The Pomp Podcast - #384: Erik Torenberg on Decentralizing Venture Capital

Episode Date: September 15, 2020

Erik Torenberg is a co-founder and partner of Village Global, an early stage venture capital firm. He is also the host of Venture Stories. Erik was the first employee at Product Hunt and has also co-founded various companies, including Rap.fm, Token Daily, and OnDeck. In this conversation, we discuss personal moats, individuals over institutions, hundreds of people on cap tables, decentralization of venture, student debt, and attributes of great investors. ============================== CoinList is where early adopters invest in, earn, and trade the best new crypto assets before they list on other exchanges. Sign up via coinlist.co/pomp and trade $100 and earn $10 in BTC and 10% of trading fees for 6 months. ============================== Athletic Brewing is re-imagining beer for the modern adult. We love beer. But we also love being healthy, active and at our best. No matter your motivation, if you want to keep a clear head and drink healthier, we are here for you. Athletic makes non-alcoholic beer that you don't have to compromise to enjoy. The beers are fully flavored, clean ingredient, and a fraction of the calories of full strength beer - they fit in any occasion. Check out www.athleticbrewing.com for more details and free shipping nationwide. ============================== Pomp writes a daily letter to over 50,000 investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy to understand language, while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://www.pompletter.com

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. Let's kick this thing off. Eric Tornberg is a co-founder and partner of Village Global, an early stage venture capital firm. He is also the host of Venture Stories. Eric was the first employee at Product Hunt and has also co-founded various companies, including Wrap FM, Token Daily, and On Deck. In this conversation, we discussed personal moats, individuals over institutions, hundreds of people on cap tables, decentralization of venture, student debt, and attributes of great investors. I really, really enjoyed this conversation with Eric, and I hope you do as well.

Before we get into this episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. First up is a new one, CoinList. Smart investors know being early is critical to success in crypto, and they've built CoinList to give users access to the best crypto projects before other exchanges. CoinList has always been the first place to buy promising new crypto assets through their token sales. Now CoinList Pro is the first place to trade them. CoinList is where early adopters invest in, earn, and trade the best crypto projects before other exchanges. CoinList Pro is a full-featured spot exchange with all the features you'd expect from Coinbase or Kraken, except you get access to the best new assets first. CoinList has supported over a billion

dollars in transactions and they've worked with tons of different projects. You should definitely go check these guys out. If you head on over to coinlist.co slash pomp, again, coinlist.co slash pomp, and you trade a hundred dollars, you can earn $10 in Bitcoin and 10% of trading fees for six months. Again, coinlist.co slash pomp, where you trade a hundred dollars and you'll earn $10 in BTC and 10% of trading fees for six months. Go check out Coinless today. Next up is one of my favorite sponsors, which is Athletic Brewing. These guys are absolutely crushing it. They're all about reimagining beer for the modern adult. They've got great tasting beer that happens to have no alcohol and be a mere fraction of the calories of even the lightest beers. In today's

modern mindful performance driven world, there's just no time for hangovers. With Athletic Beers, you can have the full relaxing ritual of drinking a great beer to wind down the day or with your dinner or day drinking without derailing the rest of your day or week. If you're looking for a great beer for Sunday through Thursday nights, Athletics got you covered. My refrigerator is stocked with them. Their beers have won awards on multiple continents, including the World Beer Awards Best Non-Alcoholic Beer multiple times.

They've even won awards versus full strength beers. I'm not joking. If you try one of these, you will literally think it is real beer. it tastes exactly the same. So you'll give them a try. You can use code POMP25, P-O-M-P-2-5, POMP25. You'll get 25% off your first order at athleticbrewing.com. POMP25, you'll get 25% off your first order at athleticbrewing.com. But wait, there's more. They now accept Bitcoin in various cryptocurrencies as well. Who doesn't love a company that's driving adoption by accepting Bitcoin as a currency. Go check out athleticbrewing.com. Use code POMP25. You'll get 25%

off and you will be drinking the best non-alcoholic beer on the planet. Lastly, don't forget that I write a daily letter to over 50,000 investors about business technology and finance. I break down complex topics into easy to understand language while sharing my personal opinion on various aspects of each industry, you can subscribe at pompletter.com. Again, pompletter.com. All right, let's get into this episode with Eric. I hope you guys enjoy this one. Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp

as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. Long time coming, but finally, Eric is here. What's going on, man? How are you? It's a pleasure to be here. Long time listener, first time caller. Bang, bang is one of the best introductions to a podcast out there. Glad to be here. So wait, before we get started, you got to do the intro to your podcast. I see people tweeting at me.

Come on, give us the quick intro. Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Village Global Venture Stories. It's the everybody accent that gets people going. That's what people were tweeting. They love it, man. They love it. All right.

So for the couple of people who are watching who don't know who you are, let's just start with your background and kind of what you did before you got to Product Hunt. Sure. So I'm a venture capitalist and an entrepreneur. I run a venture firm called Village Global, and I'm chairman at a company called Undeck. The backstory is I grew up in New Jersey. I'm a son of Israeli and Colombian parents. I went to University of Michigan, started my first company right at a college called Wrapped FM. It was like Zoom or chat roulette for rap battles. We were trying to be Twitch for music, started with Rap Battles, was solving a personal interest, and did that for about three years. We had some traction, but it was just early in the live video space. And so it didn't take off, but learned a lot through that experience. I met Ryan Hoover, who was the founder of Product Hunt. And when I was leaving Wrapped, I asked him, hey, can I help out?

I thought that helping him out would be the best way to figure out what I wanted to do next. And so I joined him. I offered to work for free. He said, no, no, I'll pay you. But my job title was hustler. So I was a hustler at Product Hunt. And within six months, it had gotten to Y Combinator, then raised $6 million from Adresin. And then I said, well, I guess this is the next thing I'm doing for a while. And after Product Hunt was a two plus year journey, fantastic journey. And I I left, right before I left, I started On Deck, which was a dinner series for event series for people who were looking to start

or join their next thing. And the backstory there is basically, I started angel investing while I was at Product Hunt because I was just building my network like crazy, seeing all these deals, sending to investors. I said, hey, I should start investing too. So I started angel investing. I started scout investing.

And I realized that Product Hunt was just this unfair advantage, this asset that I could have to discover deals and then to get into deals. And I wanted to build more unfair advantages or assets. Like I'm not the smartest person in the world. I need to have, you know, I don't have other superpowers. I need to have these, these assets.

And so I thought if I, you know, product and helps people with customers, if I could help people recruit or find co-founders, that would be an unfair advantage too. So I started on deck event series later became a, you know, 10 week fellowship and we'll go into now it's trying to be a new university. And then I said, what would a venture firm from the ground up built, built from the ground up with the idea of unfair advantages look like? And that's when I teamed up with Ben Kastnoka and Ann Duane and created a network-driven venture firm, Village Global, which is a $100 million seed stage venture fund. All right, so let's go to product hunt first.

If anyone is paying attention to the tech industry, they've heard of product hunt, they've seen product hunt, they've probably tried to get to the top of product hunt, kind of all these things. you were very early, I think even maybe employee number one, talk a little bit about like, you saw a company that not only scaled and ultimately exited to AngelList, but also a company that was right in the heart of Silicon Valley. Like you had all those deals, you had all those products coming to you guys, like what were the biggest lessons learned or takeaways for you personally, as you saw that business get built and help really helped scale it to what it became? yeah there's a few lessons one in terms of getting the job in the first place um there's this idea that young people are especially scared to just start

because they think they will be a blemish on their resume wouldn't be uh it's it's something to be proud of and there's a difference between job risk and career risk job risk is the risk that your job isn't there two years from now career risk is the risk that that it sets you back Whereas being a founder, actually, it shows to other people that you know what it's like to be an entrepreneur, that you know how to recruit, you know how to sell, you know how to take risks. And so, you know, one thing, also as a young person, especially if you founded something, you don't necessarily sell, hey, look at all the things that I've done, you know, in my life, sell your slope. Look at all the things I've done in the last two months. Look at all the things I've done in the last two weeks, in the last year. I started here and here's where I got to.

