everybody knows that and everybody has it in their skill set and every

SPEAKER_347: opportunity to use that little strategy or tactic is done yeah one of my favorite things to read was actually my journal so i've kept a journal pretty much every year since i was 10. i never knew i wanted to be a venture capitalist but i sure knew that i wanted to be a writer so i'd always journal in high school is much more about like my feelings and boys but as i got older it was like all about this business stuff that i was learning and it's fun to go back and look at what i was writing in my kind of junior year of college um and i would always make vision boards so that was like a big part

SPEAKER_01: of what i was doing i think there is something to this like if you can visualize it and you can see yourself doing it it kind of pulls you towards that goal right like yeah i see myself as a venture capitals or i see myself managing rap acts you can kind of start to fill in the blanks and the connective tissue as to what would that take and you figure that out very quickly on twitter with all these contacts

SPEAKER_347: yeah this was if you can see that it says forbes 30 under 30 and i had that on my wall for like 2017 till this year and this year i was yeah i was named uh on the venture capitalist and for me the breakdown of a goal looked like i see a goal i write it down and then i talk to people who have accomplished that goal and see what steps that they took towards getting it and what i saw at the core of it was just treating people like they're human and not assuming that there was some kind of hierarchy that meant that you couldn't talk to anyone so i would just send random cold emails for example i sent one to beth comstock of ge she wrote a really great book about entrepreneurship and i wrote her when i was at northrop and said hey this has a lot of effect on how i'm thinking about being an entrepreneur within an organization and she wrote back she was like thanks so much for the kind remark really appreciate it and you'd be surprised how far a well-written cold email goes i would not be but i think most people

SPEAKER_01: would be my entire career is based upon very sniper shot short emails yeah and you would be amazed uh you are correct how quickly uh somebody will get back to you if you write something about them that is tight um and is not asking them for anything but just hey i read your book i really enjoyed it i get these emails every day about my book if they write something nice i always write back thanks pal appreciate it go write a review whatever it's it's you're kind of showing interest in other people and you have unlocked one of the key points of business which is it is personal it is about personalities and people are just humans so you don't have to act weird just because somebody's successful you can just say how's it going and what are you up to and i really appreciated this thing you did in the world

SPEAKER_78: and they will appreciate you being normal i can tell you that people act very strange definitely

SPEAKER_347: underestimate the value of just saying your appreciation for something that someone has

SPEAKER_341: worked on a lot of times many people i've met that are successful in business their success is more the sawdust of their process and they're really at the core motivated by impact and so if you make a comment about the impact that you've had on their life that can often mean more to them than them

SPEAKER_350: closing a massive deal they've had on your life right yes yes on the impact they've had on your life that can mean more to them than anything else that's happened that absolutely if you've already made

SPEAKER_01: your money you've become famous or you've hit whatever check boxes you had on your list when somebody stops me in the street and says hey jcal i love this episode or i've been listening to your

SPEAKER_78: podcast since high school or in your case middle school whatever you know you've ran into the pod uh

SPEAKER_330: yes you know it's like really for me i mean my my bucket gets full my heart is filled with joy

SPEAKER_01: and they're like oh i love this episode i saw that it changed my life i'm like oh my god it makes everything worthwhile going to work today and the next day uh it's so incredible i was gonna say

SPEAKER_433: about the 30 under 30. you got it i did did it change how you feel or was it just like okay

SPEAKER_341: um i have kind of a funny story about it so due to covet there was supply chain issues with the

SPEAKER_393: magazines and my mom i think it had the biggest impact on my mom which i'm the happiest about and she went to every barnes nobles and best buy in town and like bought them out uh and that was

SPEAKER_347: really cool it was a testament to the decision that i had made a year ago to stay in san diego that was like a big part of having some level of success while staying true to my roots and putting my family first aside from that we've had some interesting inbound outreach or yeah inbound from both founders and investors we have closed for fund one so it's it's been great on like the founder side and then continuing to build relationships on the investor side and then i have really enjoyed people reaching out and just saying how my story has inspired them to get into venture i was sent a meeting i wanted to meet with someone at delphi digital because i think they're a really incredible firm in the crypto world ended up booking a meeting and this guy hops on the meeting and he's like hey i literally have this job because of a piece that you wrote about venture a year and a half ago and so it was a nice reminder to some people to you know reach out and say what an impact that my work had had on them which

SPEAKER_70: was awesome it uh i had a similar kind of experience the first time i was in the new york times i uh

SPEAKER_01: couldn't sleep because i was so excited to see myself on the cover of the business section i think amy harman wrote the story and uh i basically was walking around manhattan at four in the morning i was walking by each bodega you know each corner deli and looking to see if they had the new york

SPEAKER_102: times and sure enough somewhere around 4 35 in the morning the new york times truck comes by they

SPEAKER_64: literally throw the bundle of new york times to the guy and i immediately start unbutting the guy's like what are you doing like those are our new york times i was like i need a copy wait a second he goes out he gets his thing he opens it up i said i'm in it he goes really i said yeah and i opened

