Tech Brew Ride Home - (IHP) TheGlobe.com Saga Part III

Episode Date: January 1, 2024

Part three of our epic conversation with Stephan Paternot. Here's what happens when you've been through the wringer. When you've been to the top of the rollercoaster and also down to the bottom. Here's how you take stock of your life, how you reinvent yourself, re-find you entrepreneurial spirit... I feel like there are so many lessons in these three episodes. Lessons for entrepreneurs today. Lesson for... I dunno. People in the crypto space? My thanks to Stephan Paternot for an insanely great conversation.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the Internet History Podcast. I'm your host, Brian McCullough. Okay, here we go.

Part three of our epic conversation with Stefan Paternoe. Here's what happens when you've been through the ringer, when you've been to the top of the roller coaster, and also down to the bottom. Here's how you take stock of your life, how you reinvent yourself, refine your entrepreneurial spirit. I feel like there are so many lessons in these three episodes,

lessons for entrepreneurs today, lessons for, I don't know, people in the crypto space today. My thanks to Stefan Patrano for an insanely great conversation, part three right now. It's sort of like what happened with cryptocurrencies recently, right? There's a complete disconnect with what utility they truly bring to the world right now versus the perceived value they're going to bring to the world, right? Everyone piled into crypto irrationally. It doesn't mean crypto is not going to work. It just means crypto hasn't gotten there yet, and everyone piled in anyway, because the fear of missing out.

So because I got to ask this, because I've asked this of so many people have never gotten a satisfactory answer, but you've been so good at giving so many facets of this. Was there a moment when you yourself were like, the music stopped? Yeah, I could see the writing was on the wall because we couldn't keep up, right? The more we acquired and the more we grew and the more we barely managed to eke past our revenue numbers, the more the stock dropped. And I knew this was untenable. We could only buy so many companies. As the stock price is dropping, your chances of buying companies is diminishing. And so you could sense that this cart was going off the rails.

Water is going out of the bucket. Whatever. Yes, exactly. Whatever metaphor you want to use, it was I could feel it. And then, you know, okay, so then another thing happened to me personally that was totally left field and took my will. to live out from me and that was that my dad suddenly got pancreatic cancer and you know I was told suddenly that I have a complicated history with my dad and I never had the chance back then to get to know my dad and and get angry with him and get to know each other and learn to love each other

and suddenly I was told he was going to pass away and I barely would have a month to deal with that and he you know luckily for me he survived his pancreatic cancer which you know you have a 1% survival rate and while this was all going on while I thought he was still going to die that same feeling that the cancer that's killing my dad is eating away at not just the globe but the internet there's something really rotten going on that's untenable and it's only the person with the most energy and the most salesmanship and the most money who's going to maybe be the one who you know who survives to the last and gets the final chair when the music stops but I felt like, okay, the music is starting to stop for us.

It's coming. I don't know how soon it's coming because every time there was another pundit saying, all the bubble's going to burst, the bubble just kept getting bigger. Right? So you hear this enough, you're like, okay, the bubble is going to burst, but nobody knows one. So you've got to keep playing the game. You know, it's too late now to just sort of take your chips off the table.

You've got to keep playing. And finally, in January of 2000, my Todd and I got to a point where we'd already asked ourselves at one point Todd and I were thinking maybe just bring in another CEO somebody with more experience to run the company than us this was back in 99 but things were still looking up somewhat and our board was like no let's not change CEO you guys are doing okay you got challenges but let's just stick with it but Todd and I wanted them to know like we're really open to bring it on one of these gray-haired

CEOs that probably knows this shit better than us. Like, honestly, like, you know, Jerry and David at Yahoo did it. And, you know, it's like this is not atypical. But no, so we stayed. And then finally in January, there was a little bit of an internal mutiny by a couple of our salespeople who kept feeling like Todd and I weren't necessarily doing enough job leading them through and above and out of this fog of war. And they, you know, had been beating their numbers, but it was clearly getting harder and harder to do so. And they went and met with our chairman, our principal investor, Michael Egan, sort of behind our backs.

