Every company has a story. Learn the playbooks that built the world’s greatest companies — and how you can apply them as a founder, operator, or investor.
Tue, 04 Oct 2022 10:30
We kick off ACQ Sessions with the-behind-the-scenes story of All-in, from the world’s greatest moderator himself Jason Calacanis. ACQ Sessions is our new, occasional “MTV Unplugged” version of Acquired: a great IRL guest, a bottle (or two) of wine, and no script. We talk about everything you’d imagine we would over wine with JCal — All-In, bestie relationships, money & politics in Silicon Valley, who his influences and mentors have been (one surprise — the great Fred Wilson of USV!), what motivates him to keep grinding and why, at age 50+ when he could easily be winding down he’s instead speeding up into the most productive phase of his entire career. Pour a beverage yourself, pull up a comfy seat and join us!
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Note: Acquired hosts and guests may hold assets discussed in this episode. This podcast is not investment advice, and is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. You should do your own research and make your own independent decisions when considering any financial transactions.
This way it would have manazine wings. Magazine man. Magazine's was like the original platform for. Wait, have we started? Silicon Valley. I guess this is the trick. We've just been ridden. We just started. Yeah, hold tight. Yeah, but I don't know. Welcome to a private session. All that stuff that you said beforehand that like is really juicy. I don't think we should put that in. No, definitely not. Definitely not. We don't want to tell people where the bodies are buried. Well, cheers boys. Cheers. Here we go. Is this the first one or this is the first in real life? What I think this is our ninth, tenth together or something like that? A lot. Between the two pods. Yeah, for sure. Great to know you, boys. This is the first acquired sessions. Acquired sessions. I feel like I should get out with guitar here and just play some Dylan. This is your baby. What is acquired sessions? Acquired sessions is normally on the show. We are like so scripted. Yeah, you are. And we have a great time. We do four hour episodes. It's awesome. But really for folks like you who we know really well, what happens if we throw out the script and just chop it up and we just chop it up. David Rosenthal unplugged. Wow. Literally MTV unplugged. Literally. That's great. So, well, we have no agenda obviously. No, wait. Where do you want to start? We got to think Vanta. Oh, yes. Oh, Vanta. I'm an investor. We're investors too. Great. There are an awesome company. Big supporter of podcasts. So yeah, go Vanta. We are huge fans of Vanta and their approach to the whole compliance process. Sock to HIPAA, GDPR and more. And we've got CEO and co-founder Christina Casiobo back with us today. Vanta was already the best place to check the box and get security compliance certified. But now you've just launched Vanta Trust Reports, which take things even further. Tell us about that and how they can help companies deepen their relationships and trust with their customers and partners over time. Really excited about this. It's actually a bit of not yet told Vanta history, but something like Vanta Trust Reports, honestly, a much more poorly designed version. But you're truly, which is why I can say that. We're launched in the very early days of Vanta when we wanted to help companies get secure and prove that security. But weren't yet convinced we wanted to or had to go all through the nuances of what a Sock to was. So we figured, hey, let's just make this report of the best security practices. Let's check companies against those practices all the time and make this live and updating visible and transparent. This should help these companies prove their security and grow their business. And it should also help them be more secure because they've got this report, like this kind of security status page out in the wild. So 2017 Vanta tried this and found out that no one really knew what a Vanta report was and everyone wanted a Sock to. So flash word to 2022. And it's actually really exciting. Turns out creating standards is people have to know who you are before you can create your own standard. A little bit. And so, honestly, I'm joking, but I'm not. Literally the company strategy on that day sort of became, okay, use the existing standards to bolster something build something better here. And so this launch of trust reports is really exciting. These are companies that maybe it's before they've gotten a compliance certification movement their process of getting one. For some, actually, it's there already have one, but then rather than keep going through their buyer's process, they're like, look, this is just constantly up to date and has all the information you need. You know, take a look at this instead, rather than my compliance PDF from months ago. So relative to a Sock to, which is done once a year and kept up to date annually, a Vanta trust report is kept up to date to the minute, basically continuously. You always know what the company's practices are. So just really excited to get this out into the world and into folks hands. Our thanks to Vanta, the leader in automated security and compliance software. If you are looking to join Vanta's 2000,000,000 customers to get compliance certified in weeks instead of months, you can click the link in the show notes or go to Vanta.com slash acquired for a 10% discount. Thank you, Vanta. So in the juicy stuff earlier, you mentioned Mahalo. Yeah. Is that why you started to buy cash? Can we just keep her personal like referring to the juicy stuff? Yeah, the juicy stuff is the thing that's not going to do my last stuff. Yeah, yeah. Is Mahalo why you started, went from print to print to... Well, in the 90s, you know, I grew up in Brooklyn. My dad had his bar seized by the feds because he didn't pay his taxes during the 1987 crash. He became like, he got behind and the fed showed up one day. And this was the maybe six weeks before I was set to go to college. And he said, hey, son, I can't help you with college. Good luck. And I might be going to jail, so take care of your mom. So he was like really behind on his taxes and you know, a state liquor authority. They kind of take it serious. So feds come, shotguns the whole thing. They seize the place. They seize everything in it. And I was like, wow, I guess I'm going to school at night and I'm going to work during the day. And I worked fixing laser printers. And that was like a really good rack at the HP head just come out. Would you set to go to college somewhere else? Well, that's another story. But I was set to go to Brooklyn College. I got into that. It also taken the police exam to be a police officer. So my brother went into the force and then I said, you know what? I'm going to see if I can go to college and make that work. So I'm going to go to Brooklyn College. So I decided to work during the day and then I went to school four nights a week, six to nine p.m. Carried full credits, sixteen credits a semester. And I would work fixing laser printers all day. That was a bad student. I was always that student who underperformed. I didn't find great meaning in academics, but I had a computer when I was in high school that I was more interested in playing with my 300-bod modem. So they became a 1200-bod modem in my PC junior. So it kind of, you know, like many people of that era, we were sort of set on a path because we were the first generation to have a computer at home. I actually had a Tari 2600 and it could play tank was the game that came with it in pong. And so my dad bought this for us when I was six or seven years old in 1976, 1977. And he had one of the first pongs in Brooklyn in his bar. He must have cleaned up on that. Oh my God, it was crazy. And so we, I just got exposure to video games and computers and I was like, wow, this is incredible. Like computers are going to change everything. And then I happened to hack some software. We used to, I ran a lot of scams. But you told us about the VHS. So VHS Jason's hop tapes was technically my first business, but there was a side job I had which was cracking software. So we would make copies of like chess master and stuff like that and then sell them for 10 bucks. And then we started like hacking and doing what was called phone freakings. When you were doing this stuff, like it's, you'd be reasonably technical to do it. Not like the, you know, not like bossy act technical, but like you, you, we sold our chips sometimes we changed. Yeah. Like we put, we put memory in at that time. You had to like take the memory chips and put them in and then bend them over and stick them in. Did you ever think about like did, did you consciously ever make a fork where you were like not tech media? And of course media about tech, but you're like, I'm not going to be the guy doing the boards. I'm going to be the guy writing about the people doing the boards. It's a very good question. I used to go to bleaker street. It used to hang out in the West Village or the East Village. It was like the cool places to hang out. And like a thing to do would be to go to tower records and look at the Zine section. So it goes to concept of a Zine. Which was short for magazine. But a Zine was something you wrote with your friends. You printed it yourself at a photocopy store. It's like blogs before blogs. Blogs before blogs. And I created a Zine. I was like, I'm going to be a magazine publisher. So the first one I did was cyber surfer, which was about dial up magazine dial up services and CD ROMs. And I did it with my friend Brian Alvy, who you might have heard of in my career. We went to high school together. Web blogs. We went to web blogs together. Yeah. So but in the early 90s, I did. Which is to engage it twa. All that stuff. Everything in sold AOL. I think I sold AOL. But anyway, before that, I did this magazine. I did that magazine. And then I met Jerry Kelona at Internet World, the first one. And there was a booth. That's right. When Jerry was a VC before he was like the. Before he was a VC, he was starting a coaching like us. And I think CMG like us. And so there was a like us booth. And I had met this young lady at it. And we hit it off and we were talking. And then she introduced me to Jerry Kelona. And I met Jerry Kelona in an office no bigger than this room in Union Square. And he said, listen, I'm leaving LICO. But I'm going to start this hack me ventures with my friend Fred. I want you to come read business plans for us. And so I met Fred Wilson. And I would go up to them. And they were doing JP Morgan was going to back them for their venture firms. This was 1994, 95. This became flat iron. And it became flat iron. JP Morgan was the first big anchor of flat iron. They were half of it. And Masayoshi Saan, Softbank, was the other half. No way. So they wanted you to come like be a VC associate. Not a VC, just to read business plans. So the deal was they would take me for sushi and pay me a thousand bucks. Wait, what do VC's business do besides just read business plans? Exactly. Anyway, it was big. And so I had the magazine started Silicon I reporter. And they were paying me. And so I read about this Beverly Hills internet company, which got rebranded as Geocities. And I wrote a little coverage of it. And I said, you should invest. I'm 24 years old. I don't even know what VC is. That's where flat iron made all their money. Yeah. They were going to invest anyway. The flat iron. That's me, right? Yeah, it's where it was. Well, flat iron went with Jerry Clona. Then when Jerry decided he wanted to move to Colorado and just chill, he had made enough money, I think, and coach founders. Coach founders, I think. And yeah, maybe he had, I think he's been pretty public about it. I don't want to say a nervous breakdown, but maybe a fork in the road, making a decision about what you want in your life kind of situation. Do you know that great book about it? Yeah, yeah. And so Jerry was good mentor. But Fred actually became, ultimately, my deep mentor at that time. And Fred said to me, listen, you're doing Silicon Valley reporter. You're writing about us and the companies we're investing in. And you're doing stuff, which do we'd rather do? And I think I'll do the magazine. This was before now. It's like, I do both. And now it's like, I do both. I want to choose. But just to back up to Tio Cities, that's sold Yahoo for like $5 billion. And I think for flat iron was the main investor. Yeah, flat iron maybe over 5% or 10% of it. It was a huge win for them. I mean, Fred was on fire for a New York VC in Jerry. They did pretty well. They had nothing. How did that happen, right? Silicon Valley was here. But they were in New York. What was going on? There was a lot of good companies brewing in New York in my concept with Silicon Valley reporter was they have red herring in the Bay of Science in the Bay. But I own New York. And I had Silicon Valley reporter. And then I started one called Digital Coast Reporter in LA. So I had two magazines, two conferences, two email newsletters. That's kind of King of New York, right? I grew that business to $10 million in revenue off my credit cards. And had 75 to 100 people working for me when I was 27 years old. And I didn't know anything about how to run a magazine, how to run an sales. I taught myself everything. What do you family think of this? It was pretty heavy stuff because I wound up being on the cover of The New York Times on Charlie Rose. And they wrote a feature story about me for 8,000 words in the New Yorker. So anyways, a really cool time in New York. Because at that time, you were either in media or finance or art publishing. It was like a spinoid set. And I was in publishing. But I was also in this new thing technology. And so everybody wanted in on that. It would be like, the equivalent of crypto is today, at its peak, where you were the equivalent of Satoshi or something. It was crazy to be the New York internet guy. Can I? So we talked a lot about this when we did our big empire of Jason Calcanas episode with you. So I want to put this on pause. So people can go listen to that. You should. It's great. We get the detailed story of weblogs ink and all that great stuff. And you mentioned, I want to take us from your own book as good as your greatest, your newest thing. Because the last time we talked to you, we're just starting all in. So learn to say. Can we talk podcasting? Of course. I love it. Podcasting is like, I think perhaps my greatest medium. What happened with all in? How did, I mean, it's weird. Has it surpassed your wildest expectations? I thought it would be something, Chimoff and I would do 10 times. Yeah. So the origin story is pretty simple. Chimoff, I knew because he was running ICQ. Chimoff was running ICQ at AOL. And I had sold my company to AOL. And like the revolving door of AOL. I know that's so many. There was like Ted Leones has had this march to a billion. My Greek brother, a mentor, had this like march to a billion. Offsite. And so I went to this and I just sold Weblogs in to that. Like a million AOL users? Not yet. That's the, that was the application. That was that, whoa, with Weblogs Inc. And with AOL and other assets they wanted to buy, they were going to march to a billion users. Yeah. It was like this crazy rallying car. And we had these T-shirts, march to a billion. So I go to that and I see Chimoff. And I was like, hey, and he's like, hey, and we introduce each other. And we had no one of each other. And I was like, what are you doing here? He's like, I'm running ICQ into the ground. And I'm just riding it down every month that loses a million members. I'm so hilarious. And he's like, yeah, but I'm going to go, I'm going to go to the West Coast. I'm going to go work at this VC or whatever. So all right, nice seeing you. And so then when he was there, I was in LA. And what VC did he go work? Because he was at Facebook. Maybe a field. Maybe a field for a year. And then Sean Parker introduced him to. Zuck. And Zuck needed like a Chimoff. He needed like somebody who would just to mop the upper part of the growth team. He built the growth team. And he was like, I don't, there is no equivalent of growth. That was the idea of growth hacking didn't exist as a term until Chimoff did what he did. He said, just find the smartest people. I'm hiring based on ICQ. And I'm hiring based on desire to make a lot of money and be a beast. And he just went into beast mode. Because you know, he was very hungry. And you guys must have been like brothers from another club. Yeah, for sure. We're definitely, you know, both outsiders in Silicon Valley. And you know, I had Chimoff come on the pod. This we can start up. That is. We listen to it. It's fun to go back to that moment. And you know, you can see how he's not polished. He's not Chimoff, you know, it's gregarious or whatever's a little more. He doesn't have the loro on. No loro pan. Was he a great shaper? No, not one of the things. He was like a, he was like a dork, you know, like he, but he was, his business pre. No, he was like business pre. Yeah, whatever. He, he always was a poker player. He was playing in a like city. So he was, you know, like myself, an outsider who wanted to take risk and wanted to win. And, you know, confident, you know, even maybe more confident than both of us should be. But, and so I kind of introduced Chimoff to the world by convincing him to come on the pod, which he was like reluctant to do when he was at Facebook, but he did it after Facebook. So I kept asking him to come. And finally, was in LA, he came on the pod. And then people, I was like, he's really good on stage. Like he's funny, whatever. And so, which at this point, you had an eye for, because you're like, of course. I mean, one of the things when I was a podcaster in those early days, you know, from about 12 years ago, whatever is, you know, I introduced a lot of things to the world. 