The Pomp Podcast - #411: Li Jin on the Passion Economy

Episode Date: October 20, 2020

Li Jin is the Founding Partner at Atelier Ventures. She previously worked at Andreessen Horowitz and is well known for coining the term "Passion Economy." In this conversation, we discuss an overview of the passion economy, how platforms have evolved to empower this transition, the new small businesses of America, rebuilding the middle class, how creators are monetizing, and how Li is investing in these themes today. ===================== Smart investors know being early is critical to success in crypto. CoinList is where early adopters invest in, earn, and trade the best new crypto assets before they list on other exchanges. Try CoinList Pro and be first to trade on network launch. Sign up via coinlist.co/pomp and earn $10 in BTC after you trade $100. ===================== 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 80,000 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

Lee Jin is the founding partner at Atelier Ventures. She previously worked at Andreessen Horowitz and is well known for coining the term passion economy. In this conversation, we discuss an overview of the passion economy, how platforms have evolved to empower this transition, the new small businesses of America, rebuilding the middle class, how creators are monetizing, and how Lee is investing in these themes today. I really, really enjoyed this conversation with Lee, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into this episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. The first up is CoinList. Smart crypto investors know that being early is critical to success.

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I hope you guys enjoy this one. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I have a very special guest today. Lee is here. Thank you so much for doing this. Yeah, thank you so much, Anthony, for having me on the show. I don't know if I'm supposed to call you that. For sure. You're good. Let's start with your background. Kind of explain to everyone what you did before you started Atelier. Yeah, for sure. So before starting Atelier this summer, I was an investing partner at Andreessen Horowitz, which is a venture capital firm in the Bay Area. And I was on the consumer investing team there for the past four years where I focused on marketplaces, consumer software, social networks, professional networks,

anything with a network effect really was very much in our sweet spot of what we were interested in. And yeah, how far back should I go? I'm originally from Beijing. Chinese was my first language. I moved to the States when I was six years old and grew up in Pittsburgh. And that's what led me to being where I am today, speaking English. That's awesome. I love that. Let's go into this passion economy. So you coined this term. You've done a ton of work. You are probably the leading expert on what the passion economy is. So give us kind of a quick summary as to what is the passion economy and kind of how did you discover it? Yeah. So I describe it as the passion economy is the economy in which people are able to convert what they love to do into their source

of income. And I think that in general, it's an intrinsic human desire to find meaning and purpose in one's work, not just to earn money from it. I think for most people, for much of human history, people have always wanted to love what they do, to enjoy their time spent earning a living and to be able to see themselves in their own work. But I think that it was very traditionally before the internet, it was really difficult for people to be able to work in that way. You needed to sort of be employed at a company, do a very specialized role. And now I think a wave of new platforms are arising that democratize the ability to create a product or service, find customers, do all the back office work required to manage a company and earn income. And so it's easier than

ever before for people to actually leverage their unique skills and knowledge to be able to earn an income. And how I became interested in this and where it came from, I think, so for me, it really stemmed from that time at A16Z, where I was evaluating marketplace businesses for the past four years. And during that time, from 2016 to 2020, I really saw this paradigm shift in marketplace businesses that were coming in to pitch me their startups. When I first joined the firm in 2016, I think it was still the era of the Uber for X startup. People were coming in pitching their on-demand companies, whether it was like on-demand car washes or on-demand pet care or whatever. And the critical piece of having an on-demand marketplace is that you have to really

provide a ton of convenience and simplicity and make sure that as soon as a customer wants something, you can deliver it to them. And so the resulting way that you would design a marketplace to be on demand is that you have to, in a way, commoditize all of the supply side such that you can just match the customer to whatever is available at the time. Like you can't give them so many options that it's unable, you can't have liquidity that way in a marketplace. And so a critical component of these on-demand Uber for X marketplaces was that they commoditize the supplier. Driver A is basically equivalent to driver B, is equivalent to driver C. And this shows up in the design of these marketplaces where as a consumer, when you request something,

when you request a car, you don't even know the provider that you're going to be matched with because they've all been commoditized to these various service levels. And I think that on the supply side, what this meant was, even though you had this very turnkey, convenient way to make $10, $20, it felt like you were sort of at the mercy of the platform. And the platform was dictating exactly what you needed to do in order to make this money. And you weren't developing any customer loyalty.

