SPEAKER_00: snoop dog has announced uh that he may have to buy twitter now so it's got a nice long uh nice

SPEAKER_02: long tweet storm about that so but i'm just saying it's a multiple better situation people i'm i am

David Friedberg: trying to buy the assets to pass.com i literally tried like three times i just thought it was such a great name pass.com good and i was like i told dave morin like can i i asked him if i could buy it he's like yeah sure go for it um because i didn't i didn't want to buy it and not uh you know we're friendly and i consider his friends and i was just like if i tried to buy that would you be okay with it he's like they're not gonna let me sell and i guess some korean firm i think had bought it so if the folks who own path.com uh want to reach out to me i would give them some equity in it i would back it and i think it would be cool to have like a path it's path is a little bit more like an instagram ish yeah kind of thing but i always loved the simplicity and the cleanness of it and it really did start to work and i think it would be worth paying for um as a as a service so

SPEAKER_08: um call us this week in startups is brought to you by 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 twist open phone as a startup founder a lot of mistakes are easy to roll back but using your personal cell phone number as your company number isn't one of them open phone makes it easy to get business phone numbers for you and your team right on top of your existing devices visit open phone dot co slash twist to get 20 off your first six months and gun dot io the simplest way for anyone to hire world-class developers expertly vetted for you by senior engineers get 250 off your first hire at gun dot io twist hey everybody it's friday and we're doing

SPEAKER_12: four for friday because molly and i have no ability to get through five stories in five minutes so i guess

SPEAKER_02: the producers put us on a little bit of a medium-sized leash but we should we should just get right into it

SPEAKER_14: we have training wheels so let's go let's yes go we can do this we can do this all right let's get to the first story story number one ftx founder sam bankman freed has bought about seven percent of robin hood shares are up 25 this morning friday as we're recording that for some context here sam

Jason Calacanis: bankman freed uh founded a hedge fund that trades in crypto he was like not happy with all the options for fulfillment of crypto orders so he started ftx which is a crypto exchange but it's focused on institutional clients so not big companies uh foundations memes yeah me and buyers um i wonder and you can tell me if this buy represents some confidence some opportunity around robin hood or

SPEAKER_14: an influence uh an attempt to influence it more in a crypto direction yeah so uh the person obviously

David Friedberg: understands markets and trading right uh and i guess if they're trading crypto for institutions uh their arrival with coinbase who also i think i mentioned this the other day does custodial stuff when we're talking about like if you lose your money what happens to your crypto and i guess they have like institutions where they will you know manage your crypto for you and be the custodian of it but it's still yours and you have the keys and you have access to it and then there's everybody else who's logging into an app and that was part of that big controversy uh the last two days if coinbase which is extremely unlikely were to go bankrupt what would happen to your crypto um and so i guess uh ftx um is is not a us-based company they don't operate in the us my understanding and um if their rival is coinbase well robin and coinbase are a bit on a collision course here right yeah coinbase does not trade stocks but robin hood of course does crypto uh so and i i'm still a coinbase i was an angel and i still uh own my shares so according to this sec filing emergent fidelity technologies which is his company that he's the sole director and majority owner of i took a stake where it's 648 million what this is is uh as we did the other day um this is just a really opportunistic buy is my take on it by somebody who's in the know we did a little take the other day what is the market cap of the company minus the cash in the bank which gives you true enterprise value if the true enterprise value seems insanely low after you net out their cash because the cash could buy that equivalent of stock if you just think of it that way people are bargain hunting hunting and what did i say last week people were asked for earlier in the week i should say god this is a long week i said we're bouncing along the bottom this is the ball bouncing along the bottom it will come to a rolling stop at some point and everybody will stop losing their minds we'll create a floor i guess as they say in the markets and um it seems like you know today we got the bounce we have people like uh dara bought five million worth of uber that's another one of these opportunistic buys like this one um i think toby bought some shopify i saw that um uh the guy who does iheart media bob pitman bought some shares of his own company he's the ceo of it so when you start seeing that uh you you know the people who are insiders or who are very sophisticated realize there's an opportunity here and they might have some cash laying around also daniel i think bought 50 million in spotify so people can criticize these buys um but you know as like oh they're trying to pump up the stock it's a pretty cynical look but okay sure you can have the cynical take on it my take on it is money's money if you're placing that bet sure you're making a signal but it's still money and you're still making that bet so if it's a seven figure bet it's a seven figure bat and this is a bigger bet in this case it's a nine nine nine figure about yeah a lot of figures a lot of figures here um robin hood hit an all-time low of 856 77 from its ipo price and i don't know where the high watermark was but it became like a meme stock for a hot minute like where it went to 50 or 60. it was just like one that was a really weird day uh to be totally honest they should never have done that these weird pops um but yeah i think he um is just making an opportunistic buy that would be my take on it and i think you'll see a lot of these opportunistic buys when things are worse you know the enterprise value makes no sense and i don't know what robin hood's exact cash position is now in their exact market cap because it's obviously going up and down 20 percent over the same week minute by minute

SPEAKER_31: but it was it was five billion in cash or something to that effect oh 6.2 billion so robin has 6.2

David Friedberg: billion um and and now his current worth is nine after the pump so i mean is the company worth three billion and yesterday it was worth seven billion before the bump so if you take out the six billion it was worth 1.2 with whatever it was i think they hit a high watermark of 21 million active accounts maybe they're at 18 now because people have you know are not opening their accounts i don't

SPEAKER_37: blame them if your accounts that down a lot of people don't open their accounts it kind of looks

