My First Million - Kevin Rose: His $100M/Year Watch Blog, Money From Digg.com, & Web3 Business

Episode Date: November 3, 2022

Episode 382: Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) and Sam Parr (@TheSamParr) talk to Kevin Rose (@kevinrose), entrepreneur, founder, VC and CEO of many projects, about creating an online magazine that garners $100M/year focusing on watches, what projects he's interested in, why he loves crypto, and where he invests his money. ----- Links: * Kevin Rose * DIGG * Proof * Hodinkee * agelessRx * Do you love MFM and want to see Sam and Shaan's smiling faces? Subscribe to our Youtube channel. * Want more insights like MFM? Check out Shaan's newsletter. ------ Show Notes: (03:15) - Kevin's background (13:40) - Meeting Mark Zuckerberg early in his career (26:15) - Beginnings of Hodinkee (33:55) - What gets you excited? (39:00) - What ideas/projects are you interested in? (50:30) - Web3 debate (53:40) - Crypto (01:13:05) - Portfolio ----- Past guests on My First Million include Rob Dyrdek, Hasan Minhaj, Balaji Srinivasan, Jake Paul, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Gary Vee, Lance Armstrong, Sophia Amoruso, Ariel Helwani, Ramit Sethi, Stanley Druckenmiller, Peter Diamandis, Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan, Marc Lore, Jason Calacanis, Andrew Wilkinson, Julian Shapiro, Kat Cole, Codie Sanchez, Nader Al-Naji, Steph Smith, Trung Phan, Nick Huber, Anthony Pompliano, Ben Askren, Ramon Van Meer, Brianne Kimmel, Andrew Gazdecki, Scott Belsky, Moiz Ali, Dan Held, Elaine Zelby, Michael Saylor, Ryan Begelman, Jack Butcher, Reed Duchscher, Tai Lopez, Harley Finkelstein, Alexa von Tobel, Noah Kagan, Nick Bare, Greg Isenberg, James Altucher, Randy Hetrick and more. ----- Additional episodes you might enjoy: • #224 Rob Dyrdek - How Tracking Every Second of His Life Took Rob Drydek from 0 to $405M in Exits • #209 Gary Vaynerchuk - Why NFTS Are the Future • #178 Balaji Srinivasan - Balaji on How to Fix the Media, Cloud Cities & Crypto * #169 - How One Man Started 5, Billion Dollar Companies, Dan Gilbert's Empire, & Talking With Warren Buffett • ​​​​#218 - Why You Should Take a Think Week Like Bill Gates • Dave Portnoy vs The World, Extreme Body Monitoring, The Future of Apparel Retail, "How Much is Anthony Pompliano Worth?", and More • How Mr Beast Got 100M Views in Less Than 4 Days, The $25M Chrome Extension, and More

When I saw you went and did the watch site, Haudenke, first of all, Sean, have you ever read that? Like, when I, when I heard, I was like a blog. I like watches. I have Rolexes. I was like a blog for luxury watches. What the hell is this guy thinking? Did you just say that it went from like a million or two in revenue?

And now it's, Sam said, it's over 100 million. Yeah. Yeah, we're over 100 million in revenue now. Man, that is wild. That's insane. What's up? All right. In this episode, we are saying.

sitting down with Kevin Rose. A lot of you know Kevin because he's an internet OG. He created Dig back in the day. He was a seed investor in Twitter and a bunch of other cool companies. He's been a VC. He's been a founder. He recently launched an NFT project that's done hundreds of millions of dollars worth of NFT sales.

And so Kevin's has been around for a while. And the cool part of the interview, if you listen to it, you're going to see very chill guy, very down to earth, very humble. and not a kind of like, oh my God, I'm going to go take over the world, you know, bubbling over with ambition and a big chip on his shoulder. Seemed like a happy dude who was enjoying himself and had a ton of success in the process. And I like that. I like seeing people who play the game in different ways. And he's definitely somebody who's interesting.

We talked about a bunch of his projects that you may not know about. So, for example, he's creating Watchville, this niche project for watches that grew from $1 million in revenue to now. over $100 million after it got acquired and merged with Houdinke. Then also we talked about how he hires writers. We talked about how he got into Twitter as an early investor. And what does he do with his money? So he's got a bunch of money. How does he invest it?

Where does he put it? And the answer is not what you may have expected. The last thing we did at the end is we did the crypto debate. So Sam is sort of a crypto skeptic. Kevin is obviously a crypto believer and one of the kind of most well-known guys in the crypto scene. And we had a little debate where we talked about, is it all bullshit or are there some use cases?

So I hope you enjoy this episode with Kevin Rose. I liked it. I think you will too. We should give like a brief overview, but like your resume, we don't really talk too much about like resumes and stuff, but your resume is like crazy long. So I've been following you forever.

So I've known about your work. So you started Dig, which was, when did you start that in 2004? 2004, that's right. Yeah, and so it was like one of the original like site, like link aggregators. And it was like a cultural phenomenon? And that was crazy? And you were like, was it Time Magazine that you were on the cover of like, you know. Business Week.

Business week. It was like, here's this young kid taking over Silicon Valley. What's the internet? And who's this kid controlling it type of thing? And like it had all this hype. But like dig didn't turn out maybe as wonderful as like we all thought maybe it could have done. But then you like had your finger on the pulse of all these other things you've done. a dig you don't is it i read it all the time but is it pronounced hodinkie hoding yeah hodinky a watch

blog that also like sells watches you're a partner at google ventures you have this app called zero fasting that i use i love partner at true ventures which i still think you're at now you've got the you got the um the oak uh meditation app and then i have a feeling there's like five or ten other things that you just have brewing that like i don't even know like most people probably don't even know about, but you're basically, my point is, is like, you're kind of an internet OG, and you are incredibly prolific. I mean, does that kind of summarize it? Yeah, I mean, the most recent thing I started was proof, which is our venture into the world of NFTs. And so that's the only thing missing from that. And that's about 10 months old now.

So that's on the newer side. So from the outside, if I look at this kind of like collection of, or like the career path, it looks very random. It's like, you know, from, you know, from venture backed to angel vesting

to venture investing to kind of like niche communities, you know, these like kind of apps that are like simple like, like meditation or fasting. You did a podcast, you do a show, you know, you've done a bunch of content.

You did a bunch of different things. Was there a method to the madness? Is this, do you just describe it as random? Or is there kind of like some underlying theme to this whole thing? Yeah, there's, I would say that I've always been one ever since I was a little kid to just tinker and just to play. And if there's any method to the madness, it is this common thread of exploration and just wanting to, if I see something that doesn't exist, that should exist, I want to go build it. And I've done that a handful of times, you know, probably at least 10 to 50,000.

team businesses of which, you know, 90% of them go to zero. And then there's a few that pop and become, you know, pretty big. So it's just this idea that I don't want to sit on the sidelines. If there's something that's exciting that needs to be built, I'd rather just spin up a team and go after it. Of all those projects, and I'm actually going to exclude proof from that because I want to talk all about that in a little while. But of all those projects that I mentioned, which one has been the most financially successful for you personally? That's a good question. Certainly, I would say when I was in the middle of Web 2.0,

which was when Dig was at its peak, which was about early 2006, we hit around 38 million people a month using the site. It was, you know, of the Web 2 property. it was one of the largest. It led me to sitting down and, you know, dinners and conversations and hangouts with the, you know, Jack Dorsey's and Evan Williams and Zuckerbergs

and all of the household names that became these big products. And they were just friends. And so because of that, it was more like, hey, well, you know, do you want to invest in my new thing? And so I would say the investment side has definitely been the best, financial returns. I did start a media company that, well, I would say there's two things that, well, three that are, two are unrealized in Houdinke, which is going to be crazy.

It'll, you know, it's over 100 million revenue a year now, which is nuts. Whoa, really? And then we have, you know, the stuff I'm doing a proof right now, which has just been another crazy rocket ship. But in terms of the true exits of businesses that I've started, Revision 3, where I was the co-founder, was a media company that became Discovery Channel's Digital Arm. And we sold that for $35 million back in 2008 or something like that. So that was probably the biggest company sale that I've had.

But they're much larger on the more angel investment side. And maybe that sale gave you. the ammo to do the angel to do angel investing? Or would you have been able to do it without it? A bit, but I was already starting to do small investments prior to that. So I didn't have any money. I didn't come from money. But when Dig really took off and we were a couple years in to dig,

investors, and this is a very common practice. It doesn't get talked about a lot. But investors come around and they're like, hey, you know, you're doing this around of financing. Can we take a little pressure off of you as an? entrepreneur and buy some of your stock personally, right? And so I sold a little bit of my dig stock enough to give me the ammo to go and do small seat checks, you know, and put, you know, 25K into, you know, Twitter's seed round and, and put, you know, 25K and or it was more into

Facebook, but they were a little bit later stage. And, and so it was, it was those little tiny checks that, you know, when they turn into multi-billion dollar businesses, uh, were pretty meaningful. How much does 25K into Twitter and Facebook early on actually turn into it? Millions of dollars. I mean, that math is even hard to comprehend. And Twitter's seed round? What was the valuation then? Well, it was

difficult because they were a podcast company doing podcast software and then they did a new round. They pivoted into Twitter and so, oh gosh, I'm drawing a blank on the name of the podcast. Audio. That's right. They were audio. So

yeah, I didn't invest in audio. They had become Twitter. And I asked Ev, who I was the tightest with at the time, because I didn't really know Jack that well yet. And I asked, he was a CEO, and I was like, you know, can I invest? And there was no round available at that point. But he's like, I've got this engineer that, Blake that was leaving and had some stock.