And Ryan, in seeing that, you know, this sort of entrepreneurial spirit in me that was able to handle ambiguity, that was a lesson learned in terms of, that's why I think people should be more ambitious and more willing to take what I call asymmetric risks. That's what I took while I was a product of this idea that your downside is capped.

You know, if the product didn't work out, I would have still built this incredible network. But the upside is uncapped. If it was, you know, if it turned into this monster business, I would have meaningful upside in it. So one lesson is pursue asymmetric risks. learn how to sell yourself with slope. And then the other is, I knew that I wanted to be

an investor. And you can't really, if you're getting into the game, you need to have some reason why people want to take your money over the sea of other investors out there. And so being able to have an asset or a structure that really helps them recruit or get customers or raise money that is sort of independent from your time. I mean, ProductTent was this asset where I was giving or helping give dozens of founders game-changing traction every single day. There's nothing that can compete in my sleep. And so for aspiring investors out there, I really encourage them to think about what are other assets. And maybe it's a podcast like your podcast. Maybe it's an event series. Maybe it's a conference. Maybe it's a forum. Maybe it's some

digital product that really just gives you an edge. And so when you think through that, I think people now say like, oh, no brainer, Eric's so smart. Like, look at all the things that he's built to give him those edges. I'm assuming that while at Product Hunt, you saw people build lots of things, some that worked, some that didn't work. Any frameworks or kind of mental models that you came up with to kind of think through what actually was truly sustainable and kind of gave advantages versus maybe things that they were shiny toys and would be popular on product hunt for a day or two, but ultimately would kind of fizzle out. Like you, I feel like you just got a lot of reps in terms of not having to build the companies. You just saw them and any

lessons learned there. Yeah. If you think, I mean, what, in terms of sort of like building this edge or building assets, uh, in the same way that I like the idea of seeing your career, uh, as a product and focusing too many people try to network right away without thinking about how to try to get coffee with somebody without thinking about how do I add so much value when I get coffee with that person, such that they'll want to keep having coffee with me or add me to their network. And that's the hard part. Like finding Pomp's email is not the hard part. It's getting in his rotation, having something to add.

And so in the same way that products and companies think about building moats, I advise that people think about building personal moats. So your personal moat should be unique to your talents and interests, something that's easy for you to do, but hard for others, something that compounds over time, and something that's hard to reverse engineer, hard for other people to do. So some examples I give, Tyler Cowen has an encyclopedic brain and intersection of economics and politics and history. And you see him talk and you think, wow, I would have to probably spend a couple of decades to get to where he's at. Another example is Elad Gil, who's invested probably in a couple dozen unicorns. Angel

Investing is this interesting sort of inefficient market where it takes many years to be seen as good. So if you start right away, you won't know until you're good for seven years from now. So for someone to match Elad's unicorn count, again, probably have to spend a couple of decades. And then you, Pomp, building your audience over many years, a very loyal audience. For someone to say, how do I become Pomp? I don't know. That's a really hard thing to do. And you want to build a personal moat that when someone's like, how do I reverse engineer this? They don't even know where to begin. And so for you, obviously, you've learned a lot of this at Product Hunt. You saw people try things, what worked, what didn't work. Ultimately, when you

went to start on deck, talk a little bit about kind of what that original idea was. And then it's really evolved over time, right? It kind of started out as this dinner series or event series and now has very ambitious plans. But let me talk just about like what pulled you guys in that direction? So one thing I really learned from Ryan is pursue side projects because you never know what they can turn into. Product Hunt started for a side project. Ryan's documented how it was just an email list and then turned into a company. On Deck 2 was a side project. I was looking for my next co-founder. It's actually kind of hard to find a co-founder. People say, oh, it has to be someone you met in college or someone you worked with. But there's a lot of potential people out

there. And so I started this event series to solve my own problem, which is how to find a co-founder. And then what I found is if you go down to your Dropbox, Facebook, Airbnb, Stripe, all these companies and ask their sort of talented people, like, do you think in the next year you might want to start a company and might you want to be in a community to meet other potential co-founders? Nearly all of them will say yes. It's just, it was sort of an underserved opportunity. So we started doing these one-off events. It was a volunteer community for a couple of years. We had sort of, you know, 5,000 people attend events in dozens of cities around the world, all volunteer run. And then what we realized is that we weren't necessarily having the compounding benefits that we wanted, like someone in 2016 didn't have an easy way to connect to someone in 2018. And that's when we really started the fellowship, which sort of this accelerator model, this cohort model. We started last year, we've now had five of them.

And accelerators are just so powerful for creating long-term community, compounding benefits. It gets stronger the more people that enter it. And we said to ourselves, hey, we really know how to do fellowships for founders. We then were about to start this angel fellowship. But we realized like, hey, we're not just going after Stanford MBA, we're going after Stanford. And so that's the vision is to sort of be a digitally native university as if it was started in 2020, especially in the era of COVID. And so we say if Stanford is trying to teach people how to be citizens of functioning society, we're trying to help people become functioning citizens of the internet. And what do you need to be a functioning citizen of the internet? Well, you might want to start a company. You might want to build an investment portfolio. You might want to write. You might want to have a podcast. You might want to build an audience. So that's our grand vision. And is the thought process that basically it's kind of like a futuristic school where literally like I sign up and I'm with a class and I literally learn from teachers or kind of talk a little bit about like what does that experience look like for people who are participating? Yeah. So imagine, so our founder fellowship is like a Y Combinator or a Village Global Accelerator experience, but before you have a company. So you're looking for a co-founder, you're looking for startup ideas, or you really just want to be in that sort of accelerator ecosystem without giving up equity. We charge a fee and that's how we make money. Um, and so imagine that model, the accelerated model applied to, uh, for angel investors, for, for writers, for podcasters, for YouTubers, for designers, for product managers. So what makes that experience powerful is a few things.

So one is you get speakers from, from top practitioners. Two is the sort of group experience and accountability. So a lot of people who are going to our writers program, they really just want to have this regular cohort. why I see the other accelerators that do so well is every week, you have to come and share what you've done, what you've shipped. And that public accountability that some people say that's like the best part of part of the accelerator is really just week after week in front of very smart people that pressure puts, puts positive pressure on you to chip and just get things done. So people

really appreciate the cadence, and then just up leveling the game the same way you might go to fitness boot camps to see other people who are beating your butt and oh, I have to really step up my game, and then coming out with a finished product at the end. So we really think about how can we accelerate people's goals, and then you start to build positive network effects. So the first cohort of Y Combinator ever was Justin Kahn, Alexis Ohanian, Sam Altman, right? They would go on to do incredible things together, and they would benefit from the following cohorts that would, one, make the credential more impressive. So going to YC is this impressive thing. But then also they'd be able to hire those people, invest in those people, team up with those people.

