Investing Billions - E228: Balaji Srinivasan: “The Dollar Is Already Dead” and What Comes Next

Episode Date: October 20, 2025

What if the U.S. dollar’s dominance has already ended—and we’re just living through the lag? In this episode, I sit down with Balaji Srinivasan, one of the most original thinkers in technology and finance, to unpack his boldest prediction yet: the death of the dollar and the rise of a digital, decentralized global economy. Balaji explains how inflation, weaponized finance, and technological sovereignty are accelerating a massive shift away from traditional monetary systems—and why crypto, AI, and network states could define the next reserve paradigm. We go deep into why he believes the internet will replace the nation-state, how founders can build parallel institutions from scratch, and why opting out—not lobbying—is the only path forward. This is not a doomsday take. It’s a blueprint for builders who believe the future is already here.

You know, just like Rome succeeded Greece and Britain succeeded Rome, and America succeeded Britain, I think the Internet eventually succeeds America. And so how does that work? Maybe a little more specific. Right now, what's happening, when you think of democracy, there's different definitions of democracy. You can think of one definition of democracy is, let's call it blue democracy, and that is Democrat democracy. Republicans have their own version. They'll say it's not a democracy.

It's a republic. Partly because Republic for Republicans, I'm sure that's some subconscious aspect, but partly because they say, oh, you know, for example, the Senate is important and the courts are important. It's not just populist majority of rule and so on and so. There's a third very important version of democracy in the world, and that's Indian democracy. That's like a dark horse that's kind of rising and it's becoming more and more relevant at the world stage. India is that democracy is a really big word. Apology, you were the former CTO of Coinbase, a general partner at A16.

Z. You're also Wall Street Journal, bestselling author of the network state, which I did actually read over the Christmas break. So welcome. Great to be here. And that's the network state, by the way, behind me on my shoulder over there. So you can kind of see it. And you're working on the version two of the book. Tell me about that. I got the first version of the network state out, July 4th, 2022, auspicious day, of course, for starting new countries. And just as a pure Kindle book, and I basically became a book publisher and had to figure out all the Kindle formats and so and so forth. It's actually, it hit number two globally on Amazon and I tweeted that out at that time.

You know what number one was? So it's one of the most popular categories on Amazon. It's billionaire romance. I was competing for the number one spot with the, I think it's like the most eligible billionaire. That book, I think, is, so it was a bestseller, but it really is sort of, I feel it's catalyze a movement. there's a lot of people talking about, quote, network state as a noun, as a phrase, sort of like Googling or Ubering or something like that. What gets lost on a lot of people on network state is it's a little bit esoteric or a little bit in the clouds.

Can you give us an example of a network state that you believe will be built in the future? Well, I give you one, an example of something that's close to a network state that was built in the past, and that's Israel, in the sense of it was a group of people without a land that, got a country. Now, of course, I've recognized that Israel is quite controversial and so on today. But there's other precedents for the network state, like, for example, Singapore, startup country, founded by Likuan Yew, obviously America itself, you know, maybe the original startup country, and actually India, which got its independence nonviolently. So if you kind of add up those four precedents where you have the Israeli concept of a diasporic group of people that then assembles on a piece of territory, the Singaporean concept of a charismatic CEO founder,

the American concept of, you know, Bill of Rights and Negative Rights and all the amazing things that the founders of the U.S. came up with. And then the Indian concept of independence through nonviolence, that starts to get at the concept of what I think of as a network state where, you know, in a sentence, we've started new companies, we've started new currencies, can we start new cities or even countries? and that's a premise. How do you start a country? Something like in Israel or Singapore was started historically?

Sure. So both of those are quite different, where Singapore was, you know, it got its independence involuntarily from Malaysia, whereas Israel was something which started with a book. And Der Judenstatt, which was Theodor Herzl's book, was something that inspired a lot of people. And they thought Zionism was crazy in the late 1800s. And he actually didn't just do a book.

He also did a conference and did a conference and did a fund. And that conference is still going today, the world Zionist Congress. And he had a fund that actually today, the descendant of it, the Jewish National Fund, owns a big chunk of Israel. So he was actually, if you go back and read the Jewish state, the rehearsal was like a startup entrepreneur, right? He was like a tech founder. He talks about the death of distance due to the steamships that were carrying people abroad and so and so forth. He reads in a very modern kind of way about, you know, here's a vision of what's possible. Can I, you know, get the people and the capital to make it happen? I think that the amazing aspect of Israel going

from a group of people to reviving an ancient language and building a land, there's something, there's something really interesting about that. And I'll show you a visual of how the network state might work. And if you kind of understand this visual, you basically kind of get the whole thing. So the whole network state book is online at the networkstate.com, right? And this is from, the chapter titled or the subchapter title, the network state in one image. And do you see that zoomed-in version? Yes. Okay.

So this is an example network state. What is it? It's like a physical social network. It's a social network with, in this case, 1,729,314 people, but they've crowdfunded nodes that they live in around the world. So little towns and cul-de-sacs and so on and so forth. Imagine if every Chinatown was networked together. if every little India, if every, you know, Brighton Beach, you know, where the Jewish

diaspora from the Soviet Union came, if those communities were not just physical communities or were networked together, well, their collective population, annual income, and real estate footprint could be greater than that of a legacy nation state. And the fundamental thing is that if Bitcoin was a decentralized currency, a network state is a decentralized country. It's spread out all over the world, okay? But their hearts are in one place. Their minds are in one place. All of these people could, in theory, be in the same discord or in the same social network or in the same cryptocurrency, even if they're physically separated. And that's actually the opposite of what's happened in countries that have extreme polarization. If you have a lot

polarization, people's heads and hearts are in two different places. Like, you know, they're on Macedon and blue sky for one group and they're on, you know, parlor or truth social for another group. So they may be in the same physical place, but their heads are separated. This is the opposite. People are aligned on the same values, even if they're physically separated. And so here's how you'd actually build something like that. So I'll refresh over here. This is like the gift version. You start with one person in Japan, and they get 17, 172, 1,000, 10,000, 100,000, and eventually a million something people worldwide. And you notice the buildings that they're crowdfunding increase in sophistication. You know, you go to now like whole suburbs and then small cities, and then you're networking them together.

And one way of thinking about this, if you go and you look at the map of Indonesia, right? So you see how there's a group of islands that constitute Indonesia. but they're separated by ocean, yet they think of themselves as one country, right? So now imagine a group of piece of land that are separated by Internet, but think of themselves as one country. And shouldn't the purpose of every network state to be in one geographical area, doesn't that simplify a lot of issues? Well, it also means you can get nuked and you can get invaded, right? And, you know, I know that sounds like dark or whatever, but, you know, but, you know, If you think about, do you know why the internet was originally invented?

The military wanted a communications network that could stay up in the event of a nuclear attack. Okay. So the internet was built to resist a nuclear attack. And so, you know, one of the things that's happening now is we're starting to get a breakdown of the post-war order. You know, and I certainly wouldn't wish for it to happen. But basically, I think that, you know, it's possible we actually do see, we came close maybe in 2022 and 2023 at various points to Putin's finger on the button or what have you, right? And we can't always rely on that, right? What percentage, for example, of your

transactions and communications are done over the internet now? Outside of real estate, probably over 90%. Over 90%, right? And probably communications might be even higher than that, right? Like WhatsApp, signal, et cetera, et cetera, if you count everyone. And yet we don't have election. We don't have internet native elections. We don't have Internet native legislation, right? I think people still aren't taking the Internet seriously. It reminds me of the period, like 1913, the British Empire was dominant, but World War I hadn't happened yet. And the monarchies were still around, and all of the old world was still around.

But underneath the surface, all this technological change was bubbling. And there was industrial revolution and communism, all that stuff had been going on for decades. And then the whole old world just kind of collapsed in like four years, five. years, and then we entered roaring into the modern era, right? Do you remember the social network movie? You know what's amazing about that movie is if you go back and watch it. It's a great movie. It's very well done, inspired a whole generation of entrepreneurs, even if that wasn't Sorkin's intent, it was his result, right? If you go back and watch that movie, there's something that is very notable by its absence from our, you know, sort of 2020 hindsight. You know, you know what's

missing? No. There's absolutely no mention of politics in the movie, right? Social networking is portrayed as something which is like one young man's building's roman you know it's like his um it's it's it's as if okay yeah it's got 500 million users but it's like saying Pepsi got to 500 million people drinking it it's fine and it's great but it's not like it's not like something of massive importance everybody else can ignore it it's just like people poking and liking each other online that's what it was thought of in the early 2010s and yet at that time in the early 2010s, the Arab Spring had happened. You know, Twitter and Facebook had helped cause revolutions abroad. Clearly, they were of political importance. But if you had said in, you know,

2011 that 10 years from now, the most important political issue in the world for at least a few days will be whether the president of the United States of America is able to tweet, right? No one would have believed you. Even those people who had seen the Arab Spring and so catalyzed by these internet things, even those people who knew that these were massively valuable companies with hundreds of millions of users that were highly engaged, it was a limit of imagination where they couldn't project out that all politics would become social media in the 2010s, right? And my view is that we have something very similar happening, where in 2021, if you take Bitcoin, every bank and government knows about it. We have hundreds of millions

of holders worldwide. There's many billion-dollar companies that have been started, you know, either on Bitcoin directly or around it and so on. And you have El Salvador that has actually changed its laws to make Bitcoin the national currency of a legacy state. And yet despite all that, if I was to say that there's a scenario 10 years from now where the United States government and every government needs to hold Bitcoin in order to remain insolvent, just like the President of the United States of America would need to hold Twitter

to remain in power, you know, that would seem like a crazy extrapolation from where we are. But that's what it means, in my view, to take the Internet seriously. I think if in the 2010s, all politics became social media, I think in the 2020s, all politics becomes crypto tribalism. Let me pause here. Is that because crypto is essentially diluting power from everybody, so it's not as noticeable, it's not necessarily taking from Republicans or Democrats. It's diluting everybody. Diluting is one way to put it. Another way of putting it is, do you see that graph? Global currencies, 10-year returns versus a dollar, right? So this was actually, you know,

a few months ago, like three months ago. So the numbers are actually even higher now because Bitcoin is higher than it was. But essentially, every fiat currency over the last 10 years has collapsed against the dollar. Some of them have been hyperinflated away and destroyed and so on. Others, better managed currencies like the Singapore dollar or the Swiss franc have remained you know, reasonably close to the dollar. But one way of thinking about it is lots of debt around the world is dollar-denominated. The U.S. prints a lot of money. So therefore, everybody's sort of taxed invisibly or visibly by the money printing.

Okay. So all fiat currencies collapse against the dollar, but the dollar has collapsed against Bitcoin. So since the inception of Bitcoin, you can calculate this out. But, you know, you know, the typical thing for inflation is supposed to be like 0.1.1 percent or rather two percent annual inflation right so that means between point one to point two percent a month okay multiple by 12 and you can get the exact square root of 12 version but you know what I mean right so between between point one to point two percent monthly inflation and hyperinflation is thought of as 50 percent monthly inflation but if you think about bitcoin it's definitely appreciated

more or the dollar is depreciated more against bitcoin by it's not as much as 50 percent a month but that's on the order of last I calculate about 8% a month for the last 10 years. So that's not 0.1 or 0.2% inflation. It's not yet 50% inflation a month, but 8% a month for 10 years. What that means is since inception, the smart money has been exiting the dollar for Bitcoin, and Bitcoin has gone up by six orders of magnitude from one cent to like, you know, $30,000, $40,000, right? that's a really in historical timeframes right if you if you zoomed out that would just look

like voop like this like a just total step function rise you know even though it didn't feel like that during during the rise and so what that what that means what we have thinking about it is all these people rather than let's say driving across the border to switzerland and storing gold in switzerland they're taking a little shuttle up to the cloud and they're storing gold in the cloud Okay, it's like, it's as if these cloud countries have arisen, or at least cloud jurisdictions, which have better property rights and rule of law for many people around the world than their legacy state. And so if you think about it, what cryptocurrencies are is they're half of a government, the digital half, because they provide property rights, smart contracts, dispute resolution, monetary policy, identity. For example, if you look at ENS, the Ethereum name system, that provides, like, identity online. Okay.

So, ens dot domains, okay. And so, for example, if I go to, let's say, Vitalik. com, okay, and look at his EMS. This is basically like a domain name that's also a username. Okay, so it's got a lot of features of both. And it's a crypto address and so this is like what Internet native names. I think are going to look like. And so the reason I just bring all that up is I, you know,

I just don't think people really take the Internet seriously enough. Here's one way of thinking about it. You know, like the omnibus spending bills, like the legislation that's passed, right? Basically, it's like one giant bill and everybody shoves in their change at the last minute and it's passed. It's that works in the U.S. and other countries. Okay. if you know how software engineering is done, it isn't like one giant change the code that's pushed

through once a year, which is a huge political fight and so on, that then it's pushed to affect 300 million people. If you have a user base, and we did at Coinbase, we had a user base in the hundreds of millions at earn. I had like, you know, a million something users. So I've managed and it's certainly invested in companies with large two-sided marketplaces in social networks. you don't usually roll a change out to every user without some testing.

Instead, you have a subset of them like just 100,000 people, 10,000 people, and you test the feature there and you see if it's causing some dramatic issues. Like if you're going to hike, let's say Uber would test it in Australia first before they put out their new fee schedule to the rest of the world, for example, okay? You gather the data there and you make sure your code changes are having the desired effect before. you push it out to the rest of the world. That is just good government. Often you can have a change that is negative sum. Uber makes less money. The drivers make less money and the riders have a bad experience. Everybody loses. Or you can have a change as a positive sum. Everybody's happier, right? Like maybe a better rider locator thing and everybody's happier. Everybody makes more money. Everybody gets their destination faster, right? You don't always know. And often, very often,

there's a change that's unintentionally bad. It's a bug. Oh, we did this. And we thought it results in this, but it results in that. Okay. Now, compare that to how governments operate. Governments, you know, democratic governments will make changes to the law. It's a highly political process, and it's just like something is pushed in there. And then they figure out what, they just throw it over the fence and they let the courts and the lawyers and the people all just fight it out. There's no provision for bug tracking or feedback or anything like that. There's no testing of what this law actually does on a 10,000 person population. everything is just pushed live to prod if you used a software engineering analogy that's obviously

not how it should be done and i believe that's not how it's going to be done in the future Winston Churchill famously said democracy is the worst form of government except every other one known to man and and i agree with that but now comes you know digital currencies and digital truth you think that's the next evolution of an optimal society So I actually think that what we're going to see is cryptocurrency, crypto democracy, crypto country, right? Cryptocurrency puts capitalism online. Crypto democracy can put democracy online.

Okay. And then with the fusion of those two, we actually get democratic capitalism, 2.0 or 3.0 or 4.0. I think of, you know, just like Rome succeeded Greece and Britain succeeded Rome. and America succeeded Britain, I think the Internet eventually succeeds America. And so how does that work? Let me be a little more specific. Right now what's happening, when you think of democracy, there's different definitions of democracy.

You can think of one definition of democracy is, let's call it blue democracy, and that is Democrat democracy. Republicans have their own version. They'll say it's not a democracy, it's a republic, partly because republic for Republicans, I'm sure that some subconscious aspect, but partly because they say, oh, you know, for example, the Senate is important and the courts are important, and it's not just populist majority of rule and so on and so forth. There's a third very important version of democracy in the world, and that's Indian democracy. That's like a dark horse that's kind of rising and that's becoming more and more relevant at the world stage.

