SPEAKER_00: season five of angel is brought to you by linkedin jobs a business is only as strong as its people and every hire matters post your first job for free at linkedin.com slash angel assure is the leading provider of special purpose vehicles and fund administration with over 5 000 completed transactions and 2.5 billion dollars under administration angel listeners can get 20 off their first spv at ashore.co slash angel and odoo is a fully customizable and fully integrated suite of business apps that lets you build and scale your stack as you build and scale your business your first app is free forever and right now odoo is offering one thousand dollars off your first implementation pack at odoo.com slash twist that's odoo.com slash twist hey everybody welcome to

SPEAKER_02: angel this is season five of a series i do with angels now we've done four seasons already and we were really thinking what would we bring you in the fifth season these 10 episodes and we decided super angels would be the way we would go what's a super angel i don't know we made the term up but basically people with over 50 investments who've been doing it for a decade and frankly who are at the top of their game you look at the lineup that we've had it's been nothing short of amazing we did an amazing job and by we i mean my my research team did an amazing job look at this lineup joanne wilson's coming on episode 10 paul judge is coming on episode 9 uh episode 7 matt mulamook episode 6 of season 5 reed hoffman mark cuban howard linson eli gill des trainer and david tisch what a lineup for the season and today episode 8 of season 5 of angel the super angel season gary tan is back on the pod how you doing gary what up thanks for having me everybody knows gary i met gary in the lobby of the ritz call to my friend billy who invested in his company posterous i heard you're talking about posters once and you were i think you were on one of your clubhouse rooms and you were talking about how you had regrets about how you didn't focus enough or stick with it enough where you didn't have product market fit enough now that you're in i think are you in your second decade

SPEAKER_07: of investing now like me uh not quite yet 2009 or 2010 oh i started in i mean i was still i still

SPEAKER_09: had credit card debt in 09 and 10 i was working on posterous uh you know you had me on one of the first uh twist shows you were episode 14 yeah at sequoia offices that's right yeah so i had not started investing until honestly 2011 when i started working at y combinator okay so you're a decade

SPEAKER_15: yeah you're a decade in now when you look back at yourself as an entrepreneur what did you do wrong

SPEAKER_21: as an entrepreneur when you look back on it that's so obvious now that you're an investor

SPEAKER_19: yeah i look back on my successes and failures and it's so obvious to me what i did wrong

SPEAKER_09: i mean there are basically two phases to uh startups the first phase is can you get product market fit and that's just like how do i catch lightning in a bottle and the thing about postures is we caught it like we were 10x year-on-year growth we were the toast of the town all the all the people who we needed to use postures were using it we're on everyone's radar yeah you used it

SPEAKER_27: every you know everyone who was everyone was using our service and so we caught lightning in a bottle but then there was this moment where we needed to hire an exec team and i needed to stop coding i needed to hire the best possible designer to do the design instead of me doing it all i need to hire the best cto the best vp of eng and we needed to build the org and we had you know actually raised a great series a from one of the best investors satish dharmaraj at redpoint like we had everything going and it was just purely we let the lightning go like i didn't want to give up coding i didn't want to give up design and it was a gut punch because we it was it was it's so obvious like seeing so many companies now and you see product market fit at least now i can go hey don't fail the way i did because it will hurt a lot and it means something when i say it because you know we you know tom we were sort of competing against tumblr tumblr had their billion dollar exit and then in retrospect we were actually competing against instagram we just didn't even know it and so there's so many

SPEAKER_21: levels to this game buffer right you were like there was a fork in the road where you could have become the destination like tumblr yeah or you could have become 10 bucks a month 20 bucks a month did

SPEAKER_09: you ever turn on revenue like sas revenue no we really needed to at that moment and we didn't and we could have been squarespace we could have been weebly we're friends with the weebly founders they they said hey why don't you just charge five bucks a month you'll never have to raise money again

SPEAKER_31: we were only like 10 15 people at the time it would have been trivial to be profitable for people

SPEAKER_34: who don't know posterous was like my favorite service because i was addicted to social media it was the dawn of social media and i had an email address that was like a specific unique hash and i would take a picture on my blackberry and i would email it and it would go to all my services

SPEAKER_37: done i didn't have to open them up just like buffer does now yeah and jason uh jason at um uh

SPEAKER_09: you know at hey.com they just released a new posterous but on hey.com email which is awesome

SPEAKER_40: good for them it's so crazy um and i just remember from the mahalo days i had gotten the q a service

SPEAKER_21: mahalo answers right it was growing like a weed and then i had figured out youtube but it was i was trying to boil three oceans i was trying to fight a war on three fronts and i should have just focused

SPEAKER_43: on one and it's all worked out i'm focusing on one on inside and it's growing nicely so

SPEAKER_21: focus focus focus hire people who can take over from you specific job functions so you can move up the stack you're only as good as the team you build right yeah first right it's like you're saying it's about product market fit but in that sec second phase the growth phase what is it really about you you you sort of hinted at hiring people who are better than you so you can do other things and so you're not doing 10 things what else is it about when you're in that second growth phase i mean

SPEAKER_09: i think if you look at your calendar you actually need to spend pretty much 50 to 80 percent of your time hiring and then once you've hired them how do you retain them right like give them the right goals and then give them the space to execute against it like don't be in their business being like what'd you do today right it's like don't micromanage you actually have to set up okrs that are sort of monthly or quarterly and it's like you figure out how we get there but these are

SPEAKER_47: these these are the things i need you to do right and that you know people just don't do it right and what you know what got you there what got you here won't get you there where we want to go right and there's just that moment honestly post series a but sometimes it happens at seed

SPEAKER_09: and it's recurring like if you if people have not hired people or been executives before and a lot of founders haven't um you literally need someone to come and slap you in the face i mean you need

SPEAKER_49: someone to come and just be like wake up you're gonna die you're in phase two not this is gonna kill

SPEAKER_34: you i i always like to sort of explain this to people like there's a time to be a player this time to be a coach and like when you're a great player like you're you were a great designer or a great designer you were a great coder i don't know if you've kept that knife sharp or no no sadly not i heard that sword bells real quick in the developer space yep and so you know at some point you have to