And especially in sort of the COVID era, community is scarce. And so the power of a fellowship to provide that ongoing community that just gets stronger is really working for us. Got it. What's the biggest challenge with building the company, right? So you guys have kind of grand plans and things have gone well and you started to scale the business. What are the biggest things that keep you and the rest of the team up at night? We want to get to dozens of fellowships in the next year. We see COVID as the biggest opportunity where people are just eager to have community, eager to have fun things to do that are meaningful, and the opportunity cost of their time is much lower. And so we're blitzscaling. We were, you know, I think 1 million, you know, run rate in May. Now we're five. We were probably eight people in May. Now we're 21. With dozens of new fellowships, we'll probably, you know, quadruple the team in the next, you know, year. And so learning how to scale when we haven't scaled before is the biggest thing on our mind. But how to keep the quality high while you're doing it. Got it. And then when a lot of people look at this, I think that they'll say, this is a fantastic business in terms of all of the ancillary benefits. But how do you think of it as a business? What I mean by that is, is this something that looks more like an events business and kind of an exit opportunity is there? Is it something that looks like consulting or teaching or education? like, you know, part of the beauty of some of these businesses, they don't fit in a box. But when you when you kind of think through it, like, where do you put it? Or how do you think about the intersections of maybe some of these disciplines and what you guys are doing? Yeah, this business

has really actually humbled me as an investor, because it broke all the rules in terms of what you're not supposed to fund. So a chairman with a majority ownership of a company who's not full time, who it was a volunteer thing for a couple years, in sort of this weird space, it's unclear if it's a technology business, if it's a services business, so many VCs passed on this business for all the right reasons. And it just turns out that it's working. It's still early, of course. But in terms of how we see it as a very big business, the Founder Fellowship alone is a $5 million business. So 2,500 people a year will pay around $2,000 to be a part of this program. We think that we could do dozens of fellowships that are also multi-million dollar businesses

on themselves. And then we think once we've done a lot of fellowship businesses, we can do a fellowships as a service product where we can enable other people to sort of build passionate communities, almost many cults around themselves and give them the tooling and infrastructure to do that. There's a sort of saying that social networks are come for the tool, stay for the network, like TikTok and Instagram or Musical.ly, but others are come for the network and stay for the tool or data that that network can generate. So product is one classic example. LinkedIn is another classic example. Quora is another example. And I think we're doing something pretty interesting here too, where if you have tens of thousands of founders, of writers, of podcasters,

why couldn't we compete with Substack? What's defensible about Substack is the relationship with the writers, but we're going to have these incredible relationships with writers. So that as a platform for different technology businesses that you could build on top of it is is what gets me really excited but even still for the services business the fellowships is what allows us to hire to scale we're profitable we're we don't need to raise any more money uh at least that's the plan right now and um and we and the reason why i think people are willing to pay right now partially because we've we've sort of established a strong community and these businesses are very hard to disrupt like once you have a y combinator once you have an accelerator

that has you know a few cohorts under its belt and people love it it just it's very hard to compete with. And in the COVID era that people are willing to pay, they maybe have more money because they're doing less other things that we think we could bootstrap a lot of these cohorts in different categories. Got it. And so obviously you've taken a lot of these lessons around building moats and advantages into the venture space with Village Global. You have probably one of the most impressive lists of LPs. You've told the story before, but kind of give us the 60 seconds on just how the LP list came together, whatever names you're able to share publicly. And then we can talk a little bit about the actual model that you're employing. Sure. So we asked early on,

how do we build unfair advantage or a network at every level of the firm's DNA? And so part of that was the LP base where Ben Casanoka is the former chief of staff to Reid Hoffman and is just amazing at working with with reed and other uh luminaries and us three combined with reed and a couple others were able to sort of paint a picture of of what sort of a new allen and company could look like or a new allen company meets a meets a y combinator and sort of sell them uh you know mark zuckerberg jeff bezos bill gates and their their teams a vision that this was going to be really strategic for them that we were going to have like a white combinator we were going to have hundreds of startups a year that could be potential partners for them potential acquisition targets

for them uh and just keep them sort of fresh on what the latest and greatest is in in venture and so it was really a combination of luck and then selling them a vision that this was this more than any other venture firm was going to be as one could be successful but two could be a really strategic asset for for insights and network intel and at when they're at that stage in their career obviously, the incremental dollar is not as important as the incremental edge that can help Facebook or Amazon or Microsoft. So that was one unfair advantage we thought about was the LPs. And we spent a year and a half working with the various teams to make that happen. And then we also thought, how could we really decentralize venture? So we had this thesis that venture is

way too centralized. Sort of this irony that venture capitalists are supposed to be capitalists, but sort of operate their business like they're socialists. It's one central planner saying, This is what the price of bread is. I know it better, you know, across every geo, across every sector, across every network. And we just saw that there was this explosion of complexity that there aren't just, you know, one person used to be able to cover the entire internet.

John Doerr used to just clean up, right? But now you don't have just subsectors like crypto. You have subsectors and sub-niches within crypto like Privacy Coins and DeFi, all these different areas of expertise and networks that are cropping up that there's no way that five people on Sand Hill Road could be masters of universe

and have expertise into all of them. and that you need to decentralize power decision-making to the people who have the most knowledge. And so we have this network of 30 plus angel investors that we empower with our capital such that they can express their local expertise, whether they're a key network or key sector or key geography and make investments on our behalf. Got it. And so as you've built this out, obviously you guys have had a lot of success finding companies very early. Is that mainly dependent on kind of this scout-like network where those individuals have that industry domain expertise or experience and they're kind of finding it and you guys are

using that system? Or are these things where maybe you've built other systems or advantages where you're getting some sort of deal flow so early, right? On Deck is an example or other things. Just talk a little bit about, it's one thing to find good companies or to find good founders. It's another to find them before they've started a company or literally in the early days of the starting of the company, not waiting till the series A or later. And yeah, a lot of it is competition over who can get there first

and who can add value to the entrepreneurs such that they're the first person they go to when they're fundraising. Because as you know, it's an incredibly competitive market. So it's a few things. It's the scout network that is out there. We have scouts that are embedded in different companies

that we think have strong mafias and looking for the best people to come out of there. Some of our scouts own specific conferences or have specific assets themselves that enable them to be first called. And one key thing that we do relative to other venture firms is we empower them to make the decision often without our screening it.

So by decreasing the friction, they feel more empowered to work with us than to send it to some other firm. But then also, as I mentioned, unfair advantages, not just in being able to win the deal, but also in being able to evaluate. One thing, at the earliest stage, So much of it is people bet. And one thing we like to do is, yeah, put them in on deck. Let's see them, how they work over 10 weeks, over three months. What do they ship? Who do they team up with? How do they engage in the community? We pulse the community for who are the most compelling entrepreneurs here. And that just extra data gives us an advantage when we decide to pull the trigger or not relative to another firm seeing them for the first time.

And that time is accelerated. I think first round had this stat that a few years ago, it used to be 90 days between the first touchpoint and term sheet, and now it's nine days. So these processes are so competitive. Founders are often going to other angel investors or founders before they go to VCs. And by the time they go to VCs, it's sort of like YC Demo Day. It's this bidding auction. So obviously, every investor wants to avoid the bidding auction. Talk a little bit about what you're seeing with investment round dynamics. So you just talked a little bit about timeline going from 90 to nine days. Talk maybe about the idea of firms versus angel investors versus kind of the solo capitalist trend. And then also what you're seeing in terms of check sizes, right? If you talk to somebody from AngelList, they would say, hey, it'll empower somebody to invest and then kind of syndicate the rest of the deal. If you talk to an investor who's got kind of a very large capital pool, they'll say, we're trying to take out entire rounds or whatever. So kind of what are you seeing at the earliest stages of investing that might not be as obvious to those who aren't in the trenches doing this every day? Yeah, a few things. One, I have this broader belief in that it's individuals, not institutions, and that people always, and that's not just in venture, but it's in media, it's in a variety of different

industries, that people just identify with the authenticity and the specificity of an individual versus an institution. And you sort of ask, why has it been that way? Well, it's always been that way, but now individuals are just more empowered than ever, as you know, as you've covered in this podcast, to have direct relationships with their audience, to be able to monetize directly from their audience. And you can sort of cut, and it's just so much easier to create a living and create an audience individually.