Jason Calacanis: like sbf has a bit which apparently he goes by sbf sam bankman freed has been like interested in robin hood for a while way back in 2021 in june he pre he talked about how the name is so awesome it's easy to parse and remember uh he goes four years ago someone told me once that robin hood was a zero fee retail stock trading app i never forgot that so 100 opportunistic and in our last 20 seconds a

David Friedberg: way to probably get even a bigger foothold in the u.s market sure is he the weirdo who like dresses like he's like uh living on the beach in kawaii and doesn't have a home they're all weirdos to me and he's got like crazy hair i'm like yeah he's that guy um yeah this guy's a little bit iconoclastic

SPEAKER_12: uh and uh it's working works for me i i like a guy who looks like he lives in a tent in kawaii

SPEAKER_37: and is worth a couple billy i like it i got no beef with that i got no beef with that all right if i didn't have a family i would literally love to literally sell every asset i have get a tent

SPEAKER_12: put everything in storage all the teslas in storage and just live on a beach in kawaii and just be that guy who's like goes and buys a shaved ice and gives a hundred dollar tip every time it's a

SPEAKER_51: shave you can't call it shaved ice or they won't let you live in hawaii shave all right topic number

SPEAKER_53: two okay we did it we're close we're close we're close oh softbank oh yeah talk about bumping along

Jason Calacanis: the bottom softbank lost over 13 billion dollars in its most recent fiscal year the largest loss in its history and will cut back investments a lot of silicon valley companies and start starving now softbank will cut back investments by 50 to 75 percent going forward this is of course after raising the largest venture fund in history vision fund one which was a hundred billion dollars they raised 50 billion dollars for vision fund two which is currently being deployed in that fund you know they even started to run into trouble raising because that fund includes 30 billion dollars of softbank's own capital got it yeah add to 13 billion dollars i have a question for you adam

SPEAKER_58: who wins smart man or crazy man smart man or crazy man

Jason Calacanis: i'm gonna do claims by the way that his response was smart man and the smart man was like no

SPEAKER_63: smart man always win masa and masa was like no adam san no crazy man wins i call you 2am getting cancelled

SPEAKER_66: wait until next week to get cancelled you're just gonna do it now i know i can do a japanese accent i think

SPEAKER_02: that's allowed i think so i don't know so i'm doing a masa impersonation not a i think i'm allowed i don't there's we're gonna find out we're gonna find out i can do it i could do a masa accent if i

SPEAKER_48: can let's just say i could do a masa my northern california 15 year old is like no

SPEAKER_37: i think i should do a dramatic re-reading of the script where i play both masa and adam on the next

SPEAKER_69: inside stream i mean i would listen to the hell out of that i'm just saying and then i should have like elizabeth holmes come and you can just play elizabeth holmes we could just have the three of them

SPEAKER_48: talking just i mean honestly i cannot wait to be elizabeth holmes for halloween so let's talk about

Jason Calacanis: let's go through some notable soft bank investments because okay lemonade down the insurance uh easy insurance company down 50 year to date okay we work down not so bad considering everybody else i mean really right could be 80. we work of course down 30 year to date but that's after that like 50 30 something billion dollar markdown uh yep they originally invested 40 billion dollars coupang a south korean e-commerce company down 55 zymogen down 75 the synthetic biology i had high hopes for that but ouch uh uber as we know down 44 percent and compass the real estate uh company down 45 percent masa's own net worth has dropped 25 billion dollars due to soft bank's drop two-thirds of his total net

David Friedberg: worth all right listen this masa is the guy who's been through this literally more than anybody he was the richest man on the planet for a period of time this is for him this is normal so these big swings for everybody else is like oh my god you know like literally people are uh i mean sadly i mean there's reports of people uh talking about suicide on reddits and if you are and you're a young person or an old person and you lost your fortune and you made a stupid bet there is no reason to to kill yourself go find help go talk to somebody um this too shall pass you can build up your chip stack you'll be better for it you'll learn hard lessons you're loved do not make a an irreversible decision based on a very reversible situation yeah one of the great things that can happen to you in your life is to get your ass kicked and then come back and kick ass just think about how glorious it would be for you to lose everything in your luna or a stock or whatever it is and then come back and be triumphant put your faith in that story you are not defined by your worst decision okay there's my bsa

Jason Calacanis: myself 99 of his net worth in the dot-com bus yes yes and he's literally lost everything yes many times and you know yes he's lost two-thirds of his net worth and his net worth is still measured in the

David Friedberg: bees yes this is no problem he he can handle the swings and you know what there is something to be said for people who are bold enough to put their chips in the pot and to have a little variance now my piece of advice for folks is you know always pay for your home if you have gains put money in your kids 529 don't touch it have a nest egg have a floor have a foundation i did that in my life that's why you see me out here so happy that's why you see me playing as if i have a bunch of rings like steph curry or draymond because i do and there's no way for me with the exception of my you know if i if i if i had an untimely death i'm going to enjoy the hell out of it so i think moss is in the same camp he makes the big swings he goes for it he's bold um and he'll be fine uh and so my hot take on this is tuesday wednesday thursday friday whatever he's just going to get back to work find something great and crush it again and we need people like him out there making big bold bets do they seem crazy to us sure um but he's playing a different game than y'all he's playing a totally different game and if you look at the course of history the guy has put up numbers and he has created and helped create some of the great companies of all time criticize it if you want but he's winning all

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SPEAKER_89: that's o-u-r-c-r-o-w-d dot com slash twist that's o-u-r-c-r-o-w-d dot com slash twist all right