And when Todd and I found out about this, we were livid. And what was interesting is that instead of deciding to fight it, I think Todd and I suddenly saw this as our opening to actually let go. and I'm the one who's always more emotional and pushing and and Todd is more calm and methodical and okay stuff let's be let's be pragmatic and let's be systematic in our thinking and so I was expecting Todd to sort of paint the number do a paint by numbers on here's what we're going to do stuff you know we're going to talk to Michael and we're going to talk to our team or we're going to work

through challenge A, B, and C and instead what surprised me was that and I know I was taking up that role right oh you know what we're going to go tell me him this and that and blah blah blah blah and Todd was like no we're out and I just remember that moment it stuck with me forever because it was so different it was so out of character for Todd but he had this like a little Zen master moment where he said no we're out I was like what do you mean we're out like we're going to quit and he's like yeah we're out we're done and I said that he said that to you or he said that to everybody no he said that to me on the phone he was an Aspen skiing, and it was right after Christmas.

And do you feel like he was saying that to you for you as well? I think he was saying it to valid. I think he was saying it out loud to himself as well. And I think he knew that if he gave me this sentiment, that I would know that I felt the same way as well. And I did, right? Because as soon as he said it, it felt right. I didn't fight him. I was like, oh my God, I can't believe Todd.

You feel like we're done. And I know I do. I'm just so used to Todd being more calm about it that it was like a, it had flipped, he'd flip this script on me. And I wasn't going to suddenly be the one who's all like, no, no, no, we're going to stick with us and keep going. I knew inside, like, my dad is dying and I feel like there's something really rotten going on here. There's a cancer spreading on the internet.

But if everyone's going to be a casualty or if we're going to be the first casualty, so be it. But this is untenable. And so I knew that. And so Todd flew back to New York right away. We met up. We came up with our strategy. First, I called back Michael Egan and told him that I was very disappointed that he'd taken a meeting with our sales guys without telling us, without giving us a heads up. That to me, that was a sign of losing confidence and that he was maybe looking for an excuse.

and I told Mike that that was it. You know, Todd and I were resigning. And, you know, Mike was the one who then said, no, no, no, no, hold on. You know, that sounds rash. We don't need you to resign. I don't want you to resign. But that's what our sales guys had actually suggested to Mike.

And the fact that Mike had taken a meeting and it was just, it was clear to me that there was some loss of confidence on one side. And Todd and I also probably had a loss of confidence that we could solve the, what was ailing this entire Internet. market. And that was it. And then Todd and I, you know, met up at my apartment, had a couple of vodka shots, had this cathartic release and came back to the office and told Mike and his entourage that we're going to come up with an orderly plan, an orderly exit plan, and that Todd and I would stay on, but as vice chairman of the board, and that we would help find a new CEO,

who has a lot more experience in a traditional company and bring some new discipline and new ways of thinking to the organization and that everything would be fine. By the way, when we resigned, we still had something like $60 million in the bank. So despite the fact that, uh, and our revenues, we had also when Todd and I resigned, we'd hit a record, $7 million in revenue, our fourth quarter was the highest revenue we ever had. So we actually felt like this, you know what? We're leaving technically when the business is at its strongest ever.

Um, we have close to 20 million users a month. We still have tons of traffic. traffic, we're leaving the company in great shape despite the fact that the stock has been languishing. Like you and I taught are burnt out, but the company has plenty of resources still, plenty of momentum, brand awareness, revenues, everything it needs to keep going. And so we felt actually that this was a reasonable thing we were doing and we wouldn't just be letting the whole thing wouldn't just implode. And so we announced our quarterly results from the fourth quarter, which were great, great,

great, great, great, and then announced to the street, we're going to have our president, and Chief Operating Officer Dean Daniels take over his interim CEO. Todd and are going to stay. We're going to keep things going until we find a new CEO. And, you know, that was it. And I don't know how the stock responded. I think the stock dropped a little bit that next day. But we did a round of interviews.

Some of the press were very cruel to us. And like, again, a reminder that internet companies run by young kids was just the fullest, the most foolish thing ever invented. And of course, the internet is whatever. There was more about, it was just about the globe. We didn't know at that point that the bubble was going to burst, start bursting a few months later. So sometime in the spring of 2000, it started to deflate. And then it deflated very fast, right?

It was like a trillion dollars in market loss. And everyone was losing their mind. And something like 90% of internet companies lost 90% of their market caps, including, you know, Yahoo and Amazon. And all those guys dropped 90%. And I remember feeling some sort of Schadenfreude, at least, that, well, we weren't the only losers out there. Everyone was crapping out. Obviously, later on, we know who the winners are who stuck around and turned it around.

