Latest / Success Story with Scott Clary / Chris Dixon - Entrepreneur, Investor, Cryptocurrency and Web3 Evangelist | Read Write Own

Transcript

Chris Dixon - Entrepreneur, Investor, Cryptocurrency and Web3 Evangelist | Read Write Own · Success Story with Scott Clary

• 0:00
  In 1990s, when you send an email, there's no kind of email company in the middle.
• 0:03
  There's no worldwide web company.
• 0:05
  It's very different than today where you have, you know, you send a Facebook message
• 0:08
  and there's Mark Zuckerberg in the middle and they can do all sorts of things.
• 0:14
  You have to go through these gatekeepers and these gatekeepers have immense power.
• 0:17
  That power shows up in a number of ways that I mentioned, sort of,
• 0:19
  it's a control of what information is shown to their algorithms.
• 0:22
  Another very stark thing is what is the economics of these networks.
• 0:25
  All of the money is kind of getting sucked into these five companies.
• 0:29
  Instead of going to the people who I think deserve the money.
• 0:33
  Even for the people who are actually creating the content, creating the products.
• 0:37
  When these big companies control their internet services,
• 0:40
  is that over time they just kind of extract more and more money out of the service
• 0:43
  or to build value should get that value.
• 0:46
  And in the 90s web, they would get that value.
• 0:49
  If you build a website and you, you know, going back to the Uber example,
• 0:52
  if somebody paid you $100, you've got $100.
• 0:54
  There's no one taking money in the middle.
• 0:56
  There's always been two ways to build everything.
• 0:58
  There's a company-owned way and a community-owned way.
• 1:01
  And we've seen that in software, with the case of Linux versus Windows.
• 1:04
  We've seen that with internet services like the web versus Twitter.
• 1:07
  I think that we can see it again.
• 1:10
  Welcome to success story.
• 1:11
  I'm your host, Scott Clary.
• 1:13
  The success story podcast is brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network.
• 1:17
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  Visit HubSpot.com to grow better today.
• 2:23
  Chris, thank you for coming on.
• 2:26
  I have your new book here and we're going to talk about it.
• 2:28
  We're going to go into it.
• 2:29
  So read right on.
• 2:31
  I thought to kick this off, it'd be interesting.
• 2:33
  I always like, I don't always go into titles,
• 2:35
  but this title is a little bit interesting
• 2:37
  because it's read right on,
• 2:38
  but then it's building the next era of the internet.
• 2:41
  So please explain what the first era of the internet was.
• 2:45
  Sure.
• 2:46
  So in the little bit of context,
• 2:48
  I've spent 20 years now working on the internet
• 2:51
  as a entrepreneur and then investor.
• 2:53
  So it's been sort of deeply involved and seeing it evolve.
• 2:57
  The internet officially began as a government project in 1969,
• 3:02
  but really the modern internet began in the 1990s.
• 3:05
  And I sort of the read right on,
• 3:07
  refers to how I've used sort of the three years of the modern internet.
• 3:11
  And so the read right, read in the right,
• 3:14
  by the way, are common terms people use for those first two.
• 3:18
  So this is not my idea, but the own,
• 3:19
  is sort of my addition to it.
• 3:21
  So the read era was sort of roughly 1990 to 2005.
• 3:24
  And that was an era that was marked by a few things.
• 3:29
  One was the dominant systems that we use to interact with the internet
• 3:34
  were what are known as open protocols.
• 3:36
  So there's the World Wide Web and email
• 3:38
  or sort of the dominant thing that you would do in the 1990s.
• 3:41
  You go to a website, you send an email.
• 3:44
  And those open protocols had this very interesting characteristic,
• 3:47
  which they're not owned by anybody.
• 3:48
  They're community owned standards.
• 3:52
  There's no, when you send an email,
• 3:54
  there's no kind of email company in the middle.
• 3:56
  There's no World Wide Web company.
• 3:58
  There's, you know, it's very different than today,
• 4:00
  where you have, you know, you send a Facebook message
• 4:02
  and there's Mark Zuckerberg and the Facebook company in the middle
• 4:06
  and they can do all sorts of things.
• 4:08
  So the 90s, the first kind of key thing was that sort of the dominant
• 4:13
  systems that people used were community-owned open systems,
• 4:17
  which had all sorts of implications I talk about in the book.
• 4:20
  The second thing about the 90s was that the interact,
• 4:23
  the internet was mostly kind of a one-way medium
• 4:26
  in that people, you would go to websites and consume information.
• 4:30
  And there wasn't this sort of interactivity
• 4:32
  and sort of the democratic, you know, publishing,
• 4:35
  social media that we have today.
• 4:37
  So I describe it as the 90s internet
• 4:39
  democratized the consumption of information
• 4:42
  as opposed to the publishing information.
• 4:44
  So that, you know, for those who are around,
• 4:46
  you had the internet bubble.
• 4:48
  You had companies like Google and Amazon started
• 4:50
  and you had a crash in the 2000s.
• 4:53
  And in that, out of that crash,
• 4:55
  a new kind of movement developed.
• 4:57
  I was part of this.
• 4:58
  I was an entrepreneur at that movement.
• 5:00
  People called it Web 2.
• 5:01
  People also called it the Read Write Movement.
• 5:03
  And they called it Read Write because the idea was,
• 5:05
  instead of just reading kind of consuming information,
• 5:07
  you could also now publish.
• 5:08
  Anyone could publish information.
• 5:11
  And so the idea was to democratize publishing.
• 5:13
  And this began as blogging and kind of these, you know,
• 5:17
  more technical kind of nerdy behaviors,
• 5:20
  but then went mainstream with things like Twitter and Facebook, right?
• 5:23
  Which we, of course, all know
• 5:25
  and are very familiar with social media today.
• 5:27
  But at the time, that was sort of a new idea,
• 5:28
  which is let's make the internet sort of truly interactive.
• 5:31
  And now anyone can not only consume information,
• 5:33
  but also publish information.
• 5:35
  And that was, I think, generally a good thing.
• 5:38
  You know, we now have five billion people
• 5:40
  that have internet access.
• 5:41
  It's generally very inexpensive to access the internet.
• 5:44
  You can get a $10 Android phone.
• 5:46
  And you can often get free internet service around the world.
• 5:49
  More people have internet access than running water.
• 5:52
  I mean, this is just, you know,
• 5:53
  there was a lot of successful things that happened.
• 5:56
  As a result of that, I think one of the,
• 5:58
  the, in my mind, one of the very negative things
• 6:01
  was that instead of the systems that we ended up using
• 6:03
  that became dominant, instead of being these open systems
• 6:07
  that were open owned by communities,
• 6:08
  like the World Wide Web and email,
• 6:10
  they were proprietary systems owned by companies,
• 6:13
  so Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Google, and so forth.
• 6:18
  And this, you know, I think for some period of time,
• 6:21
  maybe the late 2000s, early 2010s, this seemed okay.
• 6:25
  I think that has now led to a number of significant issues.
• 6:28
  So the internet has become extremely consolidated.
• 6:32
  But there are about five companies that control 95% of the money
• 6:36
  and the traffic on the internet.
• 6:39
  People, you know, these companies have full control of their algorithms
• 6:43
  of who has access to their networks,
• 6:45
  sort of de-platforming, things like this.
• 6:46
  But I think more important and more subtle
• 6:49
  is just they control through their algorithms,
• 6:52
  you know, the popularity of different people.
• 6:55
  And this can be everything from political actors to
• 6:59
  really my focus is more on the business side and the startup side.
• 7:02
  And so we've seen this have a serious,
• 7:05
  so I think negative effect on startup activity,
• 7:08
  where, you know, a startup will build an audience on a social.
• 7:11
  You have to kind of go through these networks now,
• 7:14
  Google, Facebook, etc.
• 7:15
  to build a non-heater or a startup, they're gatekeepers.
• 7:18
  And you have to go through these gatekeepers
• 7:21
  and these gatekeepers have immense power.
• 7:23
  That power shows up in a number of ways that I mentioned,
• 7:26
  sort of it's the control of what information is shown
• 7:28
  to their algorithms.
• 7:29
  Another very stark thing is what are the economics
• 7:32
  of these networks?
• 7:33
  And so there's something called a take rate
• 7:34
  in on the internet business, which a take rate
• 7:37
  is the percentage of money flowing through a system
• 7:40
  that the network operator takes.
• 7:41
  So a friend of mine was recently taking an Uber
• 7:44
  and the Uber cost, the driver asked him how much he paid.
• 7:48
  And he said something, it was like $75 or something.
• 7:51
  And then my friend asked the driver how much he got
• 7:53
  and it was like $18, right?
• 7:55
  So what was the, you know, what goes,
• 7:57
  where does the rest of the money go?
• 7:58
  Some of its taxes and things.
• 7:59
  But the bulk of it goes to the intermediary,
• 8:01
  to the gatekeeper, the tollkeeper.
• 8:03
  And this is true, like, look, Uber's actually,
• 8:06
  I think Uber has a 40% take rate or something like that.
• 8:09
  They think it's gone up over time,
• 8:10
  but some of the social networks like Facebook is 100%.
• 8:14
  Twitter's 100%, meaning they make, you know,
• 8:17
  Facebook will make 100 billion plus in revenue this year,
• 8:22
  off of the work done by users, right?
• 8:24
  You don't go to Facebook to see Facebook's content.
• 8:25
  You go to see the user content,
• 8:27
  yet they make that money and they keep them.
• 8:30
  And that's true of TikTok, Twitter, you know,
• 8:33
  Apple takes 30%, so if you create a game
• 8:35
  or some kind of app with the App Store,
• 8:38
  just for simply the right to exist in the App Store,
• 8:40
  you pay 30% of your revenue, same with Android.
• 8:44
  And so, you know, generally, like, you know,
• 8:47
  and this is led to, so one is this is just all of the money
• 8:50
  is kind of getting sucked into these five companies.
• 8:53
  Instead of going to the people who I think deserve the money,
• 8:57
  including the people who are actually creating the content,
• 9:00
  creating the products, you know, look,
• 9:02
  I'm in the startup business.
• 9:03
  I was an entrepreneur now, I invest in startups.
• 9:05
  This, you know, I think that the startups who build value
• 9:08
  should get that value.
• 9:10
  And in the 90s web, they would get that value.
• 9:12
  If you build a website and you, you know,
• 9:14
  going back to the Uber example,
• 9:16
  if somebody paid you $100, you got $100.
• 9:18
  There was no one taking money in the middle.
• 9:19
  That's how the 90s internet work.
