The Pomp Podcast - #1103 Geoff Woo On Why Mr. Beast & Jake Paul Will Be Billionaires

Starting point is 00:00:00 What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Jeff Wu is an entrepreneur and investor. He's also partners with Jake Paul and Anti-Fund. In this conversation, we talk about investment strategies, the future of venture capital, building versus investing, and then a number of companies that he's built, including HVMN, better archive.com and more i really enjoyed this conversation with jeff and i hope you guys enjoy it as well once you get in listening to it let us know on twitter what'd you like what did you not like what'd you agree with what did you disagree with and what can we do better next time all right

Starting point is 00:00:38 let's get in this episode with jeff i hope you guys enjoy this one anthony pompliano runs pomp investments all views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of pomp investments you should not treat any opinion expressed by pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys, bang, bang. I've got Jeff here with me. You're a fascinating dude. You're an entrepreneur, an investor, a culture critic. You have kind of this whole span of things. But I think what a lot of people in the tech world are fascinated by is you run a fund

Starting point is 00:01:19 called the Anti-Fund with Jake Paul. And when people saw the announcement that you and Jake Paul were going to do a fund, they were like, all right, we know Jeff. He's in tech. He's built companies like he's legit. Jake is a YouTuber. What is going on here? Why partner with Jake on this? And what is the thought process behind bringing together what are seemingly completely two different worlds? What appears to have a lot of success so far in terms of getting access to deals and making some great investments yeah well pump thanks for having on the program I mean I think you were probably one of my first Miami friends from the tech community all coming here almost a couple years ago well I think Jake's

Starting point is 00:02:01 me president of the United States for 2050 and I actually generally believe that he is one is Ohio Cleveland Midwestern boy swing state but I also think he personifies the american dream i mean he comes from his dad was like a roofer his mom was a nurse and i think his career in terms of dreaming big making mistakes making triumphs along the way i think that's a very i think that's a very inspiring story um but all seriousness in terms of like us linking together but are you serious about you think he really can become president yeah yeah um i i don't doubt that somebody from like the internet culture will absolutely become president in the future is it just his background and kind of his story that you think makes him

Starting point is 00:02:50 potentially become president or is there something else in there i think i'm more ambitious for him than himself i think he's actually quite humble about it um but i think in terms of like what i've looked at in terms of political dynasties a lot of it is name recognition if you think about the clinton family the bush family in in some ways they are the aristocracy of america these generations of very well-known families that have bush bush bush clinton clinton repeated in the media for decades and if you look at this era of people who have their name out in the public i can't name many other people aside from the paul brothers maybe the kardashians um some of the youtubers are up and coming that have that compounding power we're like again like jake

Starting point is 00:03:40 is like 25 right his brother's like 27 you do another 20 30 years of compounding and assuming that they keep doing great stuff don't make you know don't fuck up too badly etc how much power in terms of compounding interest can you can you see the guys run with yeah and what's fascinating is they definitely started out as like vine then youtube then they started to like kind of be just famous for being famous almost yeah and now if you look you're like wait a minute like jake paul's professional boxer yeah point blank period anyone who says anything else like you get in the ring with them because there's not a lot of people who are willing to do that and then you look at logan like he's a wwe star right and so you're like wait a minute how did

Starting point is 00:04:22 this happen in what actually isn't really that long of a period of time like what is it 10 years or less maybe where they've made these transitions into kind of the more mainstream audiences and so your bet is just like hey things in motion stay in motion they're going to continue to do this at a very high level for, you know, two decades, three decades. And I think it's like the brand mode is actually very, very competitive, right? Like if you're looking at just like fashion brands or consumer brands, how much capital, how much time is it going to take to compete with Apple, Coca-Cola, Louis Vuitton?

Starting point is 00:04:49 I mean, literally billions of dollars and decades, centuries of time. Fortunately or not, fortunately, human lifespan is around 100 years. So it's like, okay, if you can start compounding your name and brand and image when you're in your teens 20s and also have i think to your point which i think very astute able to transition mediums because i think most celebrities can actually can't hop platforms like you're a singer you're kind of in that lane you're just like a business person you're in that lane i think the versatility to cross uh different platforms and i think donald trump personifies this right he was real estate guy reality tv show guy and then became president and it's like okay

Starting point is 00:05:30 It's actually quite genius, quite versatile, and quite rare to be able to be credible across so many different platforms. I think there is a reaction against, okay, this person is too ambitious. He's out of his lane. Let's slap them down. And I think there is that antibody effect when someone is too ambitious. I think there is a little bit of this human instinct of pulling people down into their lane. So having this resiliency and maybe, can I say, uncancellability to get hit, be resilient, and then keep compounding. I think it's a very rare attribute from a personality side.

Starting point is 00:06:06 You got to be kind of crazy in terms of just like mental resilience. And then some sort of versatility, genius, smoothness to be able to spot the trends, chameleon your personality, your image towards that new phenomenon and ride that macro like tailwind. When you all announced the fund, what was the reaction? I saw the public reaction and some of it was like, ha ha, this is hilarious. Jason Kalkanis, I think you guys went back and forth with him a little bit, right? And like, I love Jason because he's just as much investor as he is entertainer. Like he really understands the internet. What was it in private? Did you guys get messages of encouragement and support? Were people like, what are you guys doing? What did you personally get in terms of where people like, hey, you're ruining your career or like, what was kind of the feedback? Yeah, I think generally just super positive. I'm very thankful for Chris Dixon, Mark Andreessen from A16Z being our first LPs. I had done business with them previously, and it was great to see them believe in our vision, believe in the execution, believe in what the potential could be. But I think Jake and I have a little bit of a troll personality. i think that's where there's actually a lot of overlapping in terms of ambition and

Starting point is 00:07:22 kind of entertainment to ourselves and to the world um so i think when we saw jason calacanis like kind of troll us being like oh yeah basically hey jeff you're ruining your career like this like he's like terrible i think we were just laughing i think it was funny because i feel like jason is doing the same exact playbook as we are like he's out there saying some troll stuff entertaining and on the side running a bunch of syndicate money and it's like hey like in some sense like cool like i mean i guess it's like it's entertaining to that level but i think what i think was like the core reason of why we started the fund was that if you look at businesses and what an entrepreneur and what they want from their investors there's only two things that they really care about one

Starting point is 00:08:07 do you have capital because you need money to pay for stuff and keep the lights on and then two can you drive attention and i think with anti-fund with the rise of additional celebrity driven funds kim kardashian just announced the new pe fund i think that ladder where if capital is more and more of a commodity being able to drive attention in an increasingly noisy environment is increasingly powerful so i don't think it's necessarily maybe it was novel or a bit of a stunt a couple years ago. But I think when you see the top tier VC funds, building podcasts, building newsletters, you know, getting celebrity partners on board, I don't think that's changed. I think it's only going to accelerate towards people that can drive capital, people that can drive attention. And those

Starting point is 00:08:57 are the core commodities or levers that any business needs to thrive. Yeah. When you start looking at the creator space, I'm gonna use creator very loosely here, because I always ask People are like, OK, what's a creator? Is Donald Trump a creator? Is a journalist at The New York Times a creator? Like everyone is ultimately competing for attention. Rich over at Lightshed, he's the person who I think convinced me of this first where he's like TikTok, Netflix, YouTube, Substack, The New York Times and like your podcast are all competitors. I was like, what are you talking about? And he was like, it is an attention game. And ultimately, they are fighting. You are going to spend two hours on your phone today, or for many of us, six hours, right?

Starting point is 00:09:45 Eight hours. I recently saw a video where somebody was asking some of the TikTok stars how many hours. And it was like 10 to 12 hours on their phone. OK, what are they spending time on? It is a it's a war of attention. And so when you see these other creators that are all competing for that, who's doing it well? Like, who do you guys look at and you're like, that person gets it, that person has really nailed kind of this model?

