SPEAKER_00: you got a space you got customers walking by you start with the sandwich shop yeah you know nobody really likes your sandwiches uh but everybody talks about the ice cream sundae at the end and it's just because you made some really unique sundae and then people start coming in just for the sundae you know hey want a sandwich like no just i'm gonna go right for the sundae and i brought my kid with me oh and i brought my my co-worker say wow what's unique about this you know sundae here uh okay let's put three sundays on and let's change the name of the place from you know zach and jason sandwich shop to zach and jason's sundaes and then all of a sudden you just like minor pivot just based on the feedback and now you're running a sunday shop now if you were the investor and you got sold on hey this is the best brisket sandwich you could ever have this is the best you know reuben in the world um and you come back and say hey we're making an ice cream

SPEAKER_03: parlor you're like what i didn't invest in an ice cream parlor but if you come back and you say look

SPEAKER_06: the ice cream uh sundaes we charge eight bucks for them cost us three and we're printing money and we sold 100 of them yesterday and uh guess what we suddenly find ourselves profitable we can pay our rent now you got the magic this week in startups is brought to you by

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SPEAKER_12: everybody welcome back to this week in startup today my guy zach coleus is back for another exciting

SPEAKER_00: episode of ask an angel now well we're both vcs really but we started as angels we write early stage checks um what is early stage i think we would define it zach you correct me if i'm wrong

SPEAKER_14: as uh pre-series a those that would be the earliest seed stage yeah we're in agreement there

SPEAKER_16: yeah yeah from from the very beginning from an idea all the way up to the point where like

SPEAKER_17: the line starts to extend and any ad can extend the lines if you got you know six months of month over month growth and you know all the metrics that the vcs love to see then they'll hit that bid

SPEAKER_21: but before that come talk to us yeah and we would call this starting point um what what are the

SPEAKER_00: characteristics of the uh startups in the zone where you and i invest this early stage what would you say is most characteristic of the work that gets done during that period and the startups uh who make it out

SPEAKER_17: of that period yeah so i tend to think of it as um three sort of stages in the early stage quote unquote you've got sort of what traditionally is called precede or concept stage or idea stage or sort of like it's just getting started and so that's where the founders are largely able if they're able they raise money from people they know people who have learned and watched them over the years and seen that they have the ability to perform and succeed and and if they're successful then people are very happy to give them capital because they've done it before sometimes those are people we know because they're famous so you know if travis was to go start another company you and i would be running up there be like hey hey hey hey please let us invest yeah yeah um uh some of those people are not famous but we know them because we've you know spend a lot of time with entrepreneurs and we get to see them in the trenches in the in the arena fighting it out and you know we're it's easy to bet on those people if you know them

SPEAKER_34: so that's phase one phase one is i you got an idea and you pass the hat with your friends and family

SPEAKER_17: thus the term friends and family round yeah yeah and so and there are some investors who invest at that stage from institutional funds or from from their own capital and they'll even if they don't know you um you know one of the most well known is a guy named charles hudson a precursor so he started doing this super early um a long time ago when everyone thought he was crazy and he would write relatively small checks into lots of startups and the idea being oh if you invest in enough of them some of them will break out and then you know power law being power law that will return the fund um and but

SPEAKER_41: traditionally that's worked out for charles who's been on the program many times yeah yeah yeah charles

SPEAKER_42: is charles is brilliant and he does good work so it's not surprising he's done very well yeah all

SPEAKER_12: right phase two you you got the friends and family past the hat phase you got an idea you're in the

SPEAKER_46: ideation you know you've got an idea of a market what's the next phase in this early stage

SPEAKER_17: three phases so the that that's what we would call our sort of like pre-seed traditionally um now we're into seed stage so seed stage means you have some mvp you have metrics you have validation which is like hey i've got this idea and i went to the market and i figured out if it was any good or not um here's my channel for instance i've gone and done marketing tests to see that hey i can acquire customers and people actually want this thing but we don't have any metrics yet like we still and the mvp maybe works maybe you've made it in you know who knows how you made it it's not it's not a scalable product but it appears that there is a real thing here that customers want and it appears that um uh we can scale this and and there's a big big tam big market opportunity um you know all the things that seem good look good smell good now with we got a potential vc investable um opportunity here the one thing that you don't have usually at this point is you don't have significant revenue so you're not looking at hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in revenue you've got something in revenue but probably maybe not very much um you don't have month over month growth rates and you don't have the core metrics that most vcs are really interested in which is things like retention and churn and the virality of your product and your cac ltv and all the things that you know if you go and spend a lot of time looking at vc metrics they're all this long list you don't have any of those but you do have something that seems like it's pretty good and this is what we'd normally call the seed stage um and it's pretty big category it's they can and that can the checks

SPEAKER_56: there can run anywhere from hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars from investors got it so phase

SPEAKER_32: one you're doing ideation you're raising from friends and family phase two you're raising from seed

SPEAKER_00: funds you have an mvp a minimum viable product a prototype some people have played with it you have an idea of how you're going to reach them that was the channel so you got the mvp you got the channel channel just hey where's the stream of users going to flow from could be from a forum like reddit it could be from a mailing list it could be from a podcast it could be from instagram ads it could be from facebook ads any number of places uh could be your funnel and you do have maybe not the full complement of metrics but you may have 10 people using the product and you can study three of them and so you have some idea of how big this could get what it is uh and how do people like it so it's not strong product market fit it's not market pull of course where the market is seeking you out but it's something that's more than nothing yes yeah yeah okay so now the third phase you said there were

SPEAKER_60: three phases in the early stage that you look at broadly the third stage is what we would normally

SPEAKER_17: call seed plus or c extension and so what happens here and this is very very common is a startup will raise some money they'll go into the market they'll make contact with the market and the market will

SPEAKER_52: rip their face off like yeah great i have this awesome idea i went and i built something and it didn't work and not only did it not work i got my i got my ass handed to me and most founders quit at that point um a few the ones that i really like they take that opportunity to look at what they've learned they look at what the market is telling them and they iterate they're like oh well it turns out that they don't want this game that i built but this chat program i built to help me build the game everybody loves that i want to start working on that and that iteration cycle is messy and it's most

SPEAKER_17: investors get really skittish in that sort of iteration cycle because the companies that are flailing look very similar to the companies that are doing good things and and so usually your insiders are the only investors who want to invest in you or occasionally you get outside investors who get comfortable in that iteration cycle but that iteration cycle is usually where the most magic things happen because when you make contact with the market very rarely does the company just go up into the right and like off we go like the first original idea was brilliance and everything else is good to go from there like for instance in the video game turning into the chat that's slack and like it was you know um twitter uh that was uh podcasting that turned into twitter so those iterations to twitter yeah yeah those iterations are magical and there's often in my opinion great opportunities there both as an investor and um for the entrepreneurs when they can learn from making contact with the market about what the market really wants and then they can go build something that people actually really want and then boom you're off to the races hopefully if you find that and so what i like to say is that moment is the moment where you have real product market fit and by product market fit i mean you can cold call a customer at nine o'clock at night on her cell phone while she's putting her kid to bed describe what you do in one sentence and instead of her saying you why are you calling me she's like oh my god i need to talk to you tomorrow i actually need that i want that that's like yes please um and