And was like, do you just want to buy some of the stock? And I was like, yeah, that sounds great. I'll just buy some of the stock. I think Gary Vaynerchuk said the same story. Yeah, but he bought it after me. Oh, really? Yeah, so here's the funny thing. So I bought in from Blake and then I told Gary that Blake was selling some.

And then Twitter ended up actually, they had a preemptive round come along that really like five or ten X their valuation. And then Blake was like, oh, whoa, whoa, no, there's a new valuation now. And he charged Gary the new price. So Gary's still pissed at me because I got this like really cheap. price for Twitter stock, you know, and then, and then Gary had to pay the more expensive price, but that was a funny little. What do you think Blake's saying right now? I mean, Blake probably just lost out. He did fine. He held on to like half or more. And so, you know, he probably, I don't know, if I had to guess, he made 50 plus 75 plus million dollars or something on it. I'm sure he's okay.

Did at the time, because Twitter kind of had like a, well, there's like audio kind of failing, Twitter, who knows. And then there was like this small community of people in Silicon Valley that were like using it back when it was like texting the, the, your updates out. Like when you were writing that check, did you feel like this is the, you know, the next big thing or was just kind of like, I don't know, my friends are smart. Let's see. Or where was in that spectrum? I felt like it was the next big thing because there was, I loved. So as someone that was building a social graph of sorts at Dig, you know, there was.

always this idea back prior to, excuse me, prior to Twitter, that was bidirectional friendships. So, you know, on MySpace and Friendster and all the others that had come prior to Twitter, you had to actually know the person to see their content. So it was like, would you like to send a friend request? Yes.

Do you accept this friend request? Yes, right? And it was like, same thing with Facebook. And when Twitter came out with that model of just this idea of following, and and it allowed like there was no celebrities on the platform it was like me and lila port and a couple others that were the top followed people on the platform at the time um but i i thought to myself like wow if this catches on the with the celebrity crowd it's just going to be insane it's

going to be because everyone will just want to see and also the barrier to entry a lot of back then it was it was um it was impossible to get uh you know celebrities to sit down and kind of do technical things because we didn't really have smartphones, but the fact that you could text to that number, that short code, just what you were up to, anybody can do that. It doesn't require any special software. It doesn't require you sitting in front of a computer. And so it was just so dead simple to use.

It felt as though as I saw the tech crowd, you know, kind of catching on, I knew eventually it would spill outside of that small vertical, of users into the mainstream. And if that, when that would happen, that was the bet. And when that would happen, if and when that would happen, that would, it would, it would blow up. And it did. So that was, that was awesome.

And I remember, I've also seen, uh, you did a video back in the day when square was like a prototype. It was like a YouTube video. I remember you, you're like, hey, check this out. Like, you know, here's this little square and you could plug it into your phone. You could take credit card payments. You're like, and it was not even released yet. And you were like, you know, promoted.

I think you, did you invest in. too because that would have been like another mega winner because I hit jack up and I was like hey I heard you're doing this new credit card thing I'd like to be an angel investor and he's like oh dude it's over subscribed I'm sorry like we've closed around like blah blah and I's like damn it I'm like well let me see if I can help you in some way and so he gave me a prototype and I just went and recorded a video and it got a lot of traction and it got a lot of people excited about this new product and it was like a early glimpse of what was to come and it started getting, you know,

tens of thousands of views on YouTube. And he calls me back and he's like, I had an investor drop out. I've got some room. Do you want to put a check in? And so that's what got me into the seed round, which was awesome. What was it like, you know,

I lived in San Francisco from 2012 up until somewhat recently. Sean's still there. It's definitely a bit different now because like startups are quite popular and Jack's, and Jack Dorsey's like basically a celebrity. Mark Zucker is obviously a celebrity.

What was it when back then in the, you know, 040, 506, you know, 2010, when these things were just getting going, did you actually think that a guy like Jack Dorsey was going to be like this kind of like titan of industry like he kind of is? Like what was it like being around some of these folks early on when they were just, you know, you guys were just messing around? Well, it was, you met a lot of entrepreneurs back then and there was, it was clear there was a few people that stood out as just being wildly creative. and just deep thinkers. And I was really drawn to those folks. I wanted to just like pick their brain more and get to know them better.

And so, you know, one of the things that struck me is just how mature Mark Zuckerberg was when he was younger. Like it was, you know, I'm quite a bit older, excuse me, than he is. And how old is he now? He's still only like 38? He's younger than that. Oh, my God.

Yeah. So how old is Mark? Oh, you're right. He is 38. Yeah. That's still, I mean, he's still, I mean, he's 30s. That's pretty wild. Yeah. It's, it's crazy.

He was, he was really young. So, yeah, so when I met him was 2005, I want to say. So he was 21. Wow. So he was 21 years old. And I remember just thinking about how put together he was and how well spoken and just and just what a deep thinker he was about the space, and he wasn't winging it.

He was taking it very seriously. And that was a big, big shock to me. I remember just those conversations being like, I was like, wow, for 21, I was definitely not as particular as he was at 21. What's something he said that made you think that? Well, you know, one of the things that I was always frightened by, as an entrepreneur in my, in my youth was just this idea of would people take me seriously and could I admit when I didn't know

something? And was it, was it okay to, I tried to hide my vulnerabilities as an entrepreneur. And he just came in and was asking so many pointed questions. And, you know, I asked him about some of his hiring and firing practices and how he would edit his team, how he ensured that he made the right hires on the engineering side because it was it was that was a very challenging thing to do back then to scale websites you were like racking your own servers and you know the way it wasn't the AWSes of the world and we were talking a lot about that and um it was just it was one of those things where he just told me that um he just you know it's the obvious stuff you surround yourself with people smarter than you and then you ask a lot of questions and you're not

afraid to ask those questions so um you know back then I had some great investors and board members, but at times I was a little hesitant to be like, hey, I don't quite understand how this works. Can you help educate me? And I think it was due to my lack of, like, for some reason I thought because I was a college dropout, that I had to hide that and they would be like, if I asked a question that I should have learned in college, that it would have looked, had an egg on my face. And so there was a lot of nervousness around that. And, and, just to see Mark just be so open and just curious. And there was no, it was clear that if he,

if he didn't know something, he was going to get to the bottom of it right away, it was, it was inspiring. I had a, I had an experience just like that. When we were selling our last company, I met with all the big companies, Facebook, Google, Amazon, whatever.

We also met with Discord. And I go in, I meet Jason, who's the CEO of Discord. And I'm like, pitching him on like, you know, basically if you bought our thing, like it would add this dimension to Discord. It would be awesome. And what I was so used to was most founders, if you, if you're just kind of saying how awesome they are and how they can take over all these different things, how there's so much more they can do, how this is just the beginning and how there's all these different ways that they can expand. Normally they're like, yes, yes, yeah, yeah, totally. We can do that too. We can do that

too. It all sounds good. And he was just sort of like, you know, I would acquire you guys because I like you. And I like that you came in. You had this whiteboard and you just like painted a picture for me. But we won't do any of that. And he's like, no, that's not what Discord should do. What we should do. And he said no. And he was like, we should just be this one horizontal utility that does this one thing.

And that's our, that's, that's the right strategy for us. And he was the first guy that said no when I was like kind of giving him some ice cream of like, you can have this too. Right, right. And I just thought, oh, that's what like, this is, this is probably what Zuck was like. you know, this is probably with somebody who was focused was like, because back when Zuck was building Facebook, it was like, Myspace was adding music and then TV shows and doing these like brand deals.

And like, he was just like, nope, real names, simple profiles. We're just going to let you like, you know, communicate and add photos and do this stuff. And like he said no to a bunch of different things,

which is why Facebook was such a cleaner site than MySpace and all the other competitors that were out there. Yeah, I would argue they've lost a lot of that because they say yes to a lot of the cloning of features of other competitors. But yeah, you're right, that relentless focus is so essential. And oftentimes it's more what you say no to than what you say yes to on the product side. You know, that totally agrees and vibes with me for sure.

Do you sort of, when you're doing all these projects, back to the projects, do you have like a set of rules? Like, for example, I know a guy who is incredibly successful. I talked to him one time, his name's Kevin, or a couple times his name's Kevin Ryan. He started like MongoDB, Business Insider, Guild Group, all these like amazing companies. And he was like, well, I just do back of the envelope math. And then I give each project six months. And me and my partner typically fund it with $300,000. And we kind of like feel it out.

