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### Human: Mm hmm.### Assistant: Yeah, I mean, listen, this is like a freaking hard business to scale. It's the reason why we didn't make any like if you guys know a lot about gopro kind of an early days, like between 2015 and 2019. we didn't make any media announcement. There was no PR, there was no press releases, there's no media. We did that because we were really figuring out how to scale this business in a really massive like, all the infrastructure and tech it took to get to a place where you can open up a building a day, right? We were opening up 30 buildings a month in the last couple of months, right? That it's impressive. And the team has done a lot of really great work to get there. But it took years of planning and years of tech build up to get to a place where, you know, we could stand up a building a day.

### Human: Well, yeah, I mean, one thing at a time. But yeah, it just is really interesting how this has become a big thing to do. And I'm excited about it. I think it's great. It's probably more work for the businesses because they have to figure out the packaging and the dry ice and you know, yeah, the packaging is all that but it's a it's a super smart move by Uber for the reasons that you say they already have the economies of scale.### Assistant: Well, and Goldbelly has probably gone to all of these businesses already and taught them how to do the dry ice and had webinars with them. Totally. Yeah. So they're just like, literally can just take the Goldbelly list. Thanks, Goldbelly, RIP Goldbelly. And the Uber Eats list. You take the Goldbelly and Uber Eats list, you know, when you cheated in school on a multiple choice test, and the teacher holds the two things up to the light and looks through them and it's like, okay, you guys got the wrong ones, correct. You just hold those up and you look for what is, you know, maybe it's 70% of Uber Eats and go, maybe 70% of Gold Belly is already on Uber Eats and DoorDash. You just go after those 70. And then the last 30, you know, that'll be your slow, that's your roadmap for who to go after next. They've already been taught how to do dry ice shipping. They already have some space set up in the kitchen or somewhere in the facility. And UPS is already coming there to pick up the Gold Belly packages. So it's no sweat off their back to do, you know, DoorDash and Uber Eats. So i think this is the super the super app nature of uber is going to be very compelling over time i wish uber payments had worked That would have been super cool if we could have sent each other money by Uber payments, you know, or like they already have splitting checks. But I think gifting is a really, really powerful one for Uber. As is like theater tickets, like I would love to see more of the experience things like last minute tickets, which is in Dara's wheelhouse, like imagine you're in New York, and it's like, here are 100 last minute tickets on a tab. And it's like, here's the countdown clock, boom, buy some tickets to you know, Broadway or a concert, just last minute style, or hotel tonight style last minute hotel rooms. Another brilliant feature.

### Human: Well, I burned out from micromanaging people during the Wanderlust days. I was completely obsessed. And I think most founders have this insane challenge of doing most of the work themselves in the early days, then to becoming and growing into a CEO that just manages people who manage people. So everyone is going through that weird phase and transition, and I think most of us are probably doing a terrible job the very first time you go through this. at pitch because we have done this before from the beginning, like we knew, okay, we have to create autonomous product teams. We can't really micromanage people. If you want to make everyone, keep everyone excited and mission driven, we have to just provide a lot of freedom internally. And we also hired a lot of senior folks who have been a part of other startups, failed startups, successful startups, venture firms. And I think that really helps to, like you say, to create a very mature company culture. How do you deal with people who### Assistant: It's really good, actually. And Patti McCourt's previous one, because she was the human resources person, I had her on the podcast like three years ago when she did her book. There were good reads back to back, the Reed Hastings one with Erin, I forgot her last name, who's a HR specialist, she's going to come on the pod. And then Patty McCord, who was the HR person. So there's literally two books. And then the co-founder of Netflix wrote a book, so I'm going to read that one too, and have the trifecta of them. So you kind of get the Rashomon, all different versions of what happened at Netflix. But the core thesis of freedom and responsibility really resonates with me, which is like, hire adults, have talent density, hire the most talented people. That's kind of obvious. You want to hire the most talented people you can afford. Aaron Meyer is the person who really wrote the book with Reed. It's basically her book though based on my take on it. Reed is kind of like maybe 20% of the book and Aaron's 80% or 90% maybe. Um, which is fine. I mean, I think they really nailed it, but freedom and responsibility of like, you're responsible for Netflix, Brazil, Netflix, Poland, Netflix, Tokyo, whatever Netflix Japan, and you're going to have to make decisions. But it was really interesting as they went around the world, like in Germany, like certain things about freedom and responsibility where like, you know, Oh, we don't have a travel policy. Do what's in the best interest. Do what you would do with your money was one, their original travel policy. And then somebody was like flying first class and like going out to like absurd restaurants and ordering $800 bottles of wines. And they're like, what are you doing? Because like the CFO was in the back and coach and like all these sales executives were in business at first and they had spent thousands of dollars on wine. Like what the fuck are you guys doing? And they're like, you said to do what I do. This is how I fly. This is what I spend my money on. And then they said, okay, that's not the rule anymore. The heuristic, we're not going to tell you how much you can spend, is do what's in Netflix's best interest. Is it in best interest to spend $8,000 on wine? Maybe if it's Tom Hanks and you're trying to win a deal, and he loves wine and that wins you the deal. But if you're just going out with four other Netflix people, please don't buy $8,000 bottles of wine. So it's really interesting how they like try to take away because they basically were like the basic premise of the book. And I'm curious what you think of this just as a general strategies. Talent density, get the most people, best people you can give them freedom and responsibility and be candid with each other and then take away rules. So remove rules, but you can't remove rules if you don't have the right people in it and you don't have this like freedom and responsibility FNR. What are your thoughts on management? What did you learn in terms of managing a startup and managing people?

### Human: We hate I hate that.### Assistant: Yeah, don't break the open space book loves that Facebook.

### Human: And we're never going to get off it.### Assistant: We're never going to get off Twitter as much as everyone wants to delete all the notifications. We're just never going to do that because there's just so much information there. Everyone is so accessible. Yeah. and everyone's on the same page.

### Human: One reason is the commute. I understand that. I just think there might be a second factor, which is just, there's this huge millennial generation that's come of home buying age. So nobody wanted to live out in the burbs. It was just the most uncool place in the world. Sort of mocked in all these movies about growing up. Because it was just hip to be in New York. It was hip to be in LA. It was hip to be in San Francisco. You could go party with your friends. And now all the people who were doing that in their 20s are having a baby, getting married, moving out to the Burbs. Every time we think the city's down for the count, it comes back. I think it's gonna go through a really tough cycle. We don't know what to do with all the commercial space. You can't convert it into residential. You might as well just demolish it. Why not?### Assistant: So I may be Glenn slightly different, but I don't see multifamily in the long run holding up what happens to those places, Glenn's, you know, if people don't want to live in Soma or in Seattle, or whatever downtown area it is, what happens to wait a minute, the 7000 or $5,000 rent?

### Human: And it's remote. Oh, yeah. And it's remote. You don't have to go anywhere.### Assistant: Even better.

### Human: Because it's not really a podcatcher or even a browser. It is. Spotify is a content aggregator. Like, again, this is why I think that's so interesting as a business question. They're a content aggregator. Not a browser and not even like a search, right? Especially in more and more and more as they start to acquire stuff and make it exclusive. And that's why, like, I almost wonder if that wasn't. And frankly, there's been a lot of reporting that says it's not even the best thing for the people who got these deals, like their traffic is dropping because it's exclusive. Like, I just.### Assistant: That's why we didn't, that's why we didn't do it with all in. I won't say which platforms courted us, but we were courted early on when people started jumping to the top, you know, 100, 200 pods, they were like, Hey, and this week in startups, we've had people, you know, make overtures and stuff like that. And I was like, listen, we want to be Indy. There's a reason we're Indy. We do not want to limit where people see it. And, you know, and then every platform is like, Hey, what are you doing? And I was like, there's really two things I want to work on YouTube. and RSS feeds. Anything that's not those two, I think, you know, is, you know, very secondary. Like you can explore marketing on Twitter and TikTok. But like, no, I don't want to build your platform. No, I want open standards.

### Human: Right? I mean, as if it were hard enough to get a COVID test at a Walgreens, it's not even open to let you get up. All the Starbucks are closed right now in the in the area of as a combination of COVID and the crime. Yeah. And that's this is again, this is unpleasant. Like I'm the word pleasant is in our name. But I mean, yeah, I mean, we're definitely hiring. We're going to go out to raise a next round in the next month. I'd love your feedback. We're going to get the deck together here in the next couple weeks.### Assistant: So being able to develop a strategy for them shutting down, they're just like, we can't take this anymore.

### Human: Yeah, it's like after pro athletes end up swapping jerseys. This was the jersey swap for nerdy people.### Assistant: Yeah. I mean, it turns out 80% of Robinhood's users were acquired either organically or via their referral program.

### Human: Or do your Peloton like Justin. Yeah. Justin, you've joined a couple meetings like on the Peloton, I swear.### Assistant: A couple. I've switched to writing the morning ticker on the Peloton.

### Human: Yeah, so the way USDC works is, you know, through circle through Coinbase, in fact, through many other exchanges as well. people can redeem USDC and get a bank transfer, a CH a wire, all these kinds of methods. And we only as circle we only directly deal with businesses. So we don't like as an individual, you can't come to circle, you can certainly go to Coinbase or FTX or or, you know, one of these other places to get out of USDC or a stable coin costs one.### Assistant: And that person who gets the USDC can choose to sell it back to circle and get cash.

### Human: Sure, yeah, but the motivations for advocacy are totally different than clicks to me. Of course, yeah, I agree. I want the creator world and the journalism world to have to just sort of accept, to merge, you know what I mean? I like that. I think right now it's like, we have journalists, we're held to high standards, and then we have creators who are held to different standards. And I feel like it all needs to come together. Everybody is judged. based on their reputation. And yeah, I'm excited about that period.### Assistant: Fantastic. All right. Listen, speaking of reputations, go back to work and get more scoops and bring them here on this week.