SPEAKER_21: then move into the teacher role and the management role like you're saying and it's it is very hard to make that change and you have to also have the ability to say this is the goal so you have to stop thinking in days and weeks and start thinking in months and quarters correct yeah no absolutely

SPEAKER_47: that and that's you know for us like you and i when we work with our companies like that's actually the moment the thing that we need to do like there's not really if not us then who someone's got to you

SPEAKER_40: know help the founders figure it out it is product market reasons to have operators as investors and

SPEAKER_34: and we're part of this new class i would say yourself myself and countless other founders who went from operators and creators of businesses to investors how are you enjoying being an investor i i get the

SPEAKER_02: sense sometimes when i hear you talk you kind of miss being in the game do you miss being in the game and is investing fulfilling enough or do sometimes you just think god i'm so young i should just suit up

SPEAKER_09: again i should sharpen that sword i guess i'm trying to figure out how to make investing the game um because you know it's sort of fractal right um we spend all of our time trying to find people who can take software and apply it to these ossified industries that have no software that you know they're not they're dumb right they still pick up the phone and venture largely is still kind of that i mean i would argue paul graham was one of the first people to add some software where it's like apply on this website and like two percent of people can actually get into y combinator and right you showed that oh there's actually a lot of space for adding software and then when i got there i built you know their social network which like one in three i see people use every day so i'm like that they're like software things right yeah book it's a joke on facebook it's actually from the office

SPEAKER_66: is it uh what happens on book face people just talk it's just a forum right i mean what's funny is

SPEAKER_09: today we talk about uh creator economy and things like that but i actually think like paul graham figured out a lot of the stuff early right he did his essays his essays were the top of the funnel it was like you weren't meant to have a job and then i read those essays and i'm like no no no no oh my god this is great like this is me me yeah totally i mean i was working for peter teal's uh you know startup palantir which is public now which is insane and i read his essays and i was like oh my god i could start a company like i could start a palantir right and um you know then he's sort of like the pied piper right like there's hacker news which was arguably like one of the first creator communities and like part of it was like you've built all of these things as well like your whole you know media universe teaches people how to start companies like how you know what's the language like what's the culture like how do you be a part of this culture and then you have your slack group which is giant and massive and then there's you know all of us have been building communities for many many years actually yeah and i'm late comer actually i'm like oh i need

SPEAKER_75: to start doing youtube and i need to do clubhouse 2021 is looking up tons of new beginnings lots of hope it's going to be a great year and hopefully great opportunities for you to grow your business but if you're going to grow your business you're going to need incredibly talented people to do as a founder what maybe you're not great at or you don't have time to do anymore you need to build your team you're only going to be as successful as the team that builds your products interfaces with

SPEAKER_76: your customers and builds the culture of your company and linkedin jobs finds the right person quickly to fill your positions and we are going to give you your first job posting free right now you go to linkedin.com slash angel linkedin.com slash a-n-g-e-l angel very easy to remember hiring is super important i'm doing it here at launch just hired a second producer for this week in startups hiring a community manager we hired another support executive for the syndicate we are booming over here and we do all of this by going to linkedin jobs 722 million members worldwide mean business they keep their profiles up to date on linkedin for a reason they're looking for opportunities and you can post your job with all those great screening questions and linkedin is going to get your role that position in front of the right people with the soft skills the hard skills and all the things you need the thing i've been blown away with is the quality of the candidates

SPEAKER_43: very simple linkedin.com slash angel linkedin.com slash angel and terms and conditions apply because they're giving you that free first job posting thank you linkedin for supporting the show

SPEAKER_78: your youtube is great for people who don't know just search for gary tan um with two r's in gary

SPEAKER_80: and uh you do really nice short succinct videos what and you were just starting those maybe 18 months

SPEAKER_09: ago what's the reaction been oh it's been great i mean uh honestly the first six months really were

SPEAKER_68: terrible and very discouraging which is how it works in media terrible how you know you're like shouting you know shouting into an empty cave and you know i spent you know many many hours per week

SPEAKER_09: like three four hours a week like learning how to do videography and editing and sound design and then you put it up and then you get like a hundred views you're like oh my god why am i spending all this time but then there was a moment where the algorithm figures it out like i think and then i went from 10 000 to 50 000 subs in like a week on a couple viral videos and then now i'm like at 65 70 000 and then it's actually helped all the other platforms like i got 40 000 new follows on twitter and i was like flat wide for a long time so i don't know it's like these are systems that you

SPEAKER_80: can hack you you're either creating or you're waiting is what i learned and if you just start

SPEAKER_34: creating and you don't look at the metrics you'll wake up one day and you'll be like oh what happened this is incredible like there are people actually subscribing to my channel listening to my podcast whatever it is and then every subsequent one goes faster um and it's one of the things i learned about clubhouse and twitter spaces is like it's building off of this podcast or my twitter following and doing experimenting there you got to angel invest in clubhouse yeah i did true yes true uh

SPEAKER_88: so now but explain to me you you didn't do it through your fund or you did it personally how did that happen and how did you yeah i mean because i tried to get in that round and they were like sorry

SPEAKER_21: no no uh no no rooms at the end but you somehow got a room yeah i mean it's tricky i mean we we were one

SPEAKER_68: of the players that were trying to do the seed and hats off to andrew chen over at andreason honestly

SPEAKER_47: i mean he is aggressive he's you know totally a killer and you know they've done andreason has been a great partner to them so yeah um you can go to the you can go to the url who didn't invest in

SPEAKER_94: clubhouse.com who didn't invest in clubhouse and it says there was room but not for you yeah jason i

SPEAKER_68: have a question for you which is i guess like i mean out of your new york days like how do you think about you know biggie versus tupac in the context of like media included if i'm not included it's on

SPEAKER_34: yeah yeah yeah block me from investing which andreason horowitz did in this round yeah totally