14, yeah. 14 people to the world. Yeah. Yeah, 2008, I guess, whatever. So I introduced a lot of people who were in tech to the, you know, and it was only a couple thousand people. And then as now too, like, you could be a great founder. You could be a great, you know, person in tech, but like, that doesn't automatically make you a compelling podcast. As we know. No, of course not. No, I mean, I have my own theories about what makes for a great guest. We'll put that on the side for now. But anyway, we start a friendship. We start playing cards together. We start hanging out, you know, trading notes kind of thing. And he's going to start his venture firm. I'm a scout at Sequoia, all that stuff. We start playing and trading notes. And we just become great friends. But then he was coming out of CNBC one day, and he's like, oh my God, you know, just like, we have such a good rapport when you interview me, because he had done a bunch of interviews with me on stage and stuff like that on my events. He's like, I want to do a podcast with you. I was like, yeah, you can come on this week and start up anytime. It's twice a week now. And then, which is now five times a week? Six, six miles a day. Sunday, yeah. Plus I'll see. I'm going to go, I may go back down to five next year. It's a little much right now. Yeah, dude, I mean, we'll come back to this. We'll come back. You're killing yourself right now and you're on act three. Yeah. I have more energy now than, I may have, I just this like coming out of the pandemic might have as much energy as I did when I was in my 20s. But for different reasons, different type of energy. Anyway, Tremoff calls me, you know, coming out of the studio, I don't know if he was in New York or if he was in the one market one in San Francisco here, but San Juan just popped with me. I said, okay. And he said, I want to do a new part with you. Just me and you, we talk. I was like, sure. I was like, what should we call it with texting back? I was like, we should call it all in. And this is 2020? Yeah, it's like two years ago. And I said, yeah, we should call it all in. Like we should come up with a poker name. He's like, yeah, great. Like a raise or something. It's like all in. Because you would have been referring to this poker game on air on Twitter. Yeah, I was talking about it once in a while. The poker game that doesn't exist. And Skydatin and I had a poker game with Brooke Hammerling, the famous PR person at the code conference, which was the All Things D conference before that for 20 years. Then Tremoff had had a poker game, Sacks, I had hosted it floating and putting all that together. Yeah, I'd refer to it many times in the pod, but try to keep it from becoming public. But it was being built girly. It's all public now. Mark Pink this, right? Or maybe I'm gonna post it. I think it's that used to come to the code one. Yeah. It was just another funny story. And that's the funny story of my life. But anyway, so then the pandemic happens and we're like, well, what are you going to just drop in these little red curbs here? We gotta pick them up on the other one. Yeah, some point we gotta pick these up. Anyway, at some point I'll write a biography. Anyway, nine years. Third book. Anyway, then we were, the pandemic starts to happen. Well, Sacks has some ideas about masks and then Friedberg had some ideas. Sacks and Friedberg weren't, there was no besties originally. No, no, no, no, no. I mean, the truth, like, Friedberg and I weren't besties before all in. I mean, we knew each other. We were friends, but not besties. I was besties with Sacks and Tremoff. And not Friedberg is the bestie. And, but he played in the game, obviously. And we had just started to have a developer friendship. But anyway, that for some kind of clipped, right? Pretty quickly. And I think, I was a really good interviewer. I'd studied interview techniques and really, after doing whatever I'd done at least a thousand episodes of Twist at that point. And I had had Sacks on many times and Tremoff. So I was very comfortable with that. And at the poker game we break chops and I make jokes. And Tremoff's a great host. And just very comfortable with each other. And Friedberg kind of joined that group. And it clicked. And I think during the pandemic, and I thought maybe this was 10, 20 episodes. But during the pandemic, I think people wanted information. And I realized like, I'm a little... In perspective. I think that's a thing. I'll tell you, I never expected to be listening to David Sacks talk coming from where he comes from politically and where I come from politically and going, yeah. That is a good point. And that perspective is so helpful in our polarized world today. Yeah. It's very unique. And you know, around the poker table, we all listen to each other we're friends. But the world does not want us to be friends in some ways. The world wants us to be enemies. And I kind of think about it like, best of enemies kind of situation. Like we debate specific things. Like Gore Vidal and... Who is this adversary? Anyway, it's a great documentary about Gore Vidal and... Who's Gore Vidal? B.M.F. Buckley. They're just two public intellectuals. One was on the left, one was on the right. And there's this documentary, best of enemies. In the 60s, they started debating like different political conventions. It was like the most compelling thing on TV. But they were like friends. Best of enemies. Best of enemies. They weren't besties like Saxon IR. But you know, Gore Vidal was just... He was gay, kind of closeted or quietly gay. And on the left and Buckley was like a serious conservative. And they went to blows sometimes on the show. Like at one point Buckley... I think he called him like a sissy or something like... Really like, derogatory as a gay man. And the world didn't understand he was exactly gay. It was like sort of time period in the 60s where like maybe some adults understood like, that's a gay man, but we don't say that's a man. When they got into town yesterday, we were driving the Castro's right here by. And we saw a naked guy in the Castro. And I was like, oh naked guy in the Castro. Ben was like, what is going on there? Dude, you got on the show. No, it's the end. He's the man in the Castro's. Huge jacked dude walking around. And super sunny. So he's like just all like, butliked down. But did he have shoes on? Was he wearing combat boots? Some of the usual boots. Yeah. And then they usually carry us around. There was a big debate when I first moved up here because there was a number of folks who used to like to get a Starbucks. And they had to like negotiate. And they were like, how about a Sarong in Starbucks? Because you're going to sit. Right. Bear ass. And for context, for, you know, I've explained this to Ben. But like, this is a thing in the Castro in San Francisco. It's like, it's like, now like you see it. It's like, ah, this is like a relic of the 67s. Yeah, it actually was pretty awesome. Because David were like driving up and David goes, oh, a naked guy. It was the most like warm hearted. I had to adjust as well as in New Yorker because of that. New Yorker, if somebody's naked, that's a sign that there's about to be some crazy person in a fight and police and chaos. And here it means like high fives and write-ons. But you know, growing up in New York, like if somebody takes their clothes off on a public transportation or in a cafe, like people are getting a baseball pass and calling the police and like, this shit's about to go down. Oh my gosh. You know, and then here it's like, you know, high five and live your life. I think that's one of the things I love about San Francisco. But anyway, the pod's gotten very big. So you get the gang together and like, yeah, why do you think it works? Like, is it that you think it's like the number one ish? Tax for our business. It's number one, of course. But it was number 28 last week. Like in global order on IG. You guys have transcended. Like this is more of them just. I think it's not that you do a fact anymore. It has nothing to do with finance or tech anymore. It is worked. It was tipped over into colleges. I was at, I was skiing in Tahoe and I, you know, I was with my kids and it's hard to get a table type situation. I was like, hey, I hate to be a past. But I see you're wrapping up and no pressure. But are you going to be leaving soon? Because I'd love to camp out here and get your team. Like stop busting my balls. And the woman looked at me and she goes, Jake Hal and I was like, hold. Have we met? And she's like, no, I listened to your pod twice a week. I'm like, it's only on one. I listened to it twice. And I was like, oh my god, that's so nice. She's like, I was like, are you in the industry? She's like, I'm a dentist. Whoa. Reno. And I'm like, you're a dentist in Reno. I was coming to ask how you found out about it. She's like, I don't know. She's like, I deeply care about San Francisco politics. No, it's actually I found it and this is during the pandemic situation. And then that's when I realized it across the world. What was there a moment for you, either you for or you, where you were like, whoa, this is? I've been micro famous, micro celebrity multiple times in my career. But this is different. Yeah, not for me. And I got a lot of famous friends. I'm used to getting recognized. I'm used to people taking pictures. What I'll say is like, where it used to be, if I go to Austin or New York, people would say, I would have three people stop me on the street a day if I was walking around in New York. Now it's 20, you know, or 10. And they want to take a selfie. And it's, you know, it's just, you're not podcasting as you guys get recognized. And it creates a level of intimacy with people, for sure, if they're in the habit. Yes. Because you're hearing people every week. And then people become characters. And I tried to make everybody. I was, you know, in a lot of shows or a lot of things. I did craft with all in. I was very premeditated in creating some character. I've never really talked about that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I crafted some character kind of arcs. I, the fights are all real. Trust me, there's nothing stripped about that. But I did say, like, I think I can, as the point guard here, kind of shape the conversation. And I literally created the character of the Sultan of science. Right. And, you know, Freeberg didn't even have a Twitter handle. Well, there's followers. There's even a character of J. Cal on all in. Like, there's no the world's greatest moderator. Sure. Yeah. I think more like J. Cal the guy who lets himself be the punching bag because it plays for the show. A little bit. I would rather not be honest. I'd rather not be the punching bag. Like, they're like, you're the poor guy in the show. I'm like, do we need to point that out? So often, you're like nothing. Not my mother. I'm like, I feel like really good about myself. You don't have to point out that you all have more money than me. And you two of you have planes and I don't. And it's, it's okay with me. I could have a plane, I guess. I could get one. But you care about the environment. Well, no, it's also like I don't want to waste a ton of money. And, you know, whatever reason. But you do let yourself play that role of like, like you have been enormously successful. And you sort of let the role of J. Cal on the show be like that guy who one day wants to be like us. Maybe he'll, maybe he'll make it. I actually never wanted to play that actually. No, that was not, that was just the boys breaking my chops. Maybe it's a little bit of like them wanting to, you know, maybe take the piss out of me a little bit, which is fine. Because, you know, I give it as good as I can get it. But I think that's probably for them. You can ask them when they're on the pod. I think for them, that's kind of the disc that's the one they can easily go to is on the poorest guy on the show. But like, I've done okay. Like, what a, maybe let's flip it. Like for them before all in, I mean, Tomat had a little bit of a public. No, they were not famous. No, right. They had no, they had no mark. They're all, this is a new thing for each of them to hit this level of notoriety. It's not for me. What do you think for, I mean, we should ask them this. Sure. Like, if you were to speculate, caveat that it's speculation, what do you think for them, all in has like, done way. Well, I mean, for Friedberg, nobody knew who he was, except if you worked at Google or you were in VC. Like, he was very connected in those circles. What's that? Or Monsanto. Like, he's very connected in those circles, but he was kind of under the radar guy. I think, really by design, he didn't have any desire to. So I think it's probably the biggest adjustment for him. The increase in profile has certainly been the highest for him. And he's loved. There was a moment when I jokingly said to people during the Q&A session at all in Summit, just say who your favorite bestie is and then direct question. And it was like five in a row, Sultan of science. And it was like, oh my God, what have I done? Now I've created this monster. You know, and he, at the time, like would barely show up for like, you know, he would show up for two out of three episodes. He'd be busy. It wasn't a priority for him. Right. So I'd be like, all right, I'll put Brad Kersner in. If you can't make it, I'll try to get Bill Gurley to show up or whoever Dremont to fill in for him. You know, and it was always like, I wonder if Free Bear will show up, but he's actually really committed to the show now. For Sacks, he was high profile, but nobody really knew him as a Republican. So he kind of unclowed as a Republican on the show. Well, I feel like he was also like, he was almost even more so than any, you know, was not you, but he was high profile if you knew about the Paypal Mafia Monday. But he was like the least kind of public of the Paypal Mafia. I mean, on the Paypal Mafia, you would say, Elon Reid Hoffman, Peter T.O., Max Levchin, Jeremy Stoppelman, Chad Hurley, Ruloff, and I guess Sacks would be somewhere in that strata of like being known. But I feel like that being known. Being known. Yeah. But yeah, you know, and I think part of the reason this works is Sacks, I think Sacks is probably taken on the brunt of the head of the pod. Yeah. Because he is so passionate about, you know, a lot of topics that maybe are unpopular in the tech circles. So I do think like it's cost him deal flow on the margins, probably. I think there's probably a really marginal, like I wonder. I wonder. He said that jokingly on the show. I don't know. I'm just thinking like maybe there's somebody that has ascended because he's done all in. I guess. Yeah. Sure. I'm trying to think if like, would is there a founder? I wonder. I don't know this. But is there a founder who's a young founder who would say, I would never take money from Peter T.O.'s venture firm? Because I'm so liberal. For sure there are. Okay. So those people feel that way about craft now. But for every one of those, there's 10 more. I kind of agree with you. I would agree with that. So anyway, I do think like he's joked that it's cost him deal flow. I don't know if it has. I think surely the whole center fits in. The pod too. I think for people in America and people in tech has moved, I think a lot of people towards the center. I think a lot of people were moving towards the center and we codified it for people. We maybe made it okay to admit you're a moderate. Yeah. I've been telling folks from the beginning, I'm an independent and a moderate. I voted probably Democratic three out of five times, four out of five times. But mostly that's a function of the fact that I've lived only in New York and California in my life where you don't really get many Republicans or moderates. But I voted for Bloomberg, Giuliani, when it was crazy and Potaki who are all Republicans. We're here doing things for T.O. or we still here. No, I wasn't. But I would have voted for him. I'd like competent people and I support a Bloomberg for president, which got me a lot of flack. Really? I don't understand why I was like to. I'm very upset that I was from him instead of whoever. I think you guys talked about this on the pod that like, what was the two by two quadrant of like, whatever it was. We all think we are here in Silicon Valley, which is like social, liberal, fiscal, conservative. Yeah. Everybody should be that. But we're the smallest of the four groups. Yes. It is a small group. I think I believe in competence and staying out of people's lives. So it's very hard to know because then even David, I mean, this is I think when David and I fight on the pod, which some people love and I think some people probably turn the pod off when that happens and they don't like it. And certainly the Maga group has no love loss for J.Ga. I can tell you that. Like, my replies have been really crazy. I would get like, brigade in the last couple of months. It's funny, but it's also like on the margins, like they can get a little scary, like they'll dox sometimes. And you know, that's not fun. A handful of times has happened. But you know, I had to tell David, like David, I am not like, I don't actually listen to MSNBC and Rachel Maddo to get my information. And by the way, your pro choice, pro game average anti-war, he's the dove. And I was like, well, okay, if you don't play this game, I'm going to like, it's W. David the dove. And now you're making me into Jason the Hawk. Like, what are we talking about here? Like, but anyway, you know, it just goes to show how silly the coalition building is. Like, it's totally silly. Exactly. The two party system requires that if you feel very strongly about something, then you're not allowed to think independently about anything else. It's so crazy. And I think what messes people up is the fact that I actually just think Donald Trump is a horrible human who you should do no business with, has no business being in any political office and, you know, is just horrible on any number of levels. But I believe that independent of his party, he's a Democrat, obviously. Obviously, yeah. Yeah. And so like, I would hate him as a Democrat or a Republican. So it's not personal. And I would love to. Or it is personal with him. But it's not personal with the party. Yeah. I mean, I just think this is like just horrible human being on, you know, in every way. Now, I understand for some people, he represents change for some people. It's like the way the Republicans secure it office. And that's all they care about is winning. I get it. Whatever. And I think so much of the human condition is like being a part of a community. And he, for so many people, is a symbol that means, hey, all my friends and neighbors, we get to agree on something so that we all can find togetherness in something. And for some people, that's the flat earth and for other people that's startups and for some people, it's a tribe. Yeah. We don't, you know, a lot of people don't practice religion anymore. And so he's their religion and Hillary Clinton or Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders might be other religions or the new iPhone. Like I found myself ordering this phone and I love it. And it's the I414 Pro and it's magic and whatever. But like, it's not that different than my old phone, but I got to participate in all the fun watching of the keynote and the tweeting and the nerding out on the right. Let me look at the image quality versus the old one. It really is pretty. It is pretty. But like, I got to be part of a tribe. And like that is a thing that no matter what your tribe is, that is so fun to be there on tribe day and tribe day. I would say the thing I'm proud about the show, I think, is that it has, you know, through a lot of the trials and tribulations shown that you can be friends, disagree, learn from each other and have a vibrant debate, which is how we all grew up, I think. When I say we, including you guys, but also specifically the besties, I want to be friends with people who I disagree with. I want to debate stuff, right? And then people are like this guy Dean Preston and it's like one of these supervisors here is super idiot. Like guy in San Francisco who like, you know, like won't let them build housing on stuff and he's like, you're just a conservative blah blah. And I was like, you don't actually understand who I am. He's like, you're a conservative billionaire. I'm like, wrong on both accounts. Right. Thank you for the latter. My besties remind me of the last. I'm looking on it. I'm working on it. And that's trying to be a billionaire. Thank you. And on that, another thing that's really fascinating to me about all in and you guys is, before all in, and maybe it's still to a large extent. I feel like Silicon Valley has this weird relationship with money, like super weird relationship with money. Like, you know, remember there's a whole thing about like Zuck drove like an Acura SV SUV and like David Filo and David Filo and Jerry Yang were driving their old cars. Right. Like the cool thing, like you could like make money build a company but like you never want it. Like you never and be understanding it. You guys, I think of the first like, like you guys like, whatever. Like we got a private jet. Like, that's fine. Like, you know, I mean, listen, I, uh, you know, I believe in capitalism. I think it's great if people create jobs and