SPEAKER_14: topic number three who twitter twitter making some interesting uh management choices considering the state of uncertainty that it's in right now the company has announced a hiring freeze and head of product cave on big poor

Jason Calacanis: was fired while on paternity leave okay uh and was clearly mad enough that he tweeted about it so he was on cave on big poor uh for context was on episode 1225 of twist last year he is actually known to be one of the people who jump started twitter's product velocity which as we know was non-existent for a long time his team helped ship spaces super follows twitter blue fleets r.i.p fleets communities all of that uh yesterday he tweeted the following thread and let people know that he was fired directly by ceo parag agrawal he said interrupting my paternity leave to share some

SPEAKER_48: final twitter related news i'm leaving the company after seven years it was not my decision

David Friedberg: okay all right i think number one um as i as i told him and uh you know i i think there it has been very it is a very hard position to have you're not the ceo you're responsible for the product you got a board that is sending mixed signals you know you should be growing you should be cleaning up the box you should not be cleaning up the box you know there's a this is like you're getting pulled in all directions this is like you're the chef at a restaurant and there's four owners and one of them wants it to be like you know high turnover fast casual and the other one wants it to be fine dining and you're just like i can do what you want just give me a direction here you know

SPEAKER_64: and then somebody's coming in the back and saying yeah but i want it to be vegan so you're getting pulled in all different directions he does not have an easy job i will say their shipping of spaces

David Friedberg: uh was done very fast uh in response to competitors and um twitter blue they got it out there it wasn't it didn't hit the right notes it didn't provide enough value but i think he knows the value it needs to provide and there were just too many cooks in the kitchen twitter blue was the perfect example of like somebody had a big vision and they're like yeah you can't do those three things because those are sacred cows but what else you got and they're like well here's like the next six ideas like yeah throw those six ideas out and it's like you really need to do the number one idea yeah and the number two idea and so now you're just you took the stars of the show out and it's just not

SPEAKER_64: going to work so a really hard job now to the point of like while on paternity okay if your paternity happened to be during the moment in time when a company is being sold and there's a an epic downturn in the market there's a caveat here you know it's just bad timing it's that's not the ceo's

David Friedberg: fault it's not the product manager is nobody's fault so it's a great one for the press to like you know put in there as a dunk or for you know people to virtue signal how could you do that well if he's

SPEAKER_64: going to be out what if he's on paternity for six months this company is there's stuff going on yeah i mean we're in the thick of it here and in fact i mean i don't listen let me tell you something also if you're on paternity in the middle of this i'm a dad i i think i would be like you know what

SPEAKER_97: i need to be back at work for a couple days a week at least to figure out what's going on that

SPEAKER_64: would be my decision i wouldn't blow out on paternity for three months in the middle of this i would talk to my spouse or partner if i had one and said i think i need to be in the office two days a week while this is going on and maybe he was who knows but this whole paternity thing let's just put all that aside and what's the reality here they need to make a lot of quick decisions here and and

SPEAKER_102: maybe well that's my question consolidate who's in charge maybe the ceo

SPEAKER_71: wants maybe parag wants to make these decisions and then isn't going to be gone like my question

SPEAKER_14: actually fundamentally is not about paternity leave at all it's like if you think you're

Jason Calacanis: it i guess the question is sort of like how do you react when you think you are about to be purchased and that you yourself ceo are gone do you make a bunch of changes or do you just like shut everything down and freeze it i mean they froze product releases like i just think it's really interesting

David Friedberg: we don't know booting your leadership we don't know all the facts here this is like one of those perfect situations where there could be three or four really important facts and we're looking at this chess board saying why did you move the why did you move the queen here and it's like right and we literally are seeing 10 of the chess board so imagine all you saw was the queen exposed but you didn't see you know that when you move the queen it exposed checkmate right right right you know like there's a this concept of like um you can have a checkmate occur because you moved a piece out of the way you move up you give up a pawn but it creates checkmate and the person can't move you know whatever uh or creates a check so um this is that kind of situation so i would encourage everybody when you see something like this happen and you can't figure it out and you're like during paternity and that's the headline understand we know nothing there could be that the person wasn't getting the job done or missed deliverables it could be that the ceo um wants to um cut 50 i don't know a third of the

SPEAKER_64: expenses right and they're consolidating the team down and maybe cave on doesn't want to do that right so he said i don't want to make cuts to my team we saw this with the apple person who said like i'm going to be remote and they challenged him on it and they said okay well you can quit so sometimes there's a standoff like that again we don't have the information so i would encourage people to

David Friedberg: understand barag is in a difficult decision is this a really difficult decision and situation and cave bonds in a very difficult situation and we see but 10 of the chessboard we don't know yeah but i wish him well and that's a good get for somebody by the way somebody hire him good

SPEAKER_12: guy that is a good guy absolutely listen lots of founders are loosey-goosey with their personal phone numbers you know about this problem people start putting their personal mobile phone in documents proposals and it makes things super messy if you're running your own company you need to be professional and open phone helps you create a business phone number and it's really easy how easy as open phone you install an app and you're done you pick your number you're done and you can create a shared phone number how great is that you know how you have like an email for customer support you do vip at now you can have that for a phone number where multiple employees can feel calls and texts including those texts super important because that's how a lot of business happens a lot of these young folks they don't want to talk on the phone they want to text well open phone can help you with that as well and it's affordable already it's just 10 bucks a month i mean it's so affordable it's ridiculous i think they should triple their prices i think i would pay 30 bucks a month for this but they charge 10. twist listeners can get an extra 20 off that for any plan for your first six months that's even ridiculously generous i mean that puts it down to eight dollars a month you're kidding me you need to do it for yourself as an executive or a salesperson open phone.com twist and if you have an existing phone number with another service that's overcharging you or that doesn't have this incredible feature set they'll put it over for you if you're thinking

