Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy - Dave Fontenot - The Monastery of Code - [Invest Like the Best, EP.365]

Episode Date: March 19, 2024

My guest today is Dave Fontenot, founder of HF0. Born out of Dave’s experiences in monasteries across the world, HF0 is a twelve-week residency for repeat founders to supercharge their next venture. For 12 weeks, 10 teams of engineers relocate to HF0’s house in San Francisco. During the residency, everything is taken care of so their sole focus is coding and building. It’s one of the most interesting incubators I have come across and we discuss the model and its monastic origins in detail. Please enjoy this conversation with Dave Fontenot. Become a Research Analyst at Positive Sum Listen to Founders Podcast For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page here. ----- This episode is brought to you by Tegus, the only investment research platform built for the investor. With traditional research vendors, the diligence process is slow, fragmented, and expensive. That leaves investors competing on how well they can aggregate data — not on their unique ability to analyze insights and make great investment decisions. Tegus offers an end-to-end platform with all the data you need to get up to speed on a company or market: up-to-the-minute financials, customizable models, management and culture checks, and, of course, our vast and growing library of expert call transcripts. Tegus is changing the world of expert research. Learn more and get your free trial at tegus.com/patrick. ----- Invest Like the Best is a property of Colossus, LLC. For more episodes of Invest Like the Best, visit joincolossus.com/episodes.  Past guests include Tobi Lutke, Kevin Systrom, Mike Krieger, John Collison, Kat Cole, Marc Andreessen, Matthew Ball, Bill Gurley, Anu Hariharan, Ben Thompson, and many more. Stay up to date on all our podcasts by signing up to Colossus Weekly, our quick dive every Sunday highlighting the top business and investing concepts from our podcasts and the best of what we read that week. Sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @patrick_oshag | @JoinColossus Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant (https://thepodcastconsultant.com). Show Notes: (00:00:00) Welcome to Invest Like the Best (00:04:05) First Question - Dave’s Journey to Meditation and Monastic Life (00:07:25) From Monastery to Coding: Finding Flow in Programming (00:08:32) Creating Spaces for Uninterrupted Creativity: The Birth of HF0 (00:20:24) A Day in the Life at HF0 (00:25:15) Why 12 Weeks? The Philosophy Behind the Duration (00:27:14) Selecting the Brilliant Minds for HF0 (00:31:43) The Thin Line Between Visionary and Crazy (00:34:39) Creating Space to Meditate  (00:37:24) The Economic Model Behind HF0 (00:41:36) Building Successful Residencies (00:44:48) Expanding the Residency Model to Universities (00:52:52) Understanding Engineers and Hackers (01:02:01) The Kindest Thing Anyone’s Ever Done For Dave

Hello and welcome, everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy, and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, stories, and strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. Invest like the best is part of the Colossus family of podcasts, and you can access all our podcasts, including edited transcripts, show notes, and other resources to keep learning at join colossus.com. Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of Positive Sum. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of positive sum. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of positive sum may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. To learn more, visit psum.vc.

My guest today is Dave Fontanette, founder of HF0. Born out of Dave's experiences in monasteries across the world, HF0 is a 12-week residency for repeat founders to supercharge their next venture. For three months, 10 teams of engineers relocate to HF0's house in San Francisco. During the residency, everything is taken care of, so their sole focus is on building. It's one of the most interesting incubators I've come across, and we discuss the model and its monastic origins in detail. Please enjoy this conversation with Dave Fontenon. What was the pathway to the monastery?

In retrospect, it's much clear. It was my first major heartbreak. In the moment, I didn't know that this was the reason why. But looking back, I couldn't handle it. I had a pretty severe ADD, and so I was on an ADD medication, and I blamed being on the medication for things not working out. And so I stopped taking the ADD meds, but then I couldn't read. So I needed to build natural concentration.

So started meditating. In the beginning, it was really hard. I'd meditate for 15 minutes so I could read for 15 minutes. and then it became so much more than that. Can you tell me about the first day there? Well, the first retreat I did was a Gwenca of Aposina retreat. It just felt so spacious to just be able to sit and feel like I had an infinite time. I think there's something about feeling a sense of abundant time that's really powerful.

Even though it's 10 days, it's a finite amount of time. But if you haven't done a 10 day before, stepping into your first day of a 10 day, you're like, wow, this is an expansive time. It's more time than I can even imagine. The 10 days really powerful. And they figured this out thousands of years ago. The important thing is that you have enough time to have a breakdown and a breakthrough in 10 days. That's the cycle.

The distribution, almost everyone has within 10 days of just sitting and meditating with yourself, not writing, not talking, not reading, just being with yourself. Pretty much everyone has a breakdown and enough space for a breakthrough. challenge of seven days is there some distribution of people like myself who on day seven have their breakdown if the retreat ends you haven't had your breakthrough yet whereas 10 days pretty much everyone that I talked to is done a 10 day and has stuck it out has both a breakdown and a breakthrough so what was the longest stretch that you spent in any one place I did a retreat in this beautiful rice valley in northern Thailand and it's called prow for six weeks

at that point in life I was spent a couple years where we're my main focus in life was meditation. I went on a lot. It was like two years of just seeking out different meditation masters and learning different techniques. And just the capstone, like end of that period of my life. And we did three hours of yoga every day that was super intense. And we meditated. And I wrote a ton on this retreat. If you think about the way that these things, which have been around forever, are operated, I'd love to go into as much detail as possible, because I know it's very relevant for everything you're building now and what we'll talk about the rest of our conversation. Just to go through the details in as granular level as you're able of what they do so well

to allow for a different kind of experience, the back of house of the monastery or whatever, the things have been figured out over centuries, what stands out to you as most important? The biggest one thing is this. It's that you don't have to worry about time at all. Your relationship with time shifts drastically because I don't. don't need to be keeping track of time. There's a gong that rings that lets me know it's time to eat. And besides that, I'm pretty much meditating. So there's some beauty to being in a state of life where there's not really a space between the thing, the core thing that you're doing. There's

just the thing. There's just the breath. There's just the meditation. And so it's less about the specific things that they're adding to the experience and all about what they're subtracting. It's that you don't notice all the other things of life. Maybe you notice your body's aching, you're sitting for a while. But at least within their control, they've subtracted every single thing. It's just so relaxing. Your nervous system just relaxes into it of just knowing that there's relatively infinite time to just do the thing, whatever that means for you.

