The Pomp Podcast - #1138 Eric Tarczynski | These Technologies Will Change The World

Episode Date: December 15, 2022

Eric Tarczynski is the Founder & Managing Partner at Contrary Capital. In this conversation, we discuss the future of venture capital, innovative technologies, seeking out people over companies, how Eric raised his first fund, and how he's building one of the most exciting venture capital firms in the world. ======================= LMAX Digital - the market-leading solution for institutional crypto trading & custodial services - offers clients a regulated, transparent and secure trading environment, together with the deepest pool of crypto liquidity. LMAX Digital is also a primary price discovery venue, streaming real-time market data to the industry’s leading analytics platforms. LMAX Digital - secure, liquid, trusted. Learn more at LMAXdigital.com/pomp ======================= Arculus is the next generation crypto & NFT cold storage wallet that combines one of the world’s strongest security protocols with the easiest to use form factor and app. Arculus requires 3-Factor Authentication to ensure only you have access to your digital assets – something you know – a PIN, something you have – the Arculus Key Card, and biometrics. Learn more and buy it now on getarculus.com. Use promo code POMP to save 15%. Remember, with Arculus, it’s your keys, your crypto. ======================= With a Messari Pro subscription, you gain access to exclusive industry-leading long-form daily research reports, daily crypto news & insights in your inbox, advanced asset screeners, curated sets of charts and metrics and so much more. Try Messari Pro today! Get up to 25% off their Messari Pro membership by visiting www.messari.io/pro and entering promo code "POMP" at checkout. =======================

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. Eric Tarzynski is the founder and managing partner at Contrary Capital. In this conversation, we talk about various innovative technologies. We talk about the future of venture capital, why they seek out people over companies, and what exactly he did to raise his first fund and build what is one of the most exciting venture capital firms in the world. I really enjoyed this conversation with Eric

and I hope you guys enjoy it as well. Once you get done listening, jump on Twitter and let us know what you liked, what you didn't like, where exactly we could have done better and what you thought we did well. We always appreciate the feedback. Here is my conversation with Eric. This episode is brought to you by LMAX Digital,

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data and research needs. With Masari Pro, you can gain access to exclusive industry-leading long-form daily research reports, daily crypto news, advanced asset screeners, and curated sets of charts and protocol metrics. If you try Masari Pro today, listeners of the Pomp podcast can get up to 25% off their Masari Pro membership by visiting www.masari.io backslash Pomp or enter promo code Pomp at checkout. That's www.masari.io backslash Pomp and use promo code Pomp. 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 Eric here with me. I thought a great place to start would be you guys are very people focused. So what makes a great founder? How do you think about you meet someone and you're like, you should start a company versus you meet someone and you're like, you should not start a company. Yeah. So, so, so it's great here.

So we actually think about it across two kind of pieces. We think number one in, in terms of kind of like potential future founders. And then, and then number two, like you're actually starting a company right now. Hey, how do we think about you as a founder? Right. And so if you think about that, that, that first one of, of kind of like potential future founders, um, we think about it kind of through a few different vectors. I think number one, you know, like what is your body of work, right? Like what have you done in the past that shows

some degree of, of, of kind of grit of excellence? Um, that's essentially a good predictor for, for kind of future success, right? And, you know, odds are maybe you didn't even start a company in the past. That's fine. Um, but maybe a world-class pianist or athlete, or like you've done something. So that's piece one. And then number two is we kind of think about, okay, well, what do the people that know you best have to say about you? It's essentially just kind of character referencing, right? So managers, colleagues, peers, whatever it might be, and kind of getting an understanding of your work ethic, character, how well respected you are, all of those kinds of things. And then the last piece is just a good old-fashioned conversation, right?

I think one of the things we've learned over the past few years is if you kind of do your underwriting and kind of filtering the right way, the kinds of people that are going to start generational companies know. And they'll tell you very clearly, hey, you know, I'm at StartupX right now, and I'm here to accomplish these three things, right? I'm here to learn what it takes to fundraise. I'm here to, you know, kind of basically learn on somebody else's dime. And then I'm here to learn what it takes to be a world-class manager. and in one to two years, like I expect to quit and start a company, right? So you're looking with people

that have just tremendous conviction and understanding of like what they actually want to do on the future founder side. I think when it comes to actual founders specifically and how we think about them kind of as people, I think number one is like we're looking for, is this person deeply, deeply knowledgeable and sophisticated about the space

that they're building in, right? So we're not looking for, you know, Bobby who has an app idea and is doing it because it's cool that everybody else is doing it, right? We're looking for Pavle who has been doing synthetic biology research for a decade since he was in high school, and now he's starting a syn-bio company, and he's world-class in this space, right? And then we're also looking for are they deeply technical, are they good at sales, and are they scrappy, right? I think ultimately you could be the best technologist in the world, but if you can't also clearly articulate and tell a compelling story and narrative around why this thing needs to exist in the world, you're dead in the water. So that's kind of how I think about it.

So when you meet someone and they're like, I'm great at X, how do you actually know if they're great? It's easy if, um, you know, you won a world championship or you're an Olympic athlete and you got a gold medal. Like there are some external kind of validating components, but synthetic biology, how do you know that they're actually great? Yeah. So we'll, we'll, we'll quite literally, I mean, for synthetic biology, right?

Like we'll actually go into the weeds with them, right? Like we'll have them in depth, walk us through their body of work over the past five or 10 years in Sinbio, right? So we'll have them walk us through any research that they've done, projects they've worked on, professors that they've worked with, and talk to them, right? So we'll go as far down the rabbit hole for diligence as we possibly can. And then ultimately, you're able to suss out some understanding of, hey, scale 1 to 10, you know, how does this person kind of fit in? And then from there, like, that's a piece of the puzzle, right? How deeply knowledgeable and sophisticated is this person?

And then you're coupling it with everything else, right? with kind of like technical ability what people have to say about them their their character sales ability all that kind of stuff so move the microphone uh just in front like uh pull it yeah yeah um and so as you're going through this are you looking for specific things in the conversation so okay you're a synthetic biologist i guess it's the right terminology for the last five years walk me through your work are you looking for command of the information are you looking for like creativity in their work are you looking for like persistence or are you just like this person fucking knows what they're talking about and like this other person got

exposed and they don't know what they're talking about yeah well so i think that the single best heuristic that we've observed over the past five years of doing this now when it comes to an early stage founder is clarity of thought interesting right and so you'll go and you'll talk to somebody a potential founder let's say right sin bio founder or direct consumer founder whatever it might be, right? And there's a pretty standard set of questions that you might want to ask somebody, right? User acquisition, or how you're building your team, or what do you want to build, right? Whatever it might be, right? And the absolute top, you know, 0.1% founders, the level of clarity that they have about every single aspect of the business,

it's pretty mind blowing, to be honest, like for the really best ones, right? I'll always kind of remember, uh, you know, one of our, one of our founders, we were talking about user acquisition and a typical kind of founder for user acquisition might say something like, you know, Oh, well, like we're just going to do paid ads, right. I'm going to do Facebook or Instagram ads. Right. And when you ask them how they would acquire their first 500 customers, right. And this founder was like, no, no, no, actually we're not doing any paid at all to begin with. Instead, what we're going to do is we're, this is like a, a kind of like pet wellness company. We're going to go to, you know, Washington square park. And we're going to do it on a Saturday morning from nine to