### Human: Yeah, probably not as much as Friedberg. But I'd say it becomes a huge challenge. One is you develop a culture of no, as I talked about the opposite culture in the early days. Even at, I would argue, 8,000, 10,000 employees, Google became a place where the default answer was no. Whether it was a manager signing off on a new project, the executives greenlighting an effort, wanting to make a small change or release an experiment. All those things became much more difficult to do. And certainly at the scale that they're at today, when everybody's job has been thin sliced. When you're a young company and there are a few people, everybody's got lots of scope. And over time, job roles get defined really thinly. And as a result, people are very protective of their jobs and their responsibilities. And so it becomes easier to elbow people out and say no. So I imagine like... When that's the case, and you're trying to protect your fiefdom, it stifles innovation. No stifles innovation. Yeah. And so that's one thing. The second thing is at their scale, with the moneymaking machine that they have, anything that potentially cannibalizes the existing business is really difficult to invest in. And certainly, AI and chat GPT and all these things can have a profound impact on the core businesses. especially one that's reliant upon in some ways, the volume in lots of ways, the volume of searches that happen, right?### Assistant: probably, I would say on average, people spend 20%. Maybe 30%. Yeah, depends on where you're at in the cycle. So let's go back to Google for a second. Amazing learnings that you brought forward is, if there is something challenging about running Google today, what is it? And then how does having this incredible money printing machine, then become, in some ways, a blocker for pursuing opportunities, specifically this AI chat, you know, chatbot sort of functionality? And have you been thinking about that? And where does it lead you?

### Human: I get this.### Assistant: Congratulations. And I'm like, it's really you guys passing all this anxiety onto the game. I mean, congratulations. You filed this week.

### Human: You have to know cash. And I had a company, I wouldn't say which one, but it was high profile. And they thought they had x amount of cash because their accounting firm, and their finance person internally had said this is where we're at. And what they didn't realize was the The founder just never did their diligence of keeping up to date on cash. And all of a sudden, she thought she had three months of cash, she had like three days, and she just screwed it up. And it was all because things weren't set up properly from the beginning.### Assistant: It's crazy.

### Human: This is a thing people look at twitter and they're like well twitter is kind of a waste of time and what you're telling me. Is you built your entire professional network from zero to having your own fund at twenty. Say you're twenty two twenty three yeah twenty three and you did the fun we are twenty two. you went from like zero to hero, like on Twitter, definitely not there yet. But I would say raising your first fund is a very significant moment in time for anybody who wants it. There's plenty of people who've been working in venture capital for 20 years, who haven't started their own fund. So you get that first SPV under your belt. You start going to people saying I have an allocation, would you like to put money in? Tell us about the first deal in terms of how many people how much money?### Assistant: Yes. And my business partner, we got introduced by someone that followed both of us on Twitter.

### Human: And you know, what's great is that I went from a very like consumer oriented journalist, right? I was doing reviews. So there was skepticism and evaluation. But there wasn't, it wasn't until I really made the transition when I went to the New York times to a business journalist that I had permission to ask rude questions about money. Yes. And then now, even just in my one meeting as a venture capitalist and it took, you know, I had to like work over, I had to get over that hurdle to ask very specific, rude seeming questions about money. that journalists don't ask, even business journalists are not. And companies won't tell you. They will tell you if they want their money. And I was like, this is delightful. I can actually get the real information. And I already felt so gratified by being able to ask the specific questions that would have caused me in the past to weed out companies as a journalist. If I had gotten the answers I got today, I would have been like, I can probably write about this story.### Assistant: So anyway, that's, that's how I would think about it. And really, this is what you're, and you can start to feel, let me know if I was correct in saying the same feeling as a journalist when you're trying to figure out, like, should I actually publish this story about this company? Is it bullshit? Am I going to have egg on my face that I publish a story where it was kind of vaporware and it was smoke and mirrors? Or did I actually publish a story about a company that's real? Yep. Like, we always have that constant fear as a journalist, right? Am I going to be the one who put Elizabeth Holmes on the cover? And it was a fraud, and it didn't exist. Like, there's a group of technology journalists who did put her on the cover editors who are probably thinking to themselves, like, post that every time they put somebody on the cover, they're thinking, let's make sure this isn't another Elizabeth Holmes, so we don't have egg on our face again.

### Human: It was it used to be Really? And now it's ruined.### Assistant: Is it Gen X, Tinder? This whole is Whole Foods in real life.

### Human: Exactly. So we'll just use lithium as an example, you're exactly right. So to make these batteries, because they're at the center of this energy transition, to make these batteries, you need a lot of materials. Lithium, cobalt, nickel are three of the most critical minerals in that transition. So you can throw copper in there as well, and the dramatic increase in copper. But if you just focus on lithium for a second, you know, all of our lithium sources essentially come from the earth. You know, we've been mining metals out of the ground since the dawn of man. So that's that's nothing new, right? Just what we're mining out of the ground is different shifting over time. And now there's an increased focus on lithium as opposed to maybe iron. So that's our new iron is lithium. And the part of the problem that we're having is there's this now dramatic increase in demand for lithium ion batteries. And we as an industry are not able to supply enough lithium. And so what we're seeing is a huge spike right now in lithium prices. So as an example, lithium has jumped up in price almost 10x in the last two years. And it's going to stay elevated for a while. Part of the reason is the demand is growing a lot faster than our ability to mine and refine the lithium. And so we need ways to kind of offset that and certainly recycling the lithium. Once you spend all that time and effort to try to get the lithium out of the ground, you certainly don't want to put that in a landfill. And also with it being so valuable, you want to be able to process it and put it right back into the supply chain to make new lithium ion batteries. And that's really the part of the problem that we're solving. There's a there's another part of the problem we're solving is essentially, as this new industry is growing lithium ion batteries and or the refining of these critical minerals. It's highly, highly concentrated in East Asia, and specifically in China. And so now you're starting to get governments involved, certainly in the United States, also in the European Union, very same regulations incentives to really diversify that concentrated source for all of these minerals that are in China. So, you know, you see some new recent legislation that's happening with the infrastructure law that was passed last November in the United States. Also, the Inflation Reduction Act had a lot of provisions in there to really help build a domestic US-based lithium-ion battery supply chain, all the way from from mines to refining to batteries to everything. So we're we as a country are not so reliant upon places like China for these critical materials.### Assistant: And then we have a massive shortfall of, it may not seem like it from my early questions, but I did a whole narrative podcast before becoming a climate tech investor on like, I became obsessed with batteries and the technology that we need and the, you know, materials that go into those batteries and the lithium shortfall in particular, I think is something people don't understand, right? This entire transition rests on batteries and we are not pulling anywhere near the amount of materials out of the earth or other sources that we need.

### Human: I mean yet this is one of those things where like formally accusing him is going to take So much so long. Yeah, I mean things so long the shell game here seems to be I mean listen allegedly i'm gonna put allegedly in front of everything we've said right now because Half of this stuff is things. He said he did. I mean, honestly### Assistant: I mean, an SPF. currently doesn't necessarily have to worry about being in or not at this moment in a non-extradition country because he has not formally been accused of anything.

### Human: Yep, that's right. And sometimes it's, it's, we actually just net it out. So you don't have to actually write a check, but your net result will be the same. Yep.### Assistant: Got it. So you don't actually in the part of a sale, give the $30,000 and then get the 200,000 back and do the math in your head. they just say here after you paid for your shares, this is what's remaining. You get this $170,000. And the other reasons might be, hey, the company is three months away from running out of cash. Oh, hey, the company, as you mentioned, does not have customers yet does not have revenue. It is a straight slope down. And in six months, we will not be here because we're burning whatever it is 100k a month, and we have 600 left. So they take all that into account with the fair market value of the company. If you don't get a fair market value done, what happens?

### Human: Got it. Yeah. I mean, there was that Midsommar. Is that an example of an arthouse?### Assistant: Ari Aster's definitely one of these elevated guys where people love those movies and they have huge fan bases, but Hereditary probably has a weirdly low audience score because it's like, well, this isn't a ghost movie.

### Human: I think legacy media needs to realize that because they've got a big brain drain problem. And they have people choosing to be YouTube creators and Instagram creators and be on Spotify. And they have every opportunity to make their own podcast and platforms still matter. Like, people call you back a lot faster when you're at the New York Times than when you're not. Yeah. But I just, I think it's like a big, you're starting to see a big power shift. And it's, I think it's great to see, you know, when Taylor does it, she went to the Washington Post, so it's going to be all the same issues, respectfully, as it was in some ways. But when Kara stands up and is like, no, right, like, I have given you my product for free. this whole time. No, not for free.### Assistant: Yeah, and I think this is kind of a hybrid. So there really is like three models here. You're Joe Rogan, or this week in startups or whatever, you're a solo person, you take all the risk, you pay the staff, you own it. And then there's I work for somebody full time, they own my IP, I get, you know, all these I take no risk. I the if they hire staff, I don't have to pay them and worry about their staff. I don't have to get a second mortgage on my house or whatever to pay for this endeavor. You're not knowing if it's going to work or not. But there is something in the middle. There's an increasingly the thing in the middle, you know, could take a couple of different forms here. I'm just taking a guess. I don't have inside information. But bank off did by weblogs Inc, which was like kind of the precursor to Vox, you know, um, the verge was based on a gadget, you know, uh, and their video game was based on joystick. And he's given me credit for that. So I don't need to belabor it, but, um, you know, they are clearly going to give Tara Swisher ownership in this new brand and they're going to put up the money to make it. So maybe it's a 50, 50 partnership. Maybe she owns the majority of it and they aren't, or maybe she said to them, I'll, I own it. you get to monetize it for 10 years, and I'm doing a licensing deal with you, which is the deal that Joe Rogan did with Spotify. Joe Rogan still owns all his IP. He just gave exclusive rights to it for a time period to Spotify. So there's different flavors of this. And people need to realize that right. And they do.