Starting point is 00:10:08 I think we're at that realization, if not even more extreme on that realization, where a New York Times or a Wall Street Journal is like a basically institutional blog. Yes. And some of the best writers from those very storied publications become stars themselves, right? And I think there's a tension with the employees of these media corporations becoming superstars and then starting their own corporations, right? Like folks like Kara Schwisser, she was a quote-unquote classic journalist, but I would argue that she's more of a star now. She has her own podcast, runs her own conference.

Starting point is 00:10:45 If she wanted to raise a VC fund, I'm sure she could raise a VC fund. So to your point, I think there's just different labels and different flags that you can kind of wraparound, who are like, hey, I'm going to have more of a journalistic, I want to be, you know, the fifth wall, the fourth wall version of a content creator, or I'm going to be the star myself and have my personal conflicts of interest and personality out there. And I think with more politicization of these institutional publications, I think the public perception is that everyone is just biased anyways.

Starting point is 00:11:23 Of course, you're human. How does anybody say I'm not biased? Like you're full of shit. You are definitely biased. You may write in a way that removes bias or mitigates it or tries to hide it or whatever. But like at the end of the day, if we ask anybody, whether it's politics, it's finance, it's just kind of general coverage. Do you agree that this person is right or wrong? Or do you – what's your stance on this topic?

Starting point is 00:11:46 They have opinions. Like they are biased. And I think it's healthy if we all just accept it. Yes. Like, let's not have this fake hypocrisy of like, hey, I'm actually just like the truth dictator and everyone else has got to, like, listen. But to answer your direct question, I think in terms of groups or teams that are working really well on just a broad content creator side, I would say that MrBeast, Knight Media, executing super well. Milk Boys, Full Send, exiting super well. And I think like even like looking up to you.

Starting point is 00:12:16 Like, I think what you're doing from the tech investment content side, I mean, like, there's a method to the madness in terms of just like pumping out content and shorts. I mean, I think it's actually interesting in terms of innovator's dilemma, right? Like, the old school institutions have to monetize through ads and subscription revenue. But I think what we're seeing with especially these celebrity brands is that oftentimes owning brands, owning merch, owning equity formation is actually a more durable business model. And founders like yourself and Beast and what we're doing with Antifun, we can actually do company formation where the old school guys have to be like, hey, we can't launch companies out of our following. So this is a fascinating topic that requires understanding of history. But if you go back, and I'm going to get some of the exact details wrong, but generally, Sequoia's first fund was in like the 1950s, if I remember correctly. And in it, there was about nine investments, give or take.

Starting point is 00:13:15 I think three of them were incubated companies. So they had an idea. They partnered with some founders. They put some capital in, and they owned an outsized portion of the business. And then the remaining part of the fund was all outside investment, just traditional venture capital. Of that, two of the three companies they incubated delivered majority of the returns for that fund. Now, part of it was the companies worked. Another part of it was they had outsized ownership of the business.

Starting point is 00:13:44 But that is really the like dawn of venture capital was actually incubating plus putting capital out into minority positions and other companies. And the reason why that's interesting is because over a 50, 60, almost 70-year time frame, we have seen much less incubation and people just were like, oh, it's so much easier to just find people and just give them money and get smaller and smaller ownership to now there's people who make investments that could be millions of dollars and they get like half a percent of a business, right? But what we are starting to see and what you're getting at here is like the new venture capitalists are not people just with funds looking to invest in other people's things. The new venture capitalists are showing up and like we're returning back to the 1950s at Sequoia and like we can build the companies better than other folks because there's distribution, there's compounding knowledge, which is actually a very underrated thing. And then there's either access to capital where they're able to raise funds and do all this or just like the businesses are so profitable that they have the cash flow to actually go and build these. And so like if you look at Beast as an example, like Jimmy has launched how many businesses in the last two years? I can think of just off the top of my head. He has all the different channels. He has the translation service for other YouTubers. He has the Beast Burger. He has the chocolate bars. Right. And there's probably others that I'm not even thinking of. And you're like, that dude's not a creator. Like that guy literally owns a private equity fund or like an incubator. And he is outperforming everyone else. Like I bet you his returns are better than the top venture capitalists in the world. Yeah. I mean, he literally just raised $100 million fund with the Churning Group. So they are going down that path. And I mean, I think even if you look at just traditional enterprise software companies, Snowflake was essentially incubated out of Sutter Hill Ventures, right?

Starting point is 00:15:30 And I think it's like to the point that you see these like emergent, random, super big software companies, like a lot of these have like very calculated, strategic capital and go to market. And I think, again, going back to what I think are the core commodities, one, access to capital, which goes back to relationships and trust, and then proven distribution advantage, which again takes it takes a lot of time and energy to get your brand and be trusted as someone that can offer a great product or service and then I think just within my entrepreneurial career you're seeing that those two things compound and are just quite actually defensive moats and you just see that the people that do it really really well have really great access to capital and really great access of distribution um so again if you just boil down if you didn't

Starting point is 00:16:26 have anything if you could be the best coder the best marketer um oftentimes if you can guarantee capital and distribution you can hire those people so i think like the conversation of what is the best strategy as a founder individually to do company formation and then how do you partner with operators i think it's actually a good time to just pull back and think hey from first principles what are the most important things to double down on so people will hear us talking about this like who the fuck are these guys right uh you built a business hvmn uh which uh has built a ton of different products but i think the story of how you've built some of these products really shows kind of the the blocking and tackling the execution of not only being able to build products

Starting point is 00:17:10 but then go sell those products so talk to us a little bit as to that first business like how did you come up with the idea of going after this and why did you think it was such a big enough opportunity spend your time and energy yeah um even before hvmn our ketone iq our ketone drink company i actually studied computer science at stanford had a little mobile app company and at the time y combinator was like fairly new we were helping paul graham and jessica livingston throw like startup school and events at stanford campus so i got to know uh the yc people pretty early um so me and a couple buddies decided to start like a mobile app company long story short it's called glass map it was very very early in the social location mobile space we bought the most

Starting point is 00:17:54 efficient battery tracking algorithm for mobile so this is before location services this is like early early ios where tracking your location on on on ios would drain your battery in three four hours so we had a instead of a long story short we had a really smart algorithm and kind of hijacking the voice over IP hook to control your data. So it's server-driven in terms of location tracking versus device or local-driven. Long story short, met Mark Zuckerberg

Starting point is 00:18:25 because they were looking at acquiring the space. And this was like three months after we launched, and I think we had very big entrepreneurial dreams. We turned down an acquisition offer there at a pre-IPO Facebook campus. was kind of i regret it do you regret it yeah we would have made way more money than eventually selling the group on which is also a great outcome for being like 23 24 at the time um but i actually don't regret it in the sense that like it's very easy to just to be arrogant

Starting point is 00:18:54 when you're getting very early success and i think that like six nine twelve months of like getting an acquisition interest and then just grinding and be like hey like we were growing linearly but not exponentially and in startup land we're not growing exponentially or nothing yep right that's just a polarized business model and outcomes and then we pivoted to b2b and just really grinding like kind of more smb sales eventually our technology got a couple patents from it so i own a couple software algorithm patents that we sold the group on and then we were part of the merchant os team so we're very very early in the wallet uh point of sales you know we're talking with the square team as well to make a bidding dynamic for the acquisition

Starting point is 00:19:33 um but just getting some real brass tacks of like hey it's actually friggin hard to make money and make something of value was really useful for me as like a 21 22 23 year old yeah i think if i just punched out made millions of dollars at 23 after like launching something that like didn't really actually have a lot of users or actually add a lot of utility um i think added resiliency and understanding that's probably worth more than like the initial upfront like quick flip that would have gotten yeah well it's uh it's fascinating too because it's right out of school so like there's like the theoretical kind of academic world yeah which uh obviously if you study computer science like you're going to get uh uh education you're going to get knowledge you're going to get