SPEAKER_56: that's that product market fit is um like we could talk about that for hours but that's a magical moment and i get really excited when i when i find companies out of that you see these blue light

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SPEAKER_73: it seriously i love this service found dot bio slash twist and a lot of founders uh give up they try one

SPEAKER_00: thing and they give up and this is why you know i think part of the magic of the early stage is when you have builder founders uh you know a developer a designer and a growth hacker walk into a startup you know that compliment you know you know they run out of capital or they're on fumes but they're still iterating on the product so hey listen if we're gonna you know use an analogy here of a restaurant you got a space you got customers walking by you start with the sandwich shop yeah you know nobody really likes your sandwiches uh but everybody talks about the ice cream sundae at the end and it's just because you made some really unique sunday and then people start coming in just for the sunday you know hey want a sandwich like no just i'm gonna go right for the sunday and i wonder i brought my kid with me oh and i brought my my co-worker say wow what's unique about this you know sunday here uh okay let's put three sundays on and let's change the name of the place from you know zach and jason sandwich shop to zach and jason's sundays and then all of a sudden you just like minor pivot just based on the feedback and now you're running a sunday shop now if you were the investor and you got sold on hey this is the best brisket sandwich you could ever have this is the best you know reuben in the world um and you come back and say hey we're making an ice cream parlor

SPEAKER_03: you're like what i didn't invest in an ice cream parlor but if you come back and you say look the

SPEAKER_06: ice cream uh sundays we charge eight bucks for them cost us three and we're printing money and we sold 100 of them yesterday and uh guess what we suddenly find ourselves profitable we can pay our rent

SPEAKER_00: now you got the magic right so just keep that in mind folks i think if you figure something out and you're actually the chefs yourself as opposed to just an idea person who has to hire a chef

SPEAKER_06: you're going to go a lot further so watch the tv show the bear uh great uh show for entrepreneurship

SPEAKER_80: all right let's get to some questions here i think is a really good overview and this all

SPEAKER_00: everything this is the suffering that we go through with startups after you have um product market fit and that the sundays are flying out the the front door and you got a line around the corner then you need operators you need to scale it you got to figure out a way to get from a thousand to you know from a hundred to a thousand and you got to figure out from one location to ten yada yada so and there are people who have expertise in that that's typically when a series a happens um so let's

SPEAKER_06: um talk about the state right now uh the state of fundraising i can tell you zach being out there on the road raising our fourth fund and we're halfway done with it and we'll finish up by the end of the year i think we'll be oversubscribed again um but boy is this a lot more work than previous times so maybe you could explain to the audience what is going on right now in the uh underbelly the plumbing backrooms of the venture industry where limited partners the people who give money to general partners uh you know venture firms limited partners can take the form of high net worth individuals fund to funds endowments uh sovereign wealth funds etc uh those lps and that gp relationship those uh

SPEAKER_00: there's some texture there going on right now and then of course there's what are gps doing at venture

SPEAKER_83: firms in terms of investing in startups give us the back channel what's going on in the back room right

SPEAKER_17: now as you see it's that cool yeah i mean so the big the the big uh tldr is everyone got drunk when interest rates were zero and everything went to the moon i mean any idiot with a checkbook in our job literally any idiot in the checkbook looked like a genius genius for almost a decade from effectively from 2012 through 2022 everything went up so like over those years it was like 50 compounding irr every year everything going up everybody's super duper smart and the lp has looked at that and they're like look at us we're geniuses we invested in all this venture capital and look at it go up and if you look back you know a couple years ago there were lps releasing returns from their venture portfolios that were just unbelievable i mean it was like i think mit was releasing a 50 plus irr for their entire portfolio largely driven by venture um and other things but but at the end of the day zero interest rates like basically drove everything to the moon and so like for instance i invested over those years in almost 80 companies and we only had to go bankrupt in all those years so precede very

SPEAKER_87: strange investing and like and that wasn't because i was smart it was just because everything got funded

SPEAKER_90: again and again and again and again and everything went up and every company had growth and it was

SPEAKER_91: just like it was amazing it was it was there's a funny it used to be in uh there was a bumper sticker

SPEAKER_93: you'd see around san francisco in the valley every now and then they would say please god just one more bubble and they were referring to the 2000 bubble and they just wanted to have one because it was so good back then and now now we like it's like oh please god one more zerp that was it was

SPEAKER_00: like too easy it was a weird experience i have to say the the lack of shutdowns was always a red flag to me and i had many a conversation with founders who you know we said hey third fourth pivot you know big overhang you've raised a bunch of money lots of dilution on the cap table you know maybe after this pivot we sell the company or shut it down um and then you know take a break and you know go work somewhere or you know let's let's work on our next idea because there's no way to get over this overhang you raised 20 million you raised 10 million no product market fit it's not working yeah and sure enough there was always another investor sometimes a new investor who those founders who got really

SPEAKER_06: good at selling vision could get to put the incremental million dollar two million dollar bridge into and in fact a lot of those companies maybe should have shut down it would have been healthier

SPEAKER_83: but they were able to hang on um but yeah 2022 2023 i'm assuming the uh two out of 80 changed to 10 or 20

SPEAKER_17: out of 80. you know for me i haven't i haven't we haven't lost one yet but i mean god we are dancing through a stream of bullets i mean i had a company go through a fundraise where literally we like we were ready to do the shutdown we went out and like we did the the the the soft landing attempts which none of them normally we would have had a whole bunch of yeses and like in this in this environment

SPEAKER_90: like nobody wanted to talk to this company i mean it was like explain the soft landing that we talk about

SPEAKER_101: in the industry yeah so what happens with a quote unquote soft landing is is when a company is getting

SPEAKER_17: ready to hit the wall and you know the product is not working and the team is tired and the investors are tired and we're ready to we're ready to shut this company down usually we have some sort of asset that has built up they could be customers they could be a product they could be just a team they could be knowledge about how to build a particular thing but usually there's some value in that entity that has accumulated over time and you know historically all the way up until the last couple years because tech companies the big fangs of the world were growing so rapidly and then all the baby tech companies that were trying to become fangs were growing so rapidly they were always excited to acquire these small startups because you could get team you could get tech you could get ip you could get customers there's things you could get out of these and so they would we would go to them with the startup and be like hey we got this startup it's got 10 engineers 20 people in total uh they've raised you know call it seven million dollars um and one of these big companies would buy the company um and usually pay off the investors so the investors made some money out of the deal oh got their money back usually you didn't make any money but you got your money back and then the founders and the team would get a job going to work for the big company so this is traditionally we call an acquire um and i mean for many years it was really easy to do um and we've i've sold in my