I'm in the context of the monastery. it's meditation in the context of HF0, it's writing code. When I started coding, I was a freshman at Michigan. It's in my first coding class. I decided to take accelerated intro to programming, even though I'd never coded before, because at the orientation, they said, accelerated intro programming is for if you have four plus years coding experience,

or you're just really passionate about programming. And I was like, well, I'm passionate about programming. I'd never coded before. But I'm in this class, and it's so hard. The other kids in the class were incredible. programmers already and I never, I thought we were going to type zeros and ones. And I just remember there were a few key moments in that class where there was a problem I didn't know how to solve. And I just went to the basement of the Eeks building and I was like, I brought a bunch of Mountain Dew

with me. I was like, I'm just not going to leave until I figure this out. And in that expanse where time ceases to exist and you're just solving the hard problem that you need to solve and there's nothing else, so much magic happened there. And, The monastery is similar in that you don't have to be whacking your head at a problem, but you can just let it unravel. Because you have seemingly, I call it relatively infinite time to dissent it. HFs are similar. My vision from early on the hackathons, I was coding in that basement and I was just like, oh my God, I just want more space like this. And I started to envision a world where people could just build and not have to worry about anything else.

And I almost imagine being able to throw a pokey ball that created this bubble and you could just jump in. this bubble and just float in it and be plugged into the matrix writing code, that's actually my vision is just to be able to fully suspend yourself into the matrix and write code. And so I started thinking, how do I create more space for myself to do this? Now is when I went to my first hackathon. I never really built anything before. And I was just like, whoa, a whole weekend where you can just build. And then I got hooked.

And the key with the hackathon isn't just that space. It's similar to the monastery. It's all the things you're not doing. You're actually not going out on a Friday and Saturday night, that you're not trying to meet up with friends, that you're not doing this. You're not going grocery shopping. You're not worried about food. You're not a bunch of things. You're just fully focused on building.

And hackathons give you that for a weekend. And I got really into hackathons. End up throwing the largest hackathon in the world helped a bunch of universities start and scale. They're hackathons. But really, the vision I've constantly been looking forward to is this world where you can just build and not have to worry about anything else, not just for a weekend, but as a way of life. Yeah, hackathons gave that to you for a weekend. With HF0, it's really my next foray into how do we expand that out? Right now, it's 12 weeks.

But really, in the future, how do we create an institution that just takes care of the most creative people in the world that takes care of the builders and just allows them to build? What are the secrets about removing complexity and distraction that excite you most having been there? Because almost everybody listening, myself included, have never been in a three-month distraction-free building-oriented zone. So this is a very unusual state of being that you've created and now you can give us dispatches from it. What do you think would be the most surprising or interesting things about what that unlocks having no distraction, having no complexity? just having the single thing. Your relationship with what's possible shifts, the thing that you're not sure if it can even be built

all of a sudden becomes possible. And you're like, you're sitting there and you're like, wait, actually, you know what? If I have 12 weeks undistracted, if I have two weeks, undistracted, I can build anything. The way I put it is that you can meditate anywhere. You meditate in your room.

You really don't need anything. You can meditate anywhere. But for some reason, when you go on a retreat, you end up going 10, 100x deeper. I would even argue 100x deeper. Like you go to depths that you didn't know were possible. That's the big unlock. And I think similarly in HF0, we mainly work with repeat founders. A lot of these founders have done really legit stuff in the past.

Five of the founders who joined the program in the last year built multi-billion dollar companies before this. They've built really impressive stuff. and then they come into HF0 and at the end they're just like, wow, that was the most productive 12 weeks of my life as an engineer and it expanded what I thought was possible. A lot of these repeat founders will come in and they're building the hardest technical thing of their life, the hardest business of their life. And it really is at the edge.

A lot of these founders, they already took a big swing before and now they want to take the biggest swing of their life. They want to birth their life's work. a lot of them are building companies that not just from a technical standpoint, but really are at the edge of Like a scale of ambition. Yeah, they're taking the biggest swing of their life. And when they come in, they're not sure if it'll work. And then when they're walking out, there's a personal shift that happens deeper inside that you see manifested in the startup.

To us, our view is that startups are outer manifestation of someone's inner world. But the biggest thing that happens during HF0 and the biggest thing that happens during a meditation, retreat isn't the realization that you have during the meditation retreat. People build incredible things in 12 weeks. People say they build like make two years of progress in 12 weeks, but it's not even what you build there. It's the shift that happens and you knowing what's possible and knowing what you're capable of. You already knew you were a very capable person, but now you've unlocked another order of magnitude of that. And that plays out for the rest of your life. It's like a personal frontier. Yes. Let's talk for a while about the category of residence.

So I think HF0, the thing you've created, I want you to describe it. You start by describing just what it is, the details of the thing itself. And then if it's the first of this new category of thing, residences for building companies, I want to talk about how big you think that can get, how you want to proliferate that concept that's different from a YC or an accelerator, some of these terms that have been around for a while now in company building. So maybe you just start with literally what is HF0, the mechanics of the, the thing and then we'll talk about the category.

HF0 is essentially a 12-week residency. What we mean by residency is you live there. You actually live there. And pretty much everything in your life is taking care of so you can just build. So this vision I have of a world where people can just build and not have to worry about anything else, hackathons give that to you for a weekend. HF-0 gives that to you for 12 weeks. It's hard to get a business off the ground in a weekend. In 12 weeks, we've seen crazy stuff.

We have a team in the current batch that launched their app a few weeks before the batch started, and then just started hitting so much velocity during the batch. They, number 14 on the app store, doing like 7 mil annualized revenue. It's like nuts the results that we're seeing in those 12 weeks. And the reason is that we essentially audit your time as a founder. And we figure out every single thing that you're spending time on that isn't building product or selling product. And we aim to subtract that from your life. So you can just build.

And so the reason this is so powerful, especially for repeat founders, is that as a repeat founder, you've had a lot of success. You're probably angel investing. You're advising. You're getting invited to speak at conferences. You're maybe writing your first book. You have a thriving social life. Most of these repeat founders are either like married. They have a husband, a wife, or a fiance.

They're living with their partner prior to the program. You got a lot of stuff going for you. That's awesome. but you know that that wasn't the recipe that got your first company off the ground. And so the way that a lot of founders view HF0 is that it's this button that you can press that just subtracts everything from your life so you can drop back into that zone you were in when you were building your first company and even deeper than that. You can drop into the zone of your life to build your next thing.

People ask us, they'll be like, oh, or the startups that join the pre-seat or seat or and I'm like honestly like staged it doesn't really matter if you just stop everything that you're doing in your life for 12 weeks and you have someone else take care of everything the amount you can get done is insane and it's interesting I mean a lot of the things that we take care of individually are very mundane we just figure out everything that you're we only work with 10 teams at a time so it's customized each team we just figure out what's actually taking up their time and we try to subtract that from their life and so it's not like any individual things thing I mentioned, like food or like laundry or like cleaning your room, oh yeah, you could hire

someone for that. You could hire someone for that. You could hire someone for that. You could hire someone for that. But the real power is in aggregate. It's like a hundred little things. And when you constantly have someone looking out for you, watching out for you and just subtracting these things, getting these things out of the way in a monastery, most of the stuff that they're doing, you don't notice because they're doing a good job. Before it even distracts you, before it even gets in your way, before it even takes up your time. They're on it. Unblocking those things.