You know, India is a player in world events that it wasn't 10 years ago. And finally, there's techno democracy or crypto democracy. The reason I say there's at least four different versions, blue, red, Indian, and tech or crypto democracy. is that democracy is a really big word. It's a word that can contain many things. It's like, if you think about Christianity, Christianity is a big word that contains both the ideology that tore down the Roman Empire

and the ideology that buttressed the Holy Roman Empire. Okay. Like communism contains both the ideology that caused the Bolshek revolution and the modified version, which is a hammer and chickle on a Chinese worship in the South China Sea. right? So you have this very different version. I mean, what what Chinese communism is is not what Marx envisioned and Stalin is different from both of them, right? And this is similar to, you know, in religions, we understand that you can have, for example, Protestant and Catholic and Russian Orthodox or Sunni and Shiite, right? And so just like that, one realizes, okay, there's different flavors of democracy. It's a big word and it contains a lot of things. Once we understand that there's no, like, there's not one definition of democracy and there's going to be different versions, just like,

different versions of communism and different versions of Islam and different versions of Christianity. These are huge, one way to think about that, these are social operating systems, right? And just like the Chinese did, you know, communism with Chinese characteristics, the Indians have done democracy with Darmic developments. Okay. So they have their own fork of democracy. They've taken a different direction. And in fact, actually, if you think about it, that original British operating system,

to take a metaphor, was forked by the Americans in one direction, the Israelis and another, the Singaporeans in another, and the Indians in yet another. All of them respect Great Britain, but they've taken it in different directions with a Chinese, Israeli, Indian, or American flavor, right? So I say all of this to say, there's not just one thing of, oh, that's not democracy, you're not doing it right, and so on and so forth. There's different versions of this that stress different things, but we recognize these as all having some origin in British common law, right?

And people might say, oh, Singapore is in a democracy. or, oh, you know, this or that country, it's a eroding democracy. But let's at least say that they share some of the code base. Okay. So with all that said, what does the next version look like? I do believe, you know, I actually believe in both, quote, capitalism and democracy. But if you think about capitalism, there's a huge difference between the techno-capitalism of today, the industrial capitalism of mid-century with General Mills and General Motors and, in General Electric.

and the agrarian capitalism of the 1800s where it was all about the family farm, right? Yeah, we use the word capitalism, but that, again, it's a huge word, big word that contains very different eras. And, you know, if you had the metrics and the graphs in them, the number of transactions, the degree of decentralization, those things very wildly among these things, even if there's a commonality in some ways of private property, things like, you know, the FDA or the SEC didn't even exist in the 1800s, yet we still consider that a capitalist country. So what does that look like for democracy?

First, there's already, you know, that's saying the future is already here, but it's not yet, it's just not evenly distributed, right? So there's different versions of democracy that are already out there that are like, you know, next-gen versions or internet versions. One that's immediately recognizable is what Estonia has done. They have like cryptodemocracy, cryptographic democracy, where your votes are cryptographically verifiable. It's a very, you know, that's a place that Sony gave us. Skype. They gave us transfer-wise. This is a very tech-forward country, and they're real pioneers here, right? Singapore has something that's also worthy of note. They have something called SyncPass. And what SingPass is, it's as if your driver's license and passport were on your

phone, and you could use it to log into websites. Okay. And you start to think, okay, that's what identity becomes. That's what your password becomes. It becomes single sign-on. That is to say your Google login, your key card for your home, your API key, your private key for your cryptocurrency, your ENS name, your passport, your driver's license, all of those things combine into like one piece of digital identity that gains you access online and offline and does your photo verification. Okay. Now, that's not just theoretical. If you go to a website, for example, like snapshot.org, okay, so these are all these Dow. These DAOs have, you know, in this case, that is 817,000 members, right?

That's actually pretty big. You know, most members of the United Nations are actually small countries. I can go and look at the exact numbers, but I believe 50% have less than 10 million people and 20% have less than 1 million people. Okay. So many countries in the United Nations are actually smaller than this Dow, right? And so you have these online organizations, you know, 800,000 members, 208,000 members. And what do you see in each of these? If you go there, you will see proposals and you'll see votes, right? And the vote starts in these hours, who won the vote, right? These are like extremely consensus kinds of votes, right? But in other cases, you know, I'm sure I can find one where there's some, you know, argument or something like that. It may not be like totally, you know, 100%. See, this one, option one, option two, they're holding an internet plebiscite. And it's not exactly 99.

It's like 57 versus 31, right? And the thing is, you might say, oh, this is like, you know, just dumb people playing, you know, online. But they're allocating significant amounts of money here, right? I don't know exactly how much the Arbitrum Treasury has, but you can go and look at it, you know, $6 billion, right? Like, it's not nothing. And is it $6 trillion? No, it's not $6 trillion. But, again, this is larger than the budget of many countries.

and they're doing online binding votes to allocate that capital. That's pretty, pretty important, right? These people have all opted in to groups with governance, and the internet and the code is governing their interactions, their disputes, their capital allocations. This is actually something that's very similar to like, you know, mid-1800s America where people would go and self-organize on the frontier in various new towns and cities popping up in what is today, Minnesota or Missouri, except this is not

happening in the physical world yet. It's happening on the internet in these DAOs. Okay. So this is what I mean by like techno democracy. Would you categorize a DAO as a form of network state? Is it a subset of network states? It's on the path to a network state. It's like maybe a DAO is to a network. It's a network without a state. Yeah, exactly. That's right. Or basically, it doesn't have the physicality that I think is important, but the digital part is a very important predecessor. Just the fact that people can self-organize into these communities with binding votes for very large amounts of money, by the way, right? Remember, it's not some country's laws ultimately that is, you know, governing the allocation of this huge amount of

capital. It is, you know, a blockchain, right? A blockchain is a digital government that is handling all of these flows of funds and it's completely auditable, right? Everybody can see, you know, what transactions are happening and, you know, how much money there is there and and all this kind of stuff. What are some resolutions that are relevant that that might be of interest as use cases? Good question. So first of all, they're definitely funding software development and that's something, you know, all your listeners understand, you know, engineers are expensive, testing is expensive, all that kind of stuff, right? So that right there is a big bucket. So they're investing in securing protocols.

They're investing in making it more user-friendly to use. They're investing in all of that kind of stuff, right? Software development. A second thing many of them do is they invest in the community. And that is like some of them are actually starting to do more meetups, like physical meetups. It's the Discord. It is bounties and prizes for the community. For example, there's one called Super Team.

So basically, if you join their community, you can do bounties, prizes, all this kind of stuff. And so a kid in India or Nigeria or somewhere can just make money online by clicking buttons, right? And so here's like an example. So here's here's like earnings. Dot superteam. And so they've paid out like $2 million for a thousand projects, like $2,000 bucks a pop. That's a good amount of money in a lot. of countries around the world, right? That's like a year's salary that a kid with a phone

or like a Chromebook or something can now just earn on the internet, right? And so some really interesting stuff. So that's the second big bucket. Let's call it community and bounties and crypto bounties and so on. Okay. So do these projects and they complete these projects and they make money. A third big bucket is content, right? And I think you're going to start to see a lot more high quality, you know, movies, films, that kind of stuff come out, but initially podcasts for sure, you know, content that's interesting to the community, on cryptography, on distributed computing, decentralized systems, all that kind of stuff. And finally, a bucket that's pretty interesting to me nowadays are things like Vida-Dow, right?

So this is something I invest in. So it's like, it's trying to do research outside of academia, right? because ultimately, if you think about it, who's funding research, it's the public, right? So can we, rather than going from, you know, the public to tax dollars, to the government, to NIH, to the researcher, can you cut out some of those middleman steps, and you have people just back the research that they believe in, right? And so one that's definitely being working, at least, you know, looks like it's working, Vida Dow, and it has researchers over here that get grants, okay, fund exceptional science and supporters over here, and everybody who wants to, you know, target longevity can now go and buy into this, right? And what's the business model? Well, many of these people will go and found companies, you know, maybe they'll found longevity companies or things related to

that. And then that Vita token might be something which, you know, those people who did that get some shares in the company or what have you. Somebody could take an ideological view about the FDA being too slow to procure drugs and to create some new framework where they could tie that into kind of funding research. Yeah, exactly. So here, like here's the researchers tab. Try type of ecosystem. Exactly.

Exactly. Right. So here, you know, these are grants over here. So, you know, four million dollars in research funded. Again, look, is it billions yet? No. But it's just started like a couple of years ago. And it's, it's pretty good.

And then, you know, it's a, it's an avenue for. people who want to be, quote, principal investigators, but, you know, maybe they don't want to wait until they're 60 years old. And if you can, you know, do something good online, right? So here's on the supporter side, there's actually a fair number of academics. So that's like a fourth bucket research, right? So those four buckets are software development, community content, research. And I think as we start doing more in the physical world, some of these DAOs will start getting meetups and start buying real estate together. There's like a funny one. one called a lynx Dow, which actually, you know, this is like the, you know, the early days

of the internet, it was like, oh, pets.com. It's so dumb, right? But nowadays, Chewy works, right? Chewy is a big company. It's like a $9 billion public company. I mean, that's, that's legit, right, even if the market is up or down, right? So pets.com, oh, it was so stupid. No, it wasn't, pets.com wasn't stupid. It was just early. And then it did eventually work, right? So I'll share you another one, which seems silly, perhaps, but it's like seems be working, and that is Lynx Dow, right? And these people just love golf and, you know, so on are being using crypto to go and like crowdfund golf courses around the world, right? And, you know, the thing about this is, whereas it's the Lynx Golf Club, like private golf for everyone, you know,

so you can basically join this and it's like a crowdfunded golf club, right? And that might seem dumb or would have you. But, you know, when people came to the U.S. in the early 20th century, a big motivation for people like, you know, a lot of Jewish people were locked out of country clubs, golf clubs, and being able to start their own was like a big signal of, you know, finally, you know, being accepted in society and so on. And so, you know, guess what? Now people can build their own golf club. I'm not a big golf guy or anything like that, right? But the real point is that you can crowd fund real estate with crypto, even if it starts with the seemingly silly application or this thing you might think is, you know,

not that important. And that's something where the cloud, all of this gigantic amount of money that's swirling around online, starts descending on the land. You're like printing out the cloud in real life, in the same way that you'd like print out a document. This is a general concept I have, which is obviously we know the concept of printing out a document. But when you go and order something from, you know, Amazon or Uber Eats, right, in a sense, you're like printing something out because you're hitting a button and a digital process then results in a physical process and that thing arrives at your door, potentially that you could just have like a city just arise like this with the capital and the people just coming out from the

internet. And V1 of that, so something that was network state inspired is something called Zuzilu. Have you heard of that? Yes. Yes, that's Vital's project. Yes, exactly. And Vitalik basically read the network state, and he's written about it. And he talked about how that was an inspiration for Zuzulu. Zuzlou, basically they rented out like a village in Montenegro, right? Essentially, so, you know, I wrote the network state, which said that communities defined by common interests can start off as purely on discussion forums, but then materialize into person, you know, hubs over time. What's cool about this is if you could do this and you could prove this, maybe we're just at the beginning of a new age of community formation and participatory

democracy and opt-in capitalism and so on, right? Taking the best values that shaped America, not saying, oh, I'm rejecting free speech or I'm rejecting free markets, but figuring out the version which people are opting into and which they like, you know, and you might have a hundred different or a thousand different of these communities. I need to update this, so it's a little bit out of date. Okay, but I have this thing, the network state dashboard, where I'm tracking all these startup societies around the world that are doing their own things that are kind of like Zizola.

Okay. Did you see that dashboard? Yep. And I also had this conference, Network State. So this conference in Amsterdam, and this was a pretty big success, I think. If I show you the audience. Yep. I saw the selfie.

Yeah. Yeah, the selfie, there's a selfie, and this also shows since the scale of the audience. You just announced the fund. So maybe you could bring up the current investor base. You have one of the most prolific investor bases of any funds. Here is the, you know, the biology fund, techno capital for techno-radicals. So investors, Neville, Brian Armstrong, and Emily Choi of Coinbase, Mark Anderson, Chris, Texas of Ascent Z, David Sachs, Gary Tan, Toby Lucky, Ron Conway, Joe Lonsdale, Tyler and Cameron Winkle Boss, the Solana founders,

Notion founder, Brian Johnson Blueprint, Steve Sinovsky, was very senior at Microsoft, David Lee, he was one of the early people at SV Angel and also at Samsung now. And I could go through, you know, the list of names here, but, you know, Ajah runs Mithril, Bill and Dollar Fund, Jesse Powell, founder of Cracken. And outside of being some of those prolific investors, there seems to be an ideological bet here. are you looking for a specific type of LP for your fund as well? Yeah. If you like all these people, you're going to like the Bology Fund.

And if you don't, well, I'm sure there's plenty of other nice funds. It's really kind of that simple. What I think on balance, what these folks stand for is, you know, freedom. And in my view, the best of American values. And, you know, they stand for technological progress. and they stand for all of these good things. And, you know, that's also the kind of stuff that I want to fund. Of course, it has to make money, and I think it will make a lot of money, but it'll also make

freedom. And the focus of your fund, you call it high-risk seed. Sure. Sometimes categories get named in retrospect. Like, was there a category called an accelerator at the time why Combinator started a thing? or, you know, the TL Fellowship sort of created a category. A-6-N-Z didn't look like a normal VC fund when it was doing its thing and so on. I look at investing as a tool to build the world that we want to build.

And, you know, one of the things that I had in this were, you know, there's a bunch of these failing institutions. And I'm going to list some of them off. Okay. So here's some problems, right? high inflation, privacy violations, lack of shared consensus, costly energy, election controversy, security breaches, loss of manufacturing capability, low implements, pulse control, the declining post-war order, falling life expectancy, eroding freedoms, internet-disrupted institutions, inadequate education, blocked physical construction, click-based journalism,

lawfare, insufficient political choice, and above all, in my view, the inaccessibility of the physical frontier. And how do you solve these kinds of things? Well, for example, with privacy violation, zero knowledge proofs, other kinds of things, intending encryption, local storage, those can go after those. Loss of manufacturing capability. Well, robotics actually has a lot of promise in, you know, bringing manufacturing to anything and you can just maybe you can turn a lot of labor into electricity, which turns labor into capital.

or other less obvious things like impulse control. So, you know, Mike Moritz, you know, one of the greatest investors of all time. He has this concept on the seven deadly sins. Do you know this thing? Yeah, but the core needs. What he means is that it's like, you know, it's just so, it's so incredibly difficult to build a business that you need to have some visceral human need. You know, for example, Uber saves you time. so that's sloth. DoorDash gets you food. That's gluttony, right? Twitter raises your awareness

of bad things. That's wrath. Instagram is pride. Match.com finds you a date, right? Robin Hood facilitates your transactions. Greed. Zillow helps you get a better house. So in extremists, these things that are providing, that are meeting legitimate human needs can become vices. So that's why, in a tongue-in-cheek way, he says, every startup serves one of the seven deadly sins. The problem is, though, that if those companies are no longer startups and they become really huge companies, I think think they add value on balance, but there's some comments, for example, like the, like Netflix once, maybe tongue and cheek, but they said that their goal was to, um, was to make it so that you, uh, take away from a glass of wine with your spouse and just watch more Netflix.