SPEAKER_16: portfolio we sold i think about 15 companies of the companies we've invested in and everybody saves

SPEAKER_00: face it's a nice ending the founders can take a win you know sometimes these uh acquisitions and acquires happen and the investors get nothing or they get like 10 cents on the dollar but you know oh it gets an incredible tech crunch trade oh this company's been acquired yeah and you know we know the truth on the inside that was a terrible sale to even qualify it as a sale would be dishonest in some cases it was a soft landing and so you know we we try to be de minimis in the industry i'm sorry

SPEAKER_110: um we try to be magnanimous in the industry there's no reason to like be like oh wow this failed or oh wow

SPEAKER_00: you returned two cents on the dollar you lost 98 cents on the dollar it was hey you made an effort hey you wound up at google or facebook or some other company and uh you know yeah we'll we'll see on the other side when you come up with your next idea yeah but now people are not interested in doing that i think in large part because they've laid off 20 000 people at google facebook microsoft picked the company salesforce they've laid off 10 or 20 000 people the idea of going even through the legal of a transaction to bring in you know a 10 person team a 20 person team a six person team the the juice it worth the squeeze because they got a line of people out the door that they could hire or rehire a boomerang so that is the issue as you see it as well i guess yeah no i mean it's the

SPEAKER_17: the sort of aqua hire soft landing market is you know a fraction of what it used to be it still happens in the case of if you build something that's very strategic and there's a partner who really wants that you know um you know there's there there those things do happen but you know it's it's not like it used to be um it's become very challenging to say the least all right everybody

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SPEAKER_131: all day long i love coda oh what a great product all right so let's do a couple questions here how do you

SPEAKER_06: describe pmf product market fit in the simplest terms possibly you had a great analogy earlier they said hey you call this person on a uh sunday and they have no time for you their kids screaming but they still

SPEAKER_00: say hey listen i don't want to forget this can you email me and send me a calendar invite for tomorrow yeah that was a really beautiful description of it let's unpack it a little bit more here what else is a good sign that you have product market fit so i mean think back to like when you know

SPEAKER_17: travis started uber like you know he and i we were at this party they hadn't even started uber yet and we were at a party and he told me about it and i was like oh my god push a button get a car oh my

SPEAKER_52: god i want that so bad yeah then you know given how brilliant i am i convinced to argue with him

SPEAKER_17: for two hours about why i wouldn't work i was like dude the taxi lobby's gonna crush you they're big he's like i'm a fighter i can beat them and i mean i wasn't investing then so i don't know what i

SPEAKER_52: would have done but given the fact that i told him that it was a bad idea i probably wouldn't have

SPEAKER_142: invested so i'm kind of an idiot well you had cognitive dissonance actually so let's pause there for a second and this is important for people to understand who are angel investors or parts of

SPEAKER_144: syndicates um or who are on the other side of the table of founders a lot of times the best ideas can

SPEAKER_10: be polarizing and you could have conflicting ideas one regulation you identified their number one headwind

SPEAKER_06: it is regulation uh the number uh one reason it's awesome is because you wanted it you yourself could see using it you understood the problem so then we're left as investors or people looking

SPEAKER_00: to work at these companies or founders looking to pivot to say hey is it worth taking on that battle do i want to spend the time to try to solve that problem startups at their core are a series of problems to be solved uh whether the problem is this product doesn't exist and i have to write the code or nobody's ever um used a product like this so i've got to convince them to try it there's all these series of things and so uh that is part of the process so i think you did the right thing by identifying those but you don't want to over index on negativity i've learned yeah because a one percent

SPEAKER_60: chance at a five thousand x return is worth taking uh implied odds wise you know yeah let's talk about

SPEAKER_00: product market fit the one i love most is when uh somebody who has the product in a company

SPEAKER_60: starts telling other people in the company yeah about it this could be called word of mouth in net promoter

SPEAKER_00: this could be a promoter as opposed to a detractor or an indifferent person so one way you know you have

SPEAKER_60: this is when people come and start using your product and you ask them how did you find out about the product if word of mouth is in there a friend told me a colleague told me my lord you've done it you've done it that is product market fit when somebody tells another person to use it they use it and they become a customer that's it baby that's as good as it gets in my mind because now your product is growing while you're asleep and doing nothing yeah like literally your product's growing other signs for you of product market fit starting to collect things you've actually seen in the real world where you

SPEAKER_37: said ah you know there's something that's happening here that really nails the the core of it which is

SPEAKER_17: when the market starts pulling the product out of you and needing and wanting the product more and you are no longer pushing when you're no longer having to go out there and bang on heads and spend a lot of time trying to convince people to use your product but people instead are sending you long emails about all the things that are wrong with your product and what they would like you to fix and how they like you prove it and the word of mouth is happening and all of a sudden there starts to be this sort of like movement around what you've built um then you know like for instance i'll give you an example i uh i'm not so long time ago this thing called mud water which is the mushroom tea company yes and um fantastic product it's an unbelievable product if you want to quit drinking coffee now for for many many years i've been a coffee drinker and so like i'm like i love it but i i don't drink i don't i drink coffee and then recently i decided to try to stop quit drinking coffee see what happened and oh my god mud water is like it's like it's like magic when it comes to like when i'm really needing coffee i have a mud instead and like it totally solves the problem and like that that's when we get to product market fit is when you have those sort of magic moments and we saw that early on when we invested in the company it was like the company was just like it was just growing like crazy and the word of mouth was happening and people were like i'm so excited about this and it was like

SPEAKER_46: that's it's just magic there's fireworks everywhere isn't product market fit i think is equally as important and one thing i will tell you is not product market fit is you ask your friends or you

SPEAKER_12: ask vcs or you ask civilians about your product they give you feedback they tell you it's amazing they tell you it's great they tell you all these ideas for your product the reason why that's super

SPEAKER_06: dangerous is you've manufactured that feedback that's not feedback that's unsolicited that is solicited feedback when you explicitly start asking people to give you feedback on your product

SPEAKER_00: you're giving them permission and people are gracious people generally speaking are rooting for entrepreneurs they're rooting for underdogs so they're going to give you a bunch of feedback but

SPEAKER_163: if they don't actually use your product what good is their feedback i'm not a couch surfing person so

SPEAKER_00: when airbnb and the 1.0 came out you know i had a lot of feelings on it i was like this is crazy you know you're going to wind up on a serial killer's couch my as a you know 40 year old at the time my feedback as a 40 year old who could afford to stay in hotels uh and liked room service uh you know and and like you know i don't know about fancy but nicer hotels and nice linens and had a whole list of things was not pertinent yeah the 25 year old jay cow would have been like you know what i couldn't afford a hotel in tokyo i would have stayed for 10 days i would have worked out of there if possible this would open up a world of possibilities because i didn't want to stay in the hostel but i would have stayed in an extra bedroom sure so make sure that the feedback you're getting now airbnb today where they have full houses and i like to bring a family or maybe two families uh you know bring my sister-in-law or my brother and their family and you have two families staying at a house i have a long list of things yes washer and dryer is important yes pre-ordering food uh you know having a barbecue all that stuff is great having kids toys whatever i have a list of feedback for when i'm there with multiple families at a house when i'm traveling that i would love to give and that's valid feedback so just make sure you're not getting silly feedback the feedback from customers who pay is so important especially when they churn and so just be careful that you're not manufacturing product market fit i'll leave it at that okay um let's take another question from our audience how