• 9:20
  That's how the first year of the internet worked.
• 9:22
  Today, it's very, very different.
• 9:24
  They have, you know, Apple can kick you off the app store.
• 9:27
  You know, the game maker Fortnite is in a big
• 9:29
  high profile lawsuit with Apple over this.
• 9:31
  Yeah.
• 9:32
  There's a number of Spotify's, you know,
• 9:34
  very upset about it.
• 9:35
  There's a whole series of kind of lawsuits
• 9:37
  and other complaints about the behavior of these big incumbents.
• 9:41
  I think from a user experience point of view,
• 9:42
  it's been very negative.
• 9:43
  So if you just, you know, if you do Google search now,
• 9:47
  you'll see more and more of the page taken over
• 9:50
  by sponsored links, by Google properties.
• 9:53
  This is a, this is, I have a whole chapter on the book on this.
• 9:57
  But what happens with these, with these,
• 10:00
  when these big companies control these internet services,
• 10:02
  is that over time, they just kind of extract more
• 10:04
  and more money out of the service.
• 10:06
  And that's what you're saying there.
• 10:08
  You're going to, you're sort of seeing a steady
• 10:10
  takeover of all these services
• 10:12
  with more and more kind of ways for them to make money and extract.
• 10:16
  And then Apple instead of the booth over time.
• 10:18
  And so I think it's heard the quality of the internet,
• 10:20
  yeah, the startups, the users, etc.
• 10:22
  Sorry, we're using them.
• 10:23
  No, no, no, I was just going to say there's different,
• 10:27
  there's different people trying to solve this problem.
• 10:29
  So I know Frank McCourt Jr.
• 10:33
  is, I had him on the, on the show.
• 10:35
  And he's trying to fix it from the perspective.
• 10:38
  He put like 500 million dollars into something called
• 10:40
  project liberty, which is really transferring the ownership
• 10:44
  of data that Facebook now controls
• 10:46
  and all these other companies control back to the user.
• 10:49
  So there's that perspective.
• 10:51
  There's also the perspective like I love that you mentioned.
• 10:53
  It's almost like a 30% tax to even build a business or an app
• 10:57
  that will, it's literally a 30%.
• 11:00
  It's like, it's like that like without even building a business,
• 11:03
  now you have a 30% cost of goods that you have to deal with,
• 11:07
  which is ridiculous.
• 11:07
  It's very difficult.
• 11:08
  But in your, in your perfect future of the internet,
• 11:13
  and well, I just want to have like a sort of like a synopsis
• 11:17
  or a very high level thesis to start, someone will say,
• 11:21
  well, yeah, you have to pay 30%.
• 11:24
  But how also are you going to market your app or how
• 11:27
  else are you going to find a user base of millions or tens
• 11:30
  of millions of hundreds and millions of people?
• 11:32
  Or well, I like the experience on Facebook.
• 11:35
  I feel like it's not hurting me that much, even though if you
• 11:37
  go down the rabbit hole with Cambridge Analytica,
• 11:40
  and I believe that people understood what data was being harvested
• 11:44
  from them, they would also push back a little bit more.
• 11:47
  So I think there's a lot of education that probably has to
• 11:50
  coexist with a better future internet as well, which is really
• 11:53
  why you're writing this book.
• 11:55
  But in your perfect world, what would the next
• 11:59
  era, the best possible next era of the internet be?
• 12:02
  What does it look like?
• 12:04
  Yeah, and so to your question, I think there's broadly two ways to
• 12:07
  kind of reign in incumbents.
• 12:09
  There's regulation and there's competition.
• 12:11
  And I think there's potentially a role for both.
• 12:14
  I'm more focused on competition, on creating new services
• 12:18
  that can replace these services.
• 12:21
  I think that it's a, I think that the kind of the thing
• 12:25
  you're imagining where people say, well, I like these services,
• 12:27
  I think the mistake there is that they think that the only way
• 12:32
  you can have great internet services is if a company controls it.
• 12:36
  And we have lots of evidence over the last 30 years.
• 12:39
  The World Wide Web is a great example.
• 12:41
  You go to a website, you know, like there've been literally
• 12:45
  tens of millions of businesses built on the World Wide Web.
• 12:47
  I mean, people think of the World Wide Web as the internet.
• 12:49
  It's a service that runs on top that's community-owned.
• 12:52
  And it's been wildly successful.
• 12:54
  And it had the great user experiences.
• 12:57
  The, you know, and there's no, there's no company behind that.
• 13:00
  There's no, you know, email is the same way.
• 13:01
  There's no company behind.
• 13:02
  There's no one can decide those rules that can take the money.
• 13:05
  And so like, look, I would like in it to like the 90s,
• 13:07
  so for those who are old enough to remember in the 90s,
• 13:10
  Microsoft was seen as, you know, we had dissimilar debates
• 13:14
  about Windows and Microsoft.
• 13:15
  People were like, well, I like having an operating system that works.
• 13:18
  And I like, you know, isn't that the only way you can do it?
• 13:21
  It turns out that now today fast forward, 99% of the operating systems
• 13:24
  that run in the world are not Windows.
• 13:26
  Their Linux, Android is Linux.
• 13:28
  So you think you're using Android.
• 13:30
  You're really using something called Linux.
• 13:31
  Apple's iOS is a lot of open-source,
• 13:34
  but all of the backend servers in the world
• 13:36
  that your phones connect to are open-source Linux.
• 13:39
  Linux is, I don't know, the exact stats,
• 13:41
  but it's definitely over 95% probably close to 99%
• 13:44
  of operating systems in the world.
• 13:46
  And that's a operating system that nobody owns.
• 13:48
  It's a community-created operating system.
• 13:51
  And that's how we broke the stranglehold of Windows.
• 13:54
  So I would just say there's a long history
• 13:56
  in the 80 years of computing of sort of two ways.
• 13:59
  There's always been two ways to build everything.
• 14:01
  There's a company-owned way and a community-owned way.
• 14:06
  And we've seen that in software,
• 14:08
  with the case of Linux versus Windows,
• 14:09
  we've seen that with internet services,
• 14:11
  like the web versus Twitter.
• 14:12
  And I think that we can see it again.
• 14:16
  And so there doesn't need to be the trade-off.
• 14:18
  You can have great user experiences.
• 14:20
  You can have modern internet services.
• 14:22
  And you can do all these, you know,
• 14:24
  the addictive behaviors.
• 14:27
  If you like those, you can have those.
• 14:29
  Like it's not a trade-off.
• 14:31
  There is no reason.
• 14:32
  It's sort of a, it's just because of the way that things develop,
• 14:36
  these companies happen to control it,
• 14:37
  but it doesn't have to be that way.
• 14:39
  And I think, like, I think one approach is to say that it's over
• 14:42
  and the internet's consolidated, and that's it.
• 14:44
  And another approach is to say,
• 14:46
  it's the only way that my random end is regulation.
• 14:49
  And then the approach I take is that I think that the internet's still young.
• 14:53
  It's, you know, 30 years into a technology that I think,
• 14:57
  you know, it's not hyperbolic to say.
• 14:59
  It's as important as something like the printing press.
• 15:01
  And, you know, or any other kind of massive technology.
• 15:04
  And if you look back at history,
• 15:06
  none of those 30 years in had a kind of a
• 15:11
  originally locked-in structure.
• 15:13
  There's still plenty of time to rethink it and reinvent it.
• 15:16
  And so, so that's what my book's about.
• 15:17
  That's what I work on, which is using
• 15:20
  building a new wave of internet services.
• 15:22
  They're, you know, built-on blockchains that I argue in my book
• 15:26
  can kind of combine the best of both worlds.
• 15:30
  The open access and low-take rates of early internet services
• 15:35
  with the advanced functionality and user experience
• 15:38
  that we have come to love with modern internet services services.
• 15:42
  I love it. I want to understand.
• 15:43
  We'll go more into sort of like your playbook
• 15:46
  for revolutionizing and building that next version of the internet.
• 15:49
  And maybe some lessons learned from what you've done in blockchain.
• 15:53
  And also some of the investments that you've
• 15:56
  deployed capital into and lessons learned from
• 15:58
  successes and failures.
• 16:01
  But I want to understand
• 16:03
  the sort of your path a little bit more because your path
• 16:06
  is very emblematic of the path that somebody
• 16:09
  should have actually taken to learning more about
• 16:12
  not just Web 1 or the original Web, I guess Web 2
• 16:15
  and then eventually Web 3.
• 16:17
  So I want to understand where you came from,
• 16:19
  how you got involved,
• 16:21
  because you were an entrepreneur.
• 16:22
  You turned to a capital allocator,
• 16:23
  but then obviously you niched down into Web 3,
• 16:26
  into Web 3 crypto blockchain.
• 16:27
  So maybe just walk through your evolution.
• 16:30
  And I also learned that you majored in philosophy
• 16:34
  if I'm not mistaken,
• 16:36
  which is I want to understand how that plays into all of this as well,
• 16:39
  because that's not the normal liberal arts underground
• 16:42
  grad that would put you where you are right now.
• 16:45
  Yeah, so I mean just briefly in my background,
• 16:47
  I, you know, my family,
• 16:49
  my parents' English professors,
• 16:50
  I grew up in a small town in Ohio.
• 16:53
  And when I went to college,
• 16:54
  I, you know, I just sort of had grown up in an academic family
• 16:57
  and I, I had been interested in computers,
• 16:58
  like programming computers,
• 16:59
  but then got kind of got interested in kind of the intersection
• 17:02
  of computers and philosophy,
• 17:05
  which is sort of like artificial intelligence
• 17:06
  and things like this,
• 17:08
  philosophy of language, philosophy, like logic.
• 17:11
  And so I was doing that.
• 17:12
  And yeah, I was actually in a PhD program at one point.
• 17:16
  I would say partly, I just liked it,
• 17:18
  but also I didn't have a career plan, I would say.
• 17:22
  And then I, you know, for me,
• 17:23
  it was a real epiphany to discover the world of startups.
• 17:26
  So this was like around the year 2000 or so.
• 17:29
  And this was, you know,
• 17:30
  the internet kind of boom was happening
• 17:32
  and I was in New York City
• 17:34
  and I had friends who were doing internet startups.
• 17:36
  And for me, it was a real eye-opening revelation to realize,
• 17:40
  and this is kind of more obvious today,
• 17:42
  but at the time it was like a little less obvious, I guess,
• 17:45
  which was that you could have a career, you know,
• 17:48
  as an entrepreneur or an internet entrepreneur.