And that's no exception in venture. That's why you're seeing so many people go it alone. So many people prefer to take money from operator angels or solo GPs. They can just move faster. They have more specificity to them. And I think it relates to this broader trend within venture, which is the decentralization of venture. Instead of, this is my prediction for the future venture, instead of a couple dozen people on a cap table, you should have hundreds or a thousand. And that way you could really unbundle the capital with advice and get people who are world-class in different positions. This is the increasing specialization and thus decentralization.

And we're already starting to see it. I'm seeing a lot of firms just open up space for small checks. You know, we just had a company that is doing is raising a monster round and is leaving a million dollars. It's one of the most competitive rounds in the Valley, but leaving a million dollars for their audience and doing it on WeFunder. So I think we're already seeing the sort of rise of individuals over institutions. And I think we're going to see a lot more individuals coming onto cap table. Now, for sure, this is at the earliest stages is that seed at, you know, at A, at B, these individuals don't have the capital yet. But I think we'll start to see solo capitalists go later stage as well. And so explain maybe the psyche of a founder who says, hey, I have a really hot round. A bunch of investors are all fighting over getting in, but I'm going to save this million dollars for that audience or the user base. Is it simply I want them to have some feeling of ownership and that will lead to more usage and they'll go kind of be ambassadors for me? Is it something else? Why would they do that? There's this concept of value add or even founder friendly.

It's a cliche now, but it's a fairly new construct. And it's telling in the sense that venture didn't need, used to sell themselves to founders. Founders begged them to take their money. But then capital became a commodity and more people started to have it. You started to have a little bit of unbundling between capital and value add. And so now people really need to differentiate. And it's still incredibly inefficient. The people who can often add the most value to your business, often other entrepreneurs, other execs, they don't have the capital.

They're not leading the series. Like investors are usually generalists. They're rarely the person that can offer the most value for your company relative to the stake that they take up. And so if you're building a community product or a product that really relies on evangelists, one of our companies, Roam, is an incredible productivity product, a personal knowledge management product, and has the Roam cult. And for a community like that, who's so invested in it, also to feel more invested via ownership, is just very powerful in expanding its moat. And I think part of the dynamic is sort of questioning, hey, VCs, what value are you really adding relative to the people who can evangelize the product? And this was something that crypto was and is trying to do with tokens. Ways to disrupt these sort of network effects businesses is just incentivizing orders of more magnitude people to use your product and to identify with it and want to see it grow.

So one of the interesting trends for me, not only is one the social capitalist thing, obviously, but but two is this idea that many times founders or their operators are the most helpful. Today, they don't have the capital like you described, but it doesn't seem a stretch to me for those people to eventually have very large pools of capital. And, you know, do you see a world where, you know, there's been a couple of companies that have raised rounds where there's been no institutions, right? It's been all individuals and quite large rounds. We're not talking about a half million dollar round. We're talking about literally tens of millions of dollars. Is that a trend that is accelerating or are those kind of outliers? They're cool to talk about, but they probably won't become the norm over time. Yeah. Generally, I abide by the rule of whoever owns the customer demand gets to capture the value.

And founders would rather work with other successful founders than VCs on average. And right now, every industry is held back by regulations and venture is no different. One of them is that VCs have long vesting schedules such that it's very difficult to switch. You saw when Kiefer Boyd joined Founders Fund, when Sarah Tavel joined Benchmark, there's a sort of question of like, is this about to become NBA free agency? This is like Kevin Durant going to the Warriors. And the answer for right now is no, because the vesting contracts are just too long such that they're giving too much to do that. But I expect GPs, because they capture the value more so than the institutions that they work at, if they're stars, will be able to renegotiate those contracts such that they're more fair and flexible. And then also accreditation, of course, prevents many entrepreneurs or many execs from being able to invest. But I think this is a trend that will only continue, is right now held back by certain regulations or practices. But once sort of value capture reorients to the value creation, which sort of inevitably happens, even if it's a slow process, I think we'll continue to see it. you've talked before about generational theft uh and this idea that uh it seems like everyone's becoming a socialist and uh i've talked about it from like every capitalist on wall street in time

of crisis becomes a socialist right everyone's looking for bailouts all this crazy stuff yeah i think you're talking about something a little bit different maybe describe a little bit what you mean there by generational theft and the relationship to socialism yeah well i want to first say that one reason I'm so excited to build a new university right now is because universities are just in a really tough place. And I think that they are sort of ripping off their customers. I mean, think about an industry that has increased 300% in terms of costs since 1980, without any verifiable increase in quality. College debt is now $1.7 trillion. It's kind of like a Ponzi scheme. We have a federal loan program funded by the taxpayer. So students go

into debt and then keep paying taxes to fund other people's debt. And then that's just the financial situation. In terms of the product itself, colleges, we used to sort of outsource IQ tests and conscientious tests to colleges such that they were good filters of talent. But now we're getting rid of the SAT, we're getting rid of the GRE, we're getting rid of all these standardized testing. So it's unclear what it actually means to get into a university anymore. On top of that, professors are miserable, they're underpaid, students are in tremendous debt, And all of this is separate from COVID, which has sort of shown that the emperor has no clothes, and that people are still paying the same amount of money for Zoom University. It just shows that you're really just paying for the piece of paper. And which we said, if they, you know, stop serving as a good filter of talent, it's unclear what that piece of paper is going to mean. And that sort of begs the question, how can they operate this way? And it's because without any competition, there's been no university that's cracked the top 10 in over 100 years. And that was Stanford. Any other industry that has terrible, you know, product for its customers or just costs way too much, you get competition. And it's because it's a cartel, basically. It's a government enforced monopoly where they run the accreditation process, which allows them to sort of give federal loans, federal subsidies, tax shelters on an operating level and on an endowment level.

I mean, Harvard has a $40 billion endowment. That's a tax-strapped hedge fund. So when we talk about generational theft and socialism, part of it is education in terms of the average person, I believe, is in $29,000 of debt, but nearly half Americans have under $2,000 of liquid assets. And this debt is non-dischargeable in bankruptcy. So that's on education. On housing, we have a massive structural shortage.

between 2000 2017 you went from about 11 million units of low-income housing to about 7 million every year you're seeing 330 000 units of affordable housing a shortage there's something like 17 million people who can't afford housing right now so that's education that's housing and then it's health care like i said people have like you know under two thousand dollars in liquid assets and yet deductibles for individuals are like fifteen hundred dollars so any health issue you have it means you're basically financially ruined and so it's it's no surprise that when somebody says the system has screwed you to young people and we, the government, are going to fix everything, whether it's the right-wing populism of Trump or the left-wing populism of Bernie or

even Elizabeth Warren, it's no surprise that people resonate with that because what's the point of capitalism if you can't acquire any capital, if you can't get a house, if you can't get healthcare, if you can't pay for good education? That's why people are so skeptical about it and it's the worst time for that to happen. Well, and I also think what's really interesting is if you look at some of the non-financial metrics, like I saw a stat today that said between the ages of, I think it was 18 and 29, I believe, for the first time since the Great Depression, anyone between the age of 18 and 29, 52%, so we're over 50% now, live at home with their parents. And I was just like, look, there's the kind of cliche, oh, the millennials

live at home, you know, all that kind of stuff. Obviously, there's data that's supporting some of this. What we don't know is how many of those people are COVID, you know, they let a lease expire, they moved home with their parents, and they'll move out, you know, maybe the start of the year or whatever. But what I think you get to is, there is a very different relationship with capitalism, with money, with assets, with, you know, buying a house, all of these things that I think are kind of like memes, in terms of people talking about them. But they're funny, and they resonate because they're true, right? And that's basically what you're describing here

is that there's almost this like self-reinforcing system that guides people on this journey between the ages of, you know, I don't know, 10 years old and 30 years old. And very few people kind of recognize, hey, there's traps along the way. And I love your framework of like the asymmetric career risk, right?