12. And we're going to hand out these kinds of flyers. And we're specifically looking for, you know, 25 to 35 year old women who have, you know, disposable income of, you know, 150 to $300,000 a year. And then like, we're also building a community, which is they would, they would go on for five to 10 minutes on one small specific piece of the business. And that is how, you know, I think, uh, like what, who, what's truly separating kind of like wheat from chaff when it comes to founders yeah how did you guys get started like this is such like a a relatively unique way to do this uh but like you're not doing it on sandhill road uh you're not doing it from uh the halls of some massive institution uh you have a crazy crazy story like

just walk me through how does contrary get started yeah for sure so so the story itself actually uh yes it's pretty wild so um it's pretty wild yeah so so uh from new jersey right school in boston really kind of found my interest in school in boston does that mean harvard no yes no maybe northeastern northeastern all right people say school in boston you never know it's a 50 50 no uh yeah so i went to northeastern um i was one of those guys who got rejected from you know pan or some of the other ivies and kind of i didn't even know those schools existed yeah yeah well that's what happens when you go to like when you go to like kind of like a i don't know about you i went to like a a public high school in in rural new jersey and it was one of those places

were the guidance counselors as long as you got into any yeah you college at all it was like job well done yeah the uh uh the whole college counselor in a high school really has a lot more power than people probably assigned to yeah like in hindsight yeah like literally kids would go talk and they'd be like uh i don't think that you should even apply yeah to these 40 top schools instead let's apply to a local community college like that really sets people off on different paths in life. It's egregious. I mean, 60% of my high school class went to a community college, 60%. It's crazy. Right. And, and, and I think out of a class of four 30, 10 of us, maybe 15 went to a private four-year university. Wow. Crazy. Yeah. So I totally agree.

It like sets you up. So you're one of 10 there. That's a sign of excellence. So got out now. And so, yeah, so went to Northeastern basically found my interest in tech and startups while I was there. So, so worked in a payments company, uh, which is a good story there. Toast was actually, uh, our biggest competitor. There were, there were two seed stage companies in Boston about a decade ago, working on payments for full service restaurants. One was us, one was Toast. Toast became a $10 billion company. We died. Uh, so that was, that was my first kind of experience in, in, in building. And that was actually where I hatched the idea for what became Contri, because I was in Boston spending time with a dozen or so people

from the different universities, right? And Delian actually was one of them, right? He was at MIT at the time. And this guy, Nassar Yassin, I don't know, Nass Daily, like Nass was at Harvard at the time, right? So there were a dozen of us, all of whom I thought were sharp, entrepreneurial, had good hustle, all of those kinds of things. And we're going to go on and do great things. But it was really interesting to me that when you actually took a step back for people like this in their earliest days, nobody was actually doing anything in a systematic way to identify and capture that talent specifically. They were largely just left to this kind of random walk of life, right? And so had the idea originally for Contre at the time as a result of that, went out to SF after graduating, was an early employee at a startup, and then maybe three, four years later swung back around to it when I was thinking about what I wanted to do next. And I knew that I wanted to spend the next decade plus building something really special and thought about that concept for what became Contrary and thought, look, you know, nothing like this exists in the venture world, right?

You know, venture is still pretty traditional. It's still pretty, you know, two people and a dog, you know, seed stage fund in CityX that are doing yet the same thing as everybody else. What if you could actually build one of the best firms of our generation off of that insight of the person before the idea? um and so just kind of jumped in and the rest is history no you didn't jump in come on so you guys have found lps at blackjack tables on ski trips all kinds of explain what is the fundraising strategy contrary so well let's talk about let's talk about the very first fund right so we're so we're five years in actually the next week will be five years since starting right and so so the first fund right uh so if we go back to kind of jumping right in once i decided that i

want to work on contrary, right? I had to be all in, right? And when you think about raising money for a fund versus a startup, you know, I always thought that raising money for a fund would, I knew it would be harder, right? But I thought it would be doable. I mean, I don't know, 30 to 50% harder, let's say, than raising money for a seed stage startup, right? Turns out when, you know, you didn't go to Harvard or, you know, you didn't work at, you know, Sequoia or whatever it is it's, it's orders of magnitude harder, right. So to raise your first fund when you, when you have not worked in venture prior. And so, uh, one of our very first LPs, uh, I, I, uh, I essentially snuck into salt, uh, salt conference, like Anthony Scaramucci's, uh, conference. That's right. That's

right. I saw, I saw him. I gotta tell, I gotta tell. I don't think I've ever told him. How did, how did you sneak in? Did you just like walk in and they just didn't stop you or did you like go through the service door so there was a there was a guy that i had cold email so i i took a i found like a 60 round trip flight from sf to vegas uh and i was those are lit those are wild if you're going at the right time on like a friday afternoon some of the most unbelievable experiences in my life i once flew spirit and and an actual brawl started on directly across the aisle from me And then it continued at the baggage claim. Yeah.

People don't understand. So like you're, you're on a flight, on a plane from San Francisco going to Vegas. Everyone is going to party and some people start earlier. And so while you're on a spirit airline flight, uh, it gets wild. 100%. Yeah. Unbelievable. Yeah.

So, so had the $60 frontier flight in and then immediately it was, it was a 24 hour gig basically. Right. So I, I kind of, you know, land went straight to, I think it was a Venetian or something like that. Right. And I had cold emailed a few people beforehand and said, Hey, saw that you're going to also be at salt. Right. Uh, like let's meet up. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And so, and so the one guy, uh, we were supposed to meet and he said, Hey, like I'm in this area, right. Of, of, of, of the conference. Um, and so basically went to the security people, right. Who are kind of

blocking off. And I said, Oh, like I have a meeting with Mark. Right. Uh, and like, I'm not Like, I'm not, I basically don't have a ticket, but like I'm meeting this guy down there. Like, can I get in? And they just let me in and they didn't even really ask. And so, so that was how I got in. And then I, I didn't leave the cordoned off zone for like 12 hours. Yes. Yeah, of course.

Once you're in. Totally. Yeah. I was like, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not leaving this. Right. So, so stayed in for the entire day. And then in the evening I left because I saw a lot, a lot of people were kind of flooding out.