I say this to people all the time. I remember so clearly looking online the day that Amazon was a $5 stock, and I know that they haven't split since that day. There was a time when you could buy Amazon for $5. Yeah. I mean, there was a time when Apple was $2, right? And it was like, it's amazing when you lose the vision. and everyone was over-excited, and then everything craps out.

Like, everyone just disappears, right? It's only somebody who's able to come back and believe in the future again and rebuild from scratch, who's actually able to then prove to everyone. It was valuable all along. And Todd and I ran out of steam. And then when the bubble burst, you know, most of the pundits felt like the Internet was a joke, right? The Internet, yes, we all knew it was a giant, fad. This internet is a giant joke. Never mind virtual community. That was obviously a giant joke.

But the internet in general and people hyping it up and all that stuff, you know, it's just like crypto, right? Bubble burst with crypto 10 times faster. And guess what? I believe it'll be back 10 times faster. And it will completely transform the world. But that's okay. Everybody, everybody who has no vision associates something's value with its price. And the whole point is, No, you have to look under something's price to see its true value. And of course, Facebook vindicated us and Myspace and all the other guys vindicated at the virtual community model. And of course, Amazon vindicated itself and Google vindicated everyone that ever doubted that, you know, search engines and portals were going to have any value. But yeah, but it took a while, right?

from 2000 to 2004 when Google then went public and then eventually Facebook. It was a bit of a no man's land for two, three, four years. Well, actually, you, what about you? I mean, we can go into other personal stuff. Like, you were talking about your father, but like, that was a wild ride. Like, I feel like, again, and by the way, I will have plugged the book. in a recorded intro and things like that. We're getting into, we're getting into the book stuff.

Oh, yeah, no, no, no. By the way, it will have fully been plugged. Fantastic. You, like, you wanted to be an actor at a certain point. My main question. So, yeah. This is epilogue stuff. Yeah.

You want to. Okay, wait. You know what? Let's say this now, because, again, I will have plugged this at the beginning of the show. This book is called a very public offering. And by the way, it was published what year, like 2000, 2001, 2002? No, so 2001 was the first edition. Yeah.

And so, listen, as people know, you know, I've been doing this project for five years. I've had the hard copy for maybe four or five years. I read it for research for the book. But Stefan has published an updated paperback version with an excellent epilogue that's going to talk about what we're about. to get into about what he thinks about all of all of this craziness now well you know i'll just say this that the reason i wrote the book in 2001 was mostly for personal reasons that i needed a way to communicate with my dad and to just sort of lay out everything and to be able to say things

uncensored uh also i felt like i needed to document everything that had happened so i originally was starting to just document notes i was writing notes about everything that had happened I didn't know that it was going to be part of a bigger process I was going through, which is developing the concept of structure in my life, because I've been always all instinct and all emotion all the time. And so this was the, I turned my notes eventually into a book and published it in 2001. And it was one of the first dot-com books and, you know, it got reviewed. Sometimes it got great reviews and sometimes it got the classic,

hatchet job reviews. This was a fad who cares about this. Yeah, another young punk who wants to talk about the failure of what the internet is, please. You know, we don't need to hear it. But I got it out of my system and most importantly I knew my dad read it and we eventually, my dad survived another 15 years and it was in those 15 years I got to know them for the first time. And I went through an existential crisis.

You know, look, I spent a quarter of my life building this company at that time. which was seven years. That's all I knew. The company was me. I was the company, you know, was we viewed ourselves as one and therefore when you when you associate yourself as being the company and the company dies, what does that do for your self-esteem? What, let alone my income, all right? My income went to zero. My net worth went to negative, negative a million dollars. I actually had to go and ask my dad something I'd never asked him before, which is if you could bail me out of my apartment mortgage, because I was going to lose my apartment as well.

And he did something that was completely surprising to me, which is he actually did. He loaned me the money to pay off my mortgage so that I wouldn't lose my roof. And then he said, you know, the rest is up to you to figure out. But he then read my book. We got to know each other. I got to know him in the way that I think most people like to know their families and bond. And a lot of the things he told me while I was running the company, you know, how Bear Stearns had screwed us with the IPO.