Remember there's like a famous quote on that, right? And because they just want to maximize your time spent online. Okay. Now you start to get into maybe a vice of sloth, right? It goes from, you know, a human need of maybe entertainment to a vice of sloth. right? And so how could you possibly defend against something like that when you're at the checkout counter and there's all of this very highly optimized, you know, stuff there that's sugary that is maybe maximizing the profit of the guy selling it, but it's not benefiting your health? Well, maybe you have a different kind of business that actually boosts not vice, but virtue. For example, you have like a community where you have a membership to it and it's keto kosher. And so there's no sugary food. even allowed in it. Very much like kosher itself, where there's dietary restrictions that are just put into the supply chain and you just kind of see that something's kosher, you just kind of enter this community and it's only salad and fresh fruit and fresh veggies and, you know, meat if you're, if you're into that. But there's no processed foods. There's no sugar. You have to

get in the car and drive outside of it to go and eat unhealthy. So your defaults are set to a good level, right? And that's like one of several creative solutions to try to have a corporate virtue as opposed to corporate advice. And that's because the community is not optimizing on profit maximization. They're optimizing on other values. Or more precisely, that profit maximization is now aligned with the individual's values. It's a little bit like, you know, there's junk food, but now, guess what, there's health food and there's companies that make money on health food. And there's, you know, there's now like results-based gyms, which don't make money on the subscription, but make money if you actually achieve your fitness goals, right? So it's a little bit

like, you know, you probably manage the Salesforce, right? And not sales force the company, but a sales force like a, right? And they will do what you incentivize them to do, right? They're the saying is coin operated, right? You set up incentives and they will run to those incentives. It's almost like a really powerful stallion. And you point in a, direction. And it's going to run in that direction. If you pointed off the cliff or if you didn't realize that there was a bump in the road in the future, well, that's kind of your fault in that sense, right? You can do things where you incentivize sales people with equity. But really what you want to do is just constantly monitor the incentives and change the incentives. And so capital is this

very powerful maximizing function, but it can't set the objective itself. You know, you have to and then some creativity comes out of, okay, well, we made a lot of money off junk food. Can we make a lot of money off of healthy, well, probably we can. We just need to hit the right cultural moment, right? Anyway, so that's just like one subroutine of a subroutine of what I'm trying to do here. But really what it is is all those problems I listed, I think there are internet for solutions to many of them. There are ways that, and when we have thinking about that, if there is hope, it comes from tech. Okay, that's the one thing that's working. Why do I say it's one thing is working. Well, you have drug addiction and you have failing life expectancy and you have military issues overseas and you have inflation. You have everything that the state is touching,

which is real estate, it's health care, it's education. Those things are getting wildly expensive in price. Okay. And I can show you that graph. Do you know the graph I'm talking about? I think education has been compounding by 8% for like three decades. Yeah. And Ackman actually had this great tweet where he's like, how is this thing getting so ridiculous, expensive, and the number of students isn't increasing? Like, what business has increased its prices? At Harvard, you now have more administrators and students. Whatever the state props up rises in price, whatever technology drops falls in price, right? So this is like, you know, everything that the government touches, medical services, these are obviously related to education, right? Housing, even on this chart,

it doesn't look that bad in certain markets it's like absolutely terrible right uh and whereas the stuff the technology touches like TVs or you know cell phones those fall relative to baseline but these things rise there's a bunch of people will say oh no no you're just you know that's biomass cost disease those things that go up in price it's because there's labor associated with them and you're you know you're you're trying to blame it on the government I'm like well ask yourself why they can't be automated. Why don't we have more automated medicine? It's because, thanks to AMA and to some extent FDA and a bunch of other NHS and so on, you have to have a doctor in the loop for things that don't require a doctor. For example, like you need a doctor to get your genome

sequence in some places, you know, that's considered like a diagnostic test. This is like saying you need a doctor to step on the scale, you know, to a doctor to look in the mirror. Why do we need to put that through the medical system and register a billing event for everybody involved, that doesn't need to be like that. You want to push much more self-serve, you know. And similarly with child care, there's regulations that say there can only be so many children cared for per adult. But you have a much larger number of children care for by teacher in elementary school. And yet that, you know, you could have 30 kids in a class, but there's a limit on child care. It's one of the reasons child care is very expensive in some jurisdictions. Obviously,

housing regulations prohibit you in a variety of ways. There's also unions that make it tough. And I recognize, by the way, I'm sure some of the people watching this are like, you know, managing large, you know, pensions or things like that. No offense, any of these folks, I'm talking about the systemic effects. The goal of having a high standard of living and, you know, a job with decency for workers, of course, one supports that. It's a mechanism, you know, that one can argue it. But anyway, My point is that when you start scratching on these areas that have supposedly bowel most cause disease and nothing can be done and so and so forth, and then you go and look at

construction abroad, you're like, why is this 100x or 1,000 X literally faster? I'm not saying that as like some figure of speech. I mean, you know, I've posted videos. I recognize that China is very unpopular. I have, nevertheless, they've built a lot very quickly. And there's something one can learn from their prefab and modular construction. And there's videos, for example, of here, let me show you this. What's the speed up here?

Okay. So it's nine hours. Nine hours to build a train station. If you were to unpack those scale efficiencies, what are those scale efficiencies? Seven trains, 23 diggers. They started at 6.30 p.m. They're done by 3 a.m. The reason I say that is that shows what's like what's physically possible, right?

And when you go from nine hours. to three years or five years for a station, right, that is a greater than 1,000 X difference, right? You know, divide 9,000 hours, right, into 24 hours in a day, right? And, you know, that is, I think 2.5 times per day. Yeah, exactly. That's right. So if you go from 9 hours to one year, that's about 1,000x, right? 9,000 hours roughly in a year.

When you're a thousand X off from the state of the art, from what's physically feasible, you're going to fall way behind. You're not in the game. And this is something, you know, Elon actually replied to a tweet of mine where I said, look, we're not, California isn't 10% off the state of the art. It's like a thousand X off the state of the art in terms of speed. And if you've done any real estate, that compounds really fast. If you can build a building, a thousand X faster than the other guy,

you can have it occupied in generating rent to build the next building and the next and the next and next. Your compounding rate is so much ridiculously faster than the other guy. You're just going to completely outrun them. So that's like a fourth bucket research, right? So those four buckets are software development, community content research. And I think as we start doing more in the physical world, some of these DAOs will start getting meetups and start buying real estate together. There's like a funny one called Linkstow, which actually, you know, this is like the, you know, the early days of the internet, it was like, oh, pets.com. It's so dumb, right? But nowadays, Chewy works, right? Chooey's a big company, right? Actually, I don't know what's actual valuations nowadays, but before I say it works. But what's it, what's market cap? I don't know. Okay, it's like a $9 billion public company. I mean, that's legit, right, even if the market is up or down, right? So pets.com, oh, it was so stupid.

No, it wasn't, Pets.com wasn't stupid. It was just early. Same with Instacart. You know, Instacart was, you know, webvan.com. Yeah, exactly. That's right. Webvan became Instacart. Exactly.

That's right. Or rather, Webvan didn't become Inscarp, but the most lamp in startup of WebBand became a very successful company called Insqart or the concept, exactly. And so I'll share you another one, which seems silly, perhaps, but it's like seems to be working. And that is Lynx Dow, right? And these people just love golf and, you know, so on, I've been using crypto to go and, like, crowdfund golf courses around the world, right? And, you know, the thing about this is, whereas it's the Lynx Golf Club, like private golf for everyone, you know, so you can basically join this. And it's like a crowdfunded golf club, right?

And that might seem dumb or would have you. But, you know, when people came to the U.S. in the early 20th century, a big motivation. for people like, you know, a lot of Jewish people were locked out of country clubs, golf clubs, and being able to start their own was like a big signal of, you know, finally, you know, being accepted in society and so on. And so, you know, guess what? Now people can build their own golf club.

I'm not a big golf guy or anything like that, right? But the real point is that you can crowd fund real estate with crypto, even if it starts with this seemingly silly application or this thing you might think is, you know, not that important. And that's something where the cloud, all of this gigantic amount of money that's swirling around online starts descending on the lane, right? You're, like, printing out the cloud in real life, in the same way that you'd, like, print

out a document. This is a general concept I have, which is, obviously, we know the concept of printing out a document, but when you go and order something from, you know, Amazon or Uber Eats, right? In a sense, you're, like, printing something out because you're hitting a button and a digital process then results in a physical process and that thing arrives at your door. Obviously there's humans in the loop now. But many of those steps from delivery to growing the food to cooking the food and so and so individual versions of each of the steps you could imagine. And I can show you examples of robots for every single one of those steps from let's say, you know, if you get

tomatoes delivered to your door, there's agricultural robots, there's picking robots, there's robotic trucks, there's robotic packing plants. Every one of those steps could in theory be fully automated. and then you can imagine almost an electromechanical process where you hit a button and it goes v-ver-ver and all these things spent action and the tomatoes are delivered to your door, right? Someone could probably do that full stack right now just to prove a point that it could be done. And then what is that? That's like a printer on a larger scale where when you hit print, there's, you know, a head with some ink and it moves around electromechanically after you hit enter, right?

It's that concept of building a complicated digital object online and hitting enter and then just printing it out. We can do that for a document. We can do that for goods. And then we might be able to do that for ever larger things. So the bad version of it is you print out a mob, the flash mobs and so on in person. Somebody comes, you know, in New York there was that Twitch streamer or something who held like a thing, you know, a few weeks ago and just caused this whole ruckus in downtown, right? And you're seeing more and more pictures of these gigantic internet mobs that materialize into real life, right? You've seen quite a few of those are the last several years.

That's a bad version. The good version is potentially that you could just have like a city just a rise like this, with the capital and the people just coming out from the Internet. And V1 of that, so something that was network state inspired, is something called Zuzaloo. Have you heard of that? Yes. Yes, that's Vitalis project. Yes, exactly.

And Vitalik basically read the network state, and he's written about it. And he talked about how that was an inspiration for Zuzulu. And one of the things that I had written about several years ago, let me see if I can find this. Here we go. So you see why I built Zizaloo? Yes. Right.

So Zuzlou, basically they rented out like a village in Montenegro, right? And, you know, so essentially, so, you know, I wrote the network state which said that communities defined by common interest can start off as purely on discussion forums, but then materialize into person, you know, hubs over time, right? And so what's cool about this is if you could do this and you could prove this, maybe we're just at the beginning of a new age of community formation and participatory democracy and opt-in capitalism and so on, right? taking the best values that shaped America, not saying, oh, you know, I'm rejecting free speech or I'm rejecting free markets, but figuring out the version which people are opting into and which they like, you know, and you might have a hundred different or a thousand different of these communities. And so one thing I have is something, I need to update this, so it's a little bit out of date, okay, but I have this thing, the network state dashboard, where I'm tracking all

these startup societies around the world that are doing their own things that are kind of like Zizola. Okay. Did you see that dashboard? Yep. And I also had this conference in Amsterdam. And this was a pretty big success, I think. If I show you the...

I saw the selfie. Yeah, the selfie. And this also shows since the scale of the audience. So let me see if I... It's amazing. So let's transition to the fund. So I know you just announced the fund. So maybe you could bring up the current investor base.

You have one of the most prolific investor bases of any funds. And let's project that. The Bology Fund, techno capital for techno-radicals. So investors, Neville, Brian Armstrong, and Emily Choi of Coinbase, Mark Anderson, Chris Dixon Z, David Sachs, Gary Tan, Toby Luck. Ron Conway, Joe Lonsdale, Tatar and Cameron Winkle Boss, the Solana founders, Notion founder, Brian Johnson Blueprint. Steve Sinovsky, who's very senior at Microsoft, David Lee, who's one of the early people at SV Angel and also at Samsung now. And I could go through, you know, the list of names here, but, you know, Ajay runs Mithril, a billion-dollar fund.

And outside of being some of the most prolific investors, there seems to be an ideological bent here. Are you looking for a specific type of LP for your fund as well? Yeah. If you like all these people, you're going to like the Bology Fund. And if you don't, well, I'm sure there's plenty of other nice funds. It's really kind of that simple. What I think on balance, what these folks stand for is, you know, freedom. And in my view, the best of American values. And, you know, they stand for technological progress and they stand for all of these good things. And, you know, that's also the kind of stuff that I want to fund. Of course, it has to make money, and I think it will make a lot of money, but it'll also make freedom. And the focus of your fund, you call it high-risk seed. So tell me about that. Sure. Sure, sure, sure. I mean, the thing is, sometimes categories get named in retrospect. Like, was there a category called an accelerator at the time why Combinator started a thing, or, you know, TL Fellowship sort of created a category, A6 and Z didn't

look like a normal VC fund when it was doing its thing and so on. I look at investing as a tool to build the world that we want to build. And, you know, one of the things that I had in this were, you know, there's a bunch of these failing institutions, and I'm going to list some of them off. Okay. So here's some problems, right? High inflation. privacy violations, lack of shared consensus, costly energy, election controversy, security breaches, loss of manufacturing capability, low impulse control, the declining post-war order, falling life expectancy, eroding freedoms, internet-disrupted institutions, inadequate education, blocked physical construction, click-based journalism, lawfare,

insufficient political choice, and above all, in my view, the inaccessibility of the physical frontier. And how do you solve these kinds of things? For example, with privacy violation, zero knowledge proofs, other kinds of things, intending encryption, local storage, those can go after those. Loss of manufacturing capability. Well, robotics actually has a lot of promise in, you know, bringing manufacturing to anything, and you can just maybe you can turn a lot of labor into electricity, which turns labor into capital. Or other less obvious things like impulse control.

So, you know, Mike Moritz, you know, one of the greatest. investors of all time. He has this concept on the seven deadly sins. Do you know this thing? Yeah, but the core needs that every company sells. Yeah, right. And what he, what he means is that it's like, you know, it's just so, it's so incredibly difficult to build a business that you need to have some visceral human need. You know, for example, Uber saves you time. So that's sloth. DoorDash gets you food. That's gluttony, right? Twitter raises your awareness of bad things. It's wrath.

Instagram is pride. Match.com finds you a date, right? Robin Hood facilitates your transactions, greed. Zillow helps you get a better house. So in extremists, these things that are providing, that are meeting legitimate human needs, can become vices.

So that's why, in a tongue-in-cheek way, he says, every startup serves one of the seven deadly sins, right? With me so far. The problem is, though, that if those companies are no longer startups and they become really huge companies, you know, I think they add value on balance, but there's some comments, for example, like Netflix once, maybe tongue-in-cheek, but they said that their goal was to make it so that

you take away from a glass of wine with your spouse and just watch more Netflix. Remember, there's like a famous quote on that, right? And because they just want to maximize your time spent online. Okay, now you start to get into maybe a vice of sloth, right? It goes from, you know, a human need of maybe entertainment to a vice of sloth, right? And so how could you possibly defend against something like that when you're at the checkout counter and there's all of this very highly optimized, you know, stuff there that's sugary that is maybe maximizing the profit of the guy selling it, but it's not benefiting your health? Well, maybe you have a different kind of business that actually boosts not vice, but virtue. For example, you have like a community where you have a membership to it, and it's keto kosher.

And so there's no sugary food even allowed in it. Very much like kosher itself, where there's dietary restrictions that are just put into the supply chain and you just kind of see that something's kosher. You just kind of enter this community, and it's only salad and fresh fruit and fresh veggies and meat if you're into that. But there's no processed foods. There's no sugar. You have to get in the car and drive outside of it to go and eat unhealthy. So your defaults are set to a good level, right? And that's like one of several creative solutions to try to have a corporate virtue as opposed to corporate advice.

Okay. And that's because the community is not optimizing on profit maximization. They're optimizing on other values. Or more precisely that profit maximization is now aligned. with the individual's values. It's a little bit like, you know, there's junk food, but now, guess what, there's health food and there's companies that make money on health food. And there's, you know, there's now like results-based gems, which don't make money on the subscription, but make money if you actually achieve your fitness goals, right? So it's a little bit like, you know, you probably manage the Salesforce, right?

And not sales force, the company, but a Salesforce like a, right? And they will do what you incentivize them to do. right there the saying is coin operated right you set up incentives and they will run that's the best salesperson people get upset at at them for optimizing around the the quote unquote wrong incentives but that that's a sign of a very effective salesperson yeah exactly it's like it's almost like a really powerful stallion and you point in a direction it's going to run in that direction if you pointed off the cliff or if you didn't realize that there was a bump in the road in the future well that's kind of your fault in that sense right so now you can do things

where you incentivize sales people with equity, but really what you want to do is just constantly monitor the incentives and chains the incentives. And so capital is this very powerful maximizing function, but it can't set the objective itself. You know, you have to, and then some creativity comes out of, okay, well, we made a lot of money off of junk food. Can we make a lot of money off of health food? Well, probably we can. We just need to hit the right cultural moment, right? Anyway, so that's just like one subroutine of a subroutine of what I'm trying to do here. But really what what it is, is all those problems I listed, I think there are internet for solutions to many of them. There are ways that, and one way of thinking about that, if there is hope, it comes from tech.

Okay, that's the one thing that's working. Why do I say this one thing is working? Well, you have, you know, drug addiction, and you have failing life expectancy, and you have, you know, military issues overseas, and you have inflation. and you have everything that the state is touching, which is real estate, it's health care, it's education. Those things are getting wildly expensive in price. Okay. And I can show you that graph.

Do you know the graph I'm talking about? Not that one specifically. And education, of course, as well. I think education has been compounding by 8% for like three decades. Yeah. And Ackman actually had this great tweet where he's like, how is this thing getting so ridiculous expensive and the number of students isn't increasing?

At Harvard, you now have more. administrators and students. Yeah, exactly, right? And so, okay, so now I'm going to show you something that I've been thinking about for a long time. By the way, not just Harvard. Most Ivy League and students. Yes, most Ivy League. That's right.