And so what, I guess, what are the attributes of the people that you see maybe break out of that, you know, track that they're on or kind of what are the things that you see people do, whether they're actions or maybe some sort of attribute that does allow them to realize, Hey, wait, this isn't the only path in life. There is something else that I can go do. Yeah. The, um, I mean, just to put a bow on your point, millennials were told that they'd be better situation than their parents financially. And they're not, they're living with their parents and they see their parents doing much better. And so that's sort of the generational

theft is this lie that they see of what they envisioned was this American dream. And so now they blame the system, especially when other people are providing them with sort of what I think are faulty solutions or recommendations. In terms of people who get out of it, well, first it's don't walk into the traps to begin with. Now, if you can get into Harvard, I'm not going to necessarily tell you not to get into Harvard, but if you're going to some third rate university and about to take out quarter million dollars in debt, maybe reconsider that. Think about why you're going in the first place. The crazy thing about the university is that there's also this sort of anti-capitalist bent at the university. And so not everywhere, but in a lot

of places, in a lot of departments. So you go to the university, you get quarter million dollars in debt, and then you're told that the reason your quarter million dollars debt is capitalism's fault when capitalism is the thing that's going to get you out of the debt. So you're both like financially ruined and also like sociologically, you know, just less likely to produce a big outcome if you think, you know, or to get out of that debt in a flourishing way, if you think capitalism is the enemy. I think there's this new movement called Progress Studies that Tyler Cowen and Patrick Collison have started alongside others, Jason Crawford, who are picking up the work. And what they're really doing is when they're trying to fight back on the university level in

terms of providing viewpoint diversity. It's great. It's great to have multiple perspectives, including the one that exists currently. But then also what they're really focusing on is retelling the story of basically, how did we get such a better standard and quality of life? How did we get billions of people out of poverty? And the answer is basically markets, you know, capitalism. And so by sort of creating this, this appreciation for, for, for, for, for capitalism, for, for markets, for, for the power to get people out of poverty, to invent new things, to change people's lives. I think one way I see people doing is, is really appreciating the tools that are going to get out on an individual level. But then also be able to tell themselves a story

that once they get out on an individual level, I mean, see all the great things that people like Bill Gates and Elon Musk are able to do for society that they can, you know, not just help themselves, but also help society at large. Where do you see the biggest opportunity for young people today, right? So young people are in this situation, kind of from a generational standpoint. Is it to go into tech and build companies to go work for technology companies? Like, if you're, you know, 17 years old, 18 years old, you're graduating high school, What is that blueprint that you think is just the better way? Yeah.

So what's interesting about crypto in 2016, 2017, when it was really popping off, you see a lot of the funds that emerged out of it, or even just the people who are leading a lot of the projects, is a lot of them were young people, were people in their 20s, people who didn't necessarily have a lot going on beforehand. And that's not because they're smarter or because they're more accomplished. They're not. Um, in, in fact, but the reason was, was that they were more comfortable taking asymmetric risk because crypto looked stupid, you know, like Bitcoin looked dumb, uh, before now we

sort of, you know, normalize it. We have all the industry around it, you know, but it, it really was the career risk for, for people. Uh, and this is where we go back to job risk and career risk. The less you have going on, the more you should be willing to take asymmetric risks because one, you're only known for the things that you succeed at, not the things you fail at. I failed at Wrapped FM. A week later, I was at Product Hunt. No one cared anymore. No one's cared ever since. Reid Hoffman, Marc Andreessen, immensely successful people. Reid Hoffman started

a social network dating site that was a total failure. No one knows about it. Marc Andreessen started Ning, a social network for dogs. Total failure. No one knows about it. So you're known for your successes and you want to take big swings. You really have very little to lose if you're in an okay financial situation and a lot to gain. So crypto was that in 2016, 2017. Today, what is that? What looks dumb, but if it works, could be enormous. I'm really intrigued by income share agreements. There's a community that's working in charter cities, building startup societies. That's incredibly difficult, but could be enormous. Virtual reality is always is just, just around the corner. So, um, whether it's starting something or joining something,

I would look for where are things that other people think are dumb, but you don't think are dumb. Cause that's where, that's where the, that's where the arbitrage is. Um, I would join something like on deck or Y Combinator or Village Global Accelerator. Um, I would try to put yourself in networks such that even if your startup doesn't work, you've just built this incredible network. But yeah, nothing is better than doing in terms of learning. So if you don't have to be in college and you don't particularly want to be

and you're compelled by the idea of potentially starting a company, there are communities out there for you that will support it and I would recommend it. Geographies to do all of this. You have spent a good portion of your career in San Francisco, long or short San Francisco. And then where else would you be long on?

So this is the best time to live anywhere. I started talking about living on the internet. We used to say it was never less important to live in San Francisco, but you had more important to be connected to San Francisco. And a few years ago, you had to be in San Francisco. But now most of us are living on the internet. Most of us don't even know where we are when we communicate with each other. Most of our communication is online. So it's less that San Francisco decreases in power or the rest rises in power. It's just that location matters less and less together, physical location, especially as companies go more remote because they've learned how to do it recently. And what I'm really excited about this is that it's an

equalizer. You don't have to move to San Francisco or go to Harvard to get your education, grow your network, or build your reputation. You want to be at the locus point of where all the activity is. Now, by all means, if you can move, sure, go to San Francisco. San Francisco is great, but you don't necessarily have to. What's more important is what group chats you're in, who you follow on Twitter and who follows you, what Telegram chats you're in. What does your digital ecosystem look like? And you can do that from anywhere. So I asked for questions from people on Twitter, and they sent a whole list of obnoxious, ridiculous questions. I chose my favorites. And I figured we could do some rapid fire and you just throw out answers as we go. The first is, I think on a 20 minute VC episode, you talked about from no one to VC in that path. What is the blueprint for somebody who is literally a nobody, nobody knows who they are, but then they can very quickly break into venture capital? Yeah. So the first thing, and this is sort of contrary to what people will want you to think, is you have to get numbers on the board. You have to start writing checks and building a track record. And it's because VC is incredibly inefficient asset class. It takes seven to 10 years to be great. And not just because of the skills that you gain, but just because of

the feedback loop to even know how you're doing. You can invest for two, three years, go in a coma for seven years, come back out and be one of the best investors in the world. There's no other industry where that's the case. VC is so reflexive where if you're known to be the best, then you get better deals. It just becomes true. You need to build that early. In basketball, for example, you could find LeBron James at 18 and realize, oh my God, this person's not only going to be incredible, but incredible right now and can dominate. It's obvious. There's no equivalent of a young person. Maybe they have a network and stuff, but you don't really know if they're good at picking for years. So my advice to people who want to get into it is find a way to write checks.

And there are these things called scout programs where venture capital firms, we have one, give people checkbooks to write on their behalf. Now, they give people checkbooks to write on their behalf to people who've built a long-term relationship with these venture capital firms and I've sent numerous deals. This is what I did at Product Hunt. I started sending all these deals to ventures firms and over time they were saying, hey, this is inefficient.

You should just write them directly. You have good judgment. You have good deal flow. You just do that. So you want to add so much value such that they can't ignore you and it just becomes more efficient for them to take a bet on you.

And then it goes back to building the asset, building the reason that you have access for founders in the first place or why they'd want to take your money. And it could be something like Product Hunt or on deck or some sort of product that helps people get customers, recruit, hire people, get expertise, but could also be an event series, a telegram group, a podcast. There are all sorts of these little different assets or products that you can build to get noticed and to get respected.