SPEAKER_114: about phone numbers i just want you to think open phone.com twist that easy folks speaking

Jason Calacanis: of twitter okay there's a reason we save this for last because again we don't know but fascinating um yesterday elon musk tweeted that the deal was temporarily on hold pending determination of how many actual fake users there were uh the company estimated that under five percent of users were fake accounts elon of course has previously said one of his main goals was getting rid of the fake and bought accounts uh it sounded like he was waiting for twitter to provide more robust data about the scale of the fake accounts and then uh tweeted quite soon after still committed to acquisition

SPEAKER_14: sure um but then of course then everybody was like ah is my sum up of the response to that was that

SPEAKER_38: that's what happened basically yeah i mean it's a dynamic situation oh yes it's a very dynamic

Jason Calacanis: situation i mean can we even talk about this at this point i'm just gonna be honest with you and tell us and tell you that i was like no cnbc i cannot come up right like i i don't know even

SPEAKER_120: really like we're in a weird we're in a weird spot here we can't comment we can't comment we can't

SPEAKER_121: comment that's it no comments i think that's the best possible pretty simple course of action here

SPEAKER_12: which is we knew this day would come and uh huh yeah so uh yeah there's a deal and it looks like

David Friedberg: the uh there's well let's you know all these deals are a process uh and during this process the market has crashed uh and you know diligence occurs and so you know it's uh i i uh i wish elon well in it and i hope it happens i i really hope it happens and yeah diligence is important um so twitter currently has 229 million monthly active users uh five percent i guess is what they said in terms of it's under five percent five percent uh times 200 is 10 million five percent times the 30

SPEAKER_64: million is another uh five percent 1.5 so that would give you 11.5 million bots 11.5 million fake accounts or bots and so the questions i have about all that is like if you have if you're mollywood and you have six accounts um and one is your mollywood account and what are the other five are they real accounts where you're really you know so they're i guess defining fake and bot accounts is going to be important here i would be very surprised you know and and i'm guessing they net out automated accounts or fake accounts but who knows you know i don't know that this data uh you

David Friedberg: know we again back to like what do we know what do we don't know companies put out data how would

SPEAKER_71: anybody know how they came to that right so it's not like these definitions are there um and what are the

Jason Calacanis: let's maybe it's useful here to look at like facebook because facebook facebook has a real

SPEAKER_14: one facebook has this real problem and they sort of keep um they have a real names policy so it's

David Friedberg: they don't allow automated accounts accounts a ton on a on a number basis but on a percentage basis very small right so it might be a ton of yeah because you know it's very easy for them with the social graph

Jason Calacanis: facebook quietly admits to nearly as many fake or clone accounts as the u.s population okay there's one headline in 2017 and they're they're sort of that sort of keeps happening march 22nd 2021 facebook says it took down 1.3 billion fake accounts in october or december uh admits to having up to 270 million fake accounts i just think it's sort of like it's probably a bigger problem than

SPEAKER_132: anybody really wants to admit i think it's one of these problems entirely the point either i bet you

David Friedberg: facebook is really proactive and killing them in real time right because you do have these like companies uh typically like in india uh where they have like banks of folks who you can pay to create tons of accounts like they have phones with vpns you just pay them and they'll make you a thousand accounts on instagram a thousand accounts on this and then they'll get you 30 000 followers on instagram and um it's it's a it's a it's an information business basically they'll also get you reviews i know this because when i was on the board of a lot of companies inevitably they would come to me and say hey you know we we can boost ourselves in the rankings in the app store by hiring this company based in india you know manila was the other big place for these boiler rooms and you know they're english speaking and they have all these android phones they've i mean i and i've seen pictures of them you can google it oh yeah just like they're social farms yeah and they will they're pretty sophisticated um except when it comes to the naming of the accounts which is generally like a really like

SPEAKER_64: crazy americana name like john jones or susan smith and then a random number sequence yep and then totally no photo or a weird photo of a piece of fruit or a sunset and you're just like okay we need to work on that but uh yes you look at your followers this happens to me because whenever you're a verified account or you have like the name at jason you will um all of a sudden one day see

David Friedberg: 3000 followers and you're like what i get 500 a day why do i get 300 i get 50 a day why did i get 500 when you see those spikes if you go to your followers you'll just see them and then you click on five of them and you go look at them oh we did this actually remember when all the um we did it republicans got those followers and i was like i think this is a bot attack as well as whatever and it was in fact a bot attack all of those people were like brand new accounts uh or like no

SPEAKER_09: uh image right they didn't put their image on so totally although i think back to our no comment

SPEAKER_115: back to no comment of this i definitely don't think the fake accounts are actually leaving the

Jason Calacanis: story here uh breaking news as we go to the last part of our show snoop dog has announced uh that he

SPEAKER_00: may have to buy twitter now so it's got a nice long uh nice long tweet storm about that so but i'm just

SPEAKER_02: saying it's a multiple better situation people i'm i am trying to buy the assets to pass.com i literally

David Friedberg: tried like three times i just started such a great name pass.com so good and i was like i told dave more and like can i i asked him if i could buy it he's like yeah sure go for it um because i didn't want to buy it and not uh you know we're friendly and i consider his friends and i was just like if i tried to buy that would you be okay with it he's like they're not gonna let me sell and i guess some korean firm i think had bought it so if the folks who own path.com uh want to reach out to me i would give them some equity in it i'd back it and i think it would be cool to have like a path it's path is a little bit more like an instagram ish yeah kind of thing but i always loved the simplicity and the cleanness of it and it really did start to work and i think it would be worth paying for um as a