SPEAKER_34: hard is it for first time founder to raise pre-seed any advice to help it or what to wait for i'm going

SPEAKER_46: to say hey you know what what to wait for as in what could improve about your startup that would

SPEAKER_162: increase your chances so let's take it um first how hard is it to raise pre-seed um i mean it really

SPEAKER_169: depends on who you know and how much they trust you and how much they believe in you so got it you know if

SPEAKER_17: you're you know the son of a billionaire you know somebody rich it's probably pretty easy you know yeah if you're um you know growing up in a community that doesn't have access to money and you don't know a lot of people have access to money it becomes a lot harder and so if you're if you have to move beyond the people who know you then and you don't know people who have the ability to write checks to help you get the thing off the ground um it becomes much much harder and and what i like to say is is that ideas are worthless so you have an idea so does everybody else it doesn't mean anything validated ideas are priceless and so what that means is that if you can show that that idea could work that people want the product that you actually have a channel that you actually can build it if you can demonstrate that this thing is real and can be big suddenly you move from something which is like everybody has an idea and the hundreds of emails i get every day from people who have ideas are trying to raise money and i just hit archive archive archive but it doesn't matter you move from that category to suddenly to a category of viability and potentially something that could raise money from people who don't know you then you've kind of broken into that but even still super duper hard because there's a whole set yeah a whole series of challenges to get in front of someone like jason get in front of people like me to get into y combinator to get into you know any of the other great accelerators that are out there to find people to invest in you like you you need to prepare for a full-time job of hustling hustling is harder than you've ever hustled before and even then it could take a very long time so like when i my last company it took we raised fifteen thousand dollars in the first year

SPEAKER_52: so from the first year of operation we had one person or two people three people five a couple people couple small angels yeah but that kept us alive yeah so let's pause for a second here um on

SPEAKER_06: uh raising money uh this is a really great insight uh the majority of people do not have a rich network so we'll just put it at that right six percent of the country are accredited investors who are legally allowed to invest in private companies now of course in the most private friends and family people

SPEAKER_00: raise money from non-accredited so we'll put that aside for now um the legal issues around it so you know talk about 90 percent of the company let's say is never invested in a small business uh whether it's a deli or you know uh airbnb so i think going through a test who are the 10 wealthiest people you know in your network and just emailing them and asking them or asking them over text um i'm starting a company i have two quick questions for you one have you ever invested in a startup before for a small business number two if no would you consider it um and just quickly assessing and you can tell them because i'm starting a company i just wanted to pitch you on it um and it's fine to say no and so you just get that really quick and if one and two are 10 out of 10 have never done it before i think you've got the answer they've never done it you might be able to convince them to but yeah it's going to be it's going to be hard if nine out of ten say yeah of course i've invested in three or four companies um and yeah sure i'd love to hear your pitch well now you know your network is a network with people in it who do this so just be just run a little a b test to your point about validation the more validated you get the more credibility you have uh the easier it is to you know start meeting investors angel investors in a silicon valley so if you have a hundred hours of work that you can do in the next month right let's say you're doing this on the weekends would you allocate a hundred hour how would you allocate those hundred hours acts to um validating your product your thesis building out your mvp or reaching out to investors let's say you have nothing right now but an idea month one two and three you have a hundred hours of work i'm only spending hours

SPEAKER_169: validating yeah until like 100 like i'm not even spending time working on my idea until i've validated

SPEAKER_52: that people actually want it so like for example here's a good way to validate it let's say you're

SPEAKER_17: building a consumer let's say you're just building any product you go onto google and you find the keywords that people would search for your product so let's say you're building a a new ai video tool to help parents uh do cool stuff um and like you go in there and you figure out what people would type into google because people type everything into google to search for that and you make an ad for what you're making for them what you hope to make for them yeah and then you put that ad into google and you write the the ad for why it works uh and then you make a landing page that says coming soon would you like to get on the invite list submit your email address and then they submit their email address and then the next page or the next panel that's like oh why do you want this what's important to you and then you just keep asking them questions until you start noticing them falling off and you spend some little bit of money on that and boom you're very quickly going to realize do people click on the first ad because if they don't want it they're not going to click on it if they really want it really bad they're going to like click click click click you're going to have a high ctr and

SPEAKER_90: you're going to have something really really viable do they submit the email address do they leave

SPEAKER_193: comments like that so quickly will classic landing page technique um that takes a day of work

SPEAKER_194: five hours nobody does it like literally i see zero startups that come in when they're pitching they're

SPEAKER_196: like oh here's our landing page technique approach here's the outcomes and here's the metrics and

SPEAKER_124: i'm like they never they never do it and here i typed in ai tool video tool the auto correct or

SPEAKER_00: auto suggests on google added the word free so i thought i'd add that sure and to your point the first sponsored ad is from vimeo this product actually exists then one from adobe the new adobe express grab the best ai video maker it exists and then uh turn video into ai create stunning videos with ai video leap app so i don't know who that is and you know what you learn very quickly is not only is this validated but you have two of the largest players in the world doing it and then a third person who's a startup right here with that product and market so do you have to validate from that point on no you've got massive competitors you're too late to the market perhaps yeah or perhaps there's a good opportunity for you to do something that's got a beachhead market a channel a more a bigger niche maybe it's just for parents and baby pictures maybe it's just for family photos um so there you have it a very simple

SPEAKER_46: way for you to validate is landing pages and that's the the category you want to look at um

SPEAKER_17: someone needs to talk about this like just startup validation just like here's how to validate your startups like and just like go through all the different categories and like just with examples

SPEAKER_142: yeah yeah and you know to your point uh and to the person's question we saw this as an opportunity

SPEAKER_00: we have this founder university which we did as two days which we changed to a 12-week program now and we had 2 000 people apply zach for founder university uh for the 12-week course we accepted

SPEAKER_60: 450 people representing 220 teams and i added would you like to be considered for the launch funds 25 000 friends and family investment what percentage of people who filled out their weekly progress report do you think check that box you had to pick what 10 10 just because people are bad at that

SPEAKER_00: 60 percent oh yes and this is at a 1 million valuation so it is a 25k check at a million

SPEAKER_60: dollar valuation six out of ten people click it every week cool i did that as a test so talking about a b testing and product validation i didn't know i thought maybe you know people have their own