SPEAKER_94: they they basically i think they basically told paul not to include me because i've had a chippy relationship with them um and like mark blocks me all the time that unblocks me then emails me then stop he's just weird i mean you know mark andreason he's he's weird you agree i mean weird

SPEAKER_47: weird cool i think i don't know overall cool but he's weird has he blocked you before

SPEAKER_15: i don't think so i don't think so he's very sensitive anyway whatever reason i didn't get

SPEAKER_34: included and if i'm not going to be included uh you know my approach is i'm going to and i believe in the space i'm just going to go meet with every other company and i'll invest in every other one so i've invested in one called space and they're going to do white labeled clubhouse or they're doing white label clubhouse that's awesome which i think is going to be an awesome platform and then one of my startups capiche.com created a version of clubhouse where you can um basically save the files to a podcast kind of like zen caster does yeah but you own your audience and obviously on clubhouse you build up a following like twitter you don't own any of your audience you don't have their emails or phone numbers so that's sort of like the patreon version of it um and then i'm meeting with all the open source companies and so you know yeah the open source movements are interesting there's three or four of them and so you know my i think what happened here is clubhouse has and there were a couple people who had played with versions of this before so i don't think clubhouse was the originator of the idea but they obviously made the best version of it so i think that they win as the dedicated pure play and certainly with 110 million dollars in the bank

SPEAKER_94: yeah going anywhere for a decade or two so i think they win as the pure play and i'm interested

SPEAKER_34: on how you think about the chess field um and then i think there will be just like social networking 20 versions of this so they'll if they if they are in fact facebook of casual audio then there'll be a snap and insta a whatsapp a wordpress a twitter etc a linkedin what do you think

SPEAKER_09: dude we should uh co-invest on the one that is that allows other graphs to add this functionality

SPEAKER_41: so let's find one together for that one um yeah so if you have a graph

SPEAKER_68: yep then you could just add the feature yeah i mean i think it's going to be a modality within

SPEAKER_09: any graph and so we're already seeing this in a portfolio company so career karma which i led the

SPEAKER_68: uh kim and i led the series a for kim my cutler yes kim my cutler for you and she yeah she's the

SPEAKER_127: best she mixes it up on twitter she was she was mixing it up with me over politics

SPEAKER_41: yeah i love kim she's great she's an expert at all that stuff so it's i know i feel like i'm

SPEAKER_131: yeah she's like you're the exact wrong person to challenge rich white male don't do it

SPEAKER_41: you're not helping yeah i mean san francisco is its own thing i mean it just keeps happening so

SPEAKER_47: but yeah career karma added uh audio to their communities so it's a community for people to

SPEAKER_09: find the right uh coding boot camp initially but the bigger view is um the world actually needs a lot more retraining and i know you believe that i you know i deeply believe this like you know tech is sort of leaving behind way too many people and then the question is well how what do we do about it and so career karma says we're going to take people who you know they might have spent 10 years trying to get a college degree they couldn't get the college degree but if they have the right community around them and they find the right boot camp like they can actually join the tech economy so there's this amazing story of keisha lake who she spent 10 years trying to get and you get a college degree she you know couldn't she was working she was in atlanta um you know single mom and then she found the right challenge on career karma got the community went through flat iron school she has a six-figure job now with stitch fix wow and she's getting 20 of her friends in her community to go through the same thing i'm like can you imagine what's going to happen when that just ripples out to all of society it's going to be awesome and and now it happens over voice right so instead of just

SPEAKER_106: having a chat room they added voice right so that would be the modality and that's real you invested individually or from your fund and how does that work for people oh for uh basically everything that

SPEAKER_09: uh i try and touch i try and put it through the fund first right and then you know only if i can't get allocation sometimes if i really really want to you know our lp agreement allows us to do sort of like a placeholder bet um but it's actually worked a bunch for us like uh you know sometimes we'll invest in something that's too early or there was an allocation we met them too late and then we'll

SPEAKER_144: lead the next round and then i'll sell my angel steak to a fund 50k whatever it is into the fund because i think there's no chance that company doesn't become worth 10 billion i mean yeah yeah it's it's

SPEAKER_34: definitely on the way what do you think what's your east coast west coast view i mean obviously i'm hardcore if you decide you're going to exclude me i'm going to make a point of saying i don't

SPEAKER_37: like to be excluded yeah that's fair i mean i mean that's what twitter spaces was like literally

SPEAKER_94: twitter spaces reached out to me they're like hey we know you're active on clubhouse and then i was the largest user on twitter spaces i started using it and i think the product's better you disagree

David Friedberg: with or that you disagreed with an emoji with me we're in yeah that's right with a gif you disagree

SPEAKER_21: with a gif let's hash it out right now what do you know yeah i mean this is the fastest i've ever seen twitter get their ish together like they saw this they saw the social graph sucking off all the users to clubhouse sucking their social graph off to sub stack and they're like enough we need to have

SPEAKER_09: these products built in totally i mean i'm really impressed by twitter they're sort of moving on a dime whoever's doing that like hats off to them right and then the main thing that i'm sort of curious about will be what is what are those internal product and vp exec discussions like because there's going to be one vp who their whole bonus for the year will be satisfying the metrics that we told the street right and there's going to be someone else who's like the disruptor internally and their whole bonus will be did twitter spaces actually work and then it's like who's going to

SPEAKER_47: win right and it's about pixels and distribution and so for me like that'll be like i think twitter can win it but not without cost right they will this other guy this other guy or gal whoever it is is gonna lose and they're gonna lose some internal battles and they're gonna be mad right right and so you know that's i think the classic thing inside these giant organizations is like and so you know part is like maybe jack you know way up at the top he's thinking about it and he's just gonna make the call right and he's gonna maybe it'll win to explain this to people who don't understand wall street's

SPEAKER_34: looking at typically the total number of active users they're looking at revenue at this point in a

SPEAKER_88: company and they've been very frustrated with twitter being slow growth but high engagement and high high authority or high i don't know so something special about twitter based on the people who use it right it's an interest graph maybe yeah the graph is so high profile so strong but it's under monetized