• 17:51
  And do what I thought was cool stuff,
• 17:54
  like build products, you know, strategy,
• 17:58
  hiring, products, you know, marketing,
• 18:01
  fundraising, I don't know, just seemed exciting.
• 18:02
  And, you know, you could build stuff
• 18:05
  and kind of take risks and be out there
• 18:08
  and ideally have build products that are used by millions
• 18:11
  and maybe even hundreds and millions of people, right?
• 18:14
  That just having that impact seemed exciting to me.
• 18:17
  So I started a security company in 2004,
• 18:23
  which was, this is, I don't know,
• 18:25
  it's just kind of ancient history now,
• 18:26
  but it was when fishing and spyware were kind of at a peak
• 18:29
  and it was an anti-spyware fishing product.
• 18:31
  We were acquired by McAfee, the large security company in 2006.
• 18:37
  And then I started another company that was kind of an early AI
• 18:40
  artificial intelligence company called Hunch,
• 18:43
  which fast-forward in 2011 was acquired by eBay.
• 18:46
  We powered a lot of the, or kind of recommendations
• 18:48
  of you go to eBay and you're looking at a product
• 18:51
  that it says you might like these other products.
• 18:52
  This was, this was our technology.
• 18:55
  And then along the way, you know,
• 18:57
  it's in my business there's kind of two roles.
• 18:59
  There's sort of player coach.
• 19:00
  You're either an entrepreneur or you're an investor.
• 19:01
  And there's, at some point, you know,
• 19:05
  I'd done two, I'd started two companies
• 19:06
  and that's a very intense experience
• 19:08
  and didn't, didn't think I could do that again.
• 19:11
  And so I transitioned to the coach role.
• 19:14
  I had done some, since I'd sold my first company in 2006,
• 19:17
  I'd started Angel investing.
• 19:18
  So that's, you know, personally investing
• 19:19
  and startup to internet startups.
• 19:22
  And then in 2013, joined Entries and Horowitz,
• 19:26
  which is a, you know, the time was a startup
• 19:28
  relatively new venture firm to look in Valley.
• 19:33
  You know, now much more established.
• 19:35
  And so, I'm joined them.
• 19:38
  And, you know, I really wanted to sort of be
• 19:40
  on the frontier of computing.
• 19:42
  And my broad view, if you kind of go back
• 19:44
  and look, you know, the history of computing.
• 19:47
  So the first computers were built around World War II.
• 19:50
  And then every 10 to 15 years,
• 19:52
  you had a major computing cycle.
• 19:53
  So you had mainframe computers and many computers
• 19:56
  and PCs and internet and mobile phones.
• 19:59
  And so, you know, I started doing venture capital 2013.
• 20:03
  So that was, you know, the iPhone 2007,
• 20:05
  we've seen this explosion of mobile stuff that happened.
• 20:08
  Also cloud computing, social networking,
• 20:10
  like there'd been all this interesting stuff.
• 20:12
  I wanted to kind of explore what would be next.
• 20:16
  And so I did a bunch of, I had sort of three areas.
• 20:19
  And I've been writing about this and talking about this for years.
• 20:23
  ARVR, like kind of new devices, experiences, virtuality.
• 20:28
  AI did a bunch of AI investing and then blockchain crypto.
• 20:32
  So I, so I let our investment in Oculus, for example.
• 20:34
  And VR, which was acquired by Facebook.
• 20:37
  And I led our investment in Coinbase,
• 20:39
  which I was on the board of for a long time.
• 20:42
  That was back in 2013.
• 20:43
  I did a bunch of other like a AI power drone startup
• 20:46
  and a bunch of other kind of things.
• 20:48
  They were all kind of at the front, too.
• 20:50
  Sort of, the idea was we hadn't quite hit the next wave yet.
• 20:53
  But I wanted to be kind of at the edge of it.
• 20:56
  And then about five years ago,
• 21:00
  decided that the blockchain stuff was really what was exciting to me.
• 21:03
  And so about about, yeah, about five years ago,
• 21:08
  went full-time into that.
• 21:09
  And so I now lead our crypto fund, the blockchain fund.
• 21:13
  I'm curious when you're looking at,
• 21:17
  when you're looking at investing in crypto blockchain,
• 21:20
  what are the similarities, what are the differences between traditional angel investing
• 21:24
  into any other category, pick a category that's maybe,
• 21:28
  maybe not as like bleeding edge.
• 21:30
  I mean, ARVR is probably, there's a lot,
• 21:32
  there's a lot of bleeding edge tech and there's probably a lot of uncertainty as well.
• 21:35
  But yeah, speak to that.
• 21:37
  I'm curious because I don't know, I know a lot of investors.
• 21:40
  I don't know a lot of investors that are just so niche down
• 21:42
  and hyperfocus on blockchain and crypto.
• 21:44
  So there has to be some differences in similarities.
• 21:46
  Yeah.
• 21:47
  Yeah, well, I think you hit on one thing,
• 21:48
  which is when you're doing things kind of at the,
• 21:50
  the quote frontier, you will call soon as called Frontier Tech,
• 21:54
  there's a different approach generally because you're doing something that hasn't,
• 21:57
  you know, that hasn't, that isn't as predictable.
• 22:01
  So just generally when I do any of these kind of cutting edge sort of Frontier,
• 22:05
  like when I did VR stuff or blockchain stuff or AI before,
• 22:11
  you know, back before chat GPT,
• 22:12
  you would have these, you're sort of dependent on these external factors,
• 22:16
  like when will the technology,
• 22:17
  so generally these technologies kind of go through two phases.
• 22:20
  They have kind of an incubation phase where you have lots of early adopters.
• 22:25
  In like the case of blockchain,
• 22:26
  they're probably like 30 million kind of hardcore users right now,
• 22:30
  which is, sounds like maybe a lot,
• 22:31
  but it's actually tiny on the scale, the internet.
• 22:34
  And then you have a moment where kind of like chat GPT or the iPhone,
• 22:38
  where you have sort of a breakout product,
• 22:40
  and suddenly the space transitions from,
• 22:44
  from kind of this, you know, early adopter phase to going more mainstream.
• 22:49
  And so when you're in that early adopter stage,
• 22:50
  you just have to sort of behave differently.
• 22:53
  And so for example, you have to, you know,
• 22:55
  when you,
• 22:56
  if you're building a typical like accounting SaaS company,
• 23:00
  you might raise venture capital and land for like a two-year kind of budget,
• 23:05
  and assume that if you hit certain metrics,
• 23:06
  you can raise more money.
• 23:07
  It's a very predictable financing market.
• 23:10
  If you do certain things, you can raise more money,
• 23:12
  and it's much more established kind of what the metrics need to be
• 23:15
  and the patterns.
• 23:16
  When you're in these emerging areas,
• 23:18
  it's, you know, you'll have these massive waves of like excitement
• 23:22
  and then kind of bull and bear markets.
• 23:25
  And if you hit a bear market and you don't have the cash,
• 23:28
  you know, you won't make it, right?
• 23:29
  And so you just have to like operate,
• 23:30
  so like Coinbase, for example, they would be,
• 23:32
  they were very good at about this.
• 23:33
  They would just raise a lot of money and save it,
• 23:35
  and then kind of endure through like tough times.
• 23:40
  You have to have a thicker skin,
• 23:41
  and you have to be willing to kind of power through.
• 23:44
  I've seen just so many cases in my career in technology,
• 23:47
  where, you know, people that stuck with something
• 23:51
  ended up doing very well.
• 23:52
  Like so many of the entrepreneurs that you see today
• 23:54
  that are successful, you know,
• 23:56
  like sort of the outside view is like,
• 23:59
  there's some kind of overnight success.
• 24:00
  When in fact, they were just trudging through
• 24:03
  many different ups and downs.
• 24:06
  And so you just, so the entrepreneur needs to be ready for that.
• 24:08
  The investor needs to be ready for that.
• 24:11
  The, you know, the company needs to be structured.
• 24:14
  You know, you end up in capital for that.
• 24:15
  You need to have the team for that.
• 24:17
  So it's just a different way of thinking about the world.
• 24:19
  They're sort of free kind of, you know,
• 24:23
  pre growth, you know, kind of incubation phase
• 24:25
  and then mainstream breakout phase.
• 24:28
  I mean, that's the hard part.
• 24:29
  The good news, that's the bad news.
• 24:31
  The good news is when you do that
• 24:32
  and you're willing to do that,
• 24:34
  you tend to be one of the very few
• 24:35
  who are willing to do that.
• 24:36
  And that's how, you know,
• 24:37
  that's how you have outsized outcomes, right?
• 24:40
  That's how you have as an investor,
• 24:41
  outsized outcomes, that's how an entrepreneur you do.
• 24:44
  If you just kind of follow the consensus,
• 24:46
  you know, if you're the,
• 24:48
  you know, if you're the 10,000th company
• 24:51
  building a wrapper on chat GPT,
• 24:53
  like, I don't know if that's, you know,
• 24:55
  going to be like, that's just the consensus strategy, right?
• 24:59
  And so, you got to be right.
• 25:01
  You can't just be non-consensus
• 25:02
  and, you know, contrarian and wrong,
• 25:04
  but, but, you know,
• 25:05
  so, but that's to me the interesting part of technology.
• 25:08
  That's where I've always gravitated towards
• 25:09
  is kind of like, that's why I want to be at the frontier
• 25:11
  in doing that stuff.
• 25:13
  I assume that once this kind of like block chains go mainstream,
• 25:16
  I'll probably move on to something else.
• 25:19
  And so, you know, there's just different,
• 25:21
  it's a different approach.
• 25:22
  There's a lot of value in doing the other thing too.
• 25:24
  I mean, we need people to kind of do,
• 25:27
  you know, do kind of later stage technology as well.
• 25:29
  And I think they're, they all have values.
• 25:31
  I'm not making a value judgment.
• 25:32
  I'm just sort of saying that this is where I'd like to operate.
• 25:35
  Hey, yeah, this is just a very different way of operating.
• 25:37
  And it's a skill I've developed and,
• 25:40
  and, well, you don't know well.
• 25:42
  You've done, you've had massive success.
• 25:45
  I'm also just curious.
• 25:47
  I mean, you've worked with like Marc Andreessen Ben Horowitz,
• 25:49
  which, I mean, you're a legendary investor.
• 25:52
  They're legendary investors.
• 25:55
  I can ask you the lessons that you've learned.
• 25:57
  But I want to ask you the lessons that you've learned from them as well.
• 26:01
  Yeah, I've learned a lot from them.