You weren't really expressing any creativity or imagination in the work that you were doing. And over the years, I started seeing new marketplaces arise that I met with that were offering not only an interesting value proposition to consumers, but they were also emphasizing the unique value proposition that they gave to the supply side too, where they were creating a marketplace that actually enabled suppliers and workers to leverage their creativity, their education, their unique knowledge in order to make a living. And so the marketplace or the platforms, they were really just a set of tools that these workers could use to build their own offering rather than accepting directions from the platforms.

And so I thought that this trend was really interesting. And I basically synthesized all of these ideas in the blog post that I published last year called The Passion Economy and the future of work. And yeah, I think it's, it's now much broader than just marketplaces. I'm interested in all of the software infrastructure that enables people to take what they enjoy doing and turn it into income. Like that could be a marketplace where you're matching people directly. It could also be a SaaS tool that people are leveraging to build their own online business. It could be a creator tool that helps people make something more easily for an audience. I'm also interested in like FinTech and education, because I think those are foundational components of things that

need to be in place for people to be able to discover what they're passionate about and be able to manage their income. So like that is the whole scope of all of my interests when it comes to investing in the passion economy. Got it. And so when you say passion economy, I think a lot of people think of, oh, this is the creators, this is the celebrities, the YouTubers, and kind of people that really create content, right? And almost like the passion economy is the content economy. Maybe talk a little bit about the nuances around what does the passion economy entail or encapsulate versus maybe what it does. Yeah. So that is a very common reaction that I get from people when I talk about this. I get a lot of people asking me like, isn't this just the

creator economy and they just assume that all of the workers that I'm talking about are content creators, which I push back against because I think the passion economy is much broader than the creator economy. The creator economy is definitely a sub-segment of it, but I think of the passion economy as this bigger umbrella and encompassing really anyone who is passionate about their work and feels very much fulfilled and gets a sense of meaning from their work. I think people glom on to creators because it's this like new type of profession that has newly emerged in the last decade. And it's, you know, quickly growing and underserved. But I think the passion economy is much bigger than that and goes beyond people who are just creating content per se. So for

instance, examples that I commonly point to are, this is a portfolio company of mine called Dumpling, which helps people to build and manage their own local services business in the grocery shopping and grocery delivery vertical. So in a way, it's like a competitor to Instacart. And they're giving people the tools to start, manage and grow their own grocery delivery business. And I consider that to be a part of the passion economy, even though these shoppers would never in a million years call themselves a creator, like they would never identify with that term. And yet, they are people who really enjoy what they do for a living. On the customer side, they view each shopper as a distinct individual who develops loyalty with them. They're skilled workers. They don't view every grocery shopper as completely interchangeable with each other. they actually want to work with a certain individual time and time again. And on the

worker side, they actually have real ownership and upside in their work, and they are small business owners. So that's an example of where I think this would be part of the passion economy, in my view, but they're not a content creator. And I think there's so many other professions out there where the worker would never call themselves a creator, but they are part of this emerging economy of people who are able to leverage their unique skills and turn that into their income and what they do for a living, but they're not creating content per se. They're maybe providing a service or teaching a curriculum that has already been written for them, or maybe they're doing sales, but they're cultivating loyalty, but they're not creating

content. Yeah. What's so interesting is like before you coined that term, the passion economy, I used to tell people like it's entrepreneurship, right? It's like building something from scratch and trying to figure out how do you make money doing it, right? And one of the frameworks that I've heard people use before is that this is just the modern small business, right? Kind of, it used to be that you went to school and then when you wanted to start a business, you had to go get a physical location on Main Street in some town, and you could start everything from a coffee shop to a woodworking shop or whatever it was. The internet obviously kind of empowered more software and things like that. And we started to almost really use the word entrepreneurship or

startups to describe software, high growth, venture backable type businesses. I think really what you're highlighting here is like, there's a new type of entrepreneurship, but it's actually just the same thing in a new format, right? It's the small businesses that used to be on Main Street are now being created via all of these tools and marketplaces that you're trying to invest in. Is that generally accurate? Yeah, I think that's a very apt description of it. I wrote a post on my newsletter earlier this summer called Unbundling Work from Employment. and it specifically deals with that theme of um yeah i think the fashion economy is really about people who are able to go independent and craft their own business and they no longer need to be