What's your favorite small example of an unblocking? The small examples are a bit obvious, like food. It sounds so mundane. But having rotating chefs that cook incredible food that's super healthy to your dietary preferences, and a gong goes off at 1230, and a gong goes off at six, and you just don't need to worry about time. And you just hear this in the back of your awareness as you're writing code. It's like even the touch of having the gong.

You're just coding. You're in the zone. It's not like some alarm that just completely, throws you off. It's just something that enters the back of your presence. And you're maybe writing code. You're in full flow and you just have a little light ping in the back of your head that's like a healthy, nutritious food. That's delicious. That's upstairs. And at the right stopping point, I should go and grab some. The actual amount of mental space that is saved up by that flow is massive. I always tell the founders at the beginning of the batch, I'm like the only thing

that makes me angry. I don't really get angry. But the only thing that makes me angry is if you knock someone out of their zone. Because when you are really in your zone as an engineer, you're writing code, you're getting out of the way and letting it flow. And so much of the brilliance of engineering happens this way. And so being able to essentially hack this continual flow state, I'd say, look, for most folks, maybe they get a couple hours of flow state a day. Maybe. I think a lot of folks never really reach full flow in their normal life. Whereas in HF0, you can have uninterrupted flow state for weeks. Really, the big unblockings are actually when you're holding yourself back.

One of the powers of the residency is the surface area that we have with the founders. If you were just in your own apartment, we were trying to unblock things that are taking up your time, it would be really challenging. Because really what we're doing is we're watching how you're spending your time and then helping identify where we can win back your time. And one of the other things that we notice is where you're blocking yourself. What we say HF0 is we don't really give advice at HF0. you're asking why it's different than accelerators, incubators, other things, why this residency thing is different. The residency thing isn't about advice. It's not about helping you fundraise. All the founders who, our bar is so high, we're the most selective startup program right now.

And so the founders who get into HF0, they're the folks who would be mentors at incubators or accelerators and stuff. They don't need advice. They don't need help fundraising. Everyone wants to give them money. But what can be really powerful is if we're able to show them a mirror that gives them a really clear picture of what's actually going on for them, where they're getting in their own way. And often we'll find that the biggest distraction isn't some crazy distracting thing like partying or going out or your social life or this and that. It's actually the second most important thing that you could be doing in your business or the third most important thing you could be doing your business. And what we'll find is we're able to see so clearly because we're just pretty much living

with you. We're able to see that, wow. And we can just bring it in a business. And we can just bring up in our check-in with the founders, hey, it seems like you might be avoiding the one biggest challenge of your business, the one hardest thing. It's not that you're not being productive. You're doing number two most important thing. You're doing number three. And you're spending all your time doing those things. And we might not necessarily know for sure what number one is. We can usually tell when they're blocking themselves or running away from that number one thing and being able to reflect that to them and create the space where they can figure that out, that's the biggest unblocking that people get.

And that's the layer that we're able to work with people at the residency that's beyond the mundane. That's beyond the list of 100 little things that take up your time that we subtract out. It's this deeper unblocking. Can you walk me through a daily cadence? You mentioned check-in. You mentioned a couple times for food. Obviously, my assumption is that the vast majority of the time they're just working and sleeping.

Walk me through maybe from your perspective, since you're not sitting there and coding the day in the life for you or for your team. Yeah, yeah. So maybe I can walk you through the week. That probably gives a better shape to the batch. So every Monday we have what we call demo dinner. It's the only mandatory thing in the batch because our whole thesis is around subtraction rather than addition.

A lot of other programs, especially for first time founders and stuff, they're like, how do we add in this programming, this content, this and that? Ours all about subtraction. So the only thing that you have to do during HF0 is show up to demo dinner every Monday. Each team has two minutes to show what they built or what they sold. No presentation, no fanfare, no show. It's just this is product that we built over the last week. Or these are numbers.

Usually they just screen share their striped dashboard. And maybe you tell the story of what impacted those numbers and stuff. And so it's really just actually just showing your real shit. So that's Monday demo dinners. We'll often have a guest speaker who's the founder of a multi-billion dollar company, who we think has particular expertise that's relevant to the batch. Guillermo Rausch from Bursel was our speaker last week. Eric and Cream, the founders of Ramp, will come tomorrow.

So that's Monday. Tuesday, we have check-ins with each team. And this is really where we're able to hold up the mirror and say, hey, fill us in on what's going on. What are your biggest challenges? And we don't necessarily give you advice or solve your challenges for you. We do two things. One is we ask questions and reflect back to you what we're seeing. This is what I mentioned earlier where we can see sometimes when there's a blind spot.

And just ask you, hey, do you think there might be something you're missing here? is this actually the most important thing, stuff like this? The second thing that we do during those check-ins is we introduce you to experts one-on-one based on whatever challenges you're facing. This is one of the keys to our approaches. We only work with 10 teams. So we can actually introduce each team to the exact expert. That's the best person in the world we know at each challenge that they're facing.

So those are the two things we focus on for check-ins. There's like 15 minutes, usually. On Tuesdays, Wednesdays, we encourage the founders to grab one other founder and go out to dinner with them. For the most part, as this arc of the week, the things that I'm meant, mentioning each day are pretty light. Demo dinner is probably the heaviest thing. Then the check-in's 15 minutes. It's up to you. You don't have to go to dinner, but a lot of the founders really going deep with each other because there's such talented people in the batch. I feel so grateful to be able to spend the amount of time that I get to spend with the founders who join HF0 because these folks

are so brilliant, man. They would never hire me. I feel like I somehow hacked life to be able to spend as much time as I get to with such brilliant people. Then Thursdays will have these, what we call concrete workshops. They're 12-minute workshops. All of them are designed to save you more than 12 minutes within the first week from that workshop. So I share a lot of my secrets and stuff of how I organize my life and how I, an example of this is we help you set up text expanors. They're very concrete. So by the end of them, you have the 20 things that you message the most to people. You have them set up as text expenders in your phone and on your laptop. That's an example. So it's a very concrete life hacks that immediately win you back more time than that.

And then Fridays we have a community dinner. Community dinner is really powerful. This is an insight that we realize that's probably different than monasteries don't necessarily do. But pretty much we realized that the mental cost of your friends asking you to hang out, even of saying no is pretty high. Having to say no over and over again, some people are good at it. For most people, it's a challenge. A really good friend wants to hang out. It's tough to say no.

