The Pomp Podcast - #505: Daniel Scrivner on Great Design & Crypto

Episode Date: March 4, 2021

Daniel Scrivner is the Chief Executive Office & Chief Designer Officer at Flow. Previously he was the Head of Design at Digit and Square. In this conversation, we discuss his time working at Square, why he took the Flow CEO role, public market chaos, crypto investing, and how Daniel sees the world unfolding.  ======================= Exodus is an absolute game changer in the crypto wallet space, and we’ve teamed up to offer an exclusive discount for you, as listeners of the podcast. Sign up for Exodus today using my promo code Exodus.io/pomp. This is a no brainer for both newcomers and crypto heavyweights - go sign up today.  ======================= OKCoin.com is the leading crypto exchange for both beginners and experienced users. You can fund your account in under 2 minutes, and get access to the most advanced trading engine, all while paying the lowest trading fees in the industry (0.1%). Visit www.okcoin.com/pomp and open your account today.  ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 135,000 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. Daniel Scribner is the CEO and Chief Design Officer at Flow. Previously, he was the head of design at Digit and Square. In this conversation, we discuss his time working at Square, why he took the Flow CEO role, the public market chaos, crypto investing, and how Daniel sees the world unfolding i really enjoyed this conversation with daniel 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 exodus they're leading the world out of the traditional financial system by building beautiful and user-friendly

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quick as possible go to okcoin.com slash pomp lastly do not forget that i write a daily letter to over 135 000 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 in this episode with Daniel. I hope you 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. I've got Daniel here with me. Thank you so much for doing this, sir. Thank you so much for having me on. It's a huge, huge honor. For sure. Let's just jump right into your background. You've worked at a lot of really crazy places and done some amazing work. So what'd you do kind of over the last few years? Yeah. So my background's definitely bizarre when I try to explain to people. And just to try to rewind it, I basically made the decision when I was really young, when I was getting ready to go

to a four-year university to drop out of school and pursue a career as a full-time designer that took me to Apple, took me to Square, where I was there for five and a half years and scaled the design team and worked really closely with Jack Dorsey and Keith Raboy and a lot of the incredible team members at Square. And then for the last two years, just to skip forward a little bit, I've been taken on a very different challenge, which is I felt like I got a lot of experience seeing what a venture-backed startup was like working at Square and investing in other early stage startups. And I wanted to see the complete other end of the spectrum, which was, what does it look like to go into a private bootstrap business that is in trouble and needs to be

turned around? And that's the challenge I've been working on for the last two years. And that is with Andrew Wilkinson, Chris Sparling at Tiny, and the company I've been working on there is flow. What is flow? Yeah. So flow is a historic, I mean, I'll jump back to the beginning when it first launched, it was basically task management for friends. So the idea was we all have stuff that we need to do. Some of that stuff overlaps with our friends. You know, this is pre COVID world when you would say, do something like put together a party, tell your friends to bring different things and bring it to the party. That's how it started. So it started off on the individual side. It's moved pretty heavily in the focus that we had when it came to Flow was largely around

teams. So we have everything from kind of task management, project management, calendars. We've also recently added stuff like chat and direct messaging into the app. And the goal there is just to create the world's best productivity platform that's well-designed, that's something you actually want to work in and use every single day. And so we've got some amazing companies that are on the platform. Our sweet spot today is for teams that are probably somewhere between 50 and 300 in size. Got it. So you had this epic run as an operator and designer, and now you are running this turnaround with Andrew and Tiny. Andrew's been on multiple times and is fantastic, as I always say. What's maybe like the biggest surprise so far, kind of going into this turnaround

situation that you didn't know at the beginning, but now you're like, wow, I wish I would have known that when I first started. Yeah. I mean, the thing I definitely wasn't prepared for is the emotional challenge of turning around a business. And what I mean by that is, you know, that I think the best analogy that anyone, anyone can kind of understand, even if you're not an entrepreneur is imagine accepting a job and every single month you're getting paid less and less and less. You're looking at the direct deposit that goes into your checking account. And every month that's maybe ticking down, say $500. And at first it doesn't feel too bad. And then really quickly all at once, you're just like, oh my God, what is going on? What's going on? And you're

seeing your, that kind of revenue dip down. That is one of the things that is really, really, really challenging where I think, you know, my kind of take on it was what interested me about the opportunity was to learn what it's like. So I've invested at this point in a hundred plus early stage companies as well as cryptocurrency. And I'm sure we might talk about some of that stuff. I also do have portfolios that I manage in the public markets. And so I've really been fascinated by investing. That obviously means I'm interested in business. And the challenge that I wanted to take on was what does it actually look like to be in the CEO chair to turn around a company? And I mean, I could talk about that for a lot longer, but the short answer is it's brutal