And then I went and just started playing blackjack at the various blackjack tables with people who have the SALT name tags on them. Oh, smart, smart. Yeah, and so I just could have kind of a ghost sit right next to them basically and strike up a conversation, tell them what we were doing. And yeah, it landed,

we got two LPs out of that. You know, for our first, our first one was only a couple million dollars, right? But, you know, I got two LPs out of that. So good trip. 15% of our first one. Yeah, and then I slept, well, originally I was supposed to,

the Frontier flight back was like 5, 6 a.m. the next morning. So in my mind, I was like, oh, I'll just stay up all night and then go back. How old are you at this time? 23, 24. Of course. Well, that's what you're going to do anyways in Vegas. Of course. But I set myself a budget, immediately lost it that evening. Right. And so I, I, I literally, I will never forget this. I, I tried to sleep on the cold, hard floor of the Vegas McCarran international airport with my backpack and had the most crippling lower back pain the next morning.

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Of course. Well, also if you've ever slept in an airport, which I don't want to admit that I've slept many times in an airport, uh, sometimes missed flights, but other times like, ah, you know, why go get a hotel? I'm going to take the flight in the morning. Um, and, uh, actually I have a video once I was, uh, you can't lose your bag. That's one of the big things, right? You don't want somebody to steal your bag. So you like basically somehow lay on your bag, tie it to yourself or whatever. It's a thing. It's a thing. I didn't make the rules. That's the thing. Uh, and so I was laying there and then all of a sudden I woke up at like 2 30 in the morning and a guy is uh vacuuming oh yeah yeah and i was like so arrogant

i was like hey man i'm sleeping over here and he was like get the fuck out of my way so you forget my job bro yeah you forget that like you could try to sleep in the airport but like it's not really that easy to sleep it is not when things are going on it is not and they had because they during uh during like the i don't know three to five a.m whatever they don't let you even check in. Right. So I wasn't even in the airport. I was in the lobby. Oh, you were in the lobby. Oh, so when I've done it, I've already been in and then you stay, you can't go outside the gate or they have a connection or something. You can do that. But when you don't like they shut down the airport for a few hours at night. And so it was literally just a cold, hard for

all right. So then you just go back and you're like, I got two LPs. Good trip. Yeah. And so, And so it was that process for, you know, it took almost two years to raise our first fund, you know, which ended up being like $2.5 million, basically. And so, you know, it's- How many companies do you invest the $2.5 million in? About 20, yeah. We've always run a pretty concentrated book. So the first one was, they call it 100K checks, basically, into 20 or so companies. We've always been concentrated, still are today.

But, yeah, I mean, you know, the journey of Contra in the early days was just, you know, relentless scrappiness, right? It didn't really know anyone. So you have scrappiness to find the LPs. But there's also this story where your largest LP on your birthday is like no mas. I'm going to sit this one out. Explain that. It's the same fund. Yeah, it's the same fund, right?

So I spent, you know, almost two years running around, had 1,300 meetings to raise our first fund, right? didn't know anybody didn't know anybody who are these people are they doctors lawyers are they like other vcs are they founders yeah it's a combination so so i it was a lot of of tech folks or ended up being a lot of tech folks um and then uh i'd say it was mostly split between wall street folks and tech folks uh and the reason i ended up actually moving out to sf and and living out there was because i would go on these trips to sf i would crash on my friend's couch and i would go meet people. And the number of folks that I would get pinballed around to was unbelievable. And so, you know, people talk about, you know, the, the demise of SF, whatever. And, and I don't

know what it's going to be like post COVID, but come on, don't softball it. Is it, is it going to come back or is it not? Yeah. Look, I, I, I think that unequivocally it is still one of the best places in the world to build a startup, right? I agree with that. I think people don't understand how long it takes to build dense ecosystems of talent yep and and so I think you know will it ever be what it was no but on like a percentage basis will it still be the number one place to to kind of start a company for some time absolutely I think that's all the Miami people get mad at me but like I think that there's a high probability what you just said is accurate but what happened was uh there's more like dissipation of talent across the country

and maybe in the world um but it still is like a very good if i was 22 yeah that's probably where i would go move 100 yeah i think you either go even so so when we look at our own network right now 40 of them are in sf 40 are in new york which is staggering and then 20 are everywhere else combined right um but that new york piece is actually the most interesting right uh because that was five percent ten percent pre-pandemic right uh and and so that's that's like a i mean it's a massive tectonic shift right but but i agree i think like when you're in your 20s being in sf being in new york if you're an ambitious person i don't think you get so much better than that i think kind of you know once you're a little bit older that's right and your

network's built you can kind of go wherever you want yeah that makes sense um all right what's the craziest company you guys have funded like the absolute most insane people say like wow these guys are more technology wise or or the founders are just one of each yeah okay so in terms of the founders i'd say it has to be this company called zepto uh yeah zepto z-e-p-t-o okay yeah so um what is zepto so it's it's it's actually it's like a 10 minute delivery company uh like a go puff, but for India. Um, and so we met the founders because they, uh, they actually came inbound to us. And I think we've done a decent job of building kind of like a, a, a kind of brand within a demographic of folks. And, um, so they came inbound to us and we didn't, I don't

know if we knew this at the time, but, uh, they were 17. And so, uh, and they said, Hey, you know, We both got into Stanford. We want to build this company in India. If you give us $100K, we'll defer admission to Stanford and build this company. And so he said, OK, well, we've never done an investment in India before. Don't really have a network in India. Don't really know anyone in India, right? But these guys, going back to clarity of thought, it was unbelievable.

I mean, for 17-year-olds, right, the level of clarity that they had about every single aspect of how they were going to go about, you know, getting their first customers, scaling this thing to the moon, like what they actually wanted to build long-term was unreal. And so we said, okay, well, if we're really putting our money where our mouth is here and talent is what we believe in more than anything else, right, like let's just do it and see what happens, right? And so we gave them $100,000 and then tracked them for six months. And they actually dramatically surpassed our expectations. They made some great hires. They were executing like hell. And so we gave them another few hundred thousand, half a million, whatever it was. And fast forward to today, 18, 24 months later now, fastest growing startup in India's history, 1,000 employees, hundreds of millions in revenue.

And they're 19 now? Mm-hmm. i don't know crazy unbelievable yeah uh when you go back was it just clarity of thought or was there other things that in hindsight you're like man that was a really good signal i said like this was gonna happen yeah i honestly i do think it was clarity of thought it was you know the level of sophistication and thought and maturity that they had they could have easily gone toe-to-toe with somebody twice their age and so even if you just extrapolate off of that right and you say okay, well, these guys are 17, like, can you only imagine how good they're going to be in

five or 10 or 15 years, right? Even if this company doesn't work out, you know, no hard feelings, it's $100,000, we live to fight another day, right? But the upside is massive. So yeah, I think ultimately, it's just, it's just, when you spoke with them, you knew, hey, like, these guys, these guys are special, right? And we're in a business of benchmarking at the end of the day, right? You're talking to hundreds or thousands of founders. And you're simply just trying to calibrate hey how how sharp sophisticated is somebody relative to their age experience whatever and and these guys are off the charts so a lot of people don't realize how important big is in venture capital yeah right uh we've seen a lot of uh companies blow up in the crypto world all

this stuff yeah and people are freaking out and they don't realize like no actually that is the entire venture capital model of uh it you want it to be either as big as possible or it's gonna end being a big crater in the ground but if it ends up being small small victory or small loss then actually it wasn't a venture type company yeah i mean we we exactly i mean we you could you could talk to lps or whomever right like if if if your loss ratio is zero you're actually not doing it the right way right in venture i mean so if you take if you take you know uh our portfolio let's say like like ours right which is typically a pretty early stage it's 75 of what we're doing is kind of pre-seed, seed, series A.