those were things I didn't want to hear at the time. I thought he was wrong. I was proud of what I built and having your dad really never tell you that he's proud of you in only hearing it from third parties. You know, it killed me. And having my dad finally tell me after all this time that he was proud of me. And that actually, more importantly for me, that he was right on so many levels of what, you know, what builds a good business and how to how to, how to,

think things through more deeply and organize things, your thought process more differently. Those are the lessons I've really taken away, right? 90% of what I have needed to learn through this existential crisis was on the way down, not on the way up, right? When things were going up, up, up, up, up, you're making shit up as you go, you're doing the dance, you're spinning the plates, you're doing whatever, and you're not really learning anything. You're creating an ice bridge as you're skating, and it's, you don't have time to think.

was when it crashes and burns and you have an existential crisis and you don't know what you're going to do for the rest of your life, man, you start to think. But then you realize that you can only think so fast. Most of the real learning I've done

was well after I published that first book over these last 20 years. As I figured out how to reboot my career and figured out how to invest, well, before I go into the details,

it was really about rebooting my career, trying to figure out who I am, how to socialize, how to do the very things all my friends and family had been doing all along in their lives, living a little more in the moment, having deeper real relationships with the people around you, some of these most fundamental human things that I had not learned. Let me stipulate that we just had a recording issue and we're back. What Steph was talking about was that, and I'm going to put words in your mouth, Steph, is that you had to rebuild your life because you were almost stunted because the business took over your life and you didn't have the college years.

You didn't have the what am I going to do with my life now that I'm graduated, period. You didn't have all of a sudden you were thrust back into like reality after this crazy ride and like you had to rediscover. You had to find life. Yeah. I basically had missed out on an adolescent. if you will. I had missed out on the normal order of things where you have a regular college experience, you go out and have a job, you learn from that first job, maybe you get another job, maybe you go to your MBA. I don't know. There's a much more gradual growth curve, normal trajectory, you go out more,

you get to know people more, you have deeper relationships, you're a little more in the present. All of that was just gone. The globe experience was not. I mean, it was like going through a wormhole where I just rocketed forward across the universe and came out the other side. And I was, I mean, you said stunted. I called it just, I had an existential crisis where I didn't know what I was going to do with my life anymore. You know, what were my skills? I had built a company, but what was I good at that was employable? And do I even want to, would I be capable of having a job and working for another boss when I'd had this much freedom and power to implement a dream?

Here's something that I want to posit to you. And again, this is me interrupting your story and throwing things in your mouth. Stunted was maybe the wrong word. But the globe experience didn't work out for you. But what about emotionally? And I'm almost wondering, I'm thinking. of a Zuckerberg who was the exact same age, right? Now, he went on and is still, but I'm wondering, what you're describing is the sort of lack of like, I didn't have the same experiences as my peers.

Do you wonder, even if the globe had gone on to become a $500 billion company, is there something there that is robbed by having that sort of a whirlwind experience? experience at that age? There's no doubt that some there it's all tradeoffs, right? We have a limited amount of time and I know that your ability to truly grow as a person and be empathetic and compassionate and know really who you are takes time. And if you are on a rocket ship, you're too busy, you know, guiding that rocket ship to truly grow in the ways you need.

And honestly, when I watch Mark Zuckerberg right now, who has been flailing with all of this, the political scandals and fake news scandals and I mean, the scandals just keep piling up. It reminds me, he reminds me right now where I was when we were public, which is your head is spinning. Everything's happening in real time and you're not prepared for this. And even if it's successful, even if you are worth $60 billion, you're still missing some component of self, like some sort of... Of course. Yeah. You're missing it and you're also arrogant. You actually believe you're able to defy the laws of physics because for a hot minute with the globe, I felt that way. I felt that I was some sort of a wonderkin because everyone kept calling me that.

And I'm a dot com wizkid. I guess I am. You start to believe the hype. I remember once telling my girlfriend at the time, you know, like, let's not worry about if a trip we want to take or something we want to buy is too expensive because for all intents and purposes, with $100 million, I feel like I have infinite cash. You know, now I look back on that and I laugh because it was monopoly money. It was virtual. It wasn't real. And by the way, it can all go away really, really fast. And that's not fulfilling. You know, what's much more fulfilling is the journey itself. It's the challenge. It's the growth of it all. I mean, the business I'm building right now is not a rocket ship.

It requires a long, hard slog to really transform an industry. And it's a long-distance race. And God damn it, I'm a human. And I want to live and feel like a human lives in fields. And I have a wife, have a child. But to do those things, you need to be human. You need to be in touch. You need to be able to communicate and feel.