SPEAKER_102: it up and i read it with the guy he said congratulations i was like can i have five of them he's like yeah and then he just charged me for one he's like i take it it's a good i love congratulations that's awesome but then once you get one of them uh at some point i just thought i remember bob dylan just was like don't look back and like just move forward and whatever they define you as the press is a review mirror and so then i just in my office when i was getting so much press in the 90s in new york i had a box in the corner and i would take the press clips my system would bring them in or somebody bring hey you're in the paper hey you're in forbes hey you're in fortune hey you're in this and i take it i look at it i throw it in the box and then the box would fill up and uh my system would tape it and put it in my storage unit and they put another box there and we just fill the boxes and i still have the boxes that i've never opened in my storage unit and once in a while uh you know they get moved from one location to another and i'll peek in a box and see the

SPEAKER_492: faded pages of when i first became famous in the 90s and then everybody forgot about me for a while

SPEAKER_01: well listen congratulations on this how uh how do you uh define success for yourself now that you've raised this five million dollar fund and how has the life changed now that you got this under your

SPEAKER_64: belt like what is your day-to-day life like now that you got the fund up and running i think the

SPEAKER_347: biggest switch honestly the the forbes under 30 had a lot of impact on how i viewed what success means to me for a while that had been a big pillar of what success meant to me and after was the outside recognition was the outside recognition and after i received the forbes under 30 award i was working my exec coach to try and reframe what success meant to me and we were going through this exercise and um i was talking about how i felt a bit insecure because i felt like a lot of other folks on that list had done a lot more than me and she was like at the end of the day if you're comparing dollars to dollars you're not going to be happy because that's not what you're motivated by

SPEAKER_341: you're motivated by impact and so you have to reframe it to focus on the process and not the outcome

SPEAKER_347: so what i think about a lot is input metrics versus output metrics so for example it's how many founders that we meet with every week how many other fund managers i'm talking to so on a daily basis i will often have three to four founder meetings a couple meetings with other fund managers we a couple like lp meetings this has shifted since fundraising ended i used to be doing six ish lp meetings i was listening to max episode and i think we had had around 1700 meetings last week and or not last week but last year during the fundraise and so now you had 1700 to talk about mac vc we we

SPEAKER_102: had 1700 1700 meetings wow yeah to get like 150 or so lps i felt pretty good about that conversion for a first fund yeah and then oh yeah what will happen in the next one now is you don't have room for anybody because once you hit that 10 million limit you're going to be i mean with the exception of qps you're just going to fill up and that'll be a great experience but i like what you said about inputs and outputs uh obviously that you know the um the really good uh it's not actually well written it's kind of dry but the amazon book i've got the name of it right now they talk about inputs and

SPEAKER_01: outputs and the output you don't you know how much press you get is kind of out of your control i mean on the margins you might be able to hire pr pr people but working backwards is the name of the book and the input is your hard work and your hard work will be based upon how many founders you meet because if you meet a lot of founders the chances of meeting an exceptional breakout one go up and exactly how hard do you work for those founders and your um your reframing of success is incredibly accurate and will serve you well because there's always going to be somebody who is

SPEAKER_64: not as hard working perhaps not as smart who will hit three unicorns out of complete luck which by the

SPEAKER_503: way is what they said about me like literally there were venture capitalists who were like

SPEAKER_504: that guy hit three unicorns in his first seven screw him i was the person they were upset at because like

SPEAKER_102: how could that guy get so lucky and have no idea what venture capital is when i was a scout and i think you know now that could happen to me you know and it's it is a fool's errand to look to a forbes writer or to the scoreboard you know of the randomness in our industry for validation the validation comes

SPEAKER_416: from did the founder say hey listen i really appreciate you calling me on a sunday when things are hard that's what matters and you're so right to focus on the process so that that was a really helpful

SPEAKER_341: reframing and then focusing a lot more on content when we were pretty heads down with the fundraising i found it a bit hard to prioritize content and we didn't raise through 506c which effectively meant that i had to keep a big fat secret for nine months about raising so that i wouldn't anger the sec uh

SPEAKER_01: you did 506b which might have been a mistake watching how great mac did you might have found 10 more investors in a bit of 10 million dollar fund yeah i'm looking at this 506c versus 506b and i'm like i think i'm gonna do the 506c just so people who are interested in understanding what i do can have a meeting with me or my team right yeah absolutely i just want more people to get educated and if i could have people on a call even if it was a group call i could do like a webinar with a thousand people or a hundred potential lps uh i could just say like hey here's how i think about the world and if you want to participate sorry there's no room but if you're a qualified purchaser i

SPEAKER_393: guess there is because you could have 2 000 of those yeah i'm really looking forward to being more transparent with the process and going through it i was journaling pretty extensively during the first fundraise though so there will be sort of a reflection on that coming soon do you ever read

SPEAKER_517: any good books on i'm a writer too do you ever read any good books on writing um yes actually on writing