So what we've done is we create a party full every week. that's 7 to 9 p.m. on Friday. And any person who hits you up about hanging out, you have a text expander set up, and you just send them a party full. So instead of having to say no, you just come for dinner Friday, come for dinner Friday, come for dinner, Friday, come for dinner Friday, 7 to 9 p.m. on Friday. We don't allow any alcohol substances in the house. It's essentially a 12-week monastic retreat.

We have an elixir bar with healthy drinks, smoothies, cacao, stuff like this. And it's a whole vibe at the house. And we don't invite the folks who come on Fridays. It's the founders in the batch. So the only way to get an invite is for a founder in the batch to invite you. And it's really cool because the people they end up inviting. For the most part, they're just actually saying no to hanging out with people. The people they actually end up inviting, it ends up being some of the most interesting

researchers and AI. A lot of these founders are repeat unicorn founders and stuff. And maybe 30, 40 people are there. But it's such an eclectic, interesting crew. Because these are the people that these founders who are in the zone of their life are choosing that they want to spend time with with a little bit of social. time that they're carving out. So that's from 7 to 9 p.m. At 9 p.m. We kick everyone out and we get back to work. Saturday and Sunday. Saturday and Sunday people are in the zone. There is a big

emphasis on talking to customers during HF zero and company building in general. So Saturdays and Sundays often end up being the most continual flow state for coding. Because Monday morning, you're meeting with customers who are expecting a whole new product that you've built for them for exactly what they need. So Saturdays and Sundays, the house is usually really quiet. And that's where people feel like the most uninterrupted time to just build. Why 12 weeks, not 24 weeks, not 36 weeks, not three years? Why not even call it three months? The reason for this is funny.

So most of the founders are living with their partner prior to the program. The average age of founders in HF0 is 28 to 35. And 12 weeks is the longest we can convince the partners to be on board with it for. Even if we say three months, the partner's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, three months. But 12 weeks. Pallitable somehow. It's palatable. And really, a lot of the founders who do HF0, and some of the founders have kids for the founders in our current batch already have kids. But most of the founders are in this demographic of their repeat founder, had a lot of success in the past, but they know they need to take the biggest swing of their life before they have kids. And often their partner, their husband, their wife, their fiance, hey, when are we going to have a family? And so actually, the partners end up really liking the idea of the program because they're like, oh, if they can get their company off the ground faster, then we can have a family. family sooner. If it could be longer, it should be longer. And in fact, after probably half the founders,

after each HF0 batch, try to recreate HF0 in their lives after that. When you're first signing up for it, I think 12 weeks is already a long time to be in a monastic flow state. So it is powerful that it has the ending. But actually, once people hit week three, week four, week five, and they're in flow, a lot of folks wish they could just have that for life almost. Do they see their significant others or kids during the time? Yeah, for sure. My co-founder, Emily, really helps a lot of the founders navigate this and stuff, but it's really about being intentional. It's setting up that date night that you have time carved out where you're fully present in the same way that you're fully present during the program with your company, with code, bringing that same level of presence to your partner

when you are with them, because you're not going to have as much time for them during the program. But I'd say most founders, if their partner doesn't live in San Francisco, they'll visit the partner will visit or they'll visit every other week. And then if they live in San Francisco, usually we'll encourage them to set up a date night once a week. How do you choose people? This question is probably more important than ever as it becomes more well known, as more people want to do it. There's 10 slots. As far as I know, you feel like that's the right size. So if you've got thousands of people that want those 10 slots, talk me through that process and what you've learned about running an efficient selection process. I'm sure the 11th is a very

impressive, someone you wish you could have? Honestly, this last application process, there were 40 teams that we thought. It was crazy for us not to back. There's just so many incredible teams that want to do this residency, that want a residency right now. And there's not really any other residencies. There's some stuff that's popping up. There's Neo for younger founders.

There's the residency at Nick's running. But right now, we have about 2,500 teams who apply to each batch. And we only except 10. So it's 2400. plus teams that want to join a residency. There's just not capacity. And so it's really challenging. My co-founder Evan leads our admissions, and he actually uses LLMs, sift through the applications and get what he's looking for. We're a people-driven firm. We're not a thesis-driven firm. We back the most brilliant engineers as early as possible. That's been my thesis from day one

when I started investing. And so that's really what we look for is this brilliance. The word brilliant has this connotation of a light shining that other things are attracted to. And so really my belief is that the only real defensible moat is having the best engineering team in the world. And so we really look for founders who are going to be able to attract even smarter engineers than themselves. That's the brilliance that we look for. And it's reflected in their writing. It's reflected in the way they communicate. It's reflected in the way they write code. It's reflected in the way their product feels. In terms of more specific things, the three things that we look for in founders that we think are the winning formulas, grit, storytelling ability, and product sense.

And our heuristic for product sense is how quickly can the founding team ship end-to-end consumer-grade product? I think actually most engineers can't. It doesn't matter how much time you give them. I venture to say 90% of Fang engineers can't ship end-to-end consumer-grade product. And it's not that they're bad engineers, it's that the skills required to contribute to a large system and the skills required to ship end-to-end product as a small team or just disjoint. They don't teach this in school. And so we really look for the top engineers in terms of this, what we call product sense. A lot of the teams that get into HF0, I mean, people ask, oh, do you back teams before they have product or before they have idea?

The people who end up getting an HF0, even between applying and getting the interview, if they're, they haven't built something, they probably don't build fast enough to get into HF0. Most of the teams in HF0, a lot of teams, especially bigger teams, plan in terms of quarters. Some startups plan in terms of months, some startups plan in terms of two-week sprints. The teams that get into HF0, they plan in terms of days. In two days, they can ship end-to-end product or end-end feature and then changes. And so we're able to evaluate this better than anyone else because of our experience with hackathons. While usually a whole business can't be built in a hackathon, no one knows better than us what can actually be built in 24 to 48 hours.

And actually for the top engineers with incredible product sense, so much can be built in 24 to 48 hours, especially when you're in continual flow state. So essentially, we look for the most brilliant engineers who are already the most productive engineers in the world because our product, HF0, amplifies their productivity the most. If you're already one of the most productive, let's call 10x engineers in the world, HF0 makes you 100x engineer. Given the number of these folks that you've met both with HF0 and the hackathons just in your life, are there favorite questions that you have to ask this type of person that you feel are the highest signal questions? The best questions are when you give the founder space to tap into their aliveness,

or their felt sense of what they're building. because that's the type of thing that you can't really prepare an answer for. And you can just feel it. The founder's eyes will light up. They're not talking from, oh, I memorized this before. They're not talking from the, this is the story I've told over and over again. They're actually talking from somewhere much deeper than that. They're talking from felt sense of the thing.