employed at a company in order to access customers create a product or a service um run their business etc like the the new smb is just a single individual who is leveraging all these software platforms and technology tools in order to run their own business. And the common ground that they share with the entrepreneurs back in the day is that they have this autonomy and ownership and they feel very motivated in what they do. But I think the unit of an SMB has shrunk to potentially a single individual. Yeah. And talk a little bit about the importance of the platforms in doing that, right? Because it feels like what you're saying is these individuals used to want to do the work and they'd have to go to an organization or a company, that organization

or a company provided all the infrastructure that empowered them to do the work. Now though, there's these tools and platforms that are allowing them to do it on their own without the need for an organization. Yeah, exactly. That's right. So I think different tools and platforms are emerging that make this kind of work accessible to people. And they encompass both vertical platforms where they're helping people to create a certain product or service that's aligned to a specific vertical, for instance, a newsletter or a video course or an audio course or a podcast. And then there's horizontal platforms that people across different verticals can leverage. So these are things like financial tools for all independent workers or

community software platforms that can serve all sorts of different entrepreneurs in cultivating a community. I have this sort of image in my mind of the company that people used to be employed at, it was actually a bundle of different services that they offered to you. So a company and being employed at a certain employer, it used to mean you got a bundle of various things. You got a bundle of like the production aspect where the company gave you the means of production for something um there was the marketing aspect there was the income aspect um all of like the back office and administrative staff um there was also team and camaraderie provided as being part of a company um you got access to all of your co-workers and you had a sense of being part of a team um

There's also like learning and development that the company used to provide. And I think in this new world, in the passion economy world, new platforms are arising that take each of those component parts and have a software platform to replace that and to provide the service that a company used to bundle all together. So, for instance, that team piece, there's lots of new social networks and communities that offer a team to people who are basically micro entrepreneurs. I'm in this Telegram group with your wife, Polina, and we are all newsletter writers. We all write a sub stack or a MailChimp newsletter. Some of us do it full time. Some of us just do it as a hobby. But this is a source of camaraderie where we all relate to each other on this common basis. And I think it's going to be more common for new communities to emerge for these solopreneurs that still want a sense of camaraderie and teamwork, but they aren't employed at a common employer.

got it and talk a little bit about how monetization has changed right so obviously when you work at an organization uh you have a salary you get paid uh kind of don't have to think about it to some degree right you just work focus on the work obviously when you kind of go on your own um and pursue a more entrepreneurial path uh monetization is really important right because you kind of it's on you now and so how has that monetization methods changed and also So like, what do you see working for people who are entering the passion economy? Yeah. I often refer to this piece that Kevin Kelly wrote a decade ago, which I think is really

prescient. I never know how to pronounce that word. Is it prescient or prescient? But he wrote this post called A Thousand True Fans, which I commonly refer to. And he says that to be a successful creator on the internet, by creator, he meant like anyone who was trying to make a living by creating something. You don't need to be a mega celebrity with a million followers. You can just cultivate a loyal base of a thousand followers who are going to support you to the tune of $10. I think it was like, yeah, $10 per month

and thereby earn about $100,000 per year. I think the key underpinning insight of that piece is that the internet enables a direct connection with the customer. You no longer need an intermediary who is helping you with distribution and marketing and helping you create a product. You can actually just create something yourself, cultivate loyalty and cultivate an audience

of customers who are willing to support you directly and thereby keep the entire portion of earnings that the customer is willing to pay you. And actually, the implication that that has is that you need far fewer customers in total than you would have in the old world where there was an intermediary. So I think in terms of monetization mechanisms that are working, I think everything that people used to make a living from before, they still apply today. But I think the novel way that a lot of how the long tail of online entrepreneurs are monetizing is through that direct customer support. Got it.

And in terms of the monetization methods, I think there's a big focus on subscription and kind of fans paying. but it also feels like maybe there's been over-rotation there. Like advertising is still a viable model. And so do you see kind of the hybrid working where people are kind of pursuing multiple monetization strategies or do you feel like now we're really seeing people kind of focus on one or the other? Yeah. I don't think that subscriptions will work for everyone. Yeah. I think that we have put a ton of emphasis on subscriptions and the media is constantly talking about how people are cultivating a base of subscribers, which represents their entire

source of income, I think that's unrealistic for most people. And I don't think that advertising as a revenue source is going to go away. I think successful passion economy entrepreneurs, they are cobbling together different sources of income through different mechanisms, one of which might be subscriptions and payments from one's audience. But there's a lot of other pieces of the pie. There's a YouTube video that I recently watched from this YouTuber called Linus Tech Tips. He's like a pretty popular YouTuber. I think he has something like 20 million followers. And he showed his revenue breakdown in a pie chart. And like what really struck me was that advertising based revenue, whether it was sponsored videos or affiliate