• 26:02
  So the first, you know, five years I was at the firm,
• 26:05
  we would just do it was like very,
• 26:06
  it was a much smaller word out of the firm as much bigger now.
• 26:09
  It's like 500 people back then.
• 26:10
  It was pretty small and there were, I don't know,
• 26:13
  a seven of five or seven of us that would just sit around a table,
• 26:16
  like something entrepreneur would come in and then they would,
• 26:18
  you know, describe their business and then we'd sort of sit around a table
• 26:21
  and discuss it and make investments.
• 26:23
  And so it's hard to summarize all the very,
• 26:28
  I mean, I learned so much about just from them and just from entrepreneurs,
• 26:33
  all the different aspects of building a business.
• 26:35
  So like, for example, I'm not an enterprise software person,
• 26:37
  but I've sat in, I don't know, hundreds of enterprise,
• 26:40
  they have not thousands of enterprise software discussions and just learning all the
• 26:43
  details of organization building and sales development,
• 26:47
  just all the things you do there.
• 26:50
  Yeah, I think we have a lot of kind of broad investment,
• 26:54
  kind of lessons, I guess, on one of Mark and Ben's favorite phrases is
• 26:59
  invest in strengths, but not like weaknesses.
• 27:01
  And so what does that mean?
• 27:03
  It means almost every interesting startup
• 27:09
  will have issues, you know, when you're investing,
• 27:13
  you know, when you're doing what we do,
• 27:14
  which is investing in early stage,
• 27:15
  obviously once you're in video or something,
• 27:17
  maybe all your issues are done,
• 27:19
  but then you're worth two trillion dollars.
• 27:21
  But when you're doing kind of early stage investing,
• 27:23
  almost by definition, you're going to have things that are messed up.
• 27:26
  And if you look for the biggest danger you can make in venture capital
• 27:30
  is looking for some startup that's sort of good on all metrics.
• 27:34
  What you really want is a startup that's great in a few things
• 27:37
  and probably really messed up in a bunch of other areas.
• 27:40
  And specifically, you know, what do you grade at?
• 27:42
  Like, well, we really buy as heavily towards,
• 27:44
  and this is another kind of Mark and Ben thing,
• 27:46
  but is technical product focused entrepreneurs.
• 27:51
  So what we look for are people that have a deep insight.
• 27:54
  We like to say an earned secret.
• 27:55
  I think that's originally a Peter Tiel phrase.
• 27:58
  The idea is that kind of most, you know,
• 28:02
  almost by definition, a startup is a contrary idea, right?
• 28:05
  Because if you had an idea that was like,
• 28:08
  I want to build, you know, an iPhone with a longer battery life, right?
• 28:11
  That's a good idea.
• 28:14
  But Apple knows that's a good idea,
• 28:16
  and they probably have a thousand people working, right?
• 28:17
  So almost by definition, in a way,
• 28:19
  a startup is a good idea that appears to be a bad idea,
• 28:23
  because it appeared to be a good idea.
• 28:25
  All of these incredibly wealthy companies would be investing, right?
• 28:28
  So you have some kind of contrary in insight.
• 28:30
  And that's usually, that's what Peter Tiel calls a secret.
• 28:33
  But it's also an earned secret,
• 28:34
  because you don't just come to these things,
• 28:35
  like walking down the street, right?
• 28:37
  You often come to them through, you know, years of,
• 28:40
  of I've been working in the apparel industry,
• 28:43
  and I, you know, there's this thing I've discovered
• 28:46
  that's this crazy thing that needs to be fixed.
• 28:49
  And I have a way to fix, right?
• 28:50
  Or I was in a PhD program,
• 28:52
  and I developed a breakthrough way to do large language models.
• 28:56
  And now I'm going to go do that, you know?
• 28:58
  So it could be a technical secret.
• 28:59
  It can be a business secret.
• 29:01
  And so you want it.
• 29:03
  So when you, I think when you do venture investing,
• 29:05
  you want people that have those earned secrets.
• 29:08
  Now those people that have those earned secrets,
• 29:11
  they're often, they're not often people
• 29:13
  that know how to at first run a company, right?
• 29:16
  And they may have hired badly.
• 29:18
  They may have made some bad decisions.
• 29:20
  They may have bad press.
• 29:21
  They may have, you know, I don't know, financial issues,
• 29:25
  like, right?
• 29:26
  And so if you kind of look at the mistake
• 29:29
  you can make as a venture investor is going and saying,
• 29:31
  like, I want somebody who's got all buttoned up
• 29:33
  and everything's working fine.
• 29:36
  What you really want is someone who's got this sort of deep secret
• 29:39
  who's obsessed with a problem
• 29:40
  who has deep knowledge of the domain.
• 29:43
  And very likely the rest of it is sort of a fixer upper, right?
• 29:46
  And so that as a result, we structured the firm.
• 29:49
  This was a, this was kind of a novel thing.
• 29:52
  And really is kind of still somewhat novel
• 29:54
  in the venture industry, which is, we'll find those great entrepreneurs.
• 29:58
  And then we'll layer in services
• 30:00
  that help them fix those other issues, right?
• 30:03
  So as an example, it's very unlikely
• 30:06
  that you're sort of like a brilliant inventor
• 30:09
  and also spend all your time out of conferences,
• 30:12
  meeting and connecting with 4500 leaders.
• 30:15
  So we have a group of, you know,
• 30:17
  dozens of people whose job it is
• 30:19
  to connect you with people of Fortune 500 companies
• 30:21
  because we sort of assume that these technologists,
• 30:24
  founders that we invested in
• 30:25
  won't already have that network.
• 30:26
  So we try to supplement their network.
• 30:28
  And so we just do a, you know, we help them with legal and policy.
• 30:31
  We help them with recruiting.
• 30:32
  We help them with comms.
• 30:32
  We help them with financial stuff.
• 30:34
  And so, so that's kind of the core thing now.
• 30:38
  Now, when I described this very general,
• 30:41
  there's a lot of details.
• 30:42
  And this is, I think, adventure as like in some ways
• 30:45
  is like people talk about a fox and a hedgehog,
• 30:48
  you know, the hedgehog knows one thing,
• 30:50
  the fox knows many things.
• 30:52
  I think of the venture capital
• 30:54
  and startups as a fox thing.
• 30:56
  There's like a million little things to know.
• 30:57
  And it's very hard to summarize all of it.
• 31:00
  And so, and each domain will be different, you know,
• 31:02
  blockchain is different than consumer internet
• 31:04
  is different than enterprise software is different than Vintech.
• 31:08
  And each one has patterns and people and lessons.
• 31:15
  But that sort of broad framework, I would say,
• 31:17
  is something that, you know, I learned
• 31:20
  over the last 10 years and much of that
• 31:22
  from Ben and Mark and other folks I worked with.
• 31:25
  Success story is part of the HubSpot podcast network.
• 31:28
  In the network, there are other incredible podcasts
• 31:31
  like the Offs Authority hosted by Natalie Gingrich.
• 31:33
  Every week on the Offs Authority, Natalie discovers
• 31:36
  actionable strategies to move your business forward
• 31:38
  and transformational stories of powerhouse business owners
• 31:42
  who value operations.
• 31:43
  You can't ignore backend pieces that have to work together
• 31:46
  and flow smoothly in order to build a brand,
• 31:49
  grow a movement, or disrupt an industry.
• 31:51
  If the operation side of your business is a mess,
• 31:54
  putting out fires will always take priority,
• 31:56
  leaving no room for creative innovation,
• 31:59
  visibility, or networking with powerhouse peers
• 32:02
  or even wannabe powerhouse peers.
• 32:04
  You've got to get your house in order.
• 32:06
  And to do that, you have to listen to the Offs Authority
• 32:09
  wherever you get your podcast.
• 32:10
  I love it.
• 32:11
  And it's just a good sort of primers
• 32:13
  to how you think and operate at the level that you're playing at.
• 32:15
  One last question, just about investing,
• 32:17
  then we're going to go back to Web3 Crypto Blockchain.
• 32:20
  You've had a lot of wins,
• 32:22
  but maybe walk me through one of your biggest failures
• 32:25
  and what was learned from that from an investing perspective.
• 32:28
  Yeah, I mean, so I've had many investments that have not worked out.
• 32:34
  And generally in our business, if you do early stage,
• 32:37
  at least TAF will probably not work out.
• 32:40
  It depends how you define it.
• 32:41
  Sometimes you recover some money
• 32:42
  or something with an acquisition,
• 32:44
  but generally we're in the kind of they call it
• 32:47
  kind of the Babers Effect in venture capital,
• 32:49
  which is like you, you know, everything is driven
• 32:52
  by a few grand slams and, you know,
• 32:55
  and then often the people that have the most grand slams
• 32:57
  also have the most strikeouts.
• 32:59
  And so I've had many things that have not worked out.
• 33:03
  And it's sort of, you know, it's the famous Tolstoy quote,
• 33:06
  all happy families of the same,
• 33:08
  all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way.
• 33:11
  Like success, there's sort of successes.
• 33:14
  Like you have customers that love you and pay you money
• 33:16
  and all these other things.
• 33:18
  Failure can be, I mean, look, it's often people related.
• 33:21
  I would say most of the time it's, you know,
• 33:23
  a founding team breaks up.
• 33:27
  They don't, you know, they don't have the ability
• 33:32
  to build the product.
• 33:34
  Look, I think that the kind of basic assumption
• 33:37
  you should use in any creative project,
• 33:40
  but particularly startups,
• 33:41
  is that there will be this kind of trough of despair
• 33:43
  if you're familiar with like the Gardener hype cycle.
• 33:45
  Like you have sort of the period where you're having beers
• 33:47
  with your buddy and everything's exciting.
• 33:49
  And then you're like, oh, oh shit, I mean, you're into it.
• 33:52
  And like it's a lot harder than I thought.
• 33:54
  Like it happens almost all the time.
• 33:56
  And then like the question is, how do you get out of that?
• 33:58
  And sometimes people just can't get out of it.
• 34:00
  They can't come up with the right product
• 34:01
  or they give up emotionally or, you know, they,
• 34:04
  and so so often that's where you die when you do,
• 34:07
  you know, early stage companies is just in that.
• 34:10
  You just don't either, it's either an intellectual issue sort of a,
• 34:14
  that you just can't come up with the right product
• 34:16
  that the market wants.
• 34:17
  Maybe your hypothesis was wrong in the first place.
• 34:19
  Maybe the market just doesn't want this product.
• 34:21
  Maybe you can't figure out the right configuration of the product.