The remainder is kind of maybe series A, series B, a little bit of early series C. But if you're looking at it from a purely kind of pre-seed, seed, series A point of view, at the seed, in a 20-company portfolio, we're underwriting that half of these are going to go to zero. And out of the remaining 10, five to 10 do kind of, sorry, five of them do kind of one to two X in aggregate.

And five of those out of those 20, but really two or three out of those 20 are the ones that are actually driving the returns um so yeah i mean that's that's basically how the model works and and the loss ratio needs to be higher than zero otherwise the venture model won't work so yeah what is the craziest technology that you guys have invested in yeah yeah so um it's a good one there are a couple a couple options uh so we invested in this in this company called red leader which is essentially building software defined LIDAR, um, for all different kinds of applications, autonomous

vehicles, whatever, um, we can software defined. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So LIDAR, just for those that don't know, uh, explain it. Yeah. So, so it's essentially, uh, you can think about it as, uh, uh, kind of like what, what Waymo and, and, and if you've ever seen any of those like Uber autonomous vehicles, essentially what, what happens is there it's sensors, right. That you're putting all around a vehicle and and ultimately it's it's building an image of the world a kind of in front directly in front of you right and then you're you're using kind of autonomous technology to help the car or whatever you're dealing with a helicopter navigate that and it's basically shooting light out and like understanding the object the depth all that type of stuff right

you described it much better than i would hence why i offloaded that to you uh but but it is a technology that is really i think self-driving cars where how most people have learned about it what is you said software driven lidar is that fine software defined what does that mean yeah and so what's interesting is if you look at some of the kind of incumbents in the space companies like velodyne or whomever right um they are using a much more traditional kind of like tech and hardware stack whereas red leader this company is like software is at the core of the infrastructure They're not it's not so much the LIDAR itself that they're innovating on. Right. It's the software and the code, actually, that they're writing, which enables them to image at a dramatically higher kind of frequency than any of the existing folks.

And so if we're to pull this up and I show you after, but you look at a demo video that they have. And relative to kind of like the current state of the art, and it's stunning, they literally invented math like to make this tech work. it's it's unbelievable and so they've been working on it for four or five years where are they using it for um the initial application is going to be avs yeah autonomous vehicles um but it has kind of a broad i recently saw hopefully this isn't a competitor of theirs but i saw uh there was like a plane that was flying over the amazon yeah and they were using i think lidar and they were uncovering uh civilizations ah yeah along the amazon river that were previously not known yeah and a huge piece of it was uh people thought it was so uninhabitable or whatever uh but by

flying over even though there's the tree canopy they were shooting the lidar down and like uncovering this shit and they were like yo people used to live there right and so like again it's different than autonomous vehicles but like i was blown away i spent probably two hours i don't want to admit that but i spent two hours on the internet like looking at images of people's lives from thousands of years ago it's nuts yeah it's absolutely nuts yeah and so i think like these like there are dozens of applications here and frankly a lot of lidar companies have been a total waste of money and time and effort right i mean there's been billions of i mean i think ford has always has been you know two years away from from autonomous vehicles for the past

decade now uh so i saw elon congratulate the ford ceo on selling like a couple thousand electric vehicles yeah exactly so it's like you know the the promise of lidar the promise of av these who knows right but i think that the raw tech when you look at what red leader and some of these others have built it's it's just stunning and and and i think it makes you really excited for for the future so so uh tesla has um autopilot whatever name they want to use but basically you can pull down twice on the freaking uh drive stick or whatever and it stays in the lane on the highway that was like the only experience i'd ever seen was like it stays in the lane on the highway slows down if cars are in front of it it can kind of tell right it's got

the nice imagery whatever they have a recent update now it's driving in cities really i have a friend who sent me the video he's more courageous than me he's sitting in his driveway he puts in the coffee shop like you know probably on a mile and a half two miles and he has to go to red lights stop signs turn like the whole thing yeah he like took a video yeah and i was like oh shit it's wild Like, like, like you can just see like, okay, cool. Now I don't think it's anywhere near where like, you know, the whole, like people are going to be sitting in the back and it was going to be at the, at the steering wheel. Have you seen what cruise is doing though with the robo taxis?

No, what are they doing? Yeah. So, so, so they have, they've done this. Yeah. So, so then exactly what you're saying. So if you go on, I think on Twitter, actually Kyle vote, who's the CEO, I think he has some, some videos, uh, of, they just started it. They just opened it up to the public a couple months ago, and it's only in SF.

And, yeah, you can hail a cruise fully autonomous end-to-end, and you sit in the back seat, and the cruise just drives you. So an hour ago, Kyle tweeted and said, the press, they say autonomous vehicles are overhyped and are still five to ten years away. And then he said, us, meaning cruise. yeah at this moment there are a hundred cruise autonomous vehicles in driverless mode in san francisco and many are currently carrying passengers and he has an image from two nights ago with all the little dots on it there you go holy shit so yeah so it's it's definitely real with cruising i said i think the question now is like how do you how do you actually scale this right i mean they've been the cruise cars have been driving around sf for years right mapping it

And, you know, I mean, there's just so many permutations of things that could go wrong. Right. But they're doing it in SF. So, you know. uptime. For pro and institutional traders, they've just launched the OKX Liquid Marketplace, which is an on-demand liquidity network with multiple brokers where you can instantly trade spot derivatives and multi-leg structures at the price you want while bypassing the order book. They offer up to a 50% discount now, so go to OKX.com to try it today. OKX.com, go try it today. This episode is brought to you by 8sleep. The holiday season is here, so give the never-ending gift of deeper sleep. About two years ago, I started to sleep on the 8sleep and I sleep on it every single night. It quite literally changed my life. I get deeper and better sleep, but don't