It's a little mathematical, but it's also like, let's just see what happens in six months and see if this is promising. And we'll decide. And so he's like, six months, 300K. Can we make something cool? And I talked to Atomic Labs the other day. You know Atomic Labs? They're like that incubator. They're not really an incubator.

they like start companies. And they're like, yeah, well, like, sometimes we'll only spend 50 grand and like two months or something like that. Do you have like something like that when you're starting a bunch of your projects like the fasting app or the meditation app where you're like, I think you did another one, milk? Or is that the name of the production company? Yeah, it was the name of the kind of incubator studio. Yeah.

Like, yeah, do you like have like rules for what you're looking for? Yeah, I mean, it's there is, I guess the question. really comes to when you decide to kill something or sell it off or get rid of it or move on to the next thing. And oftentimes it's because your original kind of thesis around either the market size or just the concept behind it didn't take hold. And so I don't have any like hard set number of months. Sometimes you're early. So, you know, the fasting app, for example, you know, when I launched zero, it sat at, you know, tens of thousands of users for the first eight months. And then fasting hit and it became more of a household thing. And people were talking about intermittent fasting.

It was all over TV and different, you know, places were picking it up. And so people are just naturally searching for fasting in the app store because that's just what they do. And then that's when it exploded to, you know, hundreds of thousands and, you know, a million plus monthly active people doing fast. But it was, had I shut that down after the first, or six months, you know, it had been too soon. So something like that, if you just believe the market is not quite mature enough, I typically put it into a little bit more of a maintenance mode. You know, I got it to that first version where I felt like this is a useful utility for people that are looking to learn more and get into fasting. Now let's just let it kind of organically

build from here. And we were seeing, you know, nice, slow, consistent kind of week over week, month-over-month growth, but nothing explosive like you're used to seeing in a high-growth startup. So that one in particular was just like, let's just wait around. And then other times, you know, you create something and you've just clearly missed the mark. It's like we created this app called Tiny, which was a fun little photo sharing app that was all about. I liked it. Oh, you did? Awesome. Yeah, it was these little small postage size looping videos with no audio and we thought it would just be like a little bit more quick, a little intimate way to show kind of how you're traversing throughout your days and weeks rather than having to take

the time to set up to look all perfect in front of your perfect Instagram photo. There was less pressure literally because it was small. Right. Exactly. That part was actually kind of true. Yeah. And that was a crazy one because, you know, we launched and it just, it caught fire immediately and we had, you know, hundreds of thousands of downloads in the first week. And then it just died off completely. And everyone was like, ah, that was a fad. That was a, that was a fun little fad. And that one we shut down pretty quickly after that because it was clear that it was a fun little thing, but, but there was no depth to it. It was a, it was a feature, not a real product. So, yeah, it varies from product to product, I guess is the best answer I can give you. Cool. Okay. So,

you talked a little bit about like, you know, which one was the most lucrative? Okay, obviously, angel investing in Twitter and then getting into, you know, Facebook and others is, it works out well. Which one was the most fun? So which chapter was the most fun? And kind of with that is I'm on this mission. I just, you know, like after selling companies, like I got time. And so I was like, all right, well, what's the party now? I was like, I want to find out who's having the most fun in their career. And like, because that's what I want to do now. I just have the most fun type of career. Who's having the most fun with their life right now? So I want to know for you, which of your project is the most fun. And then who do you see? Who's a blueprint I could look at where you're like

this per I've met this person. They're having a blast with what they do. Yeah. Well, I would say that the, you know, there's the nice thing about starting your own businesses is you're, you're doing it because there's a personal drive behind it. Like I've never created anything because I thought here's an opportunity to make money. It's never been that. It's it. We were talking about this as we were just, you know, prior to hitting record or whatever, the little podcast caseholder on Amazon, right? And like there's, there's, sometimes there's these little businesses where you see a broken piece of an industry and you're like, well, gosh, if I went out and created this,

I could sell X number of units per year and it'd be a great little profitable business. And like, that's never really interested me. It's more about the, this, the creativity of it all and just the exploration of an idea that I'm drawn to. And so no startup is fun. They're all, they're all roller coaster. or is loop-de-loops. Like there's the chaos of all those things, right?

Especially as you grow your team and there's HR issues and people getting sick and products not getting shipped on time and customers being upset and, you know, there's, it's never going to be just like this perfect dream. But that said, as long as it's something that you're just naturally drawn to, I'm always having a good time. And I'd say, though, that said, that's kind of a, you know,

a little bit of a dodging the question. but more recently, when I've gotten into the art and NFT side of things, that world and the world of cryptocurrency is probably the most fun because it is so blue ocean. And there's just so much to be built there. It's not building yet another app and competing on KAC in the App Store. It's like, it's really, there's so many different directions you can go. and very few, well, there's a decent amount of high quality entrepreneurs in the space, but not as much as, say, you know, building something for the app store. So I enjoy kind of more

the blue ocean aspect of that world. Man, I remember when, so basically, I started this company called The Hustle. It was like a daily email and we sold it for, we bootstrapped and sold it for tens of millions of dollars. It kind of sounds a little bit similar to what you were saying about your story. I lived in San Francisco, and I started a media company because I was like, I'm not capable of starting a tech company, but I wish I were. And also, I'm good at writing. When I saw you went and did the watch site, Hodinkie, first of all, Sean, have you ever read that? Like, when I, when I heard, I was like a blog. I like watches. I have Rolexes. I was like a blog for luxury watches. What the hell is this guy thinking? Like, he just like,

he, he like, it started as something else, right? You started it as like Watchville or it was like a, it was something else you got acquired or merged and you became like the CEO of the, I remember looking at that, just being like, I have no idea what the hell he's doing. I don't wear watches, so I was completely out of touch with it. And it just seemed like, you know, a hobby project at the time. And then I started looking into it. And I was like, oh, wow, there's like a huge passionate base around this. And this company makes a lot of money.

And it's been around for a long time. I don't think it did make a lot of money. Did it? Like, I remember I read that. And I was like, I like this business because I'm into it. But like, this guy's frankly way above this. What is he thinking? Like, this is like, this seems needlessly.

hard. Well, watchfield was, so again, like just kind of like personal passion stuff. So I was into watches mainly because when my father passed away, he left me with a single watch. And it's something that I wear every once in a while. And it was for him, it was like to afford a single Rolex in a, middle class household is a big deal. Like that's like back in the 80s, you know, when my dad bought that, he was just like, I've made it. You know, I have it. And I'm not talking about one of the crazy relaxes. I'm talking about just the standard day date, kind of like, you know, simple relax. And like that was like the one thing he was really proud of, you know, that in his like GMC pickup truck, right? And so those, that was something I was left with. And then I started

reading some of the content. So Ben Clymer created Houdinke, the actual blog. And I created Watchfill, which was an aggregator and an app that brought together all these different sources so that people can read this stuff on the mobile, on their mobile phone. Because a lot of, As silly as it sounds, back then, most of the watch sites didn't have mobile versions of their site. So they were on just like old, old software, publishing software that was just horrible. So I made it all very readable, push notifications, like all the stuff, just kind of a wrapper for like all of this great content. And it just started growing and growing and growing. And I had a lot of eyeballs like some of the biggest collection.

were now using the product. And, you know, Houdinke was the most kind of best prominent source of this content that took it very seriously. So it was, you know, they had a couple full-time writers. And so I talked to Ben and said, hey, you don't have the tech team here. Let's merge and combine forces. So we merged the two companies together. He was three or four people and I was three or four people.

I moved to New York, became CEO. At the time he was doing maybe a million and a half to $2 million a year in revenue. So just enough to kind of do payroll. And we grew it from there and then turned on e-commerce and then started selling and creating partnerships with the big watch brands. And now, you know, as authorized dealers represent, you know, several dozen of the big watch brands that are out there. And that just became a massive, it was still a relatively unknown.

back then whether or not people would actually spend large sums of money over Apple Pay, right? And so I remember we had someone from Apple that was, you know, helping us on, when you get to a certain size, they kind of give you a little bit more concierge's help on the apps stuff. And they said that they had seen a $250,000 transaction come through Apple Pay on an American Express. And that was like the largest known transaction at that time that had been done over Apple Pay. for a sight unseen vintage Rolex, which was kind of crazy. But anyway, yeah, so that, I mean, new luxury watches are double-digit billions of dollars a year in terms of market size. So it's a big industry that many people, it's not as apparent in the States.

When you go overseas, you'll see how in Europe there, you know, watches are so much more kind of a, type of thing that is worn versus smart watches are more of the normal, no watch at all here in the States. Did you just say that it went from like a million or two in revenue? And now it's Sam said it's over 100 million? Yeah, yeah, we're over 100 million in revenue now. Man, that is wild. That's insane.

And a lot of it's commerce. I mean, you guys, like, when people talk about content and commerce, I think most of the time it's nonsense. Like BuzzFeed talks about it. And I'm like, I don't know, man. I don't think people are going to be buying a lot of branded BuzzFeed pillows and shit like that. Or like they had that tasty thing. I was like, I don't think people are going to buy a BuzzFeed oven.

I just don't think that's going to happen. And you guys did it. And I was like, I don't know. Is this like going to be a thing? It seems so challenging. But you guys are a perfect example of that. And you know the other good example? I bet you go to bring a trailer.