if they get rewards for doing so, like, fine. I'm literally the book I'm right. My second book right now, I'm writing is about wealth and money and like, but not like in my regard, but in a sort of like big picture societal regard. So I'm like literally been thinking about this topic a ton. And I think we worry a little bit too much about wealth creation with a small like outlier wealth creation. And we don't think enough about inspiring people to create companies and learn. And like the time I create the most controversies when I'm like, I believe anybody can do it. And people are like, you're so wrong. And I'm like, am I? Because I go on YouTube and you could type in any topic that you want to learn and you can learn it. And all the stuff that was at MIT where I never got to go and Stanford and Brown is online for free. And I listened to macroeconomic classes and AI classes. One of them like it's 10 o'clock at night and I'm doing my email. I'll just put one of those playlist on from MIT OpenCourseWare. And I'm like, I can't believe I can take a course at MIT for free anytime I want. And then you know, flip it. You can build a business there like David Centra over the founders podcast, like Mr. Beast and KBHD. Nobody gave me guys permission. The world has been acquittable. Yeah. But people want to spread a narrative that the world is unfair. And like I watched the world become so fair and so just and so much information and opportunity become available. And I'm like, wait a second. I could never figure out how a term sheet worked. Nobody would share their term sheet. And now there are a thousand videos and blog posts on how to negotiate your term sheet. The world is still unfair. I think I vary. I think the key insight is like recognize that the world is unfair and actually what that is is a game on the field and figure out how to play the game on the field. Sure. But I mean, it's never been more fair. So the world is unfair, true statement. And in America, it's never been more fair. You can learn Google has like five courses online. I think it's called Grow with Google or something where they're teaching how to be a UX designer, how to do this, how to do that. And it's free so that they can get more people to apply for jobs and the average job entry salary for these things is like 80k. So I find it's very weird in the world. I think there's like a group of people who want the world to be more unfair than it actually is because it makes them feel more virtual signaling goodness. Well, that's their community. That's how they find that there are other people who love that they tweet that the world is unfair. And they have to, and it typically like is a certain type of person. I'll just leave it at that. Okay. So I'm going to write your question. I'm a little founder university now. I have a course where I teach people for 12 weeks or I should say I have a team that teaches it. And I'm going to actually teach it myself. This next cohort where I just teach people how store companies. All right. How can they find a word? Founder. Founder. That's it. There you go. Yeah. I mean, it's basically it's free. The way I did it was you apply. If you want to build a company, you pay 700 bucks. If you go and you get to week 12, we charge your straight back, the card back, the 700 bucks. If you don't come, or if you don't have an excuse that since if people miss something because other kids are going to be fine. But we just try to get people to complete it. Over 90% people completed. That's cool. So, and then we're investing 25k and some of those folks to help them store their companies. And people don't know all the work I'm doing like quietly, but like 200 people go to this course now. Maybe about 400 in the next coat, the fourth cohort we'll see. But you know, like people can learn how to create companies. And they're like, no, they can't. And I'm like, yes, they can. You have to have gone to Stanford. I'm like, no, I'm invested in 350 companies. Maybe 5% of the founders went to Stanford. Like no, that's just not, it's patently false. You know, you have some confirmation bias. You're dealing with a data set from 10, 20 years ago, I get it. But I'm telling you, like on the streets, ground level truth, we all meet with founders all day. It's never been more diverse. It's never been more open. Nobody cares where you went to school. No one cares where you live anymore. Nobody cares where you live. They care about what you've built in your traction. Like it is post pandemic. All people care about is like, show me your metrics, show me the product, show me your team. What are your skills? Great. Let's go. Basically become like as beautiful of a meritocracy as I've ever seen. You say the M word, it freaks people to fuck out. I'm like, why is this so scary for you that Silicon Valley is a meritocracy? And they're like, because it's not. And I'm like, it kind of is. Can I answer your question earlier of why I think all in works? Yes. Go ahead. So I think you've got the perfect storm of three things. The first thing is. A lot of areas on this, out there, by the way. Billionaire. Important. You're in people, you're counter-positioned. Most people who attain that level of wealth crawl into a quiet hole and make sure no one knows about the product. You're doing shows from boats and jets. Yeah. So there's like, I don't know if we've done one from a jet, but yeah, there was definitely two boats in the last three years. There are like, in some peak moments of all in, it's like watching billions in real life. It's like, you hear, you hear Chimoff talk about this spread trade and you're like, this guy's got a lot of money on that spread trade. And like, does he actually have a key insight here or is he, and like, there's, there's this interesting intrigue there. So bucket one is like, billionaire porn. Bucket two is by the research you guys do and the folks that you each work with because there's definitely researchers that seem to be involved. You bring things to the table. They're like brand new insights that aren't widely available yet. So I feel like I was learning things about COVID-19 on all in that I wasn't getting through any other source. I'm like, somehow this is not making it to me. And this feels very, like a lot of it proved out to be like, this was good information before it was mass. Before we saw information junkies with a lot of research and teams that company. How many people, all in, how many people touch an episode of all in one producer neck? No, I mean, but like the research, they're like, I know. I'm pretty sure it's files open on people's computers when they're talking. We have a docket with the notes, but that's mainly for me to queue it up. Like I just read the four or five bullet points so people know it. So I do that with my team, the docket, but the docket is built from, you know, the five or six stories that people submit to our group chat and say, hey, put this on the docket. And I think SACS has some research help. Sure. Friedberg and Chimoff read the stories or they're well read. And all of us read constantly and weren't the information business of talking to people about the world. So you guys are investors. You know how it is. Like you do 20 meetings a week with founders. They're going to tell you everything about the world. You're in the world. And you guys are young still, but you know, imagine you do that for 20 years. Like you're going to get smart or you're journalist for 20 years. You're going to get pretty, I wouldn't necessarily say smart, but you'll be informed. And if you're hearing the right pitches, you actually are getting like cutting edge information before it's widely available. Definitely. So okay, that's number two. You probably have a slight information edge. Certainly a huge, I will say the information edge compared to journalists having been, this is not a dig to my journalist friends. I was a journalist. I had 75 people at the magazine. We were always trying to figure out from the principles what was going on and tell that story. But we were only as good as our access to information. And we probably, I now looking back on it, I think we had between five and 35% of a story. I know that's like probably triggering to a lot of journalists that they have that little information. You weren't on the inside. But you were on the inside. So when you're on the inside, you have 100%, or even on the inside, you may only have 50%, depending. You get enough to run with and you feel like, okay, now there's enough story here. Let's do it. And like that's clearly not the whole story, but it's enough to put the piece together. You're trying, and then over time, process journalism as some people have dubbed it, you know, maybe the six or seven stories will tell the full story. Yep. Which a third component. It makes it successful. It's the thing that David and I took forever to realize works about acquired, which is relationship and charisma. Yes. Like people like having fun by listening to stuff. And so like if we can make history fun, then a little bit of joy goes into four hours of stiving into stuff, you would never read in a book. And you guys do that in spades. Like it's just so fun to like temporarily join your world. I mean, the fact that you as a podcaster who makes elite content, like top 1% content, find it compelling is just, yeah, that's right. Listen every week. Don't miss it. I can't really walk in the baby up and down the hills listening to it. I mean, I have people tell me they listen to it twice. They take notes. I'm like, wow, that's great. You know, I don't think that maybe I should think. Well, anyway, I was very intentional with my role in it to step back and be like the point guard. But you know, I'm a shooting guard too. So sometimes I will want to shoot the ball and I can do both. I'm a combo guard. How did the free break host episode come about? So one week, you switched roles. Well he was like, I think this could be done better. This could be better than that. I was like, go ahead. And I just like, sure, I'll just shoot like I, and you pass the rock and all. I was like, yeah, you want to go grab a show. And he did a, he did a solid job. But let's be honest. It's not a point guard. It's not show time. That's for sure. Like, I don't think people are going to go to watch him play point guard. I mean, he did a serviceable job and put that on his tombstone. No, I mean, but he shines when I created science quarter for him to shine. I see. Bring me a sign. He's like, oh, you know, I don't know if I want to talk about politics. I was like, listen, Saks wants to talk about current of his politics. I'm giving him his red meat. Here's your Kenwa. Come to me with a science story. And we'll do this. Kenwa Kwon are kind of thing and I've made him the Sultan of science. It's so good. You know, it was a distinct effort. I really wanted to make him shine, you know, and it worked. You know, it worked because you see how engaged he is. And what used to happen was, and fans know this. I'm not speaking of school here. You see it every episode. Saks would disengage during science and Kenwa would disengage during politics. They would disengage during politics. And what I've been trying to do is keep both of them involved when the other is doing stuff. And Shamaht and I are involved. That's a hard job. That's a delicate. I studied the Maglachlan group. People don't know this, but I went back to look at Maglachlan and I watched him moderate. So people, there's a big debate. Do I interrupt too much or not enough? Do my interruptions, I call them interjections. Do they help? And I actually looked at the interjections and if you look at Maglachlan, you guys did knock you up on Maglachlan. I was super unfamiliar with Maglachlan group was the best Sunday morning show. And it was so good like SNL with parody, Maglachlan. It probably had a million people watching it, but because I'm a Glocklan, I was like pretty contankerous. And if you didn't like what people would say, you'd be like, wrong, this is the answer. And it became so competitive that you wanted to watch it. Now what I didn't realize by adopting that would be that Saks is the ultimate debater and will fight like a dog until he wins any debate. And so I may have pushed Saks into more of a debate situation where I'm trying to not have it be a debate. I'm trying to have it be a conversation. So what I've been working on is trying to keep it be a conversation. And then the, some people in the audience are like, you have to be the fact checker for Saks. And I'm like, no, that's not my only job. I'm not real time fact checking Saks. And so that is a delicate balance of like, and then sometimes I'll ask questions, specifically because I know the audience doesn't know what, you know, fair market value and here in Akron and me. So I'm like, explain that. Right. And I'll stop somebody now. I mean, you're, you're expanding the tim to dentists like that's correct. Thank you. So people are like, Oh, Jake, I was an idiot. He doesn't know that term where I say to somebody, can you unpack that? Can you explain that? Obviously, you know that term. You were with a third or fourth investor in Uber. Yeah, like exactly. Well played. I think he's been in Robinhood too. Like, I like to. Wow. Who knows? Uh, dude, like I'm asking that question on behalf of the audience. So when I'm moderating, yeah, as opposed to being an interviewer or as opposed when I'm working with Molly and we're chopping up the news when I'm the shooter there, right? And she's maybe playing point guard a little bit and I'm shooting and then sometimes off as a turn she shoots. Like I can travel between those roles and, you know, in that role, I'm acting on behalf of the audience and I get the sense like he's going, Tommat's going too fast. They don't know what the spread trade is. Let me pause. I'm going to explain one more time or let me reflect back to you. Is this what a spread trade is? And he's like, oh, most of this. And that's what I think has brought in to your point. Yeah. A lot of the dentist's crew. And having an intimate sense of where your audiences edges are is like really important role there. Like, what do you want to guess on? I'm always trying to catch. Yes. Where, where do they just go slightly too deep and I need to pull them up so that we, yeah. And, and, and you know, podcasting is about going deep. So it is really an art. Like, you want to stop somebody when they're going down this like crazy rabbit hole. You're not blocking this room. And they're going down some rabbit hole that has never existed in media before. Right. And you want to let them go, but you need to make sure they're taking the stairs. Because like if they just jump in, you're like, oh god, no one has any context. They can't learn anything new because you're like, you're not connecting it to something they understand. They just jumped into brain surgery. Yes. Let's just explain to us what's not here. How are we going to chop up this brain? Right. Like, yeah. Yeah, it's a bit of an art. I have to say, like, it's been a different muscle for me to flex and it's been great fun for me. The other thing, like, I don't know if you think about it on this axis at all, but like, I kind of think of there's, I use to think it is very binary. Like, there's two categories of podcasts. There's candy and there's vegetables. And like, I listen to the audio version of Stratekery and that's my vegetables. And it's not like deeply, it's enjoyable intellectually, but it's not like fun. And I can't, I certainly can't be doing anything else. It's with the language center in my brain while I'm listening to that. I have to be like on a run and like sometimes even at home so I can take some notes or look something up. I can be close to the podcast. Yeah, pause it sometimes. Sometimes you're hitting rewind. Right. Let me make sure I get what he's saying here. Or I can listen to the talk show with John Gruber and it's just like, if I missed out on 20 minutes because I was like brushing my teeth and then I left the room and I came back and I'm like, oh, I didn't actually miss anything because this has just been like, it's comforting. Yeah. I know what the stuff he's talking about, but like it's not must listen every time, every minute, every second concept and I'm not using hard parts of my brain to understand. But all then is become candy vegetables. It's both. It's both. Yeah, yeah, I try to try to do it with this week and start up and all then is try to have it be both a little bit of personality, a little bit of entertainment, some fun hot takes. Yeah, I mean, related but separate topic. Silicon Valley. Yeah. And honestly, there's a lot of part of the origins of all and there's a lot of like bashing on San Francisco politics and Calvin. Like there's a lot of crap wrong here. Yeah. But you guys are all still here. How are you guys feeling about that? Yeah, how do you how do you feel about that? Like what do you think of the area? You know, I lived in New York, Brooklyn, them in Manhattan and then I lived in L.I. and then I lived here and so I think my I'm moving to places I enjoy less than less each time. I enjoyed Brooklyn and Manhattan much more than L.I. I enjoyed L.I. much more than San Francisco. I don't know where to go next, but I'm going to go somewhere like. Which is why are you still here then? Well, I can't. There's no reason for you to be here. I came up here because I had a lot of friends up here and I had done L.I. and I was like, I wonder how far, you know, I'd been a Sequoia Scout and then I was like, my friends are telling me I could start a venture fund. You kind of need to be up there. I wonder how I would do if I was up there in the industry. And I was kind of this life. Because if you wouldn't, you'd always wonder. Well, Michael Morets used to call me the mouth from the south because they had like two investments in L.I. Oh, the mouth from the south. What if you had your sister, Jake Al? Sir Michael saying that. But I moved up here and I love it up here. It's quite buccolic. My kids are loving it. It's quite nice. I would love to live in another city in my life or two. I could see myself in Austin or Miami. I like both the low cities. I think Austin's kind of the future. I think California is going to be damaged for a decade or two. So I think for the rest of our adult lives this now. Because in the pandemic or? I think the politics and not appreciating the politics, the regulation and not appreciating the tech industry is really a problem. And then you look at this guy Dean Preston, like he is dunking on the founder of a way and Stuart Butterfield from SAC. There are a couple. And he's like, we got a million to add them when they sold their homes. And I'm like, and you also lost two incredible founders who have created billions of tens of billions of dollars of wealth for San Francisco. You idiot. And like at the same time, Francis Suarez in Miami is listing all of the venture capital and doing a tweet storm about all the companies that raised venture capital. So you have one guy Dean Preston dunking on people saying, we have this one percent. So when they sold their 30 million dollar house, we were able to extract a million to that's why tech doesn't like me. And I was like, hey, dummy. Yeah, now that all the future earnings are gone. Now what's that? Hopefully your marginal tax rate is 13.3%. I mean, but just so they haven't exit tax now for homes in San Francisco. Right. So if you're home cost over 10 million, when you sell it, I mean, I think it's just a sales tax. But one point two million from them selling their home versus 13% of their future earnings stream. That would be like literally the chef at Slack made a billion to pay to