You are a very, very big fan of rap. Everything from the first company you started to literally hosting zoom freestyle battles uh where did that love for hip-hop and rap come from and then what is your favorite instrumental to uh rap or freestyle over when i was younger i wanted to make the nba i had no chance making the nba no i i you know most people give up that dream when they're like in third grade i was like in 10th grade i was like i could still do it i i was delusional i've always been inspired by doing uh i've been inspired by agency just the power to to change your circumstances and i've been inspired by the idea of doing something that people think you have no business doing or don't have natural skill set doing and showing them that

you through agency and hard work you can get kind of good at something and so rap i'd always been a a listener and a fan and so what i just said the agency combined with i was a very shy kid in college, I went to school in Michigan, in Detroit, I made a bunch of friends in Detroit. And I sort of saw people doing it. I said, wow, I'm a really shy person. But if I learned how to do that, I bet I could public speak, I bet I could pitch, I bet I could sell, I bet I would just be so much more confident, so much more outgoing. And plus, it just looks like the most fun, fun, fun thing ever. So I've been doing it for, you know, almost a decade, a bit over a decade and um you know i'm not like a pro or anything but you know i could i could hold my

own uh in the in these zoom open mics and we brought the open mic back so wrapped fm ended in 2014 we got the same crew that we were rapping with in 2013 seven years later you know some of them were like 15 at the time now they're 22 33 on zoom every tuesday night and it's uh it's been you know enormous amount of fun in terms of uh beat to to wrap over um the uh naz state of mind is is just a classic uh but uh drake has a lot of amazing beats i mean there's so much uh so much great stuff out there i always joke i think you're about the same age as i am and uh we used to like run home and watch mtv and like the some of the early rap songs i remember was like nelly's country grammar or nas like illmatic right like all these things where you're just like man not what or uh

no nas one mic uh where like the breaking of the glass and the police sirens and just like for whatever reason, man, music just makes you super nostalgia, right? When, uh, when, when you listen to it, uh, what do you think that, or what do you wish that your smartest friends were doing more of today? I'm really inspired by people who, um, who think in public. Um, I'm, I'm in some of these private, uh, group chats where, uh, there's just, I would pay so much money to be, to be in them because I just learned so much from them. And I sometimes ask like, why can't this be on Twitter? Like it used to be on Twitter.

And for some of them it's for job risk or whatever. And it's unfortunate that it is what it is. But people benefit so much when you think in public and you help them sort of think of ideas on their own or they take frameworks and build on top of it. I sometimes think Twitter is like a GitHub for thinking where people are constantly putting building blocks out there that inspires other people when it's not a civil war, of course, it's sort of, and so I wish some

of the smartest people or all these people were having all these fascinating private conversations that they had them in public so that other people can, can, can learn. And when we create the systems that prevent or sort of the cultural norms that prevent people from having those conversations in private, we don't, or in public, we don't see the loss. We don't see the deadweight loss, but, but it's really powerful. Paul Graham had a post on this a few years ago, or maybe it Jessica Livingston, The Sound of Silence. And so that's something that comes to mind, because I've benefited so much from people I'd never met, you know, Tyler Cowen, who now I'm friends with, but for a decade, I was reading Marginal Revolution. And just hearing, reading

him think out loud, just gave me frameworks to think about so many things and inspired so many thoughts. And so I wish others did more of that. It's a great answer. In terms of the political impact or political instability, there's lots of questions around how does that impact VC? How does that impact company building. Just talk a little bit wherever you're comfortable in terms of how you foresee just the chaos that's going on, I think, across the political spectrum and how that impacts some things around tech and business building and investing. Yeah. I'm talking about a couple of frameworks I've been thinking about recently, which is basically in sort of wealthy liberal societies, there's this fundamental contradiction between sort of the politics

of safety. We want ourselves to be safe. We want murder rate to be low. We want people to have comfort, safety, equality. And then at the same time, we're interested in sort of the extremity of experiences. Our media and entertainment is about like Fifty Shades of Grey or serial killer. Like we're so interested in sort of this, you know, it's the phenomenon where the car crash effect. We can't stop looking at the car crash, but we don't want to be in the car crash. And so the way that America solves that problem, that contradiction, it's kind of interesting, actually. It solves it at the level of virtual reality, but not reality. So an example of that is Trump. I don't want to get too much into Trump, but it gives us sort of the perception

of an incipient fascist regime without actually delivering on the fascist regime. So we're all sort of like LARPing that we're in this fascist state. And similarly, on the other side, chas and all this stuff around the sort of some of the riots like seattle and protests you see videos and you're like wow is this a maoist cultural revolution no it's not a maoist it's it's larping it gives us the the sort of excitement of it without actually having to suffer the consequences and and there's some consequences don't get me wrong but it's it's not what people suggest it is on either side and the real way you tell is by the body count like real revolutionary real fascist regimes communist regimes have body counts in thousands millions

This is just in the low dozen. Most of the war takes place on Twitter. And Twitter makes you think it's the French Revolution, but it's not. Even the worst of cancel culture is a cakewalk in comparison. And so in this sort of crazy time, I came across this framework recently of sort of reality entrepreneurs. Reality is sort of up for grabs right now in a big way. And what people refer to as community building, content creation, what you do, that's a euphemism.

it's it's sometimes it's literally people defecting the shared sense of mainstream reality that's existed for centuries and creating new ones and at the same time that trust in institutions in all institutions is crump like who do you trust the who the cdc like the new york times who do you listen to it's it going back to individuals it's it's people like yourself it's people who are creating sort of their own sort of realities and communities and almost many cults. And there's just a huge opportunity right now to do that. And it's more important than ever because there's sort of this explosion of information, the explosion of intensity. And so people are outsourcing their sense-making to these reality entrepreneurs. And so what does

that mean? What does this all mean for investing and startup stuff? Well, one is any startup that helps people navigate uh uncertainty or ambiguity so reality entrepreneurial individuals or institutions or uh just chaos i predict just more chaos it's going to get worse before it gets gets better uh whether that's private security whether that's uh you know uh you know uh communities that that are sort of covid specific that help you do sort of the equivalent of nba bubble uh but in private i'm looking into that um but then these sort of like almost new religions and i don't mean religion and sort of the belief in god but religion is sort of like a community that helps you make sense of what's happening gives you a vision for the future and then gives

you practices and rituals around it and maybe the 1.0 version of that was things like soul cycle and barry boot camp and um you know daybreaker and all these sort of communities but the next level is going to be a bit more of a re-bundling of what we used to have. It's going to look unlike anything we've had before, but those are some ideas. I think that you're dead on in terms of this like rise of religions, but the religions aren't necessarily what you and I consider religious, right? There are kind of these other things around community identity, et cetera, that people just, they don't recognize them today as that, but I think in hindsight, we'll see they kind of replace religion. There's a lot of questions around attributes. And so maybe the

question to ask to kind of answer the most in the most succinct way is just what are the best attributes on a founder perspective? What are the best attributes that you see in investors? And then are those attributes shared? So if you are a great founder, you have certain attributes that also make you a great investor and vice versa, or do you feel like there's different attributes that make a great investor and a great founder? I feel like they're significantly different. I think a lot of people make the mistake of saying, I want to be a great investor, but I'm going to be a founder first to figure out how to be a great investor. Or I want to be a great founder, but I'm going to go work at a VC firm and figure out how to be a great founder.