and it's really difficult just on the kind of emotional management side. That is how leadership goes, right? It's brutal. It sounds like a very good description word to use. I want to talk a little bit about kind of some current events. So maybe let's start with public markets. We have seen all kinds of chaos transpire. I know you're an investor in public.com, a couple other companies, but just like zoom out a little bit and help me understand kind of your views on what's going on in the public markets, the whole Wall Street bets and Reddit and kind of anything in that whole arena? Yeah, just so maybe to zoom out a little bit. I mean, just to start off with, I guess, my own portfolio. So I manage, there's two strategies that I have in the public markets

that fit the way that I think about the world really neatly and that I really enjoy. And I have one called FutureShape, which is largely making kind of ARK style bets, ARK for anyone that doesn't know. I'm talking about ARK Invest, which has the ETF ARKK and largely invests in kind of next generation disruptive technologies. And the idea there is just, I think generationally, we are in a time where we're seeing companies that are going to be the biggest players in the next 10 years begin to go public. They're obviously going public at very high valuations, but we are seeing, I think, a step function change in the markets. And part of my kind of thesis, which I know a lot of other people are of a similar mind is, so I first started out focusing much more on

the venture capital side. And part of one of the aha moments for me was, okay, well, if I do this in a pretty industry agnostic way, and if I try to do this in part for research for what's coming next to the public markets, have a really interesting look into what's going on, what the competitive landscape looks like. That's true even for, take something like Coinbase or like crypto. If you're an investor in Coinbase, you're going to have a much better, much more clearly articulated point of view about what that looks like as a public business if you invested in private. And there's nothing shocking about that. So I do that piece. And then the other portfolio that I manage is totally different and it's called the perpetuity fund. And what I invest in there is

almost the polar opposite end of the spectrum, which is closely family held businesses that have been in business for an incredibly long time. So an example of that would be something like LVMH, which owns Louis Vuitton, which is a huge brand. It's run by one man who's on a tear. He owns a significant portion of the business. It's not going anywhere. Owning a luxury business is an incredible thing. So I'll stop there and kind of transition. And one thing that has been just fascinating for me is those portfolios collectively are up 30% in January, which is outrageous. Most people would close out a year at 30% and be like, oh my God, I had the best year of my life. And here we are at the end of January and up 30%. So clearly things aren't making sense.

And clearly the valuations, and I said to a friend the other day, I'm like, I really believe in the businesses I'm invested in, but I know that there's no reason they should be trading at the valuations that they're at. Here's where it gets really interesting. I read a book recently by George Soros, which if anyone's interested, he has a super thin book that's all about his concept of reflexivity, which I think we're seeing play out a ton today, which is just the idea that if you take the efficient market thesis and the idea that all businesses are always valued at exactly where they should be valued because the market's this magical thing that finds this perfect equilibrium. That's not true because humans at the end of the day are

investing and there's a shitload of different style investors as we're seeing today. There's Wall Street boys, there's endowments, there's pension funds, there's people managing for retirement. There's a bunch of different actors in the markets doing different things. Reflexivity is just the idea that if the price goes up on an asset, that starts to become self-fulfilling at a certain point. And people then believe that it's worth this amount, which then feeds. And we're seeing that, I would say, in crypto. We're seeing that in things like GameStop. We're seeing that in a ton, even just seeing Airbnb and DoorDash and how they're valued now post-IPO. We have effectively jumped five years into the future in their business. And that's what the stock's

trading at today. So it's an incredible time. When you think about that, is that healthy? Like, do you think it's like, Hey, it's going to correct in the future? Do you think it's just, no, we live in a different world now and yes, sure. They're overvalued businesses, but that's almost like the new normal and it'll persist. I don't think it's unhealthy at all. And I, you know, there, I really disagree. You know, I, I follow a lot of really smart investors on Twitter and generally I think they fall into two, two buckets of this kind of question. And one is the market's going to do what it's going to do. And if something's overvalued today, that doesn't mean that it's going to correct in six months. It doesn't mean

it's going to correct in two years, you know, and you have no idea when that correction is going to happen. I think as an investor, you always want to be aware of how closely you feel like the price is tethered to the reality of that business. But I think what we're seeing is also, again, part of my thesis behind that kind of future shape fund and investing in this next generation of disruptive technology is these are companies that our generation sees as their companies, and they want to own them in their portfolio. They want to own them in size. And if they look at Square or they look at DoorDash or they look at Airbnb, I don't think they're going to quibble with the valuation. I think they're like, this is a great business. I believe in it. It's not