SPEAKER_34: and it's not growing like it should for the quality of people and man when you look at talking to people and the minutes um people spend on an audio app like when i did a clubhouse room last night for two or three hours and it was like all of a sudden i looked up and two or three hours are gone and i'm like this is not stopping people don't want to leave yeah because it's like a dinner party i mean people use that metaphor so i think it's going to really increase minutes but to your point if you push that new product it might be at the cost of other products i think clubhouse wins the dedicated app version of this functionality i think twitter wins minutes used or minutes consumed right but what people what i've learned over these this decade of investing in two three decades in the industry is that it's not winner take all it's winner take most or winners take most like the top three take

SPEAKER_82: most is that is that right is that match your experience now yeah i think so and then the thing is um

SPEAKER_47: it's kind of like stories in a way like here's this new way for people to communicate and then you know there are scenarios where both instagram and snapchat coexist and it's sort of a duopoly or like you know three or four way tie and um twitter is not going away anytime soon it's got it's gonna have incredible it's going to have incredible reach for the long haul and then you know some of these conversations are just going to happen on spaces because that's where the graph is and then you know i think that this is growth mindset it's not a not exactly zero sum um so i think they will coexist and then the longer term view that i'm sort of curious about is you know any social app that has a graph um like career karma or you know anything that tries to bring people together you know this is the first time that you can have really deep conversations um if you set up the norms correctly that you that's value that's value unlocked period like if you just have people and you have their attention and they're on the phone and you can put them in a room and they can actually talk as if they

SPEAKER_175: were in the same room you know that's amazing and it's so simple it's like amazing how simple it is it's

SPEAKER_177: like there's a room really product guys this was sitting right here yeah this is here the whole time it was sitting there the whole time literally we're all standing we're all sitting at a table

SPEAKER_88: and on the lazy susan next to the peking duck and the roast pork is this incredible entree but it's invisible yeah and nobody put their fork down and realized oh my lord right in the middle of the table is this incredible dish yeah it's it really makes you excited about entrepreneurship that there is

SPEAKER_34: always room to innovate yeah it's just so great it's just so great i mean i'm i'm actually very happy for them i think it's super cool now let's talk about valuations when you saw that hundred million dollar valuation pretty shocking for a company with at the time three or four thousand vcs using the product yeah totally but i looked at and said i would do that valuation in a heartbeat yeah you did

SPEAKER_190: that value you did the seed right yeah yeah that's right so you obviously i mean our fund maxed out at 60 for what it's worth our fund maxed out at 60 post so we came in they came in over the top like 2x

SPEAKER_34: where we were at which is oh really oh you came in oh i see you can you offered a 60 million dollar valuation the winning valuation was 120 and i understand and 60 was already like the highest first check that

SPEAKER_190: we had ever i mean we basically looked around i mean because we're a seed fund like we are not a series a fund you know and um you know you look at your you know that at 200 million it's like you can do some series a's but we like to be relatively disciplined um and we said this is a once in a lifetime sort of deal what's the craziest that we could think of and it wasn't crazy enough so i mean but hats off to

SPEAKER_07: paul and rohan i mean i did 120 or 100 whatever posts something yeah it was north of 100 i heard

SPEAKER_190: and then the secondary piece i thought was very meaningful because you know rohan four million

SPEAKER_68: dollars off the table yeah yeah i mean is what i heard i mean it's incredible aggression and then

SPEAKER_09: the thing is i think it's right you know there i think there are vcs that and now i'm gonna get in trouble with people who are friends but the reality is like this is why we're here we're here to get in trouble good trouble good trouble good trouble but i mean i i really do think like if you look at mmt if you look at like bitcoin at 56 000 what it really means is that the dollar is worth less like 25 percent of all dollars were printed last year 2020 right so of course like there's a crazy asset price bubble you see it in the public markets you see it in real estate you see it in crypto how could it not affect i mean this is water at this point right and so the question now is do you believe that it will stay this way will it get worse or will it go back to when uh seed and pre-seed was like two to three million dollars and it's like as far as i'm concerned like i don't think we will ever see two to three million like dropbox and airbnb at two mil post three mil post like postures was two you know three mil post like it will never happen again if you're an accredited

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SPEAKER_80: such a great partner i actually invested in ashore i kid you not those will be valuations that an

SPEAKER_34: accelerator gets for running an accelerator which is a ton of work i can tell you it's like yeah yeah yeah totally you worked out why common here i mean it is a lot of work to have people come for 12 16 weeks i mean it's brutal i mean yeah yeah and then you're the companies know that you're getting a good deal and therefore they're going to extract value from you um and you can't say no to i need these 10 introductions and then you have seven companies now you got 70 introductions in your inbox and okay there goes a day of your life of like going to war for these folks it's hard yeah i mean

SPEAKER_68: so for you know even for me like the lesson is you know our self-limiting belief was we're a seed fund

SPEAKER_09: what's the craziest seed deal we could think of and it wasn't crazy enough but i actually don't think seed and series a even apply anymore like it's just one big thing that's early stage and then it's sort of a bidding process at the end of the day like things are very competitive everyone's on zoom all day all the distributions that are coming out from the ipos they're going back to the lps the lps are plowing them back into the mega funds that yeah i mean you can see the progression like people are raising 200 mil 500 mil a billion if they're at a billion they're raising three if they're at three they're raising ten right so it's i mean what's funny is it makes no sense on the other hand i would argue it makes a lot of sense so it's just money the lps are just taking their winnings and then like keeping it at the table and then yeah it's actually like pretty logical efficiently

SPEAKER_34: how do you efficiently deploy early stage capital as you know when you get more money it's harder to place small bets yeah it's really hard to place 100k bets yeah for a billion it's impossible for a

SPEAKER_47: billion dollar fund to place 100k bets yeah yeah right they shouldn't even try right they don't even

SPEAKER_106: try i mean we can't make 10 000 bets i mean it's just not right feasible to make that many bets well i