It's like they all kind of hike prices together. They also collude on admissions and whatnot, right? So whatever the state props up rises in price, whatever technology drops falls in price, right? So this is like, you know, everything that the government touches, medical services these are obviously related to education right um housing even on this chart it doesn't look that bad um in certain markets it's like absolutely terrible right uh and whereas the stuff the technology touches like TVs or you know cell phones those fall relative to baseline but these things rise and now there's a bunch of people will say oh no no you're just you know that's

bombes cost disease those things that go up in price it's because there's labor with them and you're you know you're you're trying to blame it on the government i'm like well ask yourself why they can't be automated why don't we have more automated medicine it's because thanks to a ma and to some extent FDA and a bunch of other and hHS and so on you have to have a doctor in the loop for things that don't require a doctor for example like you need a doctor to get your genome sequence you know some in some places you know that that's considered like a diagnostic test This is like saying you need a doctor to step on the scale, you know, to a doctor to look in the mirror. Why do we need to put that through the medical system and register a billing event for everybody involved?

That doesn't need to be like that. You want to push much more self-serve, you know. And similarly with child care, there's regulations that say there can only be so many children cared for per adult. But you have a much larger number of children care for by teacher in elementary school. And yet that, you know, you could have 30 kids in a class. but there's a limit on child care. It's one of the reasons child care is very expensive in some jurisdictions. Obviously, housing regulations prohibit you in a variety of ways.

There's also unions that make it tough. And I recognize, by the way, I'm sure some of the people watching this are, like, you know, managing large, you know, pensions or things like that. No offense, any of these folks, I'm talking about the systemic effects. Well, speaking of pensions, there's this really interesting thing where basically the largest pensions in the world are, of course, and they've been they have political pressure to drive up their returns so they're going into private equity and hedge funds that are then systematically going in and downsizing it's so man it's so i mean the marriage is a two-way marriage and as you mentioned it's largely driven by politics

and not the end and goals of the individual members which is where the you know that delta is essentially the corruption or the politicization of the process Right. I mean, the thing is, like, the, you know, the goal of having a high standard of living and, you know, a job with decency for workers, of course, one supports that. It's a mechanism, you know, that one can argue it. But anyway, my point is that when you start scratching on these areas that have supposedly bowel most cost disease and nothing can be done and so and so forth, and then you go and look at construction abroad, you're like, why is this 100x or a thousand X literally faster? I'm not saying that as like some figure of speech. I mean, you know, I've posted videos. I recognize that China's very unpopular. I have, nevertheless, they've built a lot very quickly, and there's something one can learn from their prefab and modular construction.

If you were to unpack those scale efficiencies, what are those scale efficiencies? It's only 30 seconds. Just watch the seven trains, 23 diggers. They started at 6.30 p.m. they're done by 3 a.m. So the reason I say that is that shows what's like what's physically possible, right? And when you go from nine hours to three years or five years, or five years for a station, right, that is a greater than 1,000 X difference, right?

You know, divide 9,000 hours, right, into 24 hours in a day, right? And, you know, that is, I think 2.5 times per day and then three years, 1,000. From 9 hours to one year, that's about 1,000 X, right? 9,000 hours roughly in a year. When you're a thousand X off from the state of the art, from what's physically feasible, you're going to fall way behind. You're not in the game. And this is something, you know, Elon actually replied to a tweet of mine where I said,

look, we're not, California isn't 10% off the state of the art. It's like a thousand X off the state of the art in terms of speed. And if you've done any real estate, that compounds really fast. If you can build a building, a thousand X faster than the other guy, You can have it occupied in generating rent to build the next building and the next and the next and next. Your compounding rate is so much ridiculously faster than the other guy. You're just going to completely outrun them, right? And so my point is that we're so far below capacity on this.

And the reason is because of, in part, in large part, these regulations that are requiring either humans to be in involved or new technology to not be adopted or all the above. And that's why the cost of construction, the cost of housing and so on goes up. It doesn't have to be like that. We could build way, way, way faster. So the point being that how do you do that, though? Let's say we've diagnosed it that the house of housing and cost of housing and the cost of education, the cost of health care, all these things skyrocketed. Everything touched by technology is dropped in price.

Well, you know, there's that famous Alan Ks saying, which is if you're serious about software, you've got to build your own hardware. That's Steve Jobs quoted, right? So I feel if you're serious about technology, you need to build your own sovereignty. Because the problems are upstream of the technology. Exactly, exactly. And let me give some concrete examples. The city of San Francisco and the current state of it, that's not something that you can solve by hitting keys on a keyboard, at least in a trivial way, right? That's a governance problem. Newsom and, you know, Linda Brie could click

their fingers like this and clean up the city and they admitted it. They said it's true. They cleaned it up for the, for each visit. Another example is, you know, when Cruz was taken off the streets, a self-driving car was taken off the streets. That's a political thing, not a tech thing. When AI is getting the 640K compute is enough for anyone ban, right? Like, you know, there's a recent executive order that's banning AI compute. When you have crypto being a tech thing, attacked by the government, right? And so you have AI, crypto, self-driving, any technology you can, obviously social media is being attacked, right? Any technology you can imagine is something where if it actually is increasing human freedom in some way, if it's giving

people more ability to speak, more ability to transact, more ability to do X or Y or Z, that's undercutting several traditional power centers, and they want to clamp down on that. Because they think of it as rocking the system or causing instability, either directly or indirectly. And you can see that more clearly all the way over in China, where even though, you know, they had done some, I think some good things, I hesitate to ever say China's ever done anything. Why are you so focused on trolls and people criticizing? I think one of the things in our search for truth, we must be, we must be brave in stating things that are, you know, factually based. I'm not like really focused on it, but it's more like defensive driving.

Yeah. you know conditioning it's it goes back to the power structures somehow you are being influenced by the implicit the implicit hands of online criticism well yeah i mean in the sense of i want to state things precisely enough to deny an out of context clip yeah and you also want the audience to be able to absorb the learning without being triggered yeah sometimes right i mean but look Is it true? Look, you know, if to really understand where China is, let's just talk about China for a second as a sub-routine pop right up, okay? Or, all right, here we go. People are just totally, totally, totally unrealistic about, you know, where China is right now in terms of how strong it is on symptoms. And I think the very, the very basis of Sonsu art of war is to know your enemy. To know your enemy. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Exactly. Like if you're, you know, if the whole thing is sort of, in my view, cope that says, of course, they're just going to fall into a ditch and win. And so that wasn't like the U.S. had to during the Cold War. It took the Soviets very seriously. But anyway, so China's number one steel, number one trade, number on shipbuilding, number on high speed rail, right? So here is the steel. Okay. And then people sometimes say, oh, it's just like the 1970s and so. Okay. In the 1970s, here was the U.S. in terms of steel production, there was China. Okay. It's basically about, that's about a 10x ratio.

Today, it's 10x the other way, and China's the number one steel producer in the entire world. And that's just a proxy for lots of physical stuff. I'll show a few more graphs. Here, back in the year 2000, the U.S. was, you know, these are all the blue countries of trade partners of the U.S. in this graph. By the year 2020, only really North America was mainly a U.S. trade partner, had the U.S.'s number one trade partner. And some countries in Western Europe, most of the world has their number one trade partner being China.

So if you tell countries, you must choose between America and China, China, you may not like, they may, they may, they may not want to choose, but you may not like their choice, you know, knowing these facts governs what tactics are likely to work, right? You can't sanction China. China's like making the essentials for much of the world. And also, people think it's all about a high-tech competition with China. That's not actually true, or not only that, it's also a medium tech and a low-tech competition. China can screw you on the screws because they make all the screws in the nuts and the bolts,

too, you know, they deny the screws as it's saying, you know, like the, for one of a nail, the battle was lost. You know, that old, old saying? Yep. Yeah. So, like, for one of a nail, like, the horse didn't get its shoe. And for one of a shoe, the horse didn't ride. So the messenger couldn't get to the king and couldn't tell them that, you know, the troops were there.

So for one of a nailed, the entire battle was lost, right? So China can screw you on very low-tech things by just denying them or, you know, having them sent, you know, a mistake, you know, we didn't understand your instructions. There's many different ways that they can sanction. the countries that are hostile to them, that they haven't really sort of flex it. The micron sanctions are just like v1 of that. The worst the U.S. can do is sort of keep China in a box maybe for a little bit

in terms of denying the very highest tech stuff. The worst China can do is to undercut your very standard of living and cause very significant inflation by a sanctions weapon. So just understanding the state of the world is important, right? So that's, you know, who are you going to call trade-wise? Here is a slide from the U.S. Navy itself, by the way, okay that shows you love this illustration it's saying china has 200 x greater shipbuilding capacity than the USA that's a that's a somewhat alarming slide i think is that is that civilian

vessels no military vessels or rather okay sorry i think they're not making sorry let me let me let me be more precise the u.s navy uh the head the u.s navy is saying china has more capacity in one shipyard than all American shipyards combined. And mainly those shipyards can be modified for military purposes. Do I know the exact breakdown in military or civilian production? I don't. Okay. But I do think that if you look at history, people can turn plowshares into swords

and the U.S. turned a lot of its domestic, you know, car production, for example, into tank factories and whatnot. So the fact that China has all the shipbuilding capacity is cause for worry if you're going to get into an extended conflict, which I think would be a disaster for the world. but it's worth actually understanding. So let's talk about there's a whole, there's a whole trend, American dynamism.

Yes, let me talk about them one second. I'll show you one more. This is how China built the world's largest high-speed rail number, right? Now, while China is doing this from 2008 to 2022, California high-speed rail, they haven't laid a single line of track for $100 billion spent, right? like they you know are it's it's like um i want to find the thing that says no uh track laid or it's like um it's a very abortive kind of thing so meanwhile here's what's happening can you see this tab

yep um billion spent still no track built and still no trains 14 years on what happened to hs2 okay so you have china and the u.s basically starting 14 years ago and china's built out this giant high-speed rail network for their entire country from scratch. And the U.S. a lot more money seemingly. And all the resources in the world hasn't gotten anywhere in one state. Whereas by contrast, this is what's happening in China and the entire country. Here's a graph, 2008 to 2020.

Do you see that? Yeah. Okay. You know, when I say this kind of stuff, and I point this out to people, I get a few reactions, right? The first reaction is you're China shill, you're, you know, you love China so much, Raj. And I'm like, I'm, you know, you can't get better. The greatest strength is doing your own weakness, right?

You can't get better unless you know that you're actually behind and why you're behind, right? If, imagine if Block, maybe they did by the, imagine Blockbuster called everybody who's points Netflix's growth, the Netflix shell. Okay. Perhaps that's what happened. Maybe Blackberry called everybody an iPhone shell. Okay. Like, that's something where you just lose to the competition if you deny the competition

actually has any advantage on, number one. Okay. The second reaction is people will say, oh, yeah, but it's all shoddy and it's going to fall apart and it's low quality and so on and so forth. And the thing is, the Chinese have ascended the value chain. They've gone from making plastic stuff at Walmart to, like, assembling phones and things like that, all the way up to DGI drones and glowing cities. You know, also, by the way, if you looked at our engineering programs in the West, a very large percentage are, you know, graduate students of Chinese descent and of Indian descent and from other places. They aren't dumb people.

They work hard and they're smart. And to always think that they're only going to make plastic stuff, I think doesn't give sufficient credit. to, you know, what was one of the world's great civilizations. Do I agree with communism? Of course, I don't agree with the communism. Do I think that they have executed phenomenally well in some ways over the last 40 years? I think that's undeniable. Otherwise, they wouldn't go from an agrarian nothing to what they've become

because they built up their whole country. They've shipped goods all around the world. And they own, you know, it was about a trillion dollars of U.S. debt. So they're also, you know, they're a creditor nation, right? They're extending credit to the world. They're not going into debt. If any one of those things wasn't true, If they hadn't built up their country, if they hadn't exported the goods, for example, if they were a net importer, right, you could argue, you know, that that was actually what was causing it.

But they're building up, they're exporting out, and they're building up their cash reserves. So this massive unlock of just domestic production happened. And that doesn't mean that, you know, all is lost or something like that. But it does mean that it's worth actually taking them seriously. Now, the funny thing is, in many ways what's been happening, over the last five years, seven years, ten years, is that the U.S. has actually been copying China without admitting it. Most of the time people say China's copying the U.S., right?

Like, oh, uh, Xiaomi is copying, you know, Apple or, you know, they're cloning Twitter or something to that for Waybo. That definitely does happen. Absolutely does happen. But that's like admitted, you know. What I think is not admitted is China copying, the U.S. copying China. And what do I mean about that? Well, obviously COVID lockdown, okay, but it's more than that.

It's, you know, restrictions on free speech and rejections of free markets. It's coming from both the left and the right where it's saying we need to ban this because China's banning our stuff. We need to ban this because it's influencing the minds of our youth, right? And what that is, I can go down the list. It's also, you know, China has a term for cancel culture. You know what they call it, human flesh search. Very evocative, right? It's like, you find somebody online, you're like, who's that guy?

And then the whole internet tries to dig up and find that person or what happened, right? One of things that also happened was, you know, for example, China would censor the name of, or, you know, if you sent $64.89 on Rechette, that would get censored because it's $6.489, like CNN. But if you gave the name of the whistleblower on Facebook, you know, Sierra Mello, this is like five-year-old, nobody cares now. But Facebook would censor that, right? So aspects of the same thing are kind of getting reinvented in parallel on these systems. So people are copying China without admitting it. And it's the, that's bad, right? Because if you're copying without admitting it, you know, people are, for example,

trying to copy Chinese industrial policy with things like the TSM plant, right? Are you familiar with this whole thing? Right. So TSMC, just for background for those people who, you know, weren't following this. The U.S. used to be the world leader in chips. then Intel lost a bunch of steps, and somehow TSM has rocketed out to the leader, and they're located in Taiwan. So that's a national security vulnerability for the U.S., arguably, and from one standpoint, if China takes Taiwan. And how do they take Taiwan?

People think they're going to invade Taiwan. Maybe they invade Taiwan. Maybe they just win a cultural victory in Taiwan. They're also Chinese-speaking people. There's multiple parties in Taiwan, and not all of them are sympathetic to the U.S. Some of them want reunification with China and so on, okay. But let's say that's a risk. Okay, fine.

The U.S. allocates $50 billion. That's a lot of money, by the way. That's $50 billion venture capital funds to become the largest venture capitalists in the world. Okay. And that $50 billion is allocated towards bringing TSM to America and building, you know, having our ally give us the technot transfer. Okay. Do you know what's happened with that? No, I've done on an update.

Okay. Remember, this thing, $50 billion, it's supposed to prevent like a giant conflict with China. It's supposed to be a huge, now-scuered thing. You'd think all the stops get pulled out. Okay. So what's actually happened? Well, so first, the, and it's very sad that this is happening, but it also shows, you know, what is, what's going on. Like, first, the unions were annoyed because basically the, they weren't doing the work that the, you know, Taiwan has a certain work ethic that is different than where America's work is nowadays, for at least some people.

So the unions didn't want to do the work in the way that the Chinese or around the Taiwanese wanted to do it. And so the, you know, TSM said, okay, can we at least bring in 500 people from Taiwan who will work in the way that we're accustomed to working? And the unions oppose those visas. And to my knowledge, those visas still haven't been granted. Okay. So the decision to bring foreign workers to Arizona a slap in the face. So these guys are treating this as if it's like some jobs program or whatever. Can you imagine, like, you know, the scientists of the Manhattan Project involved a lot of European Jews, right?

People who had been pushed out. Imagine, yeah, Einstein. Like, imagine that these people for, like, if, I don't know exactly what happened there, but if you said, oh, we couldn't process the visa and you brought that to FDR in the middle of, like, an actual conflict, he probably would look to you like you had four eyes and be like, why are you bringing this to my desk? Obviously, bring them into the country and figure out the paperwork, I would think, right? And so this is where we're at. We're like, you know, even for a national security thing, these folks can't get visas into the country and it's fought, right? And that's not the end of it.

There's so much more like the Morris Chang recently fired the, or the TSM head seems to have had issues because of Arizona. Rumors for TSM Chairman Mark Liu for cert retire of Arizona FAB debacle. So it comes out in this article that the U.S. hasn't yet paid TSM for this gigantic FAB investment. And that's why TSM's founder was very skeptical of the attempt to build a FAB and the fact that they didn't get paid yet. You know, because the company hasn't yet received subsidies from the federal government, right? So we have some thing, which the optics of it were, let's bring manufacturing back from Asia, you know, build American again and so on, sort of.