links, Amazon affiliate program, AdSense, they actually made up the majority of his earnings out of the entire year. Like it was, it was by far the majority of his earnings. And then a smaller sliver of his total earnings as a company came from fan subscriptions. And I think he used or direct fan payments. And those fan payments were comprised of merchandise that he sold through an online e-commerce store, as well as he had this platform that he used to distribute premium content to people who would pay for it. So premium videos or early access videos before he posted them on YouTube. And I thought that was really interesting because I think for everyone who's trying to create a living for themselves,

like it's you can actually reach a far greater base of potential customers and fans if you don't ask everyone to pay like the subscription model is inherently exclusive it supposes that your audience has disposable income to pay for whatever you're creating and a lot of people don't have that. And I think advertising is actually quite democratizing because everyone can have access to what you're creating and not have to buy anything and not have to pay out of pocket. Yeah. What's really interesting about this is kind of your understanding and I think kind of the perspective of there's no one strategy that everyone can take, right? And so that's not only industry-wise, right? Saying, hey, if you want to go be a writer on the internet, there's not even

a one-size-fits-all for writers on the internet, right? It's actually each individual person has a different path to pursue. And it feels like some of that is audience-driven. So who is your audience or who do you want your audience to be? But also too, it sounds almost like it may be personal preference-driven as well, right? Meaning that I don't want to go sell ads. Therefore, I have to find a different methodology or somebody who says, I don't want to ask my audience to pay for this. I would rather have ads supported. Is that kind of a fair way to look at the almost decision tree that some of these folks are going through? Yeah, exactly. I very much agree with that. And I think you can decompose personal preference

into a lot of subcomponents too. I think it's like where you are in the creator life cycle, are you still trying to build up an audience space or have you reached the stage where you think your audience is big enough and you want to start monetizing them? I think another one is like how attractive is your demographic to advertisers? Like if you were to try and do advertising, how successful would you be and what would be the rates that you would be able to charge? And then I think a third component is like what do you enjoy doing and how much effort do you want to put in? Because I think creating subscription content oftentimes is a lot more work and a heavier lift than just selling ads. With advertising, you can get a big sponsor and they

just pay you a lump sum amount and that takes care of the bills for the next few months. With a subscription offering, you have to consistently be creating output. I've heard from people who have a Patreon page set up that they feel like they have to offer these member benefits basically into perpetuity. They can't stop because then you'll lose your subscribers and you're sort of breaking their trust. That's not the case with advertising. And so I completely agree that there is no one size fits all path. And it's really a function of personal preference, where you are in your life cycle, the degree

to which you want to, like how much effort and work you want to put in. Yeah. Talk to me a little bit about building brands and digital communities. So, obviously, I think a lot of people think of the output, right? So, if you're a writer, I write words and then I put that out there. But it doesn't kind of absolve people from thinking through maybe one, this idea of intellectual property around a brand and kind of really getting people to buy into and align values with and want to continue to consume content from that brand. But also to this idea of you can have kind of subscribers, so people who just pay you, you could have members of a community. Like there's almost this varying degree of your relationship with the people that you are, you know, interacting with, creating for, serving with a service or whatever.

How do you think about building brands and digital communities? This is an interesting question. First of all, I would say I'm not the expert on this topic. I think I've kind of accidentally built a personal brand and stumbled into building an online community. um why do you say accidentally because the goal of my content creation my blogging activities has always been how do i just provide value to founders how do i package up my ideas in a way that i think would be helpful and valuable to them it was never about me it was about them and serving them. Like I've mentioned this in conversation with Paulina before, but my bar

of publishing something is super high. If I don't feel like this is going to be extremely additive to someone's life and the company that they're building, and I can't justify taking the time away from their day to stop working on everything else that is a priority to just read my writing, if I don't think a piece of work reaches that level, I don't publish it. And so I have a huge Google Drive folder full of all of these blog posts that I've written that I just don't think are that helpful to founders. And so I didn't publish them just for the sake of publishing. Like I, I, everything that I do is through the lens of like, do I think this really helps a ton of people? And that's why I say the brand building has been accidental.