Do you go to Bring a Trailer.com? I've been to bring a trailer many times. Yeah. It is awesome. It's one of his favorite sites, actually. They are awesome. And so they've done the same thing but with cars. where basically it's like this perfect tie of like,

I just, I bought one car from actually those websites. And but I read it every single day. I'm like, let's just see like what they're going to write about, what cool cars out there. And then you guys did it with watches. And I loved your videos with John Mayer where he talks about his watch collection and all that shit. It's awesome. But what other verticals or what other like industries have you thought,

man, maybe I could actually do this model. I've always thought software, but like that's not nearly as sexy and cool as watches in vintage cars. but has there any like when you're like thinking about this model i i bet you're at night you're like i'm not going to do it but i bet you i can apply this here here and here yeah i mean in some sense that's kind of what we're doing right now in the world of nfts where there everyone that's armed with Photoshop can create a digital piece of art on the blockchain and there's this mad rush into the world of NFTs but there is just a ton of clutter right and and just a

ton of projects to sort through. So what we created with proof was this idea of, you know, it's the same thing with Houdinke. It's the same playbook. It's this curation with a point of view where you can have a strong editorial team come in that isn't talking about the flipping side of the industry, that isn't talking about how to make a quick buck in NFTs, that is really talking about what would you buy and hold for the next decade plus, right?

And the playbook that Houdinke nailed so well was that we took edit. tutorial so seriously and really hired out just an absolute stellar team of writers that had a deep understanding of the world of watches and not just a announcement this is a new watch that was dropped but an understanding of the mechanics of the internals of the watches so they could tell you about the different movements and escapements and why certain complications were harder to pull off technically than others and so it was a real geek's blog and with that technical hardcore writing developed trust. And so you, and once you have the trust of your readers, then you're able to extend commerce in a meaningful way. And it's not asking them to buy, you know, a microwave or some like

inexpensive or a throw pillow. It's saying, we have your trust. This is what we believe to be a very important, you know, watch or collectible. And because of that, you know, you're willing to pull the trigger on a on a 20, 30, $50,000 purchase. So trust is so essential. Do you think that at the hustle, we hired a bunch of writers. Sean hired some writers as well for his thing as a crypto thing. And I've always debated this in my brain. I'm like, do I hire good writers and teach them about business or do I hire smart business people and teach them how to write? What did you find was the best way to do that for watches? Yeah, I mean, the best way to do that was to find people that had the natural, organic, built-in a love for horology, like just

for all things mechanical watches. So, you know, we would have writers that, if you take, for example, like the Speedmaster, the watch that made it to the moon from Omega, you know, they could tell you every single variant and movement change and the reasons why, and they were just super geeky on this stuff. And they may have been just like B plus writers where you get them, but they had the technical knowledge in their brain. And that's a lot easier to fix because you get them to put that technical information out in draft form and then you just apply an editorial layer over the top of it where you have copy editors that come in and help stitch together a better, more more cohesive story before you actually publish it out to the world. Yeah, I love that.

This data is wrong every freaking time. Have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform where everything is fully integrated. Whoa, I can see the client's whole history. Call, support tickets, emails, and here's a task from three days ago. I totally missed. HubSpot, grow better. You're a pretty chill guy.

When do you get like really fired up? Like what gets you excited or in a good or bad way? Like, you know, I get really enthusiastic about the most random shit, like the most, it'll be like a creative project that I'm like, I bet I could pull this off. And I just go, like, I just get too excited about it. Sam has that same thing, but he also has it where if he feels he's wronged, Sam's like, you know, willing to fight to the death about it. And so he gets really pumped up. What gets you really pumped up? Rage is my fuel. I love, I love fighting. Yeah. So for me, new ideas and working with creative people. is the most kind of like strongest source of fuel for me. So when I get together with an artist or a fellow entrepreneur, and I actually, it doesn't have to be someone that has created something big. It's rather someone that just has wild ideas that are potentially,

just new ways of looking at the world. So you meet a lot of entrepreneurs that are opportunistic, iterative entrepreneurs, where they'll see something, they'll say, oh, there's some rough edges on that particular product. I'm going to go sand them down, make it easier for consumers, and go launch a business. And they have great success. I like the ones that are just like really thinking about entire new verticals or just flipping something completely on its head in new and creative ways. So that is what I'm really drawn to from just a straight idea point of view. And so entrepreneur-wise, and when I invest in some of these startups, those are my,

favorites are those those crazy uh more world-changing entrepreneurs um in terms of the the rage side of things um yeah dude you've had a you've had a bunch of rage inducing moments i've followed your career i've seen i've seen you throw this fucking raccoon yeah i saw you with the raccoon we saw that one i've seen people protest outside your house i've seen you get in trouble for like i don't know wanting to demolish like a historical building. I don't know like the whole story, but like you've had, you've kind of been a target. Yeah.

I mean, those, those all have their own unique story that the historical building thing was definitely not true. That was a, that was a pretty funny one in that. But, but that was, uh,

that was just people wanting to keep an old house up in the neighborhood. And they called it historic, even though it really wasn't. We wanted to take it down because it was filled with asbestos, which we didn't want to live in a house. that had asbestos in it, but that's a whole other story. The rage stuff, you know, the, the, the last four to five years of my life has been spent trying to kind of master my own mind.

And I think that if you can't come to grips with your own imperson, like personal peace of mind, it's a horrible place to be. And so, you know, I remember as a young entrepreneur just kind of being on this 24-7 hustle to go build, build, build, I got to win, I have to win, I have to win. And it created a level of anxiety that was not good for me. And so I think that's probably why you saw me kind of do things like the meditation app and other things because I, it was just a natural forcing function for my own self to like take some of that stuff more seriously. And so, you know, I just want to be able to be able to sit and not have to have my mind be always on. And that's kind of been my goal. And it's something I'm still working on so that it's not like, I remember there was this interview with Elon Musk. And I'm not comparing myself to the Elon Musk, but there's one thing that I can certainly relate to where he talks about how his mind sometimes just never shuts off.

And he's always thinking about things. new ideas, like all of these things. And it's, for me, it's always been, that has been not a blessing, but something that has just been as weighed on me. And I've always tried to, I guess the big push in the last few years have been to try and wrangle that. What kind of gets you all hot and bothered now where you're thinking about like the new industries or the things that excite you?

What ideas would you pursue if you have one caveat that you're that you're not currently pursuing. So because it's easy to say, oh, I'm excited about this project I'm doing. I think like, for example, Palmer Lucky was on the last episode and he was talking about, all right, we're like, you're doing Anderil. You did Oculus. What are the ideas that are on your kind of like, oh, that's interesting, but like I only got one me so I can't go do it. Because I think that's the most interesting to the audience and to and to ourselves. And that's actually the origin of the podcast.

Me and Sam have more ideas than we have time to do them. And so we're like, well, if we just say them out loud here, maybe people will take them and run with them or find something interesting in it. By the way, have you ever talked to Palmer, Kevin? That guy is wild. No, I've never, I've never chatted with them. I have to go back and listen to that episode, though. I'm really curious to know.

I've seen some written interviews, but never anything on video form. It went live yesterday. It's on like our YouTube and most of our listenerships on like podcast feeds. He is, he's something, man. That guy's eclectic. He's just, like, enthusiastic about everything. He, like, knows a lot about a lot. He's like biology, but more, but almost, he's as smart, but is more common.

Do you know what I mean? Like, for some reason, I can relate to him, even though I know that he's just, like, so much more smarter than I am. Yeah, I had read some stuff, and I don't know how much of his true, but some of his company stuff that he was creating around drones for tracking people and some of the stuff. Yeah, I just, it doesn't,

it doesn't fit well with my ethos. So I haven't really followed his career as closely. But I'd be curious to listen to the interview for sure. I think it was probably, it was probably our best guest episode. Oh, that's awesome. We've done a bunch of them. And the reason why is he's like, you know,

he's like, A, he's like pretty genuine. He's pretty, he's high energy, but he's, he's like direct. So it's like, you know, why do you do this or how'd you think about this? And he's like, for example, he's like, I thought about, you know, I'm kind of overweight. Could I like solve obesity? And he's like, you know, but here's what doesn't work, telling me to eat less of foods that

I don't like the taste of and blah, blah, blah. And so he's like, he's like, my solution was, and I started prototyping this in my house was to just instead of beyond meat and stuff that where they tried to make like a burger at a chickpeas. he's like, I wanted to just make fake food out of oil. Zero calorie food that tastes amazing because oil tastes amazing and we can manipulate oil into anything. We can turn oil into candles.

We could turn it into waxes. We could turn it into this. Into that. He's like, I created a grilled cheese sandwich that was zero calorie that tasted delicious using vulva. And we're like, dude, that sounds kind of insane. And like, he's like, we're like, why didn't you do this crazy idea? You sounded pretty passionate.