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is go to compass mining.io today again if you want to get into bitcoin mining go check out compass mining.io today so they have the cars uh they're all branded crews and uh they have them like all parked in like a little uh parking lot and then there's taken off and they say on your mark get set go yeah yeah have you seen the video of the cruise car getting pulled over by by the police officers this is hilarious you got it you got it you got it maybe after this whatever you gotta you gotta watch it a cruise uh you know av taxi got got pulled over by some cops i don't think they realized that there wasn't a human in the car yeah so there's nobody in this car nobody in this car yeah i'm watching the video right now uh youtube will take it down if we put

it up probably uh but it says that they launched daytime driverless rides services live for cruisers and will launch uh to public or whatever yeah uh and literally they have the video and there is nobody in the driver's there's nobody in the car and they're interviewing these two uh ladies and they're having the time of their life in the back it's nuts it's nuts yeah this is nobody so are they the farthest ahead i i think when it comes to actually i mean they're the only one that i know of that has done this end to end right now uh but it's just in san francisco right and so we'll be curious to see how much they can basically how quickly they can scale at different cities right but yeah they're the only ones that i know right now that are doing it uh like truly

end to end in a city it's wild yeah and they have videos of people i guess uh trying to trick the cruise vehicles at night like there's a guy they claim i think this is real i mean they have a video of them trying to do it uh he says the driverless cruise autonomous vehicle was tracking both the person and the dog and managed to swerve to avoid a collision he said risking your life to prank an autonomous vehicle is stupid but it's your call just leave your dog out of it and it's literally a video of a guy it's at night the car's driving down the road and he like is in the road and darts at the cruise and the cruise swerves avoids and then like immediately slams on the brake yeah that is nuts i don't know i mean people are people are stupid right but uh yeah it's

crazy all right so you guys got the lidar what are other some crazy technologies yeah yeah um like what's like what is the future that's what i want to talk about what is the what is the future stuff that people are like, there's no way that's going to work. Yeah. Yeah. Um, what are your thoughts on Anduril? Anduril? Yeah. I love it. I'm surprised that, uh, it took Palmer and the Anduril team to say, Hey, we should use the most cutting edge technology in the defense of our country. A hundred percent. Yeah. I mean, that's, that's what we should, that's what we should talk about. Right. I mean, so we're, we're, uh, we're investors in Anduril and, and I think, you know, So, I mean, like you said, it's the most logical extension of, you know, talk about like tech for the future, right?

And in defense of not only the country, but just democracy, right? And it was funny, right, because I think for a long time, Anduril was, I think, kind of tacitly like poo-pooed, right, amongst a lot of folks in the venture, the tech world, right? And then something like Ukraine happens, and all of a sudden you realize, okay, well, actually, maybe defense is important, right? It is important for democracy and for this country, right? And kind of building the next-gen Lockheed, right, the 21st century Lockheed, is an incredibly important mission, right? uh, and, and, and something that if we're not going to do it, China or whomever's going to do it. And, and, and, you know, that's, that's it. Right. So, yeah, I mean, I think that that's been, that's been fascinating. I was, I had a chance to drop by the new, they just opened up some new headquarters in LA four or five months ago. Yeah. It's awesome. Yeah. Yeah. Matt has given me a kind of like a tour of some of the new tech and buildings. Um, uh, how much of it

is war versus like other types of uh uses so yeah hostage rescue or humanitarian aid or whatever like there's so many things that the quote-unquote government or the the defense contractors actually participate in it's not all like let's go kill people yeah but how much of that business is the other stuff yeah well so so so andrew their their whole model is essentially kind of predicated around the inverse of the traditional kind of defense prime model right which is uh you know typically kind of you, you, you know, kind of wait for the DOD or whomever to kind of like put out some RFP, right. And then kind of build something for it and you bid and then, and then you build the project, right. Um, and you use the government's money to build the project. So basically the

government is taking the risk that you're going to be able to build it. That's right. Yeah. Um, Andro's basically flipping it on its head. Right. And so, so they, they, they're building, uh, through discussions with a lot of folks, obviously in the defense community, right. But they're, they're building products that they think will resonate ultimately. Right. And they're taking that risk and then selling it right so so the first one uh the first kind of product launch was essentially just like a century a century tower for uh initially for the border right um and it's having a bunch what's a century tower mean uh just like a just like literally like a 25 foot tower uh that you'll put you know on a ranch in south texas somewhere and it can be used

to detect you know whether it's like uh illegal immigrants or uh drug what's it got it's got probably cameras it's got like a heat sensors like all the types exactly anything you might imagine like yeah sensors like infrared you know you name it right and so and then they're just putting all these different century towers every x you know miles and say along the border uh so that was the so you're saying that andrew built the wall building a digital wall uh so so that was kind of like the the both sides of the political aisle got excited there that's yeah yeah yeah so uh so that was kind of v1 right and and and now they have a bunch of other product lines essentially that they're launching or so they they recently acquired this company i forget

the name of it i think it's based out of australia and and they're building like an autonomous sub uh and they have another one uh that's essentially like an autonomous helicopter right or they have another one that it sounds like video games it's it's unreal yeah like we're just gonna be sitting here with joysticks and we're like oh this my submarine just blew up your submarine that had no people in it we'll speak about like the future i mean the future right like the future of warfare is a largely humanless future right like that's just what we're going to trend towards i mean the the reason why societies get upset with war at times right is is either you know it just goes on forever and costs hundreds of billions of dollars number one right or number two like

human casualties right so if you're able to remove human casualties from that equation number one it's a great thing for the world but number two you know and this will be interesting i i do wonder if it actually ends up enabling more net new like microaggression right because if you can just send your drones out yeah like my my robots killed your robots yeah like no humans died yeah exactly if i have a lot of money well whatever right do you know what talon robot is talon t-a-l-o-n uh so when i was in the military um at one point i was a combat engineer which sounds it has the word engineering it there's no engineering um basically they were like you guys are gonna do roadside clearance like go look for bombs and basically be bait yeah right like horrible uh and so in the

train up uh to go to iraq they're like oh we have these robots yeah and you're like sweet robots that sounds cool yeah and they literally would uh train there was like actual people trained and they kind of like field trained a couple of people in case that person got hurt or like wasn't there or whatever yeah and so this robot would like get out of the vehicle like you'd like pull it out of the vehicle and you'd put it there and you're standing like it's far away from obviously what you think could be a bomb yeah and so you like maneuver it down there like literally like a you know uh like a uh a car or whatever like a um you know remote control car whatever you get it down there and it's got this big ass arm and it has like the pinchers on the end yeah it had a camera

so you're like looking through to see what it sees yeah and the people who are very well trained could literally pick up like an m&m with the pinchers and not crush it oh wow like that was the level of uh one sophistication but also to the ability of the machine yeah so we're like we they were badasses we're let's go we're there we got the robot in the back right first couple of missions we go yeah and uh uh all of a sudden we think we see a roadside bomb we're like get the robot yeah pull that bad boy out go down four hours later not a bomb robot comes back pack it up go yeah half a mile down the road we think we see a bomb guess what happened to that robot after like three missions we're like leave the robot at the thing

if you're in one of the front vehicles just run the shit over we'll figure out if it's a bomb and so like i always think about like that specific experience as like yeah obviously the technology was incredible like at the time it's 2008 2009 so like you know more than 10 years ago, they had this technology, but like humans still had to use it. And whether we were smart or dumb, we just left it behind and then we'd just go use it. So like, how do you think about the human element to some of these technologies that get built? Like, are we now at a place where the humans recognize like, no, this is actually better than the humans doing it? Yeah. Well, I think we're getting there. Right. And like, I think per, per, per what you said, right. I think