And you need to be able to lead. You know, to become a good leader, you need to be, it's like becoming a good parent, right? I'm actually taking everything I've learned now over the last 20 years. This is the reason, by the way, I updated my book. It's been a long time coming. You know, it was one thing documenting a rollercoast ride. Sorry, it was one thing documenting a roller coaster ride. It's another thing saying, what are the lessons I've really learned?

And it took me these 20 years to go from giving glib answers about, you know, what to do, what not to do as an entrepreneur, to giving something a little bit more profound from experience. Well, and the experience of failure. The experience of failure and then the experience of rebirth and growth and what really matters. And the things that really matter to me now trump any business. And I don't define myself by the one company I build. And I no longer feel that it's important at all to create a story about yourself, a mythology about yourself that can just as easily turn against you and hurt you. If you believe that hype and all the compliments on the way up, you'll believe it when it goes negative and goes against you. And I think that you need to use it and understand what it is.

It's a tool. It's a tool that can help you build a brand, build your business, attract customers, but don't believe the hype. And quite frankly, if the product really is all that good, just like with a movie. If a movie is really, really good, word of mouth will bring you your audience. Word of mouth will go out and spread and it will reflect the fact that this is a deserving product, a deserving service, a deserving story. There's no amount of lipstick you can put on a pig to make people believe it's anything more than a pig. And those are the things, those are some of the things you needed to learn. But for me, the thing that mattered the most is the leadership thing.

Because when I was 24 and insecure and running a billion dollar company, I kept imagining that somewhere out there are these amazing 50-year-old leaders running large institutions. And these guys are just wise beyond their years and they know exactly what to do. And I'm not that. How do I become that? And so this is the whole structure thing, right? It turns out that when I published that book the first time round, it was probably one of the best things I could have ever done to help put structure around. the experience I had and to make sense of it and learn from it. And now I'm a very different, I'm a much more mature leader now with my new company than I was back then. I care much more

deeply now about the people I work with. I care much more about what type of daughter I'm going to raise. And I want to instill in her the values that I think really matter in this world and are the same values I espouse for my company. You know, and how will she, How will my daughter become a great leader if I can't instill in her some of my life lessons, right? So they cross over from business to personal life and back. And it took me 20 years and republishing my book and holding my feet to the fire and holding myself accountable and walking through the truth of what happened, what went wrong. And, you know, this book is essentially me resetting the record straight, setting it not just, you know, for the world to know, but for myself. All right. As promised, I'm getting us to today. Let me, to get us to the book, you were an actor for a while. You went to acting school, as you said in the epilogue of the book, that you actually learned a lot from going to acting school. You recommend it to everybody. You went into angel investing, investments in things like Lending Club, Indie Go Go Angel List, involved in the founding of a,

production company that among other things I think was responsible for John Wick and other great movies. But, all right. The book, which as I said was published in 2001, I had the hard copy, has been republished, a very public offering. The reason it's being republished is because there is a TV show. Is it a documentary, half documentary? Tell me what Valley of the Boom. Tell me what Valley of the Boom is. So Valley of the Boom is a scripted series with some documentary component, maybe 20% of it or something is documentary.

And it completely caught me off guard a year ago when I heard that there was someone being cast to play Stefan Paternoe and Todd Chrysleman and Mark Andreessen and all these people from the dot com 1.0 era. and then they pulled me in to do some interviews to talk about the experience with the globe. And they've done that with a lot of different people, you know, Mark Cuban, Ariana Huffington, and various other people from the Netscape Days. And they've woven that into this story. At this point, I've only seen the first two episodes. And it is probably the first real series, certainly scripted. series about that era. And I thought that era was long gone. You know, that was a chapter of my

life, closed it, moved on, and I thought the whole world had moved on. And I couldn't imagine a series about this subject would be interesting. But I guess the showrunner, Matthew Carnahan, is, you know, an amazing showrunner, a creative genius. And he's managed to make this into a genre-busting, incredibly fun, fast-paced energetic retelling of an era. And I was, first of all, I was shocked when I saw the series. I was having an out-of-body experience watching some actor named Dakota Shapiro playing me. I couldn't get my hat around it. I couldn't even understand what was going on.

I felt like I was watching a subtitled Korean movie or something. And then I let it go for a day or two and rewatched it. And I started getting into it. Watching Todd and Steph, watching a young Mark Andreessen, watching them try to figure things out, tinkering with their products. And I started rooting for them. Like I actually felt separate now from this thing. And I'm reliving this era and rooting for Todd and Steph.