Starting point is 00:20:12 some like experience in the classroom but to then go out and if you almost just like do it like i've had this where you have quick success doing something and you're like you're just like hella i'm a fucking genius yeah yeah it's better to then get punched in the face and be like no hold on a second like there is this grind to it because it then uh serves you better later on yeah no 100 um so that so having that again relatively early success i would say that it gave me time to explore and i just really got into biohacking and human performance and i think it was just like tinkering with nootropics ketogenic diet fasting so if you remember in like 2015 um there's like a bunch of articles and media around silicon valley biohackers

Starting point is 00:20:58 and smart tricks silicon valley people and fasting and all this stuff and maybe i can claim a little bit of credit there like we eventually ran the largest online biohacker community based on the silicon valley so we had like 80 000 people like doing fasting and all these experiments with us um and that was like kind of my first iteration through a lot of podcasting content we had like Netflix, Showtime, and all these different like shows come and watch me eat like raw meat and like fasting. What's the craziest thing you did? Probably the, I did a seven day water fast,

Starting point is 00:21:33 so I didn't eat any food for seven days. Okay, what happens when you do that? Like what does your body go through? Well, your body goes into ketosis, which it runs out of stored carbohydrate, stored sugar. It starts eating, or you start converting your body fat into energy. So our bodies are actually quite resilient.

Starting point is 00:21:52 When I first embarked on this, and this is after studying the literature and talking to doctors and PhDs, I thought that it was actually just impossible not to eat for two days or one day. It's like, hey, I remember my mom being like, don't skip meals, it's bad for you. Eat your breakfast.

Starting point is 00:22:09 I think the biggest learning I got from it was actually understanding stimulus uh and and how your body interprets things and i think i realized that i finally understood what true hunger is versus the board i am like literally neurochemically bored i want a dopamine hit by like drinking something of and having some like flavor in my mouth or i'm like literally bored sitting so i need to like move around and go consume something um and that and brought down just like a self-exploration around reading a lot of eastern philosophy western philosophy meditation and I think where it applied a little bit more to business is that I

Starting point is 00:22:47 realized that most of our stress is intellectual stress and we actually our bodies are adapted towards responding to physical danger so essentially if you are have like a like a legal problem or a business problem your body naturally reacts as if you're going into a fight-or-flight fight mm-hmm right your Adrenaline dumps, you're literally trying to fight someone, your heart rate goes up. And going through fasting, understanding what true hunger was versus like false bored hunger, I think was very informative for me to, from a mental resilience perspective, realize that basically every single business or modern civilization problem

Starting point is 00:23:29 is not a physical someone trying to kill you problem. It's someone is like suing you or like there's a business negotiation or like you have a conflict with your boss. but it's like a very intellectual and decreasing your physical response like just mentally be like hey no one's trying to kill me like calm the f down and just process it like very cold logically ruthlessly from a rational perspective has been very very helpful as like a hack to be able to deal with a lot of requests and stressful situations um because i think it is actually very scary when like you have your first legal dispute or contract dispute or business dispute

Starting point is 00:24:10 or like you negotiate a salary or a new job and oftentimes you're like in this fight mode and oftentimes being trying to fight someone or run away from someone in that conversation is actually very very bad for outcome so i think through all this physical biohacking experimentation I think it just really made me attuned towards the natural evolutionary pathway of how to respond to stimuli versus, like, what is the more rational, logical way, given that we're in a very, very different game. Like, most of the problems that all of us deal with are modern civilizational games versus, like, physical, I'm going into a fight scenario. Yeah. And so as you're going through this process, like, there's almost like a self-exploration, right? there's like a oh i learned something that's cool maybe i tell my friends you start a company right

Starting point is 00:25:02 like like why start a company and how did you think about like the commercial uh kind of value or opportunity versus just being like hey i'm a badass now because i understand how you know the human body works better than the people i deal with on a daily basis maybe i can use that to like my own advantage yeah i think it's actually just actually quite uh tactical so at the time in circa 2014 nootropics which is like like a technical term for brain enhancing compound supplements the reddit community was growing quickly and the natural Google Trends was growing quickly so I felt like at the time there was this untapped growing community behind this expiration or this

Starting point is 00:25:48 revisiting of can I enhance my cognitive ability through diet behavior exercise etc um and then it was very uh like lean startup mode i coded the a little landing page on ruby on rails um and was taking pre-orders so it's basically like a day of like buying domain neutralbox.com at the time getting a pre-sales landing page hooking into stripe and collecting credit cards and then posting on hacker news like that was like the experiment at the time i remember we got 34 pre-orders for like 30 bucks of product at the time so i pre-sold a thousand bucks of revenue and i was kind of crazy enough to be like yo i i should just fulfill them and we just didn't really stop and then we i think it was like three four months later or

Starting point is 00:26:38 like six months later we were doing like 80k a month of sales just like rinse repeat like like, I guess we got to just freaking do this now. Yeah. So that's like a million run rate business. And I was like, Okay, maybe we should kind of scale this up properly, go from like hobbyist, homebrew version of nootropic supplements. So like, hey, let's actually develop, you know, higher PhDs build out a proper supply chain and all of that. And I think that's been amazing platform to go from nootropics into fasting into eventually acquiring IP and know how from a DARPA research program. Describe this process. Cause, uh, for, for those that don't know, uh, there's this ketone IQ, uh, that recently has come out. It's a daily ketone supplement. Uh,

Starting point is 00:27:21 I took about, I don't know, was it 15 milliliters? Uh, is that right? Uh, before we started, I think I'm high right now. Um, you're supposed to take what, 30 or so a day. So maybe halfway through I'll, I'll come down and do it again. Um, but, uh, when I saw this come out, I was like, oh this isn't like uh in my head i was like this isn't fuckery right like this isn't like hey we just like read some books and decided to come up with something like there's like real science to this yeah so describe a little bit about this process of like going to darpa getting the actual ip and then being able to commercialize it with great success so far yeah um so as i was going down that rabbit hole of biohacking human performance um essentially like self-taught

Starting point is 00:28:02 like pretty advanced levels of metabolic biochemistry and around 2016 2017 there was a number of published literature showing that exogenous consumable ketones were able to enhance cycling performance and enhance physical endurance and this is all in the backdrop of me really getting into fasting me getting the ketogenic diets me experiment carnivore diet so I remember I see like liver King running around all the time like I was doing two-month blocks of carnivore back in 2016, 2017, so it's cool to see

Starting point is 00:28:35 that re-emergence of some of these interesting axiomatic principles of nutrition. Were you eating bull testicles? I didn't go for bull testicles, but I was eating a lot of liver, actually. I actually like offal. It's actually very standard in

Starting point is 00:28:51 Cantonese, Chinese cuisine. I'm just eating this stuff. I was growing up as a kid, so it's like, oh, okay. I will compete with Liver King on eating liver, man. Let's go. I'm not afraid of that. um i like eating weird stuff it's actually one of my pleasures um that sounded weird but um so so in the in the substrate of like doing a lot of fasting really understanding ketosis and then realizing that hey um it's actually really hard to like not eat for three days not

Starting point is 00:29:19 eat for seven days i remember it like the first few times just like feelings like not being able to really sleep on day two day three or that that evening because of hunger or your body's not used just like yeah your body's like hey i'm starving like jeff wake up go hunt and eat yeah um you're dying right yeah um but that'd be very interesting after you pass uh this the third night your hunger actually attenuates you feel very zen it's like you're very clear um so i think when you hear these stories of i believe you know socrates for his academy he would have students fast for 10 days before joining the academy i think there's a lot of this tradition of both religious and academic and philosophical traditions of people fasting before going and

Starting point is 00:30:04 entering the school as a proof of devotion but also just like a clarification of mind also it's very interesting that like shamanic rituals of plant medicine ayahuasca there's like a purging and fasting involved with it too i think there's a lot of interesting cultural substrate around this notion of fasting and purification and clearing your mind so i think there's a lot A lot of little, I would say, like, lindy cultural things that say that, hey, there's something to fasting, right? Moses was fasting, you know, all these, like, biblical stories about people fasting. So if I can skip the pain of and the discipline of fasting and just, like, drink ketones and get a lot of the benefits, that seems like a super massive problem to solve. Yep.