You know where I learned this from is I met Vitalik. It was crashing on our couch at Mission Control. Mission Control is this house I lived in San Francisco when I first dropped out and moved out there. That was in some ways, some of the inspiration for HF0 because so many incredible founders came out of this one small house. And Vitalik was crashing on our couch, and I remember thinking, he was telling us about all the things we don't need government for anymore. Same stuff he's saying today, by the way. But at that moment, I was like, I'm not sure if this guy is crazy or if he's visionary. And at that moment, when he was trying to convince

us to buy Ethereum early on, I thought he was crazy. Whoops. I realized in retrospect, reviewing that experience, the difference between crazy and visionary is consistency. When someone is visionary, they're not necessarily always right about their vision, but they're speaking from a felt sense of something. They're able to feel into something. They're seeing something that doesn't yet exist in the world. They're actually able to see something. They actually are visionary. Then when they talk about it, they might not have the perfect words, but you can tell that they're talking about the same thing because they can see it. And maybe they're talking about it from different angles.

Maybe they're talking about it from different perspectives. But there's this felt sense. There's this place that they're talking about it from that isn't scripted. That is alive in a way. It's live because as they're talking about it, they're seeing it. Often I'll notice that the founder's eyes are often to the distance, looking to the side of me, not directly at me, because they're looking at the future. looking at this vision that they have. They're feeling into this felt sense. And so my favorite

questions are the questions that can get in touch with that felt sense. Some part of that can be vision. Another part of it can be motivation. What at a deep level is motivating that founder. How would you encourage people listening to try to tap into the answers to this category of questions for themselves? How can someone explore the inner thing that can be made outer? I like how you put that earlier. I think everyone wants a vehicle for self-eastern. expression and creative expression in their lives somehow for lots of people that's a company, for lots of people that could be a journal, could take a lot of forms. How would you encourage people to try to get on that track for themselves? Yeah, meditate. Yeah, the answer is pretty clear. And

this means different things for different people, but creating space to meditate. For some people, that means running. For some people, that means swimming in the bay. For some people, that means sitting on a cushion and breathing. But figuring out what it is for you that really gets you in touch with yourself when it's not yourself on your phone or on your laptop connected to the world, connected to something deeper inside, what actually pushes you to keep going when you're running and you're tired and you almost have nothing left to give, but then you keep going, what's right there? For some people, it's lifting weights. And actually, one of the previous HF0 founders, Diego Rodriguez from CREA AI, he came by the house the other day and he was talking

to some of the founders in the current batch. And he was talking about how when he was in HF0, they would go workout every day. In HF. Zero, we really have an emphasis on exercise as part of what makes you most productive. And he said he would hit his limit and then he'd stop. And then his co-founder Victor told him one day, he's like, hey, that moment when you hit your limit, that's actually when the workout starts, when you can find what's there that allows you to keep going when you hit your limit. And so it's that when you're sitting in meditation. and you have a distraction, it almost pulls you out, but you like bring it back again. When you're running, you keep running even when you feel like you hit your limit.

What is there that motivates you? So that would be my recommendation is to actually just get in touch with the thing that motivates you. If you can actually be on the edge of your curiosity, there's authenticity there that can't be replicated any other way. What are the unrealized aspects of your vision for all this? Right now, only 10 teams get to go through. this and I love working with 10 teams. I don't necessarily want to scale up what we're doing. But I think actually there's just a missing institution in the world, man. Right now, a third of people in the U.S. get to go to college now, get to go to this institution where they

get to spend two to four years of their life being curious about whatever they want to be curious about. Not everyone. Or drinking and party. Takes advantage of it in this way. How is there not an institution for people who are in the prime of their career where people can just build and not have to worry about anything else? And the fact that we don't have an institution that creates that space for people hurts me inside. And that's why I feel so motivated to be building HF0 is that really this question of how do we as a society take care of our most creative people? Right now, we don't. We maybe give them money in some industries and tech and music and film. We have the money. But we don't actually take care of them as a human being. And the analogy I'll give

is what we're doing today in venture is the equivalent of taking the top Olympic athletes in the world and just giving them money and saying, see you at the Olympics. Maybe we make some introductions, but no, what do you do with the Olympic athlete? You'll figure out every single thing in their life that you can make better. You get them the best coach in the world. You get them the best dietitian in the world. You put them around the best peers in the world. You put them around other Olympic athletes.

In 50 years, there's no way venture looks like what we're doing today. The equivalent of we're giving Olympic athletes money and telling them to see it, there's no way. In 50 years, people are going to be dropping into these restaurants. They're going to be dropping an institution that actually just takes care of pretty much everything in your life so you can just build. And so much potential will be unlocked. Talking through what you've learned about the economic model behind all this, what is your economic model? And how do you think it remains to be tweaked to be even better? Are you paying for their whole stay?

What do they pay? What do you pay? How much do you own? They don't pay anything. So our model is that we take 3% of each startup. and then we invest 500K uncapped. And that's it. That's it, simple.

We did a ton of research on this and we wanted to make it really easy for founders to just be able to understand the deal. So it's 3%, 500K uncapped that converts at the price of your next round. Why those numbers? I'm just so curious about why not 5%, why not a million dollars at a 20 cap? Or do you think there's magic behind that or do you think it'll be played toyed with and experimented by lots that try this? It's not necessarily magic, but it's intentional.

So there's a few goals that we had. One, we didn't want to set evaluation for your company. So a lot of the founders that we're backing are ridiculously strong founders. I mean, Alex Atala, the founder and CTO of OpenC, started his next startup with us. Andrew D'Souza, the founder of Clearbank, started his next startup with us. David Vork, the founder of CIO, started their next startup with us. These are all repeat unicorn founders. We have a founder who we just accepted our first team for the next batch, who IPOed his last startup. Something about setting of valuation for them early on just doesn't feel right. So we really tried to engineer it where we don't set a evaluation at all. So that was one of the goals because honestly, like some of these founders, one, they don't even need a raise in the beginning. They're not looking for venture capital. They're not looking at other programs. They just want to do HF zero because the only thing they care about is their time and we're the only product built from the ground up to win them back time. So often we're like, especially for these top repeat founders where they're only investor or they're raising around out ridiculous terms. And so it's easier for us to not set evaluation. So that's one side of it. The other side is that we actually want to give you enough cash where even

if you don't do other venture. Roughly half of our teams already raised around before they did the batch. And then other half were the only venture money that they're taking. Maybe the only venture capital they'll ever take. We want to give you enough money where you actually can leverage capital to win back time during the batch, too. 500K is more than enough to do that to bring on someone else if you need to bring on someone else, to pretty much anything that's taking up your time, be able to actually bring on third parties or pay third parties to win back that time. So that's another part of it.