• 34:23
  Or maybe, and this is at least half the time probably,
• 34:26
  there's just some kind of emotional thing.
• 34:28
  Like the founders just can't take it or, you know,
• 34:32
  or, yeah, and keep the team together.
• 34:34
  Or so.
• 34:37
  And so that's generally, you know,
• 34:40
  again, I do early stage mostly.
• 34:42
  I mean, later stage was all sorts of other, you know,
• 34:44
  sort of each stage is sort of a set of failure modes.
• 34:48
  But, but that's sort of the main thing is just like,
• 34:52
  but yeah, it always has like a different kind of way of unraveling.
• 34:56
  This is very hard to do.
• 34:57
  It's a very, you know, and look, I did on the other side of it.
• 35:01
  As, you know, very sympathetic to it.
• 35:03
  It's a very, you know, you, you, you, you bet your whole career,
• 35:08
  often these people are, you know, have other options
• 35:10
  and have decided to bet their whole career on something.
• 35:14
  You have the biggest, most stressful thing for me was having
• 35:17
  employees, you know, that depend on me, having investors that depend on you.
• 35:20
  Investors a little less worried because like that's our business and we have a portfolio.
• 35:24
  But, you know, like with VCs, but with employees, obviously that's their, their career.
• 35:30
  And, you know, and then you're sort of under this pressure to, to, you know,
• 35:33
  to do something is very hard to do, which is just, you know, among the thousands of
• 35:38
  tech startups to break out and, and build something special to people's laws.
• 35:44
  So, yeah, so I've had a whole bunch and it's a, it's a, it's never easy.
• 35:51
  No, I, so I appreciate it.
• 35:53
  Um, and, you know, this is, this is useful information people that are raising money.
• 35:57
  I mean, the, the listeners, the people that are listening to this, they're a mixture of people
• 36:00
  that, um, are people that are starting their first business, their earlier stage entrepreneurs.
• 36:06
  Some of them are building in crypto, some of them are not.
• 36:08
  So I always like, you know, just getting a little bit of perspective as to
• 36:12
  the reality of entrepreneurship because whether or not you're building in crypto,
• 36:15
  we've three blockchain or, or any other category,
• 36:19
  everything you just mentioned is so hyper relevant.
• 36:22
  Um, and I think that said people up there.
• 36:23
  If I could add one thing, it's like, you know, the, the, the type of capital that we are,
• 36:27
  or the venture capital is only applicable to certain subs, very small subset of startups.
• 36:31
  Yeah.
• 36:32
  Why? So I know you're listener, bass is broader.
• 36:34
  And I, by the way, I don't recommend venture capital for a lot of things.
• 36:37
  Um, you know, our, like I mentioned, it's a grand slam business.
• 36:40
  Um, and, and so you need to, the entrepreneur needs to sign up for that as well, right?
• 36:45
  But like, you, you're getting on a certain treadmill, a certain path.
• 36:49
  Um, and that, that's what this capital is designed for.
• 36:52
  There's lots of other kinds of capital in the world that are designed for different types of
• 36:55
  businesses. So if you want to build like a, you know, a company that maybe is a smaller business,
• 37:00
  but with higher margins and more profitability, you know, there's debt.
• 37:04
  There's, there's angel, the sort of non-tech regular angel investors.
• 37:08
  And, um, you know, there's, uh, many others bootstrapping.
• 37:11
  There's many other sources of capital.
• 37:13
  Um, and, and I think that is important because it really changes the kind of the pressure
• 37:19
  that you'll feel both on your, by yourself and from others and the expectations around you.
• 37:26
  Um, so I'm describing, you know, I think our business gets a lot of attention
• 37:29
  and like, when we're successful, we build big companies and that's probably why we get attention,
• 37:33
  but it's a, but it's, but it's a, you know, it's, we actually look at the numbers.
• 37:37
  Like venture capital is like, uh, it's sub one percent of, if not far less than that,
• 37:43
  I think it's like, we know one percent of capital fundraising in the, in the country.
• 37:48
  I didn't realize it was so small to tiny.
• 37:50
  It's a tiny asset class compared to dead and other things.
• 37:53
  Um, so, and, and it's really first specific purpose.
• 37:57
  Um, let's talk about, let's talk about why you wrote this book because you've been in the space
• 38:02
  for a while now. You've worked with some of the biggest, uh, companies in the space.
• 38:06
  You've seen positives, negatives, success stories, you've seen fraud, criminal activity,
• 38:11
  you've seen all of it. Um, so what is this book hoping to accomplish?
• 38:16
  Because I feel like the layman coming in, I'm still not super layman.
• 38:20
  I'm technical enough to be dangerous, but not, not as technical as you or people that you work
• 38:25
  with, obviously. Um, so I feel like this industry is not new.
• 38:30
  crypto blockchain, web three is not new.
• 38:33
  And I feel like there's been multiple stabs at trying to help people wrap their head around it
• 38:40
  and understand it. What are we not getting right that you're trying to solve for
• 38:47
  with read right on? Yeah. I, I, so a couple things I'd say, one, yes, it's been around for
• 38:54
  15 years. If you count sort of the, you know, beginnings of Bitcoin, although I would argue that,
• 38:58
  you know, it was a pretty different industry at that point and up until recently. Um,
• 39:03
  and really look, it, it, but blockchains are a technology and there's many different
• 39:06
  kind of movements around it. So there's the Bitcoin people who are kind of, you know,
• 39:10
  sort of libertarians who want to create an alternative form of money. Um, and that has been
• 39:14
  around for 15 years. The art of the movement I'm part of has been around for maybe six or seven
• 39:19
  years, um, which is sort of this tech movement I would describe it as, um, and I felt that, and
• 39:25
  it's a different movement and, um, and a newer movement. And I felt that that movement had not been
• 39:32
  properly explained to the world. And that's why I wrote the book. And so the book is meant for a
• 39:36
  general, I understand the difference. Yeah. And the movement's either. So yeah. So I know it's
• 39:41
  very simply like the, the, the Bitcoin movement is concerned with big government inflation.
• 39:46
  They want to create sort of digital gold, right? And that was a lot of the, and that's how a lot of
• 39:50
  people think of kind of crypto. I am much more concerned with the consolidation of the internet
• 39:54
  and creating new services that fight that. So sort of think of it as like we, you know, the tech
• 40:00
  movement is trying, trying to counter big tech, the political kind of Bitcoin movement is trying
• 40:05
  to counter, I don't know, big government, right? That's, yeah. And they're like, like anything kind
• 40:10
  of technology that's all sorts of sub movements and other things. But I, I felt this sort of this
• 40:15
  side of it that I'm part of had not been properly explained. And look at, and I had after things
• 40:20
  like FTX and all of these scams and scandals, it, you know, I had spent time trying to explain
• 40:27
  this and I felt like was making some progress. And then all that stuff happened. And it really
• 40:31
  sellied the, you know, the image of the space. I, you know, I go to talk to people a lot, you know,
• 40:40
  folks like you, but then I go to like DC and other places and talk to policymakers. And
• 40:44
  generally I hear over and over like what one is the people say, what book should I read? They
• 40:49
  said that to me for like a number of years and I didn't have a great answer. And two, they would
• 40:54
  say, hey, I've never heard this view of it. I've always heard like this sort of anti-government view
• 40:58
  of blockchain. I've never heard this, this kind of tech angle. I hear that a lot. And so I felt
• 41:04
  that no one had really kind of fully, you know, made that case in a way that, you know, was
• 41:10
  accessible. So I tried very hard in this book. I did many, hopefully this came through, but I did
• 41:14
  many rewrites to, you know, to not use jargon to explain things with examples to make it success.
• 41:21
  I mean, like it's, it's, it's not, you know, it's not for everybody, but I think that there are
• 41:24
  lots of people who are not tech people. I hope they can read it and understand it. And I tried
• 41:29
  very hard to make it that way. Well, I think because like, I now I understand, now I understand
• 41:34
  the difference in between what the existing sort of story was with crypto blockchain and how you're
• 41:40
  tackling and solving, you said a few times, you're not looking to tackle and solve it from a
• 41:44
  regulatory perspective. That's difficult and it's slow and it's a drawn out process. So you're
• 41:49
  looking to tackle it from a, we want to create innovation. We want to create better options, right?
• 41:54
  So when you think about the opportunity in creating innovation, obviously you work for venture
• 42:00
  capital firm, you can, you can invest in companies, you can help them grow. How do you,
• 42:06
  how do you, what's the best way to put this? How do you give companies or alternative options
• 42:13
  the best chance of succeeding as an investor compared to sort of the incumbents in the market?
• 42:19
  Actually, if you don't mind, I feel like I've been a little bit abstract. Can I give you one
• 42:23
  example of a hundred percent? So your audience knows that I'm not just being abstract.
• 42:29
  So just to put a fine point on it, like we're investors in a project called Farcaster.