SPEAKER_393: well is one of my favorites and then any books by joan didion are really how i based my writing style

SPEAKER_347: off of oh really yeah i love her writing style i i actually really funny i haven't talked to my high school english teacher in eight years and she randomly reached out yesterday and texted me and said hey would love to catch up and in her class that's where i became a good writer because we had to

SPEAKER_102: write a two-page essay every day for a year and just takes practice yeah she was um really a keen observer i think uh when you think of joan didion's writing like just very very sharp eye and a good

SPEAKER_16: sense of humor which i really appreciate that was another thing she didn't like take herself or

SPEAKER_01: anything too seriously and she really um she just knew how to like study what was actually happening in the moment which of course new york writers and everybody started cribbing so anytime they would do a profile it'd be like oh this person walked in and their stride was x and the room turned around it's just like very descriptive like taking you to that moment all the magazine writers aped that in the 90s 80s and 90s um including bready stinellis and you know a lot of folks just were didion fans like crazy and they just built and built and built on that uh yeah and then you missed magazine writing magazine writing was such a weird awesome time i mean i was still like growing up during that period

SPEAKER_476: so i was born in 98. okay well you were eight years old the 90s is when it peaked i had my highlights

SPEAKER_01: magazine rejection for submitting a piece oh you do i loved highlights magazine goofus and gallant oh yeah there's great stuff in that highlights i used to love getting i'll give you a couple of recommendations

SPEAKER_102: um weren't standing up uh i don't know if you've got a chance to read that by steve martin and he's a writer incredible just his story of you know how he built his craft um you know in a number of different because you know he's got a couple of different skills stephen king on writing oh yeah

SPEAKER_345: have you read it or have you just heard of it i've heard of it it's been recommended many times so

SPEAKER_102: it's been i mean i just i'm writing my next book and i read his book for the second time this summer and it's like mind-blowing like even the second time he he he has this theory and it's worth sharing with the audience here because you're going to love this theory but he's like i believe

SPEAKER_416: that writing and he like he reads the book in his stephen king voice so i believe writing is telekinesis and it's time travel because i could say to you right now i'm writing this book on a desk looking out in massachusetts on the countryside and i have a red you know velvet uh tablecloth and

SPEAKER_141: there's a bird statue in the corner and a cup of coffee but it's stained and in your mind i am telepathically putting these images into your mind that you're hearing but it's not the same time period and i don't know when you're reading this book but i just am impacting and firing off these things in your brain and bringing you to this moment that i'm having and when he said that my brain melted i was like oh my god that is what writing is you could and i just said it and now all these people are having that fire up in their mind you're like oh my god you could literally paint the world that you're experiencing right now and hundreds or thousands of years later people would have it and

SPEAKER_393: they would be there in their minds as well yeah i think that's the power of descriptive writing and why i've always liked fiction so much is i feel like that's been absent for the most part from a lot of

SPEAKER_347: not all non-fiction books but a lot of business books is that they don't tell anecdotes writing

SPEAKER_70: yeah every two pages i kept saying every like two or three pages my my partner brian and i would talk

SPEAKER_78: about it and he was my partner writing the book and he really like edited it for me and read it and we're like we got to drop an anecdote in here it's been six pages since an anecdote let's come up with

SPEAKER_102: a crazy story that you've experienced and drop it in oh the final one bird by bird ann lamont another great i saw a quote from that recently i think tim ferris my pal tim ferris just had yes i didn't listen to it but i know tim was also i think tim might have been the guy who accepted it in my mind is the ann lamont book and she just yeah he talks about the four hour chef

SPEAKER_393: i'm going through it right now i just got my like cast iron pans i'm ready to be oh very good yeah

SPEAKER_01: uh all right listen congratulations uh you're a force of nature uh and thank you for sharing how you did it so that other people you just dropped down a thousand ladders there's all kinds of people

SPEAKER_102: listening to this now going huh maybe i should do that too so everybody take a moment pause the podcast go to amazon if you're not driving you can do this at the same time possibly and uh i want you to type in seed to harvest a simple explanation of venture capital now i want you to order three copies and give it to your nieces and nephews and then put one on your shelf go buy a couple copies of the

SPEAKER_70: book and let's get more investors and capital allocators out there because that's what the world needs more people placing bets and solving problems and if you uh are in the podcast player anyway listening to this you could search for seed to harvest and subscribe two pages podcast as well you could follow page she's p-a-i-g-e-f-i-n-n-n that's three n's nice uh she's a general partner at behind genius ventures and you can visit them at behind geniusventures.com well done page

SPEAKER_544: thank you so much for having me jason really appreciate it i wish you uh tremendous success

SPEAKER_70: in your career and uh it's nice to see this next generation crushing it so we'll see you all next time

SPEAKER_548: on angel hey guys rachel reporting here on february 14th and 15th we'll be hosting a founder university intensive this is a two-day program for founders now this course is only open to women founders

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