SPEAKER_68: think someone might come back to it i mean your your buddy tamath was doing um capital as a service i'm super still i'm still super interested in that and that too explain yeah is alluring to you about capital as a service cas yeah i mean we're just yeah we believe in tech and so you know anytime i hear

SPEAKER_09: someone say like it's not possible i'm like there probably is a way using software right and i mean even like clubhouse itself sort of shows you that there can be new interactions with people you put people it's like pixels on a screen and you can somehow turn those pixels on a screen into a place

SPEAKER_47: that feels like a dinner party that's so powerful and that could never happen before like yc people had to fly to mountain view spend 10 12 weeks there in like a physical location and yc is totally virtual now and from what i can tell is as good as it was when it was we went fully with the launch accelerator it's

SPEAKER_34: yeah yeah it's better um and and people here's the thing a lot of people came here under duress yeah yeah you know and sometimes that duress was good because it got some people to make the jump and then they met their co-founders or you know their their third employee or their fourth co-founder whatever it is their key hires um but now i mean the efficiency tell me about your meetings and your meeting style when you're meeting a new founder like if i were to send one to you and you're like okay i'm interested in that how has that changed from pre-covid to during covet and then what do you think

SPEAKER_106: the future of a gary tan meeting is post-covid totally well i guess two things one thing is that

SPEAKER_09: oh but briefly i want to complete this crazy point which is like too much money and then crazy number of problems and then i think like using social software there will be just the new institutions right like your accelerator is one of them and we're using software to actually find more people you know career karma is bringing in the engineers and like future designers and product people it's like this revolution is only getting started and the money actually now i'm with you you convinced dude the money is coming right the money is here and then like if people are worried like are there going to be the startups i'm like they're coming right like they're watching our youtube channels

SPEAKER_27: they're reading they're watching your podcast like they are ready they're here they want to be a part

SPEAKER_34: of this thing too i mean if you look at the robin hood revolution you look at bitcoin as a revolution cryptocurrency what do those indicate if not people want to participate in equity i think young people have realized that being a wage slave is a dead end unless you're learning massively so i mean it is fine i mean i went to work for other companies learn or earn right yeah that's it you're earning and

SPEAKER_15: learning great but at a certain point if you want to create multi-generational wealth which is what

SPEAKER_34: everybody's saying just if you want to be independently wealthy you want to be able to define your own schedule i think these young people just realize i have to have equity which is why they're literally with bitcoin and nfts and anything they can get their hands on through a robin hood or

SPEAKER_21: coinbase interface they want to take risk and they want to be in the same assets that you and i are or

SPEAKER_68: you know a bunch of old boomers are yeah i mean i'm excited that people want to create and it's like

SPEAKER_09: the money the wealth like the status whatever it is like these are all zero-sum type things that like don't matter really like it's the creation that's awesome and then the score sort of takes care of itself

SPEAKER_250: i'm like let's like rise that up it matters to people who don't have it right oh no totally it

SPEAKER_76: absolutely does money it does matter this is one of the weird things about silicon valley is when when you get everybody gets post money so quick here or a large number of people get post money so

SPEAKER_94: quick here just based on the size of the salaries and you know people hitting lottery tickets that

SPEAKER_47: that's new that's relatively new i feel like i mean then again it's still like the 10-year overnight

SPEAKER_80: success too so yeah i mean but i mean is it possible to spend 10 years in silicon valley aggressively taking risk and not come out of it a winner i don't think so yeah even if you don't

SPEAKER_82: make any money your experience makes you employable for the rest of your life yeah look at paul and rohan

SPEAKER_09: i mean they literally you know they worked on high you know highlight and like so many different

SPEAKER_41: startups for years and years and years and years and then yeah and then all of those learnings

SPEAKER_21: have a winning startup during that whole time like a big exit or any exit i don't know the history

SPEAKER_47: yeah i know that they spent a lot of time learning a lot of things and then i mean it's testimony to show that you can take those learnings and if you just go back and you're in it you know you will find

SPEAKER_261: something well i mean and they found it uber was travis's third major effort right i mean yeah yeah yeah

SPEAKER_263: and he was in his what late 30s when he started it or mid 30s like yeah there's a cult of the young

SPEAKER_80: here but no yeah it turns out that i think the kill zone is your 40s or late 30s to early 50s like i would say 35 to 55 is when founders have enough experience and still have energy and then they get past 50 55 the energy starts to trail off yeah is that what you find i mean it just it's so individual

SPEAKER_09: so it's true it just depends like i don't think it's even an age thing i mean i'm about to turn 40 in a month and uh still look like i don't know i i hope to continue to feel 27 forever we'll see i think doing

SPEAKER_80: what we do in the early stage is the fountain of youth i turn 50 and i feel younger than i ever have because i hang out with 20 somethings or even 30 or 40 somethings or 50 somethings who are starting companies but who believe they can change the world so that's important i think it's just the

SPEAKER_195: greatest job ever isn't it like to just yeah it really is winners it's yeah it's nuts pinch myself

SPEAKER_47: every day like yeah well you gotta spend time with the losers and help them turn turn them into

SPEAKER_76: winners too and then i think that's what career calls for you know yeah totally you know lambda school etc you got people who aren't where they want to be in life and then you look at these ices

SPEAKER_82: man i think that this is the game changer i'm looking for every isa company i could find income sharing agreements you have any investments in that space yet i mean career karma is sort of like

SPEAKER_277: the beginning of that and then um yeah yeah the top of funnel for that they make their money by

SPEAKER_34: um funneling people into different boot camps etc that's right commission yeah for that oh what

SPEAKER_31: a great business and yeah so the whole ecosystem is growing yeah that's right that's right and then

SPEAKER_47: it's the i mean having these voice groups that you are with even as you're in the accelerator and then afterwards they're gonna you know i mean what you're doing with your accelerator and what yc is doing with sort of this idea of being a part like being a part of a cohort like you're a part of something there's an identity and then people when people in the cohort do well you know you do well and then you know then the bar is raised and you know you can do it because that person did it

