The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Silicon Valley VC and Entrepreneur Shares Insights on NFTs and Crypto

Episode Date: August 12, 2024

Silicon Valley VC and Entrepreneur Shares Insights on NFTs and Crypto Tether.to Wax.io Clearstone.com About the Guest(s): William Quigley is a veteran venture capitalist and serial entrepreneur with over 25 years of experience in the tech and innovation industry. He was the first institutional investor in PayPal and has founded successful ventures like Tether, the world's first fiat-backed stablecoin, and WAX, a leading blockchain platform. With an impressive background in VC and entrepreneurship, William has made significant contributions to the tech and crypto space. Episode Summary: Welcome to The Chris Voss Show, where host Chris Voss interviews William Quigley, a seasoned VC and entrepreneur, about his ventures in Silicon Valley, including Tether and WAX. The discussion delves into venture capital investing, entrepreneurship, emerging markets, AI, cryptocurrency, and blockchain. Discover key insights into the evolution of digital assets and the future landscape of technology. William Quigley, a pioneer in the crypto space, shares his journey from founding Tether to launching WAX and explores the transformative potential of blockchain technology. Gain valuable perspectives on the importance of understanding blockchain, the significance of NFTs, and the challenges and opportunities in AI. Dive into the intersection of tech, entrepreneurship, and innovation with a tech visionary. Key Takeaways: William Quigley emphasizes the revolutionary impact of Tether, the world's first stablecoin, on the cryptocurrency market. The emergence of NFTs represents more than collectibles, offering a unique way to authenticate and transfer digital assets securely. The future of AI holds immense potential but requires deep understanding and strategic investments to unlock transformative applications. Building a successful venture in the tech industry demands insight, innovation, and a relentless pursuit of novel business models. The intersection of blockchain, AI, and emerging technologies presents a vast landscape for entrepreneurial opportunities and technological advancements. Notable Quotes: "Without Tether, crypto barely exists. It is the backbone of the global cryptocurrency market." "NFTs represent a revolutionary concept, allowing for the authentication and transfer of digital assets with unparalleled security." "Insight is the rarest element in the universe and comes from being deeply immersed in a subject, leading to transformative innovations." "In a complex economy, specialization and niche markets drive entrepreneurship, offering unique value propositions to consumers." "The future of technology lies at the intersection of blockchain, AI, and emerging innovations, paving the way for digital transformation."

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast. The hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show. The preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready. Get ready. Strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times, because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. I'm Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. There you go, ladies and gentlemen. There makes it official. Welcome to the show. For 16 years and over 2,000 episodes, we have been bringing you the Chris Voss Show.

And this August, this is August, right? Yeah. Sometime this August. I think it's on the 19th. We turn 16. Can you believe we've been doing this for 16 years? We need to find something better to do with our time, evidently. But as always, we have the most amazing guests on the Chris Voss Show.

Remember, the Chris Voss Show is a family that loves you but doesn't judge you, at least not as harshly as your mother-in-law. Tell your mother-in-law, though, to get on the stick and go to goodreads.com, 4chesschrisvoss, linkedin.com, 4chesschrisvoss. Chris Voss is one of the TikTok and all those crazy places on the internet. Remember, the Chris Voss Show family loves you, but we don't loan you money. Please stop asking. Today, we have an amazing young man on the show.

We're going to be talking to him about his VC firm and some of the work that he's done in Silicon Valley. It's going to be an interesting conversation about venture capital, investing, entrepreneurship in emerging markets. Talking probably we'll throw some AI in there a little bit, cryptocurrency and blockchain. There's a little bit of everything for everyone, as it were. It's a buffet where it's going to be a silicon valley vc buffet of information there you go i don't know why i'm putting my poor guest up to this he's what the hell i didn't sign up for a buffet anyway we have william quigley on this show he's a veteran vc and serial entrepreneur and he has a remarkable entrepreneur journey and is deeply rooted in the tech and innovation industry.