• 42:34
  And Farcaster is a, this is a real product that exists. You can download, you know, you can go
• 42:38
  download it. And it's a open protocol, sort of like the worldwide web and email or social
• 42:46
  networking. And it's got hundreds of thousands of users. You can, the way it works is like email,
• 42:51
  there's like like the web, you don't download the web, you download a browser to the web like
• 42:55
  Chrome or Safari. And so if you want to try this, you download Workcast as an example. It's one of
• 42:59
  the browsers kind of for this network. And to use it, it'll, it'll feel like Twitter or some other
• 43:03
  kind of social network. The big difference is there's no gatekeeper. And so there's nobody that,
• 43:10
  that kind of runs this network. It's just owned by the community. And so anyone can add a new,
• 43:14
  can build a new client software to it. People can add, there's a whole series of developers
• 43:19
  adding applications on top. They don't pay 30%. They don't pay anything because there's nobody to pay
• 43:23
  because it's just a community on protocol. And so the economics are dramatically better for the
• 43:28
  users. Developers can openly build on top. People already, like we have all these startups pitching us
• 43:34
  who are building Farcaster apps on top of it. And so it's sort of developing in this kind of community
• 43:38
  way. So just just one example. These are real products. And to your question about, you know,
• 43:44
  the space has been around for a while. Like none of these products existed until last couple of
• 43:47
  years. And this had to do with a whole bunch of performance issues with blockchains and just the
• 43:51
  technology developing. But only in the last two years could you build like mainstream consumer
• 43:55
  products built on blockchains. So we have games, social networks, marketplaces, like out of anything
• 44:00
  that you can imagine that you use today on the internet, you can now build a blockchain-based
• 44:06
  version that removes the toll keepers, improves the economics for the users, removes the gate keepers,
• 44:11
  you don't have a CEO in charge, the communities in charge. So just to be clear, like these are real
• 44:16
  products that exist. And I wanted to, you know, kind of provide the intellectual foundation for them
• 44:24
  and explain it to the world. And that's why I wrote the book. And I expect that if we're successful,
• 44:29
  these products will become more and more common and people will use them right now. They're still
• 44:33
  relatively small user bases. I was just going to say the financial incentives for people to move
• 44:38
  onto these platforms. I can assume because they're open-source, like you can now, and the community,
• 44:46
  I guess, decides how it wants this particular product to evolve and grow. But if you don't have
• 44:53
  centralized CEO, you know, company running this, then creators, for example, that really drive
• 45:00
  adoption of a certain platform, like a social platform, right? They would now be getting paid out
• 45:06
  to some degree. Like I think there's like, so there's different ways, I mean, so,
• 45:10
  already. That's why, like, why do creators move to, like, why do so many journalists try to move
• 45:14
  the sub-stack, right? Because sub-stack is built on email. And email is an open protocol. And
• 45:19
  therefore, the take rate is like, sub-stack has a fee, but it's a very, it's like a 10% fee,
• 45:23
  and they have that, and the reason it's slow is not because they are nicer, it's because
• 45:28
  it's built on an email, and therefore you can switch. The same with Forecaster. If the client,
• 45:33
  if the software provider tried to charge your money, you could just switch to a different browser,
• 45:36
  and so to speak, because you control your name in a way that you don't, like, you have full
• 45:42
  control of your name and your followers, the same way you do with email, and unlike Twitter,
• 45:47
  and Facebook. I can't leave Twitter. I built an audience there. If I don't like something that
• 45:52
  that the owner does, I can't leave, right? Without losing my audience. With email and the web,
• 45:57
  you can leave. With blockchain-based systems, you can leave, and that changes the power dynamic.
• 46:01
  So yeah, so to your point, the social networks last year, the top five social networks generate
• 46:06
  150 billion with a B in revenue, you can sort of think, I think if it is sort of money flowing
• 46:11
  through the network, like, think of it as like a traffic grid, and there's this toll keeper in
• 46:16
  the middle that took the $150 billion. If you didn't have that toll keeper, I think it's very
• 46:20
  reasonable to think the bulk of that would flow to the outside of the network to creators.
• 46:25
  So I think there's an extremely compelling economic proposal, which is, by the way,
• 46:29
  one of the reasons I think this movement is inevitable because I don't think that they're going to be
• 46:33
  able to hold on to that 150 billion forever when people realize that there's alternatives that
• 46:38
  are just as good and that have dramatically better economics. I think the dam will break. I
• 46:43
  quite sure of it. It's just a matter of time. And also, you think about, like, who's paying
• 46:47
  the $150 billion? It's advertisers and advertisers will just go wherever the audience is. They don't have
• 46:52
  they'll go where creators are. The creators have the real power and the creators are getting screwed
• 46:55
  right now. Yeah. What is what is composability at the content you speak about? What does that mean?
• 47:01
  So that's that's a so you can kind of look at this. We just talked about creators and how they're
• 47:05
  kind of getting the the short end of the stick here. The other
• 47:10
  the set of folks who are getting who are losing out on this current system are startups and
• 47:16
  software developers. And this is, you know, maybe less relatable to your audience, but is the
• 47:20
  world I inhabit? And specifically with software developers, a very, very powerful force. And I
• 47:26
  mentioned Linux earlier. And one of the reasons that open source software has been successful
• 47:30
  is a feature of software called composability, which is if you go to get GitHub is a,
• 47:34
  this is the most popular website for using open source software. The reason that open source
• 47:39
  is successful is it is people kind of treat software open source makes software like Lego bricks.
• 47:44
  In the sense of some one person can build like a AI library or graphics library or some other
• 47:50
  thing. And then once one person builds that, someone else can come along and take that Lego brick
• 47:55
  and reuse it and build something else. And so you can think of the open source software world as
• 48:00
  this huge collection of Lego bricks that people are constantly building new bricks and adding onto
• 48:05
  it. And that process had it turns out over the last 20 years that process of sort of the whole world
• 48:12
  collectively building Lego bricks of software has been a vastly more successful process than
• 48:19
  you know, having a company internally try to try to compete with that.
• 48:25
  And so one of the things with blockchains, as I mentioned before, the forecaster,
• 48:28
  the social network is you have the same effect going on now, but with social networks. So like,
• 48:33
  I was recently at a conference on my book tour and I was signing books and I always asked people
• 48:38
  when I'm signing books, what they do. And more and more, I meet these like the other day, I met a
• 48:42
  kid, he's a college student. And I said, what are you, you know, what are you working on? He's like,
• 48:46
  I'm building features for forecaster for the network. And I was like, so why are you doing that? He's
• 48:52
  like, well, I always wanted to build a social network. But until blockchains, I had to go build the
• 48:56
  whole social network. Right. I had to go and like build a TikTok competitor and market it and get
• 49:00
  millions of users. And so that just seemed impossible. But now I can just build a piece of a social network.
• 49:04
  Right. And that was very exciting. And we're seeing more and more of that. Right. And so you're
• 49:07
  going to see this thing where like kind of this, this army of kind of ants ends up, you know,
• 49:13
  kind of coming together and building this, this big thing and competes with these, you know,
• 49:19
  these big companies like Facebook. And that, that, that, that's composability, sort of the software
• 49:24
  is Lego bricks. And that has been a very, very powerful force in the last 20 to 30 years with,
• 49:30
  with software. And I believe we can bring that same force to internet services. So this is, so
• 49:37
  maybe just help explain and, and, and help people understand who are listening to this, who
• 49:44
  again are like adjacent to the industry and they've seen people build projects. And then they've
• 49:49
  seen, for example, like, very scammy fundraising and ICOs and all the negativity that comes with
• 49:56
  the industry that I think everything kind of gets like bulked together and grouped together if
• 50:01
  you don't understand, right. You get ICOs and NFTs and Bitcoin and blockchain and crypto. And
• 50:07
  it's very confused. So when you talk about building apps, obviously it's massively different than
• 50:13
  what was happening. And I don't know what five years ago, or, or whatever that time frame was.
• 50:18
  So maybe like walk me through the evolution and just paint the, the, the, the picture like the
• 50:25
  back then what was happening versus what is actually happening right now. So people understand
• 50:30
  there's a, like a massive difference in who's actually building the value that people are actually
• 50:35
  creating. Yeah. And the, in the book I talk about what I, the distinction between two communities,
• 50:40
  I call them the computer and the casino. And so the idea is that there's really kind of two cultures
• 50:46
  attracted to blockchains. And there's casino is people that are interested in speculation and
• 50:50
  gambling and scams. And then there's the people like me and, and, you know, who want to build a
• 50:55
  new wave of internet services. And there are, you know, I would say certainly tens of thousands in
• 51:01
  my side of the camp. And then there's, you know, at least that many, maybe more on the other side.
• 51:06
  And it's your point. Unfortunately, if you're not in, in the industry, it all looks kind of
• 51:10
  grouped together. But I think of it as very much two distinct movements. I believe that
• 51:17
  that the role of smart regulation would be to tamp down a lot of the speculative behavior.
• 51:24
  Certainly the scams. I, you know, I'd, I've been frustrated with that. I don't think that's
• 51:29
  happened. And we've been calling for that for a long time, long before FTX and everything else.
• 51:33
  And we're one of the only these seasons looking at value that we're not interested in FTX
• 51:36
  or any of these scams. So we, you know, like I think this is, to me, this is a role of referees
• 51:43
  of policy makers of regulation is to, you need to put guardrails around these things and,
• 51:49
  and, you know, and, and have protections. And I don't think that that's been done yet in a,
• 51:55
  in a, in a smart way. So that's a big reason that we go to D.C. and kind of implication policy
• 52:02
  is to try to do that. And I think, and, and a lot of, like, so for example, one of the things
• 52:07
  we're big proponents of is lockups. So lockups, and you create a token, the investors like us,
• 52:13
  and the founders are cannot sell those tokens for a number of years. I think an ideal, you know,
• 52:19
  length would be like four years, which is kind of what you see in a lot of the, you know,
• 52:23
  the non blockchain industry. And that forces people to be long-term. And it, and that,
• 52:28
  that alone would remove a whole lot of issues, I believe, a lot of this sort of get rich quick stuff.
• 52:33
  And that's only one of many things that, you know, disclosures or a bunch of other kinds of
• 52:36
  things that, that should be there. So, so that's part of it. I think, um, yeah, and, and, like,
• 52:42
  I think it's, um, um, yeah, and unfortunately these, you know, I think part of it too is like
• 52:48
  people on my side, it's just having gone out and kind of made the case. This is why I wrote my
• 52:53
  book. This is why I'm, yeah, I'm going to focus on podcast. Um, you know, people had heard a lot
• 52:58
  from, from some of the bad actors. It's, it's a juicier news story. They talk about, you know,
• 53:04
  price is going up and down and people making fortunes and losing fortunes. It's less interesting
• 53:09
  to talk about kind of the stuff, you know, some of the stuff I'm talking about is longer term,
• 53:13
  it's slower moving. It's true. It's creating true value. It's creating true, true innovation and
• 53:19
  value and disruption as opposed to as a, as opposed to speculation. And I'm, I'm actually curious
• 53:26
  if you think speculation plays that not scam. Remove, remove scam and remove fraudulent actors.
• 53:31
  And that's, that has no place in any industry. But is there, is there some benefit to speculation?
• 53:36
  Or is that entirely toxic? I, like, I think I would take the view that I think we've generally
• 53:43
  taken in the US, which is speculation has a role. So like, for example, the stock market,
• 53:47
  the housing market, right, it has a role, but it needs to be coupled with real utility.
• 53:52
  So to give you an example, like, why, why do we decide to value home ownership? We value it
• 53:58
  because primarily because it's one can, you know, buy home, there's an emotional attachment,
• 54:02
  you can raise a family, it aligns your incentive, you have an incentive to improve, there's a lot
• 54:06
  of evidence, people that own homes, you know, contribute more to their home, to improving their home
• 54:12
  and also their community, right, to home ownership. I think we think it's a good side of value.
• 54:16
  And then we allow for speculation, right? People lip homes, people speculate. But it's, but it's not
• 54:22
  the main focus. Like the main focus is home, like the reason we have, you know, the main focus of
• 54:26
  housing policy of our social values is home ownership as a, as a, as a good for citizens, right?