The flag was waived and money's allocated and everybody, you know, blew their kazooz. And now what's actually happened, project is foundering. You literally can't get visas to get people into the country. The unions are holding it up. All the reasons you don't build in America are now being encountered. And it's not just about money. it's about basically alignment and coordination. And this brings us back to my very original point about when you have disaligned people,

when you have people who just do not see things the same way, it doesn't matter how much money you throw it. It'll get like, you know, dispent and burned in lawsuits and lawfare and environmental union reports and like strikes or whatever. When you have people who are really aligned and locked on to a single purpose, you can get a lot done with a very small group, right? And so the question is, how do we rebuild that consensus? And by the way, I'll just show you one.

graph to quantify the level to which there isn't consensus and then remind me how I got on this is something related to China and so on, right? You know, it's not one country, it's two parties, okay? So that's, this is, you know, each of these are congressmen, and the 50s, people of one party, another party used to vote together quite a bit on bills. By 2011, these had come apart into two totally separate graphs. And this is not like a one-year thing. This is like a 70-year trend, right?

And this is something which has been happening for many years, and now it's reflected in a totally different graph. And this graph, I'll show you next, is the graph of social media in 2017. So this is, rather than congressmen on both sides, it's individual users, and it's like publications, and these are Democrats and Republicans, and they mostly follow each other. There's a few in the middle over here. And this is 2017 when they're all, you know, in one social network. And now you have blues on Macedon and blue sky and threads. And reds are on, you know, parlor and gab and truth social and so on. And so not even fighting anymore.

They're like already divorced and they've digitally split apart into their own apps. Okay. So that's the reason I say all that, pulling it all the way back up, I got into this topic because we were talking about how. prices had risen and how construction had become impossible in the U.S. And as an example of that, that it didn't need to be impossible, I showed how fast China builds. And I also showed how the U.S.'s attempts to build recently with TSM and so on weren't working. And so what can work? Well, one answer is just double down on all the government processes that are obviously not working.

The government processes, U.S. government processes that are leading to the TSMC debacle, to the California high-speed train debacle, to the AI regulations. to the crypto regulations, to the state of San Francisco, to high inflation, to too many other things to name, right? You can just keep doubling down on that, try to reform that system, right? Or you can build a better one. And the fundamental question is, we know how to do that for things that look like companies. You can build a competitor to Blockbuster Video.

You can build a competitor to Ford Motor Company with Tesla. How do you, now we know how to build it with currencies. And so you can build a competitor to the Federal Reserve with Bitcoin. You can build a competitor, in a sense, to the judiciary with smart contracts, at least a part of it. Elon has figured out how to build a competitor to NASA, a government agency with SpaceX. You start extending the domain of the kinds of things that you can build competitors to. And so the question is, how do we build a competitor to Harvard?

How do we build a competitor to the New York Times? How do we build a competitor to the Senate? How do we build a competitor to, you know, FTA and to NIH and so on and so forth? And we're starting to get versions of that, like Vita Dow that I showed you. It's very early. But that's the kind of thing, which had a few billion dollars a year, you know, and crypto can go very fast upward when it works. That could start to become a competitor to NIH, and maybe a small amount of money,

but really aligned people does better. So this is where my head is at is how do we build internet-first replacements to those failing institutions which we haven't yet been able to build competitors. Your thesis is the ethos of Silicon Valley. It's based on the innovator's dilemma that's written by Clayton Christensen, which basically says that it's much easier to start new organizations with First Principles' thinking than it is to reform previous organizations due to all the intransions that you mentioned.

So tell me about your funds. So what do you, outside of being a high-risk seat fund, which I think is a great way to frame it, what are you looking to fund? What specific verticals are you looking? to find from your seat fund. What specific verticals? Anything that is building an alternative to a failing institution.

For example, internet homeschooling to replace broken K-12, internet education like synthesis or replet to replace, you know, failing either higher ed with AI tutors or, you know, professional training with like online crypto bounties and online training. like that. If you have failing medicine, well, can we do medical tourism? Can we do AI diagnostics on your phone? Right. And if we have, you know, issues in manufacturing, can we do robotic manufacturing? So I'm essentially looking at these extremely valuable institutions that are in decline. And even an imperfect solution that gets you even 20% of what they were is so valuable in many sense of the term, economically, of course, but also societally, that people

will use them. And so crucially, it's not really necessarily about novel technology. Sometimes it is. AI tutoring is using novel technology, crypto's novel, you know, robotic construction will be novel. Sometimes it is. But it's really starting first with a societal problem that's happening and trying to address that with a focused technological fix in that area. You know, So, like, AI tutors are not a solution for the manufacturing crisis, and so, but they do really improve homeschooling so that you can get a very high quality homeschooling experience better than any K-12 school, but it's also customized to your child's needs. Something that really resonates, as you know, at the seat stage, it's all about power loss. It's not about how many wins you have or how many losses you have. It's about how big your wins are.

A lot of times people have difficulty conceptualizing that. One example that I like to give people is a $10 billion outcome is better than $7, $1 billion outcomes. Something that resonates with your strategy is you are not looking for incremental. You're not looking for a SaaS company that grows at 30% versus 20%, which may lead to a 10x or might lead to maybe even a 15x return. How are you going about building out your portfolio? Great question. One comment I want to make on the previous thing is I have nothing against enterprise SaaS and stuff like that. In fact, many of the techniques to build those businesses may be applicable here.

You're still going to need to know about churn. You're still going to need to do all the basic stuff like HR and so and so forth. Being ambitious doesn't mean you don't, you know, do the blocking and tackling of, you know, having a CFO or whatever when you need one, right? So I'm a pragmatic ideologue. You have your eyes on, you know, the prize, but you are nailing all the details all the way. So with that, like, for example, with SpaceX, Elon wants to get to Mars, but there's a lot of details to make sure a rocket launch is pulled off, you know. So I'm not at all negative or disdainful of, you know, quote, boring SaaS businesses or stuff like that. In fact, they may be components of what's done.

However, I do believe going after important societal problems could yield outsized returns both societally and economically in many senses. Now, to your second point, what does portfolio construction look like? And the short answer is, I'm just, you know, betting on the smart, young early founders. And not always young. Sometimes actually they're in their 30s or 40s or 50s, they're serial entrepreneurs. But they feel energetic, right? They, you know, their past wins were just prologged to what they're about to do. Okay.

And this is a group of folks that I sort of, I think I attract a few different demographics. Being of Indian descent, a lot of Indian people like me from India. Why is that? It's kind of like, I don't know, it was a poor country, and it's just recently leveling up. And so for a lot of those kids, I'm, you know, somebody that they, you know, could aspire to be like, right? And I hope to invest in some of them. And actually, Indians are the single most common immigrant tech founder. And the other, the second is Israelis, right? And so there's a lot of Indian tech talent. I mean, maybe obviously, right? And so that's like one important channel, you know, if you want to say, like, I sort of hate talking in like VC LP terms, but let me, let me, let me talk to those terms. So the unique deal flow is that, so A, I think there's a, there's a lot of, you know, Indian kids, Indian founders and so on who I think I could be the first check into, very high IQ, people who just got on the internet.

So, you know, we, we can tap like a giant gold mine that just opened up. because I do believe that India in this decade will be, or let me be more precise, Indians in this decade will be what China was last decade. And why do I say that? China had a miraculous 2010s. It was WeChat and Wee-Bo and just a giant build-out of their entire tech economy. I do believe, though, that it's more about the Indian network, whereas it was about the Chinese state. China's development is very much focused within China.

Their Internet is air-gap from the rest of the world. It's got the great firewall. It's all in Chinese. Their apps are all controlled by the Chinese state. So it's its own island. India is the opposite where, because in English and its internet is connected to the rest of the world, most of your followers will probably soon be India. Most people on the English internet will soon be India.

So India is a totally different phenomenon on the internet than China was. And it's almost like a mirror image in some ways. It's as open and connected as China was closed and siloed off, right? So that has a lot of interesting phenomena. One impact of it is there's a lot of visa restrictions. are being placed on Chinese nationals. And if you remember my comment about engineering departments, like Stanford Electron Engineering, when I was there, was on the order of 30 or 40% Chinese, 30, 40% Indian.

I forget the exact number's on that ballpark. With the Chinese talent basically dropping off, Indian talent is sort of surging to compensate. So a very large, so a lot more emigration of Indians to many tech roles around the world, just as India itself is rising. So that means it's not just about Indians in India or India of the country, but Indians globally. So I'm extremely bullish on Indians, moderately bullish on India. Okay. And so that means is you can get Indian founders out of India and you can place them into vehicles and they don't initially have to come to the U.S. They're global founders. They can be placed into vehicles and they can

just crush it on a world stage. Let's call that one like, you talk about portfolio construction. I'm just talking about deal flow first, right? That's one stream. The second stream, of course, is all of the, you know, crypto folks and so on. I've been in crypto for a long time. And that's, I I do think, by the way, crypto isn't just finance, parallel finance. It's parallel financiers. At a certain price of cryptocurrency, a certain market cap, depending on how you calculate, around $200,000 of Bitcoin, if it hits that, around half the world's billionaires become crypto. Thousands of new billionaires are created.

If that happens, that means that we actually have a third global pool of capital that is distinct from, albeit interacting with the American and Chinese pools. Like that is say, I think of crypto as, you know, people talk about Web 3, and it is also like a third pool because it's like totally globally unlocked capital. One of the attractions of cryptocurrency and smart contracts is that they treat a Brazilian, a guy from Boston, and a guy from Bangalore equally, right? even as the rules-based order is breaking down, the code-based order is rising up. There's no gas-lighting in crypto. There's no gasoline, yeah.

I mean, look, look, there's like people say, what about all the hacks and the scams and sort of and stuff that happen on Shade? Absolutely those things happen. But it's like the Wild West where what's coming out of that is actually a generation of combat veterans in cybersecurity, right? All of these, like, you know, in Israel, they have Unit 8600, all these ex-NSA guys, all these amazing cybersecurity people are getting really good in crypto because, you know, just being one bite off can mean the loss of millions and millions of dollars. It's a very different kind of trial by fire than the sort of bureaucratic checkbox process

that typical security consulting is, right? Typical security says, oh, you know, did you follow ISO 9,000 or whatever guidelines for, you know, check this? Do you have a chief security officer? Do you have a security at email? It's just like a checklist of things. Cryptosurity is like, here's a billion dollars, do you still have it tomorrow? Right?

It is 24-7 unlimited internet warfare to try to capture the flag. As such, it's actually taking cybersecurity for real. So what crypto is, it's another stream of talent besides the Indians, but it's more than just finance. It's cybersecurity, it's smart contracts, it's a pool of capital, and now it's funding things that those other two pools of capital are maybe more risk-averse about funding. For example, we're funding things like longevity or funding things like startup cities. And what those have in common with crypto is not that they're about moving money online, but they're about a parallel system.

Longevity is like parallel medicine. Startup cities are like parallel San Francisco, just like crypto is like parallel Wall Street. Right? Okay. So one stream is Indians. One stream is crypto. So, and certainly I actually, my, my background is in biology and genomics and whatnot, right? And so certainly I have those folks.

And, you know, for example, I was a investor in Benchling, which is a multi-billion dollar company that, you know, when I was at D.C. and Z that's done very well. That's like lab, for managing your clinical lab, all this. That's actually like a SaaS company, by the way, but it's like a multi-billion dollar. You talk a lot, but you don't talk a lot about your own success. So what are some other power lot type outcomes that you've had in your personal portfolio? Sure. So I'm early on just about every coin, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, Chainlink, so many. Avalanche, near protocol. It shows your non-ideological bent.

Yeah, no, I mean, basically, because all of these are smart founders, and, you know, like, if one of them works, then it's really worth it. And you know, one of the fine things is, crypto tribalism, I understand why it exists, and that's the whole topic we can get into. And I think I can speak the language and understand many of the arguments of. And in fact, I was probably one of the, I'm a person that people would mistake for a Bitcoin maximalist, but I do believe that we're going to need more financial assets than just Bitcoin, even somebody who lived in a world where there's only gold, where gold was a reserve currency, didn't believe that gold was the only asset, right? So I think we need different tools for the job. You don't just have a hammer. You need wrenches and screwdrivers and so on. So, okay, so first is many, many, many of the crypto assets and crypto protocols out there.

A. B, at A.C.Z, benchling, digital ocean. You know, I did that deal in Peter Levine, you know, that was in early 2014. Then there was Omada and OpenGov. Those are both that billion dollar valuations. You know, knock on wood, I think they're doing well. Yeah, Amata Health and OpenGov. And there were some early investor in Superhuman, early investor in Replit.

And, you know, here's a nice comment. You know, Replitt's a multi-billion dollar company. And I'm shot ahead. A nice comment about me. Do you share your track record? Do I share my track record? I mean, I can. But like people kind of know, I mean, if you know, you know, well, I don't know.

I don't know what I can say about this because of the regulatory blah, blah, blah stuff, right? So what I can say is I invest in those companies and they're currently at that valuation. And, you know, a bunch of the best investors in Silicon Valley have invested in me. And so I think I've been a positive some contributor to the ecosystem over time. So in those companies, you have a unique thesis around check size. a lot of people say your fund size is your strategy. I say your check size is your strategy. So tell me about your check size and how are you strategic about it.

What's your min check? What's your max check? And tell me about how that's evolved over time. I'll get a short answer than the long answer. So I tend to do a constant investment in every company that's above my bar. And so you're making only one decision, the zero one of invest. and then you put in, let's say, 100K or 250K. Okay.

Now, you don't do too much. Why? As a seed fund, you have a different strategy than a VC fund. As a VC fund, you want to gobble up 20% because you need to have 20% of a, you know, $5 billion company to get a billion dollar exit, right? You want to get double-digit ownership. Percent ownership is the thing you're constantly optimizing for, and you're doing everything to get that. But that means is you have to elbow everybody out at the table to get the table to get

the biggest chunk for yourself. Every other point of allocation is very precious and makes a big difference to your returns. As a seed fund, it's very different. You just essentially want to be part of lots of winning deals. And if, for example, you saw a space early like cryptocurrency in 2013, a very good strategy was to just simply invest in everything that was above your bar, right? If you just took the top 20 companies, you would have gotten Coinbase, you would have gotten shape shift, you know, a little bit later would have gotten a bunch of other things, right?

Blockchain at info, these are multi-billion dollar results. And you would have gotten a pretty good chunk for very little money, right? Like maybe for a few million bucks you could have gotten on the order of a point in many of these companies, right? And crucially, you're playing nice with everybody. Okay, you're not, you know, nobody dislikes you. You are in every deal and you're helping people in general. general. And of course, there's limits. You can't, you know, you can't go all in on one company that's a total competitor of another and so and so forth. But in general, you can be an ecosystem-wide kind of player. And you get very high ROI on a relatively small amount of money. Now, that doesn't scale up if you go to a very large fund, then you need new tactics. But if you keep your fund on the order of 100 mil or less, you can actually get very large ROI in multiples, in my view, relatively easily by basically just being in a lot of these great companies. Does that make sense so far?

I can talk about it. And a couple other things. And this strategy has worked for me personally. So I've just been investing 100% my own money for many years. I'm basically just doing exactly what I was doing personally. But now I've just got like a fund and some ops and stuff around, right? So the reason, by the way, to not like, you know, try to dial check size up and down and so on on each investment is it's actually kind of when I go back and back test. it.

What you find is often you can diligence, intelligence, but you can't diligence, diligence, what do you mean by that? So in a, with a founder, I can very quickly, usually figure out kind of how smart they are, how polish their app is, how polish their website copy is, and so on. What's much harder to tell is where they have the grit and staying power and consistency to grind it out for 10 years. And often, not always, but often I found that people who were above my minimum intelligence bar actually have much higher grit than you might think and outperform people

who are smarter but have less grit. And so if you just allocated, you know, more money to the, I mean, this is one of those things where it's a neural network that's trained and it's hard for me to fully articulate it in a few words, but that's the short version, right? By investing in those people who are above your minimum intelligence to invest bar, the remaining variance is explained by variables that you're not as good as assessing, right? Because it's like long-term performance. And I don't want to name individual people,

but there's specific people I'm thinking of that are not that showy in a conference room, but they're just marathon runners, you know? Because in a conference room, when people are giving a pitch or something like that, you're seeing their top speed, but you're not seeing their endurance. I'll name a couple. Brian Armstrong was not the hottest company in YC by Longshot. It's so well-known. Neither was a Porva in the same class of Instacart.