SPEAKER_00: service so um call us call us path.com owners and also a great domain name it's a great don't but domain name and great design on that yes yes yep all right i think we mostly did it we even sneaked

SPEAKER_14: in a fifth story in four for friday all right enough of four and a half for friday it is time

SPEAKER_115: for everybody's favorite friday 4.5 for fridays we just like a little fractional investing around here yeah okay boomer round up everybody's favorite producer rachel nicole ruiz is who she's talking to today an investor at compound vc a thesis driven research centric investment firm quants are back

SPEAKER_149: the kids are doing quants these days yeah nicole is extremely smart but she had to explain everything to me like she's explaining to a five-year-old because compound vc is incredibly awesome um but they do invest in things like medtech so i don't i don't know what's happening um in medtech the coolest thing that she explained to me was their investment in pair bio um which monitors cancer progression and they're doing really awesome stuff she had a really untraditional path into going into venture capital where i'm starting to realize that there is no traditional path i guess going into venture capital hers is extra special um overall i think it's going to be a really cool episode for people that are interested in alternative investing especially those that just aren't interested in that cpg space i see a lot of gen z's that are interested in investing gravitating towards like consumer social cpg things like that like more of the sexy industries and she is really focusing in on a little bit more on traditional things deep tech infrastructure so really cool i love to see that

Jason Calacanis: you'd love to see like especially if we're you know if we're just leaning into the trope here you'd love to see the idea that a gen z investor or a millennial investor is like i'm still very hardcore i

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SPEAKER_12: they're a developer hiring platform they're super focused and here's what makes them different their candidates are expertly vetted and then they're matched to your company by a team of senior engineers not by an algorithm or just a recruiter gun.io developers have eight plus years of experience building products and they're comfortable working directly with founders and executive teams they're going to get you candidates as quickly as 48 hours think about that and the average time to hire is only two weeks 90 of the candidates are us-based and they have a network of vetted international candidates as well if you're looking to hire from other markets there are two ways you can use gun.io number one you could work with a freelancer and enjoy gun.io's ongoing support services they'll handle the billing and swap out talent for free at any time or you can hire a remote developer directly from the gun.io network for half the typical recruiters fee so here's your call to action gun.io is the easiest way for startups to find and hire world-class developers and you're going to get 250 off your first hire at gun.io slash twist i saw this tweet the other day and it

SPEAKER_150: might have been from like lex friedman or somebody like that where it was saying like oh do you see

SPEAKER_149: like the importance of or the how scary it is more so that you're seeing so many young people really wanting to be things like influencers or tiktokers or youtubers when they grow up whereas like just a few years ago you know you had kids being like i want to be a scientist i want to be an astronaut and just like the detrimental like effects that could have i think she's like a great person to have as a role model especially for young women that are interested in investing yeah yeah yeah totally totally i mean

SPEAKER_116: there's there's a lot of trends there's a lot of trends going on here at once you know we're starting

David Friedberg: to see a lot of diversity uh in the investment class we're starting to see a lot more women uh people of color and we're seeing a lot more young people right and so i think that's great that the people who are writing the checks uh are younger and more diverse they're going to see things that maybe the people who you know 10 20 years ago were you know a bit of a monoculture in venture uh is now cracked open and that means more entrepreneurs uh are going to get funded uh maybe who didn't fit a certain mold that that monoculture had had previous success with because once you have success betting on things you become uh you have a little bit of survivorship bias confirmation biases all these biases we talk about mental models and in venture and you know i always try to fight against those but you know if you if you had a success in consumer apps like uber and robinhood and com all of a sudden you're just like oh consumer apps you know and then oh you know stacks had a bunch of sass wins and you know friedberg had a bunch of science wins it's very natural for you to pursue the things you're good at the things you've had success in now that could be in a topic and it could be on the theme of the company it also be people don't want to say it it could be in a certain archetype somebody who went to stanford somebody who went to stanford for a science degree somebody who went for an mba somebody who's tall somebody who's a male somebody who had this pedigree and you know people don't like to admit that they have biases and in some cases they don't know they have it so this is just the great result of the last 10 years of the change in venture capital which it's just really nice to see i think it's a great win for for the industry um that there's more diversity and younger people doing it uh and it's easier and easier to get into venture the numbers in venture are going to be uh and entrepreneurship on a gender basis are going to change radically because if you look at college right now uh the statistics for men going to college and for graduate degrees is plummeting it's 60 or 70 percent in some uh areas including like science and things that maybe people were like oh yeah that's traditionally you know male dominated um the the graduate degrees are uh and men in colleges it's gonna be 60 40 65 35 female to male what is that going to look like in 10 years uh that's going to be really uh interesting so we're going to have the pendulum swing the other way i don't know why these guys are not going to college and or for graduate degrees and they're playing too

SPEAKER_25: many video games and trading too many nfts yeah they're trying to become tick-tockers or something

SPEAKER_149: but it's really cool being like a young person interested in the tech space and the investing space um during like this entire movement where i feel like i have so many awesome people that i can look up to whereas like if i was really interested even just a few years ago maybe like five ten years ago i don't necessarily know if like the landscape would be the same right now the shift is happening so

Jason Calacanis: very very thankful yeah also i love anybody's twitter bio like nicole reizes who where her cover photo is uh britney spears guide to semiconductor physics this is going to be a great interview