He was the first institutional investor in PayPal and has over 25 years experience as a tech-focused VC. He founded Tether, the world's first fiat-backed stablecoin and the most traded cryptocurrency to date. Additionally, he founded one of the active blockchains globally, Wax, which has over 10 million users and 20 million daily transactions. His experience as a VC is equally impressive. He founded Clearstone Venture Partners, a 700 million early- stage focused VC firm, and was managing director at Idea Lab and Capital Partners.

He was the world's first consumer internet venture capital firm at Idea Lab. He was an early investor in leading web 1.0 companies, PayPal, Net Zero, MP3.com, and GoTo.com, the first company to rank search results based on competitive bidding process. Welcome to the show, William. How are you? Good, thank you. And the only correction I would make there is I was a co-founder of all those things, not the founder. Oh, well, did I give you the card? I think I just skipped over that, didn't I?

I just glossed it, but it's okay. Let the power go to your head. Run with it. There you go. So we have that corrected. So William, give us your dot coms. Where do you want people to find you on the interwebs and check out your companies? I'm not as active as a lot of people, but it would be Twitter, William E. Quigley, or at William E. Quigley.

But I'm usually building stuff more than I'm actually publishing. There you go. That's the better thing to do because, you know, no one gets paid to talk their opinion on Twitter, except for Elon Musk, maybe, I think. Yep. But even then, he's having to sue people to get paid, so there you go. So, William, give us a 30,000 overview of your companies. We're going to plug today a little bit and talk about Wax and Tether. Sure.

I'll try to go real briefly. As you mentioned, I was a venture capitalist for many years. Part of what I was working on during that time was video gaming. Your audience may not know that a lot of the early people in crypto were from that industry, the video game industry, particularly the area that my partner and I focused on, which was the buying and selling of video game virtual items. We operated the two largest marketplaces for that globally and as a result of that experience when we eventually figured out that crypto or initially bitcoin had some value there were reasons i was skeptical i'll be honest but we went in very

deeply and basically followed the playbook we had used during the internet 1.0 period which was looking at how that industry would probably evolve from infrastructure to applications and then to data analytics and basically built companies or invested in companies that were doing all of those types of things. The most noteworthy one would have been Tether. That is a stable coin and a stable coin is a crypto that is backed by something. And in the case of Tether, it's backed by a US dollar, not pegged to a dollar. It's backed by a dollar. And there's a difference we can go into later. Without Tether, crypto wouldn't exist the way it does. You would

probably have a 75% reduction in the amount of daily trading, probably a 75% reduction in the valuation of crypto globally. For a lot of reasons, without Tether, crypto barely exists. We, because of our background in video gaming and trading video gaming items, we were very interested in putting skins for those in your audience who are gamers. They'll know what a skin is. A skin is a video game virtual item that has no in-game utility. It's strictly used for cosmetic value skins as opposed to video game virtual items we thought would benefit from being tokenized in fact before we

tokenized the dollar we wanted to tokenize video game skins but the market the the technology didn't really allow for the scale that that would need. By 2017, through some great technical developments, particularly by Dan Larimer, who invented something called the delegated proof of stake mechanism, we realized we could start to trade skins, which in the blockchain parlance are called NFTs. So we launched WAX. WAX was the first blockchain dedicated for nfts and video game blockchain video game items and it's still by far the most used traded blockchain for that purpose and and now we're in 2024 you know six months post-habiting a little less from the bitcoin blockchain and soon to enter the next

whole market. There you go. What are some top video games that you guys work with? The most traded, we only care about video games where the virtual items are tradable and traded, which is a very small segment of global video games most video game companies don't like their their players to be able to trade which i think is kind of bs i would agree so the um the most popular the dominant game would be valves csgo counter-strike global offensive oh csgo has very valuable skins at different times when i've told people not in that industry what they trade for and this is before people got hung up on nfts and what they went for yeah but you know you could have a dragon lore skin time type of rifle in csgo that would go for 30 000 you know us so a lot for a thousand dollars us wow for a for a skin that you got

for two dollars and fifty cents when you were playing the game and you know you opened up a crate it popped out goes csgo the developers have done an extremely good job of monitoring and managing the proliferation of skins so that they keep stable. They are not the Venezuela of skins. They've managed the production of them such that they all hold their value, which is great. And after that, it drops off markedly. PUBG, for those of you, they're mostly first-person shooter games.