Starting point is 00:30:47 Um, and apparently in the early 2000s, DARPA also had asked that same question. Can, uh, scientists create a liquid super fuel that gets you a more efficient energy source? Um, and it's a kind of a crazy story because, uh, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, this gentleman, General Peter Pace, who was the first Marine general that became a chairman of the Joint Chiefs, was the vice chairman of DARPA at the time and actually signed off on this research program called operation metabolic dominance what a fucking badass yeah it just sounds badass um and now you know essentially almost you know 20 years later

Starting point is 00:31:27 he's on our board helping us advising us on how to take this and scale this technology up to the to the to the to the next uh i guess stage but at the time um one dose of this was cost twenty five hundred dollars this episode is brought to you by unstoppable domains they've partnered with blockchain.com to create nft domain names ending in dot blockchain it's the perfect ending to show that you're a believer in a decentralized future the blockchain.com community can join a short waitlist to get one for free at blockchain.com slash waitlist slash blockchain domain free nft domains provide all the benefits of premium unstoppable domains including fee-free lifelong ownership if you don't have a blockchain.com wallet no worries there's new free domains

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Starting point is 00:33:53 with military pharmaceutical industry? Is that because of the materials? No, just straight up the technology to manufacture. So like many organic chemicals, is a carbon backbone it's like it's a carbon-based molecule ketones so our body naturally converts fat fatty acids in the liver called ketogenesis into these ketone bodies so just like a organic chemistry process that your liver does when it's under the presence of no no glucose hanging around or low

Starting point is 00:34:21 glucose hanging around so the original technology to convert into these ketones was taking crude oil and processing petroleum product into these exogenous ketones. So very dirty, very expensive, very complicated process. But what happened in recent years is that with the rise of synthetic biology, we could actually code genetically engineered E. coli to ferment sugar into the precursors into this drink. So really it was a technology breakthrough, actually not a bureaucracy breakthrough. so by fermenting sugar with with bugs a much more efficient process so it took you know we had a version one of this product that cost $30 a dose and a lot

Starting point is 00:35:08 of our customers were Tour de France teams MMA athletes and that was actually my initial foray getting to know a lot of athletes you know getting no Lance Armstrong Apollo Ohno and then you know Conor McGregor's the world Jake Paul's the world is actually all due through ketones and then and they were on like some search they knew that hey if i can get deeper and deeper into ketosis uh my metabolism and my kind of metabolic health all this stuff will improve and therefore i can be more dominant at my sport and so they were already kind of in the science and trying to find this stuff or would you guys go and be like hey i know you're you know gifted as an athlete but like there's this whole science

Starting point is 00:35:45 thing you should learn about so that you can get it's actually the former so i think what i realized being able to work with you know the tip of the spear elite operators in the military and elite athletes and like business folks or entrepreneurs and tech folks like ourselves i think everyone is just like smart and savage about winning yes and like the very very elite athletes are just super disciplined and super structured around gaining edges right like sport is how do you get an unfair advantage that's fair against your opponents same with business same with every single endeavor of humanity that's that's competitive right you're just trying to find advantage and i would say over the last couple decades like the nutrition and training

Starting point is 00:36:30 regimens of cycling nutrition cycling workouts right there's like this whole notion of recovery is super important and you're cycling like heavy uh workouts and then backing off and doing recovery um i would say like the most elite athletes are also doing nutrition you'll have like you will lower your carbohydrate intake in pre-season just to really ramp up your fat oxidation right you're almost starving your body forcing your body to get really really efficient and then when you're getting closer to competition engorge it with like all the nutrition possible so you're just super flush with energy when you go into your olympic match or your boxing match your mma match so this notion of exercise cycling and the nutrition cycling it's like that is what

Starting point is 00:37:12 people are you know full-time professionals are studying this and part of these teams and if you look at just sports medicine sports physiology before like in the early 1900s it was like a gentleman's sport right like you just were like a rich person that had like your family estate you're gonna just go run the marathon or you compete with other gentlemen um and then i would say got a little bit more professionalized there's like a a coach that would like teach you everything hey do this do this workout do the nutrition and now you look at sports departments strength and conditioning specialists nutrition specialists recovery specialists i mean i think just seeing like jake's jake paul's specific camp i mean he is like actually crazy sophisticated with like

Starting point is 00:37:57 literally a full-time breath coach a full-time like stretching and and and like yoga coach like multiple boxing coaches a strength and conditioning coach a chef nutritionist and i think that's actually quite commonplace with the elite teams in the military as well as elite sports teams so i would say like the whole sophistication has gotten very very uh granular because like the difference being gold in i don't know 10th place is like so fractional at this time Yeah. When you see that, do you think this will get into business as well? So we already see, I don't know, like the super wealthy, they have private chef or they have, you know, some components of this. They don't think of it so much as maybe performance as they think about it as it's saving them time or it's for their family to make life easier or whatever. But do we know of stories where there are founders who have very specialized coaches for their own physical body? Not, hey, I have a coach that I talk to, you know, for business strategy or something like that, but like actual physical optimization as performing in the business environment?

Starting point is 00:39:03 I mean, I think people talk less about it, but maybe like one just very visible example is Jeff Bezos definitely is on some optimization, right? like i mean he's what in his 50s and he's just like ripped ripped right like you don't suddenly add 20 30 pounds of lean muscle tissue without some hormone optimization and all of that and this is not like uh he just like bought some uh steroids off a fucking website that came from like china and he's like doing like self-administration like you're saying he's literally going to see a a physician like a doctor who specializes in it they're measuring his blood work probably they're they're trying to understand here's that's like an interesting point i mean i didn't think about that angle but yeah there are actually a lot of concierge private doctors who

Starting point is 00:39:47 cater to tech billionaires and performance right so they're like and this is like a very interesting thing of just like modern american health care which is i think it's you know people talk about really a sick care right you really only go to the doctor when it's like i don't got some problem yeah um but i think the most optimized ceos founders investors that are in our circles they're getting their bloods done every month every quarter fine-tuning everything is that what you do like what is your regimen both uh exercise maybe like uh from a physician in interaction and then also uh from a diet or nutrition yeah so yeah so like when i was like super measuring and everything i was doing monthly blood draws optimizing every single micronutrient hormone

Starting point is 00:40:35 levels just i guess an analogy is that like we have dash real-time dashboards for your business yes you probably know more about your car health and your your house your apartment health and what like for a lot of americans like we go we like hate to go maybe go to once a year maybe once a couple of years to just get some baseline panels um it it seems backwards we're like we should be getting real-time dashboards of just all our body's metrics so it's very time intensive just i don't know i don't like being stuck with needles um so but i think in terms of just like understanding what you can do i think it's actually quite material when it's like oh like my vitamin d levels and i think most people's vitamin d levels are very very low um because

Starting point is 00:41:22 we're just indoors all the time um so i think all these things that we should be tracking because like our bodies are our most valuable asset we're not really doing so i think when there's like companies that like are you know levels with the cgm and i think eight sleep you know material our mutual friend is tracking hrv and sleep metrics i think it's all directionally in the right way of how to be better humans right like we should be metrics driven on on our bodies yeah Yeah. Why is testosterone falling so aggressively? This is like the thing that whenever I talk to people who maybe are like surface level educated, they're always like, oh, testosterone is falling. You know, every 20 years it's like getting cut in half or whatever. Do you have thoughts there?