SPEAKER_170: she is incredible yeah enjoy everybody enjoy everybody thanks sit down rachel rachel report

SPEAKER_174: thanks get okay boomer okay boomer i understood the assignment thank you so much for joining me today nicole um this is very very cool for me i've been following you on twitter for a while now for those

SPEAKER_179: of you who don't know nicole is an investor at compound vc she's pretty popular on twitter super smart thank you so much for joining of course yeah excited to chat so can you explain a little bit

SPEAKER_182: what compound vc is totally yeah so we are a firm that's focused on the pre-seed and seed state of

SPEAKER_183: companies so typically been pre-incorporation sometimes to i don't know around two or three years into operation uh we are focused on frontier tech specifically so frontier tech means a lot of things to a lot of people we say the common denominators of these companies are machine learning robotics and automation digital health biotech synthetic bio decentralized computing next gen computing d5 crypto all that good stuff plenty of things outside of those categories but uh we're super thesis driven as a firm so we take a lot of time to read white papers dig into technical communities around these industries more broadly and basically develop a view on what a core technical inflection point is that's coming up and why a new company that's built there would be built off of that new technology um and so that's us we're on our fourth fund we've been around for a little bit over than over a decade now and i joined about two years ago that is very

SPEAKER_179: very cool you got your job in venture in kind of a unique way can you walk us through how you were able to how to land this very very sick gig totally yeah so i guess i'll add some of the context that i

SPEAKER_183: had an atypical background in general i didn't have a college degree i tried college i tried community college i did lambda school for a little while and jumped and dropped out i did moocs online so uh all sorts of types of education and then obviously uh sort of more self-taught as well um but i lived in dc at the time i moved up to new york recently and was interested in the tech community it's very interested in machine learning especially machine learning applied to healthcare and a lot of these uh newer areas of research and so uh sort of realized that a lot of people got their jobs by you know not just having a college degree not just like applying through a job portal and started sort of going to professional meetups all the time in dc there's a lot of things to attend there's a lot of things you can sneak into for free and so i would do that and sort of just ask people like hey how did you get your job what do you do you know what's the day-to-day look like uh and then more specifically started putting a ton of white papers on twitter i found you know white papers for the industry super interesting then i also found that like academic people are super willing to answer your questions and so you know it's almost the better version of what linkedin should be which is like a lot of researchers posting what they've been working on and they're super happy to answer any questions about like what their research means and so that was super exciting and started doing that more and more and then uh michael dempsey who's a gp at compound who i'd been mutuals with him on twitter um i was job hunting at the moment and i guess he has said that he was just sort of intrigued by all the weird sort of machine learning related stuff i was posting and so he reached out and said hey we should have a chat about venture uh are you interested in the industry i didn't know a ton of things about the industry at the moment but um i knew i liked mike's writing and the approach of the firm broadly so we chatted and sort of learned learned more about compounds focus and the the thesis drivenness of it which i love and uh the rest is history

SPEAKER_179: it's awesome i guess there isn't really a traditional path into venture anymore because every time i talk to somebody i feel like it's radically different um including including the way that you found your job and similarly i guess to your boss with how he discovered you post my um machine learning i think one of the first tweets that i saw from you was in the quantum space and um definitely in the healthcare space if it wasn't just in the quantum space i would love to hear your thoughts a little bit about machine learning powered healthcare because your content on that

SPEAKER_183: is really interesting totally yeah i'll start out with what first got me interested in the industry and then i can expand what's interesting now um so originally in 2017 uh again was super interested in ml reading all these white papers that were published online google research published this paper on federated learning which is a type of machine learning where you're basically storing models you're training models locally and so if you have an iphone or an uh a google phone like both of your keyboards will use this technology which is basically not sending every bit of a conversation that you send to the cloud so your information isn't stored in google services or apple servers they train models locally to predict text right predict what you're going to say next in the conversation and then only send the high level take away to the cloud so i found that super interesting because healthcare broadly has a ton of interesting applications of just basically studying data at a larger scale to make predictions to do diagnostics better um but there's a number of regular regulations around the category hipaa is one of them and those are rules about where your personal data can be sent and that makes machine learning a lot more complicated plenty of them plenty of those rules exist for good reasons but there's also plenty that can be done safely in the near term uh with that data and one of one of those things is using federated learning to make predictions off of your healthcare data about whether or not you know some circumstantial data you have around your your own body and your own markers that might mean you're at risk for kidney cancer maybe you should go get checked that go get that checked out um and so privacy preserving machine learning is super interesting um and that was what originally interested me in the space but more broadly there's so much being done right now genetic testing is a huge one people who have outlying conditions like uh treatment resistant depression for example or other things like that um there are often genetic markers that can tell us a little bit more about why uh an ssri that a person is prescribed doesn't work for them why it might cause a really bad experience and rather than going into that uh prescription more randomly you can begin to take their genetic data as a person you know submits their data to this company and understand how to make better predictions off of things like ssris or even birth control or things like skin care as well um so that's another area down the rabbit hole and recently that's so interesting it's funny because

SPEAKER_192: i think mental health is one of those like sectors of medicine where it's so trial and error for like

SPEAKER_179: lack of a better term um but it feels so trial and error that you would think there is a better like a better solution so if there's all these laws like around hipaa right how are these companies actually able to collect data is this like all volunteer like volunteers that have to like give up their