PUBG, Team Fortress 2, these are all first-person shooter games with cool skins. Things like any of the very popular massive multiplayer online games like a Fortnite, the management of those companies really prohibit the trading. And there are ways to do it, but it's very hard and dangerous because you lose your account. So this is one reason why I think blockchain video games have a purpose, because the developers of blockchain video games actively want you to own and trade those skins. And so that is a much i think better use of a blockchain for that because then those skins can survive whether or not the original game publisher is

still around i like that the you know i'm a big modern warfare 3 fan there's all sorts of skins they sell us and stuff and it would be so cool to be able to trade some of that stuff yeah there's you know go into any reddit forum around item trading and you will see you know heated discussions about whether it's good or bad i think if done correctly the gameplay is not hurt and of course skins themselves don't enhance the gameplay. That's where they differ from video game virtual items. They don't provide any particular power or benefit to the player. They're strictly cosmetic features, which is why they should allow those to be traded. Yeah, they really should. I mean, it'll be fun.

It adds more community. I mean, that's the one thing. It does. You always have to remember, adding community is really really helpful to support of a product or service it's everything for games right uh and it's it's it's over a 20 year you know period of time where a lot of game publishers have been against it i think a lot of the older guys in the game industry are more against it than the younger guys you know my partner invented the concept of trading on a centralized exchange, trading skins for fiat with a game called Ultima Online in the late 90s.

Oh, yeah. And then, wow, World of Warcraft Gold and whatnot. And then at some point, there was a fork and publishers hated it. And a lot of game people liked it. And then, you know, it just became a battle. And there's a few game publishers that are okay, but most are not. That'll do it for all that. You know, I wish more of them would adopt that.

What happened to NFTs? It seems maybe NFTs didn't work what's what's the story on that since so you could spend obviously a lot of time on on the nft concept what i'll say is this nfts are a technical capability right the board apes or you know any of the other more popular nfts you saw that's an application think of the nft as the as an iphone and the the the board apes is like an app, right? Okay. So if you get, if you're kind of bored or done with your app, you don't use Angry Birds game anymore, you wouldn't throw away the iPhone, right? Oh, okay. So an NFT, I'll define it this way to your listeners. And this is why they're so extraordinary and will be around for a long, long time. Don't think of an NFT as a video clip, a music clip, a pretty picture.

That's just one use of an NFT. So an NFT is, for those entrepreneurs out there thinking of building stuff, it is a way for me to send something to you electronically, where you know, without any effort, without any cost, and in near real time, that what I sent to you is genuine. And I can even be anonymous and send this thing to you. And you know, instantly, at no cost, with no effort, that it's genuine. There is nothing else in the universe that has that property. Nothing else. If I give you, I don't know, a bar of gold, first, I can't do that electronically.

But if I give you a bar of gold, you would have no idea if that's a bar of gold. And you would have to go to your, you know, your neighborhood assay office, who may be in on the con. And they will tell you in a week, yes, it's gold or not. Obviously, any kind of paper currency, about it how about if I give you a copy of my passport or whatever of course you know North Korea exists all of that stuff is is a lot of it is fraudulent in fact there are many many people in the world millions of people in the world whose sole job is to determine whether an official document is authentic. And if you could put a lot of those types of things on a blockchain, you would never have to do that, which is what makes it really remarkable.

So you could be trading things electronically around the world with no effort, no cost, and always know instantly that what you got is the genuine thing. That's the properties of an NFT, right? Now, one version of that was, I'm going to make a pretty picture, and it's the original pretty picture, and it's not a fake okay and so when the the consumer mass market found out about these things in 2021 yeah they went crazy because people like to collect stuff and of course also because there was this promise they were going to go up in value net net i think it was still good that the NFT phenomenon happened because it introduced people to, oh, blockchains aren't scary. They actually are pretty fun.