SPEAKER_00: 25k so they're just you know if i was starting a company today i would put 250k in for my own pocket you would put 500k in you you've done really well for yourself um and then maybe you'd call some of your friends and say hey i'm raising at a five million dollar valuation 10 million dollar valuation friends and family around i'm putting in 250 myself if you want to put in 250 you can yeah

SPEAKER_142: but you know we forget the days where you were raising 15. it's a pretty scary concept to for you zach at that time to find 15k in your own personal account and then write it to the company

SPEAKER_34: yeah you didn't have it yeah um and so i was just shocked you know how guess how many in the last

SPEAKER_42: two classes we have those checks we wrote take a guess uh 460 percent so 240 you wrote 100 of them

SPEAKER_230: 46. wow that's awesome that's cool that's quite an awesome portfolio 25k checks and i'm just like you

SPEAKER_14: know when this thing gets to 300 of these yeah which is only 7.5 million yeah i'm gonna be really

SPEAKER_232: interested to look at what you got yeah what i got right yeah just 25k micro checks what's in there

SPEAKER_00: and then uh you know it's so you we as uh investors also a b test concepts and try them and we'll see what happens right we're running the test we we got there's a market for it now let's see if the

SPEAKER_101: returns are there right yeah uh so we'll see very quickly that that's really fascinating it's really

SPEAKER_17: different it kind of goes back to the original charles hudson idea of writing really small checks or real evaluations into a lot of companies and then seeing what happens from that but you've got because

SPEAKER_42: of your media empire and because of the footprint that you have all the infrastructure and the team

SPEAKER_17: and all the stuff that you've built you've got the ability to do that at scale which is like yeah

SPEAKER_196: i like that idea i'm i'm gonna be really curious to see what comes out of that yeah that's absolutely

SPEAKER_00: awesome yeah it's gonna be interesting it's kind of part of my launch four pitch if you want to read that launch.co slash memo i wrote a deal memo but well in this third fourth fund we're doing my plan is to have 300 of those checks in the fund yeah and then to invest a second time in maybe the top 20 of those so maybe 60 of them would get 100 to a 500k check from us and then that would put us at you know five to ten percent ownership in those com the winners of that company if you think of it like a fun yeah yeah yeah um so we'll see it's a great way to do it i like it that's smart

SPEAKER_46: yeah it's an experiment right it'll be 7.5 of the 100 million dollar fund uh hopefully

SPEAKER_71: founders always ask me for pitch deck punch-ups and how to present their startup in a better way well i've got some great news we worked with a team at miro the awesome whiteboarding software to create an amazing pitch deck template for founders you can see it if you're watching the video right now or you can just go search for it you go to miro.com slash miroverse and search for pitch deck you'll find it immediately and this pitch deck will help you go from zero to vc ready our founder university participants they love using this template it starts them on second or third base and if you're hybrid or fully remote miro is incredibly useful to you it's like an old school in-person whiteboarding session but distributed and asynchronous so you can work on your time schedule miro lets your brainstorm ideas and collaborate on projects from anywhere in the world whether you're in the adirondacks or you're in cabo or you're skiing in lake tahoe when you think about miro think zero to one but faster and miro is so much more than a simple digital whiteboard your team can collaborate on planning research design and feedback cycles now remember faster inputs equals faster outcomes and velocity is how startup wins we look for product velocity in all of our startups so to access our new miroverse template and thousands of others sign up today for a free

SPEAKER_245: miro account at miro m-i-r-o dot com slash startups again miro dot com slash startups so an interesting

SPEAKER_00: question somebody asks that they are going to be coming to the bay area for two weeks starting sunday

SPEAKER_06: any advice on how to officially meet vcs and pitch my startup okay so they're just showing up they're

SPEAKER_247: showing up and they want to walk down uh santa road and just pitch folks yeah what's your advice there

SPEAKER_52: is that exactly how it works or uh no no no uh i would i would change the expectations uh at the

SPEAKER_17: day silicon valley is a is a place of relationships and it's about uh honestly it's a place of giving which is like you in silicon valley would you show up the nobody knows you and the only way to really break in here the best way to break in here is to just do favors so it's funny when um joseph wallah

SPEAKER_91: who was the founder of uh hello sign um he uh was on my debate team and my ex-wife and him were really

SPEAKER_17: good friends and so when he first moved to silicon valley he was like what do i do how do i break in here i was like look it's really simple you just go to as many events as you possibly can and you go there's tons of events happening in san francisco every day all over you meet people and you just help them you figure out ways that you can be useful to them in scalable ways like not where you're going to go work for them we're going to put hours and hours of work in but like where you can make an introduction or you can help them find a customer or you can do something useful for them and you just plant these seeds throughout the city throughout the valley you're just constantly meeting people and helping and you're helping in in ways that are valuable to them but low cost to you and you just do it over and over and over again and it takes a long time but those seeds they become an orchard and that orchard bears fruit like you wouldn't believe because the valley creates so much amazing wealth and so much promise and potential and awesomeness that like if you're out there helping people they will give back to you like you wouldn't believe but it takes time you can't just come here and show up and be like i'm just gonna go pitch people and then everyone people are gonna give me money you're gonna you need to you need to know that like your your time in silicon valley if you want to really come here is about relationships now once you have a company that's scaling and you're growing and you have month-over-month metrics totally different story

SPEAKER_138: but in the beginning it's about helping people yeah i call this the uh johnny apple seed uh strategy

SPEAKER_06: johnny apple seed actually a real person and what he did was he planted a bunch of apple trees from apple seeds and then he took those um seedlings i guess whatever you call a small tree um and he sold those or gave them to people to start their own uh apple orchards and this uh planting of seeds and being you know in a minor way helpful to people um really scaled for him and uh that's the strategy you're talking about it could be just uh setting up dinner with three or four people you know and then this was my hack when i was trying to break into the industry i would find one or two people who

SPEAKER_00: wanted to have dinner with me i would get a reservation for six or eight at a mexican or pizza joint somewhere where i could put a super cheap and i could put a bunch of food on the table chinese food as well and i just say hey everybody um i see the two people hey did you know anybody interesting i have an extra seat or two and i'd ask those two people they'd say i know this person this person okay great can you introduce me to them i'll talk to them on the phone hey what are you working on you listen you ask a couple questions then you invite them to come to dinner and they say oh by the way somebody dropped out i have one extra seat yeah you know anybody i know two or three interesting people um or you could just cold email people hey i'm having dinner with three or four people would you like to come to dinner i would do this constantly yeah i remember one time i was in at sundance with david sacks and elon musk it was the preview of thank you for smoking yeah and uh walter mosberg was there and i was having coffee walter mosberg and i was like walter hey

SPEAKER_114: uh can i bring my friend elon and he walter uh now uh walter mosberg got a little upset at me he's like listen i don't want to take pitches you know i'm just here like whatever and i was like okay