in, in oh eight or nine, like, you know, there's a lot of tech that's just too far ahead of its time. I mean, this is the definition of hype cycle, right? Like this is what happens every one or two whatever years right i mean right now we're in the generative ai hype sucker i don't know if you saw the the chat you know chat gpt3 thing that came out yesterday right so like you know i think that's significantly more mature than the last aiml hype cycle three four years ago right but it was you know aiml it was self-driving cars it was you know uh crypto for me yeah yeah yeah it was um i mean i don't know right you keep going back back back every one or two years yeah yeah exactly and and the vast majority of them uh don't fulfill the the the

stated aims right and and and they're just too far ahead of the time for for the hype but i think ultimately what happens right is your your tech that in 0809 was was like incredible for the time but still very little real world human applicability you know i think we're inching pretty close i mean you look at some of the some of the videos now what the military is using or some of the robots or even you look at like what boston dynamics has done right and um you know i i we're not there yet uh with i think kind of human like hand-to-hand combat for example right you're saying humans could still beat up the robot but like it's getting harder i think it's getting closer yeah and i i think i think i think when it comes to drones um i think we're

pretty close right like i i think you were already pretty close right and so i have a friend who lives in texas and you know in texas they uh they think that they can't be fucked with and so he i remember joking with my dad i was like what are you gonna do when the drones come yeah and he was like i'm gonna shoot him out of the sky i was like that's a great answer but uh i was like do you understand how quick these things are or whatever and he like started thinking about it and like you could tell that he didn't want to say it but he was like oh shit i can't shoot that out of the sky no way or if you have drone swarms right if you imagine having to send 400 drones at you that cost a couple hundred dollars each to manufacture and they're all attached with

you know some small bomb or whatever right what's up with san francisco they're arming the robots now to kill people i saw that just yesterday is that real it's unbelievable i i mean i didn't i didn't actually read the article but uh it's on the internet you don't have to read the article just read the headline yeah if it's if it's legitimate then it's it's bizarre why why would san francisco be the first city to no i don't think it's bizarre i think this is like a perfect san francisco thing to do yeah is to like oh we have no law and order to like now we have robots with weapons as our law and order but it's the same thing like the bathroom the uh like the five million dollar bathroom whatever they have i forget how much it was yeah uh they have like a

ribbon cutting ceremony because they built a public bathroom right and it's like uh oh we have no infrastructure no look at this bathroom that we built same thing here it's like we have no law and order people get mad like you know what the solution is they're not just like put police officers on beats in the city yeah let's get robots with guns yeah and it's to any normal person outside of like the bureaucratic like apparatus you're like uh i can think of a lot of ways this goes really bad yeah and then by the way like god forbid that these robots kill somebody yeah and it comes out that they shouldn't have yeah who gets in trouble yeah well i mean you don't put the robot in jail yeah this goes back to the self-driving thing with like a cruise

whatever right i mean this is why they spent years and billions of dollars and millions of miles driven right like to prevent this because all it takes is one what's going on with uh gpt3 and all these ai models like yeah uh the generative art for those that don't know you basically uh type in a prompt a prompt it's just like a sentence you could say like uh uh show me a photo of a person sitting on a park bench with water behind them or whatever and it creates it's awesome like super cool yeah not very clear how people will use that but like cool yeah and now there's like okay now we have the chat now we have like more and more and more what do you how do you guys look this yeah you know i i think for us um we always i should say number one we rarely if ever chase

hype cycles so i think as a firm the the view is that the hype cycles themselves maybe you have one or two companies that emerge from these um that end up being some degree of successful but the companies that are going to be multi-billion dollar companies a decade from now are often spaces that, you know, people aren't really looking in, right? They're kind of undiscovered, they're unsexy, like almost by definition, there's not a ton of hype behind them. So actually, Kevin, all this, we rarely kind of like engage in hype cycles. I think when it comes to something like GPT-3 specifically or the generative AI stuff,

you know, I think for me, there's always a question of like, what is the durable source of value that is being created at the end of the day? And is it sustainable, right? And you look at, um, how do you, how do you measure that? I mean, I think you just, you can just look at it and, and, and like, like, like art is a good example, right? Like what, like the real world utility of, of me saying like, Hey, draw a picture of, you know, Anthony sitting in the park, right? It's nice. It's, it's, it's, it's helpful, but it feels a lot more like a feature than it does like a meaningful platform or something that people are going to pay, you know, SaaS style

model of revenue off of, right? And so, yeah, I guess what I'd say is like, we tend to be skeptics of these kinds of things. And when you look at different like innovation waves, right, kind of like SaaS and mobile and whatever it might be, whether the advantages accrue to the startups or the incumbents, I think tells a lot too. So Elad Gil kind of wrote a post about this recently, which, which I think did a good job of encapsulating some of my views here too. But, uh, you know, I think the, the reason the mobile wave, for example, wasn't super protracted relative to SAS as an example is because the incumbents, the, the Facebooks, the Googles, whomever, they ended up capturing a lot of that value pretty quickly.

Right. Uh, within like a, really like the burst of time was like three to four year periods, like 2009. Are there any companies that ended up being fucking massive that didn't work out of the gate? Oh, all the time. but no i don't know which one pivot though yeah but like that's not but that's okay so you're saying like oh okay yeah i can't think of any like slack right i think you'd be like oh it was you

know the video game or whatever right exactly uh but like slack was a different product that's right and then it was like pretty obvious i think from what i understand from that story like immediately twitter was out of audio but like pretty quickly people were like oh this is cool and it started to take off yeah so like i do think a lot about uh like the 90 day or 180 day shot clock. Like if you start something and in 180 days, it's not working, there is a, it doesn't mean that it won't work. It just means that it's unlikely to be really, really big. I think that's right. Yeah. I think when you, when you think about like real generational companies, right? Like the, the, the 10 billion plus companies, there's usually something that almost from

inception feels like it's working. Yeah, I agree. I agree. I think, I think there are other companies that you can make work over time but those end up being smaller outcomes yeah i mean we could talk i i definitely have some views on on um just kind of like the the ability of kind of like lock versus timing versus hard work versus whatever when it comes to building companies right what are your thoughts i mean i i think ultimately like this the simplified version is that these a lot of these 10 15 20 billion dollar plus outcomes it is the confluence of all of those factors right whereas if you're i i pretty strongly believe that like if you're a sharp person building in the right space uh and and somebody who can kind of like listen to customers like

with enough grit over a five ten year period like you can make something happen right um i mean i think you had max leption on recently right and like this is kind of what they do with with a firm right it's like a firm kind of like it's been around for a while but you kind of listen and tweak the model and like inevitably you kind of hit on on like a burning need for a customer and then you kind of hit the gas and go from there right so like these things exist all the time but i think for the truly big outcomes like an airbnb or whatever like pretty much from the beginning you know it was working right so yeah where are you guys looking now like okay you're not chasing the hype cycles yeah well what are we all missing yeah where where are the areas that you find