Come on, guys, you can do this. And what's really been astonishing to me is, and this show has brought it back into crisp foot. focus is how incredibly far we've come since the birth of the internet. We all take it for granted because it's just been growing and growing and growing and growing and growing. We've been growing with it. But this show, you know, the two episodes I've seen of it, brought me right back to 1994 and how incredibly unobvious the internet was and how people used to laugh at us when we explained what the internet was and virtual community. And they would tell us like,

what can't, you know, what normal people use the telephone. Why would they need to use anything else? And if you want to write a letter, you should do it by hand. You know, who's going to write using electronic mail? You're not going to see any personality in that. You're going to lose all the personality. So it's an amazing thing to see. And I think the timing is perfect because all of us who've grown up with the internet now and maybe the next generation that's all that's has never known anything but the internet i've probably seen that the internet has become perverted in some way it's become deformed it's warped uh social is no longer this utopian vision of connecting with friends and family it's become these fake news echo chambers

it's in some ways it's become a wasteland and not all of it i mean there's a lot of value in using instagram and using twitter and everyone's there's a different tool for for every person but it's no in so many ways it's become deformed and the internet now the whole internet stack needs to be reinvented and it's no surprise that it is getting reinvented um web 3.0 is finally getting whispered uh and and coming to reality with the advent of blockchain and of course everyone you know sees the dollar signs with crypto crypto crypto but that's just that's just the noise right that's just like when people all thought, oh my God, I want to buy dot com stock in the 90s. The real innovation is underneath with the blockchain.

And I'm a fan of Ethereum, but really what they're all trying to do, especially Bitcoin or Ethereum, is create this trustless system that's decentralized, where more of who you are, your identity and your ability to transact is decentralized, So you circumvent governmental bodies. You can circumvent traditional bodies. Maybe your identity and your social engagements and your social graph won't be controlled by Facebook. And there'll be a greater level of transparency and trust

and an ability to verify an entire history of how something came to be, right? Which affects democracy and voting, everything. So we're at the very beginning of probably a sea change. And I think that it's more important than ever to be able to look back and see where did we start? How did we get here? How do we avoid the same pitfalls? Where do we need to pivot to correct these things?

And I think that this whole new generation, what was exciting about hearing you say that your podcast has listened to, you know, largely a younger new generation of entrepreneurs is exactly. I was going to say, you're preaching to the choir. Like that's what I've learned. I'm so excited to know that's the truth. I was suspecting that my book or certainly the time. TV series coming out is going to appeal primarily to the new generation of entrepreneurs, not necessarily, well, maybe everyone who's my age is going to reminisce, right, about the 90s and relive it all. Everybody loves to remit reminisce 20 years later, but I think it's really

going to find its audience with a new young generation. Like the actual people who are the same age as the actors playing Todd and Steph and Mark Andreessen. Like those young actors, they loved shooting this show. They can't stop talking about what an unusual experience is. the show was, but how much they had no idea about the beginning of the internet and that this series has suddenly made them hungry to know more. And when I hear that from the actors, I'm thinking, oh my God, okay, there's something really here with this series. So I'm excited for the future of the internet and that we can course correct however deformed it's become currently and probably bring it back a little bit more to its utopian vision. And I'm just,

excited to be a footnote in internet history and to be able to tell my story along the way. Steph, sorry to do this to you, but let's end with this. Tell me about Slated in two minutes. So Slated is an online film finance marketplace. Basically, the film industry hasn't been innovated on in 100 years. And even though everyone watches movies, everyone watches TV shows, the process of finding good films or TV shows and getting them made is as archaic as anything. It is back in the internet dark ages.

So as a massive film fan myself and my desire to just watch better and better movies and better TV series, I decided to do something about it by creating the first online film finance marketplace. For the tech world out there, it's very much angel list for the film industry. So we've already helped connect thousands of filmmakers with lots of investors and distributors. And there's movies out now in the theater that have been made by members of Slated. In fact, half of all the movies that got nominated for Academy Awards or got into Sundance last year were made by Slated producers, writers. Wow. Wow, wow, wow, wow.

Wow. Hope that covers it. I did not know that. Listen, Steph, Patternode. this might be the longest episode we've ever done, but there's a good reason for that. It might be my favorite and the best that we've ever done. Thank you so much. Oh, my pleasure, Brian. This is terrific, and I'm looking forward to reading your book.