You went pretty far. He's like, well, there just simply wasn't going to be enough oil supply to do it. And he's like, we would have had to take the oil out of the sewage system and centrifuge it to the recycle it. He's like, I and I realize, you know, even I couldn't do that. And I was like, wow, this guy's like, you know, half genius, half crazy. And I, you know, I don't even know where the line is, but I find it fascinating that he, A, thinks like this. And B, doesn't just think about it. You know, literally is like, yeah, in my house, we converted the dining room into like this lab in order to like do these, you know, these sorts of projects.

And like, you know, out of one of them came Anderil, the $8 billion company. And the other one was going to be this crazy, like, you know, oil-based fake food. That's crazy. That is awesome. I love, yeah, see, that's the type of entrepreneurship that I'm really drawn to is just like people that are hacking on stuff at night. You know, for me, a lot of the stuff that that I think about in that vein, I tend to outsource and get other people to work on it.

A lot of the stuff around longevity, I've been interested. been specifically a drug called rapamycin where it's been proven now to extend life in in various animals and now apply to dogs so myself and um jack dorsey and brian from coinbase and a few others all have been putting money into funding studies out of the university of Washington um to to really prove this out in dogs and canines and then eventually move it into human trials so you know some of that stuff and the biohacking stuff, I still put a lot of effort and time and attention in. And I, I try this stuff out on myself as well. You know, I'm trying some of these experimental things. Not because I'm not one of these people that wants to put, you know, young people's blood in them

and live forever. I want to die. I just, you know, I do like the idea of, since I am an older dad. I didn't have my first kid until my four, until I was 40, I would like to be round a little bit longer for them. That's, that's all. I've heard of people doing this. I know Tim's doing this with a, what's it called, silicillum, like mushrooms. Yeah. Silicillin. Yeah. And how much does it cost to fund a study? And what do you get out of it other than like the altruistic of like, well, we're just contributing to like the grand thing? But is there, is there like a direct outcome that you can get from it? Like we can use this to fund a company. No, no, not in this particular case. Yeah, Tim was also put some money into this one as well. There, there was,

there's nothing you get out of it other than just trying to help further science. You know, a lot of these, in this particular case, the study was funded, but be, depending on the sample size and how many canines you have involved, you can only to detect certain levels of, of output. You need a larger sample base. It's called like a properly powered study in order to detect smaller little nuances in the data. And so we wanted to make sure it was powered enough to detect, I believe, up to 10% lifespan increase. And so to power it was to add another million dollars or so into the study to make sure that

they could bring on the additional canines required to make that happen. And, you know, I put my dog on it as well. And he's 12 now. And he still runs around like a pup. And I attribute some of that to a cycle of this that he did. but yeah it's it's nothing other than just like you you're figuring out ways in which you can like there's there's all these different avenues on the philanthropic side where you're like what what is meaningful to me personally and um this this this particular study you know I think even if it just

worked for dogs would be fantastic like forget humans if I could have my dog live for an additional five years like what a win you know so that it was kind of a win win-win study dude I talked to to this guy that was like building, I think it was called, is it called Ageless RX? I forget his, the name of his company, but he was, he's trying to like, you know, do longevity stuff, supplements and shit like that. And things are going well for him. But I was, he was kind of explaining his reasoning. He was like, you know, a lot of people are afraid to take these medicines. But we've been thinking, if we told them it's good for their dog, they're actually will give it to their dog. And he was, he was kind of like hypothesizing to me and like

brainstorming with me in real time. He was like, maybe we should just like do this for dogs and just give it to dogs. And if once people see that it makes their dog live longer, then they'll be like, yeah, you know, fuck it. Give me that pill. I'll take that thing. Yeah. There's, there's so much easier to commence to give it to their dog. I'm with Kevin. Oh, for sure. Let the humans die. Dogs live forever. Well, genome-wise, there's so much more overlap and, and, and connection there between canines and humans and there is a lot of other animals out there. So, but, you know, back to your question, though, about, you know, at a curiosity, what, what would I go pursue right now in terms of startups that I'm not doing?

I believe, and it's very, very clear now that AI in the next five years is going to change everything. With seeing open AI and a lot of the projects they put out there recently, whether it be creative writing, or I believe Fiverr as a company will just be non-existent. It's going to destroy the low end of the creative market initially and then work its way up the chain. And, you know, just the

outputs that you're getting now from prompt-based art, you know, the future versions of Photoshop are not going to be about moving mouse and pixels around. It's just going to be telling the computer what to do on your behalf. You know, you'll highlight an area and say, you know, change this aspect

and it'll all be done via prompt and meaning you type in what you want to see change and the A well will just make it happen and we're seeing that today and I'm seeing you know advancements on the A side in in medicine obviously all the creative side there's a probably a half dozen or so tools now that will complete you know write complete paragraphs for you if you're writing sci-fi you give it some initial kind of prompts of where you want the story to go and the writing is quite good I have no doubt in the next five years we'll see a New York Times bestseller that was 90% written by AI. So it's, it's, there's just so much interest. And with the interest and excitement flows the engineering talent.

So I've seen a lot of friends that are these, you know, a lot of people I worked with at Google and other places where, you know, they're, they're very insanely amazing engineers, you know, previously working on distributed systems and some of these hard problems that they were trying to solve and now said, hey, I'm actually going to pivot into this new world of AI. And anytime you watch that kind of flow of high quality engineering talent and go move into something, you, you pay attention. So I'm looking for at a lot of investments in that particular sector. And I'm very bullish on it. And it's something I don't have time to work on, but I believe some great businesses are going to be built there. What would be an application you would want to do in that space?

of all those kind of like threads where it's like creative work, medicine, you know, writing an AI book, is there an application that you can think of that you're like, I feel like AI could solve this? Because I think that's the, it's a hammer in search of nails at this point. That's when I talked to- Sean, you made a joke. You made a joke. I always tease Sean about Web 3 because I'm not the biggest fan of it.

And he was, and we were joking about how he was like coming up with ideas with AI. And he's like, finally a use case. We found it. And like with AI, it seems like. there's actually way more obvious use cases, right? But yeah, what application excites you? Oh, I'd love to have that Web3 debate at some point, too. But on the AI side, you know, we're already seeing this, right?

So Figma was purchased by Adobe. You probably all saw that. It was crazy acquisition. You know, probably the standard these days for prototyping and creating interfaces for everything from mobile apps to websites to you name it. we're seeing already built-in plugins to Figma that allow you to prompt-based build anything in just a matter of seconds. So you can say, hey, give me an interface for a mobile app that has these five options in this color with this futuristic type style. And you know, you get something back in real time

in 25 seconds. And it's rough, but it's giving my design team and other designers out there just a great starting point and it saves them a ton of time and effort. But this is like inning one, like two, three years from now, it'll be doing 90% of the work versus, you know, the first right now was probably 20% of the work. So that is super exciting in the assistance and time to market for new ideas, new projects, I think is going to be compressed even further. It's the same thing that what happened with the kind of like late web two when we went from racking our own servers to fully deployed and automated and managed AWS instances and some of these databases that just auto-scaled

as you threw traffic at it, it really compressed the time to go-to-market time by quite a bit. I think we'll see the same thing on the design side. So the speed at which we can develop and deploy new ideas is just going to be probably an order of magnitude better than it is today. So I'm excited for that.

Where do you, a question that we started asking people, and it's actually, I've always learned so much from this, but what message boards or Facebook groups or websites, what corners of the web are you lurking in right now? Like for me, I love Facebook groups. There's always like a weird Facebook group. Like a tiny example is overlanding. Do you guys know what overlanding is? It's like, no. It's like, I don't know the exact definition, but it's like, you know how you see like Toyota forerunners or F-150s to have like, campers on it and it looks like they can go in the desert for like two weeks. So I started like joining overlanding groups like three years ago because I was like, oh, this is kind of an interesting turn that's picking up. Or another one that we got really into a couple years ago was mobility. So like all these grown men, not caring about yoga, but they called it mobility. And it was all about like stretching. And it's like what's going on with there's like all these weird Instagram guys like doing all this stretching shit. It's kind of intriguing. And like a lot of times it's like instead of therapy, executive coaching. Uh, you know,

That's what happened from yoga to mobility. Yeah, they just changed like mayo and aoli. And it totally worked. It's awesome. Like, I love mobility now. And like, for the body stuff, Tim Ferriss was always pretty good at that. Like, he'd be talking about all this weird stuff, like fasting. It's like, dude, what the hell is this fasting thing?

What are he talking about? And that was like a really cool corner of the web to like look in on and like see like how are the geeks behaving now. So I can learn like how the rest of the normal like average Joe is going to care about in the next. five or 10 years. Yeah. There's that Chris Dixon quote. Are you familiar with it? Yeah.

What does he say? This is what the geeks who are playing with on the weekends will become like what we're all using like several years later. It's something, some version of that. Yeah. So like what geeky places are you hanging out right now? From Sean Nights like a lot of Twitter people. So we'll find like specific people on Twitter who are like quirky and we're like,

what the hell is this guy talking? He's talking crazy. It's really cool. Yeah. I mean, I follow a ton of people in crypto Twitter. So I pay attention to all the, you know, the what's happening on Web 3 via via Twitter and then also, you know, mostly Discord. It's just a lot of private discords.