### Human: Right. Well, you know, I was preparing for my interview with Reid Hoffman, you know, the LinkedIn co founder who just stepped off the opening board. And so I was talking to chat GBT, and like asking him for question advice. I thought, on the one hand, it was a very useful tool to think through things. It knew generally, this is somebody who thinks about blitzscaling. He was at Microsoft. It's smart enough. You could ask the questions and not look like an idiot. On the other hand, I was talking to it. I was trying to tell ChetGBT, have you ever watched Joe Rogan? Or I could have said, have you seen All In? ask straight questions. You know what I mean? Yes. Sometimes you give a rant, and then you ask a question. Sometimes you ask short and sweet. Sometimes you're annoying. You ask a range of different types of questions, and at least I wasn't able to evoke from it the questions that I wanted. Now, I do think some of that is just like there's going to be all this human language engineering of the machines to get out the output you want. You know what I mean? Right. But, but yeah, I, I, I definitely, I think it's going to be very hard to predict which jobs actually get replaced because people want to say, you know, other people's jobs get replaced, not mine. You know, everybody sees, I don't know. It's hard to predict.### Assistant: Like, uh, this is hilarious while we're talking just to show you the power of like this technology in its most early state, I decided to, uh, type in the doing an interview with the prompt I gave was what question should I ask read Hoffman on a podcast ask questions in the voice of Joe Rogan. All right, folks, we got a legend. We got a legendary Silicon Valley entrepreneur investor in the house today. Correct. He's both read Hoffman. Explanation point read. Great to have you on the show. Pretty nice. Let's start with your journey. You had an incredible career as an entrepreneur investor. Can you walk us through your journey? How you got started and some of the biggest challenges you face along the way? I mean, that's a generic college.

### Human: It's no it's a no brainer. It's a it's a no brainer because you want to control your own destiny. You want to be in control and master of your domain. you can get from here to there with the capital you have, be default alive. And then you can always accelerate behind your own profitability. And as a CEO, and I remember this, apparently, once you have to spend a huge chunk of your time with concern about this existential risk around financing, and that's off your shoulder, you have much more degrees of freedom to think and worry about creating the most valuable business you can.### Assistant: I've been dealing with business insurance for three decades, I am on the board of a bunch of companies, I watch people who don't have insurance, get themselves into trouble all the time. Switching providers has always been a nightmare. It's too expensive takes too much time. And often, it doesn't even guarantee better coverage. But now you can make switching radically simple with Embroker. Yes, Embroker is the perfect destination for industry-tailored commercial insurance. It's business insurance specifically for startups. Embroker's single application helps startups get four quotes, one, two, three, four, for four lines of coverage in just 15 minutes. They connect you with one of their expert brokers for unmatched service that goes beyond your policy. And listen, Embroker is such an amazing product. I use it. A lot of my startups use it. It's so easy to use. So try Embroker today. with code twist and get 10% off their startup package at imbroker.com slash twist. That's E-M-B-R-O-K-E-R.com slash T-W-I-S-T and use the code twist to get that 10% off. It's meaningful. Every dollar counts right now. We love you, imbroker. Thank you so much for supporting this podcast for so many years. Let's talk about this sort of fallacy around acquiring customers and the cost to acquiring customers. What have you learned over this last cycle about the actual real cost of acquiring customers and, you know, the lifetime value of customers? Because it seems that maybe founders got, and even capital allocators, maybe got a little cute, or maybe disconnected from reality in terms of the cost of acquiring the customer.

### Human: And you have to rack them somewhere. So wait a second, why isn't this part of Azure? Why don't they just I wonder if they're buying them and putting them in Azure's cloud.### Assistant: And you know, you got to add on other things. That's just the immediate cost.

### Human: Hey, let's talk about COTA. Last year, I interviewed COTA CEO Shashir on episode 1160. Go back and look at that. And we spoke about the productivity renaissance going on in tech right now. And well, that's what COTA is all about. In COTA, your text and tables live together in the same documents. And all your valuable data plans, objectives, and strategies are all in one place. So this helps any team collaborate more efficiently, especially in this right first world that we're in, remote world. They've got thousands of templates for you to work with. Or you can take the playbook published by some of the best innovators out there and use them for yourself. It's right there, ready for you to read, duplicate, and start using. For example, if you want to map out your OKRs the same way Pinterest does, it's right there. You can read it, duplicate it, and start using it. So Coda works right out of the box, it's totally customizable, and you can create a wiki or a knowledge hub for your team, you can onboard new hires quickly, and you can adapt fast to any major or minor changes in your business. What Coda can do is exciting, but what's even more exciting is what startups can do with Coda. Here is an amazing program for startups they've created. They're going to give you $1,000 in credit. I kid you not $1,000 in credit. Right now if you go to coda.io slash twist coda.io slash twist, Emily Kirsch founder and CEO of powerhouse.### Assistant: Thanks for coming on.

### Human: Everyone always says Starbucks, but like, what's the real bad habit?### Assistant: Oh, absolutely. And you're totally right. I mean, it's all about trade offs. It's not like a top down thou shalt not ever go to Starbucks again sort of thing. It's more of a hey, listen, here's where this fits into the context of the rest of your life. Now you make your own educated decision. Does this align with your values or not? If you love your job and you live for Starbucks, then great. Do it three times as much. But if those aren't the case, then, you know, give it some thought.

### Human: It's like, it's a work or you die system. It's just amazing.### Assistant: If you're rich, you get the best. If you're poor, you get screwed. If you work for a company, they have the thumb over you where like, oh, if you leave, your kids don't have the health care, you got to get new doctors. It's just stupid.

### Human: When you think about nonfiction writing and telling the stories of businesses and entrepreneurs, what do you think the key is in terms of writing the prose and story architecture? Do you have any insights in that now that you've done it a couple times? Yeah.### Assistant: A company like Amazon poses a massive challenge. I mean, people want to understand, readers want to read these stories chronologically. That is the way the brain works. That is the best way to tell stories. There's a great, you know, there are many millennia of, you know, demonstrations of that. And the problem, the challenge with Amazon is that everything's happening at once. And, you know, you not only have different business initiatives, but the, you know, the central story, which is the transformation of Jeff Bezos, almost before our eyes, from the geek who extolled the technical specs of the fire phone, to the guy gallivanting around Hollywood, retiring from Amazon and building a super yacht. you know that the so it really was an organizational challenge how do i tell the story horizontally across the last ten years but also vertically. The alexa story the amazon go story the indian china story hollywood. And then HQ to antitrust and Bezos his own personal drama. And, you know, you see how I did it in the book, it's, I started 2010, with Bezos coming up with the idea of Alexa, I end in 2020. And some of the increased antitrust scrutiny and Amazon navigating the pandemic. And so the horizontal story is kind of teased throughout, but there are also chapters devoted to Alexa and go and Indian Hollywood. So you just have to do a little bit of both. the steven levy who you know once told me this thing that for a long time i had up on my wall um it was this advice he said find the straight line and that's the thread that is takes you from the beginning to the end of the story so however many digressions diversions or chapters subheadings you go into always always keep the straight line in mind you know the beginning to the end

### Human: She mixes it up on Twitter. She was she was mixing it up with me over politics.### Assistant: Yeah, I love Kim. She's great. He's an expert at all that stuff.

### Human: Sure, I'll do both. I was just going to say that it's, to me, you look at these charts of the distribution of technologies over time, like how long did it take for people, for everyone in the world to get the printing press, and that's a curve, nice slope. And then you look at that same thing for refrigeration, for microwaves, for televisions, for mobile phones. The slope of the curve is getting more and more extreme with every new technology. What's exciting to me about the internet is that itself is a force multiplier on distribution, meaning you can make things, you can learn things, and you can distribute to people in a way you were never possible before. You talk to some of these indie hackers, some pioneers, some launch companies, and they're like, yeah, life's kind of tough because I have some customers in the UK and I have some customers in Japan. That's not possible up until now. to me, that's a that's a huge, huge deal for human productivity.### Assistant: What is the deal that you're gonna say something? Go ahead. Go ahead. No, no, you go first. And then I was just gonna ask you to inform the audience of how you invest in the companies.

### Human: Can they do with batteries? So, so I think it's a little bit, um, cute to try and be like, but because like, it's a little bit sort of capitalizing on this, this conversation right now around electric vehicles. I suspect the two things that are playing into the, into here the most are, um, the end of the supply chain glut. So there's actually available inventory of new cars. And so new car prices are going down, or at least there are new cars available for people to buy. Therefore, used car prices go down. And at the same time, we're seeing a huge macroeconomic shift. We might be heading into a recession. Maybe we're already into a recession. People need jobs more than they did before. And so people are becoming much more price sensitive on all things, real estate. And so Think those two things are probably the things impacting price more now. You know where I stand from this on previous episodes We've done in terms of cars. I My method is always by a car very deep and it's a depreciation curve so if Kathy's right and like all cars are about to become devalued because of Some extrinsic force like people want electric vehicles Oh, no my car that I currently think of as a $50,000 car shoot It's gonna lose half its value my solution to that is always go buy a $6,000 car car that has lost 70% of its value. Well, what do you do? Do you buy in year four?### Assistant: Is that your idea? So wait for the lease to come up and you buy the year four or five?