Um, I think through that people feel like my writing is very unique and authentic and the entire landscape of venture industry writing. Um, but yeah, for me it was never about personal brand building. Yeah. And then what about this idea of like digital communities, right? So, you know, take Substack as an example. Uh, you can be a Substack writer and you can simply publish an email every day and you basically have readers. And readers to me sets this expectation that I'm going to write, the readers are going to read, maybe 1% of them respond and there's some engagement, but for the most part, it's a one-way communication and they're basically paying me for those thoughts or words. If you then instead say, but I want to build a community, that implies

something different, right? That sets a different expectation. It's almost now saying, no, the readers are going to communicate with each other and with me and it's more of an ongoing like larger value proposition to some degree is that kind of how you see it or do you think of communities as kind of something else or use a different framework maybe to look through that yeah well so first of all i think the term community is like wildly overview overused in the tech industry right now because everyone wants to have other people believe that there's network effects to their business and so everyone claims to have a vibrant engaged community even if what they really have is just a list of Instagram followers and so to level set on like

what I believe a community is and how I define it is I think it's a group of people who have really strong bonds with each other not just with the creator who is leading the community but with each other there's a network like a mesh network of very strong pairwise bonds and people have mutual concern and interest for each other so that's how I define it and so I think when we're talking about sub stack writers or other content creators who are now cultivating communities and creating digital spaces for their audience to gather in one place and discuss whatever shared interests or topics or content that they all find interesting. I think about it from that angle of like, what is the actual, like, what is the need that the community is serving? What ties everyone

together? How do people relate to each other in that community? What is the source of their bond? and i think as a community leader admin creator like you have to start from first principles and start with asking yourself that question of like what is the value that people are trying to seek from this place how are they relating to each other how can people benefit from each other and how can you deepen the care that everyone feels for each other versus just aggregating your followers into one place so that they consume more of your content like i think the latter is actually what a lot of people are trying to do, but it's like a faux community. Absolutely. Before we get into the rapid fire questions to end, I want to talk a little bit

about this idea you have around the passion economy being a catalyst to help rebuild middle America or kind of the middle class, if you will. So not necessarily the geography middle America, but the middle class. Can you elaborate on that idea a little bit and help people understand? Yeah, totally. So this ties a little bit back to the conversation that we had earlier around the passion economy versus the creator economy. So just personally, and as an investor, I'm not just interested in how do we enable the next wave of celebrities to be built online? And how do we help the top 1% of content creators make a ton of money? um i'm i mean i think that's cool and all and that's great for them but i am actually much more interested in the long tail of how do we empower anyone in the country to be able to make an income doing what they love um and that necessitates empowering the long tail and helping people um who don't have a huge base of followers or fans to be able to earn money from what they

love to do. And so I think tying this to the middle class thing, I mean, everyone has probably seen the stats online around how the middle class in America has shrunk substantially in the past few decades. I think it's dropped by about 10 percentage points since 1970. And in addition to that, income disparity is widening in America between the upper class and the middle class. and I think obviously the solutions well first the reasons for why this is the case it's it's very multifaceted and complex and therefore the solutions to combat this are also very complex and nuanced and I don't think that technology is going to solve everything I think that it requires a multidisciplinary approach involving policy shifts in societal attitudes, but I think

technology can play its part as well. I consider myself to be a huge techno-optimist. I believe that technology does have the potential to really improve people's lives and to make the world a better place. And specifically, the version of that that I want to push forward is a world in which people are building technology that helps to broaden access to income and to customers and to give people new ways of working that feel more meaningful and fulfilling to them. I think technology can create new jobs. I think technology can broaden access to new types of careers that were previously really inaccessible to lots of people. Like I think if you had asked people 10 years ago, do they think they can make a living full time as a newsletter writer,

just writing a newsletter once a week? I think most people would have said no. And I think that answer has meaningfully shifted in the last couple of years because of technology. So I'm really excited around new platforms that are giving people new ways of working, new tools to help them build an income and specifically doing that in a way that can empower not just a handful of people to be really successful, but tens, if not hundreds of millions of people around the world. Yeah. I tend to one, agree. And two, I think that that is the best possible path forward, right? Is one where the world continues to improve and technology plays a big part of it. So So not only do I agree, but I'm hoping that that is the case as well.