• 54:33
  Not the, but the financial, the speculation part does play a role. I mean, the reason you can
• 54:38
  get a price on Zillow so easily, right, is there's very liquid markets. And same with stock markets,
• 54:43
  right? Like the hedge funds and all these kinds of things are legal and people speculate.
• 54:48
  But the primary purpose of the stock market is not speculation. It's to provide capital to,
• 54:52
  you know, to companies that are building products, right? And then the speculation just provides
• 54:57
  liquidity and price discovery and things like that. So I think that's how it, things should evolve
• 55:01
  in a healthy market. Is it like fundamentally, this is about building new internet services? And yes,
• 55:05
  there are, there, you know, tokens are important because they're the mechanism by which you
• 55:11
  enable community ownership. You can allow people to, you know, have, by owning a token in this new
• 55:17
  network, you can, you as a user can get paid, for example, for your contributions to the network
• 55:21
  through tokens. And that's valuable. And that person might now to then at some point sell those
• 55:26
  tokens and they need a market for that. And there's a role for, you know, markets and that. It's just,
• 55:30
  it's, it's, to me, it's a question of, of focus and priorities. There's been all, all of the focus
• 55:35
  and priorities have been on the speculative side and far too little on the utilities. The utility
• 55:40
  needs to come first. It needs to be the priority. And, and then to some extent, you'll have these
• 55:45
  financial markets, but they'll, they'll have guardrails around them and they'll be secondary, not primary.
• 55:51
  Well, I was going to say, I think that the, the speculative market grew so much quicker than the
• 55:56
  utility market or the, the casinos versus the computers or the builders or whatever you said.
• 56:02
  Because I love that, I love that analogy because it's so true. But it's because utility for the,
• 56:07
  for the layman for the average person was difficult. It didn't, it didn't seem like me using a decentralized
• 56:14
  app or an app that runs on blockchain was that much better than me just using something that was
• 56:19
  run and built by a company. But what you're investing in and what you're creating and what,
• 56:26
  and Dries and Horowitz is creating and what your portfolio companies are creating are companies that
• 56:31
  again, to your point, the, you, it does, the user experience is, is all that matters. The user
• 56:36
  experience is on par or better than what is already in the market. And I think that's when you have
• 56:41
  more adoption of utility. And there's, it's been hurting. It's been hurting for years. And I
• 56:45
  think that hopefully we're at the point where we're there. I would also say, you know, there's,
• 56:49
  I think there's a little bit of revisionism happening in other areas of tech. So for example,
• 56:54
  you know, AI, the first neural network paper was 1943. If you go look on, if you go look it up,
• 56:59
  there was literally an AI financial stock market bubble in the 1980s around these things called
• 57:05
  expert systems. You know, I look, I started an AI company in 2008 and I thought that was the
• 57:10
  right time I was saying first to really sift, you know, which is a mistake. But the, but it's been
• 57:16
  around a very, very long time to the point where even when I was doing my company, you didn't say
• 57:21
  the word AI because it was kind of a bad word because you know, you'd say machine learning or
• 57:25
  something because AI had been so overhyped. Smartphones, you know, there was a, there's a good
• 57:30
  documentary on iTunes about general magic. It was a company trying to build an iPhone and
• 57:34
  something like an iPhone in 1994 or something. And there were attempts in the 80s. You know,
• 57:41
  the internet had a 20 year period before the browser. And so I would also say like now people
• 57:47
  pay attention more to tech. And so it's been the spotlight more. But my experience is just as
• 57:52
  how these things, I mean, like everything's different and history doesn't repeat Iran's. But
• 57:57
  also like just new, you know, trying to build a set of internet services to replace the tech
• 58:03
  incumbents. Like it doesn't happen overnight. Like this takes time. And, you know, and you got to
• 58:09
  kind of dive into the details to my opinion to understand, you know, what's going right and what's
• 58:13
  going wrong. And anyways, that's what I'm trying to kind of explain and share with people.
• 58:19
  When you, and then just one more thought on like the underlying technology. So
• 58:25
  there's so many different protocols and so many and they're really just operating systems that
• 58:30
  you can build on. What is evolved to the point where now we can scale something so that it can
• 58:36
  accommodate millions of people. I don't want it. I don't want you to say like this is a protocol
• 58:40
  that is killing it right now. But I would just want commentary on why we couldn't do this 10 years
• 58:46
  ago. Why we can do this now. There's transaction costs involved. There's some friction that used to
• 58:51
  be there not so much anymore. Just speak to that for somebody who is like a little bit more involved
• 58:55
  in this industry. Well, the mode like so that yeah, so just very high level, you know, there was
• 59:00
  Bitcoin. And then in 2015, there was Ethereum, which is a program of blockchain, which means you
• 59:05
  can write software for it and build applications for it, which was sort of the beginning of the
• 59:08
  modern era. And but the big problem with Ethereum was that it would it would cost like a dollar like
• 59:14
  to do a transaction. Like think about a social network. You click a button and it costs a dollar.
• 59:18
  Like no one's going to use that. Today, and this is only as of honestly like two months ago,
• 59:24
  some upgrades to the system. It's finally extremely inexpensive. And so for example, Coinbase is
• 59:31
  on a good job. They're building they have a they have a blockchain called base. You can download
• 59:36
  the Coinbase wallet and and use it. You know, it's it's easy to use. And that's that's a kind of
• 59:43
  thing built on Ethereum as an example. And so that that I'd say that ecosystem has finally gotten
• 59:49
  to the point of sort of, you know, you can really build. Because there's interesting competitors.
• 59:55
  People who probably heard of Solana, that's a that's, you know, I think incredible. Alternative,
• 1:00:00
  the few others. And like any kind of computing market, I expect you'll see multiple, you know,
• 1:00:04
  you have Android and iPhone, you're such a sort of one thing. So there's sort of, you know,
• 1:00:08
  there's multiple things like that. But I think it's for the first time really in the last few
• 1:00:13
  months. I would say you can you finally have these these things at a point where the the infrastructure
• 1:00:20
  is not the gaining factor. Yeah. I mean, you look at when you look at, you know, you speak to people
• 1:00:27
  that are asking you like, what book should I read? You know, how do I go on this rabbit hole?
• 1:00:32
  You have your book. But I'm also curious about some of the major misconceptions that you still
• 1:00:36
  see about crypto like while you're on the podcast, maybe quash some things that you hear repeatedly
• 1:00:42
  that are just massively incorrect that are still commonly held beliefs. Yeah, I think the energy
• 1:00:47
  you used to think. I mean, that so that's, you know, people say it waste times of energy. That's
• 1:00:52
  specific to a certain type type method of what's, you know, certain types of blockchains,
• 1:00:58
  literally proof of work blockchains. You know, Bitcoin is a proof of work blockchain. It's true
• 1:01:03
  of Bitcoin. You can argue that the Bitcoiners would argue that they there's, you know, a lot of
• 1:01:07
  clean tech and other things used. But, but that system, you know, does consume a lot of energy.
• 1:01:14
  The Ethereum and all that have blockchains that were involved and all the services I'm
• 1:01:18
  discussing don't they use what's called proof of stake, which is has energy consumption that's
• 1:01:24
  comparable to, you know, when to kind of data centers like traditional software. I have a chart in
• 1:01:30
  my book kind of going through that. So that is simply not the energy usage is simply not a valid
• 1:01:36
  criticism of Ethereum, Solana, and all the kind of services I'm talking about anymore.
• 1:01:43
  That that it used to be Ethereum switched over about two years ago. So I think that's that's a
• 1:01:49
  giant misconception. I think the, you know, the, just the general conception that I discussed
• 1:01:57
  before of sort of thinking it's all about kind of gambling and and speculation. I think that
• 1:02:02
  does exist for sure. And, but, but there's just other side to it. So I think that's sort of
• 1:02:09
  probably the other big thing. I think another, well, another big one is that it's that blockchains
• 1:02:15
  are good for illicit finance and hiding things. It's quite the opposite, which is it's actually
• 1:02:21
  pretty much an unsolved problem in blockchains as to how to in a in a scalable way
• 1:02:27
  create privacy. Because by default, all blockchains, everything is public. And so and 99% of the
• 1:02:35
  usage today, if not higher, is, you know, is done in that way is public. So if you do something
• 1:02:41
  out of Ethereum, you can just go see everything somebody else has done. And so it's actually a
• 1:02:45
  really bad way to do to do legal finance. And all this data, you know, chain analysis of
• 1:02:52
  firm that's sort of law enforcement. And they say that I think it's sub 0.2% of blockchain
• 1:02:57
  transactions are illicit. And that's actually less than is, is, you know, a percentage lower
• 1:03:04
  percentage than in the non crypto world. So that's another common misconception. So I would say
• 1:03:09
  those three like energy use elicit finance. And then the third is just sort of, you know,
• 1:03:14
  that there's it's all about speculation. And if you're going to pinpoint one particular
• 1:03:19
  challenge that you're still working on to to basically this has to be addressed for widespread
• 1:03:27
  web 3 adoption, what would that challenge be that's still sort of inhibiting where you want
• 1:03:32
  this to go? I think it's I think at this point, it's mostly regulatory policy. I think it's having
• 1:03:37
  clear what we need our guard rails to eliminate the bad actors. But then having clear
• 1:03:45
  path for good entrepreneurs. And specifically, here's what I see in my daily life, which is,
• 1:03:49
  you know, you're not you're a technologist who's got a, you know, a brilliant technologist who
• 1:03:54
  can do many different things in their life, including starting an AI company or joining Google
• 1:04:01
  or whatever it might be. Are you going to join an industry where there's some uncertainty about
• 1:04:07
  the legal status? And there's some chance that you'll get sued by some regulatory agency.
• 1:04:12
  The answer's no, like it's it deters good actors. Uncertainly deters good actors.
• 1:04:20
  On the flip side, if you're a scammer hacker and you, you know, your other choices in life
• 1:04:25
  stealing credit cards, you may say, hey, I'll take that rails, right? And so what we've,
• 1:04:30
  this is the biggest issue with the policy side. And I see this on daily basis is that we've created
• 1:04:35
  an incentive system that attracts bad actors to blockchains and and deters good actors.