### Human: We have over a million users within our community. Out of that, over 100,000 are active investors. But that campaign was driven primarily by the company, by the founder, Sahil. And he did a ton of preparation of activating his own community of customers and fans, so much that the preliminary interest, soft commitment, so to speak, for the Gumroad campaign was many times the $5 million cap. I don't remember if it was $10 million or $15 million, but significantly higher. So this is one case whereby we provided the infrastructure to enable a company to raised from its own customer in its own community, by and large, rather than Republic supplying the investor base. These are the two different models that I think you're going to see very clearly emerging and somewhat bifurcating as the industry continues to mature.### Assistant: Wow. So yeah, actually, I just got a note here. According to our preliminary research, we'll double check at 9,346 people participated in that one. So close to 10,000, which means for 5 million, they're putting $500 in on average, who drove that? Is it your you have 100,000 investors on your list 250,000? How many people are investors on your platform? And we have under expect in terms of the mixture between their investors and your investors? Is it 5050 7030?

### Human: But yeah, I'll try it. All right, listen, great to have you on the pod. I'll let you get back to work. I'm sure you got a file and hopefully we'll get to meet in person someday and when I'm in New York.### Assistant: Come to LA. I live in LA.

### Human: This Week in Startups is brought to you by Open Phone. As a startup founder, a lot of mistakes are easy to roll back. But using your personal cell phone number as your company number isn't one of them. Open Phone makes it easy to get business phone numbers for you and your team. right on top of your existing devices. Visit openphone.com slash twist to get 20% off your first six month. Lemon.io. Need to speed up your product development without draining your budget? Hire vetted engineers from Europe at lemon.io. Go to lemon.io slash twist to get 15% off for the first four weeks. And, Helpware helps you outsource the tasks that slow your team down. From data entry to world-class customer support, Helpware can help make you bionic. Go to helpware.com slash twist to get $1,000 off your first invoice. That's H-E-L-P-W-A-R-E dot com slash twist.### Assistant: All right, everybody. It's Sunday. It means VC Sunday School. And I did a little prompt. I just thought we'd hear from the audience. We've done over six months of these where you had questions, I answered them. Maybe the audience wants to get in on the action. Yeah. And so we got one. So tell us what the audience and for those of you tuning in for the first time every Sunday, Molly and I will talk about her journey as a venture capitalist. She's now in her seventh month and she's made a bunch of investments. She's joined the board of a company if you want to see her deal memos. syndicate.com slash climate, you can join the party and invest as little as 12345 K. If you're an accredited investor, do your homework, a lot of disclaimers there, but it's only for accredited investors right now very apologetic about that. But eventually we hope the SEC will allow civilians who are not accredited to come in and join the party and plays very small bets in companies that are very risky, but that could have great outcomes for society and perhaps even a great return on investment. So congratulations on your seventh month here. And what was the best reply we got?

### Human: This is like my favorite account. And I will rain hell if it is ever. Just so odd brand that Artie Bucco would start a hedge fund. It's amazing. Tweeted a bit of a counterpoint to this. Not a complete counterpoint, but just an interesting like if you're a Facebook employee, I think that the first point in this tweet was the one that I think is interesting because it's it's like you see Facebook meta. trying to execute this big turnaround. And if you are an employee at Facebook, right, the blue, the original product, and you're frustrated with all the metaverse stuff, this is probably not going to help, there's going to be a real morale issue. And then he also makes a point in his third bullet point that it's going to be rough out there once big tech normalizes big layoffs, which is kind of going on and on and on. It is a great time to be hiring. So to all of our founders out there, if you are trying to hire benefit, you're going to benefit. But he also makes the point that tech companies are getting their finances buttoned up for 23 guidance. And that actually to what we just talked about, there have been people sort of celebrating these layoffs as though you know, and I think it's really good that we're getting that out of the way that that that although companies gave them entitlements, that doesn't mean they were entitled. There's still people losing jobs and that even though like, I have been known to out and out cheer for Zack to fail. I don't want that to come at the expense of the people who work there because they don't deserve that.### Assistant: Spoiler alert, he didn't die in The Sopranos. If anybody thinks Artie Bucco got whacked, he's alive and well. He does not participate in social media for obvious reasons. He's busy cooking. If you're on the line, you're making Man of God. You're making the Vongole. You can't be tweeting. Come on.

### Human: I co-founded it. So me and another Australian, I was the CEO and co-founder. And so I came into that thinking that now that I had sort of a deeper understanding of search engines and And how to build something like that, I sort of looked at the app space, HTML5 apps, as well as the App Store apps. And, you know, it was really clear to me that was a big technology problem on how we were going to make it so you could do like thematical searches and more generic searches, given sort of the technology problems at that time. And so that was something I was really interested in and started a company about that.### Assistant: And so then you go work on Chomp. They ask you to be CEO, the founders of that company, or they bring you in, or you co-founded it?

### Human: All right, welcome to the program. Just starting right out, what is the difference between a game that is based on crypto blockchain, NFTs, etc, versus a normal game?### Assistant: That's correct.

### Human: That's what we did with Karen, which was so interesting because she started her career out on YouTube. and had hundreds of videos out there. And once she switched to Snapchat and then found out about us, she she deletes all the YouTube videos, gives us all that content, and then we're able to use what we built internally, which is an auto fine tuning tool internally that we have to take these hundreds of YouTube videos and auto fine tune our AI based on those videos and the content in them. the questions and answers in them, and her experiences of them.### Assistant: The movie her with Joaquin Phoenix kind of showed the dark side of like, some number of people are going to get addicted to this, like any, you know, product or service in the world, people can get addicted, doesn't matter if it's pizza or fentanyl or wine or cannabis, people are going to get addicted to video games or social media. So, and in her, you had somebody who got addicted to having a virtual girlfriend. Has that started to happen? Have you had people who, you know, at $1 a minute, you know, maybe got to our three or four this week, and, you know, now they're shipping three or 400 bucks to this virtual avatar and 15,000 a year, and they're well in the system. And maybe this doesn't feel healthy. And you feel like you don't want to take $15,000 off some lonely person. Yeah.

### Human: The funds come from Stripe, Google, Shopify, Meta, and McKinsey. And the way that we have... There's so many big dollar number commitments flying around these days. Every single company has committed to a demand schedule that every single year, here's the sort of maximum amount that you can spend. Because unlike philanthropies and governments that might be able to pull those funds immediately, companies have other fiduciary stakeholders, they can't have like $100 million expense randomly in one year. So we have a demand schedule that we've created with every company. And some of this will shift a little bit, but it's a rough demand schedule, which means that every single company has talked to their CFO about this. They really know what they've signed up for here. And our hope is that in the future, more companies are going to sign up, like we'd love to get this to $10 billion, let's add a zero to it. But that's, you know, it's companies in the future, maybe it's governments, potentially individuals. So there's a lot of different potential future contributors. For now, it's private companies.### Assistant: So whose money is it? Whose money is in this $925 million fund?

### Human: That's, I mean, there's an obvious reason, there's some disruptions here. And we have geopolitical issues that are, you know, beyond the scope of this interview, but what happened in Hong Kong, and what what could happen in Taiwan certainly have people thinking Hey, you know, and what happened with jack Ma or some other companies just thinking, hey, what's the redundancy here? What's the number one place to manufacture products like the ones you're featuring outside of China, or maybe the number one, two and three places outside of China?### Assistant: It's interesting. On the luxury side, a lot of what has happened over the past 30 years specifically is obviously consolidation on the brand name. So you have companies like LVMH, Kering, Richemont, so on and so forth, consolidating those premium labels. But on the flip side, you also have consolidation around the supply chain. So Shiman or LVMH can actually go and buy out the factories that they historically have had to share with other clients for prioritization, for cost optimization, so on and so forth. But it's still, relatively speaking, a very small percentage of their overall supply chain. Factories are incredibly expensive to operate, and also very low margin business that truly rely on volume to make money. So I'm not surprised that Amazon did not buy anything on the factory side. It's a really expensive kind of operation, and you have to really know what you're doing to operate. They've also been, speaking to Amazon specifically, and their work in China, they've started to shut down a lot of They're best merchants, actually, on the Amazon marketplace. They did a recent audit where they pulled literally hundreds if not thousands of some of their top stores that were cross-border, China-based sellers. So I think there's... I can't speak to why specifically or the strategy around it. Maybe it's just for the sake of you know, being compliant with everything, you know, stateside and data protection, and so on and so forth. But, but it does seem like I think, right now, there's a, you know, an increased, I guess, lens by which people are kind of looking at their supply chain and where products come from.

### Human: So we've built some of the building blocks from 2018, and we have an engine to understand the concept of layouts within user interfaces. We have a model that can understand styling. And then all of these kind of work together to basically generate the entire thing. And then we use a large language model to just understand the text and generate text. So now we have our all-in website, all in summit, the future of tech by tickets. I don't know if this is not going to be accurate location, San Francisco, I guess this is Miami.### Assistant: But here we go. It gave you some text like chat GPT might are using chat GPT for the natural language model or a different one.

### Human: Yep, exactly.### Assistant: All right, listen, continued success. Everybody go try Magic Spoon. It's pretty great, I will tell you. Oh, sorry, bleep that out. Pretty freaking great. And my kids love it. And good for kids too, right? Yeah, yeah. Good for kids to not have all this big sugar issue.

### Human: So the question is, why are the betting markets so pro Trump then? What do they know that we don't know?### Assistant: But again, this this that lacks a very basic understanding of how county reporting is happening in these highly populous, you know, or these sort of sort of these these bimodally distributed states where they have a bunch of suburban and rural vote that's fast to count. And the big places, for example, like, you know, you're not going to see Milwaukee and Green Bay report until probably close to midnight.

### Human: Yeah. Did you get to listen to it, Ben? Any thoughts on it?### Assistant: I haven't, but I was definitely following Taylor's thread around like, Hey everyone, like I'm an employee was with bosses. Like I'm, I am not the CEO of this company. And the, the thing that has struck me as the most ironic about this whole, um, You know, the whole kerfuffle that she's been in with many people in the tech ecosystem is that like tech and entrepreneurial folks should understand that better than everyone. Like, of course, she's very public because she's a journalist. She's opinionated. She has very interesting content, but like she works at a company. So if you're mad at the company, it is so strange to go take it out on an employee. Anyway, that that's kind of my take on that angle.