a billion to taxes from their RSUs. Like are you such a way to think that's a certain probably the billion to yeah, but that only to probably paid in taxes on their RSUs at Slack. Yeah. You absolute moron like you're literally so upset about their mansion and dunking and you're dunking on an individual's name. But anyway, the fact that we hate entrepreneurs who create jobs and wealth or certain people do is just insane. It's just insane. Like what I mean, you could go change the tax code. It's fine. Like, you know, raise them in one way. Like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren attacking Bezos endlessly and then Amazon starts paying 22 an hour. Gives you benefits and pay through your college. And it's like, okay, hold on a second. I know what Bezos just did. He took the platform that you could never actually enact and he enacted it inside of Amazon. If it's not perfectly clear what just happened, literally he's dunking on you. You wanted free college and couldn't get it done. He gave it to Amazon employees. You wanted a $15 minimum wage. He made a 22 and you wanted everybody to have universal health care and he gave universal health care. Like that is literally what Bezos did to them. How in business are they? Maybe you could do that like them pushing it and pushing it but no, no, definitely it is literally him showing like as the Amazon crew showing like let the free markets work. Like the DoorDash, Uber, Amazon, Starbucks, Absolute, race and battle to just hire entry level employees and make it delightful for them is what has driven, you know, and a lack of immigration has is what has driven these salaries up, right? And the benefits up. It's extraordinary what's happened with the free market. It's still $7. Federal middle wage is 7 and change, no, right? And 15 here in the city in New York is 15 like, yeah, that's weird. All right, listeners, it is time to tell you about one of our favorite things now that Jason is out of the room temporarily. For all of us who have been paying attention in this crazy space, there are now a ton of options for picking a corporate card and expense management software. So how do you cut through the noise? What's the difference between all of these companies? Well, any founder or CFO who's expanding globally and is becoming really like an enterprise grade company will tell you most are really not up to the job. Reinversements take forever issuing cards internationally, huge, huge pain and they basically never offer currency visibility. Totally. Well, this is why so Brex was one of the first corporate cards that's most folks now. The first like new innovative. This new innovative startup, corporate card for startups that's how they started, but now they've added on a whole spend management platform on top of the corporate card and it makes so much sense for it to all be together like the data being integrated. Let's them do really great stuff to like you want your employees to be compliant. So it ensures 100% compliance, but also you need it to be easy for them. So you can do cool stuff like have managers set budgets and then as long as people are spending within those budgets, then they're just in policy, everything's always approved all the time. No receipt chasing. No receipt chasing, no approvals, no it's all just done. It's all integrated. And they really are thinking about this the way enterprise companies who are expanding globally and deal with lots of contractors in lots of countries with lots of currencies and just need like a command center that they're not going to outgrow. That is really when you need Brex. Yeah. You're globally like how many companies these days even startups employ people globally who are not just need to be paid, but then are like spending, buying things, going to dinners, et cetera, around the world. Like you need something that operates globally. So it's awesome. The like the remote work thing is here to stay. They share the stat with us. More than half of the startups in the last YC batch are from outside the US and then there was another one Accenture said that workforce models with productivity anywhere are now used by 63% of growth companies. So remote is not going away. So you really do need to figure this out for people who live everywhere. Despite you and I and Jason being together here. We are remote so many of you are we know too. Obviously. The last thing that we want to tell you about with Brex today is related to being remote in different time zones. Brex now has 24.7 enterprise class enterprise grade support, which is important because if something goes really wrong with your spend in a time zone half the world away when everybody in HQ is asleep, you really want somebody to be on that. So Brex now 24.7 is able to take care of everything. Yep. If you have global enterprise ambitions, Brex is the answer. And of course they have a great mobile app. They were like one of the first corporate card programs to have a delightful mobile app. And now that they're serving large growing customers around the world, they can do everything from that mobile app too. Indeed indeed. If you want to learn more about Brex cards and spend management and why both of those together and I loved by teams all over the world, go visit brex.com slash acquired or click the link in the show notes. Thanks Brex. We referenced this at the start of our conversation. You're working as hard or harder than you ever have. You said you've got a new well of energy. Yes. Tell us about it. Well, I find great purpose in what I do. And when my friend Tony Shade had, I really thought deeply about like what I wanted to get out of the rest of my life. And I realized like these are the things I really love doing. And these are things maybe not so much. And I just realized my life over the last two years. So what are the two buckets? Yeah, exactly. So I can tell you the things that just to me, I'm just not going to get any pleasure about life. Working like no offense to my incredible lawyers, but negotiating term sheets and legal and HR issues and accounting and operations and tax and you know that entire stack of things. Not fun to me. Not fun at all. And I'm sure you never viewed that as fun, but at least before you were like I'm willing to put up with it because maybe it's a thing that creates value enough for me to do it. Doing my podcast every day. Absolute joy. Entertaining an audience, you know, thinking about the world and having these conversations. I had Toby from Shopify on today. Like I leave the Toby interview. It's like it's a third or fourth time on the pod. That's awesome. And it's just like instead of us having dinner or lunch, we just required a pod. The end. And to me, no, just, you know, I thought on Zoom. You know, he had to start it because he did that tweet about his compensation tool where, you know, here's your total cost. You can move to the slider. I was like, that's brilliant. Come on the show. Wanna come on the show and talk to you guys? Yeah, of course. And so like those conversations, I just looked at them and I'm like, my energy coming out of the show is on 11. Why am I not doing this every day? And I watched Howard Stern when I was a kid or Charlie Rose do it day in and day out. And I was like, I could be like those guys. They, every day, get on there. And they seem to love it. And I do. And so I just committed to doing it every day. And I love it. Isn't it weird when there's something that takes a ton of work, but somehow it doesn't drain you? Not at all. To me, it's like going to the gym. It's like working out or having dinner. It's just something I do every day. That gives me great joy. And then that's I recruited Molly. I was like, I need somebody to do this with me every day. Oh, yeah. Who I respect and who's awesome and bring something to the table that I don't have. And having to be. She's so great. I feel like that's the thing that's kept acquired going. Yeah. Is that like you and I can like. I don't know how you did it alone for a decade. Well, I, you know, I'd have guests on. It was a large, a guest driven show. And then I would do the news round table once a week. Because it was once a week, then twice a week, then three times a week. And then I was like, well, however many I just sell out, I'll do it five, six days a week, whatever. And I enjoy meeting with founders when they fit a certain profile. But it's very hard to meet with a large number of founders given how many are coming in. And it's hard to work with them when they're just talkers. Yeah. To me, that's a very hard part of the job because it becomes very repetitive. So how have you excised that? Well, I created a platform found university where if you want to build something, I will talk myself to 200 people. You can build and then whatever rises as the performance and the product, you know, and they as people move from talkers to the walkers to from, you know, when they actually start building stuff, that's when I get great joy. And so I'm like, bring me the people who have product of velocity. So I told my team, listen, you're doing my team to six, people don't understand the scale of the business I have. Nobody's, yeah, I don't really understand what I'm doing. And I kind of like it that way. But the angel syndicate is now the largest syndicate in the world. I've deployed like $185 million in my career as an angel investor doing 50 million a year. That's awesome. I'm raising the fourth fund in public like 11,000 angels in the syndicate. Like this is going at a really significant velocity. If you were to look at the slope, it's not quite a hockey stick, but it's hockey stick S in terms of the total capital I've deployed. And it's in really high quality companies. I mean, getting a better at it. There's 11, I have 22 people and 10 on the media sign, 12 on the investment side. And of the investment team, like people don't understand, like, oh, you're a solo GP. I'm like, yeah, 12 people. Those people are doing 60 introductory meetings per week, 60. And then we're doing maybe 15, 20 second meetings. So there's, it'll be 100 meetings a week shortly, probably in the first 10 people. Or 12 people. But you're not doing the, I'm not doing them. And what happens is, you had this line, it was on, it was on twist, I think. That's a lot of work. People say that's a lot of work. But you have enough for me. That is the new philosophy. This is why my energy is really high. This is your, everybody who comes to work for me. I work 60, 70 hours a week. Keep up. If you can't keep up, don't be here. I'm looking for a, you know, a fixed 50, a solid 60 hours a week. If you want. You don't have to match me 67, but 60 or 70 hours a week, but keep up. And are you looking in that team? Are you looking for like the next Jason callicanos to be a part of that team? Or is it like someone who likes doing that part, like that's, well, let me ask it more directly. Is it someone who's content with doing this? Or are you looking for people that are like hungry enough to be the next Jason? I'm open to all of it. I'm open to all of it. They don't need to want to have my absurd unhealthy desire and my youth to be successful. If they did, they probably wouldn't come work for me. But maybe they would. Actually, I would. So yeah, they probably would. Not for very long. Yeah, my brother, you'd come, you'd learn years, you'd extract. You'd extract. People come and they work for two, three, four years and they go start their own venture fund or whatever. Mousseltov. It's great. But what I told them was, you know, just find the great companies and I looked at investment team meetings usually there Monday. People do it for an hour or two and then they go to lunch. I said, I want to do it twice a week, Tuesday and Thursday, it's 2 to 4 p.m. Hit me with companies. So that was another innovation I did. And I also brought Mike Savino, who was my first boss when I was in my 20s doing IT and I brought him on as president. So this is like one of my lifelong best friends and I said, run the company. Here's what I want to do. I want to do a podcast, meet with founders, do the LP fundraising, that's it. You're a teacher, of course. Are you enjoying the LP fundraising? I am now. Yeah. I'm kind of like, remember it acts, I don't know if you watch Billion. Every episode. Great. So you know, like at some point, he was like, I'm going to go and raise money. Yeah, it's cap raise time. It's cap raise time. And like, Wags is like, so I got my Wags, Mike Savino is my Wags. Yeah. I got my Wags, who just fixes everything. And I'm like, I'm going to go raise money. And so literally was like, we're doing 506C. And they're like, you've talked about this now. You're now, you were in kind of this one bucket with your capital. And now you're going simultaneously in two directions of you want the public and you want the big institutions, right? We'll see. I've had select institutions make small bets. The first one was 10, the next one was 11, and then the last one was 44 million. The first one I deployed in five years, the second fund two years, the third fund two, and then five years. I was just, that was my first fund. It was, you know, me, Bill Gurley, Dave Goldberg, Rustin P's, Tony Shea, Rustin P's, David Sachs, Chimoff, just a bunch of my friends put money in. And it was to see if I wanted to be a venture capitalist and do this as a career. And I was like, yeah, I just did it over five years. And the second one I raised 11 took me six months to a year to raise the first. It took me the second one took three to six months. The, no, it took six months. The third one took me three months to six months. And in this one, I think I'll wind up raising in the first 10 days what I raised in the first, yeah, a couple of funds. I literally did two webinars, a couple of hundred people came to each show. For people who are listening, 506c is you can raise in public, which means you just can tell people I'm raising a fund. And I was like, well, I'm doing all in, it doesn't make any money. I have this week in startups. And I watched a bunch of these young aspiring VCs raise publicly. Right. You didn't raise publicly. No. New to the private. Thought about it, but for a whole bunch of reasons. Well, it's kind of scary because people don't do it. But if you have no track record and you want to raise, so like this guy, Mac, the VC, yeah, you did a great episode with it. Yeah, it was great. I had like, you know, first time founders for a season of Angel, just like a subsection of the this week in startups podcast. And I became an LPN's fund and you just saw me like I just did like hundreds of meetings. I did like five meetings a day for a year. And I raised my whatever $10 million. And he's African-American and he's like, it's just a matter of hard to do on work. And I'm like, well, careful saying that publicly because there's a group of people who do not want you saying that. He's like, no, it's just all you have to do is like go to Angel, just set it up. And then you just are talking to other VCs, you talk to them and you just have to be willing to take 50 meetings a week. And I'm like, do not say that it's easy to raise a venture fund as a black man in Silicon Valley. But that's the position. But it's not that it's easy. But that's possible. All the internet too. You find your people who believe that could you and then they believe in you and then they back you. Correct. Correct. Correct. Correct. And so the whole thing good. But what I noted when I was taking my notes watching him was so many times people like, oh, you're, when's your next fund? And I'm like three years. I was like, oh, let me know. And I'm like, okay. Right now I'll put that right there in the place where I keep everyone who tells me. Three years. Yeah, what you do. And so, you know, I mentioned it on all in. I tweeted it in all of a sudden, you know, I had a thousand people sign up. Is there a limit to the number of LPs? You can have a bit of a bit of a 60. 250 accredited up to 10 million and then 2000 QPs. And so it's a lot more work. And QPs. Not for you. Not for me. So, I'm a part of service. People are having. I know you know what a QP is. I just want to ditch the ball. I think it's five million in investible assets. Yeah. And then accredited now is 200 if you're an individual for the last two years, each of the last two years and 300 if you're a couple, each of the last two years in income or a million dollars in net worth. In net worth. In net worth. I've got every primary resident. So there's a whole, and these things are going to change over time. But I believe that we're going to have a test for accreditation. And you'll be able to be sophisticated if you take a course. So I think that's coming in the coming year. So just like I democratized angel investing, where the book angel was the first syndicate on angel list, the most successful syndicate on angel list, created my own, got the domain name, the syndicate, created the largest one, have done 265 syndicate deals by far, like the largest amount of anybody I think. I don't know. I mean, now as a participant of a fund on angel list, like these are like, those are big numbers. Like, you do something consistently. Or SPP's angel listed. We have the fund too, but like, yeah, like that's a lot. You're hurting cats. You need to have a lot of people. But anyway, putting all that together, I think now it's the time to democratize venture capital. So that's what I'm attempting to do here is I want more people who are accrediting qualified purchases who've never been an venture fund to look at the asset class and just consider it. It's high risk. It's high reward. I'm in 20 venture funds myself, including yours. Thank you. And I'm sure. But don't pitch Jason. Don't make sure I'm interested in yours. No, I mean, I'm just going to pick them based on people I know or people I know online or be on the pod. And, you know, I'll probably do one or two new ones a year. And, um, well, this is kind of to the conversation earlier, like on the internet, this is the democratizing thing. Nobody's going to just give you, if you just, you know, nobody's going to just invest in your fund. But if you go do stuff, yes. And then people like, oh, Jason does stuff. Great. I'm a back-to-ace. Ben does stuff. Like, be a vaction. Yeah. And it doesn't mean you have to start a pocket. You could be a blog. You could be a founder, university, whatever it is. You can do any of those things. You could have a track where you can be an advisor to startups, whatever it is. Do you like the idea? I'm curious. As someone that's always raised, uh, from sort of individuals, do you, do you like the idea of having some institution be like, can we invest $15 million? Oh, yeah. Of course. I mean, I've had five, you know, million dollar checks, 10 million dollar checks in the fund. Yeah. From, you know, fund to funds and institutions, you know, but I would very much at some point, I don't need it. But I would be meaningful for me, uh, both my parents or cancer survivors to have moral slow and catering's endowment or an endowment for something like that. You see, yes, for something like that. Yes. Somebody like that, you know, if they wanted, I would work, you know, really hard to try to get them a great return. I would find more, I would find even more meaning in what I do. Yep. Uh, and I, you know, I got that from Sequoia. I like, you know, you, they would have this Sequoia dinner every year for the founders. And they would say, here are what the foundations who are LPs are doing with the money you made for them with your companies. Yeah. Click, click. Here's where four foundations are doing here's where this foundation is. And your, their conference rooms are named after their, and