But they've kind of those collectible objects really got overinflated. A lot of scammers just trying to tell you that their collectible thing was going to be worth something. I'm glad that came and went. And the trading volume's down 95%, but it still exists. And what you will see, I suspect, in the next 10 years is companies and countries putting passports, driver's licenses, birth certificates, real estate records, employment histories, college diplomas. They'll put those on NFTs so that anyone getting it knows it's the real thing. Okay.

That makes sense. I mean, I imagine there was just a lot of hysterical. I mean, we had so many people on the show that were doing startups for different nft variations and projects and add-ons or or whatever the case may be and so it was kind of interesting all the stuff we had going on there so let's talk a little bit about you how did you grow up how were you raised what got you into the vc business and to be an entrepreneur? I grew up in Oakland, California, and my mother was raising a bunch of kids by herself. And the only way she could figure out to do that rather than give us up for adoption was to start a company. And she really is probably the one that influenced me the most in terms of entrepreneurship. Because this is a woman who, you know, basically an immigrant, not terribly educated, you know, came to America when she was 14.

And by herself. And figured out a way to make a living. And she emphasized to all of the boys how amazing America was that, you know, in most countries you don't, you don't start companies and get people to loan you money and get people to help you very easily. And then America it's, Oh, you want to do something that people might like? Sure and get people to help you very easily and then america it's oh you want

to do something that people might like sure how can we help so that i've learned over i probably invested in and started hundreds of companies and one of the things i've seen is many of the people who start companies, their parents were entrepreneurs. And so I feel like there's this path. If your parents are W-2s, and they did pretty well as W-2s, you know, upper middle class, you're much more likely, I think, to be a W-2. And if your parents were entrepreneurs, they demystified that i think you have a higher chance of saying oh that's a path for me yeah it's and being an entrepreneur is such a great thing i mean i don't think there's anything else like it maybe other than experiencing childbirth you know where you get pair bonded to your children yes it teaches you

so much and it forces you, I think a lot of people, although I've seen some people that, I don't know, I think they got their money from family. But for the most part, it forces most entrepreneurs

to become their best self, to become very self-actualized, very self-reliant, accountable, very self-accountable. And it's just such a great, I just can't think of anything else I'd rather be than an entrepreneur. Although some days. Yeah. And, and, you know, in the U S I

think it's, it's a very powerful phenomenon, entrepreneurship. We promote it in our society. We tend to hold people up higher in status if they have started a company and employed people to work there and did it. Obviously, you always have other people helping, but you're one of the people who led the charge. And I've been all over the world. I've spent time all over the world. I've spent time all over the world. And there's no other place like America for being able to start a business. And then the business maybe fizzles out, doesn't do too well. And really no stigma attached to that. It's okay, try again. That to me is a powerful aspect of the American economic engine. And another topic you could spend a lot of time

on is how post-globalization, the U.S. is going to be a major, major beneficiary, probably the largest beneficiary. And we will need a lot more entrepreneurs to be fulfilling some of the things, the goods, the services that previously we were maybe importing. And I think it's a very, very good time to be thinking about starting something. Also, the biggest change between when I was younger and now is now you can start digital businesses. And the economics of digital businesses is massively better than traditional analog companies, you know, where you have a lot, it's a lot harder to scale a traditional kind of brick and mortar business than it is a digital business.

And so the internet has opened up a lot more opportunity for people to start companies with a much smaller amount of capital at the beginning and still scale it up to be addressing a global market. Yeah, there's a lot that can be done there. What is some of your advice that you would give people that are entrepreneurs that are interested in getting into cryptocurrency and blockchain? Is the space already too full? Is there space for innovation? What would you say? Let me say this first. 1995, when we were starting our first consumer internet venture capital firm, there were,