Often the best way to learn to do something is to do the thing directly. So some people believe this, but I think you don't have to be a great founder to be a great investor. And you certainly don't have to be an investor to be a founder. They're significantly different things operating at different levels of resolution. One of my favorite things in investors is epistemological modesty, sort of the knowledge of what their knowledge is, of how much they actually know about a topic, about a person, about an opportunity. And the answer is often not as much as you think. And so how can you shore up your weaknesses in those areas? And so what sort of systems and processes can you build around it? I'm really interested in evolving this concept

of venture for something that is just a craft to just something that is a platform and a product and a business and something that isn't just sort of relying on great man theory, but really just leverages networks. So I'm excited about investors that know how to do that, that want to do that. And that might be different at different stages, certainly at seed. I think it's most important because it's, there's the least amount of data there. And it's also the widest aperture of potential opportunities. From a founder perspective, I mean, a lot of it is on founder market fit, right? Like, Ev Williams is the perfect founder to do Twitter and Medium, and Travis Kalanick is the perfect founder to do Uber and Cloud Kitchens, but Travis would fail at Medium, and Ev would fail at Uber. And so it's really just what's easy for – it's this understanding of what's easy for you to do but hard for others, and I look for founders that have unfair advantages, whether it's key relationships, key expertise, or just key sort of distinct product sensibilities. But then also one general skill set from a founder is really just ability to just zoom in and out. And so the zoom in is like, you know, what's the perfect email to send in, you know, marketing copy or that converts and here's why it doesn't convert and really just get into the nitty gritty of the details. and then an hour later, zoom out into a board meeting and say, hey, here's how we think about

the next 12 months. Here's what the fundraising landscape is. And to be able to communicate at that level of resolution to your team inspires an immense amount of confidence because it's a very hard thing to do. The people who are doing the weeds work won't be able to understand the long term vision or the big picture, but they'll really appreciate it. And the people who are doing the big picture, won't really understand the weed stuff, but they will really respect that you understand it. So that's a way to differentiate. Accessing talent, right? One of the things that you've done a great job of is on your podcast, asking over and over and over again, many people I've heard, just how do I find and identify great talent? What are the things that I think you've

learned from either asking that question or doing it yourself? so yeah i have this this broader philosophy of don't play the rat race don't enter the rat race unless you're the fastest rat and so don't try to play tournament level games unless you could really win and i was never an a plus i never won the tournaments i always said how can i make the game unfair unfair advantage such that i can do even a b job and just you know win easily and so So on the talent front, Kiefer Boy, who's one of our mentors, has this line that Peter Till told him, which is, if you're a startup, you're going to have to learn how to assess talent better because you're not going to be able to hire the same people that Facebook

and Google are hiring. So you're going to have to hire people who they wouldn't hire or they wouldn't even think to go to or they wouldn't think to go there and work with them and have them be fantastic. I think that's very hard to do. So the trick I've had is basically on deck. I want to build relations to people over a long period of time so I could see them in action.

Another hack I did is I started this retreat where basically I wrote a long list of all the people I ever wanted to work with. And once you write that list, most of those people will be unrecruitable. They'll be starting a company. They'll be working at a company. They won't want to join.

And what I did is I started this retreat. I would do it three, four times a year and I would invite all of them to retreat. and lo and behold, you know, three, four years later, I'm now hiring a bunch of them. Uh, and, and the trick there is it's one, I became regular top, top of mind for them. I, uh, anytime they were thinking about a career transition, I became the person that they, that they went to. And he always with sort of a positive, some spirit, like, Hey, I'm just going to put my friend hat on. What do you want to do next? Um, and that really inspires trust that you're thinking about them

for the long term and then over time uh once we ended up by introducing to each other they became friends they started to build relationships and then once we hired a few people in that that retreat community now a bunch of other people are just sort of want wanting to join and so i think it's really just treating recruiting as a as a long-term game you know communities aren't built overnight they take years in advance and same thing with with great teams it's the relationships that you build in advance and the structures that allow you to build these relationships with a bunch of people over time. So I normally ask every guest

the same two questions to end it. I'm going to add a third because I thought this was a fantastic question that was sent in, which is what is your favorite pre-podcast meal? You know, I've really fallen in love with English muffins with peanut butter. I mean, it is what it is.

It just pumps me up. what's yours uh i don't know if i have one single one you know what actually uh living in new york uh you end up ordering food a lot for whatever reason just because it's so so easy and uh there's like i don't know four restaurants and uh i was telling plan one time that like it's pretty funny that we're at the point now where we don't even remember the names of the restaurants sometimes we just know like oh we want sushi okay like just go in seamless and hit reorder right and you know you start getting into this world of um instant gratification which is probably not a good thing um but there's probably a rotation of four i got like a greek meal there's a sushi meal

um a couple others that uh that i go on rotation but i will say uh here's a good one for you my brother when we were younger uh pop tarts he used to cook them in the microwave not in the toaster for whatever reason and he used to walk around our house telling us 17 seconds 17 seconds that that's the perfect amount of time. And so we still, to this day, give him a hard time about that. Amazing. Two questions to end it. What is the most important book that you have ever read? Nonviolent Communication is a really game-changing book. It's a communication framework, not just for conflict negotiation, but for day-to-day life. They basically, think of it like a fork of English, like a modified version of English that just maximizes

the chances that you're going to not make anyone defensive and you're just going to say exactly what you mean. Because sometimes you'll say something like, is 99% what you mean? And then 1% can be interpreted differently or maybe as a passive aggressive comment. And then people just focus on that 1%. This just makes sure that your communication is super clear. So you're going to cross what you want to say, but then nothing else extra that is likely to make them defensive. That's been a total game changer. I recommend it to people. I love that book. Aliens, believer or non-believer? I am a believer. I don't know how one could not be a believer. The bigger question is, do we know of their existence? Do they know of our existence? One thing I'm really curious

about is why it came out in the New York Times recently that there are some files that they're now opening. Why have the US government tried to hide this from us? And I think they're just trying to prevent commotion or chaos, but I actually think we need this. There's this saying, you know, me, me against my brother, me and my brother against my cousin, me and my brother and my cousin against the neighboring family. So it just goes to show like, we're going to have conflict. And ideally, it could be at the highest level of resolution possible. So we can go here. And as we're having this conversation, you know, there's never been more sort of internal chaos in our country that since since I've been alive, we need a common enemy. And ideally, you know,

Ideally, aliens would be way better than China. And so I say, release the information on aliens. There's this great quote by Jonathan Haidt has this concept called Asteroid Club, which is if an asteroid was coming to Earth in the next two weeks, we would just stop all of our conflicts and just focus on how to prevent this

and we would all cohere. And so I wonder if something similar can happen around aliens. While you were talking, I was literally thinking, yeah, we have the common enemy of China, but definitely agree that aliens would be much better so all humans can come together rather than just be imaginary lines in a map.

You could ask me one question to end it. What you got for me? Yeah, I got a couple, if you don't mind. So COVID could be the opportunity for crypto. I mean, trust in institutions is at an all-time low. And so what is crypto all about? It's all about trust, right? So governments have shown that they're incompetent.

So it's an opportunity for charter cities. the media has shown that it's sort of cynical or can't really predict what's happening and won't even admit it. So it's an opportunity for prediction markets. And then we've shown that we'll just print our way through anything. And so that's the opportunity for Bitcoin. How do you sort of think about the game plan or the opportunity for crypto in a post-COVID world? That's one question. The second question is sometimes I advise people to take the pump for X career path. You made a name among other things, just going, painting asymmetric risk on bitcoin you just let you know there's this quote of i fear not the person who said you know a

thousand different things uh but said the same thing a thousand different times bruce lee modified quote and that's you with bitcoin you were really early on that and made a big bet on it and it really paid off for you and so what are other spaces that people can do that and how do they sort of be the the pump for x i see your brother doing that in sports and he's doing it phenomenally so crypto in a post-covid moment and then uh pump for x opportunities and what advice do you have for people who are looking to take your path in different spaces yeah so crypto i think uh it's this weird thing where everyone wants it to happen now right and you know i'm always kind of careful now to say like bitcoin is a multi-decade type thing if it fully fulfills the promise of kind