going anywhere. So I think it's just, in my mind, I think net-net, it's always better to try to just be a student of the times. And if things are, so as an example, I'll give you a practical example. So I said my portfolio is up 30% in January. I think for a lot of investors, they would say, well, let's just go ahead and start closing out those positions, or let's go all the way into cash. And I know a lot of people that are all in cash. But in my mind, I feel like, why would you do that? Why wouldn't you set stop orders yet 10% underneath the current price, let it continue to ride up, maybe take money off the table as it goes up. But if you're a proficient trader, you can effectively limit your downside risk and continue to enjoy the upside

gains. And I just feel like today for anyone who's in a fully cash position, I'm just like, you're going to, you're certainly missing a really incredible window of time. And if you're in a cash position now, you could be in that cash position two years from now. Cause I think, you know, yes, we're at historic highs, but that's not to say it's not going to go higher. I think that's the one thing that people always forget is like almost like the relative aspect of it. So yes, we are high relative to the past, but we make it low relative to the future. And that isn't necessarily a good or bad thing, but just you got to remember this is one point in time and you only have really half of the equation. And you frankly have the wrong half of the

equation. Like if you want to know performance, you'd like to know what the future performance is, not the past performance, right? Yes. And the best book on this, which I listened to recently, I've read recently that is incredible, although you've really got to just go with it because it's not always easy, is misbehavior of markets, which talks about fractals. It's basically a very, very in-depth study by looking at markets and trying to, one, it totally debunks the idea of the efficient market hypothesis. Two, it talks about that by and large, markets have almost never been efficient and markets always go lower than they should and much higher than they should and so what that's helped me to do is kind of reset the way that i look at the world and just

understanding that there's a much wider spectrum of outcomes and things that could play out than i think most people like to entertain and i just feel like net net anyone that's always looking backwards to try to define what's going to happen in the future it's never ever ever going to happen so i think you want to like stay in the game just you know and that's part of why yes, are we at elevated prices? Yes. Do I think it can continue to go up? Yes. Could we see a large drop? Yes. Okay. You take all those things that can either lead you to do something like go in all cash, or it can lead you to say, let me just put some downside risk mitigation by putting some stop loss orders in and let me continue to ride it up and be in a position to benefit.

Absolutely. When you think about kind of the whole idea of Wall Street bets and Reddit and the little guy versus the hedge funds? Any thoughts there just in terms of maybe even Robinhood and public.com? How do you think about all of that market dynamic or market structure stuff? Yeah, I think it's, I mean, to me, it's like a hilarious dark comedy, what we're seeing play out because I've had a bone to pick with Robinhood since Robinhood came out. And on the pro side, let me just start there. I think it's wonderful that Robinhood has served as an on-ramp for a lot of people in our generation to become investors and start investing. I think every person has a right to have money in the market and be able to invest in the things they care about.

And Robinhood has made it really easy. Now, let me flip to the negative side. The negative side is, I think, unfortunately, this whole idea that you should sign up for Robinhood. I think the reason you sign up for Robinhood is it's a well-designed app. The reasons not to sign up for Robinhood is because it's commission-free trading. Because if you do any bit of research, and this has now been made public, although a lot of people, I think, still aren't aware of it. If you do any research, yes, you're effectively not paying commissions, but you are paying commissions because you're always paying a price that is higher than the best price you could get on the market. Because as you see, they're selling their order book to Citadel and these other hedge funds,

they're effectively front-running it, adding in a bit there. And it's just the whole notion. And I think it's, you know, anytime you see one, you see a value proposition like that, it always helps to dig in and think about why does that value proposition exist and how are they actually achieving that value proposition and running a business? And in this example, yes, it's commission free, but there's a whole bunch of downsides. And those downsides are you're not getting the best rate, you know, stuff like we're seeing today where Robinhood has effectively made it. So you can't search, you can't invest.