### Human: You just look in front of you and look at your spending.### Assistant: You're in a recession. This is the problem. And then people are like, Oh my god, Biden said we had 0% inflation. And we had 8.5%. Okay, we're talking about two different numbers month over month, year over year, both are valid numbers. Just say both numbers. We don't have to sit here and argue over semantics constantly. face reality.

### Human: Yeah, well, that's a great model. And there are a lot of accelerators based on that model and all for it. We decided to do something different. And we think it's a competitive advantage because we get public private partnerships that other we get people to work together that never would work together. I was on the phone with 32 other accelerators last week, because we wanted to figure out how to make our business sustainable. So we're there for entrepreneurs, because we are part of the solution for the economic problem. At the beginning for economic recovery at the beginning of this, this podcast, you talked about the big guys. Well, I also want to talk about all of the people who create jobs. So we have accelerated over 2000 startups over these 10 years, and they have created over 157,000 jobs around the world. So those aren't small jobs. So that is high paying job part of it.### Assistant: How do you become sustainable then? Let's put the spotlight on you as a nonprofit. How do you become sustainable? Because you're giving away this million dollars in prize money, which seems to me crazy. Why not make it an investment from your nonprofit? and make it evergreen and use the profits if there are any in 10 years to just make the program bigger. I don't understand.

### Human: There's a lot of things that go into that. I would say early research has been showing that basically lowered heart rate variability, you're right, is a very good indicator of a heart attack or cardiac event. Now specifically there's lots of different cardiac events and turns out Like you were sort of getting, why can we see heart rate variability now? That's a really good question. It's really the granularity of these sensors and I can talk about sort of why it's a ring and why, you know, how we focused on that because there's a lot of key details in there that are pretty technical but would love to dive into. You know, I think you can train these data sets on anything. So if you can actually get that raw pulse waveform, you can start comparing that raw pulse waveform to an EKG and then start looking at EKGs of, hey, what do people have AFib look like? Well, what do people who look like, you know, some congestive heart failure look like before that event? And you can start to train, and we even showed this with COVID, what do people who've gotten sick look like? What does that pulse waveform data and your temperature data and all the things we derive from it, respiratory rate, heart rate, heart rate variability, look like for this subset of people? And you can train these data sets. You can train these models against reference data.### Assistant: There is a whole philosophy of working out which is for guys who get older, or anybody who gets older, I suppose, but I was listening to it on the, this is it. Maybe we saw Tim Favreau or something that they try to get older men to try new exercises, crawling on the ground, moving balance beams, just anything different. so that your mind and your body gets just better at adapting. And when you don't, you get this negative cycle of totally being at your desk all the time. But at some point, the the sensors were able to pick up heart rate variability. And is that how we know when heart attacks occur now or something is happening? Is it the heart rate variability? The one that? Yeah, there's some sort of indication something's wrong.

### Human: It's roughly that. Yeah.### Assistant: Wow. And WoW, World of Warcraft is 15 bucks a month?

### Human: All right, Justin, go ahead.### Assistant: Can you guys introduce yourselves a little bit? I want to hear like a fun fact.

### Human: Correct, yes. So yeah, that was what we did in 2022, so this year. So it was a very good year for raising money. So this business that we're in- You got in just under the wire and then- Yes, but it is a very capital intensive business. So it's not like we're a software company that needs development time and then once you've got it developed, you can replicate it. It's called a hard tech or deep tech type business where it takes a lot of capital. But on the flip side, what we're really doing is we're building infrastructure that's needed for the long term. And so this is a very sustainable business. It's a long term business. And so those are the type investors that we look for. It's Whenever I get on a phone call with an investor that is used to developing and investing in software companies, it's usually not a good fit. We have to find the right investors and there's plenty of those out there that are interested in clean tech or the deep tech. They really understand it and get it and they're in it for the long haul and helping us build this infrastructure. Now, the fact that we're getting the support from the US government in these Department of Energy grants is very, very helpful. But they're also making a long term investment in building this infrastructure we need in the US.### Assistant: And by very large, we should say there's a very, there's a correspondingly large amount of money that has to go into an endeavor like this. So you raised, it looked like a little under 500 million in grants and then a $300 million Series C, right? Led by Fifth Wall?

### Human: Oh, my lord. These guys have no idea what post CEO of Twitter Jack is going to be like.### Assistant: Yes. So then Chris Dixon jumps in with a subtweet. First, they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. We are here. Then you win. And then Jack is like, Oh, hell no. You're a fun determined to be a media empire that can't be ignored. Not Gandhi.

### Human: You know? Yeah. I'm gonna go over. Okay. People are excited to get back to the movies.### Assistant: I think so. I think it's like, especially for spectacles. Okay, how many months left of recession starting on January 1, over under 21 months? Okay, does not end before after Q4 of 2024. I'm taking the under, I think we'll be in the recession for three or four quarters in 2023. And then we'll be out of it by Q1. So I'm going to say under 21 months.

### Human: You never know, like, that's the amazing thing about it, right? You never know, like, if you could take the cost of something down by 100,000, or a million times, like, what would you do with it? Like, you know, but nobody, nobody ever has any knowledge. One of the funnest things is making interesting bets that have market size risks. right? Because if you do something special that no one's ever done before, a lot of times it's really hard to figure out how you're going to use it.### Assistant: Yeah, what is the market for a supercomputer in your pocket? You got exactly as it turns out now big. Yeah, it turns out you can do a lot of things with it that you got. There's a great William Gibson quote where he said the street finds its own use for technology. If you're a small business owner or you manage hiring at your company, you know that success in 2023 is totally dependent on the team members you surround yourself with. Of course, that's why you have to check out LinkedIn jobs. It's really simple. LinkedIn jobs helps you find more qualified candidates more efficiently, right? That's what you're looking to do. You want to get better candidates and you want to get more of them. And you know what? You also want to get them faster, right? You want to fill these open positions with the right person and you want to have choices. Well, they do this so simply over on LinkedIn because they have everybody with a profile. 875 million people are on LinkedIn. I mean, the march to a billion continues. And they do this by matching your open roles with people who have the skills, values, and experience to help you achieve your goals. So I can only speak from personal experience here, right? I can read the ad, but the truth is I found some of the most amazing team members at LinkedIn jobs. It works better than any other hiring platform because they have the tools, right? and they have the network. It's all sitting there waiting for you. Some of my top contributors from Launch It Inside were found on LinkedIn. The targeting, the screening, the rating tools, it's all built in. It's simple, easy breezy, lemon squeezy. All of this is why small businesses rate LinkedIn jobs number one in delivering quality hires versus the leading competitors. So post your job for free at linkedin.com slash angel. That's linkedin.com slash angel to post your job for free. Terms and conditions do apply.

### Human: No, not really. We haven't we haven't come quite that far yet.### Assistant: Well, I mean, it also is if black women weren't supported to start funds, then all of them are going to be on their first fund or maybe second. the first funds, the second funds, as we talked about are the smallest. So it's sometimes you see the change, but it's not reflected in the dollar amount. But you could see the quantity early, I see this with a lot of the discussion around fundraisers. Oh, you know, dollars allocated to this group are very small. And I say we have how many deals because when you look at the Y combinator stats, the deals in those early stage companies, we're starting to see a lot more diversity across all vectors, gender, race, But the dollar amounts Yes, you could that's an overhang six, seven year old companies are raising a billion dollars. And that's the entire totality of accelerator investing this year, you know, so one deal can skew those numbers dramatically. What about with LPS? Are LP we do see LPS have, you know, a mission, a mandate, in a lot of cases to get more diverse, they've been holding a lot of the traditional funds to account like, hey, we're visiting your team page, no women, no people of color, like, really? kind of making it hard for us to give you the next billion dollars or $100 million. So and then also climate and all these other issues. I think a lot of the funds and endowments are starting to think, hey, we're responsible for allocating capital, we need to put pressure on folks to do the right thing here. And to make some change in the world. Did you feel more supported by LPS? Now, you know, you know, being a black woman, or maybe that's a misnomer?

### Human: No, no, it's a wonderful investment. And one of my favorite, if I can tell you a story about better app is that and it kind of gets to in this wave, which I thought we were in a bubble when I first started at freestyle to then realize, no, we're not even close. Right. It's like, I was a little bit like the sky chicken little with the sky is falling when I first started, but we can go back to that. But I don't chase heat. I don't like heat. I don't like that we're taking in term sheets next week. Are you in? Are you out? That kind of thing. And BetterUp is one where every VC, literally, every VC had passed. To your point, what models do they like? VCs in general don't like when human beings are involved. And here with the coach, there's a human being. Now, Alexei and Eddie knew how they were going to scale the business and how they were going to scale the product. And they would get closer to software type margins, but it would never be the 90% margins, right? And VCs didn't like it. And they didn't see what was coming in terms of the macro trends. And so when we seeded it, there wasn't, I didn't, someone asked me, how'd you win that deal? It was like, I was the only man standing. Wonderful, wonderful.### Assistant: Interestingly, it says something about non consensus bets. Maybe you could explain non consensus to people who are listening and why that is such a powerful determinant of success as an investor.

### Human: It was great. It was john boyega who's in pacific, right?### Assistant: I'll just say the shape of water to me is like the shape of water to me. Wow, you know, just poetic a nightmare.