It's a lot of private telegrams, small groups and gatherings of peers that get together discuss new ideas, new projects. These Dow's, these decentralized autonomous organizations where people get together to discuss and collect and purchase things. So it's a lot of, I've never spent so much time in Discord. It's like it's crazy that the conversation has shifted there. and Twitter largely. Dude, I hate that, by the way.

I love the fact that, like, a dig or Reddit or something exists where you can just, like, if you Googled it and found it, like, you could participate. Now I'm like, oh, what the fuck, man? Kevin's probably got this crazy-ass telegram group that, like, there's, I don't even, I can't get in because I don't even know exists. No, you can join proof. It's $50,000 and you're in, bro. It's easy.

No, it's, I think it's more like it's, people realize that, um, they wanted a little bit more intimate conversation. So I have a feeling that like there was a lot of, of this move to do smaller private discords and smaller telegram groups because it would lead to just not the masses flooding in and the chaos that you would see on Reddit. And so that's kind of been the move that I've seen and the reason behind a lot of that.

But it's not hard to get into it. You used to have to actually show them that you know what you're doing. Like you have to, you know, get in there and embrace Web3, which it sounds like, Sam, you may not be the biggest fan of. But you have to get in there and talk the talk and know where to go. And people will tell you, like, this is the place to be hanging out. Or I'm enjoying this Discord over here. And you'll learn about this.

And this is where the AI discords are or whatever it may be. And that's just kind of the new, it's the new Facebook. Facebook's, it's, I'm sure it's good for some things, but it's, it's dead when it comes to Web 3. You want me to tell you why I'm not a fan of this? Yes, please. I'm going to try and get you fired up here. Yeah, let's try. We can talk about proof.

I do. It sounds like I'm making an easy out, which I kind of am, but basically, like, I am, I'm decently educated just by hanging out with Sean. And so I have to admit that, like, some of my beliefs are a little bit loosely held, and I'm not the most educated on the topic. But my opinion on Web 3 is basically, it's a bunch of, like, it's just this kind of circular economy of a bunch of people making, making products to serve an industry that has yet to like truly figure out, or I don't know what you call an industry, a movement that has yet to

truly figure out like what the, what the thing is that they're doing. And there's so many examples where people, I think are fairly like egotistical and elitist about it saying like, Web 2.0 is old and like the way of the, this has to be decentralized or this has to be this way. It's like, man, just because you're putting Web 3 in front of something that doesn't mean that there's actually a problem here. And I think you're just wasting so much time and energy working on something that is just like a circle jerk that doesn't actually solve a problem better than the Web 2.0 version.

Also, I thought it's pretty dogmatic where it's like decentralized everything. It's like, dude, I want some stuff centralized. Like, can you imagine like calling customer service on a decentralized? Like, it's like, no, I, like, there are some things that I want like to have a, to be centralized. And I thought that they were a little bit too dogmatic. And I thought that they were oftentimes, I'm saying, like they, like you people, like you guys like didn't always have wonderful solutions. You

were just making shit up in order to like get in the game. And I just thought that it, it kind of bothered me. Yeah. I mean, I feel your frustration there and that I too am someone that when I look at what's being built in Web 3, if it's, it's just for the sake of calling something decentralized and there's nothing behind it or no structural advantage for that being the case. I think it's silly. I'll give you a great example. We're working on, there's a lot of things that you want to do in Web 3.

Some of them are high value and some of them are low value. When you were talking about working with the community, so we have a community of people that come together to do all different types of things. And some of it is what we call token gated content. So it's like a membership model, where you have to be a member of something and hold a certain NFT in order to unlock certain access

to videos or content or whatever. it may be. Some of those things can be high value items where you receive an NFT or something that actually has some financial, like, you know, something behind it. That is a case where you want to actually have that hardware wallet and pull it out and do it in a way that is secure and that is protected. But the rest of the time, you don't need that. You can use a Google login. It's okay to use a Web2 login. It's okay to use your email and password with two-factor authentication. Like we don't have to throw away a lot of the fantastic technology that's been built in Web 2. There's other things like, for example, some decentralized maximalists.

And I think maximalist is really what we're talking about here because anyone that is a maximalist on. Maxxlist means what? You're just like extreme and extremists. It just means that you are so into something that you can't see any other way. And it's like it's your way or there's no possible. There are people out there that say there is no other cryptocurrency than Bitcoin. That's the only one. Pomp our buddy.

Isn't Pomp? Like, don't they call them online like a Bitcoin maxi? I don't think he, I think he is a maxi on Bitcoin. And, you know, Dorsey's in that camp too where he's like trying to extend Bitcoin and says that's kind of the only currency. And I think this applies to so many different things. Like I don't want to get into political talk. But anytime you get to the fringes of anything where it's like this is the only thing

that matters, you get into crazy. town in my point of view. And so, you know, I think that is a danger of Web 3 where there's a lot of that kind of idea that if it's not pure Web 3, it's not right. And I'm with you. I 100% agree. But that said, like, I've seen this idea and a lot of the defy tooling, when I say defy I mean decentralized finance, a lot of the defy tooling that's being built on the blockchain in a performant way, in a cost-effective way, in a way that when you think about Wells Fargo as an organization with, you know, 150,000 employees, I'm just making that up by maybe it's 50,000 or 75,000, somewhere in between that range, where that is just a lot of bloat. And because of that

bloat and because of that insane monthly nut that company has to cover, you know, those dollars are not flowing to the right people. And so there are, examples of more efficient ways of doing finance on the blockchain that can be done in a trustless way written into smart contract code that will mean for better outcomes for the consumer. Now, those can be paired with centralized solutions, right? Like, Coinbase is a centralized organization. You have an email address you can send it if something is wrong with your crypto account, but they hold and keep decentralized currency, right?

And they do things like decentralized staking where you earn 4% on your Ethereum, but they're a centralized company that gives you that customer support. So I'm not, I'm a, I think that the ones that really win here, yes, there are going to be the people that say self-custody is the only way. There's this famous saying that if it's not your keys, it's not your crypto, like, like you have to hold your own private keys. I'm not in that camp. I do that personally and use safety deposit box and a whole slew of things to safeguard that for some. things, but there's other solutions where a hybrid approach makes more sense. So know that your argument is completely valid and that a lot of entrepreneurs that are building a Web 3 completely agree with you and that let's not throw away the baby with the bathwater here. There's a lot of

great things. But there are also some great advantages that come with being decentralized or a whole slew of other technologies that's being built on Web 3 that I could point to that you'd say like, oh, yeah, actually that does make more sense than the old way of doing things. So let's do this real quick. So you've probably seen, just like anybody else, these like, there's like these permanent, like just like there's permaboles for crypto,

there's perma bears. And their mission in life is to basically find every stupid use case of crypto and highlight it or every bad investment or every clip of a, you know, some dude at A16Z who goes on a podcast and says something dumb about crypto when asked about a use case. Are you talking about me?

I was just on their podcast two weeks ago. No, no, I haven't seen it. Who interviewed you? Dixon. But like, you know, there's people that sort of are focused on poking holes. And I think there's some value in poking holes, but there's also, you know, it's a little embarrassing to spend your whole day poking holes in something, you know. But let's put it this way.

I'm a, on this podcast, I'm the, the crypto believer. I'm the one who puts a significant portion of my net worth. I have a crypto media company. I have a bunch of belief in crypto. But for this use kit, for this. for this exercise here, I'm going to point out two things that I think would be, would be, you know, strong and valid points against crypto to somebody like you, who is also a crypto believer.

So I want you to kind of argue against these. And I hope that this doesn't get clipped as like, you know, famous investor X fumbles the ball when trying to explain, you know, crypto thing. So let's try to do better than that. Yeah. Let's do it. Okay. So the first would be around NFTs, right?

So you're a big NFT guy. And there's NFT art, which is. I think pretty hard to argue against at this point, like digital art, cool, their ability to own digital art. That's one use case for NFTs. But a lot of people who believe in NFTs will also say, but that's just the beginning. NFTs is a file format. It's a protocol.

There's all these different use cases for NFTs. And I saw the founder of OpenZee, I think, talking about this yesterday on a podcast where he's like, they're like, you know, he's like, oh, another use case is NFT tickets. And they're like, so why would there, why would you want to have an NFT ticket? He's like, well, because then you can plug it into defy and you could take a loan against your ticket. And then people were like, why the fuck would I want to take a loan against my $60 like concert ticket? Like, is that really what the hype is about is sort of a silly use case. So I would like you to give me the non-silly NFT use cases that you're excited about.

So like, yeah. Well, let's take the ticket example. Let's take the ticket example. And the art one is easy. It's a new canvas. Actually, let's cover that first. The art one is easy. It's a new canvas.

You can do things and pull from real-time data to display art in very unique, fun, creative ways, right? It's really not that much different than Rolex's. I mean, like, there's no reason why a Rolex is $150,000 other than, like, a lot of people think it's cool. Yeah, well, I would say there's a difference there because something you may not know about Rolex is they make over a million Rolexes per year. And so Rolex, high. that number. And the reason they hide that number is because if they didn't have a sense of scarcity around it, and they do this specifically when you go in their stores, they're always

be, next time you walk by an actual true Rolex boutique, notice how there's like some missing spots. And when you go inside, and that's all play. It's play because they're like, oh, they're sold out. They're not available. But we can put you on this list. And in three to four months, you might get a phone call. Guess what? You always get the phone call. And the watch is coming because they're making a million a year. The nice thing about, you know, one of the things that I was always so confused by is I was a comic book collector way back in the day. And I bought Wolverine number one because I love a Wolverine. It was like my childhood.