SPEAKER_261: no i won't bring you and i didn't bring you on oh wow because he called me out on it he was savvy he knew i was using his name in my relationship with him from engadget yeah to help elon because i wanted him to review the tesla whatever when it came out so he kind of saw right through it he called me out on it i was like you know i got elon with me can i bring him elon didn't ask me to do

David Friedberg: that i was just doing it because i was trying to help elon out because the you know the car company

SPEAKER_06: was failing um and so those stories well those stories of me helping people whether it was travis

SPEAKER_00: before uber or elon you know when he had just uh started the the tesla journey those a lot of those are legendary stories now of just trying to be helpful to people be of service try to help people it all comes back so less focus on you more focus on um helping others and it all comes back it's a

SPEAKER_83: huge giant favor bank here and goodwill so keep building up that goodwill every chance you get all

SPEAKER_46: right dave asks you discussed money going after everything in a zerp environment a zero interest rate

SPEAKER_06: phenomenon i think is what the p stands for environment what attributes of companies uh that

SPEAKER_46: are getting funding today more stable and break even different industries what is working today great

SPEAKER_00: question what is the profile let's leave out the type of company like ai we everybody knows ai companies are getting funded but what is the what are the attributes the qualities of uh the variables that you see help people clear market in the seed stage let's put this on seed stage and then we'll do series a as well what are the qualities you see at the seed stage any of the three phases we outlined

SPEAKER_42: and then add the series a i mean the the biggest thing is that every everybody was able to raise money a few years ago in zerp um and raising capital was easy capital was free it was it was like it was quite quite a wild time today the bar is substantially higher and what that means is is like when you go

SPEAKER_17: in to your buddy your friend you're racing and precede you go to your friend and you're like hey i got this crazy idea i want to do it two or three years ago they were getting zero percent on their bank

SPEAKER_91: deposits their the stock market was overly inflated so i mean it didn't make sense to go buy public equities uh their house prices were through the roofs they didn't want to go buy more houses they had cash sitting in the bank and they were like i don't know what to do with it okay fine i'll invest this crazy startup you didn't have an alternative today you're making six plus percent on your cash sitting in a in a very safe investment uh vehicle uh houses are cheap uh cheaper radically cheaper

SPEAKER_277: depending on um where you want to go and they're on the market for six months so you're not like

SPEAKER_46: you're having to overpay and come over the top so you can take your time and pick the right house for

SPEAKER_17: you so that's true public equities are all over the place so there's some things are overpriced some things are massively underpriced like there's opportunities everywhere to deploy capital right now and smart capital allocators who are sitting on capital whether they're your friend bob who's a dentist who has a couple extra hundred k or their multi-billion dollar fund they've all got places to put their capital so you're in competition so you literally have gone from a place where the fomo oh by the way and two or three years ago everything was going up every startup went up 50 so like i would feel so dumb when i would pass on a startup and then see somebody come in and mark it up at a crazy price every time that happened i was like i'm an idiot i should have done that deal so the fomo was raging back then uh and now not so much now the alternative we're all

SPEAKER_169: looking at startups that are fighting to stay alive uh and we're looking at qualities of those startups

SPEAKER_06: the ones that you see getting a 500 to a k to a million dollar check from a seed fund let's start

SPEAKER_286: there you know pair first round uh you know some seed stage fund yourself me well what are the qualities

SPEAKER_50: of those companies yeah so we could we could break it into the three groups if we want or we just make

SPEAKER_17: it simple in the beginning you either you've either validated an idea and if you have a validated idea in a big market and it's it's a great opportunity and you can prove it call me call jason call other people you're very quickly going to figure out if we are excited about your validation or not or i'll tell you i'll be like uh this is what i need to see um and that validation if you have that great now you doesn't really matter anyone who validates a big idea in a big market that has the chops to build it is going to find that investors are going to be excited so that second piece you

SPEAKER_290: you kind of just subtly put it in there has the chops to build it yeah is critically important yeah

SPEAKER_00: you know we could build a landing page and validate it but if you're just an idea guy or gal and you're a solo founder chances go way down oh yeah if you're a team of three man chances go way up because i think investors correctly see teams of three as having a greater chance of survival and it's more serious and you've proven that you can get two other people to come on the journey with you like shackleton getting people to go to the north or south pole or wherever he went like pretty pretty uh hard to convince people to come on a journey and if two or three of the people two out of the three are actual builders who can actually build the thing and have the chops to build it and have previously built stuff and are in the process of building the prototype and you can show each week or two hey we made a little more progress that's going to be specifically very attractive to our firm

SPEAKER_83: we really like builder founders we really like multiples of founders and we really like product

SPEAKER_17: velocity is the internal term we use yeah i mean so if you if you come to me and you're like hey i invented a new battery that runs a thousand miles you know unless you literally are the world's expert in batteries i'm just gonna hit archive on that if you come to me and you're like hey i got this idea that's trivial to build and i can build it really easily you know um and there actually is a moat you know that's another hard part then you know suddenly you might find people get interested so the question is not so much what what are the capacities of your builders is what are you trying to build and is it possible to be built by you and your team yeah and so this is absolutely critical

SPEAKER_297: at the series a yeah it's pretty straightforward you're you're looking for i would say 10 month

SPEAKER_12: over month growth two to three x growth year over year so you're doubling from 250k to 500 to 750k or you're going from 500k to 1.2 million or from 700k to 1.7 something in that range two to three x uh growth in the low millions of dollars is going to be interesting for a series a today

SPEAKER_00: it could be as little as 500k could be as much as two or three million to get a series a to get that vc to say this is one of my 10 boards i'm going to be on and this is one of my five million dollar i have ten five million dollar series a checks to write uh you know i'm going to buy 10 of your business i'm going to spend the next 10 years with you uh if it works that's what you're

SPEAKER_184: looking at doubling your revenue year over year on a base of let's call 500 to 1 million something

SPEAKER_169: like that yeah yeah minimum and one thing that is really important right now is capital efficiency

SPEAKER_17: so if you spent five million dollars to get a million dollars in revenue you're going to find that most investors are going to be very skeptical of that the unit economics of how you acquire customers and then what those customers are worth really really matters today two or three years ago nobody cared like you had all sorts of crazy companies that were being funded that had negative unit economics where it cost them more to acquire a customer than they would ever make from those customers yeah but people didn't care as long as you had growth you were able to raise more capital now people were going to look very closely at what is your cost of acquiring customers and then what is

SPEAKER_93: the value of those customers and what's the long-term value of the business because right now

SPEAKER_17: in the public markets you can buy sas companies very very cheaply like you can buy sas companies at a

SPEAKER_308: very low price and so 10 15 times revenue yeah yeah i mean it's it's amazing how cheap it's amazing