this is really powerful. Like I find we have like state pension funds and stuff like that. And, you know, I'm gonna make you get in PSL ventures and like, you take it much more seriously. You're like, it's, cause it's not just about the reward. It's like, oh, I'm so excited about what we're gonna do for them. And it's like, this is really important to preserve and grow, but like preserve this capital. Yeah, yeah. Which the psychology of doing that while you're taking big swings with asymmetric upside, that's, that I find to be a fascinating dance. That was like one of the seasons of that of billions was he's like, I'm gonna be a family office. No, I'm gonna raise my own phone. Right. And so there's just natural tension for, um, acts like what should it be? And he decided, yeah, I like when I have other people's money because he, he seemed to perceive like, I think he felt that he wasn't a somebody in his ecosystem in his community with me managing outside. I think it's like playing, you know, in the bubble with nobody in the stands versus right. Getting on the court at Madison Square, and there's people in the stands. Your numbers don't mean anything unless you're putting them up for. Dude, I'm doing this public, where should I say quasi public, people still have to sign up to, you know, come to a webinar. But I'm sharing with them like, here's my, the totality of my investments. And here's what I've done. And here's what I plan on doing with my team. Um, so, you know, I'm kind of enjoying it. Um, and if, you know, I've met with all the top endowments in the world over the years, and they're very kind to me, but it's always been like solo GP is a block or no track record. You're fun just so small. Small, small, small fun. We're a $50 billion in down there. Yeah, and, you know, like, you know, um, at some point, like one of the ones who's the most rigorous, I would say exactly which one was like, we have a lot of respect for you. We know who you are. People would like you to sign a book and take a selfie with you when you're here. But I just want to be straight with you. We don't add many funds. And if you go through our process, it's going to take a lot of your time. And it's going to result in you not getting our money this time. I don't want to put you through that. I respect you. And if you want to do it, we'll do it. But maybe just put one more fund on the board and let's talk them in next one. And I was like, let's do that. I don't need the money. Let's wait. And I think what a lot of these funds are doing was in the last fund cycle. That was in the third fund cycle. Yeah. So now, so I will contact them. What I decided to do was let's see what my syndicate members and the public want to do. Let's see which two P's come out of the woodwork. And literally I did the second call this week, the first one last week. I'm doing the third one next week. And it's been so productive. I added two more. So I'm going to do five webinars as fall. And then I'm going to go on the road and start meeting with folks. Are there any downsides to doing the raising in public thing other than? And not that I can see. I mean, I guess you could fail in public to fail to raise the fund. That doesn't seem like something you're scared of. No. I could also, you know, the freeing thing, you know, is I looked at the model and I said, you know what I could do? I could just invest my own money in each company and then syndicate them and never have another LP. Right. But then you're raising capital every single time you're making an investment. Yeah. And I'm getting deal by deal carry and I have 100% of my investment, not 25% carry on it. And I don't ever have to talk to anybody. I could just say I'm placing this bet. Would anybody like to join me? Yeah. And I don't have to have a fund. I don't have to do audits. I don't have to do any work. Well, literally this, you know, we had so many hearing you say this myself, lots of our other friends in the ecosystem that are in similar positions. They're having this same question like on the one hand, I could do what you just said and do very little work, but have it all be pure. On the other, yeah, I could go do what you are actually doing and like raise, have LPs be accounted for. Yeah. How did you weigh these two? I'm going into my second era, my second decade of investing. And I again, last two years, a lot of like sort of post pandemic and Tony's death thinking, huh, like what's possible here? Because I've won so much in my life, it's only me to be obnoxious about this. I know it probably sounds that way, but for a kid who's, you know, going to be a cop to be where I am. And this is why I like when the guys break my chops on the pile. I'm like, guys, I don't aspire to be a billionaire. I, it's not important to me. If it was, I would do a late stage fund. I aspire to be happy and do what I love doing every day, which is the podcast, maybe get in 40 days of skiing, hang out with my kids, take them on the mountain and then meet with like, you know, early founders and be able to say, I helped that company at the earliest stages. That's in me is the rush. I found them first. I backed them first. I sat there with them and figured out with them. We were talking about the legendary twist episode 180 with you and Travis. Yes. I mean, that's the secret for the show stuff, David. Yeah, that is the secret. But from the juicy, I can talk about Travis. Yeah, but that was like, you know, you know, Erbu was such a baby company back then in like, you know, one city. I mean, I had had an open angel for him where Siam Bannesher and Chris Fraleck from Fershran, you know, invested in the company. I think they both met them there. Soko is there too, but he already had a relationship with Travis. So I can't take any credit for that. And Kevin Sistram was watching and I was going to kick him out because he was at this co-working space called dog pass pass. I worked there too. Yeah, I worked there too. Yeah, so he was, oh, coach, we didn't know that. Yeah. So he's sitting over there building bourbon and sokas like, can bourbon come in? I'm like, fuck no, this is like private shit. And he's like, but, and I'm like, just tell him to sit at his desk and I won't come down. This open angel form was at dog patch labs here on the pier. No, I think they're here then they shut down because it was going to collapse. Condemned. Yeah, condemned. So that was there. Novoids. Novoids. And so it did a bunch of like events there for angel lives. I, at the time, Novoly and I were very friendly. Not, not friendly now, but not, we don't hang out or we, but we used to hang. Kind of bummed about that if I'm being honest. I really respect him and he was doing something called venture hacks at the time. So he would just send an email with here are the five companies and I was doing an imperson and he's like, I'm going to do this thing angel list. I'm like, well, I'm just in person thing and he's like, great, let's just, you know, trade notes or whatever. Then he set me the syndicate thing. He's like, do you know about SPV? So I was like, I don't explain it to me. He taught me what SPVs were. He introduced me to a sure fund management, which I wound up investing in. Did you buy that? I didn't buy it. I mean, about 5% of the company I'm interested in it, but they back everybody and they've done more SPVs like look, like I don't know if they're up to 10,000, five, that's I mean, they've done it. It's great. Seriously, great group over there. And so he taught me how to do syndicates and the first one I did was calm at $4,500. That's not. It's funny. I was looking for you. Literally like winning a championship the first time you step on the court. I was looking at your track record getting ready for this and I was telling David, like I think the word that I used because like obviously Uber is some ridiculous multiple on a return. But then there's these other ones that are like promising, but early and then there's other ones where it's been less than Uber multiple, it's still good and Uber multiple. But you look at Calm, I looked at David and I was like, he sharp-shoetered that one. That was even more proud of because I mean, it was ridiculously early and like a super low basis. They had, it was $4 million, we put $378K and 0.6% and they didn't raise any money until it was a $250 million dollar version. It's a no-division. And sharp-shoeter. Sharp-shoeter. And it's really like that. That's the same story. I could even cry, like telling the story, but Alex, too, and I became very good friends. Ed Michael Acton, you know afterwards, because he wasn't actively running Calm, while Alex was. Alex had some conference. I was interviewing him and doing a little victory lap for him and giving him his flowers and he said, you know, I just want to stop and tell you, you don't actually know this story, but we were going to shut the company down. And we had Mike and I had a conversation. What? You're money, but we're not sure about this, but you believed in us so much and you insisted on us taking the money, but we had just pitched 40 investors and they all said no. And we were trying to debate if we could, in good conscience, burn your money to do this. And we probably calm would not be here for everyone. And they found product market fit while burning through your money. I think so. I think so, because you're like, take more of my money. No. And we got that as like a, that is not the case with Uber or Robinhood. I was along for the ride. Let's be honest. I did not change the trajectory of the company. But like, but for Jason Callacan, it's called. That's what they said. Well, he said it's, they were going to shut it down possibly. I don't believe that they would, but I do think it was on the table. That's like real angel investing. There's a lot of like individuals participating in venturing around and like, no fence. Oh, hey. I don't know. I think it's. I don't know how to hold that angel investing, but like coming in when the company could die needs 100k, 200k, 300k to get it to the stage where they. And down to the dollars of the revenue to date, I think, when I invest. Like ever. Yeah. Because they were selling the app for $10. Because remember, I think early stages, there was no subscription model. Right. In the episode. You just sold an app for $10. That's right. So the business model of apps was make a lighter for a dollar than make lighter to. Yeah. And charge $3. And then lighter for would come out. And you would be like, well, this doesn't make any sense. It's like making Microsoft Word 1.0. You buy it, you throw it away. It's like, but we could just update it. And it's like, yeah, but we need to make more money. So shut the old one down. So you buy angry birds and you buy them. It's two angry birds, three. And it was a really weird time. And then they were like, yeah, we're doing so they told me like, you know, because you know, it's under NDA as well. And you know, hey, subscriptions are coming. That's going to change everything. And they were going to do $10 a year. And I said, Alex and Michael, how much does it cost to go? Go to a meditation class. This is donation based. And there's only one 10 places you can go. I'm like, well, what's the suggested donation? It's like $20. And I said, you want to switch $10 a year. It's $20 a month. How often do you have to do this to get that? $20, visit. Yeah. 20 hours of visit. I said, how often do you have to do this if to get value? This should be a daily practice. We're like, well, how often do you have to go and learn? I said, if you go weekly, that's good. I said, so it's $80 a month to go. And we're charging $10 a year. So that's like $1,000 a year versus $10. What if it was $10 a month? We've been thinking about that. I was like, okay. And they're like, okay, yeah, I think we're going to do that. And then they went to $10 a month or whatever. I didn't mind if it's $60 a year, whatever it was. But we got money printing machine pretty quickly. So I've never made an investment at pre-product market fit. That's like now worth over $1 billion. That's a very early to very successful. And I'm curious, did it feel any different when you were making that investment? Where you're like, there's something more special here. Of course. Then my normal investment. Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. And that's what I've basically turned into a playbook at launch and that I'm teaching these 12 people how to do. It's how to do that. What do you think it was? Like what was, when you look back and you're like, Nine factors. Nine factors. Nine, okay. All right. Well, Angel, Angel that university. Angel that university. No, I'm an institution angel on university. Oh. I'm training my team when they're meeting with those 60 companies. And every time they pitch me one, they say, this has three of the nine. This has four of the nine. And then I'm creating the antilist. These are the things that kill companies. So how many of the 15 things, we have a long list of things that kill companies. How many of the red flags does it have? Reasons to not invest. How many reasons to invest does it have? And you know, like one of them for me, and everybody's got the different ones. So I won't give all of them. But one of them is world class design. And so I'm trying to teach people what world class design is. And world class design to me is if you were to look at all the companies in the space, this one would have the best design. Or this would be one of the top 10%. So if you were to look at something like calm or Robinhood, okay, they're the best looking app with the best UX of all of everybody in the category. Right. So calm was better than headspace Robin, who was better than he traded. I mean, it just doesn't take our rocket science to look at them. But when I first explained this to my team, they would bring me companies, and they'd say world class design. And I'm like, I really like the design. I'm like, pull it up. And they pull it up. And I'm like, that's a template from, yeah. You know, like a website builder and it's a stock photo, but where's the actual design of the product? And I'm like, oh, that's on this product page. And we're probably by a job. I was like, okay, yeah, again, that's just like the, I mean, if this was a bank's website, maybe, but that's not world class. That's serviceable design. That's utilitarian design. That's okay design. That's good design. It's not world class. So let's, if we're gonna say world class, like a world class performance is different than a serviceable performance. World class cinematography, world class script, world class dialogue, that's different. And that's, and then product velocity is the other one I like. So, okay, we met with this company in June. It's now July. What's changed about the product? And they're like, we don't know. I'm like, okay, well, let's find out. Where's their change log? Where's their roadmap? So in the earliest stages, you might have revenue traction or user traction, but you might be able to ask them for their product roadmap and somebody like Travis would be like, yeah, here. I'm the guy on the phone with this guy and we'll walk you through it. Here's what we're debating about on Sunday. We're reprioritizing this. And then, like, check, check, check, check. And then you go like if we're with Rob, what's superhuman? And I was investor in his company before that report of Rob, like the change log at superhuman. Superhuman that people don't realize like, like the bank, bank, new feature, bank, new feature. Oh, boom, we fixed Grammarly. Oh, bank, we have calendar, boom. Oh, we got a new calendar feature, boom. We got this feature and you're like, hmm. So here's the interesting, quite, we should ask Rob, well, that's, we've had one the show three times now. Product genius. Like, the parallels between superhuman and Figma are uncanny. Like design led founder, like Rebblushar, he designed in the software, rewriting the entire browser stack and we're gonna get the performance. And I remember it being breakthrough when it came out and then the only thing that I can recall being different between then and now is adding a calendar thing that I don't use in a mobile app and iPad support. And why? Outlook support. You just don't, you know, when you hit Command K, yeah, you probably know 50% of the features, like do you use remind me of this? I do. Okay, great. Do you use labels? Do you do snippets? I do. Okay. Yeah, so it was all there. What I started using it. Three, four years ago. I think a lot of those things have gotten better and better. Yeah, so it's just that like polish, polish, polish, polish. I really like want them to make snippets multiplayer. I wanna share my snippets. Oh yeah. Oh, it's your team. I love, yeah. So I want to love David's Pass emails. They're so nice. I don't know. I don't know. Look, you do it on the phone. No, no, I just don't know. David doesn't have fun. I don't email anybody. I actually company. Do you have a pass emails from? I've been literally creating a collection of how to pass with my team and I'm standardizing that. I'm trying to help my founders. I don't know that I'll be successful and this may be a mistake, but I'm trying to just not had, I don't end up having a conversation with a company if I'm not going to invest. No, but you must say, hey, we are not going to invest. You've took a pitch. Oh, no, I'm getting it. I don't, I don't, I don't. You basically don't take a pitch unless you're going to invest. It's the weirdest thing. Oh, that's very weird. So you do all your work upfront? You've unloaded it, the data, everything? We're in this unique position. You are too, but with acquired, we're like, you know, we have every six months, we have six companies that we work with on the show as our sponsors and our partners. And we get to know them really well. And I'm not an investor in just about all of those companies. So it's not like a, it's the pitching. It's growth stage investors. It's growth stage. It's growth stage. They're not yet priced as if they're the winner. Most of the time, they're going to just keep compounding. Yeah, good luck. Pricing's going to be hard. We'll see. We'll see. We'll see. Yeah, I don't know what's going to happen to these companies after the flat is the new up, but I think 50% haircut is the new flat. Well, the comp's got hit 50 plus percent. I mean, it's sweet they got hit harder again. Yeah, I mean, I'm buying equities right now. I've been doing it at Jtrade and dot com. And I am going to buy more. Sorry about all the pics a couple weeks ago. Which one? Whatever I tell you is. Oh, yeah, no, no, I actually love Taiwan semiconductor. No, good news. It's fake, so it's the other one. It's just a little more. No, it's just a little bit of an awkward studio. Twilio is yours, and I love that one too. And I like Shopify as a pick. I'm actually really enjoying it. It's really not investing out, not invest my vice, but it's balancing out my understanding of what public successes come out to private. And so for me, it's just the way, like, am I going to fight with a blast or no, I'm a Jedi user, I'd say. But, you know, I'll learn if you look at the blast. Yeah, it's not as, like it's helpful. It's really helpful. If you look at the very best people, the best GPs, like Hoelhoid. Over the past two decades, they all trade public stocks. And they do it for the same reason. They're going to fight with the Saber, but like they want to know how to also use a blast. Or how to fight in the next wing or something. Like it's not what Jedi does, but Jedi will do it. It also keeps you really sensitive to the public cycles. So that like, it's not that you have to think about the public comps when you're investing, but