• 1:04:41
  Now this is not like I said, there's still tens of thousands of good actors kind of working on
• 1:04:45
  these areas, but but it's it's a big issue. And it's created this kind of negative cycle where
• 1:04:52
  you have the bad policy leads to bad sort of attracting the wrong people, which then creates bad
• 1:05:01
  behavior, which I think is a statement more. And then I'll see. And so I think we're in that
• 1:05:06
  kind of cycle. And that's what we need to break. And that's what I, you know, think about and work
• 1:05:10
  on a lot. And I think we're making progress. You know, there's a there's a, I think there's,
• 1:05:17
  you know, the kind of growing awareness that on the policy maker side that something needs to be
• 1:05:22
  done. There's also it's like right now. And if you follow it, there's this thing of like,
• 1:05:28
  there's a thing called meme coins, which are this kind of like doge coin that are more and more
• 1:05:31
  popular. Why are they more popular? Because they're they're they're one of the few areas and blockchains
• 1:05:36
  that's that we have regulatory clarity. They're fully legal. It's fully legal for you to create a
• 1:05:42
  coin that is, you know, absolutely silly and like, you know, has has no value at all, but it's
• 1:05:48
  super speculative, but it's legal. But that's legal. And actually you get into legal gray areas when
• 1:05:53
  you start adding utility. That's like, which is like, that's as backwards. Yeah. So exactly.
• 1:06:00
  So we've created this incentive system for people to create more and more silly stuff. And and if
• 1:06:03
  you create utility is when you get into gray area. And so that has been, and again, I'm not,
• 1:06:08
  I'm not anti speculation or anti like a, like a people sports gambling of legal slot machines
• 1:06:13
  or legal, a lot of those illegal. I'm not here to moralize. I'm just saying that you create
• 1:06:19
  the incentives for this and you create, you make utility, you know, gray area and you make gambling
• 1:06:26
  legally clear. And what do you, you know, what do you expect? What do you expect? What do you expect?
• 1:06:30
  What do you expect is going to happen? Yeah. Yeah. Um, this book is very new. I think it's it,
• 1:06:34
  when is this coming out? Or is it already out? We can try to keep this podcast evergreen. What's
• 1:06:39
  the date when it actually came out? Uh, it was January 30th. January 30th. Okay. Oh, so it's it's
• 1:06:45
  out now. Okay. Perfect. Um, candidly, we, we, we're going to break the fourth while we push this
• 1:06:50
  podcast back to your times. I appreciate you. And I'm glad we finally got it done. No, I'm very,
• 1:06:55
  very glad we finally got it done. So you can get this book. Um, wherever you get books, obviously
• 1:06:59
  now whenever this drops, it'll drop very, very soon, uh, Amazon or wherever, um, or you get
• 1:07:05
  your books. If you were going to, so the reason why I asked is because it's been a couple months
• 1:07:12
  since this book came out, is there anything that's come into your life recently that you wish
• 1:07:18
  you could have included in this book when you were writing it, but you didn't have a chance to.
• 1:07:23
  That's a good question. I tried. I, I, I, I, I used to blog for years and so, and I had blog posts,
• 1:07:28
  I wrote that that I felt like, uh, didn't age well. Some age well and some didn't. And so I had
• 1:07:35
  that knowledge going into it. And so I tried to keep it at a little bit of abstract enough that
• 1:07:40
  it would age pretty well. I mean, this stuff is hard like AI because it's moving so quickly.
• 1:07:46
  Um, I would say right now it's pretty good. Like I, there wasn't a lot I would, I'm sure in a
• 1:07:50
  couple of years, there'll be examples I used or predictions I made that were off, but, but, um,
• 1:07:57
  so far, it's been pretty good. And it's been, I've been done with it, you know, you have to finish
• 1:08:00
  a book a few months before you publish it. So I've been done with it probably for almost a year now.
• 1:08:04
  And it's not a year, but nine months or something. So, um, it's pretty good so far, but I'm sure
• 1:08:09
  at some point I want to revise something. No, of course. And, uh, and, and lastly, I mean, like,
• 1:08:13
  if you, if you've gone down this path already and you've gone through, if you've gone through the
• 1:08:17
  process of writing, I mean, now you know what it takes. And now, like the next time won't be as
• 1:08:22
  hard, but I always laugh because it's not, it's not easy to put this together by any means. Like,
• 1:08:26
  it's so it was a, I had no idea what I was getting into. Like if I heard this a lot, I would have
• 1:08:31
  done it. It was, it was, I, you know, the first draft took me like four months. I was like,
• 1:08:36
  oh, this is great. And then I, I realized it was crap and I had to spend another eight months
• 1:08:41
  rewriting it. So it was like a year of a lot of works. If people want to, if you want to connect
• 1:08:46
  with you, um, where, where should they go? Like, you're really active on Twitter, right? I think
• 1:08:50
  Twitter. And then when the one I mentioned, uh, Forecaster, so Forecaster.
• 1:08:56
  Okay. Perfect. If you were going to, if you were going to, you know, sort of look back over your
• 1:09:01
  career, um, and you've seen, you know, all the seasons that you've gone through in your career,
• 1:09:07
  what would be a lesson that you would tell your younger self? Yeah. I think, you know, I mean,
• 1:09:13
  look, I, I think the technology industry is a fantastic industry to work in. I, you know, I,
• 1:09:18
  I haven't, it's, it matters so much what wave you ride. Um, this may sound obvious, but like,
• 1:09:27
  I, I, I mean, I just, like, you asked me why I have mistakes. I made so many kind of mistakes,
• 1:09:31
  investment mistakes, entrepreneurial mistakes, but I made one, did one thing right, which is like,
• 1:09:35
  you know, I got on, I joined the internet industry in the year 2000. And, um, and I,
• 1:09:42
  by the way, a lot of people, you know, in the 2005, I've gotten very negative about it. Um,
• 1:09:48
  and so I kind of, you know, luckily I was a friend of the bunch of optimists. Um,
• 1:09:54
  I would say, you know, surround yourself with smart, optimistic people and, you know,
• 1:09:59
  and the optimistic about these trends, you know, today, I think it's, to me, that very clearly,
• 1:10:03
  it's blockchain and AI, I would be involved with one of those two. Um, and I think they both have
• 1:10:10
  strengths and weaknesses from a career point of view. Um, the, um, maybe, maybe VAR and self-driving
• 1:10:17
  cars and other new devices, a lot of cool stuff happening. Um, you know, surround yourself with smart,
• 1:10:23
  great high integrity, optimistic people. Um, they say, you know, you become the five people
• 1:10:28
  you spend the most time with. It's really true. You know, you chat, you, you challenge yourself.
• 1:10:33
  I've seen people that join startups and the sort of may not go well, but maybe if they join the
• 1:10:37
  right people, like, it's like this sort of PayPal mafia kind of thing where they all go off and
• 1:10:42
  do interesting stuff. Yeah. It's so often the case, um, it doesn't matter so much. Um, you know, um,
• 1:10:49
  so yeah, I mean, like, I don't know. They just sound like kind of obvious platitudes, but
• 1:10:54
  well, I don't think there is, I think, I think they're obvious platitudes, but I don't think people
• 1:10:57
  understand the, the wisdom behind the words that you're saying, because I know that people
• 1:11:02
  that have started a company, started their next company, myself included, like, you already have
• 1:11:06
  the people you're going to be working with for the next one. And that goes from that, that, that
• 1:11:11
  speaking to from an operational perspective and sort of finding the periods you want to work with.
• 1:11:16
  But also when you start to have some success and you make some money from an investor perspective,
• 1:11:23
  I know groups of people that only do deals with their friends. Like, they don't have to go, if they
• 1:11:28
  want to go invest in a deal, like, they don't really need to go find LPs. They just invest with
• 1:11:34
  the friends that they've invested in because they've all done deals together and they all know what,
• 1:11:38
  you know, this person is not going to screw up the due diligence on this deal and they trust
• 1:11:41
  like I'm part of an exited founder group and everybody just pushes, puts deals forward. And,
• 1:11:47
  I mean, you start to trust the people, you start to deals with again and again and again and again.
• 1:11:53
  And it just, it removes a ton of risk and ambiguity, especially like not at the level that you're
• 1:11:58
  doing that where you see thousands and thousands of deals. But if you just want to do a couple deals,
• 1:12:02
  then you, you have your circle. So it's incredibly important. I mean, it's, and it's, you know,
• 1:12:08
  and I would say one other thing I would add to this is I wrote a blog post a years ago about
• 1:12:14
  this called climbing the wrong hill and it was about, I think there's on the negative side or
• 1:12:18
  just sort of the flip side of advice, I guess is the traps people find themselves, especially
• 1:12:23
  early in their career, which is getting on kind of a, you know, you go to some fancy school,
• 1:12:27
  you get a fancy job and getting on these kind of treadmills. I called it climbing the wrong hill
• 1:12:32
  because you sort of, you feel like you're making progress, right? You're going upwards. But then,
• 1:12:37
  you know, maybe 10 years later, you're going to look back and be like, I was climbing up the wrong
• 1:12:40
  hill, right? And I hadn't, I needed to spend more time looking for other hills. And that also suggests
• 1:12:47
  some exploration, some kind of experimentation in early in your career and like really sort of
• 1:12:52
  is this the right hill? And are you getting kind of hooked on near term kind of dopamine hits of
• 1:12:58
  like I got a promotion? I've, you know, I'm in whatever Google or Goldman Sachs or something.
• 1:13:04
  As, you know, it's like, look, if you go and, for example, join a startup from Google,
• 1:13:08
  it's, it's, it's, it can be a jarring experience. You go to a party and like people like,
• 1:13:12
  what? I never heard of that. Whereas you go, yeah, you're Google and it's like, oh, you're,
• 1:13:15
  you're used to like the status that is associated with these things. And so a lot of times the kind
• 1:13:20
  of the right hill, it will feel a meat in the near term like a setback, right? I think again and
• 1:13:28
  that's a pattern I've seen with people that feel fulfilled in their career is that they took
• 1:13:33
  their moments when they took what seemed to be steps back. And, and you know, we call it risk.
• 1:13:41
  But risk kind of, I think glosses over the, the emotional side of it, which is like, wow,
• 1:13:45
  I just, I just gave up this fancy job and took a step back of what it feels like at some point.
• 1:13:50
  And then things are going badly, you're into it and you're like, what the hell did I do?
• 1:13:54
  But did you power through it? So, um, anyway, so that would be another, another kind of career lesson
• 1:14:00
  I'd add. I love it. Chris, uh, thank you so much. Thanks for, thanks for writing this book.
• 1:14:05
  Thanks for educating. Thanks for, for investing in an incredible ethical, smart entrepreneur is trying
• 1:14:11
  to disrupt. Um, it's, it's, it's, you're doing good work. That's all I can say. So thank you.