SPEAKER_09: and then you know amazing things sort of have like that's the missing piece to me like the accelerators and career karma and communities that are facilitated through the internet are the missing piece to square

SPEAKER_47: the circle of like too much money in the world right there's way too much money but then there's so many problems and who's gonna solve it well like this is how we get enough people to do it

SPEAKER_76: how much money does your startup spend on all these different software products and how much time does it take you to integrate them all together let me guess too much time too much money well odoo is here to help that's spelled o-d-o-o it's a suite of business apps that runs your entire company on one platform i kid you not and if you're currently using a frankenstack of individual software solutions that don't talk to each other while you're wasting your time energy and that precious money you raise for your startup odoo streamlines your workflow and brings all that information together your workday will be more productive because odoo's integrations eliminate all of that repetitive tasks and data entry that you have to do when you're when you're doing a frankincite right plus if you only need two or three apps to optimize your workflow that's all you pay for odoo won't stick you with the bill for the apps you don't use you pay for what you use odoo has an app for every business need they offer 30 main apps that are updated regularly and another 16 000 from their active community for instance odoo offers a suite of financial software that'll help you keep your books tight with accounting payment tracking invoicing and more your first app is free forever and right now odoo is offering a one thousand dollar credit on your first implementation pack go to odoo.com slash twist odoo.com twist to check it out odoo.com twist take the thousand dollars put it in your account and then use it when you're ready but get it now because i don't know how long the offer is going to last well you know what and all that money is in

SPEAKER_34: dead assets you know when money is sitting in bitcoin or a bond or in apple's you know giant hedge fund like of 200 billion dollars what is that money doing for humanity or the world it's yeah i call it dead money it's just dead money sitting there it's not being touched there's no velocity to it

SPEAKER_88: it's not moving it's it's just it's static it has no value to anybody yeah it's sort of the difference

SPEAKER_265: between like i think a bank and then a really good concert or party right right and it's like you

SPEAKER_09: could you know you can go to the bank the money's sitting in a vault and it's doing nothing or like the most pure form of idea creation and value creation in the world is like two people come together with a dollar each they put it together and it's like here's three dollars right and then like let's keep that going right and that's like we get a front row of that yeah the thing i think

SPEAKER_76: that's problematic is so many of these vcs are moving downstream with these larger funds that they i i don't know if you're experiencing this but it's almost like there was this incredible orchard of apples and apple trees and fruit trees and all the vcs were like you know what too much work uh just bring us them your your seed funds y combinator tech stars whoever just bring us when you have a shiny apple that's really nice and we'll overpay for it yeah we call it the

SPEAKER_09: bag of gold just bring the bag of gold over here and just leave it on my desk and i'll think about

SPEAKER_68: whether i want to take it it's not funny but i don't think i think i think there will be a new model and you know hopefully we get to build it together right for yeah what's the new model for

SPEAKER_82: you when you think about this you have a 200 million dollar fund or something in that range i think

SPEAKER_287: yep 230 out of the last one yeah you got 30 people working at uh the firm uh about 18. so we have

SPEAKER_47: eight yeah six partners and two principals and two associates now and we've been growing so we have a team

SPEAKER_43: it's it's crazy when you start getting to that level yeah you actually have to have a process so

SPEAKER_80: how do you think about it in terms of ownership percentage and not giving a bag of gold to the next person or giving some of the bag of gold because they're going to put 10 bags of gold into you know the treasury of that startup how do you think about your role and not getting rolled over

SPEAKER_09: by the later larger funds yeah i mean the thing that i feel like uh you know at the angel stage or as a super angel the one thing you can control is what percentage ownership you're willing to take and so our men off the bat is 10 and then our pitch to people is like we're worth it like we will work for you like yesterday i dropped everything and we like turned around a video for around one of our seed companies and it's like wing did the a forerunner did the a but it's like i'm the seed investor like i was one of you know i mean actually maples was like the main seed investor maples was like come on over like let's work on this together and it's like we drop everything to turn around like a video for that company in like 24 hours and there's like they got like 8 000 views on that on that video like on twitter this morning and i'm like that is like what i want to do that's like what can we do to like help these companies at any stage and i'm like we're worth the percentage

SPEAKER_47: ownership because like that's what we do for the companies right um and so i think that's really

SPEAKER_09: important like picking people who are not just money and then also seeing the hard part is like how do you see through the marketing like i sort of empathize with and sympathize with founders

SPEAKER_68: because everyone says their value add everyone says that they're and we're like whoa no no like we actually do it you know but i don't know it's like the marketing i don't really care about it really

SPEAKER_09: it really needs to be do we actually have a positive impact for these companies um and staying

SPEAKER_34: early 10 percent provide massive value to prove that you're worth that 10 percent and then you probably have this experience all the time founder comes to you this vc wants to do the series a series b they asked if you could step back from 10 ownership to five and you could waive your pro rata and sell some of your shares to them yeah what do you do and how often does this happen to you it

SPEAKER_09: doesn't happen too often it has happened um the way we try to get around it is if if we're the ones who introduce the founder to their a or b yeah that doesn't happen so that's good um we actually basically like help people raise their you know sometimes b's and c's and d's so i mean so that's the number one best way that um a seed investor can sort of avoid having that happen is like we literally made that connection so right it's an unspoken rule would you try to step on me as a

SPEAKER_34: downstream investor they wouldn't do that because you brought it to them yeah and then the other thing

SPEAKER_09: that we try to do is um make it very clear when we you know so first check ownership is what you can control and then after that we actually explicitly say like we're gonna set aside half of that first check and if things if you get punched in the face things don't quite work out to plan but we have a plan to get to the other side like we're gonna be the ones who do the seed extension and a lot of people say like we don't do seed extensions a lot you know a lot of people i respect are like we'll never do seed extensions and i you know for me it's like if i were that found you know i was that founder right like i remember the moment where you're like oh it's not gonna quite make it you know like i need a little bit more time and it's like the best thing a seed investor pre-product market fit can do is literally just be like we believe in you we believe in this problem so much that if something happens and we still believe and if you know we all believe and we have a plan to get out like we're gonna do we're gonna double down right we're gonna help you through