Yes, well, we can do our part as investors to help support those companies. Absolutely. Absolutely. I always ask the same two questions to wrap up and then you get to ask me one to end it. But the first one is just, what is the most important book that you have ever read? wow oh my gosh there's so many um it's hard to narrow it down but i i talk about this book all the time um it's jane eyre by charlotte bronte i i guess this is probably unconventional to mention on your podcast but it's a romance novel um why do you like that one i read it when i was 13 years old and just immediately felt like it felt like my eyes were open to a brand new color that had previously not been visible to me yeah it just describes love and emotions in such a

beautiful way like the passages between Jane and Rochester in that novel are I think some of the most beautiful sentences that have ever been written in the English language. And I, yeah, I just have a keen appreciation for beauty. And I appreciate love. I think it's why we're put on this earth. I think we exist for love. And I think that novel encapsulates a lot of that. Yeah. And how much of it do you think was just the period in time when you read it, kind of at 13 years old. If you'd read it at a different point in your life, do you think it would have had the same impact? Or maybe it would have had more or less impact? Like if I had read it as a jaded adult. I think it helps me from, I think reading it when I did

has helped me resist becoming jaded as an adult. that's a great answer uh second question is uh much more fun which is aliens are you a believer absolutely without hesitation i mean just mathematically it's like it's impossible right for us to be the only beings in the entire universe if it's really infinite and vast Like, I just don't think that we can possibly be that special. And I think mathematically, we are also probably living in a simulation. I tend to believe that much more than I think other people do. And I always try to understand it's cheating because I feel like when you're in the tech

world, that's probably a very high rate of belief on the simulation versus like the average citizen. but it's a non-zero chance. Right. Yeah. Like if you read through that essay arguing for why we are living in a simulation, it just makes logical sense. I know that a lot of people disagree with me. And so I hope I don't, I haven't just completely undermined the rest of this podcast. You would be surprised. I think there's a lot of people who listen to this who actually agree. You could ask me one question to finish up. What's the one question you have for me. If you were making a homemade pizza, what toppings would you put on it?

So I cheat. I wouldn't make a homemade pizza. Everyone knows that I order Domino's every Saturday. And I only get pepperoni pizza and I get cheesy bread as like the side. And for me, it's all about like the consistency of like, when you order, you know what you're going to get. You're loyal to the same pizza. I have, I have one. Yeah. I have one friend, uh, who I'm not going to say, cause I don't know if he wants this known or not, but, uh, he's somebody in the technology world that you probably know. Uh, and he makes homemade pizzas all the time. And, uh, every time he posts a picture of it, it always has like different toppings and different things. And I think that if I had to guess, like, there's this enjoyment of like experimentation

and, uh, trying to get better and improve at like making the pizza. And so I think that people who make pizza at home, they don't just go with like, Oh, I always make pepperoni pizza. But like part of the joy of doing it is we're going to try different things. I'm going to, you know, use different sauces. I'm going to use different toppings. I'm gonna use different type of bread or whatever. Um, and, uh, that's not me in terms of going to do that, but like, it would almost be like what are the ones that you would try more so than like you would use every single time right because the whole idea of like being the homemade pizza maker um it's kind of like bread like i don't know anyone who makes the same bread every single you know night it's usually they kind of

experiment with different things try different ones and part of the experience is oh this one was good or like you know what lee like you messed this one up right yeah you're just going for like guaranteed something that you know you already like and just consistency i continue to say because everyone obviously doesn't like i like dominoes i think it's the best like takeout pizza by far by far now i live in new york city which is that's what gets And so I always say that like, yes, there is better pizza than Domino's in New York, but, uh, there's also a lot of pizza that's way worse than Domino's as well. And so if you want to play kind of Russian roulette, uh, in order from places you don't know, sure. Knock yourself

out. Um, I have a couple of favorites like Joe's pizza, et cetera, that I will get. But, uh, if I just i i want to know what i'm ordering right now domino's pepperoni got it yeah so all right lee thank you so much for doing this i really appreciate it where can we send people to find you on the internet or kind of consume some of the content yeah so i publish a newsletter it's on substack it's lead.substack.com i have a two-letter subdomain which they no longer give out. So it's very OG. So yeah, lee.substack.com or if anyone has an interesting startup that they're working on that relates to any of the themes that we talked about, they can reach me at my email, lee.atelierventures.co. Awesome. All right. Well, thank you so much for doing this.

We will definitely do this again in the future and best of luck as you kind of start investing. Thank you so much. This was really fun. I enjoyed it a ton.