you have to be aware of how much those will change. And early stage investing, it's almost silly to compare to, like my opinion is it's very silly to compare to public comps. Because the only thing you know for sure is we're going to be in a different place in the cycle by the time this company gets liquid. So it's ridiculous, but it's helpful to drive into you, like how much variability there is. When was the last time it was this different? That's what I'm doing. Yeah, I'm really enjoying understanding what the founders of those companies go through versus the founders of the private companies that go through it. What the board's decisions, the board has to make of a public company versus the board of a private company. So I'd like to join a public board at some point. I'm probably not a good idea for me to have said that because I might get an info for one and that might be too much work. But, yeah. No, I mean, especially given the market right now, I'm very careful. But you could also do that. But it's just, it's been great. Especially through the show now. You have relationships with public company founders. Sure, of course. And if I really wanted to, I'm sure I could lobby. Oh, I'm just wondering, you don't have some on the board, though. You can have a great relationship. Yeah, I'm just enjoying doing the analysis. And I'm doing it anyway with Molly every day, okay. Twilio's or Adobe's come. I just bought Adobe this week when they bought FIGM. So far, he said, I'm not a investment advice. Not a investment advice, but I was like, they bought FIGM. Well, you sure think. Okay, so here's my theory on this. They bought FIGM on Tanked. And I was like, why did people hate this? And they're like, oh no, Adobe's admitting defeat. And that they can't innovate in house. And to me, I look at it like, Adobe has customer channel. And it was foretold five plus years ago that they were not going to build the next FIGMA. Like that would be a full rewrite of their entire software stack. So buying the thing, even though they paid a tremendous premium, 50X revenue multiple because of the network effects that FIGMA has. And obviously all the product stuff. But if they can get that through Adobe's channel, like I think that is an absolute win-win acquisition. And all these people that are like, oh, they're gonna ruin it. They're gonna kill FIGMA. No, they're not. That's why they paid $20 billion for it and have a gigantic bonus for Dylan to stay on board. Yes. They're taking a YouTube approach. I think everybody in M&A knows now. Yeah. Or what's app? What's app? Just leave it alone. Don't screw it up. And then, so I like your analysis. I added to that analysis is if you're not going to win the war and you can build an alliance and then fight another war. Like they've just removed the downside of FIGMA creating Photoshop. I'd be concerned for Adobe if they didn't buy FIGMA. Correct. So the fact that you're giving us a discount on the shares for them doing the right thing is like Christmas. Like thank you. You just discounted the right move. Fantastic. People would be like, oh, the Warriors signed Kevin Durant. They're going to lower that. They're going to lower that. We're lowering the cost. But they paid a lot to get them on the team. And you know what? We're going to lower the cost of the tickets. Okay. I'll buy quartz-eyed seats. Or they're lowering the odds in Vegas. It's like, wait, why are you lowering the odds? They're odds increased. I'll place that back. It's obviously sped. And then they're like, oh, that's leftist Canva. And Melanie's awesome. Totally different thing. But yeah, and they have a free Canva already. And you know, what if there's always the internal people who are penciling out that spreadsheet? There's a group of MBAs who penciled out that spreadsheet with Figma, no offense to MBAs who are listening. And they said, hey, boss. If x, y, if x, y, z. And they said, you know, here's like five potential paths. If we make Figma free for 10 users and whatever. Or if we, you know, take whatever Figma costs and then we blend it with the Adobe suite. Okay, we would get this many more Figma users. But we know when we get Figma users, then we get non-designers to pay for it. So right now Adobe has a bunch of designers paying. Right, right. But they may not have all the non-designers in their face. Right, only designers pay Adobe. Right. Well, they have marketing cloud. But that's a totally unique set of. Yeah, yeah, only. But when you look at Figma, like, I got a Figma account. Like people who are doing, giving feedback on designs. The business side, the sales side can get into Figma. Well, they got the whole creator class. Exactly. So I think you're opening up the aperture of who design software is for with Figma. It's for BD. It's for the CEO. Sure, the CFO can come in and take a look at the product. Oh, Legos should come in and take a look at the product. Yeah, buy them a seat. So it's like slack is for the dev team. And it's like, yeah, and the sales team. And ops. And anybody else might as well be on it. Because that's where everybody is. Yeah, yeah. And that's where I think they'd have a Figma. It's like, everybody's gonna have a Figma account. Yeah, yeah. Just watch the product team build the product and put a comment in. And who cares if it's a hundred bucks a year. It's cost of doing business. Any company that has, like, that kind of strong network effects inside an organization deserves a meaningful revenue multiple because they just, their differentiator is literally the company's moat. So like, I tweeted this. But like, if I have a castle and it has a moat around it that is much wider or deeper than your identical castle, shouldn't you pay more for my castle? It's more defendable. 100%. Like the vi-rality ever thinks, sax made this point on all end two weeks ago, which was like, if they're paying 50x now and the company's growing, they're paying 20x next year. 25x, who cares? Right. It's such a high growth company. And then I was just thinking, well, somebody's got a theory there. And when I sold Weblogs to AOL, people were like, oh my god, these people are idiots. They gave $30 million to, you know, for Weblogs ink. They weren't got 200K in revenue. But they didn't realize what AOL, autos, AOL, tech, AOL lifestyle, those were sold out at like a $90, RPM revenue per 1,000 pages. The ads were different CPMs. So then they would put an Engaget or an autoblog story or blogging baby or whatever other blog we had on the homepage of AOL. And a half million people would flow through. And then they would put those ads on our sites. And then they would blow out 50 or $100,000 in ads a day on a blog. And those people were like, great. Because it was costing AOL to make content like $500 per piece of content. $3,000 per piece of content on AOL.com, slash autos, whatever. And we were doing it for, at the time, five bucks a blog post. Because we said, well, people can write for an hour. So it's 20 bucks an hour and it's $6 minimum wage. It means that's God. 50 years old. The media game has changed so much. And that I was like, okay. You guys were doing 200K annual revenue. We had done 200K to date. Holy crap. Over the 18 months. What is it? I mean, now like the world we're in today. People hold to the multiple and they were like, Jekowski's robbed. And I was like, okay, $30 million. But now I was like, what do you think? Like, here's a, I was like an 88 five years old. And that's the best, the best MNA is when. Yeah. You look like you robbed the bank. Yeah. And then five years later, it looks like you robbed the founder. You tube. Instagram. Figma will be in this category. Instagram. Yeah, when they bought Instagram, they're like, 30 people worked with this company and they gave it a $1 billion. Yeah. You guys are morons. And now it's $150. What is the thought exercise question? Yeah. Obviously irrelevant because you don't monetize it. Yeah. What do you think the enterprise value of all in is? Well, it would do $10 million in, when I was at the code conference, and a lot of people have been trying to buy it or put it as part of their network, obviously, which would kill it. Yeah. And my partners are right. Like, let's not make money from it. Part of the delightfulness of it is that we're not trying to monetize it. Well, but you do get huge economic value out of it. I was like, I was like, I was like, hey, Schmuck, we're friends. Yeah. Your next fund will be bigger. Hey, dumbass. Yeah. Now I was like, you know, when you have a friend who can be like, hey, dumbass. Yeah. Like, that's a good friend. So I appreciate Schmuck saying that. And it's playing out. And we had a rule, no talking our books on the pod. But we kind of talked about it. And we're like, the pod is great when we talk about our bets. Right. So explaining our bets, not talking our book is the new philosophy. Yeah. So like, you guys just started doing that. You talked about his back. You know, I, in most of the time, he did it. He just found a target for it. Yeah. Schmuck talked about the healthcare company. The healthcare company, which is, I mean, we wanted to talk about that because Schmuck and I both agree like maybe we're, maybe, maybe. Like, we're definitely over prescribing these drugs to kids like for ADHD and attention drugs and adults are taking too many. I think that that's not disputable. I think all the science is showing that. So, you know, to make software that could help kids with ADHD is like noble. But I think people want to hear us explain our bets. So, you know, explaining our bets, I think is kind of a cool aspect of the show. Talking your book is lame, but explaining your bets is cool. So anyway, in the event, did a couple million dollars had a small profit. But it was the number one tech event of the year. Right. So, you know, I'm kind of bummed that you know, freeberg's a little bit of a blocker for it. But I might turn them around and we'll have a vote maybe in the fall. Let's do it again. Oh, well, I'm going to do another one. The question is, am I doing it under the all in brand? Or do I have to create a new brand for it? And so, I told the guys that I'm going to do it again. Well, Code Conference is done. So, like there's a value. Code Conference is done. Yeah. They need a new host. That's crazy. Oh, good. Like it's such a value. No, I talked to Bank off about it. And he's been very public. You know, I, Carousel, I think, is going to do the pivot stuff and wants to do other stuff. And, you know, she's, I really respect what Carousel has done, you know. In terms of like, she does stuff and then she moves on to the next thing and tries. Like, you know, it's kind of my approach as well, which is like Bob Dylan, you know, said, like, don't look back kind of thing. And he always tried to make the next album and forget about the past one. And much to the sugar and the people who loved him as a folk artist and didn't like, you know, like a Rolling Stone. And when he went electric, they booed him. You know, it's like, really? You're booing Bob Dylan because he's using electric guitar. Are you guys dumb? Did you hear all along the watchtower? Like, this is incredible. And so, I think, you know, Carousel is like moving on, but Jim said he's going to keep doing it. And, you know, it's probably a small list of people who could actually host that credibly. You know, very small list. Which is, and so. Which you're definitely on. I am. You think? How could you not be on? I mean, I'm not even saying that to like make you feel like. No. I'm pushing a little bit for this issue. Okay. Okay. You're joking about being humble. But if it had, I'm trying to joke on you. If it had that kind of prestige, it seems like Friedberg would want to do it. It seemed more like the thing he was a verse to is the like. Yeah, I mean, whatever the issue is, like we've had our issues. We will have issues. But I think the, there's basically two possibilities for all in Summit. I'm going to present it to the boys and say like, here's the plan. Yes or no. And we agree. We'll put it to a vote. So we put it to a vote. If three of us want to do it, we'll do it. And if two of us want to do it, then we can't. And if I already, Friedberg already said, if you do it on your own with a different name, I'll come and support you. And I'll show up to do a talk or do an interview or whatever. And I said, great. So I'll do it with a different name. If they don't want to do it, and the fans can decide if they want to come or not. And partially and. Partially and exactly. So, you know, it's up to the boys. They want to do it. But it was like a pretty great success. Call it a year. You already have Collins. Yeah. Well, yeah. I started doing a, I started doing a call in show called After All Infilus. Two episodes where I took calls about the last episode of all. Just to support David because I don't think people remember how great that app is. Yeah. It's really made great progress. I want to be supportive of him and I have a small investment in it. Do you. Very meaningful, but. On the one hand, this is ridiculous. Say on the other hand, it might be ridiculous. So low. It's worth 50 million. It's to answer your question. 5,200 million. I mean, as a top 40 podcast, it's worth at least 50 million. On its own though. But I mean, like economic value that the four of you. Oh, who knows. I mean, if Chimoff. Like if Chimoff or Saks or I or Freeberg were to get, but one more deal out of it. And it's an Uber. The economic value is nine figures, possibly 10. Yeah, like so. But that's the thing. Like I think like man, Weblogs like you were doing 200K revenue. You sold it for 30 million. Pretty great takeaway. And now look at this. Like you know. Yeah, I mean, listen, I hope it keeps going. I hope we can keep it on track. And you know, I love doing pods this week in startups. It's a juggernaut as well. Yeah, that was for 10 years. And all in is. What is that like to quarter million listeners or something? Yeah, something that range. Yeah. I mean, it's hundreds of thousands per episode. Yeah, it's this very niche podcast. I'm not trying to make it all in. I'm trying to make it for founders. And so, you know, if in order to make it bigger, it have to be worse for founders. And I want to be talking about with our sound. I want the capital allocators to listen to it. And I'm not trying to move up the rankings. I don't mind, you know, hanging with, you know, all in being number one in tech. And hanging out with you guys at, you know, slumming it at six to 15 with you guys in the rankings. It's like, where we belong. Look, I got number one on one. But who's counting? Whatever. You know, like, that's where we belong with these things, right? Like it's like it's a niche podcast by definition, right? Yes. Like it's not supposed to appeal to everybody and you try. If you want to appeal to everybody, like read the Bible, like that's, right? You don't know that this is the, like the, like the, like, read Bible passages and he's huge. It's like, if you literally... True crime? True crime? Religion. Right. And when you go into the Bible or Ben Shapiro, dunking on libs, the end. That's like that's how the organ, or do a daily, but your aged but your old man it's out right? He's on Spotify, right? Right, right, right. You know, he's not in the other ranking so... I mean, do you a daily news program for 20 minutes? Like that's not what I want to do. I want to talk for an hour or 3 about deep topics in founders in County Loneys. It's probably be a fun, acquired, so is Howard Stern. I feel like it's underappreciated how much Howard Stern is. I know. That should be the next Taylor Swift type episode that we do. Yeah, I know for sure. She wrote the playbook. I literally took notes for it. King of all media. Do you know him? I have never met him. I'm left to at some point. I have a lot of respect for him. I mean, obviously, he did crazy stuff when he was young and that shocked, shocked stuff. But he, in his later years, became a great interview. He did a great interview. He really refined his technique. I really appreciate that about him. And he created characters. Sound familiar? Yep. He branded them. Yep. He showcased them, the Wack Pack, you know, all this stuff. Did he ever do an event? He used to do live events. He did the US Open Sores. And then he would do Howard Stern's New Year's Eve celebration. So yes, he did the equivalent of those in New York. But it was a very New York thing. So he played tennis against Boba Booey. But I mean, he got 10,000 people to show up and buy tickets to a tennis match that they pumped up, you know, like for whatever number of months. I remember this for my childhood. And then he did his books, which were phenomenal. He did a movie. He did a movie. He did TV shows. So he's done a lot of stuff. And I'm just starting the process of doing a reality show right now. Oh. Literally going to do it. Are you really? Yeah. I mean, I have got work. Just you or the besties are. Just me. The besties don't want to do it. They don't have time for it. I mean, there was talk of like maybe all in, you know, kind of going onto one of those services like people had reached out. Like, hey, would this work? You know, it's a lot more work though. Well, you know, we would have to show up in a location. We'd have to do it weekly. You know, there'd be some formats, some shiny floor, whatever. It's a different beast. I don't think they have the time for it if I'm being honest. But for me, I would like to do a reality show in the Gordon Ramsay kind of vein, you know, where I'm helping founders. I think it'd be great for reach. So I had done a reality TV show with NBC. And the YC Corporation. Oh, wow. Yeah. And it didn't make it on air. But I have the, you should be a shark tit judge. I had been, they had reached out. Before Mark Renat had reached out early on when it was dragons then. Right. Before when they were going to bring it here. So when it was dragons then they had reached out early. But I wasn't very successful back then. I wish, but you know, I think now I think I would have the credibility and the advice to give that I could do a Gordon Ramsay style show that would be very entertaining and educational. And completely different than, you know, the fundraising aspect and the pitch aspect of shark tank. So I'm not going to do that. But I'm, you know, I've got, you know, the, I won't say which one, but a very major, the major, you know, reality TV folks reached out. I think in part because you always do so well. We'll do founders and companies feel comfortable. Like I feel like a really amazing window and insight would be the type of conversations that you have with a founder as they're building the company. Yeah. So the founders and companies be open to that. Yeah. So I had done the pilot for which never made it on air. What was really good was really about, you know, me incubating companies and they spent like $500,000 doing the pilot. It was really good and it would have been a big head. Did it get canceled because of the hard work? Yeah. It's these stuff. Wow. So they were just like anything that was in his family. And all the IP is dead because he's a monster. Yeah. And so anything associated with it. But you got to remember he did project runway. Right. So he had done some of these giant shows. Because people don't know that about that. So that's right. I forgot. Yeah, that had the TWC at the beginning. Exactly. So, you know, NBC, you know, I'm, I NBC bought the show in the room, loved it and did the pilot. It came close and Shemoff was on that episode actually did the pilot. Oh my god. He was like my VCE friend who came in and it was my VCE friend. It's no it's hilarious. But I'm excited to do it if it works out. It