SPEAKER_149: exchange for that that we're here to send you that lifeline please don't ask us or downstream investors might ask you to sell us out yeah and erase our pro rata our ability to maintain that 10

SPEAKER_34: and do you pre-socialize that with founders like hey be aware this could happen downstream

SPEAKER_118: i guess the ideal is to be so useful to the founders like it doesn't quite come up

SPEAKER_149: yeah i just tell them now explicitly here's what's going to happen if if this succeeds they're going to ask you to screw us and then just know that whoever would ask you to screw us the only the next person on the cap table to get screwed is you so if they're willing to do that and i've had funds do this to me and i just tell them if you try to screw me i'm the point guard i will never pass to you again yeah which is why i don't send companies to andrecent horowitz just too many too many elbows thrown in my face and not enough love and so when a founder comes to me i'm

SPEAKER_34: like okay here's chamath here's sax here's ruloff here's gary here's everybody but andrecent horowitz if they ask for an event you know introduction to andrecent horowitz i say okay you know i haven't had

SPEAKER_43: a great experience there but you know if you want to i can i can forward your email there but you know here are some other options for you if you like these better and so you know like my explicit concept here is since they haven't been kind to me is i hope that my next robin hood uber com doesn't make it to their doorstep and goes to one of their competitors that's the level of competition i

SPEAKER_34: like to play out as if you're gonna but you you haven't had anybody try to squash your pro rata

SPEAKER_317: it happens and you have to like have a bunch of back office you know let's do it you just have to

SPEAKER_34: like talk you know details i don't expect you to call people out on the show but tell us a story of how that went down and how you protected your interest in the interest of your lps people oh man this back this you know like behind this there's not really one way to do it right

SPEAKER_09: it's like okay so we have the lead we usually know the lead and then the lead also knows like we're probably going to send you more things like this terrible way to like start a relationship with us

SPEAKER_68: so you can have that conversation then you have it with the founders yeah and you know sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't i don't know i mean we're not we're friends with most people like i try to be really friendly like i don't have sharp elbows i try to be you but you don't you know but there are people who you know yeah like i have enemies too you know like i'm a human being so um so yeah you know do do we keep a list of people who we don't like like yeah we keep a list and i got my

SPEAKER_323: list you know recent horowitz and recent horowitz but everyone does right like you know even the

SPEAKER_16: nicest among us will like keep a list of people who well we remember that right so as we get towards the

SPEAKER_88: business oh man i it's i've never heard you address it on a pod yeah you guys are both super nice guys so what happened like it's like one of your favorite couples gets divorced but we're still friends and

SPEAKER_144: we love each other still you know would you love each other you're happy so is this a conscious

SPEAKER_68: uncoupling i think so i mean i have to point to dude like you know exec coaching is amazing and it can

SPEAKER_09: do work wonders i mean um i guess a lot of it is like some you know even among friends it's like sometimes you hit your numbers like you things like succeed to like your wildest dreams and then your dreams are different right and the reality is like you know if you love someone and you care about them and you want them to do well um you know at what point do you say like well i don't want to sacrifice my dream but i also want you to have yours and that's sort of like that can happen so

SPEAKER_273: you guys were in executive coaching together and like you realized you had just a different different

SPEAKER_68: set of goals yeah well and i don't know it happens you know the hard part about this business is like

SPEAKER_09: it's so long duration right like i feel like i grew up with alexis both as you know he helped me with my startup like we started the fun together we learned about how all this business worked together and then but at some point it's like you know we're also different people and you know we're extremely aligned in the way to do it but i mean you know this like the judgment part is so hard like you

SPEAKER_16: you're literally you know sometimes do not have exactly the same idea of what is a startup that

SPEAKER_02: will succeed versus not right got it so you guys i what i'm reading into there is you guys couldn't agree on which deals to do together he wanted to do a certain type of deal you wanted to do a certain type of deal and the fund's got a thesis so if we're going to have disparate these these i how do you say multiple thesis these systems or these i whatever it is multiple strategies you can't run

SPEAKER_287: two strategies with the same set of lps in the same fund it's just not possible right yeah i mean unless

SPEAKER_24: you like end up running two different funds and uh i guess and we explored all of those things too

SPEAKER_09: and i was like you know you're he i the thing is like i knew he would be happier and i would be happier if you know alexis is a true founder for real you know legit so legit youtube you know and so um there are times when you want to keep it together but you know like if you play it out in the

SPEAKER_16: simulator you're like everyone will be happier and we'll be able to honor our friendship if better wow if we're not together thanks for sharing that i think everybody's been wondering what

SPEAKER_80: happened i think it's cool that you i didn't pre-screen this just so the audience knows with you not at all and i was wondering if i should bring it up but we're all good and yeah you guys everybody's rooting for you so it's almost like this you know like perfect marriage we all saw and we saw you do great work together and then you went off to do different work and i think that's cool yeah i mean

SPEAKER_09: alexis is he's like the best consumer person i've ever seen like he really pioneered this idea that every business is a meme he taught me that for sure and then he's doing super well explain what

SPEAKER_24: that means oh i mean you know it's like that jay-z line you know i'm not a businessman i'm a

SPEAKER_09: business man you know like that's how you are like that's how you know i've learned to try to be like that you know i think alexis is the original real deal on that and um the things he can do for founders it's unbelievable right and uh you know he's having great wins you know dispo is an incredible company he like he saw it he met david dobrik he met daniel liz he like did that whole thing you know and um i am super over the moon on how well he's doing and how he well he's gonna do how do the

SPEAKER_119: lps take that i'm just curious as a i'm a solo gp so i won't have this issue and uh i'm kind of a solo act you know i'm kind of like dealing with the microphone and a guitar uh not the beatles so there's no chance of it breaking up but um how do you explain that to lps i mean that's that's got to be

SPEAKER_24: like a serious thing like yeah it was intense um it was intense wow yeah it's i mean it's definitely an intense thing to go through um i'm like just well i don't know i'm thankful to you know alexis