you can't even see your positions if you've already invested in GameStop or Knock or some of the other kind of short squeezes that we're seeing play out. And so I've always had this bone to pick with Robinhood. And just to talk about that, like the other thing I find really fascinating is, you know, the only way they could achieve this commission-free model was by effectively kind of screwing users, just doing it in the background without them really knowing about it. And if you think about just where we're at, so think about not Robinhood, but all the other brokerage options you have today. What's kind of hilarious to me and part of the dark comedy piece is, sure, it's nice to not pay commissions, but we're also at a point in time

where you're paying the lowest commissions in the history of investing, if you invest on any platform. And those commissions are in the low single dollar range. And by going and using an actual brokerage fund. I use interactive brokers. There's a whole bunch of stuff I don't love about it. It's an atrocious UI. I waited 30 days to get my application approved. There's just maddening stuff with it. But at the end of the day, once you have an account set up, they're not going to restrict what you can trade. You can trade anything that you can trade. And you can set up trades in a lot of sophisticated ways and get the best prices. And just one other thing that I would say is, you know, I invested in public.com maybe two years ago, and I'm huge fans of what they're

doing. And really the only reason I invested in this part of reason I want to talk about this a little bit is, um, that I felt like they were running the ethical values-based model that Robinhood was doing, which is we, we same mission. We think that everybody has a right to be able to be an investor in the public market, and they should be able to do that by an app that's on their phone and an amazing experience. But then from there, they're doing things that actually help work in people's best interest. So they're not selling their order book to people like Citadel. They're actively warning you when stocks or options have very high volatility. And those are the things where I think Robinhood has taken a very hands-off approach, which is

fine. But I think part of opening up the floodgates and making it so everyone can invest is knowing that clearly not everyone's going to be competent and know what they're doing. And it doesn't mean that you need to limit them, but you need to help educate and inform them. And I think Publix done an amazing job there. So I would highly recommend anyone who's on Robinhood that's interested in switching. You should absolutely go check out Publix if you want to have a similar style app. You're lucky that you got equity. That's pretty damn good pitch. While we're recording this, my phone keeps blowing up and people keep sending all sorts of things where there are many of Silicon Valley kind of heavyweights who normally

would not say anything negative, who would kind of let the dust settle. Literally, I won't say who it is, but there's a very, very well-known person who literally just tweeted just F Robinhood. Right. I mean, just like the sentiment just switched. And I think that- Yeah. They're destroying their brand today, for sure. It is not good. But, but hey, you know, I do keep saying to myself, look, there may be certain things that we aren't privy to, right? If, if the regulators come to your office and say, hey, if you don't do X, you're going to be in trouble. Like, you know, I think it's just people don't like disingenuous behavior. And when you when you make the Robin Hood promise, and then you do this later on, you need to know that that's a risk that you're going to upset a lot of people. Completely agree. So if we kind of switch gears to crypto, I think there's a lot of people who think Bitcoin and crypto and decentralized finance and all this stuff is the solution.

What are your thoughts there? Yeah. So crypto is, I don't even know where to start, but I guess just to maybe set up my history on it. So I was super fortunate in that I've got two younger brothers. Both of them are amazing. But one of them got a job for working at Coinbase as one of their lead engineers maybe about four or five years ago. And the way that I view the world is I think generalists rule the world. I think everyone should be a specialist in some areas, but I think generally with just the way the world is changing, I think being a generalist allows you to connect dots and see opportunities that you're not going to see if you stay in your niche. And we're at a point in time where because we're all connected, because there's so much disruption, because

there's so many different kind of companies getting spun up and opportunities that are all around the world. I think being able to look super broadly and connect those dots puts you in a better position. And so I've always just been fascinated. So I just started asking him tons of questions about crypto and he helped, you know, I ended up reading the Bitcoin white paper and where I netted out, and this is generally how kind of my investing style when it comes to disruptive technology is, I do not need to, in fact, I actively try not to come to a definitive, this is good, this is bad point of view. I think the best way to think about the world, especially with disruptive technologies, just probabilistically. So in my mind, I read that,

I was confused in a lot of different levels about how Bitcoin worked, how it actually operated, how the blockchain actually worked, how transactions happened. And I think that's one thing just that I learned early on is that the crypto spaces, I think there's a ton of really compelling opportunities. It is also one of the least accessible, most intimidating marketplaces and industries in the world right now. And, you know, I know things are improving there, but crypto has a long, long ways to go in terms of making it so the average person can actually understand and engage. But when you think about that, is that like a user experience standpoint? point, is that something that can get solved through education? Like you, you know, you kind

of sit this very interesting position where you were the head of design, I think, right? Or you ran the design team at Square. Square's obviously made this massive push into the space, done a great job, been very principled and kind of really put a flag in the ground. At the same time, you understand design, you understand making a beautiful experience, which Square and Cash App and stuff have. So how do you think about like, is that the solution? Is it more of just the user experience or something else? I mean, yes, I think there's more education that can happen. I think, you know, seeing firms like Square with the cash app, making the Bitcoin buying and holding and custody experience great is amazing because it, you know, in my mind,