Starting point is 00:42:01 Or have you guys looked at any of this stuff in terms of one, is it important that it's falling? Right. Like, like, should we be concerned about it? And then any ideas as to why that's happening? Yeah, I think it's actually just like a very open scientific question. The leading hypothesis is there's just a lot of EP like BPAs in essentially like plastics that are estrogen mimicking compounds are just floating around in the environment a lot of like fragrances are estrogen izing so a lot of the modern environment and modern like niceties of plat like disposable plastics fragrances cleaning materials all impact your hormone levels mm-hmm so one I think it is a real

Starting point is 00:42:47 problem and I think there's also just like a lot of like funny things were like for example like nicotine actually preserves anti-aromatizing so it stops the conversion of testosterone to estrogen so with the reduction of like nicotine is probably a good thing compounded with prevalence of plastics and then uh increase in obesity and diabetes so uh the conversion the aromatization of testosterone into estrogen is caused primarily happens in your uh adipose tissue so if we as a society are getting fatter with more adipose tissue there are more sites to for conversion of testosterone to estrogen so i think it's like uh all these environmental factors these metabolic factors

Starting point is 00:43:33 that are causing this reduction of testosterone um do i think it's a good or bad thing i think it's a very material thing like i don't have like a a priori judgment on tea and estrogen but if it's a science experiment over the last 20 30 50 years where humanity has succeeded and not killed ourselves over the last millennia. And now we're running this experiment where the hormone levels of half of humanity are changing quite drastically

Starting point is 00:44:11 over a measurable year-to-year period. I think it's potentially very, very dangerous. I mean, I think you can kind of start speculating, does that impact politics? Does that impact culture? Does that impact societal preferences? Look, we can kind of speculate there and you could probably get into trouble

Starting point is 00:44:27 by speculating a little bit too far. But I think at least that's something that I care about personally, right? Like if I were to advise myself or friends, like, hey, I've been talking to friends, like, hey, get your T-levels measured. And it's actually very surprising, like being able to have these conversations

Starting point is 00:44:46 with athletes, with entrepreneurs. Actually, a lot of my friends who are in their 20s that are high-level athletes, high-level entrepreneurs, actually have very low T levels compared to what their grandfathers are, right? I don't know if it's due to stress, environment, you know, having that, you know, extra drink on the weekend because you're stressed out. All these things actually compound. I think there's a lot of great literature how testosterone actually makes effort feel good.

Starting point is 00:45:16 I mean, it actually impacts neurochemistry. So I think from a productivity, traditional masculinity perspective, I think these are like very, very like important questions. I think when you have, you know, I really enjoyed your conversation with Andrew Tate. I think he's opening up questions and conversations around what is traditional masculinity? Is there a place in this modern world? And I think it would be silly to think that changing testosterone levels does not contribute to that conversation. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:45:47 People can't listen to the conversation on YouTube because they took it down. Go to Apple Podcasts. So when you put this into my body, for those that didn't see, I just took another 15 milliliters of this. So I think I'm topped out for the day. It's 10 grams of ketones per serving. What the hell is going on in my head? Like why do I feel like maybe like clearer or sharper or high, whatever terminology you want to use. What is this actually doing to my body?

Starting point is 00:46:19 Yeah, so – I probably should have asked that before I took it. No, no. I love it. You took it first, so I figured we were good. that's that's a true friend um so ketones are actually a preferred energy for the brain so ketones cross the blood-brain barrier and when there's presence of ketones your brain actually metabolizes ketones in preference to glucose so the really cool thing about ketones is that now

Starting point is 00:46:39 we're going to go into uh like high school bio if you remember the krebs cycle the atp cycle um we have mitochondria which are kind of the power plants of the cells it takes energy and oxygen and it converts and turns into atp the energy currency so the cool thing about ketones is that ketones produce more atp per oxygen so it's literally at the biochemical level more efficient than sugar so that is like one of the key reasons why um some of the research we're doing with the military relate to uh cognition reaction time at high altitude so if you think about taking people up to 40 000 feet think afghanistan mountain ranges when you have less oxygen your reaction time slows your decision making slows if there are energy substrates

Starting point is 00:47:32 that can produce more atp per unit oxygen when there's less oxygen available and you're able to preserve function that's very useful from a military application but of course from like a like an intellectual creator, you know, application, very useful as well. Yeah. It's a fascinating conversation right now because, um, uh, I recently had Kaj Larson, uh, pretty well known, uh, Navy SEAL. Uh, and we were talking, um, about all of the controversy in SEAL training. And so now there's people who are claiming like, Oh, there's like rampant steroid use and like all this crazy stuff. And I'm like, dude, y'all want to know, uh, what was going on in every single military school I ever went to? Like people were popping Advil, right?

Starting point is 00:48:12 because like their bodies hurt right and like is that is that rampant is that abuse is that whatever like i don't know but i can tell you that uh in the military guess where else that was super popular in a college football locker room where guys were taking percocets and all kinds of stuff before they went out and played right and so like you start to look at this you're like man okay so we know people are going to take things because either want an edge they want to uh contain pain they want recovery they want whatever but a lot of in the military specifically it's like what can we put on the soldier so it's like let's give them night vision And cool, we've like now made this like thing that can see in the night and our warriors can go out in the night when other people can't see, right?

Starting point is 00:48:46 We've got scopes. We've got body armor. We've got like all these things that are external to the body that we are essentially trying to create like the robocop soldiers, right, to whatever degree. You then supplement that with things like Andorra, which I know you guys invested in in terms of better intelligence, better information, better technology. But really what you're talking about is like, well, what happens if we also could improve the soldiers in the military use case from the inside out? and going on a 10 mile run as fast as you possibly can to some degree is trying to strengthen the body and build endurance and like do all this stuff. But like, there's probably other things that we can do. And if we have our soldiers eating cupcakes all day versus eating like a

Starting point is 00:49:23 healthy diet, like they're being coached to eat healthy, not eat shit. So what is the difference between like, don't smoke cigarettes, you know, don't eat a bunch of sugar and like, Oh, by the way, drink this drink that is going to help you in some way. Like it feels like a natural extension to me yeah um yeah i mean i think one of the coolest career experiences that you know through hvm and we became a military contractor so we have a multi-million dollar contract with special operations command and like getting to know service members really at the tip of the spear and hearing their stories i mean being a california la born raised and then a stanford can be like just a california kid and just like going to fort bragg and virginia beach and like you know

Starting point is 00:50:08 georgia right like it's it was like i felt like i just understood america much better um by spending time with these guys um like they truly believe in this country i mean they're they're bleeding and and had you know and and people you know like lost their lives like defending our way of life. So it's been like, I think one of the, honestly, one of the privileges or the coolest parts of my career so far. Um, but I think that, um, there's actually like interesting, like bureaucracy and like contracting, uh, related stuff where you have to be careful about human experimentation. There's actually like very interesting i would say like regulatory contracting vehicles that we've just gotten exposure and a lot

Starting point is 00:51:01 of learning from um so i think there's a lot of good effort by uh the general staff the senior ncos um and then the civilian staff looking to improve the process because i think it's it's you're actually right like it's much easier to just like have a better widget to install on on someone's over someone's body versus like hey how do we take care of the individual service member without crossing lines of human experimentation ethics human safety all of that so I think and it's probably the right approach you got to be a little bit more thoughtful so I think going back to like even just like steroids and all the stuff I my experience has been that the

Starting point is 00:51:45 the higher tier units they're like super locked down in terms of like what they can take and what they can't take and they're just very very serious about it so probably the right approach to be relatively conservative with dealing with our you know the tier one operators that really the tip of the spear for our country um but can we have a little bit more speed a bit more innovation i mean hopefully that kind of the silicon valley approach uh it can speed things up and i think to your point around andrew i think it's great to have new blood new approaches mixed in with like institutional safeties. Yeah. Uh, one of the things with Andrew specifically that like blows my mind is when I think of, uh, the big prime contractors, like I think about lobbying,