And then on the LP end, we've actually. done a bunch of modeling to structure the deal that makes sense for LPs. But essentially, I asked LPs like, what's the best deal that I can give founders that you feel good about? And then I worked backwards from there. I think most funds try to ask founders what the best deal the founders are willing to give them is. Whereas my approach is actually to LPs, hey, what do you need to see? And then trying to give the founders the best deal I can give them because my goal, I've done a lot of inner work on understanding what drives me. And I'm not really driven by money. I want to work with the best founders in the world.

So our deal is structured so that it works for these top repeat founders who wouldn't necessarily consider a program that's taking 7%. But at 3% for the exact product that they're looking for that no one else is really offering time back in their life. It's just a no-brainer right now. And is it safe to assume that basically if I think of you as a fund, the vast or all of your fund expenses are actually the house, the services, the people, the team. that is your expenses.

We spend a ton on which founder. Doing what we do with how well we take care of the founders, there's pretty much no other way to do it other than this residency fund model. So to your question, that is another key part of the only way you can justify the amount of expense that we spend per founder is if you're getting equity upside in their business. And really our fund is structured around $10 billion plus outcomes. We're really looking for the founders who are taking the biggest swing of their life. Like maybe their last company was worth $2 billion.

Now they're taking a swing that could be a generational company, could be a $100 billion company, could be the next NVIDIA. That's really what we're looking for, are people taking that big of swings. I know you're going to meet another person who could be a candidate to run another residency. So not only do you back founders, maybe you're also going to be backing or at least helping. You helped a lot of people at hackathons. This is a flavor of that, it seems. What do you think you'll be looking for in the people that might set one of these things up?

What are the attributes of somebody that could do what you do well? man, that's a good question. I spent a lot of time thinking about what makes founders, good founders. I have probably 20 friends who have started unicorns and stuff. I don't have as much training data on other people who have started residences successfully because actually outside of our residency, I don't know another one that I really look up to yet. But our hope is to actually inspire a whole wave of residencies. And internally, we started bringing our attention more to this idea of essentially backing other residences and helping them get off the ground because we realized how hard it is. The first year and a half of HF zero, we lived in the house.

And if we didn't, it wouldn't have worked. And this is where like people, oh, what if big fun copies y'all? I actually, I would love more people to start residencies and I would love to help you because I actually don't worry about competition at all. There's so many little things that you need to get right to make these work and to even have adults, especially with strong personalities, our founders living together in harmony. All of this to say, really, you'd need to find more folks like my co-founder Emily. She's really the secret sauce to the residency. What does she do to say more about her? I don't know if there's other Emmys in the world. She's one of one. She has such an insanely high level of empathy. She's able to see the founders

way beyond their company, really see them as a human being, really see, she can see when you're afraid. Doesn't matter how composed or you have it, she just sees through it. And so she doesn't do check-ins with the founders on their business. She does check-ins with the founders on them as a human being. And we essentially make adjustments to the batch. Every batch, we make adjustments that are specific to the human beings in that batch. It's funny. Two batches ago, we rewrote the values a new way to fit that batch better than this batch. We're swinging it the other way. We're nudging things. the previous batch people weren't hanging out enough. They were so in the zone working that they almost afraid to talk to each other,

knock each other out of the zone. Whereas then in this batch, people have so much chemistry between them that they almost like each other too much to hang out. Every batch is different. Pretty much every batch, to be totally honest with you, halfway through just about every batch, it would break if it wasn't for Emily. She has a one-on-one with every founder individually at some point in the batch. Her one-on-ones with the founders end up giving her the end up giving her the end

insight to know just the right way to nudge the culture of the batch to be what the people in the batch need. And before this, she's the best living community builder I know. Anywhere she goes, any city she goes in the world, not just for work, for HF0, any city she goes, she went to Portugal a year and a half ago. Next thing you know, there's a 16-person house in Portugal. She goes to Croatia sailing. Next thing, you know, 48 friends are sailing for a week together. Anywhere she goes, I mean, a lot of our friends say that anywhere Emily is home. I don't know how you find more Emmys because I don't know if they exist. I probably know more engineers than just about anyone else in North America.

That pairing, someone who deeply understands hackers, combined with someone who deeply understands living communities and people living together. I think it's not just finding one person. It's actually finding that type of Ian and Yang. Who's the best position to, for some reason, what popped to mind was if tomorrow there was the Stanford residency? And it was some building that John Doer builds at Stanford and some amazing person wants to go sponsor this thing. I would imagine you'd get 2,500 applicants to go be a Stanford resident. So what I'm trying to think through is what are the existing institutions that could, I guess this didn't really happen with accelerators or incubator.

So it would be a leap to think it'll happen here. But why don't the existing institutions that are hubs of the kind of talent that you're after? It just seems like such a simple, smart model to try. We're after a different town in that. We mainly work with founders who are 28 to 35, who are repeat founders, who are much more experienced than college students. But there's going to be a residency like this at every college, for sure, 100%. There was already something like this at Waterloo. It was called Velocity.

It's not quite the same anymore, but it was like dorm that you lived in if you wanted to build stuff. Good name. Inevitably, there will be a residency at most major engineering universities where you can take a semester off and just build. The key, though, is that they actually do the residency fund model. Because you don't want to be in a residency if you're not with other people who are as driven as you. PG talks about this all the time. The problem with co-working spaces and a lot of accelerators and incubators try to do YC, but with a co-working space. The reason that doesn't work is that if you're not insanely selective, you're going to have two things.

One, nascent ideas get shot down before they fully bloom because most ideas seem shitty in the beginning, even if they end up being really Airbnb probably for a lot of people where they're like, what? The second thing, though, is you need to be around people who are as driven as curious as you. So this is why the residency fund model is so key is that it forces the organizer to know actually there's accountability. If you don't get incredible teams, you don't get to keep doing this thing that you love. That is so motivating for me. Way more motivating than any potential financial return is knowing that I love doing this so much. And that if I don't find the best teams that end up making this sustainable, then I don't get to keep doing it.