I think there were 2,400 or so websites globally at the time, something like that. And when I went around to investors, and no one even knew what venture capital was back then, it just wasn't, the general public had never heard of it. But you would go to these people called limited partners who are people who would give you money. And there were very few new firms, right? It was a very closed industry. But the most common thing we heard was,

but there's already 2,000 websites. What could we possibly need another website for? Oh, geez, wow, dude. And, you know, I tried to, tried to i tried because it was the most common question so i tried to come up with good answers and you know one of them was hey how many food places do you need right why do we need a submarine sandwich shop when you know why doesn't pizza hut just just sell subway sandwiches why why doesn't your you know mcdonald's sell indian food or whatever and it's because people like variety people specialize in different types of things people have different skills and what

they do which seems so obvious to me but it was not obvious i would sometimes say why don't we just have one store in the us called clothes and you just go to the clothes store why do we need thousands of different clothes stores that's just because in a complex economy you you serve very niche markets you You become very good at one particular thing. You make really good skis, whatever. So that was the most common thing I would hear. At the end of Web 1.0, which roughly ended, let's say, in the year 2000, once again, the prognosticator said, we're done.

There's no more websites that need to be built, blah, blah, blah. I used to say to people in the 90s, I think there will ultimately be over 1 million websites. Now, what I should have said, which is what I'll say about blockchain, I should have said there will be more websites than there are human beings. And I would say the same about blockchains there will be more blockchains i'm certain of that than there are human beings and there are many many reasons why many many chains should exist and so the what i would say to any entrepreneur is is this and i do say this when i talk to entrepreneurs who are thinking about doing something in blockchain. Please don't attempt to do anything until you have a good understanding of what that is. What is a

blockchain? And that's more than just reading it in a book. I was building blockchains for over three years before I knew what they were, you know, before I really sat down and synthesized what exactly is this thing? You know, it's like a database, but it does more than a database. What is it? So I would say, build a chain, build a, an intelligent layer on that chain or, or, or build an application, what we call a smart contract. Build wallets or maybe marketplaces that interact with that chain. Build a blockchain bridge that connects chains from one to another. And because blockchain is open source, you go into a GitHub repository, a lot of the code is already there.

That's part of what makes a blockchain a public blockchain what it is the code can be inspected and therefore seen and taken by anybody why because we want to find vulnerabilities so you everybody can see it and then offer up patches if there's a vulnerability. So I would say first that go build a chain. Go work with chains. That's another thing. Build an app on different chains and see how those chains work. And what's going to happen is you're going to develop, hopefully, what is the rarest element in the universe, which is insight. Insight is so precious. And all the great companies come from somebody having insight. And my bias is I believe insight

doesn't come magically. I think insight comes from being deeply immersed in something and then realizing maybe there's something missing or, wow, maybe the way people are doing it could be improved by some twist. You really it's hard. And I think this happened in 2021 with all of the NFT nonsense. And it happened in 2017 with the ICO boom, which is people rushed in half-cocked, not really understanding what they were doing, but having no problem raising money. And when you can raise money quickly, a lot of people will cut corners and say,

I'll figure it out as I go along, which is not usually a good strategy. I saw a lot of that. Yeah. Yeah. I saw a lot of that. Let's see. What else do we have up here on deck?

Now, you talked some about the Web 4 infrastructure and the need for massive investment in Web 4. I thought we were still trying to get to Web 2 or 3. What web are we on yeah i i truly hate those labels i have to say just for your audience web web 1 and web 2 made sense to me web 1 was just first round of the internet web 2 was integrating the social graph graph and therefore allowing businesses to scale really fast. Web3 is a dumb, dumb label because blockchain has nothing to do with the internet. It uses the internet, but it is much smaller than the internet. It's less important than the internet. There is no internet to be built on a blockchain. A blockchain is the

worst possible way to do almost everything. But there are caveats there. And the caveats are amazing. There's a few things for which blockchains have no equal. But Web3 was a term invented by venture capitalists who were prohibited from investing in crypto. So they decided to call it Web3 so they could go to their limited partners and say, hey, we did Web1, we did Web2, you really don't want us to do Web3? And a limited partner said, oh, no, please do Web3. So that's how we got Web3. But we got it.