Starting point is 00:52:29 I think about like dinners, suits and ties, like, like there's just for whatever reason, it's an overgeneralization, but like, there's a lot of, uh, just like, it's a machine, it moves at a machine's pace. Uh, and it's more based on like, you know, us, you trust us, uh you like us and like we can get uh this done efficiently whereas andrew showed up and was like yeah that's all cool but like we have a better fucking widget right and i do think that we're seeing this across society right if you if you think a lot about uh go back to the media for example like there's a lot of publications that just kind of were like resting on their laurels being like you know us you trust us we're kind of the big institution you know chill out we'll get

Starting point is 00:53:07 you the information efficiently and then somebody else just showed up was like no like you guys are wrong. Like I have a different opinion and like, this is like something that people want. And so do you see that when you're actually evaluating markets and businesses? I know that you guys built like archive.com as an example. Like it just seems one of the key pieces to your career, the threads through it is that you guys actually are going after markets that people have been looking at for a while, but it's in some new unique way or with some new type of approach that ends up actually being fairly disruptive. I think you have to believe that if you're in an upstart position.

Starting point is 00:53:44 And I think, I feel like history is on our side where there is this innovator's dilemma, this sludge that accrues when it's like the third, fourth, fifth generation where the ownership and the vision is really diluted across managing professional money bean counters. Yeah, I mean, I think for,

Starting point is 00:54:03 I mean, I think just even for like like currency right like you know i think we talked a lot about crypto and i think last year was like a crazy time for crypto um like i i want a world where people can choose better systems to partake in i mean i think it would suck to be forced to you know like i when i see like the british royalty i think it's like kind of crazy that like hey they're literally having to pledge their allegiance and they're like i feel very lucky to be american i pledge allegiance to a flag or a constitution or an idea but literally our friends over across the pond literally the pledge to a queen or a king and it's like damn like i thought this is like some game of thrones stuff

Starting point is 00:54:50 like you got literally bend the knee to get a award from like some nice you know friendly elder the queen was getting a dollar ahead from every person who lived in australia still like there's a dollar ahead tax on every australian because it was like still a a queen you know land or whatever you know fuck that and i and i get that like there's a reason why it's there how they came upon it there's no one who's been like disrupting it a lot of times when it comes to this geopolitical stuff there has to be like revolution and war and like all these things that actually people who have been exposed to that stuff are like hey you want to avoid that at all costs and only use it as a last resort uh but it is wild in 2022 that the citizens

Starting point is 00:55:36 of australia were paying a tax someone who lives across the world yeah and their private estate and then and then like the queen is able to just transfer all her assets to charles right just like oh man like different roles being played um so like i think like yeah and i and i think when you look at that when you step back like hey like there are just a lot of like systems with government that might have made sense at the time, a lot of legacy, a lot of institution, but can we rewrite today? I think if you and I just were deciding

Starting point is 00:56:07 things to start anew, I think we'd build a lot of things differently. And I think a lot of people that are listening probably think the same way. So when it is looking at new opportunities and new approaches, I think that's what we live, breathe, and we'll die on. That's a hill we'll die on.

Starting point is 00:56:22 That's just how we operate. I want to operate in a way where I look at every single human, whether you're a barista or you're the queen or king of england i want to treat you the same and i want to be treated the same as well right like just treat me as an individual not some weird legacy institutional thing um so hopefully that i think has that that core axiom has trickled into how i think about business formation so for archive um so two three years ago we were you know one of the primary direct marketing channels and distribution channels was e-commerce right we

Starting point is 00:56:56 We were pretty early on building our own e-commerce stack, moving over to Shopify, just seeing how everyone is doing the same Facebook CAC LTV equation. Can you acquire and get paid back within three months, six months, 12 months, and then optimizing your landing pages to like reduce your customer acquisition costs, right? This is like a math problem that every single DTC company was doing. I think people got really, really good about it. but we were quite metrics driven around like hey like a lot of the like reported results were actually very very soft um and i would say two three years ago we realized the power of actual

Starting point is 00:57:32 community and just thinking what is the first principles of marketing it's just like an extended way of like goodwill like how do you get people talking positively on your brand and how do you actually uh manage a digital community so archive really came from this insight that hey doing this that like pay to play run facebook run google and then maybe have 10% or spend on random other like snap and and other stuff probably wasn't going to be sustainable i think now that has that has come true uh so we just built a lot of software automation how do you run a community how do you actually trigger community events uh from someone for example posting about your brand so um i'm actually curious like when someone tags pump in a story when they're listening to podcasts like

Starting point is 00:58:24 how is that being managed are you just like you have a team you have a person like physically like looking and reposting resharing no nothing it's just it's just if i just see it which is wild right it's like literally 80 percent of and like most of how we perceive information is through stories yes these ephemeral pieces of content yes and we realized that like there are literally full-time human jobs screen saving this content tracking this content and then maybe engaging with the creator be like hey can we use this content repurpose it and we're like wait why is this like a full-time person's job like like at hvm and we had a person doing this every day and it was like stressful to like manage them on saturday whether they had to go on vacation like

Starting point is 00:59:07 someone's got to do this so we're like a computer science guy let's build software to automate it mm-hmm and that was a seed of archive like let's automate the workflow capture of all this community driven events and now you know as we progress and I think with increasing focus where there's companies like open store skims it's very very sophisticated community oriented brands can you automate like an API to trigger automatic events so for example one of our customers every time an ambassador posts like an Instagram story of like wearing this underwear or wearing this clothing they want to give like a reward

Starting point is 00:59:44 like a 10 $20 ACH stripe payment well doing this manually sucks if especially if at scale you have a thousand people that you want to be tracking why not build software to automate it so we're just realizing that just this core insight of how do you actually go to where the audience is where the community is talking about a brand or a product and build webhooks, build APIs to actually trigger software events around it has been a very interesting opportunity.

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Starting point is 01:01:34 Again, that's lmaxdigital.com slash POMP. It's fascinating when you start to understand that you were doing it with a human and then you just wrote the software to automate that over time. Are there other things that you all have seen as you've built businesses where humans are doing it and you're like, nah, that's definitely gonna be software,

Starting point is 01:01:54 you know, two, three years. Like, why don't we just go build it? I think that's actually one of the core themes of what we're looking at with anti-fund and just also where I think Jake and I spent a lot of time. I think we want to start a company called 247 Industries. That's literally like an AI home security business because I think Jake has had a lot of personal stories where he hires security guards that are around his property

Starting point is 01:02:21 that are just falling asleep, taking a nap. you know um on that specific point uh this is actually a thesis we'll talk about it later uh i think that somebody's going to build a 21st century uh security business but not a security business for like businesses or uh even just uh uh individual like homes where there's cameras and stuff uh if you think of one of a very large business that a lot of people don't know about is uh bodyguards executives uh security all this stuff and um in miami for example a lot of conferences so what happens is a bunch of executives fly here and some of them will come with their own security but a lot of them just want to use whatever security is on the ground

Starting point is 01:03:03 or whatever you see this in other uh uh cities where there's a lot of events las vegas things like that go and search miami bodyguard on google you'll be like i think i just teleported back to 1995 because it's like you know look and and the people who are running these businesses they're that's not what they do they're not technologists right so the so the websites are all built on like wordpress they're not updated they're like all these things and so in some way uh there's an opportunity to just like go build a better one but have a website that works right what you're talking about though is like no what if you reimagine the entire thing and you say hey from scratch you know just like andrew looked at what's the defense contract look like this is you know