These are both good friends of mine, but I think. I'm calling out your friends. Also, Vitalik, Peter Thiel had a chance to invest a lot of money into Ethereum. And being a genius, he was not able to maximize that either. And a lot of people did not see that happening. Also, Dylan from the Teal Fellowship, I think he spent, took five years to launch, and those two are the two biggest outcomes so far on the Teal Fellowship. So I think there's something there, and I think it shows your humility to show that you're not able to assess that potentially, and you want the asymmetric exposure to everybody. All for those people are my friends, and I think they would, you know, they tweeted nice things about me, and I think, and I say it as a compliment to them, by the way, as.

their genius was not, was not known early on. I will say one thing. They both got into Brian and Approva got into Y Combinator and Vitalik and Dylan got into the Teal Fellowship. So if you had just said they're above my bar and I'm going to index in everybody, that's essentially my strategy. If you had just said they're above the bar of getting into this organization and then you index in them, that actually turns out to work very well empirically. So let me play a contrarian thesis to you. One thing that I've noticed in Teal Fellows versus YC is they do seem to have another standard deviation on average of intelligence. They are, from a purely IQ standpoint, they have that bar, and the returns on the Teal Fellowship have been phenomenal, as I'm sure you know.

One thing that was not obvious to me is that IQ actually plays a very large part, especially when you account for highly power law outcomes, like creating Ethereum. And you seem to have a different thesis, which is IQ once you get to the top 1% is kind of like table stakes and then it's hard to do. Isn't there an argument that made for the opposite? So, yeah, so Camilla Benbow has actually collected some of the data on this. There isn't a diminishing return to IQ. In fact, to the extent that you can measure it, it just keeps becoming more valuable. However, I think what I'm saying is just for academic pursuits. Right.

I think, you know, there's multiple variables that go into great founders. Two of them we just discussed, which are intelligence and diligence. I feel I have much, I put it like this, diligence, I have much higher error bars on measuring in the short run. You know, the kinds of ways by the things that might correlate with diligence, physical fitness to some extent, right? That's like, you know, to how consistent somebody is. You'd have to study that, but I think that's a hypothesis. Mental health. That's really meant.

Yeah, maybe, maybe. In both directions, there's a, there's a, there's a book. Yeah, they might be, it might be crazy consistent. Go ahead. There's a book called Hypomanic Edge that showed that some, some people. Yes, I was going to say that. Polar, bipolar disorder actually helped founders. It's pretty wild.

That's right. It's like, gosh, it was this guy by John, something, something. And he wrote in the early 2000s. It's funny. I was just going to mention that book. You know how I know about that book? Did I mention on a podcast? A dear friend gifted it to me, which didn't appreciate it at the time.

He's like, he's like, I'm not saying anything. What other factors? So you mentioned physical, physical, I would actually add mental health. What other kind of non-trivial factors have you found leads to success? So there's intelligence diligence, and then the third is maybe the most important for what we're doing, risk tolerance. And, you know, it's called contrarianness or whatever. But for example, early Wycombinator had a really impressive list of people there, right? There's a founder of Reddit, you know, it was a founder of, you know, of Twitch.

There's Sam Altman. Like that group of people in those early photos with Paul Graham includes some very, very, very, very impressive people, you know. And that's kind of like, you know, the Till Fellowship's first class. I mean, Wycomner still attract a lot of great folks. And, you know, it's, you know, Gary's also an investor. the fund by then. Gary's a friend and, you know, I think they're doing great. Yeah. Incredible CEO and they're doing great. That first class of Wycomner is like the first few classes of the TIL Fellowship, which pulled out Vitalik and Dylan Field. And actually,

there's other people there in that, in those classes that aren't as famous, but they've made also billions of dollars. It's like multiple unicorn founders there 10 years later. Those are smashing successes. And part of it is that I think what they selected for was not simply IQ, but a willingness to do unconventional but good things, you know, or unconventional things that would be proven smart later. It was absolutely not, nobody knew what Y Combinator was. It didn't give you a status increase in the mid-2000s, right? It wasn't like, I'm YCO6. That didn't mean anything back then, right? The TIL Fellowship was hit and attacked by so many people at the time that it was launched, if you remember that. This is the stupidest idea ever. Peter Tiel needs his head

examined, all these negative articles, right? Recently, the Washington Post admitted defeat, Michael Gibson, who founded the Teal Fellowship, spoke in the network state conference. Again, a longtime friend of mine, and he took a victory lap recently in his book on the paper belt on fire, right, which is actually named after... Higher education isn't doing itself any favors. It's not really... Yeah, it's a great...

Like Peter was 10 years, 12 years ahead of that. I mean, people saw that, but he really, you know, he started to build at least a prototype what the alternative would be with the Teal Fellowship. So my point on those is, so then what then attracted a bunch of talent that was very non-consensus, five or six years later? Crypto did, in my view, right? Then also, AGI, until chat GPT, people didn't really take it seriously. And now a lot of people then took it seriously, right? And of course what Elon did with SpaceX, he turned space into an investable category.

Nobody thought that was an investable thing. They're like, why don't you get back to bits and bytes? What do you think the distinction there is? So the early YC people did it for the love of technology, and later on it was a status-seeking kind of NBA-type activity. What's the distinction? Frontier mentality. The frontier mentality. What is behind that frontier mentality?

Is it just to build great things, or is it the absence of something? So it's funny. You know, there's this great article. Let's see, on the, I'm going to find this from. Okay. So the triumph and terror of Wang Huning, okay? This is a great article that made the rounds a while ago. Okay. And you should read this because this guy is a very important theorist in China. And he's been around for a long time. And he's important intellectually there. And if he's not very well known in the West. What's a point of citing him? He wrote a book a long time ago. And it's amazing how well it holds up now. and so much where he said, you know, Americans, because of capitalism, they're very practical, but there is something that is, you know, spiritual about them, and that is, they're still spiritual, and that is futurism, their vision of the future.

That is something which is powerful enough to overcome the short-term dollars that sense and focus on the long-term future. Now, of course, techno-capitalism marries the two, where that long-term future, still has to have some possible payoff, but it could be distant, right? And that turns, quote, you know, you've heard the saying, I don't love it, but the saying that turns short-term greedy into long-term greedy, right? You're still going to make money, but you're taking such a long-term view of it that you're not like jostling for position to the same extent.

You're not as short-term-oriented, right? And so that pioneer mentality, that frontier mentality, is very different than the day trader, right? It's very different than the arbitrager. I've nothing against those kinds of people. They're making a living, whatever, right? But that's not the spirit of the frontier. That's not the risk tolerance and the vision of what can be

and the boldness to do something when it's low status. I actually believe that people are more willing to tolerate low money than low status. You can argue with that. It depends on, you know, like, but in a sense, those people who join early Wycombinator or the early Teal Fellowship were not simply saying, okay, I'm going to go a few years of living on ramen and, you know, not starving, obviously, but living way below what they would have lived at as an engineer at Google, okay? We're not simply taking the money hit, we're taking a status hit because at that time, that was not cool, right? Today, you know, yes, YC or TL Fellowship is almost like an alternate of MBA.

And that's fine, and that's good. It's good that these things grow up and become like that, right? They become institutionalized, and you know what? Everything has to become institutionalized eventually if it's successful. The pirates become the Navy. I totally get that all that. That's fine. However, there's always the next frontier, right?

What's the next level? What is the crazy thing out there that might just be technically possible? And I do think that we're going to go, as I said, from starting new companies like Google and new communities like Facebook and new currencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum to starting new cities and even new countries. We're already actually at the city level, like cul-de-sac.com in Arizona, investor in that, Prospera in Honduras cabin. We're starting, these cities are now on the scale of hundreds to thousands of people. And, you know, it's like crypto was at a billion dollars, Bitcoin was a billion dollars in 2013. close to a trillion dollars today. Okay.

And so that's a thousand X growth in 10 years. Do I think those things could go from hundreds and thousands of people to hundreds of thousands of people? I do think they can get there in 10 years or so, maybe 20 years. I don't know. Okay. I think it's possible. I think we can make that happen.

I think also, you know, here's a funny comment, right? In tech, you know, Elon wants to build a Mars colony. Okay? Sam Altman and others want to build a machine god, AGI. Brian Johnson and others want to live forever. I just want to start new countries. That's been done hundreds of times in the past, right? In a sense, I actually am the boring enterprise SaaS founder that you talked about.

This is the boring enterprise SaaS of crazy tech, in a sense, right? Being able to start new cities, new countries, new jurisdictions. Yeah, absolutely. And you mentioned Israel and Singapore and I would even argue Dubai. in Abu Dhabi, fascinating, fascinating cities. I call kind of Dubai run, if you create a city run by an LLC. There's a lot of alignment. The police is responsive.

It's really a fascinating place to go. Yes. I do want to triple click, I guess, on the frontierism. It's essentially an optimization. The premise there is that it's people that are optimizing on wanting to actually create change. So instead of doing a SaaS startup, which make them rich, they're doing something so groundbreaking that might actually change things, not because they want to do something groundbreaking, but because they want the eventual change, they want to improve society. Is that a fair characterization? I think that's right with a couple of edits, which are their improvement of society is constrained by the fact that all the people are opting in to their vision.

That's the big thing, right? With communism or other kinds of ideologies, people have maybe wanted to improve the world, but everybody's forced it, right? That's different. Whereas, let's say something like Chatchip T or Dropbox or Tesla or, you know, Coinbase, like people are opting into that. No one's forcing them to sign up, send an account, to put in their information. It's consensual, right? So it's a vision of the good that is constrained by the fact that other people need to buy into it. But not necessarily right away.

You know, at the very beginning, they might think it's totally crazy. And you get more proof points. You convince 10 people, 100 people, 1,000 people, 10,000 people. And eventually you get there. People forget how weird online dating was and how normalized it is today. Oh, man. I mean, everything. Everything is.

Or getting into somebody else's car. I remember in San Francisco, people are like, you're going into a Lyft, you're going into somebody's random car. It was one of the most absurd things to a lot of people. And two years later, it was completely lost. Yes. Completely exactly, right? And so that is why you have to tolerate some status loss at the beginning to do things that seem weird, but that are actually interesting, you know, to shift social norms in a hopefully positive direction. There was something else that you said that I just wanted to address. Oh, so the frontier, right? You mentioned Singapore, mentioned Dubai, mentioned Israel. More recently, there's El Salvador, there's Malay and Ardalen.

Argentina. There's the head of Bhutan who's actually doing Bitcoin mining, right? And all of them are powered by the internet in a really fundamental way. We're not initially seeing that, but it's sort of like they're gaining power from above from the cloud because their Twitter is huge, right? They're posting videos online. They're getting their message out to English-speaking audiences, okay? Like Bhutan, for example, is doing Bitcoin mining. You're going to hear big things from them. They just announce a new special economic zone on the border of India. They're just like putting themselves on the map, just like El Salvador, put itself on the map. And no one was talking about El Salvador before Naïbe Kelly became like the start of CEO of a country, right?

And so what's sort of happening in a sense is the cloud is like, imagine like sunlight coming from the cloud down to land and patches getting opened up on the land that are now being turned into frontier areas that weren't. And one way of thinking about this is I have a few macro-theises and one of them is that history. is running in reverse. So starting in like 1950, if you go backwards and forwards and time, 1950 was peak centralization. You had one telephone company, AT&T, and you had two superpowers, U.S. and U.S.S.S.R. You had three telephone companies, CBS, ABC, NBC. And everybody watched, I love Lucy, and it was a very centralized world with like less than 50 U.N. member countries. Everybody had been rolled up into these giant nation states like China and India and the USSR. And actually, Germany and France and America, that had been a process that had taken hundreds of years.

Before the Civil War, people used to say the United States are, and after they said the United States is. Before Bismarck, all the German, you know, the things that we now think of as Germany were independent, like, countries or principalities, and they got merged together. Before the French Revolution, lots of little, you know, French or things that are in the area we now think of as France that got rolled up into France. Even within living memory, India was a bunch of princely states before it got independence. British had delegated power to a bunch of princes that got rolled up. So 1950 was like massive centralization. The world maybe had never been this centralized before in history with just a few people holding sway over the entire world.

And then as you go forwards and backwards in time with the invention of the transistor, things start to unwind. You go to the transistor, you have the personal computer, you have cable news, you have, you have the internet, you have mobile phones, social media and cryptocurrency, and you start radically decentralizing technologically, and then you have decentralized AI, so you can have an intelligence on your phone. But if you go backwards in time, it also decentralizes, and lots of things are happening today in the opposite order they did in the past. Example, you go backwards in time to 1890, the frontier closes, forwards in time to 1991, the internet

frontier opens. Okay. Backwards in time, you have the robber barons, forwards in time, the tech billionaires, okay? Backwards of time, you have COVID-19, or back to time, you have Spanish flu, forwards in time, you have COVID-19. Okay. And this holds for lots of interesting political events. You go backwards in time, and you have Russia, the senior partner in the Russia-China relationship. You go forwards in time, China's a senior partner in the Russia-China relationship. Backwards in time, there's a British guy running India. Fords in time, you've got an Indian guy running Britain. Loll, okay? And so, I mean, there's, I compile many examples of this in the network state book. There are so many examples. And why is that even

happening? And one way of thinking about it is, you know, have you ever seen those sort of like origami things that people do with their hands where like the complicated, you know, yeah. And imagine you fold it and you unfold it and you get the same complicated thing in reverse, right? All of this centralizing technology of mass media and mass production resulted in like the centralization of these like iron-fisted, you know, guys like Stalin and Mao and so on in the 20th century, Hitler, etc. And then decentralization, like, especially for, the fist just started loosened, the ability of states to control reduced, and it's happening faster in reverse than

it did. It took maybe 500 years to go up and we're taking like 50 years to go down. And so in many ways, I think of our future as more similar to the 1800s and made the 1700s than it was to like the recent past. The way that I look at it is human beings have two paradoxical drives. One is for order and one is for freedom. And you talk about the history in reverse. I would use a SaaS term of bundling and unbundling.

Yeah, these bundling and unbundlings. And I think what we might be seeing is the cryptocentrality is essentially a new type of system of control and order that satisfies the needs of both having a central truth, but also having maximal freedom. That would be the thesis, I think, on the crypto future. And you know what's interesting about that is there's a third word. Actually, it's funny, that is the exact thing you're talking about. I discussed in the last chapter, the network today maybe the most important culmination of it, which is it's bundling, unbundling, rebuttling, centralization, decentralization,

re-centralization. This comes from, like, the famous Chinese epic, where it starts with the empire, long united must divide. Long divided must unite. The cyclicity of this is because we have a lot of order. It's too much control. I want to break free. Now you've got freedom. Okay, it's anarchy. Oh, my God. Someone bring order. Right. And so that's the loop that keeps happening in history. It's not to say, by the way, that's only a loop and we just come back to where we are. One of the things I talk about in the book is the helical theory of history, where it's like cyclic in a plane, but you're ascending on the z-axis. So our technology, and in a sense our progress keeps getting better,

even if there's certain very human things that we just keep doing, you know. And so to your point, you know, for example, you had bundling in CDs, you unbundle into MP3s, and you've re-bundle into Spotify playlists, right? You had the bundling in newspapers, you unbundle into individual article URLs, and you've re-bundle into Twitter feeds and you follow those people, right? So you have the bundling into countries. We have the unbundling of like internet anarchy and social media and so on, which is kind of happening now.

I think we have the re-bundling into opt-in countries, what I call network states. And that's going to be so messy and so crazy, as crazy as everything that's happened in the last 20 or 30 years. But I think that at least it's better than just being in the state of total anarchists. You have some vision for re-bundling and re-centralization on their side. You know, we didn't start the fire, okay? And I think to your point, the opt-in nature of it is very powerful. It's giving people the freedom to choose and to vote both with their time, money, and energy.

You know, one way to look at money is how you accumulate and spend your energy. And the reason that's so important is actually, you know, people talk about Elon, for example, as a strong leader. And he is a strong leader, okay? Zuck is a strong leader. But why are they strong leaders? Yes, in part because they're a CEO and they have total control and authority of the whole thing. But in part because every single person who works for Zuck opted in to be there and can opt out. It's mutual opt in.