Like I always wanted to own one, right? And so I bought Wolverine number one. And it always hovered around $50. And I was like, why is this not going up? It's the very first Wolverine launched in the 80s, right? It wasn't the first appearance of Wolverine, but it was the first Wolverine comic. And I finally got a hold of a really well-known collector. And he goes, oh, he goes, you don't know.

They knew by that point that Wolverine was a hot character. And so they printed over 300,000 copies of that first edition. And it's like, oh, shit. Like that's why there's just a flood of these in the market. So, you know, NFTs, the beautiful thing about this is when you have an artist, produce a piece, it has proven proven provence so you know where it's come from, as proven scarcity. So you can't, like, create, you know, additional add-ons or duplicates because it's all

recorded on the blockchain. and then you have the unique ability to do very creative things like animation, oracles where the art can change based on the stock market price or time of day or phase of the moon. And there's just so much more extension. It's a new vertical for art. Fine. That's great.

Awesome. Like digital frames are going to be getting better. It is going to be a thing. Like there's no, in my mind, there is no argument to be had there that this won't be. I don't bet against the future or the inevitable. And art is the easy use case. NFTs. The ticket thing is different, right? So the ticket thing, I'm with you. Like, I understand that people are in, Web 3 are trying to, like, create these fancy financial instruments to, like, leverage you on

anything that you own. They're like, hey, you have a ticket to that upcoming concert that's sold out, you know, spin it into this defy unit and take a loan against it. And then you can buy it back and use the money in the short term. And it's like, that's all bullshit, man. That nobody's going to do that, right? It's, it's, it's, don't get me wrong. There's, there's, there are specific use use cases where that does make sense. Like, loan against NFTs is going to be the same thing that happens when Christie's gives you a loan against your Picasso, right? Like these, these happen, this happens all the time. It's just a parallel for the digital world. There are certain types of, of assets, digital assets, that getting loans against them, if it's something you want, will make sense. The ticket thing for me is

very confusing. But while I will tell you is interesting, and I've talked to actual rock stars about this. Like I had Mike Shinoda from Lincoln Park on my show, and he's a huge NFT fan and he creates them. And, um, you know, awesome, awesome flex, by the way. You know, I've talked to some rock stars about this. I'm gonna, that's a good one. No, but like, I've not making fun of you. I'm saying that's cool. I think it's cool. I think

it's important because like you, do you want to get the artist to buy in on this stuff too? Because just geeks are saying it's cool. Yeah. Yeah. He's a, he's an awesome guy. Very approachable. We're very approachable in the terms of rock star guys. But no, it's cool. We'll tell you that. Like what we talked about, which is an obvious one, is like, okay, imagine the tickets, well, let me step back. One thing I believe is to be true, 90 plus percent of people that interact with NFTs over the long term, I believe won't even know it as they're doing it as an NFT. It'll just be something where they have a digital wallet, an app or something like that, and they have a ticket there, right? They're not going to know that behind the scenes that is powered by the blockchain and recorded by the blockchain, right?

So I think what's going to happen is the nice thing about the blockchain is because it is a ledger, an immutable ledger that is a way to say improve that you have done something, that you either attended an event or you've actually physically done something. There's a ton of possibilities that I can unlock. If I go and I see Mike Shinoda play five shows or 10 shows, maybe he says, okay, now according to the blockchain in our app, and again, the consumer doesn't need to know about this. Anyone that's attended, 10 of my shows,

gets a VIP meet and greet before the show, right? And there's a thousand different things that you can do that you want to have that security of the blockchain behind the scenes so it's not being forged. So there's not being copies of it being made. So there's not like a way to fake it. And that's the nice thing about the blockchain is it provides you a way to have the security

and knowledge that something is not being faked. And you can imagine that's broadly applicable to a whole slew of different industries. I don't think we'll be calling them quote unquote NFTs. You know, it's just going to be a great piece of tech. It's just another database. That's all it is. It's a distributed, immutable database that is decentralized.

That's all this is, which unlocks a bunch of fun new use cases. Let's caveat it. All right. So let's say, because I think I get what you're saying, but I also get the eye rolls that people get when it's like, cool, tell me like how this is going to make my life better. And it's like, well, the cool thing about a blockchain is that it's provable, scarce. It's like, it's like, wait, you're telling me about the under the hood part. Whereas, for example, if my mom is like, if I'm like, mom, you should set up an email address.

And she's like, what the heck is email? I don't need that. And it's like, well, no, check this out. Like, you know, you send letters or you, you know, you send letters to your sister who lives across the country. Like, watch this. If you do it this way, it's free and it'll be instant. And like, oh, wow, that's cool. And hey, you know, it's even better because it's all digital, you can just type the word and it'll find that file. You don't have to keep it organized somewhere in a folder in your house. Yeah. Right. So I can, I don't have to tell her how it works at all. I can literally just say, it made your life better by being, by giving you know, more time, more money, more whatever. And so I think the question is, what does NFTs give? What does, what will an NFT give a person that makes their life better without explaining how how the tech works at all? Sure. I'll give you, I'll give you a great example of one that hasn't launched yet, but something that that I'm personally working on. So I, I'm working with, um, a well-known, like, very, very,

culty kind of wine producer out there. And, you know, wine at the highest level at the high end, it's a tricky, it's a tricky business because there's, you know, forgeries, there's fake labels, there's, they're putting holograms on the side of them. They're putting chips inside of the labels so that they can be scanned to prove that they're authentic, right? That's one piece. So the first question is, if I'm buying off the secondary market and not directly from the producer, am I getting something that's legit. Excuse me. The second piece of that is once I receive that bottle, you know, how do I store it to ensure

that if I'm going to keep something and I want this asset to appreciate over time and I want to drink it a decade from now or two, then, you know, how do I ensure that it is being stored the right way? So one thing that is happening in the next four months will be the issuance of NFTs to people that is going to be from a major well-known winery where it will. represent one physical bottle of wine. There's a couple advantages here. One, you don't have to take possession of it right away. You can let it sit in its proven perfect storage conditions and age for decades to come. You can let it appreciate in those storage conditions and you can hold on to the

proven ownership of it as an NFT. Let's say that bottle of wine for four or five X is over the next decade. You don't ever have to then pull the wine in out of the cellar, take ownership, above it, find a third party to sell it and then resell it where that person is questioning the authenticity of that wine. Instead, you can just transfer that NFT to a buddy. You can gift it to them for a special occasion or an anniversary. And then when they decided, hey, I want to drink this, they press two buttons in that bottle of wine that has been stored perfectly for a decade shows up at their door. That is efficiency that eliminates fraud. There is just so much to love in that equation and that'll be applied to the watch industry, to the luxury world, to all these

different verticals and it just makes sense. Like what about that? I'm just curious if as you hear me explain it doesn't sound like a better world like in terms of fixing a bunch of problems. I think if I was going to if I was going to argue against that, like just to steal man the argument against it. I think it would be cool. Like maybe it's going to maybe these are certificates for collectibles. Most, you know, it's not going to, that doesn't impact most people's lives because most people are not collecting high-end bags or wines or this where there's huge problems of forgery like that. That may be one thing, which is it's not going to impact that many people in that sense. Oh, you're telling me NFTs are this game-changing, world-changing technology, but that's a really

niche specific, you know, one-percenter type problem. And then the other is like, you know, sounds like an NFT is like a digital certificate. You know, you could have done that with another type of certificate, but another type of database, maybe, but maybe this is better. Like I do agree it's better, but like it was possible before. It didn't take the impossible and make it possible. It made the possible, maybe made it more efficient or a little bit more convenient for the consumer. And so I think that would be maybe one argument against it, but I don't want to go too far in the weeds.

Yeah. The other thing that I think to add on to that, though, is that because you have, well, I'll give an example. Like back in, you know, back to the rock star example of an artist, you're reliant upon if you did want to do some type of rewards program or something for, well, actually, let me step up one more point. The point you made about the one percenter problem and is this applicable to those people, you're absolutely right. Like there's only a certain number of people that are going to collect art at the highest level and wine at the highest level and all of that. I mean, granted, these are double digit billions of dollars of year like big markets to go after,

but you're right. These specific use cases that I'm giving are very niche, right? I think on the more broadly on the idea of just membership and access and prove where you've been, what you've done to unlock loyalty and rewards over the long term and think about replacing the Amex points or other point type systems or reward systems with blockchain, the beautiful thing about it being decentralized. And this is one argument for decentralization is that it's forever on the chain and you're not dependent upon a company being around for the, for that to exist. So if an artist is engaged with a startup that is working on a loyalty rewards program for them and they run out of capital and die three years later, as long as they stored their information on the blockchain, that artist can then just pick up where they left off

and it just, it continues forward. And we've already seen this happen where there's been several startups that have stored their information on the blockchain where they go out of business because they just, their idea didn't hit. And then someone fills the void and comes and says, I have a better take on this and now let me tap into that public data and use it going forward so that not all is lost, which is kind of a new concept. And rather than just a

database going away, it's always going to be there and can be reused, which I think is pretty compelling. The really simple two-second example of this is you play a game. You get really into Fortnite. You go buy a bunch of skins. You dress up your character. You got the cool, you know, like glider and you bought all that stuff.