of next global reserve currency etc and you know people hear multi-decade they're like oh yeah yeah, sure. Like, I'm down for that. I'm like, no, no, just so we're clear, that's like 30 plus years, right? Like, like, that's a really, really long time horizon. And just humans are really bad at, you know, there's the Bill Gates quote of like, we overestimate one year underestimate 10. Now bring that out to like 30 years. And it's, you know, very hard to kind of predict where we're going to be and also have the patience to do that. So I think that when you kind of zoom out, you look at where are we, it's like, actually, like, we're way ahead, I think, of where most people thought we would be at this point. And now you've got this like macro tailwind, right into a

halving, there's probably going to be this, you know, really big price, kind of upward movement in the next 18 months. And what's interesting to me is like, pretty much every time this has happened in the past, there wasn't a lot of people paying attention. Like the last one kind of brought people's attention right in 2017, where like the media started being like, wait a minute, like this thing is actually going to $20,000. Like that's insane. And you saw kind of articles and you saw the ICOs and kind of all of that, you know, hype and excitement. If it happens again, like I think it's going to happen now, it's like everyone's already paying attention, right? And so it's just going to be that on steroids, which, you know, there'll be a lot of bad parts to that, but I

think really kind of thrust it onto a global main stage. So that'll be interesting. I definitely agree with this idea of like crypto in a post COVID world being essential. Like I talk a lot about like centralization now it's becoming a business risk so whether you look at it like you know TikTok being potentially banned from the United States all the way to just trusting you know do you trust the cloud providers with your data all that kind of stuff figuring out how to be efficient and decentralized is going to be hard for a lot of people across the technology stack but I think that's just going to become a necessity. One thing on that real quick is fascinating you know the conversation a few years ago when Chris Dixon had his post of why decentralization matters

is it was really focused on sort of the Zynga Facebook use case, which is the platform risk as a company you take on somebody else's platform or a user when you don't own your own data. And it was really this risk that the platform would screw the user. And it's so interesting because now we're in sort of the era of cancel culture. We're seeing platforms want to decentralize themselves to not have a risk of the user rooting their brand. And so it's like now they can cede responsibility a little bit from having to make a really tough editorial decision or being sort of motivated by the mob. And so I think that is a fascinating transition.

Yeah, and look, I actually think just like Bitcoin is kind of different things to different people, same thing here. Decentralization serves like different benefits to different people as well, right? So it's always like we like to put things in a box and say like, oh, it's because this is why this is valuable. But at the end of the day,

these are like very complex systems. So I think generally like that's the trend and it'll only accelerate, it won't kind of retract at all. In terms of the POMP for X, I think it's first of all hilarious that you call it that. Um, I really do agree with this idea of like, taking a early bet on something that you truly believe in, like, like, if you're not authentic about it, then, you know, you're dead on day one. But there is this benefit that I had, obviously, with Bitcoin kind of, you know, going the way

that it went. Other people have done this in certain verticals. My brother's definitely a great example, I think of just, you know, I joke with him all the time, like, what he's doing is not necessarily new. Like Darren Rovell did this 25 years ago. It's just that like you and me are probably on the lower end of the generation that remembers Darren Rovell, right? When he was at ESPN and kind of all this stuff. But like some of the stories that my brother will tell, like literally Darren will like, you know, tweet out and be like, I told a story 18 years ago, right? You know, I've written this article three times. And so it goes back to like, it's not necessarily just like having to do something new as much as it's like having a very specific focus telling

people like this is what i'm going to do so i'm going to cover the you know in his case the money and business behind sports and then just drive at it every single day and just like kind of just like beat people over the head with it right and what you almost end up doing it's um who is it superhuman i think did a great job of this early on where they were like i don't want as many users as possible i want the right users like that's basically what you do with that repetition is you end up like getting rid of everyone who was kind of like a half fan and you just get the people who like they can't eat you know soak up enough of the content uh and that really builds kind of engagement and distribution, all that kind of stuff. Other areas that I think it's

interesting. So one, definitely in education, I think there's going to be this massive kind of resurgence of all kinds of education. So you're talking about like, you know, what is a digital first kind of university look like? You can basically take every single subject that you would have in high school or in college, and somebody is going to be that person teaching millions of people on the internet, right? And that historically, like, it was kind of cheesy, If someone was like, Oh, like I have a YouTube show and I teach people American history, like nobody really cared. But actually that, that can be built into a massive business now because the tools and software are in place where you can do everything from subscriptions to

advertising to physical products to, you know, virtual events, like all that kind of stuff. And so I think just go through your high school, like a curriculum and every single course will turn into a business. Another area I'm fascinated by is all of the technology verticals that benefit from taking supply chains and manufacturing facilities and bring them back on shore. So if you've got to bring your manufacturing or supply chain back, you can't use American labor because the cost is too high and it becomes cost prohibitive. So you've got to use technology. So there's like this resurgence of 3D manufacturing, 3D printing, all kinds of things around just robotics and automation, whatever. Um, I think that's an area that we all kind of know is like,

it's cool. It's going to be a thing. I couldn't tell you the first thing about it. And so like, if I knew that there was a person who was like, that's the 3d printing guy, right. Or that's the 3d manufacturing woman. Like you just naturally gravitate towards them if that's what you want to learn about. And so you can kind of own entire verticals like that. Uh, and then the last thing, um, is I don't have enough thoughts to know what the answer is, but an area that I think is really interesting is creativity. And so creativity kind of cuts across all industries. Like you, you want somebody who is creative, but school's like the last place to teach you how to be creative. Right. And so like, I don't yet know what the solution is. Like, is it just some like

revamped version of like an educational, you know, uh, situation where like, I'm a teacher, you're all on Zoom and I teach you how to be creative? Probably not. But there's got to be something that people can do to like, how do I drastically pull you up the creative spectrum or curve so that you engage with this product, this service, whatever it is, and now you feel like you've become way more creative. My guess being that that's one of the most viral businesses in the world as well because if all of a sudden you start talking to me at a party and i'm like dude that guy's super creative like oh yeah i took this course right like it's something that like people want to brag about because creativity in our society is still uh put on a pedestal to some

degree as well right like it's like oh you're wealthy or like you're an artist to some degree whether you're a musician of like a physical artist whatever like we still hold that in high regard um and so i don't you know first of all if you have ideas or if anyone listening has ideas would love to hear them but but i think that that's like the other area uh that's really interesting because again it's also the thing that is the farthest away from being disrupted by automation machines etc right it's got kind of this like inherent moat that uh we at least like to believe that we are uh you know the most creative animals but after gbt3 or whatever maybe not i think part of it is just doing it of all this old tweet of the desire to it's not the

it's not the education that is scarce it's a desire to learn uh and and similarly with with projects uh and that's what you know on deck is really trying to have project-based cohorts where you've said you wanted to have a podcast for a long time you said you want to youtube channel you said you wanted to do uh a startup you said you want to start angel investing what are all the bottlenecks that prevented you from doing it here's where that stops like you are going to start you are going to ship something you're just going to start start trying it and then just your point on on pump for x or our point on it it's it's never been a better time to be a creator in terms of monetizing even stuff that's come out in the last few weeks like the the rolling funds i

think is game changing if you have an audience based on your writing or you have a course one if you have a right if you have an audience based on writing you can start a course you can make money off that then you can also they people trust your judgment you can start a fund and invest in people that you're that you're you're seeing or starting and so i'm seeing a lot of creators pursue that path and uh and and it's very exciting listen you're welcome whenever you want i'll do this forever with you uh where can people find you on the internet find out more about global uh or village global and also on deck uh village global.vc uh be on deck.com follow me on twitter eric torenberg uh pump when i talk about personal moats your name comes up because

to reverse engineer what you've built over the past few years is is immensely difficult mad respect. It's a pleasure to know you'd be your friend. I'm stoked you had me on the show. Thanks a lot. You're way too kind, my friend. We'll do it again soon. Awesome. Okay.