Every single person who's got an account there has opted to be there and can opt out. Now, you can argue with me at the limits, right? Like somebody did an experiment, can you actually block Facebook.com on the internet and still have a normal internet experience? At a certain scale, you can argue these networks get so big that it's hard to practically opt at. Fine. Okay, that's a different. Then I would argue, yes, we need to fund competitors and so on to that to preserve practical choice. Still, the moral legitimacy comes from the fact that people consented.

And you can, the fine thing is, is you can opt into constraints. That's what signing a contract is. You give up some freedom, in a sense, in order for mutual benefit for you and the other party on their side. opt into constraints, right? So you can actually get order out of that anarchy, but the moral legistency of it comes from the consent. The Republican, Democrat, and Libertarian. In today's world, you know, libertarian has become almost just pseudo-conservative,

but ultimately libertarian borrows ideas from both Democrats and Republicans, which is about maximizing on freedom. Yeah. So you asked about, like, for example, American dynamism, right? And I like Catherine Boyle. She's also a friend. All these people are friends of mine, right? So the one way of thinking about it is technology is sort of forking into Silicon Valley and the internet. Okay. Where Silicon Valley is going more nationalist, right? Military stuff, right? Double down on America and wave the flag and so and so forth. I told you. understand where that comes from. It comes from a good place of turning the thing around. There's another direction you can take it, though, and that is to go more internationalists, and that is blockchain, that is crypto, that is, you know, international capitalism as opposed to ultra-nationalism, right? And again, these don't necessarily have to be completely at odds, but they're just different ways of thinking. And the way of thinking is, for the international

capitalist, guess what, 80% of the world is neither American nor Chinese. How do we build a rules-based order that works for them and that also benefits American and Chinese people? Because that's not something people are thinking about. They're thinking, oh, it's just a fight between the U.S. and China or they're thinking it's still a unipolar world or something like that. They're not thinking about everybody else except as bystanders. You think it's going to be like the Cold War where it's just the U.S. and USSR. But it's not like that. Actually, most of the GDP is actually outside of the U.S. and China, even now, as big as both of those are.

And the reason I say that is because if you have an American, they certainly don't want to be involved with the Chinese court system nowadays. So you can't make money in China. You can't invest in China. Nowadays, for a Chinese person, it's a reverse. After there's a lady from Huawei who is, like, arrested in Canada, a lot of Chinese nationals are kind of scared of coming to the U.S. or to U.S. allied regions.

And perhaps for a good reason because, you know, lots of people are suspected. of being spies. There's lots of, you know, sanctions and so on and so forth. You don't want to get caught in any of that stuff. So Americans and Chinese no longer trust each other's legal systems. That's bad, given that that was like the engine of the world for like 40 years. You know, lots and lots of deals were based, like Apple is straddled between America and China. They're still making a lot of stuff and a lot of tooling is over there, right?

So, and all these people who built all those companies, you know, in 2012, you're doing a deal, for 10 years, and you don't know that the U.S. and China are going to fight in the future. Maybe you can guess that they might, but that certainly wasn't on the radar there, and you'd be called a paranoid crazy person if you did it that. So it's my point. If Americans don't trust Chinese courts and Chinese don't trust American courts, what can anybody trust? Well, there actually is something, a forum, that hundreds of millions of people,

globally, including certainly tens of millions of Americans and probably hundreds of millions of Chinese, all trust. You know what that is? Bitcoin. Bitcoin, and that's a more profound statement than we might think, right? Amidst this era of deep fakes and fake news and political strife and back and forth, there's a lot of Americans and a lot of Chinese people and a lot of people who are neither American nor Chinese that all like Bitcoin. And similarly for Ethereum, and similarly for other coins, this is, in my view, it's hiding in plain sight the next, the basis of the next rules.

based order, the mammals that will eventually succeed the dinosaurs, or that could, right? And that are fair, right? The thing is, an American knows that the Bitcoin blockchain will not favor them or a Chinese person against each other. The rules are constant, they're written in

code, they're in force by cryptography, and if you don't speak either English or Chinese, you can diligence under the language of code. Okay, maybe code is often in English, but you know what I mean? People even who don't speak English can read code, right? And that's globally fair, in a way that the rules-based order isn't.

It's globally wealth-creating in a way that declining rules-based order isn't because it's about contracts that you're abiding by. And now, guess what, a Banghadeshi or a Brazilian can be on the same plane as somebody in Beijing or Boston, right? That's really important.

Because, you know, in a sense, right now, by the way, like, you know, I'll say something, and I'm kind of exaggerating, but kind of not. like international law for like corporations kind of doesn't exist and what I mean by that is take that example of Bangladesh and Brazilian if you're if you're a guy in Brazil you're trying to acquire a company in Bangladesh which by the way could increasingly happen because internet has made all these communications across borders okay you're trying to acquire that who speaks both like Portuguese and Urdu or Portuguese in Bengali right very very few people

who knows what the tax and whatever obligations are between those two countries nobody knows that probably instead what you do is you set up like an adapter company in the USA, and then that has enough deals with the U.S. in Brazil and the U.S. and Bangladesh that you can make that deal probably happen, right? So you have like a hub and spoke. Or China also nowadays does enough trade with both of them. You could probably make it work through China. But what that means is, like, does international law even exist?

Right? Because everything is actually hub and spoke when you come back to it. You go back to the hub and spoke of the U.S. or the newer hub and spoke of China to do these international deals until the blockchain, which actually gives a system of property rights where that Brazilian and Bangladesh can at least do a transaction today. They can do a contract today. And I think in the future, you won't just have on-chain transactions, we have on-chain accounting and on-chain companies that's kind of already happening for these DAO's, right?

Many of the features are there, and all that is required to serve some backwards compatibility, like, you know, the Wyoming Dow Law or the Tennessee Dow Law, people are starting to recognize these internet objects as being important in legal code. This is what I mean by internet first law. So what I'm describing there is complementary too. I think it's another great part of America. It's not just, you know, the military and nationalism and defending us. I get where that comes from.

I think that comes from a good place. But there's another, you know, strain, which is the Thomas Jefferson, Ron, Paul, you know, line of things, which is peace and trade and so on. that's more my vibe. And I think also we've been criticizing America quite a bit, I think, with good reason. But one of the secret sauces and one of the most powerful things about America on a relative basis is America's private property and secure personal property. I think, you know, few countries in the world over the last 250 years or 300 years have the track record of securing personal property like the United States. that's a very big aspect of our economy. I hope if you look at the whole transcript and so on in context,

you know, like there's many aspects of the U.S. that I admire. I'm talking about the ability to do, it's really Washington, D.C. and the kinds of regulations and rules that have strained the whole thing. But there's still that strain of the tech American, the pioneer American, the frontier American, the American that builds stuff with their hands.

Of course, you know, that I respect, that one should respect. And the private property rights that you described, I mean, an interesting question, you know, sort of maybe a provocative question. Is Bitcoin American? Say probably no. Well, it reflects many of the best values of America.

It's, you know, it's certainly property rights. It is freedom of contract. It's freedom of association. You can argue it's freedom of speech because you can use the blockchain to write. things, and some of the concepts come and you can encrypt things with them. But I would argue Bitcoin is about as American as America was British. It takes those things, and then, you know, America took a lot of the great things of Britain, and then it had the new world

to apply them. Right. So there's a continuity, but then also an innovation. And the new, new world is the internet. And so like, you know, Bitcoin is just one of the first forms, maybe the most important, but an internet native form that is the next in this lineage of Greece to Rome to Britain, to America, to the internet, in my view. So let's tie that all together. So you are raising a fund. It's 506C. So it's a general solicitation. So tell me a little bit about the form. A lot of people might not know about a rolling fund. Tell me about that. And then tell me about the type of investors that you're looking for in terms of connectivity, ideology, value add. Great.

So the kind of investors that I'm looking for and also the people that I have. And to be clear, by the way, I have enough capital to do what we need to do. One of the awesome things about rolling funds is you can just accept new investors at any time. You don't have, oh, the fund is closing today and so, so forth. There's a fun close every quarter, and if you want to be in, you can literally go to Bology.com. Zoe, maybe you can put that on screen. Bology.

com. No, no, no, no. This is, like the, no, but, yeah. 1,800, B, A, LH, L.A. What, right, right, right, right, right. Exactly. No, it's funny. No, but, you know, it's just, it's like literally my first name.com, so if you can spell my

first name, which, which I grant is somewhat challenging for, you know, but B-A-L-L-I. Uh, if you, you go to that domain, it's an angelous landing page. Um, I'll put, I'll put it on screen for a second a moment. Let's see here. Are you got it up? Yeah, there you go. That's right. Yeah, that's it. So go to biology.com and you land there, right? And, um, you can literally just click down there to apply. Okay. And, um, um, um, you can literally just click down there to apply. Okay. And you can take it off screen and I'll just comment on it. Okay. And so what is, what's the premise of the fund? So we are, A, it's a rolling fund. So you can just kind of click online. And so what kind of investor is a kind of investor who wants to do it self-serve? I mean,

I can talk to them if they really need it. But, um, You know, the kind of person who wants to go there, click, wire, and just basically be done with it on the same terms as everybody else. And that's how you know it's fair. This is what I was talking about, like the rules-based order, right? And there's one kind of person who just wants to haggle and negotiate over everything. And another person who's like, I'd like to click and be done with it. And it takes me 10 minutes and, you know, go with God and make me money and so on, right? And it's very modern because you can just refresh your dashboard, see your investments, get your K-1s or what have you.

Right. So it works for high net worth. It works for entities. Angelus, the platform, takes care of all the compliance. It takes care of the wires. It takes care of distributions. It takes care of all of that kind of stuff, right? So you don't have to send 40 emails. You don't have to ask for anything. It all just gets pushed to you in a dashboard, right? Which is so much more efficient than emailing a bunch of people. So that's very modern. Now, I recognize there's some conservative LPs or folks who are bound in certain ways that can't do that. And that's fine. I mean, like maybe, hopefully you can update your thing to be able to do something on Angel's. Then in terms of how the fund is structured, we're using fees to hold conferences, publish books, we're going to professionalize the podcast, we're going to generate a lot more content, and we're basically just going to generate a ton of deal flow this way. And this is kind of, again, I've got proof points on all of these things. I've got, you know, I've got a best-selling book.

I've got a million person Twitter feed. I've got a sold-out conference. I'm just saying, whatever, I have prototype versions of each of these things where I've just been like tweeting from being in the line at Starbucks. I've done zero optimization of any of that, really, right? Maybe, okay, I did set up like a camera or something here, or let's say 0.1 optimization of what could be done. Okay.

And so like a small team that actually just goes and does that. that. And also, many of those people who will be on that team will be folks probably who we fund as future CEOs in two or three or four years, right? They're like fellows, okay? And so that itself is like a meta version of deal flow. Okay. So, so A, the kind of investor is the kind of person who, or entity that can self-serve on angelist. B, or we're using fees for, you know, they're used to basically hire people and build things. Okay. C, we already talked about what we're going to invest in. D, they have to be basically qualified purchasers, all investors, because there's just, like, we very quickly hit the cap on the number of accredited investors there.

And the minimum is $10,000. So this is made to be really accessible by a large network. Well, $10,000 for 10,000, so it's $100,000, right. So, yeah, but a qualified purchaser is considered by the law to basically be a big boy. You know, they have $5 million in investments. And I believe that also includes, like, a founder who has $5 million in equity and thereabouts. But you have to go and check that. Angelis takes care of the accreditation.

And so the big thing about it is, you know, there's different kinds of investors. And some types of LPs are like, they're like activists. or they want to get lots of reports and, you know, lots of personalized updates and they're offended if you say, if you don't reply to them right away and, oh, I put it in my money, why aren't you give me your report right away, and so and so forth? And then there's another kind of investor, and this is more like what I am for the companies I invest in where I make the decision of where or not to invest, and then I realize I'm putting in capital, I'm not putting in labor, right?

So I'm putting in capital, and being a backseat driver doesn't improve results, right? So if my company's asked me for help, if they have WhatsApp or signal me, and, you know, it's an acquisition or it's a serious inflection point for the company, I will respond. You know, if I had the time, and usually I do. Sometimes it'll be 20 startups. They'll ping me in a day, and I have to triage a little bit. But basically, if it's an important thing, I'll get back to them. But I won't, like, actively interfere. They're going with God.

you know you add value by quote not adding value this is actually closer to the founder's fund mentality of pick the founder and then let them go with god you know i have found me i experience the people that phrase things as you do are the most value added investors by by a long shop and the ones that the ones that are humble and actually responsive that's like not top one percent of investors but but i didn't want to cut you off go ahead sure yeah well so i i hope i i think you know i mean look Can I say that everybody, you know, here is, I thought this was a pretty nice. Yeah, I would look at your portfolio. I think you would very quickly see how much value you've added.

I'll show it just a tweet or would have you. Here, this was a nice, this was a nice tweet by. You know, one thing that we interview a lot of, a billion dollar funds. And one thing that was very interesting is a fund that went off record. They have an acknowledgement letter for anybody that invests less than $10 million. And what does this acknowledgement letter say? It says, I will not go to the annual meeting.

I will not respond to emails. This is a very large private equity fund. And as I mentioned, every time I talk about this acknowledgement letter, if benchmark or Bologi ever wants to give me allocation, wants me to sign the acknowledgement letters, I'm very happy because the worst thing in investing is not actually getting up to date from the GP. It's backing the top GPs that are going out there and executing for their founders. So there is an inverse relationship to people that are building LP relationship protocols and those that are actually going out and funding groundbreaking startups.

That's exactly right. And I think that, of course, that's not to say that one, you know, shouldn't treat LPs properly and so so forth, but the dashboard, I think Angelus is a good reconciliation of that, where you can get whatever information you want at any time day or night quickly through a dashboard that goes out to all LPs, all tax filings, all the kind of stuff. Here's just like, you know, a couple of nice comments that I thought were nice or whatever. So, so this is Amjad, you know, Sierra Vreplett, pretty nice comment. Can you see the screen? So, you know, I feel embarrassed to read that, but it's a very nice comment.

Okay. And here's, you know, like Julie Fredrickson. And so, you know, I believe Slate's our Codex, which is Scott Alexander, was to academic online culture, as biology as being to tech. So early with the vibe shift, they were given hell.

And now so mainstream, people don't recognize the source. Meaning, like, I'm sort of like the fish, you know, the water in which a lot of these things swim. Like the idea. I think I created the concept of the IDMA is, right? Yeah, that's right.

And so, like, I think, I think I am. What about Russell conjugation? Did you create that? I have a specific connection. You popularized. So Bertrand.

Well, Bertrand Russell created it. And Eric Weinstein has also cited it. And I think I have been one of the people to popularize it. I think I came up. I know I came up with this concert with that dear amaz. And this is like an old lecture where I gave that. And whatever. I hate kind of thumping my chest or whatever like this, you know, in the sense that if you, if you like me, if you like biology, if you like what I tweet,

If you like the companies that have, you know, built, if you like Coinbase and crypto, if you like the network state book, I think you're going to probably like investing in the fund. And if you don't, there's a lot of others out there. And, you know, like, I won't feel, I won't feel badly about it. The, gosh, there's something else you said. Oh, yeah. In terms of, oh, here's one thing I will say. You know the famous phrase, how can I help? right the VC phrase is like a VC cash phrase now that's a Suarez thing right okay

this is a funny phrase because first of all it's become a cliche right on their hand how can I help is way better than you know the Wall Street style how are you trying to F me kind of kind of thing right like in general it's it's like it's better to be have like a friendly culture, even if it's fake friendly in some ways, then unfriendly, I think, right? How can I help? Sometimes it said sincerely, which is, can I make an intro for you or something like that or what have you? Sometimes it's said insincerely.

Sometimes it's a pain for the founder to, like, break out a task for the investor to help. Because it's like, okay, will you take on a task that actually takes you a minute? Or will you do something that's like an hour or will you actually help me recruit somebody that's like a whole day and so on? of it. Yeah, exactly. And founders are often badly calibrated on how investors should help. Okay.

So I actually think there's two models of investor help. There's a founders fund model, which is the help is that they just don't interfere with you at all. You can take extremely risky decisions. And because you're the founder and because they're in the business of variance, they'll never veto them. Who else could you put in that camp? Me?

In the sense of like, that's my kind of thing. I'd say Novel is kind of like that, my friend, you know, Neville Robicon. Let's see. Who else is like that? Fair number of crypto investors are kind of like that. But I can't speak for everybody. First do no harm. First do no harm and go with God and crush it.