So that would be the key. But yeah, Waterloo, Stanford, MIT, Michigan, all these universities are going to have residencies like this. My hunch is that you have to start with the right side of the bell curve. That's why we've started with the best founders in the world. There's pretty much no other program that's really been able to crack going to the right of the bell curve from YC. And we really spent a lot of time being intentional. Like you don't want to compete with YC. YC is so good at what they do. I'm not going to compete with YC on giving advice. They have so. much data, they give incredible advice. Gary, Michael Sibb, those folks are fucking awesome at what they do. And if you try to go head to head with them, you have no chance. So what we did is we spent a bunch of time thinking about what demographic isn't being served right now by YC and we built towards that demographic. That's how we came up with our deal. That's how we came up with the programming. That's how we came up with the messaging. That's how we make the founders and stuff. So most of the founders doing HF zero aren't considering any other program. And the key is that any residency that wants to start needs to be thinking in the same way. If you try to go head

to head even with HF0, with YC, you're going to end up getting the founders that don't get into those programs. So the real key is how can you engineer your program to be an incredible fit for the specific demographic that you're targeting? Who's your audience? So for us, that's repeat founders and first-time founders with breakout traction. One of the things we love doing when studying a company is studying all the failures that are adjacent to the business. Is there anything there? Any program that takes in talent, does something with them and graduates them, that you saw that failed that you think is instructive? I try not to look at what other people have tried because honestly, even if you did a lot of things right with residencies, if you didn't have Emily,

you wouldn't have been successful executing it. I'm much more on the Peter T.Lend on the learning from failure is popular to talk about, but at least in the context of doing new things, does not teach you everything. I'd say the biggest. thing that we learned is just looking at all the programs other than YC is that every program that tried to go head to head with YC lost because they got the founders that YC didn't accept. And so that was probably the biggest learning. And so we just engineered a program that went after a different demographic than YC. But I try not to learn too much from them. And really, I think there's a power and we don't even spend that much time thinking about YC. We really try to think from first principles

just around what our customer wants, what the founders want, what they need. And we know that if we can stay in touch with that, we'll constantly be a step ahead of everyone else because we're so close to our customer. We're pretty much live with our customer for 12 weeks. So that's the key. How do you decide what investors you want to cultivate as the preferred people that fund the companies coming out of HF0? This one's really hard. I'm trying to figure this one out. I think for us, for every founder, it's about them finding the right fit partner for them.

And so really we've been thinking a lot about the thing that founders waste the most time on within six months of HF zero is if they do a fundraise. That is the thing that they waste the most time on. I want to save them as much time as possible. And our whole thing is about taking care of you as a human, is about being human driven. And so how do we create an efficient process where you actually get to know investment partners as humans? And this is why our demo day is so special right now is that we only have roughly 10 teams demo, two minutes per team with 20 minutes. The rest of the time, as a GP, you can just go talk to the founders that you want to get to know, get to know them as human beings.

And each team sets up an experiential version of their startup. You can actually experience their startup. And not only do you get to see their startup, but you get to see their personality. And we only have 44 seats at our demo day. We only allow each firm to send one GP, no junior partners, no associates. So we really have been trying to create a space where the founders can just get to know these GPs as humans. because who am I to pick which GPs they should work with? They should work with the GP that believes in their vision that they really resonate with.

And that's going to be able to help them in the ways that they need help. Many of the best, what turned out to be the biggest outcomes, were often unpopular categories or even low status categories when they were started. Airbnb is a good example that everyone always cites. How much do you see the things being worked on inside of HF0 as reflective of prevailing trends, whether it's crypto at a certain time or AI at a certain time, versus just some wacky thing that you wouldn't expect that back to that point about self-expression is just for whatever reason the thing inside that person.

So we're industry agnostic and we back the most brilliant engineers as early as possible. That's our thesis. And I always tell our team to stay non-religious. Doesn't matter crypto's up, cryptos down, AI's up, AI's down. Just how do we stay non-religious about it all and just keep backing the most brilliant engineers as early as possible? That said, the most brilliant engineers constantly are trying out the latest technology to give them an edge. And so our view of AI is that AI is a tool, not an industry. And it's a tool that's generally useful across just about every industry.

And the founders who don't find ways to leverage it will get disrupted by the founders who do. So people like AI residency and I'm like, we look for AI hackers. We look for hackers who are messing with these tools because if you're not, you will get beat by founders who do. But it's less important to us whether they're in quote unquote AI company. I really don't buy this idea of AI company so much unless you're building a foundation model. who's your customer? That's what type of company you are. And so I think more than ever right now, it is crucial for founders to be steeped in first principles of working backwards from their customer. Right now I'm seeing more rampant than ever technology in search of a problem, hammers in search

of nails. And so we really look for the founders who understand their customer and are incredible building stuff. But really, if we're thinking about the business stuff, the key is, are they talking to their customer? How well do they understand their customer? Are they building backwards from their customer? I don't care what tools they use. I don't care if they use React on the front end or Angular. I don't care. I care about that they actually understand their customer. Are they building something that solves their problem?

For those of us that don't have the reps with engineers that you do, what would you say to help the layperson understand engineers better? I'm still working on this definition, but I'm zeroing in on it. My definition of hacker is essentially an artist who's not attached to any medium of expression. It's essentially an unshacken. artist. And this is important to understand that hackers are artists. I think a lot of people view engineers, and because we use the word engineer, they don't view it in the space of creative expression, but you better believe it's creative expression. The element of being an artist that I think

people neglect with hackers is understanding that it's really about expression. I realized this when I was running the hackathons. I started thinking about how do we end the hackathons in the right way. we end up coming up with this whole expo format that pretty much all the hackathon switch to. But the key insight here is that there's something about being seen in what you're building. That's actually really important. Fun to build. A lot of hackers like love writing code and stuff, but there's something about being seen in the right way by someone who actually understands you. Not just understands your work, but understands you when they see what you've built.

And this is the part that I think most people don't understand. And I think even most hackers don't understand about themselves that I think is the first principle that's led me to success building hackathons that people love going to. Say a bit more about the period of your life that was just hackathons all the time. Two days instead of 12 weeks. Any lessons that you've learned during that period that are distinct from what you've observed in the residence? So when we started MHACs, at the end of the MHX, the hackathon I started at Michigan, it

was the largest hackathon the world and it was the first hackathon ever through. At the end of it, I gave a speech that was like, hey, look, there's no good reason the largest hackathon in the world is here at Michigan. It's a good school, but it's not the best. The only reason this isn't happening at your school is that you haven't started it yet. So if you want to start the hackathon at your school or you want to scale it up to this size, here's my Facebook link, Bitley slash hell yeah, any number of else I just ran a script, hit me up and I'll come to your school and I'll help you get it started. And students from 28 of the 35 schools hit me up. So I dropped out two weeks later and just started traveling to these different universities,

helping them get their hackathons off the ground or helping them scale them up if they already had one. I really started zeroing on figuring out what is the lightest touch way? I can increase the chance that that school ends up having a mega hackathon. What I do is I'd go to a lot of the universities way before they threw the hackathon. I tell them, hey, call a meeting with your whole hackathon team. And then I would really talk about why we were doing it. I talk about why do we want to build this big hackathon. I remember this is actually from my meditation teacher from Dali Dama, this guy from his retreat.