Starting point is 01:03:44 what does this look like from a technology standpoint to protect someone's home, to protect them, to protect their business? I mean, I think like, yeah. So I think that's like the one specific instance, but I think that is going to be an inevitable transformation. I think like machine learning AI, I think you just see like every single month, there's just like a breakthrough in terms of game playing and what is physical reality,

Starting point is 01:04:06 but just like a more complicated game than like a little digital or a chess board or a go board. I mean, you're just adding more and more degrees of freedom and it's like okay the product the progression seems quite exponential right now are there more and more jobs and and like and i think the question is oh like are you destroying people's livelihoods and it's like that is part of creative destruction i and i and i honestly don't know if like a retail job is like something that we want should be happy as society be like hey like that is someone's like passion to be in a retail job maybe it is but like maybe it's not for a lot of people I don't

Starting point is 01:04:46 think a lot of retail job people are like yeah this is my life's passion let's be real so I think in terms of transformation market opportunity in just efficiency I think those are gonna be some of the areas that will have a lot of disruption and a lot of opportunity there will be some short-term pain as people transition but I generally just believe in people's resiliency right like like i just never understood like why like longshoremen for these ports get to have like this weird family like oligopoly over like america's ports right like if you just look at because i grew up in uh la county palos verdes a lot of friends were like families of longshoremen

Starting point is 01:05:27 they're getting paid like a lot of money to just like move uh crates off of boats and into trucks and ship them off and like these unions are like very very strong and it's and they're like you can't even like i can't even apply like like like the jobs get passed on like family the father the son and it's like wait this is like a weird version of aristocracy where it's like yo you were part of the original longshoremen's group and like gotta be you gotta know them to like even get that really well-paying job look i like i support everyone making a livelihood but is it like do we actually want some like weird monopoly that's passed on through family lineage to like monopolize like an area that probably could use some updated machinery updated technology um i think the

Starting point is 01:06:14 answer is yes because like again to your point like why does every australian have to pay the queen it's like well why does every american citizen to like get their i don't know whatever their iPhone need to pay these guys a tax when it's not a fair competition. Yeah. When you look at entrepreneurship today, one of the types of businesses that I'm fascinated by are there's Trilogy, there's Constellation, there is Tiny, right, in kind of more of a tech-oriented way. There's a lot of these that are popping up now where people are going and they're actually acquiring businesses. How do you guys think about buying versus acquiring versus just investing in like a minority stake yeah i think that's a interesting like like like debate that we

Starting point is 01:06:57 actually have i think acquiring business is very hard because one the infrastructure to maintain and to retain the people that actually know how to like improve the product is actually quite tricky like being having sold the company and being amalgamated into like the borg of groupon through my first company glass map i just saw like the the very difficult challenges of like a properly good m&a integration right like i think it's hard from an existing ego perspective because like i remember i i probably was getting paid a lot more than like my random co-workers i just went through the front door and then like i had like a bigger ego because i was like oh i got i sold my company and i'm more important and it's like wait like i don't think you actually like

Starting point is 01:07:45 Those are like the weird subtle dynamics of the human personality side that I think are underspoken about with a big M&A kind of style play. So having been on the acquired side and thinking about if I want to be an acquirer, I'm always very skeptical. Like why are they selling to me now? Because they understand their business better than I do. If they're willing to sell it to me, why are they just not trying to sell it to me? if there's like some broader reason why our sentence is a line moving forward i will feel more comfortable about about it but i think it's kind of dangerous to be like i have i have a strict information disadvantage and you're selling it to me why are you doing that um so i feel like

Starting point is 01:08:30 so like i've been much more on the sky like building and incubating because i feel like um maybe with the same amount of effort you and and and selection you can just go from zero to like you know one two five million of revenue versus like hey i'm gonna spend five times ten times whatever multiple whatever industry to buy someone's thing and then maybe have to rebuild the whole thing anyways yeah uh that's an interesting point of like do you think about starting businesses and you're like hey the first goal is to get like a million or five million dollars and it's kind of bottoms up and like let's get momentum or do you think about you know is this a billion dollar revenue opportunity and then like back into here's how we're going to get to

Starting point is 01:09:11 a billion dollars in revenue like is it more master plan top down or is it more um this is an interesting idea let's get started build momentum as bottoms up i think it's like the paradox of having to hold both states in your mind um i think you so like i think you always have to have like this narrative this vision of why this is like a valuable problem that we're spending our scarce resource of time on so yeah i want to have this vision of like hey how is this to be a billion dollar company that's worth all of our smart brains and energies and limited effort um but i think when it's like pure narrative i think that oftentimes is very dangerous because like you just go into like the atmosphere just raising a bunch of money you don't actually like

Starting point is 01:09:49 make actual business um so i think you choose a good market and i think maybe better our sports betting business is like a good case study for this right sports betting massive market we think it's gonna be a growing market as more states legalize sports betting um but like what is our first what is our approach to literally get the first state licensed and how do we acquire our first 100 1 000 10 000 users and have a really great experience with them um so i think that is like the challenge in the art the artistry of entrepreneurship how do you actually have like this path this winding path to like a billion dollar opportunity but like don't get so full of your ego for it's like yeah but you like you literally need one person to like pay you money to like keep

Starting point is 01:10:33 the lights on um so if you can find and hold or have a complementary team where you can do both i think that's almost required it's insufficient to have one or the other like what how do you get your first five million of revenue i see a lot of investors starting to build companies again which is exciting. Uh, but I also see a lot of entrepreneurs who are, uh, previously they had the dream, they had the, Oh, I'm going to go build the next, you know, Airbnb or whatever business. And in conversations over the last six months, market prices come down. I think reality kind of sets in a little bit more. Uh, there's more of an acknowledgement of like Airbnb didn't start off with like a multi-billion dollar plan. It started off with like, I have an air mattress

Starting point is 01:11:18 in my kitchen. Yeah. And they're like selling like captain crunches or whatever to like pay the bills. Absolutely. And, and, and so I do think, um, uh, it goes back to kind of the saying of like everything valuable starts off looking like a toy, right? Um, it feels like we are almost kind of reentering this, like, uh, almost a Renaissance of like real founders. And I say real because, uh, there is this cohort of like, Oh, I think I'm a founder. So I just go to conferences and networking and all the bullshit. Um, and, and like try to position myself to be forbes 30 under 30 and put it on my linkedin uh versus the people who are just like no i actually don't give a shit about any of that stuff like i just want to figure out how do i build something

Starting point is 01:11:55 that like people are willing to either use or buy from me um and that it like gets me very excited it feels like oh now if you have ideas like now's the time to fucking go leave your job quit whatever else you're working on like go because for the next two to three years you're going to see like this uh capital injection early stages you're going to see a renaissance of all this stuff and five, six, seven years from now, we'll be talking about the companies that are started right now. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:12:19 I mean, I think also just broadly, I think like the best investors I know, I think think of themselves as founders. I think we're all just like building stuff. And I think if I, when I was less mature as an entrepreneur, I would always look at like VCs or investors as like, oh, they're here to like give money and support.

Starting point is 01:12:37 No, it's like, they're just as much of a savage business person as you are. And it's like, yo, it's just hard to like build something that grows and compounds and cash flows um so i think it's like a healthy correction of expectations i don't blame anyone because i think that was probably the right strategy in in full bull market like yo everyone was throwing around money like crazy and i think again i think when we're hanging out in miami over 2020 it was like oh this is a crazy time um fun time it was

Starting point is 01:13:06 like and it's probably the right approach just like tell a great story acquire capital just get long and loud right like like literally that was what people were doing i think uh mark cuban may be the one who who said like in the 90s like that was like an entire investment strategy was just like get long and get loud yeah and it feels like that that it describes 2021 yeah was people were just long every asset in the world like they're like i just bought a fucking beanie baby i got a baseball card i got this i got then everything's going up and then it obviously you know yeah so like i think like you learn like hey you also got it it's not just like entry price but also sell price right like i think i learned that from a lot of my wall street new york friends i feel

Starting point is 01:13:45 like at least i probably kind of the same cloth i was very much like a founder accumulator never hold never sell i think i definitely learned a personal lesson in terms of his you know we're also in the business world where you also should de-risk and take uh gains off the table um so it's like a balance but i think to your point i think it's great that ultimately like what is i I think one thing I like to say is that a lot of things are simple but not easy. Like make something that people will pay you more money for than it costs you to produce. It's a super simple statement, but it's not easy to do and easy to do at scale. And I think that like as more and more people build, like I'm very optimistic on capitalism and people's creativity and people's like ambition.