SPEAKER_183: data to them or yeah so is this with um so the cool thing about federated learning is that with hipaa there most of the time you're actually totally fine because because that specific personal data is staying on the device that you collected on the company isn't collecting it they're collecting a high level sort of like meta level analysis of how a model should change and they're not saying for example to switch away from healthcare data if you were sending your social security number to somebody over text that number never gets stored in like google servers in which case you know you're avoiding that uh that thing with some of the companies we've seen on genetic testing and more broadly personalized healthcare sometimes they do have to go through hipaa approvals sometimes it's perfectly fine and a

SPEAKER_182: patient will will uh you know go onto the site upload their data and say you know i trust you as a company you've demonstrated that you're not going to sell this to anybody you're not going to you know prescribe ads to me based off of this and then that's you know another way to approach that

SPEAKER_179: problem totally that makes sense uh i am a little afraid though i have to say about anything in the medical space and venture capital like how do you know that you're not being theranosed

SPEAKER_183: i mean technical diligence is definitely important um yeah you don't want to be theranosed we we have a great bio researcher on our team who definitely helps us with that i think learning how to read white papers is super important on that front right because if you hear from another vc that it sounds great but you don't actually dig into the technical side of things we think that puts you at a disadvantage and so uh that's definitely part of why we operate the way we do which is like being able to read white papers and begin to understand them again you're never going to be as deep as somebody in the industry and that's why we also talk to people about their research we talk to academics etc to help us uh learn these things but um yeah definitely definitely digging into the research

SPEAKER_179: because it's not like consumer where you'd actually be the one that's using the product um the theranos came up in my brain when i was checking out one of your guys's investments a pair bio it seemed pretty cool it monitors cancer progression of patient derived tumor samples against potential treatment options their organ on a chip technology recreates core parts of the human tumor micro environment for accurate testing that's freaking awesome um obviously i was just reading this off of like their website but that seems incredible yeah but again like i said the first thing that comes to mind i'm like wait is this like real like is this actually working so is this company fully

SPEAKER_183: fledged doing this right now yeah so i can give a high level description of what what all those things mean and then and then tell you a little bit more about how they're doing it so basically they're using something called oriental chip it sounds crazy but really all it is is like a petri dish that's fully enclosed you have holes on each side so you can understand how different fluids are moving through that chamber that's important because like in your body cells are typically surrounded by fluid and

SPEAKER_217: understanding how those two things work together gives you a better idea of the environment that a

SPEAKER_218: tumor for example is existing in and so you then take a slice of a tumor from a sample from a patient a patient submits that to the hospital the hospital then sends that to pair bio pair bio then uh tests

SPEAKER_183: a number of different chemotherapies across all of these samples they use computer vision to understand the progression of tumors over time maybe certain movements are indicative of the chemo actually causing it to metastasize in which case that would not be a good that would not be something that you want to prescribe to a patient and so helps them gather data helps them understand uh what chemo is that they can prescribe to a patient they had done some initial trials they're going through another clinical trial right now so you want to get plenty of patient data before you make sure it's safe and that it works well and that um the models are predicting everything accurately but again it's it's just a way of getting more complex data around these things before you have to uh try them on a patient and specifically pair does it incredibly quickly in less than a week and so if you have high growth cancer that's an incredible differentiation to be able to have to be able to have that data across a number of different samples and then say okay we've actually seen how this will interact with the tumor itself

SPEAKER_192: here's what you should try that is so freaking cool so as you are explaining all of these things

SPEAKER_179: i can't help but wonder why don't you think there are a lot of young investors operating in this like

SPEAKER_183: infrastructure space yeah i think um i think broadly there's a few things i think one is that we need more more sort of research driven firms i think the more you're able to engage with primary sources it helps you uh sort of form your own opinions about what's going on in this space i think a lot of people are nervous to engage with white papers they're so dense and maybe don't have a background in the field of the thing that you're looking at but really if you already don't know something what is the worst that can happen as you begin to try and learn those patterns read them yourself so you're never going to understand everything but it helps you sort of pull in experts find other people to talk to you can ask them okay am i understanding this space correctly and so i think it's easier to to maybe look at things that a lot of other people are looking at and that's not bad but i think it's definitely exciting as we see more people get comfortable with engaging with newer research and developing non-consensus opinions around those things because the whole thing that venture capital is best at is putting money into very you know non-consensus bets that could have massive massive payoffs even though they're maybe really crazy research and so yeah definitely excited to see more people enter enter the space yeah i definitely hope to see more

SPEAKER_192: people go into this i feel like i even on this show to be honest we've had a lot of people that are

SPEAKER_179: vcs on especially on my segment but they have been investing in things like consumer social sass um not necessarily things that are quite literally helping cure cancer or at least detect cancer at like a much earlier rate i also noticed that on twitter when i like violently stalked you before the show you're really into philosophy and i find that a lot of really good investors are really into philosophy how has having that as like a passion or something that at least you seem to be pretty well versed on um impacted you as an investor yeah i think oh man a few different ways honestly

SPEAKER_183: i've always been interested in philosophy and tech which is maybe a little trite to say at this point obviously machine learning and ai communities have gone through this whole like ethical reconciliation moment where everybody's like how do we do this better how do we create rules about using these things better but i think i think it's just another tool in your toolbox of how to think about the world that you want to exist and how to sort of approach that as you're as as sort of like a starting point of like what is the world missing and you know there's lots of things that would be great businesses but do we want that business to exist and how would it help people and how would it

SPEAKER_217: help you know a number of different types of people and so um yeah i think it just helps you develop frameworks around thinking about these technologies i agree and i keep talking about your

SPEAKER_179: twitter and you got your job off twitter i got my job off twitter um it seems like a lot of people these days are getting their jobs off twitter what advice do you have around trying to build a personal brand