Hudo is say, we run the risk of no transformation. That your hackathon could go smoothly, but actually the risk is that people come to your hackathon and leave the hackathon, the same person. And so the real opportunity there is the transformation. This is what I mentioned earlier. So I tell the teams, I'm like, hey, if y'all throw this hackathon, not ever, everyone, but some percent of the people, it might even be pretty high, might even be like 40 percent of the people are going to have their entire life changed. They're going to walk in the door of that weekend and walk out the door a different person. And then what I would do is I would say everyone,

the one thing you need to know about organizing a hackathon is that everyone has to help with fundraising, so everyone pull out your laptop and let's all send at least one email to someone that we know to try to get them to donate $500 to the hackathon. Because I knew if they got one yes email, then the hackathon would happen. So I'd really start with why and then think about the one concrete thing I could get that would set things in a motion. And so that's what I'm trying to figure out with residences right now. So if you're listening to this, you're thinking about starting a residency, the one thing I'd say is just start it. Don't ask us for permission, just do it. And then two, I need to figure out what the lightest mechanic I can do on my end that actually takes the people

who are thinking about starting them or who are starting them and trying to get them going, sets them fully into motion. It seems like the technology that's proliferating today is going to collapse the distance between imagination and reality, and that engineering is going to be a fuzzier concept that you mentioned hackers are just self-expressing. The barrier to entry there is if you didn't take the CS class like you did or whatever, you don't have that kind of brain, it's hard to do. There's lag between the code on the left and the outcome on the right.

It's hard to do. What do you think that means for the future of this? stuff that in five years time or two years time, you may not need to be technical at all to do a lot of the same things. Do you think that you will always edge towards what is more technical? What it means to be technical is just going to shift. You will be technical if you're building stuff. But the key is what I mentioned earlier is that felt sense. The key is way less about your exact coding skills. It's way more about you seeing something that's possible that doesn't exist yet. And you being in the felt sense of that vision, actually seeing something. For me, it's the

world where people can just build stuff, the world where people can just build shit and not have to worry about anything else where they can just suspend themselves in the matrix, suspend themselves in that bubble and just build. Whatever that vision is for you, what's going to happen is that if you actually do have that vision, you're going to be able to build it much faster. You're going to build it much easier. The barrier for that's going to be lower. The other thing is that as more people are able to build stuff, you actually start seeing more possibilities. As you know what is possible, you start envisioning more possibilities. To me, the technical, non-technical thing is actually more of an identity.

Maybe you're resourceful is the right word? I actually think when we were running the hackathons early on, I would be taking a bus to a hackathon. If someone didn't show up for the bus, sometimes I'd say, hey, hold the bus, and I would go to the center of whatever campus we were on and just convince random freshmen to jump on the bus and come to the hackathon. And I wouldn't look for the freshman who had done a class. I would look for the freshman who have ideas. That's, hey, do you have any app ideas? Hey, do you have any app ideas? Maybe the third or fourth person would be like, oh, yeah, actually, I have this app idea. And that's hey, you can build that this weekend. Oh, but I've never could have it before. And I'm like,

do you have a laptop with you? Yeah. So even the barrier 10 years ago with hackathons wasn't that high. If you actually gave yourself two days where you subtract everything else from your life, you could actually build something. So I think a lot of people who identify as non-technical end up opting out of taking those two days. But even someone who previously identified as non-technical could come to a hackathon and build something. And so what I would really tell people is Hackathons aren't just for hackers. Hackathons turn normal people into hackers. And that's that shift.

It's about agency. It's like an internal shift that happens. And I remember 10 years ago, I tell people, hey, when they built Facebook, it was really hard to build an app like that. Now, if you wanted to build a basic app like what Facebook was, you could do that in your first weekend building stuff. That barrier is just going to continue going down, but it's still going to be about the shift in agency.

The most important thing is having a vision, having an idea of something that you want to build, but then you're going to be able to manifest that much quicker. But the real key is that shift where you actually believe that you can do it. Is there anything else about everything you've built, want to build, believe about the world, believe should be different in the world that we haven't talked about? When I think about venture today, I'm just like, how are we not taking care of as founders as human beings? The way we're doing venture today is we're taking the top Olympic athletes and just giving them money, telling them see you at the Olympics. And there's just such an opportunity to actually take care of founders as human beings.

And I just want to see more of that. We bring in a doctor of physical therapy the first day of batch who works with you to put your monitor at the right height, your keyboard at the right height, set up your body for, if you are going to code for 14 hours straight, how should you sit? What exercises should you do when you take breaks and stuff? This should be table stakes, man. Coding for extended periods of time is actually pretty rough on your body,

especially as you get older. And early stage investors should take care of their founders at a way higher degree. And I think it's inevitable. I think as right now, what we're doing is working so well. And it's working so well that it's attracting the top founders in the world, but it's also working so well in that they're making progress faster than ever before. I just hope that as people see that, as people witness that, they're going to realize those other 2400 teams, a lot of them are really strong, want something like this. And they're not being met. There's a ton of demand for a product like this residency.

or just a product that takes care of you as a human being so that you can just build. And not worry about anything else. I would just love to see venture find more ways of offering that. I think what you're doing is so cool and different and interesting. I would predict that this is something that's going to get tried a lot and a lot will be learned about what makes a great one of these, what makes a bad one. And I'm really excited to just watch it. I ask everyone that I interviewed the same traditional closing question.

What is the kindest thing that anyone's ever done for you? I have a close mentor who's passing away soon, and the kindest thing she ever did for me is believe in me, even when I didn't believe in myself. So we started HF0, February 15th, 2020 in New York. Two weeks in, I had to shut it down because of COVID. But I knew we were onto something. And so I heard there was no COVID in Taiwan, and I flew there. I spent six months learning Mandarin. I was like, I got to keep this thing alive. But by the time my Mandarin was getting good enough, and I was six months in there. I lost faith that it could be pulled off because I kept asking people to help me

and I couldn't figure it out. And then I met her and she was pretty much like, why are you here? And I told her, oh, I came here to keep this thing alive, but I don't know if it's possible. And she just believed in me at that moment where I could have let this whole dream, this whole vision fade. And next thing I know, I was giving a speech in manner and in front of a bunch of people in politics in Taiwan. They helped me get the visas. And then I was able to fly everyone out to Taiwan to run the first full bachelor during COVID. This is what came to mind when you asked the kindest

thing that someone's done for me. Dave, thanks so much for your time. Thank you, my man. If you enjoy this episode, check out join colossus.com. There you'll find every episode of this podcast complete with transcripts, show notes, and resources to keep learning. You can also sign up for our newsletter, Colossus Weekly, where we condense episodes to the big ideas, quotations, and more, as well as share the best content we find on the internet every week.