Starting point is 01:14:31 Like when I look at that side of the world, I'm very optimistic, and then I look at the other news of like war and crime, and I'm like kind of – it's like, okay, like the world is so big. You can kind of look at whatever you want, and you can tell yourself whatever story you want, and I think it's probably like our own discipline and almost our own self-brainwashing or self-religion, which – where do you want to draw your attention to? and i think hopefully we can inspire more people to go towards building and creating versus like hey like the world's going to shit and like i gotta like burn everything down yeah it um it's an optimist view which i think uh in technology is very persistent like the technology industry is you have to be an optimist it's very hard to be a pessimist and and survive uh i do wonder how much of the pessimistic view we see outside of the technology industry uh is kind of a point in time and the pendulum swings back and people are like oh pessimists you know they end up

Starting point is 01:15:35 broke and depressed and like basically screwed um and even if the ship is going down being the optimist is still a better position to be in like the optimist on the sinking ship than to be the pessimist in you know the the great empire because uh at the end of the day uh you can only control so much and it's like your mindset being you know one of the most important things yeah i mean i think it's important on the individual level and important on a societal level like i think i think humans want to be part of the winning team so i think it's like super important if as you're thinking about team formation or like nation state construction like how do you create this narrative that you're a force of good force of positivity um i think it's very dangerous

Starting point is 01:16:20 when it's like oh your country is like founded on sin or it's like a bad position we gotta tear everything down like like how does that allow you to build and create value right like and i think it's like it feels very value extractive versus like value accretive and at a certain point like if we're just like looking at our neighbor's stuff and trying to take stuff i don't know if that's like that world i want to be in right like i think i'm i'm more mindful of that because i feel Like there are, I feel like there are definitely just segments of every country, but I think especially in America where it's like very like value extractive, like, Hey, we need to like punish people.

Starting point is 01:17:06 And I think that's like, I don't know if we were like, that's the direction of the country we want to go in. Yeah. I, um, uh, I could not agree more. Uh, when you look out over the next five years or so, what are you most excited about, uh, in terms of, uh, investing and building companies? um i think on the maybe like just like just like just fresh like just the approach in terms of strategy shift yeah i think last year was like go long everything i mean i think we've i know

Starting point is 01:17:33 we've just shared stories of just like just crazy deals just flying around things getting like oversubscribed in like 24 hours just fire stuff everywhere um i think the mood and and focus now is be really involved incubate get on the ground floor with in markets or problems that we think that we have a special understanding of or just big believers in so I think AI machine learning and their applications into like very verticalized applications is very interesting I think especially with Jake with sport and media I think there's a lot of interesting applications and I think this better is one manifestation of that how do you

Starting point is 01:18:14 get the modern version of kind of these entertainment products and community products um and then i think and then so like focusing a lot of incubations are super super early stage like ground floor level co-founding starting these things from scratch or just like backing like post product market fit post revenue like companies like anderil or like things like alchemy which is like a web3 infrastructure company um i think it's increasingly hard to be in no man's land which is that like you don't have enough ownership or control or moral authority to be like really that engaged with the company but it's also like not post product market fit where you know our expertise with marketing branding like really can is they're

Starting point is 01:19:02 still finding product market fit um so i think the philosophy and is like hey polarize the position like really understand are you and are we in category one or category two and be very very polite about like hey just you know anything else is not in our focus areas it's a barbell strategy and uh i think why you and i get along so well it's like almost to a t that's how i see the world now it's like there are a very small number of companies that you will not build but are grand slam opportunities and you have to be uh aware of them and be able to get access to them sometimes you're aware you can't get access sometimes you could get access but nobody told you or whatever right um and so uh in those opportunities like it makes sense to essentially make angel-like

Starting point is 01:19:53 investments or kind of fund investments where you're a minority kind of passive participant and there's some great capital uh compounding that can occur but i think it's a white you know kind of uh slate in terms of the building side and my guess is that the next cohort of really big companies people are going to be shocked by who's building them because it's not going to be uh you know some some of the same types of people like the patterns are about to get broken and, uh, that is healthy. Uh, but also the best investors, they're not going to be caught flat footed. Like I already see them. They're like, Oh, okay. World's shifting. Like there's certain other people, you know, how many investors are like, I'll give Mr. Beast any amount of money

Starting point is 01:20:35 he wants to build companies. Like there's actually a number of them that are very intelligent. They realize, okay, the world has shifted. Now this guy actually, uh, is, you know, is Mr. Beast, the new white combinator. Like it's a different model. It's a different way of doing it. It's different value proposition, but Y Combinator has been incredibly successful at being able to put companies through and find success. It's going to be hard pressed to find someone who's doing it at a level that he's doing it right now. Right. And so it's like an interesting thing because with Y Combinator, you can invest in their funds. You can put companies through like all this stuff with Mr. Beast. It may not be as clear as to how do you benefit from that financially if you're

Starting point is 01:21:13 just a passive investor who's got capital. Yeah. No, I mean, this is what I said. I said, i've always said that paul graham is the best entrepreneur in silicon valley over the last 20 years probably i mean i mean just straight up like he literally is a multi-billionaire literally has stakes in some of the most iconic companies built out of silicon valley and he's made himself an institution right and and like i think the way he succeeds is like you don't even think of him as an entrepreneur he's just like the nice principal guru and it's like it's part the substrate of silicon valley like he succeeded so damn well that he's invisible that any people don't even think of him as like a profit collector um i just remember like all like he was like the

Starting point is 01:21:55 only lp or besides like sequoia for like a lot of the initial funds i mean the guy arguably made one of the best companies over the last 20 years and i think people don't even consider him an entrepreneur which is like the super interesting jiu-jitsu move like aikido move where it's like he's a silent killer like he won it is pretty freaking impressive right like people don't think of as an entrepreneur yeah but why combinators gotta be worth a couple billion dollars easy yeah i mean if you just have a few points of stripe airbnb drop i mean just name to go down that list like oh shit and he's like the main lp of all these funds oh okay yeah it is absolutely insane uh where can we send people find you on the

Starting point is 01:22:39 internet uh find out more about the companies uh i'm available at jeffrey woo g-e-o-f-f-r-e-y-w-o instagram twitter um anti-fund hvmn archive better better b-e-t-r available just google yeah i always appreciate talking to you thank you so much we'll do it again in the future yeah it's awesome thanks so much for listening to today's episode i really hope you enjoyed this one. Make sure you're subscribed on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player. And if you're looking to transition into a brand new job in the Bitcoin or crypto industry, we've got you covered. Head over to thecryptoacademy.io. My team and I have been working with the top HR teams in the industry to develop an intensive three-week training

Starting point is 01:23:22 program with over 50 live events. We teach you exactly what you need to know to break into the industry, including live interview prep and resume review. Our students have been hired at over 75 of the world's best Bitcoin and crypto companies, go to thecryptoacademy.io to learn more. Again, that's thecryptoacademy.io. If you enjoyed today's episode, make sure you share it with your friends, and I'll see you all for the next episode.

The Pomp Podcast - #1103 Geoff Woo On Why Mr. Beast & Jake Paul Will Be Billionaires

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