So it is what it is. My comment about that is Web3 was basically a lot of people putting NFTs and video games on a blockchain. Not really at scale. But in order to get, remember there was this stuff called Metaverse? Facebook talked about it. Blockchain people talked about it blockchain people talked about it oh yeah there's a there's a there's a role for blockchain in the metaverse mainly in allowing people to pay things electronically but it wasn't going to be run on a blockchain however no matter what you say web4 to me was the hardware revolution that would have to take place

before ready player one style worlds could actually exist and there was this i thought very naive view in 2021 that a ready player one was going to happen in 12 months or two years or something. No, the technological development that we need for anything close to that is decades away. And it's going to require trillions of investment in virtually all aspects of computer hardware infrastructure. And it really is, to me, computer hardware infrastructure. And it really is to me a hardware focus, something that venture capitalists for 15 years, heavily neglected, because all the money was in, you know, funding some two guys to build an app and sell it for a billion dollars. And that is a great business. If you don't have to invest in hardware, that's amazing. But we have come to the evolutionary end

of milking as much as we can out of the existing hardware. And this is why you see companies like NVIDIA going from a few hundred billion in market cap to being the most valuable company on earth. Because NVIDIA is a hardware company. It makes semiconductor chips. And that is monstrously expensive and difficult. And VCs are going to have to start investing in that.

And as are big companies. And unlike software, hardware is ponderous. It's very slow. You don't spin up a semiconductor fabrication facility in a year. Between planning and building and designing and launching, it could take seven years and 15, $20 billion. What I would say is if you want Ready Player One, and that'll incorporate blockchain as well as internet, 2050, I would say, maybe we'll start to see cool stuff. I hope I'm around. 250? Yeah. I mean, my partner and I, and I've worked with him for 20 plus years, he was much more optimistic about, for instance, all the metaverse stuff, right? He thought maybe by late 2020s, we would have, you know, you put on the goggles and you really feel immersed.

Yeah. I don't think that. I mean, how much do we talk about Apple's product at this point? The lens one that they stopped production on or something like that? Right. To me, that was like a no-brainer that that was going to happen because we simply don't have the tech. And there's another more fundamental reason,

and that is particularly half of our population, women, cannot stand wearing headgear in order to use computers. I've watched this all my life with gaming. Is it because of their hair? They don't want their hair messed up? I think so. And makeup, too. I mean, you get makeup if you've got that thing sitting on your face. Yeah, and I i mean i can't

stand it because it gets hot yeah you know i burn and and my god and i don't want to go on a rant about this too long but when you see i love the way even apple kind of like was trying to sort of gaslight what they had they weren't showing fricking 10 pound battery pack that you have to have. Right. The garden hose, you know, conduit of cabling that's going from the batteries to the back. I mean,

come on, that's not a fun thing. I think it, Microsoft got it much more correct. This is going to be a workplace kind of industrial application sure you're a worker you're doing something you know you got to put on the headgear whatever but not for fun no gamer wants to go and put on these goggles and you know so i don't see it i don't see it until they are wearable glasses or contact lenses before people really do it.

Now, once it happens, it's going to be staggering. The idea of everywhere you go, there is a persistent digital overlay that's providing you information that's important and contextually relevant to you at that moment, wherever you are, is such a powerful thing. And I suspect it's so powerful, we're going to get there at some point. But if you said to me, even 2050 or 2100, I'd be more confident it's 2100 than even 20, 2050, because the, the, it's a challenge, but once it's there, we're going to love it. I suspect people will never want to leave the house without it. You know, my friend, Robert Scoble, you may know him. He, he's out running around with it, interviewing people. And then the price point's a big problem. $3,500. I think there you go. It's another problem. You know, a lot of families can't really afford that without selling a kid

you know but you know you run a if you're if you're on the iphone environment i forget what they call it the the iphone network whatever you know their body of of service charges the your the ecosystem there's the word i'm looking for if you're in the iphone ecosystem you've already sold probably at least one kid and probably your own kidney at this point it's when i saw that you know i'm a big i i had the google glass early on and i really loved it i miss it actually i really do miss it it was 720p on the camera but i have all these videos of my dogs that i don't have anymore where i was shooting first person and i could have both my hands because i had two huskies and i could pet both them and play with them and throw throw the stick and stuff and you could see