works out if it doesn't, you know, no skin off my back. But I like the media space. And then, you know, I, this is the thing I'm choosing to do media because I get joy out of it. I'm 51 now. I'll be gone soon. Like, I'll be gone soon. Well, you know, you never know. And, you know, if you've been to your friends, yeah. I have two friends who died young. And I'm just like, I, you know, I talked to my wife. I was like, I don't know. Like, what if I make it another year or make it 25 years, but I want to make it count? I'm not going for max dollars. Like, and so when the guys break my chops about that, I'm like, guys, it's not going to be a good one. It's not my priority. Like, literally maximizing money is like, you're probably going to spend it. Well, also, you're probably going to spend it. It's not, literally not in the top 10 minutes. What is more money than it seems unlikely? It seems unlikely, you know, it's going to be a good one. It's not my life. You don't want to understand my life. Yeah. Like, it is ridiculous and charmed. Like, I can do whatever I want. I have enough money to do it. I'm not my kids are fine. I can have whatever I want. I don't care about like a third home. Like, it's a, I have a ski house. I have my regular house. It's good. I'm good. I have a college day for that. I literally do not care about my money. Do you feel like that's a demon that you fight is like any alert toward? No, I had it when I was younger. I wanted to be powerful. I wanted to be important. I wanted to have money. I wanted to be seen. I wanted people to recognize my greatness like any person. Recognize me for what I do. I got all that. It literally does not even come up my radar to have more money is the last thing I'm thinking about. What I do want to have. I do want to, you know, be the greatest investor of all time. Yeah. Like to me, that's meaningful or be one of the, I want to be like, I know I'm out Rushmore for angels. Yeah. I want to be out Rushmore for all investors. So when you guys do your thing in 10, 20 years and it's like, okay, you know, here's Doug Leoni and Moritz and, you know, here's, you know, John Doar, here's Gurley. Like, if we are making a Mount Rushmore. You want to be on that with them. I would like to make it there or at least be in the conversations. All right, listeners. We kicked Jason out of the room again because we have our next sponsor of the episode are very good longtime friends over at tiny. The Berkshire Hathaway of the Internet, if you recall. Indeed, indeed. There are so much so the Berkshire Hathaway of the Internet that as we told you about a few seasons ago, they literally built a business on the Internet selling bus of Warren and Charlie that you can order. Berkshire nerds, not so long. Berkshire nerds, that story. That's not what we're here to talk to you about today. They go. They've got something new to share with us this season that we've been talking a little bit about, kind of from the founder angle, but we want to share with you from the VC angle. Yeah. So the core business of tiny is acquiring wonderful Internet businesses. These are businesses doing 5 million or more in revenue at 30 to 40% operating margins. Well, and the DNA really comes from Andrew and his partners originally running MetaLab. And of course, it was a very successful and is a very successful design agency. That started spitting off cash. What do you do with the extra cash? Well, they know how to run a great Internet business with MetaLab. And so they started buying more and more and more businesses. And so now with this awesome portfolio. Kevin, is it a dribble pixel union creative market 80-20 girlboss? These are all tiny companies and. So what are they doing differently now? It's funny. It's different in a sense, but it really is the same tiny playbook that they've always been running to buy wonderful Internet businesses. But something changed in the last five years. We were in this crazy go-go era where lots of businesses, even ones that really aren't the shape of what venture capital should be funding. Well, most venture capitalists were funding those businesses too. And so you end up in this situation where you've got a lot of companies that have raised a lot of money that probably aren't tripling, quadrupling you over a year the way you would expect a venture business to be doing to raise their next round of capital, especially in this environment. And so if the business is growing 20, 34%, and it can get profitable or it is profitable, well, most of the time. That doesn't really make sense in the context of a venture portfolio. Right. But the founders probably want to keep running that business. They probably want to keep serving those customers doing their life's work. Exactly. And you end up with a lot of these companies in a portfolio that are like capable of being tiny like businesses but are not going to provide a big exit that's going to move the needle for the venture portfolio. Well, tiny realized they can provide the perfect solution to this problem for the VCs on the boards of these companies, for the founders running these companies, and most importantly for tiny to then come in partner with these founders and own these companies in perpetuity without looking for an exit. So really what tiny can kind of do is come in by the company from the VCs or a lot of the company from the VCs. The VCs get them by the back. Some were all the way back. And most importantly get their time back, get off the board. So they've capacity to do new deals. So it's great for founders to keep doing their life's work. They can figure out a structure with tiny or tiny things. Tiny is very good at figuring out structures that make sense. Yes, there are some factors. To align interest here. Yes, it's really super cool. Like honestly, like I've talked with a bunch of folks of varying different financial groups and institutions over the years who have had some version of this idea and it's never gotten off the ground and I'm so glad that tiny is now doing it. And they are the perfect ones to do it. And this is the perfect time to do it. So very excited for this to exist. Yes, well, if you are running a business like that or you are invested in a business like that or your friend is invested in a business like that, you really should shoot a note to high at tiny.com and just tell them that Ben and David sent you. Don't tell them Jason sent you. He's not here right now. You can say Jason sent him to. All right, thanks to Tiny. When you guys were having the conversation in 20 years and I'm gone or I'm retired, and you're saying, Mount Rod. I'm not talking about you retiring. Yeah, that was possible. I met Don Valentine when they were like, you know, he was not active at the festival when I pitched Mahalo. He was in the room he came up. I talked to him. Oh, he was still hanging out there all the time. Yeah, yeah, like why retire? He was just awesome. But you know, if you had that conversation right now about Mount Rushmore, like you got to, who's on your Mount Rushmore? Well, I mean, you got to have Don Valentine. Yeah, right, that's just not possible. And how are you scoping eggs? I don't need Paul Graham too. Well, yeah, I mean, you got Paul Graham is in the running for sure. But that's like a number of startups. But there's a lot of big ones in there. You have big impacts of programs. Definitely running. But okay, so do you go with John Doors in there along with... So if you're doing firms, it's a lot easier because you get Coach La Door and Perkins. Tom Perkins, you get the three of them at once. You do Sequoia. Which people forget. You were Coach La Spent a decade at Client and Perkins with John Doors. Yeah, and you had... Yeah, so I mean, you look at that firm. It's like, that's like the OKC with like James Hardin, you know, whatever. But then you have Doug Leoni, Mike Moritz, and Valentine. Roll off. Well, you got to get rich. Yeah, but you've been all of them there. You've been active all the same time. But those 30 years, and it's like, well, that's Mount Rushmore, right? So it's a Mount Rushmore of Mount Rushmore's. It's kind of how you might look at it. You definitely have to have the Sequoia Eiffliner. We just did Benchmark. You got to have the Fab for error of that. The Fab for error of Benchmark was truly something special. Yeah, sorry, I mean, it's kind of like... It kind of builds itself the Mount Rushmore right now, right? It's going to be Sequoia Eiffliner, Benchmark. And then we're like, we're going to have a big debate on the fourth arm, right? Yeah. Like, is it... Well, it just depends how wide we're willing to scope it. Is it like traditional series A type venture firm? I mean, is it Angelus Naval? Yeah. Do you put my C in there? Do you put... YC or Techstars? Both have a huge impact. Do you put, you know... Well, it's going to be in there. You can argue for a founder's phone. You can say YC in Techstars. And I have the founder's phone. It's completely different than the YC. What YC is, like... Yeah, for sure. I mean, three orders of magnitude. For sure. They've done the same number of companies, I think, but just in terms of returns. Yeah. But Techstars, I think, was a little before White Combinator. But anyway, you definitely have White Combinators, you know, and then running for that four-spot, I guess. And then who else would you put in there? Masa? She's... Oh, wow. You're a real... That's not a beta. Well, no, I mean, but you had... In that maybe found her's phone. In that maybe found her... In that maybe found her's phone. In that maybe found her... No, no, no, depending on... Excel would be in the running for sure. It's wrong, calm way. I think the way you kind of have to define it, which is unfortunate because it means that it's going to be a long-ass time before your firm hits Mount Rushmore. Is three successful generational transitions where each of the generations would have been on Mount Rushmore? All right, so then let's just do this. Instead of Mount Rushmore. Because we're talking firms. So for firms you do Mount Rushmore, right? So I think if you were just going to say the Hall of Fame. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Just the Hall of Fame. Yeah. And the Hall of Fame has, let's just say... Oh, dude, we should open the venture capital Hall of Fame. The venture capital Hall of Fame. The venture capital Hall of Fame. The investor Hall of Fame. Capital Alligator Hall of Fame. Top 25. I was trying to figure out when we were doing the Benzbrand episode research, which will be out by the time this comes out. Yeah. 24 AD Sandhill Road is a very special building. It was the fourth thought PowerPoint. The quadrice complex. Quadrice complex. Yeah. Office. Then it was Microsoft's second. You were probably only free people who wanted to shit about this. Oh, no. This is the end of it. This is the end of it. Wow. We're talking about getting all the other people off. Everybody else cares about this. It's not. It's like, and like, Sebastian who wrote the parallel. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You guys have taken this way too seriously. It's not bad. But then we're like a lone villain in David's house. TVI. I'm gonna say Hall of Fame. TVI, Merrill Picker. TVI. That's a good, I'm gonna say. Wow. I was just capital. One on 20. One on 20. I was just capital. Shasta Capital. All in this same building. And I think there's some space for rent in there. I don't want to go live down there. But like, I think we got to take out at least just to put the museum. Yeah, I mean, at Hall of Fame. The Hall of Fame. A Hall of Fame. A Hall of Fame is something we should wrap right on. We should just do it. We'll just do it. Yeah. We'll just do it like every year. We're in duck somebody. We'll get up there. The three of us and be like, yeah, yeah, yeah. This year we're in ducking. You just try to have a whole day totally do this. Can no hire like this. You know, Cooper's town. Well, no, there is a, what do you call it? There are, it'd be our Cooper's town. Yeah. There is the history museum. Yeah. That's for the PC, which is totally valid. Right. But it's not for capital allocators. It's not for people. So no, no. There should be a Hall of Fame. And do we, like, do we might as less style ask people for the real hard truth numbers? No, no, no, no, no. It's about impact. No, we decide. The three of us. We decide. It has to be impact on the game. The NGCA have like a lifetime achievement award. It's not the first thing. It does really exist anymore. Yeah, no, it's about impact. Legacy. Like the intent of the person. Right. This is why like Paul Graham would be like, you know, first ballot. This is why. Yeah. Okay, who are the first ballot entries? So obvious. We've already talked about it. We already talked about it. Those are all first ballot. And do we have anybody who we haven't talked about or who's not obvious, but would be a first ballot? Yeah, you're right. If you're under 20 years, you're not, like, just, like, like, just, like, let's wait to your 25 years in. Yeah. Just like the sports hall of fame. So you've got to have a, yeah, you've got to be, you're not playing in the league anymore. So Paul Graham's still playing in the league, right? Does Jeff Bezos count like, wow, I mean, how many investments has he made? That Google investment is crazy. So there's that, but there's also like, I think Amazon is the best venture firm of all time. And just in terms of like, it's internal. Oh, yeah, yeah. But like, so yes, capital allocating, lower KC, lower KC, they've been great at placing bets. But you're right. And this is probably the most successful angel of all time. Yeah, I mean, if you just did it on top of it. Yeah, I don't know. You know, when you're looking at it, I think you have to look at impact. Like impact on a game, legacy. So it's Carmelo Anthony, Hall of Fame, of course he is, but he didn't win a ring. But you know, he's just, he's Carmelo Anthony, right? Or Charles Barkley, he didn't win a ring, but. Okay, so then we got like Arthur Rock. Like you got to look at like the founding father type. Of course, of course. Yeah, that's no doubt. I mean, that's like going back to Bob Coosie or whatever, going back to like some really like, you know, people who built the league kind of situation before it became the league. Right? So you got the league and you have the people before the league, you have people in the league. You can generation with shit right here, you know, Patrick Ewing. Yep. So I think like you look at Gurley, like he's part of that Patrick Ewing generation, right? Yeah, yeah. That's the female eyes you want, Charles Barkley generation. You start talking about Founder's Fund or YC or Angelist. Like, okay, now you're talking about more modern era. Still going modern era after 2000, but if you started before 2000, it's a different group. You know, as we haven't talked about entries in Harlowitz in this conversation. Oh, I don't know. No, impact on the game. I'm not saying they're in. I mean, for sure. No doubt. First of all, they totally are. I guess. Impact on the game totally changed. I mean, I just feel like it's gratuitous. It's just like raising $10 billion, $3 funds a year. I want to see what happens with the crypto stuff. I think they're just an index adventure. I find it quite soulless if I'm being honest. Like, I feel like it's a giant index on venture. And I don't think that their hearts are super into it. Well, I do think they have interesting ambitions, though. I think this like the GPMorgin. Yeah. It's more ambition than soulful. But there should be a GPMorgin or Goldman Sachs of Silicon Valley. And they are that for sure. I don't know. Yeah. Why does Goldman Sachs manage the money of entrepreneurs? I just feel it's too, okay, fine. But I just feel like it's too, it's too, it's like too premeditated. It's too, premeditated and less soulful. I feel like it's a soulful business where like your intentionality and your relationship with the founders really matter. It's not the craft. I mean, it's like the literally antithesis of it. It's an industrialization. It's the industrialization of it. It's the factorization of it. And listen, I'm sure it'll be very successful. At the end of the day, all the returns will be great, except for the crypto stuff. Well, I mean, that's a dream reversion. Because like when you get the law of large numbers, you have a dream reversion. Exactly. It will be a mean reversion for sure. I mean, that was, at some point they leaked a lot of their returns and they were like, eh, not fair. That was the 2015 thing. Well, they did actually was early. So yeah, that was stupid that the journalists didn't understand it. But there were some older ones. But it was like during that time, like you start comparing it to Sequoia or benchmark. I think I don't think it's going to, I think in the arc, it will not be comparable to benchmark at Sequoia. And we, I mean, made a lot of hay at the fact that they had, that they made $11 billion in profit on Coinbase. Right, which is. I do not think they sold out of that. No, they sold out of that. They did not make $11 billion in profit. Yeah, fair enough. Well, I mean, it's timing is everything. We'll see. I mean, it's interesting, too. I mean, having just done this benchmark episode, like the benchmark fun seven, one of if not the best institutional size fund of all time, just like unreal. Like, even that, like the, the fluctuation in the marks on that fund. And it'll probably end up between 15, 25x, maybe, but like, but it fluctuates up and down so much. Yeah, of course. I mean, it's, we'd live in a very volatile time, right? Yeah. So, yeah, I like the Hall of Fame idea. It's kind of interesting. I think we, that actually would be a fun thing to do. We should get some space on Sand Hill and put up a, No, I just, we could just do it as like a dinner. We just literally have, we don't need a space. We don't need a space. We get a, we get a, we get our, we could just start in a restaurant, but you could get like a little hall. Yeah. I say we're going to induct into the venture capital Hall of Fame, the following people. And here they are. And we just have three pictures. Boom, boom, boom. And you drop it. And it's like, he's got three people. And then people come up and say something about the person. And I think like you, we could do like the three who we would hope would be there. And then we'll have like one or two posts where you have the person who's being inducted chooses who inducts them. Sure. Who that's fun. Yeah. So, in the buff, Doug or whoever does Moritz. Yeah. Yeah. But John Parker does Moritz. Mike chooses who you know. Yeah. Jason Cahillicannis come up and be like. I read surrogate. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. John Dore would ask. Basos. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's killer. Yeah. I mean, we just do basos. Yup. Doug and Mike. Yup. And then who would you want to do Moritz? Yes. We could do one in Moritz exactly. Yeah. You know, whatever. Yeah. Because it would be anticlimactic if the only person, because we will induct on first. And if the only person that we inducted that year wasn't a living person who could attend. Yeah. You know, you do a combo. Maybe it's four people a year. You have to think, how do you want to get to 25? So maybe it's, you want to get to 25 to 50 over 10, 20 years. Yeah. Maybe it's three a year. In order for this to like feel good, I think you're right that it has to be about impact, not about returns. No, returns is like so. That would be like saying it's like album sold for the rock and hole full fame. Right. There are people that be a very interesting horror. What's the way to do it? That's what you say. That's what you say. Oh, what's the total assets under management? You know what I'm saying? Okay, dude. We get it. I'm so, yeah, they're the nickel back of that. Oh, I didn't read that. You said that. You said it. I wasn't talking about it. I didn't really say that. Oh, God. Oh, God. I can really even know there's so much about it. I'm not saying that they're the mill. No, they're like, oh boy. If you were to look at Ron Conway, did Ron Conway, who had a big impact? Ron Conway or in Drieson? I think it's a conversation. You know, and if you, because Ron Conway, when I came into the industry, like there was that one point, I was at the crunchies. And Ron Conway, at one point, like somebody said, hey, can everybody stand up who said Ron Conway invests in their company? And 100,000 out of that. And my mind was like, oh, whoa, angel investing is cool. I mean, I wasn't an angel at the time. I was, you know, long before I became a scout, but I always remember that moment when like 100 people stood up. That like inspired the sky. It was the scout that was essentially. Is that what put you in business as an angel investor? The scout was what put me in business. What happened was I had, was your Uber investment, you personally or was that a sequoism? That was a sequoism. And we were like, rule off an hour trying to figure out, like, do we let people know we're doing this or not? It was like a big controversy at the time. Right. We want to keep the stealthy, but I mean Travis knew, but you know, it was, it was a pretty great deal. You know, it was like, wow. You know, at the time, the carry 50, 50, 50 at the time. Yeah, they dropped it down after that. Every time I see Doug, the only thing is like 50. And they had 30% carry at Sequoia at that point, I think. Where is you? I mean, if I were you, I'd be like 50% carry to them. I can't believe it. Doug, they're so classy. Doug always made a joke. He would always make a joke. I was like, 50% carry. Oh, God. We get 30. You get 50. It was just funny. We get 30. We get a lot of it. Pretty funny. We're very lucky. I think if you look at what we do as capital allocators, I think it's a very special part of the, it's a very special function in the world. We make it very seriously as you do for the retirees you're investing about half of, but also I was just thinking about humanity. I don't mean to make it heavy, but these companies do move the human species forward as. Look at Elon. Exactly. So the human species getting moved forward by, as Steve Jobs would say in those commercials, like this is the crazy ones. They do need fuel. They, you know, maybe don't have an idea of, you know, if they should even build this company. And I think the capital allocator is really come in and say, here's some fuel. You know, here go fight that war, you know. It's fuel and it's belief too. I mean, like what you're saying, your story about Com is not uncommon, I think amongst founders. Oh, my God. I mean, look at, I mean, the story is about Don Valentine and Atari and other places where he was at Cisco. So we got to get this thing back on the rails. This thing's going to zero. Yeah. You know, like there's a lot of existential moments where things go to zero. And like, I can ask you, as we start to like drift toward the end of the episode here, that's your line. That's your favorite line. Drift. That's the bend signature line. I call us here to the end of the, the drift towards the end of the episode. Is it a good time together? Like, is this different enough from our normal show? Should we do this? What shall we change? Yeah, do you like this? I think a casual glass of wine and just, you know, if you have friends of the pod and you want to go deep and talk about them and over more casual, I sure. Yeah. I think it's a great way to just have somebody on again. You know? Yeah. So if you're profile, somebody like, I forgot that I had, do had done like the first episode with me and that was more about my career and more details. So I'm sorry to tell stories over again. Let's talk about some other stuff. Yeah. So, I think it's a good time. I think it's a good time. Our audience was, why did this song, this format? Well, part of what we, you know, like Lex has done so great with his show. Yeah. But, but those type of conversations, but I feel like that's more, what's the way we're going to do the other wayward. Our shows are about the business of tech. Yeah, you know, his is intellectual about that. It's not about that. I don't know why he's in the tech, but I like the format. And like Kevin Rose used to do with foundation series and like... Yeah, I mean long-for-ung interviews like Howard. I mean, I think Joe Rogan stole it from Howard. Yeah. And I think it's now Lex stole it from Joe. Yeah. I want to seem to say, stole. I think, you know, inspired by. Yeah. So Lex is clearly inspired by Joe. And Joe was, Joe was in the running to replace Jackie Martling on the Howard Sternship. People don't know this. So he was very enamored with Stern. And he wanted to be Stern, I think. And he eventually has supplanted. Yeah. He did, he did become Stern. Yeah, he did become Stern. And so good on him, yeah. Right down to the, you know, serious Spotify. Like right down to it. Well, yeah, doing a platform. Yeah, doing a platform. Which is what Stern did. Stern had multiple platform deals. He did syndication first. Then he did the serious XM1 because it was a new platform and he built the platform. He used his number one show to build their platform, right? Which is I think what, yeah. Which is, but actually bring it all the way to full circle back to Charlie Rose. Like, yeah, he was like a, you know, business, I mean, he needed more than business, but like he would have. He could have culture, business, anybody in New York, because New York, everybody in New York was pretty fucking interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And he would have a publisher and author of somebody who does films, you know. He would have like Spike Leon, you know, he'd have Woody Allen on. He would have, you know, any actress on who was doing something interesting, any novelist, Margaret Atwood, anybody, which is coming through New York on a press tour. You know, you, you would do your press tour and then you would just go chill with Charlie and you would get to do something long for you. Yeah. It was like a little like sort of more jazzy, you know, like acoustic. So I like this format for you guys. Listen to smart list at all. Do you know about that show? I have listened to one or two episodes. It's Batman, Will, Arnett, Arnett, and then somebody else. Yeah, the guy from Will and Grace Sean. I don't know who that person is, but they bring on a surprise guest each time. And they, and the other people don't know. Yes. So they're not prepared. Yes. And it's like, it's like Katie Perry. It's like Chris Pratt. Yes, become a big deal. I kind of want to do that of tech. But like, wait, you and I don't know who the, one of us is bringing somebody down. You guys are not good. You can't make, you got to know the person's background much better. But they all sent to carry a certain charisma with them. That R&D doesn't have that. Yeah. But maybe it doesn't have to be a surprise as much as like, well, the other thing is that even though they have guests, the show is actually about them, the guest is a prop. In a way, yeah, I guess. I've only listened to one or two. You know, I see it in the rankings. Like it does incredibly well. Like it's a top 10 or top 25 podcast. Is it part of a network? Is it part of Spotify or something? I don't think so. So I see it on iTunes, right? I think so. Yeah, it's really weird that like, Spotify doesn't allow Joe Rogan and call her daddy on iTunes because the advertising would be huge. Right. So why not bake the ads in and put them over? There's some NBA that's run the numbers that says it's more valuable if it's driving new subscribers to Spotify. I guess that's it. I guess that's it. Oh, guess you know what? They want to be able to have those new subscribers. So when they go renegotiate with the music, I saw they're doing audiobooks too now. That's the next piece. Yeah, that was the next piece. Yeah, they're doing audiobooks one off purchases. Smart. I mean, audio is great. All right. It's getting really hot in here. It's getting so hot. We got hot. We're in like a sauna. A new, yeah, David's new house. David just moved. David's got a new empty house. There's no way it could succeed. It's sort of like the shining. There's no furniture. We just feel like this room is closed. This is all from Craigslist. All of it literally in the last two days. That explains the smell. That, all right. You could have, I mean, listen, your rich dude just going on the bros. Oh, my son, Craig, we can't all be Jason Calakitas. Yeah, you're good. No, come on, man. I know those fees. Oh, my God. I have Craigslist. I love Craigslist. I love it. You buy use furniture on Craigslist. All the time. I do not buy new furniture. All right. I bought a temporary couch to Craigslist. It was a thrill of the, oh no. No, no. You're going to get robbed. Don't do it. It's too crazy. Craig, new marker, I love you. All right. Thank you. Thank you. To Vanta. Oh, Vanta.com slash. A choir. Oh, there you go. Vanta.com slash acquired. Oh, thank you. Also, you don't know who the other sponsors are because we haven't, we don't tell for them like with you because we like, we felt very strongly that it was, you know, we wanted to make their use of your time. I love reading the ad you can't, I mean, who you want to read our brex ad? They don't sponsor my pots of knowledge. Brex, maybe they have. I don't know. There's also a lot of ad loving it. Brex, Brex, yeah. I know, I know, I know, I know, I know. I use brex. I think we use brex. It is one of my companies. If you're enterprise, if you're global by far the best corporate spend management. It's much more than a card now. Yeah, for expenses and everything like that, right? And then they've kind of expanded behind that. So you can give cars to each of your employees. And then if they screw up, you can turn it off or something. Yes, exactly. They jump free, approve some budgets. Yeah. You don't want people jumping the fans and don't crazy. All the listeners know because they heard it like an hour ago. They're very familiar. Oh, that's it. Yeah. So that's Brex. Yeah. And then use the promo code to us. We share this last sponsor. These are great folks. These are like dear friends and geniuses and rac contours. Masterworks? No, no, no. Think smaller but bigger. Smaller but bigger. Literally small. Oh, you got to get a secret. But secretly huge. Tiny. Oh, tiny of course. Yes, they're buying companies. Yeah, buying companies. They're doing a good job. Yes, they're creating like the Berkshire of the internet. They're going to go. And can you imagine a better time to get the monkey off your back of venture capital? And some of your company. Let's secure the bag. Secure the bag. Secure the bag. Let's go. Secure the bag. Let's go, man. Trust me, if you haven't secured the bag yet, it's a wonderful experience, man. There's nothing like getting home with the bag. You get that tiny bag. Get that AOL weblogs. Exactly. Oh, man. Let me tell you something. I'll tell you the story. I'll tell you what happened. I got this a funny story. I'm in my office and I got a bank of America and I got like low thousands of dollars in my bank of America. I got an American Express car with 10 negative 10 on it. And a visa with negative 5 or 10 on it. And I'm sitting there and they're like, oh, wires are good. You know, the BD people are AOL and so I'm like hitting refresh on the thing. This is 2000 refresh. I'm hitting refresh. I'm hitting refresh. And then, Bing, Bing, Bing, Bing, Bing, Bing. You know, all the numbers come in for the whole amount. And you own most of weblogs. Brian and I were equal partners. Then we had Peter Rohan, someone who had shipped and then Mark Cuban was our big investor. And by big investor, we put 300K and for 5%. So that was a great outcome for him. Wow. Yeah. Or more. Maybe one 10%. I think one 10%. Anyway, long story short, my wife comes in. She said, you okay? And I said, what? She said, are you crying? And I reached up and I had a tear in my eye. You're like, this is a new experience. And I've never had this before. And she said, I said, she said, why are you crying? And I said, my family will never have to worry about money again. Because I spent my whole life worrying about money. Yeah. You know, my dad had lost the business. It was a very cathartic thing for me. And I think people, you know, who are already rich, you know, or maybe who come from means just they don't understand the concept of living with the fear of being broke and in debt, all the time. And then when you have the bag, you secure that tiny bag. It's a tiny bag. But it's filled with diamonds and cash. And you just open it up and say, thank you, tiny. Thank you, tiny. Thank you, tiny. You're really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really give us a thing. Oh, we don't need them. No, no, no, no. Is it a higher tiny? And tell them about everything. Whatever it says, like just know that tiny one. Tell them that Ben David and Jason. You can mention Jason. Yeah. You should have did by a one touch express machine in Bauder-Georah, one touch express machine, which at the time was like two grand. And I was like, this is unbelievable. That's the, that I tried to buy a Ferrari. They wouldn't sell it to me in Beverly Hills. You were the refer, no new money or something. Yeah, basically I went in there and they're like, oh, yeah. I like to buy a Ferrari today in the 430 and they're like, oh, we don't have any available. And I was like, okay, can I put myself on the wait list? We're not taking the answer to the wait list. So I said, this guy, can I ask, what do you do here? He's like, we sell Ferrari. So I'm like, to who? You know, you know, this is part of their strategy. It's part of the strategy. It's part of the strategy. I was like, how the Ferrari is, but they don't sell the Ferrari's to build this. We're not putting any financial list. I was like, well, how long is the wait list? He's like, I was like, okay, I was like, I'm a cash buyer. He's like, everybody's a cash buyer. I'm like, okay. Can I ask you a question then? He's like, sure, come into my office with like a espresso. He wants some Pelagorean. I'll say, I'm good. He wants some Pelagorean. Like, I'm going to offer me Pelagorean espresso and I was like, I said, I have the same what touch. Sure. And like, it's like a tie and guys like, I was like, I don't mean to be rude, but what do you do here all day? He's like, well, we deliver the cars and we service them and we sell used cars. We put the car to pre-owned certify it for more. And I was like, oh, I was like, well, I would take a pre-owned one. He's like, oh, well, the one you're looking at is pre-owned. I was like, no, no, the one I'm looking at, the fourth or the red one out there. That's the one I want. That's got a sticker in the window. He's like, yeah, no. We certify them. We put the sticker on the window. And I was like, oh, well, that goes for $230,000 or whatever. And so, yeah, what do you want for? He's like, $300. And I was like, you're like, the sticker says the same thing. No, no, no, no, no, no. It's a potential. He used one I was looking at. He's like, you can't get these cars. And I was like, so you pay over $70,000. He's like, it only has $2,000 miles on it. And I was like, $2,000 miles, $70,000 more than new. I was like, why wouldn't I buy a new? He's like, because you can't get them. And I just saw such an idiot from Brooklyn who doesn't understand the concept that people would pay over the car. And I'm just perplexed. That would bother me too. I was like, well, let me think about it. And I left. And then I was with my friend. And I was like, and I had the Rob report. Like number one car was the Ferrari F-30. And that turned the page of his Corvette C6 was the number two car. And the starting line was make Ferrari buy two for half the price of a Ferrari and beat them off the line. Or something like that. And I was like, let's go to the car. Let's go to the Chevy store. Let's go to the Chevy store. I'm walking. There's Corvette's everywhere. The guy that looks at me, he goes, you want to buy a Corvette? I said, yeah. He said, if you buy a Corvette today, I'll give you $5,000 off. I was like, yeah. So we'd go out on the 405 and we're driving the Corvette. And he's like, this is a Corvette son. Like, you're going 70 miles an hour. I'm not selling this car to you unless you hit that gas much harder. And I said, OK. And I punch it to 100 miles per hour. And I was like, yeah, how does that feel? I'm like, great. We go back. I'm not home with the Corvette. I come home with a yellow convertible Corvette. And I was like, when I went to the Ferrari, I was like, this thing only costs 65 grand. It's like 70 and I got 5 grand off. And it's American, baby. And it's American. And that was the car that I famously was according to Gauker. Robert Skolman, myself, in Elon, went Elon got the first P1 of the Roadster. He was like, I got it. I was like, oh, let's meet in Bretwood. And we were driving them. It was easy. We were driving them along since that Boulevard. The Spirit Drive. The Spirit Drive along since that Boulevard. And we did it like five times. And five out of five times, the Tesla just destroyed the Corvette. And I was like, I'm doing something wrong. And then we switched cars. And I was like, no, electric's going to beat everything. And this was the first one that, you know, first, that was the one, the prototype. And that's in space right now. It's the Cherry Red one. That's the one that's in space. And there's a famous photo of me and Elon in front of the Ferret. With the space. That one's it, but there's a famous photo of the two of us, you know, in front of my Corvette and his P1. And I remember that night like it was yesterday because before the iPhone, you realized like Robert Skobo is recording this on his Nokia, you know. These are the memories, right? This is the journey that you've been on. Yeah, it's pretty great. This is the stuff you just will cherish forever. My life is unbelievable. I am so grateful for it. And thanks for having me on the podcast. Thank you. Listeners, thank you so much, acquired.fm slash slack. Come join us. We'd love your feedback. Oh, that's cool. This is a new stick. Yeah. acquired.fm slash store. You can buy cool shirts. Shrack. This is a slash jobs. Find your next one. Quired.fm slash Craigslist. You can get a couch. That's right. Fired.fm slash David Beisusem Smilly furniture. My god, it is hot in here. All right. Let's go eat something. You share a Mexican. Yeah, I don't know what we're going for here. That's awesome. Oh, so fun. Thank you so much. Of course. All right, listeners, we hope you enjoyed that very first acquired sessions with Jason Calicanas. It's a new format we're playing with. We would love your thoughts. acquired.fm at gmail.com or tweeted us at acquired.fm. I am curious what you liked, what you didn't like. And on that note of feedback, we have something that we really, really want you to participate in. No pressure or anything, but it would mean the world to us if you did. We just launched the 2022 acquired survey. And we have had the wonderful problem of our audience growing a lot since the last time we did one of these. And we no longer feel like we have a great handle on who all of you are. And so we would be eternally grateful if you would spare the three minutes to participate. Tell us a little bit about yourself. 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