### Human: Amazing. And then tell me your seed stage. That's the name of our little mini series here. How much money have you raised so far, house fundraising, Ben?### Assistant: So we closed our first, we call it our pre-seed round 700k euro two months ago. So very happy about that. We did learn a lot from our investors because while talking to investors, you need to say, what's your focus and what's your differentiation towards the competition. Obviously, we are acting in this emerging field of carbon accounting, and there is lots of players. Also, those get series A, series B kind of funding. So, hey, Climate Camp, what do you do different? What's your differentiator? Yeah. We initially started as a kind of yet another carbon accounting tool, but we really quickly pivoted towards the scope tree, which everybody believes is a too difficult problem to address. So lots of people are running away because of the complexity behind, but that's reconfirmed as well for us the way to let's double down on this. So thanks to the feedback from the investors. Yeah.

### Human: They did it in Wally.### Assistant: Yeah, it was. Yeah, that was Steve Jobs trolling. Anyway, this is going to be very interesting on an M&A front. Can't wait. Keep it up. Go Lena Khan. There's got to be 20 more Facebook cases. All right, here's Lena Khan's quotes just so we have them here. Even if it's not a slam dunk case, even if there is a risk you might lose, there can be enormous benefits from taking that risk. I think what we can see is that inter inaction after inaction after inaction can have severe cost and that's what we're really trying to reverse so this is the whole concept of. You don't mean to you know looking to the future and saying is. competition going to be harmed in the future, not does this harm competition today? It's a really hard thing.

### Human: I mean, you start with the hook and then work backwards to the song now. supposed to, you know, you have a song, you may have a couple of chords, I've heard a bunch of interviews with songwriters, you know, they sometimes start with a hook, sometimes they have a verse, sometimes they have a chord structure. But now they're and there is a seminal study on this, we'll put it in the notes, just studying all of these hooks over time. And then there were you don't necessarily have to have this harmonic surprise. There were also things that just sounded different as an entire genre. And So it turns out Nirvana was one of those things. And Nirvana was very influenced. Kurt Cobain, rest in peace, was influenced by either the Pixies or the band that sings Zombie. What was that band that sings? Cranberries. The Cranberries. It was either, it was that sort of... They both kind of have, yeah, some version of that. They both had that like kind of grungy sound that really influenced Kurt Cobain, reportedly. And so there you have it, folks. I think that's... It's also, by the way, I did see Top Gun Maverick.### Assistant: And people are customizing music now to have those drops, like those moments, whatever it is.

### Human: This is not going to be in the YouTube recommendation algorithm anymore, where it's not going to sort of bubble up to people who are watching other. That's amazing.### Assistant: I think the clips will be there. Clips. Clips are the value of YouTube. Just clips.

### Human: It's like called the car thing. Did they call it car thing? Yeah. I thought you were being funny like that Simpsons where he's trying to remember the name of the movie Speed. It's like the bus has to go below a certain speed, goes below that speed. What is that movie called? Yes, I was anyway, it's called car thing. Yes, the note is brilliant.### Assistant: I mean, come on. Come on. I mean, this is so obvious. I mean, it's just so obvious what they should do. And you know, there's something Spotify can't do. Spotify cannot spin up a hardware division. They did make that little Spotify thing or something that was to connect old cars, you know, like an FM to a Bluetooth dongle for cars. Remember that Spotify thing? What was it called? Oh, yeah. I think that's what it's called. It's like a little hardware device.

### Human: What do we lose by being remote? What do you think will be the counter? Because there's always a counter swing, right? We talked about getting your Amazon one day a week and Amazon Day versus Amazon Prime in same day or second day. What will be the counterbalance to work from home?### Assistant: So, first of all, even me as a fairly much, you know, I occasionally call myself a Zoom Zionist, in that I believe that this is our natural homeland to work remotely in this way, okay, and that it is our future and our, you know, our entitlement in a sense. The interesting thing there is that even people like me didn't propose that this was a five-day-a-week thing, I think. And it obviously is different meeting people remotely versus who you've never met before versus meeting people remotely who you know. It's not that different. I was talking to Laurie Santos at Yale, who's originally a primatologist, and she was saying it's a surprisingly good, the research seems to indicate it's a surprisingly good approximation of human contact. Because as I said, when I go to a conference and people wanted me to fly, at one stage someone wanted me to fly to Singapore to talk for 20 minutes and then fly home. Yeah. What do you want to smell me? I mean, what the hell's going on here? Right. Okay. That's a terrible use of time and fuel and everything else. And I I think office spaces need to change, but in an unexpected way, and I've been writing about this a bit. They need to become what Nassim would call a barbell, which is two extremes, either highly sociable, coffee shops, meeting rooms, places for accidental or predetermined human co-location and sociability. And then a chunk of it needs to be like a library for people who don't like working from home, but do need to escape. Because I think the modern open plan office is a classic example. In my book, one of my bits of advice is don't solve for the average. Right. And the open plan office is neither sociable, nor it's neither sociability, nor is it solitude. And it creates a halfway house, which is actually the worst of both. And experiments bear this out, which is that when you put people into an open plan office, bizarrely, the volume of face to face conversation goes down. And the volume of electronic communication goes up by something like 60%. By the way, Nobody, as far as I can ever see, has ever done a test on whether email, in fact, improves productivity. Have they? No. We took this technology. We thought it's free and it's instantaneous, so it has to be good. And of course, for the sender, that is good. But for the recipient, it means that your inbox is essentially open to the whole world 24 hours a day. Is that good? It also means that what's important and what's urgent. Have you ever read the Paul Graham thing, maker schedule versus manager schedule? Yes. He's a Brit, I'm proud to say. He's actually a Brit, isn't he? I'm proud to say.

### Human: Absolutely yes he's awesome and for fans of the show one of the segments we're gonna make is molly is gonna learn how to be an investor that's why she's here. You know half time on media half time on investing which is basically what i do or pretty close to it. So we'll do segments maybe you know on the show on some regular cadence i'll let molly produce it. And we'll just talk about what molly's learning about investing and then we'll have little debates about best practices or how to do interviews for those of you who are interested in venture as a career. I was gonna produce some segments on that.### Assistant: No, I was just going to say that. So nice. Maybe sometime we'll have a mind talk about macroeconomics.

### Human: Well, we feel that we might bring a securities fraud action against you. And so I think that's really an important thing to underscore, because a lot of people start out, they're enthusiastic about their companies. And that's great. Be enthusiastic about your companies, but tell people the truth. Be honest with people about what the limitations are, how you're going to use the money, and then follow through on what you said. Otherwise, you really are in a position where you're violating the securities laws. You cannot lie to people in the process of raising money. That's a violation of the securities laws. And we do take it seriously. the reason that Jason brought up at the very beginning of this podcast, which is that we can't have well-functioning capital markets if there aren't rules of the road that people adhere to. And when they don't adhere to them, that there's an enforcement mechanism to come after them for not adhering to them. So on both sides, people who are trying to raise money need to be honest about what they're doing. people who are trying to invest money need to ask lots of questions. Never just assume that because it's someone you know, or a name that you respect, that you should put money in without asking. You just always want to ask questions. And that's a good theme for life anyway, just ask lots of questions.### Assistant: Incentives certainly matter. My friend Chamath has been, he kind of brought this SPAC thing back. Chamath is putting, when you want to talk about skin in the game in the Nassim Taleb kind of way, I mean, Chamath is putting tens of millions of dollars of his own money into each one of these. Therefore, you know, he doesn't want to lose that. There's a massive amount of skin in the game. I'll end with this. Young people who start companies and they're raising capital privately, They are sometimes dopey kids. They're inexperienced. And they do something which I'll call presenting the best picture of their company. And when you present the best picture of your company, and it might be taking the truth and just bending it And then at the same time you sell securities, the SEC has a view on this. When you bend the truth and sell a security, how does the SEC feel about that?

### Human: That's amazing. This is this could be dangerous.### Assistant: This guy likes very high end tequila, so. It's amazing. Oh, boy.

### Human: Yeah, I love this phrase toxic positivity, because there was the Bitcoin toxicity with some backers actually explicitly encouraged, which was pile on mob on to anybody who is opposed to this. And at the end of the day, it's like, I don't know why this has to be discovered a new over and over and over, but truth creates trust. Yep.### Assistant: Pretty good t-shirt. Also trust is not something you can spin up like you can a discord server, right?

### Human: But you are an LLC then, or you're a corporation in Delaware?### Assistant: Yeah. So there's lots to unpack around how that happened and how that works.

### Human: Yeah. So I think it's really interesting. I think there are... What I will say is there are specific applications that I think are really interesting. I think the application that Mark Cuban talks about of the resale market and teams being able to capitalize on secondary sales is by scalpers makes a lot of sense in my mind. The ability for musicians to allow fans to participate in the upside of their albums and cut out their labels makes a lot of sense in my mind. I would say there's a lot more shit right now that doesn't make sense in my mind than the applications that do.### Assistant: Which is exactly what happened in the internet, people just said internet plus, and they would just pick two random keywords, internet plus restaurants, and you'd be like, okay, internet plus restaurant. What do you mean? They're like, I don't know menus online, or reservations online, or?

### Human: You shipped it. I am on the wrong J-Cal podcast, apparently.### Assistant: No, that is an all in right there. OK, well, then that leaves it to you and I to do the hard work, David. Who is your first that comes up?

### Human: Yeah, you put the ING. It's okay. I think you can use it with the ING. Thank you. I mean, it's still kind of a swear, but I don't know if it's going to get kind of you're talking like it's gender neutral. It's complaining.### Assistant: I'm not worried about that. I'm not worried about the gender thing. I'm worried about getting I am.

### Human: So they pay $1,000 a month, 50 bucks a day, but they get 100% of the revenue that comes in then. Exactly. Yeah. So if you had six chairs in your barbershop and you had them fully rented, barbershop's making 6,000 on the chairs, they're paying $2,000 or $3,000 to keep the store up and running, they make the other 3,000 clear.### Assistant: 200, 300, 200 to 300 a week, usually. Okay.