And, you know, a year and a half goes by. Your friends have moved on. They're all playing Call of Duty now. You've sank $350 into Fortnite. You don't own those items. You can't resell those items. You can't recoup any of that value. Nor could you take those items into any other game.

So in a Web3 world, either another game could come out that says, hey, we accept item. We plugged into this protocol. So you can bring your cool sword from game one to game two. That makes the sword more valuable because now it can be used in multiple games. So maybe I'm going to play. And we're seeing this already. The interoperability between multiple Web3 platforms. saying that this is a defined standard

and now these items can digitally move between platforms. It makes a ton of sense. Now those items are more valuable because they can be used in more places. And the other one is that if I'm just done with the game, I can just dump it on to the next person who's really interested in for it. And I can recoup some of my investment,

which will make more people want to spend in games because it's not just a money pit. It's an asset that they can resell. All right. So that's like the quicker example maybe. I love that you join my side. I'm truly on your side, but I have to argue the other way

in order for this to be interesting. At the end, you're like, I get it, I'm in. The other crypto nerd argument would be, okay, for years, people have been saying that Bitcoin is this inflation hedge or this currency that doesn't inflate. And oh my God, you know, how lucky for you guys. The U.S. government starts printing trillions of dollars. Inflation is at record highs. It's in the news every day. Wait, what happened to that awesome inflation hedge asset?

Why is it down 50% when inflation is, is, is, is, is, is, the, you? the bigger problem than ever. Shouldn't this be, shouldn't this be your time to shine Bitcoin? So, yeah, what say you to that? Yeah, I mean, it's, it's a real shame that Bitcoin has been so spiky, because if it had it been this linear growth to 20,000 to where it is today, we'd all be like, this is the most amazing thing ever. Like, like, if you just take the spikes out and make it look linear, it's, it still looks like an incredible asset. Like, you know, just go back five years. Look where it is now versus five years ago. So it's the spiky nature of it that. that hurts it in the end. I would say that, you know, I'm a fan. I think Bitcoin is a tough one because

it's, I don't like that it's not a green currency and I don't see a clear path that ever being the case. And I know everyone's trying to extend it new and exciting ways and try to make it more Ethereum-like and so that it can do more than just be this type of digital gold. For me, you know, when I think about those types of assets, it's, I'm responsible in that I'm not betting the farm on this, but is it a small percentage of my portfolio? Absolutely. And I just considered another asset class that provides me a little bit of, um, of diversification across the board. So, you know, the majority of, of my, you know, personal holdings is still, um, standard, you know, index funds, uh, that, that are pretty vanilla, the low cost index funds, you know,

the Vanguard way, right? Yeah, I was actually going to ask that. What is your liquid portfolio look like? Like where I was, I was, I was been waiting to ask you that. Sam is like a ETF, low-cost ETFs and bonds. Dude, I'm 80% in Vanguard index funds, 20% bonds. That's all. And then I built private businesses.

Yeah. So, like, has put everything into. I'm like, angel investing in crypto. And then like, you know, five companies I believe in and, you know, a little bit of index funds. Like it's like, yeah. zero like it's like five percent or something like that to keep 10 percent in cash or something and so what would your what would your pie chart look like and obviously it changes over time

yeah so so my pie chart would be essentially this um you know 80 percent well i think there's an important thing to caveat here is that as a venture capital uh partner over true ventures i have a lot of um risk on the table there in in venture early stage investments did you have to put your own money into that or is that just your carry? I do. Yeah. I had to put my own money into it as an investing partner. You also invest alongside the fund. So that is my bucket of risk, right? So just setting that aside and saying, okay, you know, I have carry in the fund. That's my bucket of high risk. You don't put too much capital in, right? You put like, I don't know, what, like quarter million dollars or a million dollars, something like that into that. It depends on the size of the fund. It's a, it's a

percentage of the fund. We just closed our latest fund, which is $750 million. And so the partners put in a percent of that back into the fund. I'd have to look at what the exact numbers are. But it's substantial. They want you to have skin in the game when you're investing. So, you know, I consider that to be like,

those are the big high risk buckets. So everything else I do, I want to be just super vanilla. And it's that Vanguard index fund. Keep it, you know, keep it really simple. I don't do bond funds. I'd rather rely on people. to buy bonds on my behalf. You know, I am laddering into bills right now because you're getting

four plus percent in the short term. And so, you know, just, just ladder into those makes a ton of sense right now. You know, anyone out there that has 10 grand that's sitting around that doesn't go buy an eye bill right now that's earning over 9 percent is just insane. That's the most no-brainer scenario for someone that's listening to this podcast. By the way, there's like one week left of that, I was like, Yeah, that's right. Obviously not investment advice,

but you are getting the full faith of the U.S. government as the backer, and it's over 9%. And you can do 10,000 for yourself and 10,000 for your spouse, which is amazing. So anyway,

it's, I keep it really simple. And then the rest is, is the crypto, the crypto side of things is like, you know, let's call it 50% NFTs and 50% digital assets.

And that's, you know, probably, 10% my overall pie. So 90% of non-venture stuff is in just an index fund. Yeah, yeah, multiple index funds that cover a variety of markets. But yeah, low-cost index funds. Do you touch real estate at all or no?

Not really, other than just, you know, my own stuff. Do you own or rent? I own. We've always had this debate. And I know you've got to go to me and I hear your alarms going off, but we always have this debate. Well, we both agree. I own. I wish I would have rented. Dude, I just want to rent everything. I don't want to own a lot of stuff. Do you regret owning or do you like being an owner?

You know, the thing is when interest rates were low, you can just take a bunch of capital back out of your house and pour it back into the market, assuming that you're going to beat that. You know, if you could get, own a house, take a loan out against against that house and get, you know, a couple of points. and earn five to seven in the market. Like, I'll take that Delta all day long. So that's kind of the way I play it. Cool. Well, dude, I'm really happy we got to talk. I used to work out of the Reddit building third in Bryant.

And I remember seeing you walk by. And I was like, oh, shit, that's Kevin. I wish I would have said, hey, that was in 2012. So it's only been 11 years later, 10 years later. But I'm happy that we were able to talk. I've been a big fan of yours. I know Sean has as well. So it's really exciting to be able to meet you.

I love that you guys are doing show. I mean, it reminds me a lot of like the, the kind of fun little hash out debates that Tim Ferriss and I have when we do our random shows. Like, they're just fun, right? You get a couple of friends together and shoot the shit and some, some crazy discussions come out of it. So that's, that's great. Dude, those were, I can't believe how big those were back then. I remember the, the Kevin and Tim shows, I think they call that he like had a funny name for you, like Tim Tim Top Top. Yeah, oh, I call him Tim Tim still. And he tells me Kev, but yeah, we just shot one here in person maybe two weeks ago, which was fun. It was good to see Tim again. I'd seen them in a minute,

but there's so many little things. Like I remember you talked about Wim Hof back then, and I was like, you know, next day I'm on my floor, like breathing, you know, hyperventilation on purpose. I even remember your wife, Dr. Dara, is that her name? Daria, yeah. Darya. Like, it's funny. It's like that stuff was so, I mean, it still is, but it was like particularly when I was in 22 and just getting into Silicon Valley. Like I really looked up to you guys as like just show me how to Silicon Valley. You know what I mean? And it was really cool. Yeah, that was that was a fun.

I miss not living in the same city as Tim because we always have getting to some trouble when we're together. Yeah, you guys provide a blueprint for us in terms of like, hey, if you can find somebody you got chemistry with and you shoot the shit and like, what's your content? Your content is just, yo, I'm super curious and interested in a bunch of things. And this becomes my outlet to summarize, you know, my set of experiments and rabbit holes I've been going down. And like, you know, we would have never done a podcast of like, oh, the ad revenue will be enough. It's like, no, it's not really like, fuck that. That's not really relevant.

And seeing, you know, Tim and you and how, oh, actually, it's these relationships and these investments and there's these little side projects you kick up. And actually, you can make this whole thing work without having to go, you know, do this like, you know, traditional kind of venture path of raising money to go do this thing. So that was pretty inspiring. So, you know, thank you for that. I think, you know, just seeing a blueprint is like that Roger Bannister, four-minute mile where you're like, oh, I can have the lifestyle I want, but on my terms. And if these guys can do it, then we can do it. Oh, I mean, it's, it's congrats to you both. It seems like from what I heard here at the beginning of this episode, you guys have done quite well.

And congrats on your success. It's awesome. Congrats to you, too. And thanks for kind of paving the way. We appreciate it. And thanks for coming. Thanks for having me.