SPEAKER_183: for young people that really want to get into vc oh yeah let's see um okay so for vc specifically a first of all i will say feel free to reach out to me about this i literally right before this was writing a thread on this because it's something i love helping people with i think it can be very unsettling when you don't have a normal background to try and approach something and everybody is telling you just have just you know have the degree that was focused on this exact thing and you don't have to do that um i think the best things come from people working and crossing industries all the time so i'll say that first i think with vc specifically you really want to think about how you can demonstrate proactively the work that you're going to be doing at that firm so vc has become sort of a trendy job a lot of people get inbound emails saying hey i'd love to work in vc can you give me advice you don't want to do a very generalized cold email i think you know it's good to write cold emails but if you want to stand out from those people i would say find a few investors who you really admire both maybe in terms of their portfolio the way they think maybe they put writing out um their character more broadly learn about those people learn about their investments learn about their history and things they put out write them really thoughtful cold email saying hey you know i've dug into x industry that it seems like you guys are interested in um i have a thesis that the space is going to change in this way maybe spend some time doing your own work that will not only teach you how to begin to think about these things but ideally will also show you know the investor that you're approaching that you are able to do this job proactively i mean cold emailing is generally a big part of vc but also thinking through those things as part of the industry and so um i think it's a great way to to search for a job while doing things that will make you better at the job and to combine those in and of itself is super helpful to you um but a lot of people send companies without context which isn't necessarily bad if you can source companies that's great but i think having a view a deep view around why they're good the market conditions the way research is changing

SPEAKER_217: uh is really like the most differentiated way to set yourself apart as you're approaching the industry

SPEAKER_179: when you're doing like research on these companies while working in venture what are some of your best practices to do the best research you possibly can yeah on on the diligence side or even before we

SPEAKER_182: get to diligence and sort of like forming market views before the diligent side for definitely forming

SPEAKER_183: market views yeah i would say um reading primary research which you've touched on not being afraid of white papers again like the cool thing i think is once you start reading a few in an industry your brain literally starts to sort of absorb the formatting of white papers and so maybe you don't fully understand 20 of the words but you begin to realize okay this one really matters to the the abstract of the paper for example i'm going to take the time to dig into this a little bit and then jump back into the paper whereas these other things don't matter so that's one thing to do don't be afraid of that i would say also researching or reaching out to researchers more broadly reaching out to people who are working on like the incubation stage of these technologies and asking them about what they're seeing another thing is on the industrial side and on the infrastructure side as we've been talking about reaching out to people who do that job on the daily just generally being curious about people around you people talk about investing more broadly and always say invest in things that you would use as a product similarly as you're going through life if you don't understand how something works but you have the opportunity to talk to somebody who does who like works on that infrastructure ask them i think a lot of people a lot of investors like i'm gonna think about market research you know like if we need more if we need more infrastructure this type like i'm gonna read a report on infrastructure and that's not bad but honestly like you probably can get in contact with a person who like touches one part of the process and sure it's an incomplete view but you'll probably learn some really interesting stuff um i think some of the most interesting insights i've had have been just being curious about there's protests going on from this one working population like what are they protesting about what is the issues that they're facing you know that type of thing so curiosity in the abstract talking to people who work in these industries who you might not think about approaching

SPEAKER_192: and then reading primary research yeah i absolutely love that there's something to be said to just going straight to the source um and talking to people i find that that's a really big thing

SPEAKER_179: that is getting missed out on a lot of times even with reading primary research like i think that's wonderful but you're right there's something to be said about going straight to the people that are the subject matter experts and can break it down for you in language that's like way more comprehensible uh so you've also touched a lot about white papers and you say they're written certain format seems like you've been you read a lot of white papers what how does that process go for you where are you getting these white papers and then how are you reading them definitely you can

SPEAKER_182: find them on twitter again i think you know if you're interested in vc don't follow a bunch of vcs on

SPEAKER_183: twitter follow researchers in industries that you're interested in if it's academic of course so i mean i had another investment thesis and sort of like gaming more broadly and how gaming is becoming more persistent and a bunch of other artifacts we see there um and gaming for example has almost been like uh interestingly separate from academia for a long time so maybe some of the areas in which people are doing real innovation in in there like maybe it's innovation around latency or other things like that might not be an academic institution so then think about like where are you seeing social scenes even like you almost have to be like a scene analyst um like where are you seeing social scenes around gaming and like talk to them like learn what that social scene means and why people are part of it and uh what they're doing there but um once you find that and you find those people then follow them on twitter uh for academics you can find their white papers and you can talk to them um i would say once you're digging into white papers just trying to understand like high level um high level like inflection points that are really novel like there's a lot of innovation happening all the time but why does this change something for a bunch of people or where could it be implemented would it where it would change things for a bunch of people obviously that's where venture sort of hits the road is like science that could change a lot of people's lives um and so thinking about how how this could change somebody change something at massive scale i think is really important and then how you begin to break down that research where it would be sold to 100 people or a thousand people and then you can expand

SPEAKER_179: that product over time freaking awesome thank you so much for coming on you answered a ton of questions you're incredibly smart super excited to keep checking out your um tweets but more importantly i actually like your long form stuff even better than your tweets so for where keep talking about your twitter

SPEAKER_182: where can people find you yes at n williams 030 i also have my research twitter linked in my bio if you want to read white papers like i recommended go check out our white papers they are pretty incredible

SPEAKER_179: uh been loving like i said your latest blog post all about again in the quantum space thank you so much for being on nicole i'm gonna have to have you on again like a year from now just to see where you're up to let's do it thank you awesome thank you