### Human: mean, they just never that I don't think they understand the product market fit here. What they should be doing is they should have somebody who's like a real expert at productivity, you know, and workforce stuff, and then somebody who's a real expert at art, and then somebody who's a real expert is what I would do if I was Zack, I'd have somebody who's an artist and really good at art, somebody who's really good at education, somebody who's really good at work. And I'd say, Listen, I, you know, as a technologist, I'm obsessed with the screen. And I'll tell you all about, you know, how we are investing in the hardware and the platform. But let's be honest, the apps are what are going to define this. And I would like to introduce you to the greatest artist. And she's going to show you the art she's using. And by the way, MIT has some of these great courses and Stanford as well. going to be doing their biology courses, and they're going to be doing their engineering courses. Now inside of this, let's let the teacher speak for themselves and the artists speak for themselves. And in terms of productivity, you know, communications is everything, you know, here's zoom, and they bring zoom on and say, here's you.### Assistant: I do. I 100% do. He has fallen into the, I mean, it is not the case that everything that is being built in the metaverse and for the Oculus Quest is actually just a universe where Mark Zuckerberg gets to be the god king, but it's way too easy to come away with that impression because he has made himself, I'm not even gonna say, there's no they here. He has made himself the face of this thing. He is sitting here saying, I'm the Steve Jobs of this whole universe. And presumably some version of him thinks that people like him enough to want to buy what he's selling. The best thing, like Facebook has a narrative problem. The best thing they could do is get him the hell away from this. Totally. Put somebody else in charge. Instead of trying to make him the Steve Jobs of it, because he's not.

### Human: I just want my old Teebo back.### Assistant: Whatever it is. And then they put it in yellow. And it's like, you're stuck in this yellow zone of like, you know, two minutes of ads.

### Human: She was delegated show anymore yeah so she delegated like it doesn't seem like she was.### Assistant: It's funny because I totally didn't even realize she was still on whenever somebody did that thread on bad workplace management or whatever. I think she's so rich and successful. She doesn't have to deal with any of this anymore if she wants to not do it. I don't really know what happened. I do think people were making it clear that her behavior was unacceptable, but I think she

### Human: Oh, yes, absolutely. I have to always remind myself, no acronym talking. It's the old banker in me.### Assistant: So you're trying to save time.

### Human: You can probably take this chart away now.### Assistant: We squeeze lemons. We have food at home. I'm literally turning into internet dad. I'm Rachel's internet dad. I'm just like Rachel. I talked to Rachel's dad this week, and we're gonna, we're, we're gonna go over Rachel's expenses. No more Wawa. At Christmas. It's enough, Rachel. What are you saving, Rachel? I want to know what's in the Wealthfront account. Enough with the Wawa. I feel like we're gonna find out any second now. And Brooklyn water, Manhattan water is delicious. It's the best water in the world. You don't need to buy it in a bottle. We're gonna find out any minute now.

### Human: Right. I want to ask you about that in a minute, since, of course, that's what you specifically do. But before that, like, what do you say to the idea that that that markets would have gotten this done anyway, markets would have led us in this direction, no matter what, because it is the natural way of economics to seek maximum efficiency. And that, you know, when government comes in with these incentives, you get like, perverse outcomes sometimes, or that you can have the rug pulled out, like happened in the first clean tech investing boom.### Assistant: So, I think I would take a little bit of issue with the premise of the question that the rug was pulled out of us in the first cleantech. There are certainly things that didn't work, for sure. So, I'm not saying that that didn't happen. But I'd also say that the economy is not a perfectly self-contained economy. managed machine, right? Like we have, you know, our flashback to the 1980s, we have a Top Gun movie, there's a war with the Russians, and we have inflation, right? And then questions about, you know, economic stability going forward, right? So, it's not a, you know, self-oiled machine in that sense. And the activity that led to the last stimulus was You know, the global collapse of the economy almost. And we're in a situation where, again, you have inflation issues, you have, you know, choppiness in all kinds of parts of the economy. And there's a time for the government to intervene. The other side of it is the government does stuff all the time, like we got to buy trucks for the postal system. So, are we going to buy ones that are going to drag the economy in a particular direction or accelerate it in a different direction? Are we going to support other parts of our foreign policy or economic engagement with the rest of the world in a way that actually supports our ability to build relationships and lead on climate and build technology in the United States, or are we going to sit back on our hands and sort of watch the rest of the world go forward and get to it? So, I think the idea that this is all going to happen at the right efficient pace and there's no other distortions in the economy, whether it's subsidies, for the fossil fuel industry or ways that we're actually buying and selling things in the government itself as an actor, I think is not entirely correct. So I would say that the difference is, you know, the rest of the world wasn't standing still either. You know, $50 billion was raised to deploy capital in these areas. This creates a different part of the conversation. that can continue now. And even though the federal government was sort of offside during the Trump administration, in the climate context, broadly speaking, you know, New York State and other states and municipalities were deploying utility scale solar and wind, and we're really moving forward with innovation and driving a lot of activity forward. Some of that, you know, catalyzed or facilitated at really critical points in time by the last two most recent people, but parts of the world are moving. What I think this does is creates momentum and stability around how that trajectory is going to go, as opposed to a lot more uncertainty about whether it's going to be two steps forward, one step back, or two steps back. I think this says, okay, we're really going to move in this direction in a reasonably sizable way and do it in a way that's multifaceted, that's more thoughtful.

### Human: Alright, joining me for Angel season six, episode six is Elise Helene, who is the general partner at Stillmark, one of the only Bitcoin focused venture firms, at least has been around the VC industry for a while, and then became as befits our theme here on season six of Angel, a first time fund manager. Welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. So let me start with the pretty obvious question, which is what made you want to raise your own fund?### Assistant: It does look like Terminator two one, where it does those like crazy shoulder movements. But anyway, that's, that's kind of the concept here. So okay, let's go to our interview with Elise from Stillmark.

### Human: Yeah, so we have a basic subscription, which allows you to customize our search results. So there's some really cool stuff you can do with that. And then we charge 20 months for the personal shopper, we're testing out some manual plans, we'd also tested tested out a usage based model as well to see if how people are going to interpret that I we're definitely leaning towards subscription than we are usage based.### Assistant: So how do you plan on getting this product out there? How do you plan on acquiring new customers aside from doing PR hits like this?

### Human: I mean, it's a long term vision that has such power in terms of directing the way that money gets allocated, right? Like how, at what point do banks come out of the equation in this vision?### Assistant: Good question. I mean, I think this is something that we always struggle a little bit with, like, do the incumbents still participate? Or do they become entirely obsolete? Right. And if you look at the history of finance, right, I mean, banks tend to not become obsolete that quickly, like we've digitized finance, we've, you know, we've even come with digital banks, we've come with other solutions. It's just a different form of a similar type of regulated, centralized organization, right? That is still what the banks are. Do we think that they are going to be eradicated because of something like this immediately? Probably not, because there's so many users who wouldn't yet be able to interface with an alternative. And say that the alternative is a DAO, right, where you have a network of nodes, right, that effectively become an investment platform through which investors can screen, you know, through a staking pool, what opportunities may be interesting to them, and companies would just upload their data onto the DAO through the proof of impact, Impact Oracle, for their impact information, through a credit or finance Oracle for their financial information. So if that mechanism, which we're already launching, by the way, so the extent of a DAO actually going and offering the proof of impact verified companies, NFTs, that will go live in Q3 of this year, right, in Switzerland to begin. And that's obviously not proof of impact because it's a DAO, right? But that will effectively be the launch of connecting that. If that takes pace right and it becomes a new way of I mean my kids are between 11 and 23 right for them to take their revenue money that isn't doing anything in terms of yield or earning if that becomes the way that they then stake right whatever they have there to then stake with both a yield because we're talking about value right we're not just talking about buying a board a right we're talking about something that has legitimate underlying cash flow assets If that then becomes the way where they then restake their digital assets to have both profit and purpose, I think the investment banking model is going to struggle to stay alive.

### Human: Now, what's interesting, if you were to layer in here on top of this chart, like Merck over the same timeframe, or Pfizer, and what you're going to see is what grows faster is not necessarily the pharmaceutical manufacturers. So, as I said, in the history of pharmacy benefits, and not to bore people with this, it's important to remember what's happening is the PBM went from kind of not that significant member of a supply chain to the all-encompassing and all-powerful controller of the pharmaceutical supply chain. So you start with retail, you add into your power through mail order, you expand through what is called specialty drugs. These are the highest cost medication. And then you look at pharma and you go, well, pharmaceutical manufacturers, brand manufacturers have all the money. I would like their money. And so, if you think about the optimization of the traditional PBM model, what's next on the menu is, how do I get to pharma's money? And a really interesting thing happened. We call it the birth of what's known as a formulary. And a formulary kind of maybe was born with the right intent, which is, I would like to select the appropriate medication. My team has gone through and we have done a survey and an analysis and collected data from the FDA and other area. And we have basically stated that we have determined precisely the right medication for you. Now, I want to pause for a second and think about how implausible this is. I use this example all the time. My sister and I are very close in age, we're genetically similar, but we have very different medication needs as well as we respond very differently to medication. What are the odds that everyone in the country should respond to the same exact formula? Right. Zero.### Assistant: Zero. Especially considering how few women are even tested with respect to, you know, like you can get into a whole women's health situation and me and your sister will be in a real rage about it. Oh, exactly.

### Human: You feel it is? Yeah. Yeah, I feel like we're, we're working through the issue, because there was a moment in time where I would, the only calls I got were like bad news calls. And like, especially from the New York Times, it was just like, you know, or even CNBC, you know, and I understand it, because I'm associated with, like, say, an Uber, they were like, Come on and talk about it. Come on. I'm like, Listen, you have me on to talk about something else. You know, I don't want to be the proxy for Uber. And you know, in fairness to the producers, they were like, Okay, let's, let's take these next two hits off from Uber. And let's talk about some other topics, you know, like, because And then it's when you're when you're the subject, and the only thing you hear is bad news, bad news, bad news, problem, problem, problem, you're like, Okay, well, this isn't worth my time. I think that's what a lot of them are like is, I would rather tell my story.### Assistant: And that's the problem. The question was the problem, Uber, because I know you and I based on this, and I just don't know that there's been really good news on Uber for like, as long as I've been here.