interesting yeah um well so i think for us it depends on on kind of what stage we're at as a firm, right? So pre-seed, seed, series A, we're laser focused on the person, right? We actually don't care what space they're building, right? I don't care if it's digital health or fintech or infrastructure or whatever it is. As long as this is a person that we've known for a period of time, we think is top 0.1% and is doing something really interesting, we have enough conviction to write them a check at the early stage and see what they can make happen. When we get to a later stage, right, kind of call it series B and beyond, that's when we start to get more thematic, I'd say as a firm, right? So I think that's, that's when you look at a company, let's say, you know,

fintech infrastructure, right? And you're looking at, hey, in the FP&A space, and what are the five companies that we think are world class in this space right now? And what is the one company in that space that we think is going to win, right, that we think is going to be a multi billion dollar outcome. So depends on the stage. But I'd say in general, right now, we're still spending a lot of our time in like digital health and and then uh what i'll call like fintech infrastructure like those are two spaces that were will you guys not back a founder if uh you haven't known them before um no we will uh we will but i'd say it's it's the minority of what we do yeah so if i kind of look at where where we're deploying capital today probably 30 to 35 percent of what we're

doing is kind of from this closed loop network of folks that we've built that we've gotten to know you know, through our fellowship community, whatever it might be. I think probably 30, 35% is from our software platform. So we've built a pretty sophisticated software platform. It's kind of systematically identifying and tracking great talent. And then we'd have what I'll call like traditional sources, right? Founder referrals, whatever it might be. And that's the remaining 20, 30%. That's essentially what the breakdown looks like. But all things equal, we like backing people that come from our network and folks that ultimately kind of like have a Like we have some kind of edge in finding them first and understanding like, hey, why is Contra seeing this deal, right?

Not just getting the deal that everybody else has passed on. So it's like real adverse selection there, I think. Is this the future of venture capital firms? Like is this what they're going to look like? That's a great question. I mean, I think the answer is yes. But is it just one type of firm or will this be one of many strategies that can be successful? I think it will be one of several.

But if we look at a decade from now and you ask yourself, hey, Eric, like what like what does venture look like in a decade? And I essentially think three things will win. I think, number one, you'll need some degree of technology at your core. I think number two, you'll need talent and community. And number three, you'll need distribution, you know, content, media, whatever. Right. And I think the firms that will win. Right. The next kind of Andreessen's or YC's or whatever will have all three of those in spades. And then I think, you know, there will be firms that exist that do one or two of those very well.

Right. Or even individuals. Right. I mean, obviously, like you've done a great job of kind of building it like that last one, a distribution. Right. Like you have a world class brand and community and whatever. Right. And so there will be pieces of the puzzle and people who can kind of carve out their niches within those. But I think if you're trying to build the next Andreessen or ever, like I think you need to ultimately have those three things in spades. So, yeah. What are the strategies that people are chasing now that you think won't work in venture? Yeah. I tend to be not not as much of a fan of what I'll call like thematic venture funds. Right. And there are some that do exceptional work and I think are best in class. I think like a, like a Ribbit for FinTech or, you know, Amplify with enterprise infrastructure,

like there, there are some world-class firms that, that do that. But I think there are a lot of firms that do that. And it's, it's principally a marketing endeavor more than anything else, right? So they'll say, oh, you know, we're a, we're a, you know, a cybersecurity fund, right? And as a result of that, you know, we're, you should, you should give us capital because we're, you know, deeply, deeply knowledgeable about this, right? But, and so from an LP point of view, I think it can be enticing or alluring, right, because you're saying, wow, well, I'm looking for a cyber fund, and these guys brand themselves as a cyber fund, so they must be the best, right? But when you look at the best venture platforms in the world, right, the Sequoias, the Andreessens, the Founders Funds, whomever, they're all generalists, right? And they're all generalists for a reason, right?

They're generalists because the best companies don't discriminate, right? You know, the best companies are in enterprise SaaS and, you know, fintech and consumer and everything between, right? Like, your job at the end of the day should be to identify and back the best founders full stop, regardless of what they're building, right? Regardless of the space that they're building in. So, yeah, I think that's kind of, I think, one that I feel pretty strongly about. There's also something, I think, somebody like kind of some of the kind of like tier two, tier three accelerators as well. Like, I think that's a ship that has long since sailed. I think YC is, I mean, they've just built such brand equity at this point.

But yeah. One of my last questions for you is, if I want to start a company in the future, what is the things that I should do beforehand to get positioned to have the skill set, experience, network, et cetera, to be able to start that business? Let's say I'm coming out of college and I'm like, one day I want to start a company. What is a, maybe not the only path, but a good path for me to pursue? Yeah, I think it depends on the kind of company that you want to start, right? So I think if you're interested in starting, you know, in an enterprise infrastructure company, right? I think that's a much different path than if you want to go start a fintech company or whatever company, right? And I think, you know, in enterprise infrastructure, for example, when you look at many of the very successful companies that have been started in that space, right, if you look at a Rubrik or a Samsara or whomever, right, they're started by people who are oftentimes in their 40s, typically, right, who have spent 20 years basically, like, deeply understanding, like, how infrastructure works at large scale enterprises, right?

So that's that tack. Right. But I'd say for your for your typical kind of new grad, if you're thinking about, hey, you know, I want to start a company, the best advice that I could possibly give them is to go work at a series A to series C hyper growth startup, one that's backed by, you know, a top five, maybe top 10 firm, one that has somewhere from 20 to 50 people. and then just go do whatever it possibly takes to learn. Just get your hands dirty, right? I mean, I think about it as like a ramp or a retool or whatever, right? Like if you can get in early at one of those companies, the velocity of learning that you'll have over the next two, three, four years

will be unequivocally higher than anything that you could ever get by working at a FANG company or working at a Series D or C or soon-to-be-public kind of company. and you learn so much on somebody else's dime brand credibility reputation, right? That by the time you're ready to kind of spin out and start your own company, you know, the fundamentals and, and, you know, let's say you're working at ramp, right? You don't have to go start a

fintech company, right? It doesn't matter. At that point, you've learned a broad based skill set. That's pretty generalizable, right? Uh, and then you go build. So that, that would be my best advice is like, if you're a new grad thinking about starting a company over the next two to four years and you don't already have the idea that you want to work on today, go work at, you know, a ramp style company, um, for a couple of years, learn under some of the best, most ambitious entrepreneurial people in the world, and then spin out and do your own thing. I think that's a great idea. Uh, what about friend groups? Like founders who end up being successful usually tend to be around other founders that are successful. Is that fair? Yeah. I, I think it's fair. I think

like when we look at even kind of within Contra, like the, the, the networks of people that have been formed, um, or even if I go all the way back to the genesis of Contra, right, you know, a decade or so ago, um, I think the, the most ambitious people associate themselves with other really ambitious entrepreneurial people. And so when I look at the founders that were backing, who are, you know, earlier in their careers, right. I think kind of call it like 20 to 26, 27, yeah, for the most part, I mean, they have a small pocket of half a dozen to a dozen friends in their city that they're living with, you know, living in a hacker house with, like, spending time with, working on projects with, right? And this stuff matters, right? And it