SPEAKER_00: yeah i mean and so if you were in that position um and you if if you're trying to pitch david sacks for your series a or lemkin jason lemkin two really great sass investors and you'd play 10 million to get to 1 million arr that is wildly inefficient yeah uh now if you spent 3 million to get to 1 million arr they're going to say hey wow for the first million in great how much is it going to cost you to get the next uh million is going to cost you 2 million to get a million in is going to cost you 1 million and the closer you get to that one to one ratio i spent a million to make a million in reoccurring revenue i think they're going to be delighted when you start to get to three four or five times they're going to go huh are you just throwing parties and flying first class to conferences and just not being thoughtful about the growth so if you are lucky enough to have growth it has to be thoughtful growth it cannot be spastic um you know wasteful growth so capital efficiency you're going to hear that term all the time multiple founders and builder founders ah also capital efficient the other piece of capital efficiency that we love internally is the company doesn't go out of business if the company is capital efficient they get a they might have 24 months of runway when we see people raising money they got six months of runway they're constantly coming to us nine months and they're in a panic we're like this person is not doing great financial planning and it's usually because it's three idea founders who want to pay themselves 200k each and then hire a third-party dev shop for a million dollars a year that may have worked in zerf that you're blowing 1.6 million that way not going to work here hire your own developers get them internal that's the key um or have them as co-founders

SPEAKER_34: ideally all right uh listen big big breaking news story while zach and i were taping here sbf's former romantic partner who was the ceo of alameda research took to the stand for the first time today zach in the sbf trial according to reports from inside the courtroom it's not televised but people are reporting from inside the courtroom uh allison admitted to fraud during her time in

SPEAKER_06: alameda under sbfs direction that second part really uh important uh this is carolyn ellison i believe is her first name she placed the blame for misuse of ftx user funds directly on sbf claiming he

SPEAKER_34: quote set up the systems leading to alameda taking roughly 14 billion from ftx some more quotes from carolyn ellison alameda took several billion billions of dollars from ftx customers and used it for investments i sent balance sheets that made alameda look less risky than it was prosecutors made

SPEAKER_03: ellison's point made ellison point out sbf and say everything was under his direction um and uh here is an excerpt from ellison's back and forth with prosecutors these are from

SPEAKER_46: uh inner city press um on x thank you to them who uh they cover sdny trials that's the southern

SPEAKER_03: district of new york the hardcore folks uh prosecutors how do you know the defendant ellison we met at jane street then alameda we dated for a couple of years uh jane street i met the founders of that uh firm really interesting uh savvy firm prosecutors did you commit crimes ellison fraud what

SPEAKER_00: others with others yes prosecutors do you see sam back but freed ellison he's over there prosecutors what's his involvement in the crimes ellison he was the head of almeda then ftx he directed me to commit these crimes prosecutors what makes you guilty ellison alameda took several

SPEAKER_03: billions of dollars from ftx customers and used it for investments prosecutors what was the defendant's role he set up the system and told us to take the money how much did alameda take to repay its lenders in the ellison in the ballpark of 10 billion ultimately around 14 billion prosecutors how did you

SPEAKER_193: defraud alameda lenders ellison i sent balance sheets that made alameda look less risky than it was prosecutors why was there not enough money for customers in november 22 ellison we had take we had taken it to repay lenders wow uh well i guess she's flipped and is going for a smaller sentence but what do you think of this entire crypto space writ large did you invest in it and what do you think this trial um which is obviously going to result in a massive sentence for spf i think he's getting life in prison or at least 30 plus years i set the over under at 30 years everybody took the over so i

SPEAKER_83: didn't set a great line but what do you what do you think this case represents in the bigger picture here

SPEAKER_17: i mean i've always been highly skeptical of crypto because it's it's it's fundamentally it has

SPEAKER_169: beautiful product market fit for doing illegal like it's amazing it's amazing product market fit for

SPEAKER_90: illegal things speaking it's so good and i think a lot of people like they see the growth and they see the money that's flowing into crypto and they're like oh there's a real thing here it's like no it's

SPEAKER_17: really good for illegal amazingly good at that yeah um and you know i think i think this is a great example of that which is you know they they engaged in a giant fraud um because of the nature of crypto

SPEAKER_42: crypto facilitates and makes it so easy to do this and they just they they it's amazing the the

SPEAKER_46: amazing digital digital money and the ability to create your pop-up your own currency if they didn't have this ftt token they made if they didn't have the ability to move money around seamlessly if people

SPEAKER_12: didn't pour money into the system to gamble in their casino uh they wouldn't have had the opportunity to do this if this was actual real dollars there would have been real controls in place if this was equities this was people's netflix shares there would be really serious controls in place but

SPEAKER_06: because they were playing with an entirely new paradigm shifting i'm using air quotes there paradigm shifting technology all regulation all controls were removed what do you think happens

SPEAKER_03: if you play chaos and we had a poker game where one time chamath and sky date my friends were like okay let's play an orbit of no rules poker there's now no rules uh you can do whatever you want and

SPEAKER_343: so me and chamath lead over to each other we put our four cards together and said we're playing from the same four cards yeah and then somebody else said okay great i get to take two cards from the bottom of the deck because i'm the button the button now gets to take two and it immediately turned into chaos it was lord of the flies uh and and then then it was like okay if i have a deuce i get everybody stacked first person to turn over juice and then i turn over and do seven i get everybody stuck it was complete chaos what do you think when a bunch of young entitled and i don't want to say brilliant but

SPEAKER_60: you know above average intelligence let's say and above average tech savvy you give them their own casino and say do whatever you want make any rule you want they're like okay great uh let's tell everybody that they are guaranteed to double their money playing roulette and then let's have

SPEAKER_350: everybody lose 90 of the time go yeah yeah i mean it's just the the michael lewis quotes were just did you watch any of the michael michael lewis quotes go by some of the things he appeared to have

SPEAKER_91: gotten snowed pretty hard so i um it's really weird yeah i'm i'm i'm really really uh interested to see if tether's role when all this comes out because the end of the day tether is literally has the ability to print money whenever they want wherever they want at billions and billions of

SPEAKER_17: dollars and it appears that what they do is they basically take that and they fund all these exchanges like the biggest one they had ftx and they give them the ability to print billions of dollars as a loan quote unquote um so the exchange is able to basically have access to free capital to go to go gamble and that it appears what happened here is that ftx at the end of the day they gambled with their loans they lost them and then they had to steal from their customers to pay them back

SPEAKER_00: and the great part of all this is one of the bets they placed was on anthropic and apparently like i don't know exactly what the numbers were but supposedly there's this 500 million dollar number now i don't know if that's how much they put into anthropic or how much their anthropic stake is worth but um supposedly they wanted to bring that up in the trial and the judge is like yeah like the prosecutors

SPEAKER_06: are like no you don't get to you know do a parlay with the jets and the giants and then you hit some crazy parlay and you win with stolen money and then because you paid back the grandma you stole it from

SPEAKER_00: yeah and then gave her interest yeah you don't you sorry that's not how uh stealing works um anyway yeah it's uh this is uh absolutely disastrous speaking of disastrous the city of san francisco has lost their mind and i know correct me if i'm wrong uh but cruise was one of your great