the video and and the video still looks really great even why do you think google glass was such a flop because they? Because they made it a, they tried to give it to influencers and make it influencer based, but they made it elite. Elitism is what killed it. You know, once they said that only special people can get a hold of it, people really

resented that. If they would have made it so that, hey, you know, we have a limited run of this, they should have just fucking run with it. I think it would have caught on. But the elitism of it, people didn't be hearing that you can't get this because you're not special, you're not an influencer. Remember the term glass hole? The glass hole, yeah.

I think Scoble actually, coming back to Robert, actually helped create that with the infamous shower scene. I think I, the only other thing I would say on, on what you said was also there was this hype that it was going to be ready player one ish. And I thought they really messed up there. You know,

they should have much been much more modest and how they described it. Yeah. I think it would have caught on. The only other pushback was people yelling at you because they thought you were recording them all the time. Oh, right. And people would get up in your face with it. But now imagine, go to Soho in New York. Everybody's got their influencer camera. It probably nowadays wouldn't

be as big a deal we were i think mark zuckerberg had to say that line that pissed everybody off but they woke them all up when he said their privacy's dead it's been dead for a long time and i'm the one who killed it if you remember and he said that and everyone got pissed off but then everyone started going oh yeah i mean i would have people yell at me with google glass and i'd be like do you see that there's cameras here? And these cameras are actually working. My video, the battery dies in 15 minutes. But I got to tell you, I'm enjoying the meta glasses.

I have the meta Ray-Bans. OK. I've been loving the crap out of them. I mean, they're not going to do anything crazy. But they're actually making some improvements to to it but i really love it because it has that same google glass effect right i would love to see google glass i like i still really think that could have been huge if they would have just mass produced it and said fuck it let's let's just put the hammer down like anybody else does for a product. I think Google has no cultural strength

in consumer electronics. Yeah. They're not a consumer electronics company. They probably, if they were going to do something, they would need to have acquired a company and let that company be their consumer electronic manufacturing company. Yeah.

Because you think about it, I was able to see messages, notifications on my screen. So I could read messages. I could read my email on the screen. We don't have anything like that nowadays. Well, maybe the new Google Glass thing or the Apple iPhone, whatever the hell deal that is. But for $3,500, no. Yeah. It's not something you're going to go outside with.

Definitely not that. Unless you want women to resent you. When that happens, as I said, I think it's decades away, but when it happens, I think it will be just extraordinary to have all of these filters,

you know, whatever. If you're looking for a place to eat, you'll have that filter on. If you're looking, if you go to a conference and you want to know who here knows me or, you know, is in my social graph one step removed, let me put that filter on. Digit digitally enhancing life will be super valuable when it can be done in a way that's convenient for people which is as you mentioned one issue battery life huge issue not an easy problem to solve talk to elon musk or anyone else who's working on battery technology it's very hard yeah so those things are tough you know when you stick in the digital realm much easier there you go what is your outlook on ai are you doing any vc investing in ai or what's your no i uh it's a i have to say it is an area for me that is really undeveloped and I know all the hype is there I've I know the value of

of diving deep into a new when a new platform a new technology platform emerges that's when there's amazing entrepreneurial opportunities and I did that with web 1020 with blockchain, but I have not done it with AI. And part of it might be because, you know, all investors have scar tissue. I have, I'm, I'm guilty of that or have that as well. I, I have in my mind from the 80s to the 90s to the early 2000s, late 2000s, all of the effort to do something transformative with what we call AI, which itself is such a squishy, hard to define thing. Much of what we do today would probably have constituted AI 10 years ago. But my lens where I look through when I'm trying to decide if I'm going to jump in is based on novel business models or some other capability I think I can do to offer a new product or service.

And I think there's some obvious ones which are being addressed pretty well. And beyond that, I don't have a deep opinion. As a result, it's probably the biggest area of investment globally for which I am not deeply committed. And, you know, frankly, blockchain's got me occupied enough anyway. And at some point, there will be some kind of crossover. And when I see that, maybe that'll be the way I go in. But I've seen so many attempts at things that were not well thought out. And so they just fizzle.