If you're not going to succeed, you weren't going to succeed anyways. Well, yeah, exactly. It's kind of one of these things where it's like they're smart enough to know that what they want is effectively the brand endorsement. Because a brand endorsement is scalable. You don't have to be like Novel or me or, you know, we don't have to be in every single meeting on the call. That person could just say so-and-so invested. That scales our presence, right? It's like, you know, and that's a non-up.

How do you deal with the three-standard deviation founder that's always asking you, for things. That's a great question. The squeaky wheel. Squeaky wheel. I set the expectation and I say, sometimes I'll say, here, let me do a screen share with you, and I'm just going to show you all the names, nothing else, of all the companies I've invested in, right?

Just like a long table. That's public information, all the companies I've invested in. And I'll just slowly scroll down that while we're on the call. And after about like two minutes in, he's like, okay. Okay, I get it because there's so many companies there. Have you ever thought about productizing to your point saying these are the three things I could do? I could introduce you to these. So, so that I'm coming to that, right?

Basically, now the other model, so the answer is yes. Okay. And so I'm going to talk about ways that I think investors can help. So how VCs can help founders and how LPs can help VCs and then vice versa. Right. But though vice versa is less important because, you know, you're most. most important. So Founder's Fund helps by not doing anything. Rather, by, they will hold some annual events and stuff like that, but it's all optional. You can come to them if you're busy.

Don't worry about it. Go kill it. You know, we're with you, right? They'll never get political on you. They'll never, you know, do anything like that. They just will not interfere. Extremely helpful, right? And they're wealthy enough that they can just write off any check so they can go through the rough ride and in tough waters and so on. A6 and Z, which is, I also, you know, founders fund back my, you know, first company, you know, we made the money. A, second Z, I was a partner there, and I, and I love all those guys, and Mark and Ben, or rather Mark and Chris are investing in this one, and Mark and Ben and I've, we've worked together our many deals over the years.

They have a different model, which is they actually help. They don't say, how can I help? They say, we can help in A, B, C, D, and E forms, right? Now, of those different services they have, the most important to are, so most people don't know about exactly how A6 and Z works. They might know, you know, but I'll give a quick summary. They don't just invest in your company. They've used the fees to build a tank of all of these professional services. And they're the first ones really to do that. One of those services is what they call the Enterprise Briefing Center. And what that is, is it's that all of these VCs at AISC and

all the partners are senior enough that they know, let's say, the CEO of Coca-Cola and the CEO of Johnson Johnson, the CEO of Pfizer. And they can call them up and WhatsApp them or text them and be like, hey, you know, we've got, we know you've got a problem in terms of dealing with X or Y or Z procurement issue. And we have a startup that's good for exactly that. Okay. And so they get their VP who has the decision making power to come in to Anderson Harwitz. and they sit through a briefing where founders come in and they basically pitch Coca-Cola, Johnson, Johnson, and Pfizer on their product. Now, why does this work insanely well?

First is, if you're a startup, it's very hard for you to even get that meeting with Coca-Cola, Johnson, Johnson, advisor. Second, you're coming in endorsed by A6 and Z. Third, sometimes, you know, this is something where there have been five deals like this that have been done before, and Coca-Cola, Johnson, Johnson, Pfizer love A-Sync and Z because it's like they're short. shop where they can click like Amazon and just get, okay, let me upgrade this enterprise offer, this one, and this one, I'll take five, right? So A-Sing Z is a repeat player in the ecosystem that makes the deal close because it's like a two-sided market of enterprise SaaS vendors and enterprise SaaS buyers, and you have this scaled VC firm in the center that's putting

those together, like a skilled matchmaker. And the reason it works is A-Sing Z is invest in these companies, of course, and wants to make money, but its reputations on the line with these large institutional buyers, and so it wants to make both parties happy. Does that make sense? Yeah, it's a marketplace. Okay. It's a marketplace, right. Okay.

So that's the enterprise briefing center. The second thing that's, and that's really valuable for a founder, because often a series A, series B founder just doesn't have the connections to, or what we call the distribution, to get to all of those Fortune 500 CEOs, right? So this levels them up. They have, you know, product is merit, but distribution is connections. They have merit, but not connections. Okay. So they sell some of their company, and now they get a bunch of distribution and it massively increases the value.

It's almost something where AISN Z, when an enterprise SaaS company who's working at A or B, they could almost deterministically level them up with like 100, you know, big brand names that they could just slot them into, like this, really great, right? So that was EBC. The other thing that Ais KZ did that worked is the corporate development. So they hired these ninjas there who knew everybody at Facebook, at Google, and so on, who buys companies for a living, right? Now, it's the event of a founder's life when Google knocks with a possible acquisition. It is Tuesday for the corporate development guy on the other side. This is a radically asymmetric thing where that founder is like micro-analyzing every period and sentence and common. and so on on this transaction that could be the most important thing in their life. And the corpter person is like, yawn, they could forget about the deal, it's in their inbox

and so, so, so, because they're not getting paid usually, you know, extreme amounts right? Now, I'm not saying all corpter people are like that, obviously, right? Corpter. But it's a job for them. Yeah, it's a job for them. And it is an absolutely life-changing, world-changing outcome for the founder on the other side, right? So, AISC, Corp-Dev is in between these, where they know all of the Google, and Facebook and, you know,

drop up, all these other guys, they know all the corporate people there. They're on a first name basis with them. And if they say one of our companies is at Google and it's got an offer of X, Facebook will you match? Sorry, meta, sorry. Alphabet is making an offer. Meta will you match, okay, right?

I can't say Google and Facebook. So meta knows that that's not a bluff, right? The founder has an incentive to bluff. Because it's a recurring game. It's a recurring game, exactly. So again, ASEMC corporate development is a marketplace, two-sub marketplace, of company sellers and company buyers. And it's not just buyers. It's also the next round, right?

Series C investors, Series C investors. If AXXC has the financials of these companies, these guys know that it's representing them correctly to them for the purpose of an investment, right? So those are two extremely value-ad functions where the founder cannot be, expected to, I mean, cannot be expected. Great founders can do anything. Okay. But it's hard for a founder to have hundreds of, you know, possible buyers or, you know, their enterprise and software. It takes years and, and more. Yeah. Exactly. It's not a, it's not a function of, you know, there's certain problems that I call, uh, you can just type faster and solve them. Coding, type faster, right? Content,

type faster. Okay. debugging. Obviously, it's not exactly typing faster, but you get my point. It's entirely within your control and the sequence of keystrokes that you input to your device is the quality of your software, the quality of design. Everybody starts to do. Things like, yeah, exactly, right? Which is very important. Global equality of opportunity is this, you know, this device right here, this keyboard. But the relationships with LPs or with enterprise software buyers, that's not a type faster thing or it's much it's not easily reducible to that okay so those two were massive massive massive value ads for a 16c that they just did better than anybody else and they made a more

efficient marketplace out of it right um there were other you know functions which are also valuable actually one function that used to be very valuable was PR and in the early days as he did PR when no one else was doing PR and that was like phenomenally discussed with them more recently I think the right approach is just for founders to go direct and build their own media organizations. That was not reasonable 15 years ago and is, I look at it as table stakes today. So that's a technological shift where through the rise of social media, the rise of podcasting and so and so forth. Many founders are actually not founding engineers, but founding influencers. They come in not with an amazing engineering background, but with an amazing community background. And then they hire an engineer

to build a product. That is actually also a reasonable approach. You know, everybody knows how you went from 100,000 followers to million followers. But how did you go from zero to one? And did you have to propagate less radical ideas when you were starting out to be taken seriously? And how did that evolution? No.

How did that happen? Well, I think that, so I taught a MOOC on. So first, I had no public profile until 2013. I was basically just a career academic. I mean, like my nature is that of a math guy, right? Let's say, you know, based on my background briefly, BSMS PhD, electrical engineering, Stanford, MS chemical engineering, Stanford. I taught genomics and stats at Stanford for a few years after getting my PhD.

Then I found a genomics company, clinical genomics company, that founders fund invested in and was sold later for 375, so clinical diagnostics. um until 2013 i had no public profile i was just like like a deep quiet deep tech fan i actually thought i was well yeah i was doing work but i also thought and i think incorrectly so this is one things i got wrong um i was late to social media because i thought it is just a waste of time i thought i was tweeting breakfast i thought it was um like you know sharing you know updates about you know you He thought it was eco-centric. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I was like, do I care about whether somebody went to Tahoe or not? I mean, good for them. They're at a restaurant. Great. Yeah, it's, you know, like how monkeys will, like, pet each other's fur and so on and so forth and, like, so on. I was like, okay, that's great. It's not my thing, you know?

And I saw this chit-chat, idle chit-chat. Then one day, there was a friend of mine who had attended a genomics conference, and he posted a summary of the conference on, Twitter, as what we now call a tweet storm or thread or something like that. And he was a, he was a professor. And so he included details like, here's how the BAM files were set up. And here's how they, what they were doing with FASQ and so and so forth. Stuff that no journalist would ever have written up from that. And it was like getting a lunchtime conversation with a really smart friend of mine that saved me a plane trip out. And it just like distilled. It was like taking the juice of an

orange, and I could just slurp that up and learn what was at this conference, not in a week of time flying back and forth or four days flying back and forth, but in 30 seconds, right? And I was like, Twitter is useful for me. Okay. That is, I mean, now, of course, like, who would ever pitch that as the application of Twitter, right? That's such a niche, niche. You have to get to massive scale before you start getting that as the application. Twitter. That's kind of, though, what Twitter has become, where whatever vertical there is,

if you want to learn about real estate, you can really learn about it by just looking at the top, I don't know, 50 real estate people on Twitter, and you learn cap rate, you learn all this stuff. At least you'll distill the language of the people in a community that you could really find hard to learn about how they actually talk about things outside of a textbook. Textbook presentation, one thing, the conversational presentation is another, right? So that made me... Are you on the four you are following? setting on your Twitter?

I switch back and forth between them. I think I probably, it keeps going back to four you, and I think four you is fine. I don't know, I have to go back. I have found time and time again the most successful people on the following setting, and that's really binary. That's one of the hacks. I had a viral on the Harvard situation that Bill Ackman literally reached. tweeted and wrote an entire essay on what I wrote. And I started getting all the tech luminaries.

And I just started now I realized they were all on their 4U setting because they started to interact. And my content hadn't improved. But suddenly it was actually being propagated on their form. And I found when I went from from following to 4U, my mental health significantly improved because I wasn't now. It was thoughtful, smart people versus whatever is like the most polarizing and, you know, antagonizing content. You mean from 4 you to following? Yeah, from 4 you to following, yeah. Right.

Yeah, no, I think I keep switching it back to following, but I think it keeps going back to 4 you or something like that. So I think Elon Musk is susceptible to profit maximization. Maybe, maybe, right? Though I think on balance he's done, I'm a big fan of what Twitter is today. I'm a very big Elon fan as well. Yeah. So, but I want to answer your question, which she said, how did I go from zero to 20,000 or so?

So the answer is basically in late 2013, I gave a talk at startup school. So I did a few things in 2013. But one of them I did mid-year, I gave a MOOC course, startup engineering MOOC, that's where the Idea Maze lecture and other things were from. And it's funny, you know, the idea maze was just sort of, it was like one subchapter in a bunch of lecture notes that. I think were well received at the time. And you don't just really know what is like people's going to become really popular or whatever from that, right? But it put, I think, a finger on something that people were thinking of and, you know, then that propagates.

So that course, which had the idea amazing, various other concepts, actually totally organically just got to 250,000 students on Coursera. And I did no promotion of it whatsoever. It was just like, I think it was just quality. content and word them out that just and corsair's distribution in the platform so that course um did fairly well and that was in mid 2013 and then when i got on twitter later in the year like like november december i also by the way somebody had been squatting bala gs and i had had bala gs at this and bala gs at that for a long time and i was just trying to get that and then when

i managed to get the bala gs handle then i actually tweeted and it just ticked up quick did I think like 10 or 20,000 followers pretty quickly because a lot of the kids from my startup engineering course followed me there, right? And so that was like my first like pump of and then I didn't even I didn't know what was good or bad or whatever at that time. I just kind of then it was announced as a partner at A signal Z and I got a few more and then that's kind of how what I was doing. So I guess the answer is I contributed a lot of value at least in their perception. I think it was valuable. That was like, here's what.

In many ways, you grew through offline, not necessarily offline, but off-X and off-twitter accomplishments. Yeah. So here, if you want to see how early I was to certain things, right? Here, this is not the entirety of the course, but this is part of it. Do you see this headline from Coin Desk, 2013? July 2013. Build a Bitcoin crowdfunding site, right? So what was Bitcoin's price?

It was like 50 bucks then. It was like a thousand X smaller than it is today, right? So this was, you know, the course is given by biologists from you of us. And of course, so, of course, young entrepreneurs requires and build a Bitcoin crowdfunding system, the inclusion of, you know, right? And guest lectures from a range of Silicon Valley startups. And, you know, I basically just had some of my friends,

engineers and stuff give talks. I wasn't as senior as I was at that time. But it was like the kind of course, which I wished I had had when I was first starting a company. It was just like everything that I, that I was fresh in my mind that a PhD in engineering didn't know about the business of technology, right? So that proved successful. And also that, you know, that was like early to crypto, early to, I mean, very early, that's 2013, right? That's like, you know, a thousand X less valuable than this today. So, anyway, that shows at least I'm early to something sometimes. Absolutely. You know,

what the most predictive of somebody that has a fund returner based on data of 11.5,000 companies by David Clark, it's an existing fund returner. So it sounds like a joke, but it is actually the most predictive to somebody that is able to find a fund returner, somebody that has done it wants. It's the most highly predictive aspect. So on that note, you know, I think apology, you're one of the most fascinating people, certainly I've ever interviewed, but I think it's important to note that like Elon Musk, you are also accelerating people to improve themselves and to think bigger. It's kind of this meta thing where like Elon Musk is not only accomplishing these great things, but he's also inspiring people to accomplish great things.

I think you have that order effect that I think really inspires people such as myself and others who might have been maximizing on just capital to think bigger. So it's been a real pleasure to sit down and chat. How could people find you and how could the community help you in your pursuits? Well, if you want to help, I'm at bologi.com for the fund and Twitter.com, BologiS, for the feed. Oh, I will say one thing. This is like maybe a little extension of the end, but it's like a post script. we had asked how how can lPs help if they want to help well they don't have to help they can just put in capital at biology dot com and just call it a day and that's totally good right we'll use the fees to hire people build things

but if they want to help there's four ways they can help um first they'll be an annual conference at the network see conference in Singapore you saw the video from the last one and how packed that auditorium was that was on relatively short notice thousands of people came to Amsterdam. This one, I think, will be, I don't know, several thousand people. So it'll be pretty big. And I'm going to invite all my portfolio companies and all the LPs there. So we'll have a really great LP dinner and you'll be able to meet lots of portfolio companies. So that'll be kind of fun. A. B is, of course, you can invest and so on and refer others online. C is if I post about our portfolio companies, which I don't often do. I only do it when, A, they need the publicity and B, the publicity can benefit them. And C, crucially, they're in a state where it's useful to followers, right? And that's the most important.

You have to always add value to your followers, teach them something, get them something, and so and so forth, rather than ask something of them. So in that event, then you can tweet like RT, et cetera, the portfolio companies. And then D is, of course, you can always refer good companies and we'll have like a form for that, right? The reason those are good is those are four very scalable ways to help if you wanted to help as an LP. that are actually helping. They're not just asking time and so on and so forth, right? And I think other fund managers who are sort of internet first fund managers

could do things like that as well, right? So it can basically say to your LPs 2x, Y, and Z if you want to help. Otherwise, you're putting in capital rather than labor. And, you know, let me spend the time on finding great deals and making all of you guys money. Well, I think this has been an incredible interview and really appreciate your time. This has been by far, I think, by order of magnitude, the longest interview I've done.

I was strategizing how to make this 30 to 45 minutes, and I epically failed. But it's to the audience's benefit and to my own benefit as well. And look forward to being at the conference in Singapore and also always happy to host you in New York City or Miami. Great. Thank you very much. Thanks for listening to my conversation. If you enjoyed this episode, please share with a friend. this helps us grow, also provides the very best feedback when we review the episode's

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