matters because you're building trust, you're building long-term relationships, you're getting to know someone. We just, back to company, actually, seed stage, but, you know, the founders went to college together, lived together, have stayed close, sorry, both in SF together. And, and, you know, one just recruited another one from a startup to go start the company together, right? So like, these things can take time to play out. But ultimately, you know, finding your tribe, right, like finding your group of people is super important. And then that carries on to the company that you're at as well, right? If you look at, again, like a ramp or an Andrew or whomever, right, the the, you know, the early employees at those companies end up building their own

versions of mafias, right? And they spin out and they all angel invest in one another's companies and they start companies together, right? And it's really powerful, right? And there are a small number of companies that have large numbers of entrepreneurial people. And again, like if you're a new grad or whomever, like those are the pockets that you want to look for both in friend group and also in colleague group. So yeah. And when you think about your day to day, what is your like normal schedule look like yeah um ebbs and flows by the time of the year i'd say but uh you know i you know i'd say typically today i'm i'm in more of like a ceo style role at contrary so we have about 20 people on the team now five on the investment team 15 kind of helping us build the

the talent identification machine right across engineering and data science and talent and so on um and so i spend probably um uh maybe a third of my time recruiting uh you know trying to kind of bring world-class people on the team uh and kind of level up with every single hire and i spend probably a third of my time uh on some combination of fundraising or managing the team right kind of like setting strategy vision and probably the remaining third on investing and supporting existing founders. So that's roughly the allocation of time, but it can ebb and flow if we're fundraising.

You're remote or you have a office? Remote, but we have a, we have a call like a third space in New York. Actually, I should have just opened it up a couple of months ago. It's called Contra NYC. And basically like it's an extension of the whole thesis, right?

Which is we're trying to build infrastructure to support people at every step of their journeys, right? We're trying to help them find their first jobs, write them their first check provide a home for them to meet like-minded technologists you know all the way through you know supporting them for their whole journey um so yeah we have a space that we just opened up in new york recently it's it's pretty awesome but um remote first is a firm yeah and then how do you communicate with the team slack email uh meetings yeah we guys do yeah we use uh we use microsoft teams teams some people do yeah yeah yeah no uh we i've banned teams by

the way good we one of the companies uh i don't know why the founder uh always wanted to use teams and like if you don't have the app on your phone or whatever you like can't like call into it like it's just like it's brutal it doesn't make any sense and so i finally got frustrated and i was Like, if I see another Teams link, I'm going to freak out. Yeah, it's brutal. Yeah, so no, no Teams. So we use a pretty traditional stack. So it's Slack, Zoom, email, whatever.

And then the cadence that's been pretty good for us actually is remote versus a team. I'd say out of the 20, maybe less than half of us are in SF. And then we have a couple in LA, New York, whatever. um and then we kind of marry uh that cadence with a quarterly in-person team off-site so every quarter we basically go somewhere in person usually just in the u.s right and and to kind of take three four five days to you know do feedback level set on where we've been where we're headed and just have some team bonding time in person i think it's been there are certain people who are obviously more energized than others by in a person and so it's been a good balance for

us that allows everybody the flexibility to kind of do what they want, live where they want, live their own life, but, but also kind of show up for their colleagues. You think people work, uh, as much remote as they would in the office, or do you think they work more remote than they would in the office? I think it depends on the person, right? I think you have to, you have to be internally motivated, right? Uh, and, and you have to have ambition and want to build. I think, you know, if you're talking about, you know, Google style scale, I mean, there's no, there's no there's no doubt that it's becoming massively less productive company but i think when you're a team of us with 20 where there's really high accountability across the board right it's like

every single day like you have your responsibilities right and if you don't have your responsibilities you're not doing them it's obvious right uh and so i think in those kinds of environments it's actually fine you're you have you know for the most part senior ambitious motivated people who are going to show up and do great work regardless of where they live but i think once you start scaling meaningfully right call it past the century mark yeah i i i i would i don't know if i do it if i were uh if i were ceo so but there's a war of talent right you end up with a with a you know game there's not a war of talent here's my here's this might be one of the things people disagree with all right yeah there's not a war of talent for the best companies

if you are a generational company people are knocking down your door trying to work there right think of uh andero as a great example how many companies are actually competing with andero for talent i don't know the answer yeah but like i bet i mean i went i looked one day they have like 200 open roles yeah right yeah and when you look at a business like that if you're into defense tech like where do you go work for sure right and then maybe you're just like into tech yeah like where else you're going to get to build this stuff yeah like it's just so differentiated than everything else that again it's bombastic say it's not a war on talent but it is a very very big competitive advantage just simply the mission that you're doing and so

naturally you are able to attract talent that other people can't yeah i think that's right and i think that's right but i think there's you know a handful of companies we can probably count on one or two hands those companies and i mean frankly those are probably the companies that people should be trying to go to work for of course uh but there's a reason why people want to go work there totally yeah but but for the rest right like it's it's uh you know i think it's a much tougher sled right if you're if you don't have the visibility yet if you don't have the brand yet and you know employer x says oh yeah you can stay remote and and you say oh no you have to be in person you know i think i think many founders that i've talked to feel like it

puts them in a hard spot right where like especially if you're a seed or series a right like you're still building your company you're just trying to get the best engineers we're kind of full stop. Right. And if 95% of your competitors are saying that engineers can, can work, you know, remote, it's just hard. Right. And you don't have the time necessarily to be, to be, you know, spinning your wheels on trying to find amazing engineers who also want to work full time. So, uh, yeah, it's, it's a hard one, but, uh, I think it just depends on like where you're at and the company's evolution. So, yeah, that, uh, that makes sense. Where can we send people to find you on the internet yeah we're at contrary.com or uh my twitter what's your twitter account uh

it's just first first initial last name so e tarzanski but it's a brutal one to spell so contrary.com how'd you get that yeah it just was a slog but we got it yeah yeah it just paid up yeah so we uh we we paid but we we found if we have a fantastic uh broker that we use um And this person, uh, talk about hustle. They have unrelenting hustle. We've said, we, we, we said that we sent him to, oh man, half, half a dozen of our own portfolio companies at this point too. Uh, yeah, he, um, he will spare no, uh, uh, spare nothing really to help, to help, uh, help people get the domains they want. So I think one time he called up. He found the so he found the owner of the domain. Right. And then he called up the spouse of the owner of the domain and told because they originally didn't want to sell. and then he told them uh that uh did you know that so and so like your your partner has an offer uh to buy x.com or whatever it was for it's like fifty thousand dollars i don't know what it was um and he doesn't want to do it uh and they were they went crazy yeah they went nuts

literally the next day sold so this guy this guy's pretty good yeah yeah you just gotta love people who understand how the world works. That's right. That's hustle. Yeah, that's absolute hustle. All right. Thank you so much for coming and doing this. We will definitely do this again in the future. Yeah, appreciate it. 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

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