One of my critiques right now of the business models within AI is most of them don't have what I would call a moat, some competitive differentiation or barrier. So when you are building something that anybody else can build at the same price as you launch it at the same time, market it to the same people, then that's a very tough business to, to succeed. And, and then of course you add to the supply issues of the hardware you need to actually do it. And like we talked about, there's a reason NVIDIA is worth $3 trillion. It's probably right now an area for very big companies. And they're investing massively in the infrastructure side. And I'm hopeful at some point we'll get something great. The closest I can liken it to from my vantage point, which they're not apples to oranges, but they're closest. When a GPS became, I think it was 93, 94, the U.S. military opened it up to the public, right?

And we got some good gadgets, companies like Garmin. Like there was some mapping companies and whatnot. But then GPS got embedded in phones. And for years, we VCs tried to figure out what would be the killer application of GPS on a phone. And it's one of the, when I teach seminars to entrepreneurs about, you know, being on the one yard line, but not being able to see you're on the one yard line and trying to figure out how do I actually make that score, but you can't, I can't tell you how many, many hours spent in, in strategy sessions with startups where we were trying to figure out what do we do with this?

And then it was like, boom, boom, boom. You had a series of companies that figured it out, which of course seems obvious. It always seems obvious after the fact. And they're like, oh, okay, this is what we use it for. But there was a lot of lost money before that. There was a lot of just wasted time. I feel a little bit like that with AI.

I think, again, there are things you can do with it. Search is great, but it's hard to monetize search in its AI format. You know, what Google has, which is it produces a series of clickable links, all of which SEO optimization have ensured are above the fold, and most of which aren't really relevant to your search, but they're hoping you'll click anyway. That is a shitty way to organize information. AI does a much better, right? It tailors the response to what you want, but you're not monetizing links. So where is the SEO equivalent, which is where Google makes all its money for AI.

It's it's it's really seems to me a brutal trade-off. The more you allow a company sponsors to, to influence the results that you've asked for, the poorer the result it is to you, the user. And so it, so there needs to be someone who figures out the perfect optimization where you perfectly match the search result you want with a, a revenue generating opportunity for a company who can help get you what you want. There you go. It's going to be an,

it's going to be an amazing thing to see and how it all works out and plays out with AI. It's such a, I don't know, it really changes the landscape of everything. I agree. It is, and I suspect it will be a few more years, and then out of the blue, it's going to appear. Someone's going to come forth to create the next Google or whatever. It'll be this massively valuable company because they figured out the trick. But I, you know, in the meantime,

the bigger companies, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Facebook, these businesses are investing in infrastructure, giving companies the ability to use the AI to make better customer service, you know, to develop better email marketing techniques and whatnot. So it's useful, but it's sort of like, it's almost like more at the infrastructure level, not a, you know, shining computer or example of consumer facing tech.

Now, people will say, what about ChatGPT? But, you know, that's a... I don't know for how long that business has a solid revenue model. It's a subscription-based service. I don't think that's the final version of what becomes super valuable. There you go.

It'll be interesting to see how it works out. So as we go out, pitch out to everyone what you want them to do, look you up on the interwebs, follow you, check out your companies, and all the dot coms. Yeah. As I mentioned, for me, it's William E. Quigley at William E. Quigley for Twitter. And other than that, I'm really not publishing anything. I do do a lot of podcasts and you know

interviews where i speak about certain things but i'd like the longer form format than you know a cnbc interview because you can actually explain why you think a certain way so podcasts like yours are super valuable definitely and talking about so many different things that we can cover so thank you very much william for coming on the show. We really appreciate it. You're welcome. There you go. And thanks to our audience for tuning in.

Go to Goodreads.com, 4chesschristmas, LinkedIn.com, 4chesschristmas, chrisfast1, the TikTokity, and all those crazy places in the Internet. Be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you next time. And that should have us out, William.