### Human: It's an apartment building. It's a New York party. Yeah. Ours were more like a big like branch in the middle of or like a house farmhouse in the middle of nowhere and go crazy. Yeah. And then we had a rule when I was growing up, which is if the cops come in cars, not a problem. But if a paddy wagon shows up, you go through the backfield and you jump the barbed wire, you get away.### Assistant: I was at a party one time to do that. And there was a line on the guy's receiver that had put there or he had put there. He had put a line that he had negotiated with his neighbors that they would not call the cops if it was at this level.

### Human: I'm finally gonna live my preteen dream. Yeah, as as evidenced in my absolute favorite show of all time back then Jim and the holograms. Basically going to be Jim and the hologram tree. It's going to be Jim and the holograms in real life. It's going to be truly, truly, truly outrageous because I will walk into my virtual closet. Stand on your pedestal. Stand on my pedestal and wear whatever outfit I want.### Assistant: Competitors stitch fix, let's say, okay, stitch fix, whatever. So now we have these other ones in there. And they build for you, Molly, when you're on the way to meet me for our investment team meeting in the metaverse, you walk through a hall, and your hall is a fashion show of all of this incredible world designed for you. Now my journey to our staff meeting is going to be like Knicks and Mark Knopfler and other bullshit that draws me into buy like some vinyl version or digital version of a Mark Knopfler concert that they recreated for me in the universe. They're going to combine these things and they're going to terraform ads in virtual reality with this technology. Totally. So the it's going to be bonkers, like they're gonna be nuts.

### Human: 15 plus one. Uh huh.### Assistant: So you're looking forward to getting your $15, $15, $2 bills next week. Exactly.

### Human: So you don't really get pulled over here. really chaos. I went to Oakland in Oakland right now.### Assistant: There's a mess up your speed thing, right? Well, I locked all the cars and speed. I'm the other one I told she wanted me to on this is like the modern relationship navigation. I put a speed limiter on our cars 84 miles per hour, which means that 7879 it starts telling you like, hey, it starts slowing you down right about 7879. Why do I put it there? Because that's where you get tickets in California. If you go above 80, you're gonna get a ticket. If you keep it under 80, just general rules. I in my experience, this is not investment advice. It's not a J trade. But I think generally, if you're under 79 or under, they're not pulling you over. If you do pull you over again warning because they don't want to take it for something.

### Human: Yeah. And I mean, it doesn't have all the advanced features, like some of the stuff that we've been demoing, but what I found interesting is they did do like a, like a, you know, like a home screen widget. So I think that's what you were looking for at one point, right? Jake Allen. So you can with the latest one, you can make it a home screen widgets. You can just push something on your home screen and it pops up and you can ask your question.### Assistant: But it, what we really need is I need to be able to say, Hey, chat GPT, as opposed to saying, Hey, Siri. And so that's the change that we really need is can I use Siri as an interface for it? And why do I need to use Siri for it? I guess maybe on an Android phone, I could do that. Um, cause Android lets you integrate into the operating system a little bit deeper than iOS does. Um, all right. So we, we've been playing with a bunch of stuff this week. Big conversations all over the internet about regulation. We'll talk about that in a bit. But what have you been playing with this week?

### Human: Seymour Butts. I need a Seymour Butts. I need exactly. Yeah. Shout out to Neva. Oh, come on.### Assistant: Or, hey, I'm looking at Hey, is, is Seymour there? Seymour, hold on a second. Mo at the bar of the Simpsons. Yeah, a last name, Utz. Hey, Seymour Botts here. Seymour Butts.

### Human: And we had an email newsletter that went with the print magazine called Silicon Alley daily in addition to Silicon Alley reporter.### Assistant: Correct, which predated all the email newsletter craze that there is today, obviously. And in it was a job that may have been open, may have been closed. And I emailed you saying, hey, is that job still open? And I think you and I had talked, because I had quoted you as a source in some of the stories that I did for Inside.com. And you said, I don't know if it's open, but come and meet me. And I went and met you and we had a very good conversation. And then I came back and I said, I don't know if you're going to hire me, but just hire me for two months. If you don't like me, fire me after that. What did I say? And you said, okay, come join Monday. That sounds like me. And so it was, I think it was, it really was a Friday that I went and met you. So it was probably the fastest person to get a job out of all the people that were laid off from inside.com when we shut down. And I was like the lowliest of lowest intern there.

### Human: Yeah, it's it's billions, but not 10s of billions.### Assistant: If we were to pick a number, is it a trillion dollars, $100 billion? what would have to be invested to make that an almost certainty? And nothing life is certain. But is there a number where you said, Hey, if we put 100 billion, or 250 billion, or even a trillion dollars, or $10 trillion towards this, it's gonna happen?

### Human: What do you think the straight line of and I want to get into let's just get into Jeff as a person. What is the straight line of Jeff Bezos?### Assistant: Well, I mean, it's, it's quick turn, right? I mean, yeah, I don't know if it's how straight it is. There's many downs and zags. But, you know, roughly speaking, it's a guy who, you know, had a successful career on Wall Street in the early 90s, who quit his job to bet big and bet early on the internet. And, you know, and over the course of 25 years, many ups and downs being written off as almost the personification of.com hubris at one point, became the richest guy in the world built a recognizable corporate franchise that's changed the world. And in the process changed himself, you know, and became a much different person, and a very polarizing and controversial figure. So, you know, yeah, roughly speaking, it's an incredible journey. He looks different. He sounds different. He, you know, some things have remained the same. But He sometimes I look or I listen, I went to his rocket launch in Van Horn, Texas. And sometimes I don't recognize him. He's he's changed quite a bit.

### Human: I watched the first one. How many we in? We're like six into Halo or something?### Assistant: Yeah, we're six weeks into Halo, maybe seven. As an option, as an option. I would be down to talk about Halo. The other one I was going to say, if we do want to do sci-fi, today on Paramount Plus, Star Trek Strange New Worlds debuts. The new Star Trek series. And this one, it's set right before the classic Kirk Spock Star Trek. So young Kirk, young Uhura are in this one. Anson Mount, Christopher Pike. Perfect. I'm definitely going to check this one out. Let's do it. Let's do it. That's just a no brainer.

### Human: So I think there's a difference between a bubble versus fundamental supply and demand. So what happened in 2000? Well, what happened in 2009 was the government did a mass amount of foreclosures and flooded the supply when demand was staying constant, increased supply demand stays constant means prices are going to drop, right, right. Today, we actually quite the opposite. And what's actually so interesting, Jason, is, you know, I've raised several four rounds of capital at this point. Every investor, when I was raising every venture capitalist asked me, they said, what happens if home prices decline? Right? What what is Debbie gonna do? Not one venture capitalist asked me, what do you do when home prices skyrocket, inventory becomes tighter. And so that's just a lesson in the unknown unknowns, which is, yeah,### Assistant: you know, just how the venture mind thinks, right? There's something that they're like, I have a chance to ask the founder a question, I should ask them about what happens if the Titanic hits an iceberg. Because it's actually not as much about and I know you spent some time in venture, it's not as much about they actually care about the answer to that question as they care about how thoughtful you are in answering it.

### Human: Yeah, absolutely. And those are the people that I call friends. I mean, frankly, you know, I get along with artists, musicians and entrepreneurs the most.### Assistant: Yeah. And there's something fabulous about entrepreneurs in terms of building, just things that change the world, the excitement that comes from that. It's just something that's just a lot of fun to be part of. And when you have a fund, you get to be part of part of it 30 times. So you have this incredible group of people around you who are so world positive and want to make things better. It's just, it's addicting, right?

### Human: COTS, everything off the shelf components everywhere. And that's really, you know, my background is as an aerospace engineer and building EV tools and electric aircraft. And, you know, when we, when myself and my co-founder, Mike started this company, we said, we're going to build a vehicle technology based on existing tech, and we can immediately deploy this into service. So yes, COTS batteries, COTS motors, existing structural composite technology, existing flight controls and sensors. And we have some pretty spectacular stuff there.### Assistant: Let's go back to that infrastructure question that you mentioned, you know, because in this case, you don't have to build roads. It's not like Hyperloop or pipe where you have to create any tunnels. You just cruise over the existing ocean, but you do have to build this craft. So talk to me about the parts of that that you have created. You're not inventing new battery technology, right? You're using off the shelf to make these craft.

### Human: And is there a fee for the card for the consumer?### Assistant: Yeah. So it's, yeah. So it's a, it's, it's a card model, right? So we, we, we, we make money when, when, when folks use, uh, use the card. Now we have fairly, uh, rich rewards, right? We give you 5% cash back for a lot of kind of everyday spending item, right? Whether it's kind of secondhand fashion, uh, or it's, uh, all sorts of public transportation or using scooters or bike share. So there's a pretty significant range where we give you cash back. Um, we also partner with a number of groundbreaking brands that are really pioneering and bringing you low carbon options. Um, and so we make some additional, uh, kind of revenue for us when you, uh, when you make those low carbon choices.

### Human: would that money have been better spent if Amazon was like, we're taking a stake in this or we're spinning up a renewable energy company, or we're buying a utility because utilities are like literally just standing in the way of renewable energy rollout, or we're buying 10% of utilities, you know, we're just gonna buy 10% of 10 utility companies, and we're on the board, we're gonna put somebody on there.### Assistant: And there'll be somebody there just steering the discussion towards what are our renewable goals here?