SPEAKER_09: and i mean the thing is like alexis has a team like he has caitlin holloway she's amazing um you know

SPEAKER_16: you know lizzie garvin his chief of staff amazing yeah i mean the lps get got it and uh you know there's so much money in the world so yeah and so they probably honestly so do i get to double my

SPEAKER_09: deployed capital give you each 10 million give you each yeah and the answer is like absolutely like

SPEAKER_16: you know growth mindset you know this isn't a zero-sum thing this is totally like it's you know

SPEAKER_80: one plus one equals three for sure when you look back on your great wins and you look for a pattern

SPEAKER_46: and you then try to carry that pattern forward what patterns do you see in your style of investing

SPEAKER_09: that have paid off for you i mean i think the number one thing whether it was like a poor of a

SPEAKER_16: meta with instacart um or brian armstrong with coinbase i mean really really good technical founder who like saw something that you know sometimes other people saw but often like not you know

SPEAKER_09: coinbase you know the idea of something that was a great well-lit place to buy bitcoin you know that wasn't something that happened like the places you went to to buy bitcoin were like sort of the

SPEAKER_76: i don't want to bring it up somebody sent me like 10 bitcoins to a mount gox wallet yeah and then it all

SPEAKER_67: got so if i have we need to get you to move it over to we need to move that over to coinbase earlier

SPEAKER_76: god jade actually bought a bunch of coin a bunch of bitcoin i got all those bitcoins gifted to me at

SPEAKER_119: like a dollar and they they're gone and then my wife bought a bunch under a hundred so yeah good on

SPEAKER_175: coinbase yeah so i think that is that right it's like there's always a new generation of builder and

SPEAKER_09: then you know when they figure out something that is sort of fringe but it means something to them that and then we meet them and they're like hey this thing's happening i'm going to devote my life to it and then we believe it's like you got to believe in things before like it's obvious right that's

SPEAKER_119: such a important thing like if everybody agrees clubhouse is going to win and is worth 100 million or coinbase is going to win or instacart's going to win and they're not going to get rolled by whole foods or amazon like you have to have conviction and most people did not think

SPEAKER_46: coinbase or instacart or a number of these companies you've been lucky enough to invest in

SPEAKER_119: and prescient obviously it took some skill there too to see those opportunities like most people

SPEAKER_43: did not understand those right i'm assuming you tried to get 10 other people to invest in those and

SPEAKER_24: they said no yeah yeah totally and you know it happens and that's okay we'll get them at the next

SPEAKER_80: round you know oh yeah what was the second round of clubhouse like you got that small tiny little bed in

SPEAKER_41: there oh they didn't even ask anyone i think they didn't ask anybody yeah yeah someone's like hey how

SPEAKER_119: would you like six months later a hundred million at a billion how do you that's a crazy crazy bet yeah

SPEAKER_140: or is it not that makes sense to me it's totally self-fulfilling right like i mean explain what

SPEAKER_329: people don't understand about that and why it is self-fulfilling i don't think most people understand

SPEAKER_09: what i think the number one thing when you look at consumer deals the number one thing you have to

SPEAKER_47: look at is retention and the retention for clubhouse was like facebook level it was outrageous right and so at that point and then if you looked at the top line growth over even like january um which is when i think they were talking about the deal it's like sort of obvious honestly you know it's like is

SPEAKER_09: this going to be the next facebook is this going to be durable and if it's going to be durable this is going to be super long-term cash flows over a hundred years and you just you know you can take

SPEAKER_47: all those future cash flows and discount it to now it's like yeah can you underwrite like the

SPEAKER_119: valuation they gave like i think you can yeah it's going to be a textbook one i mean i i'm trying to think of the last time we saw a company with i guess at the time four or five million members no revenue get a billion dollar valuation i don't know if it's ever happened in our industry but i would have i'll be totally honest i tried to buy secondary shares at the billion dollar valuation because i had somebody who was on the cap table who was buying some of my shares from a late stage company in secondary because i was trimming our position 10 to get some lps and syndicate

SPEAKER_149: members um uh to lock in a win for them and i said i'll sell you the 10 in this company if you sell me 10 of club your clubhouse share she said no gotta get the i mean there's always a deal out there so

SPEAKER_80: so shout out to anybody who's got clubhouse shares uh i would love to get on the cap table no i can't get

SPEAKER_149: on the cap table now i got other investments so you're all good listen gary you've been great for sharing so much wisdom and knowledge continued success everybody signed up for gary's uh youtube channel it's uh do you have a name for that is it just the gary tan channel yes yeah youtube.com

SPEAKER_09: gary tan two r's okay very creative yeah easy gary tan he does these and also follow him on insta

SPEAKER_34: because he takes the same content and even make shorter quicker versions of it you are you fucking with this tick tock thing yet and making short tick tock videos or oh man you're too old

SPEAKER_88: i'm too old for that unfortunately if you're 40 and you're too old that's 50 year old i'm way too old

SPEAKER_371: creepy people like you should post videos to tick tock i'm like that's like you know i like the my

SPEAKER_68: korean you know my korean dad nick cho you know he's he's great there's not it's not an age thing you

SPEAKER_40: know it's pretty hilarious like being in a korean family and watching my korean dad because

SPEAKER_374: like the idea of a loving korean father is such a yeah like a kind loving korean dad seems to not be the typical archetype people had that's right i see all these reaction videos to people crying

SPEAKER_177: and he's like yeah oh i love you so much you're so good at everything you do don't put any pressure

SPEAKER_68: on yourself and it's like uh i don't know if that's the yeah that's you know but maybe it's the well that's why it's the korean dad you wish you had it's the yes it's the idealized version of

SPEAKER_80: every person's dad but yeah he does he does make it work so maybe i should do like a boomer

SPEAKER_62: okay boomer finance channel yeah it could be it's well i'll be a subscriber over here

SPEAKER_383: all right everybody gary tan great job we'll see you all next time bye bye