SPEAKER_91: investments of all time am i correct it was one of my first uh so we invested is the first second investment i ever made first obviously billion dollar eggs that i've ever had so i was like woohoo look at

SPEAKER_17: that and you know what it really really makes my heart warm to see them getting all the progress that they're getting because every year 40 000 people in america die from human driver error there's no other the only cause of people dying from car crashes is humans being stupid they're looking at their phone they're drunk they're not paying attention they're just driving like morons 40 000 dead people a year just in the u.s alone and robot cars are going to eliminate that

SPEAKER_196: they literally have virtually no deaths from that every year it's like curing cancer it's like so freaking huge so i get really excited when i see them driving around well and we we talked on all

SPEAKER_00: in if you just look at the top three or four reasons people die in car accidents you know drunk driving speeding distracted driving not wearing a seat belt yeah all four of those are opt-in by

SPEAKER_06: stupid humans yeah like stupid humans get in cars don't use their seat belt use their phone drink and speed yeah uh and so cars just automated cars can't do any of those so the top four killers are

SPEAKER_12: removed immediately um what did you see that was a deep tech investment that you made i think a decade ago right yeah first investments how did you make that deep tech investment that you knew was going to

SPEAKER_184: be a long bet what what gave you the courage to do it at that time and make that long bet it was all

SPEAKER_91: kyle so kyle the founder of cruz i had tried to hire him uh to work for me for many many years for over a decade i met him when he first started with justin tv and i was like wow this guy's brilliant he's like

SPEAKER_17: he's really really good and i was like please come work for me please come work for me and he was like yeah no yeah no he's smart enough to to avoid uh that and so when uh the justin tv team split off and

SPEAKER_91: they ended up starting twitch they ended up starting um uh exact which was justin's thing uh and then they ended up starting uh social social cam yeah michael's thing was social cam and then kyle went and started um cruise um i was just like in love i'm like this guy's really good and so

SPEAKER_90: and the market is so big i mean you think about the scale of the market for autonomous driving is

SPEAKER_370: like huge trillions and trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars i mean it's like it's

SPEAKER_297: probably one of the biggest markets in the world we have yes the tam is ridiculous so san francisco is

SPEAKER_00: uh one of the test beds uh a hit and run driver hit an individual yeah that individual tragically

SPEAKER_12: ricocheted off the hit and run driver the human yeah and got pinned under a cruise car yeah uh no problems with the cruise car yet the local socialist communist lunatics fringe in san francisco including

SPEAKER_03: the san francisco chronicle which is i think a bunch of lunatic communist commie bastards over there uh

SPEAKER_17: feel free to quote this they just said they have mind worms their brains their brains have literally like become so convinced of their own rectitude and righteousness about the beliefs the political

SPEAKER_42: beliefs that they hold that they just literally just engage in falsehoods constantly and the falsehood

SPEAKER_34: here was they framed this as cruise yeah was responsible here which quickly got debunked

SPEAKER_06: um your thoughts just on um the progress how do we how do we continue to accelerate progress of the human species in the face of uh lunatic fringe trying to including sadly some members of the press

SPEAKER_184: were part of this lunatic fringe which are just so anti-tech how does the tech industry deal with this i

SPEAKER_169: mean the good news is that we've always had stupid people they've always been around they've always done

SPEAKER_91: stupid things and i don't think they've stopped us before they're gonna do the best they can to slow things down to try to create their own narratives and to try to change the future in the ways that

SPEAKER_17: they want them to be but if you look back at the history of of technology it's a it's a history of constant improvement and progress like you can look at the cost of solar power now i mean it's falling so rapidly

SPEAKER_91: that there's a real hope that we actually will have clean safe power that we can use everywhere

SPEAKER_193: everywhere every now it's so crazy you bring that up literally in uh australia they hit a hundred and

SPEAKER_12: 26 percent capacity with solar and now they're having to figure out um what to do with it so because rooftop solar and solar farms they are doing so well they're just planning on doing a bunch of um batteries uh and the amount of coal being used went down 80 percent as uh wind and solar levels uh started hitting these these record uh this summer and so congratulations to the people of australia germany had hit that as well during some particularly um uh sunny days it's not always

SPEAKER_193: sunny in new germany yeah australia's got a lot of sun so the the the southern part of australia is just going to have free energy forever and so they're doing a major major push there so yeah and you can

SPEAKER_42: think about all the things that we could do with free energy like it's like the world could be a very

SPEAKER_17: cool place if we have free free clean safe energy um and so you look at people have been fighting technological improvement for the history of humanity the luddites have always been there they'll always be there and so the the people who run san francisco they they are they are luddites at the core they don't want any more housing built they want their museum to stay the way it is they don't want anything to change in their their little museum city and they don't they don't like technology and they don't like technology companies and so like but at the end of the day the cruise is safer cheaper better it's it literally is going to replace all human driving like you will our kids will not drive cars and they will just there's no reason you know what we'll be thrilled with that

SPEAKER_12: check this out this is just so insane that's awesome uh the caesar renewable records on australia's main grid continue continues apace with the first days of spring also adding a new milestone for solar solar in south australia the country's most advanced renewable state combined output of rooftop

SPEAKER_34: and large-scale solar reached a record 120 percent of local demand at 12 55 pm on sunday according to data provided yada yada rooftop solar alone contributed 93.7 percent of the state's demand

SPEAKER_00: with peak production of 130 1332 megawatts large-scale solar added another 23 percent

SPEAKER_12: uh of 374 megawatts this is extraordinary um uh the state was reporting more than 400 megawatts of excess

SPEAKER_00: power to victoria so now different when they say states they mean regions of australia distributable

SPEAKER_163: so different states inside of australia are shipping their energy to each other because they've got so much and so abundance is upon us folks all we need to do is keep executing and what we need most

SPEAKER_71: of all is great entrepreneurs to take money from zach and jay cal let us slide in that 100k let us slide in that 250 get on the cap table 100 exit for us so that we can keep doing this job because it is the greatest job true on the planet to be able to sit with entrepreneurs

SPEAKER_73: act how lucky are we two lucky bastards life does not suck it's just great even in this sucky 18

SPEAKER_163: month period where like i have to do five times as many meetings to raise 10 as much it's like a it's a 50x lift i think right now raising the phone right now i mean we'll get there it's no big deal but um how lucky are we even in you know with the shutdowns and the in the hard work to get to witness things like uber and cruise change the world robin hood whatever you get to you know invest in it's

SPEAKER_402: just fantastic what a job we're so lucky life does not suck i like it a lot all right everybody you

Chamath Palihapitiya: know how to get to zach you figure it out you're an entrepreneur and uh if you want to come to the

SPEAKER_00: founder university i mentioned founder.university we're doing it quarterly now so uh and i do maybe three in-person sessions with the teams so you get to spend get some face time with jacal as well

SPEAKER_408: uh so founder.university it's my new passion we'll see you all next time on this week and startups thanks zach