it just eliminates all the complexity of if you try to have your own wallet, you try to custody your own keys, you try, I mean, it just becomes very complicated very quickly if you try to kind of spin it up on your own. So I think that's all wonderful. But I think one of the biggest things is crypto is still an industry where nerds are building for nerds and nerds need to build for everybody. And what I mean by that is like, you know, I, one of the investments I made in this space is Trust Token, which became TruFi. And, you know, it's been really interesting to watch how they play, how that's played out. And I think that Raphael there has done a really great job recently with the launch of TruFi and how that works. It is, you know, so I'm a large investor

there, those tokens are beginning to come liquid. It is still super, super, super confusing. You know, I can stake that on loans and I can look at these loans and try to say whether I think they're going to pay it back or not pay it back. But you get very bad information about what, you know, why is someone borrowing this? What's your payback rate? So there's like these technologies where you can use crypto to, you know, be able to kind of vote on a loan and earn a return for that loan. But none of the other things make sense. You know, I'm not given any information about who's borrowing. I'm not giving great information about their payback history. I'm not giving great information about the mechanics of it. And so I think just in my mind, net net

crypto just needs to, uh, you know, if honestly, I think the beacon is Apple, you need to take complicated technology and you need to put it in a wrapper that makes it drop dead simple for anybody to understand. And I think that's where crypto keeps shooting itself in the foot. yeah so i i wonder if um is the promise of decentralization the promise of the lack of market manipulation you know all the kind of things that i think people today especially when they're watching the game stop and and uh day trading and um you know kind of wall street bets all that while they're watching that play out is the decentralization promise enough just to start pulling people in that direction and then as more people come we get the improvement of uh

the design, or do you think that it's kind of, you know, the design's got to improve so that when people do look for decentralization, they can actually be onboarded and it works? Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, I am of the standpoint that almost no one understands what decentralization is, and it's still a buzzword. And if you were to ask the average person, even someone investing in crypto, to articulate that really clearly, that most people wouldn't be able to get past maybe a sentence or two, honestly, explaining what that is. And And I think that, yeah, in my mind, I think it's right now we have, I would say, but if you look at Cash App, you look at Coinbase, I think there are great experiences for people to invest in, you know, the kind of blue chip assets in the cryptocurrency space. So things like Bitcoin, things like Ethereum, once you get beyond that and you get into the world of tokens, I think it is incredibly convoluted and incredibly confusing.

And so in my mind, I think it's just part of what I think is fascinating about the crypto space and why I, even though I admitted that I didn't fully understand it, and I admitted that there was a huge range of outcomes, some of which crypto would be a very big thing and some of which crypto would not, I still thought it made sense to place a bunch of bets in this space. And that's because it is incredibly disruptive technology that I think will define a lot of what things look like kind of five and 10 years from now. But part of what that means is you're working on the cutting edge. You have to have a team, have a mentality, have an approach where you're building those things for the average person. And I would say too, just maybe to make the devil's advocate point of view, most people investing in tokens, they're not the average person. And I still think that is not where the average consumer, average investor is going to invest. But those tokens were created with the intention that the average person would be able to use it. So someone that wants to store files could choose Filecoin instead of Dropbox. And in terms of making that a reality for the average person who couldn't care less about Bitcoin or Ethereum, but is really compelled by some utility like Filecoin, making it easy for them to choose and use Filecoin over Dropbox is, we still have a long ways to go to do something like that. Got it. And when you think through the crypto businesses, is there anything that changes the evaluation when it's like, hey, the stock market's like pretty US-based centric, pretty Western world? you need to have a bank account, you need to kind of have all these things. Then we go to this crypto world with Bitcoin as kind of the core unit of account and all these decentralized applications. And now that's like a global thing. Do you see that the global aspect having a

material impact? Or is it more just, no, we're gonna take the Western model and just more people doesn't necessarily change anything specific about what's going on? Well, I mean, I think that is still, in my mind, one of the key things underpinning why something like crypto is the future of store of value or is the future of currency is just the fact that for the first time in human history, we have one, we have something that is global in nature and decentralized in nature that anyone can transact on. And I think that in my mind is some of the most compelling, most interesting use cases of Bitcoin that we're seeing is seeing how people use it in emerging countries, seeing how people use it in countries where the currency has been devalued. And that's

where I can really, um, in those cases, I totally buy the argument that Bitcoin is superior to, you know, kind of the currency in that market. And I think that Bitcoin is a huge blessing that people have this kind of global, uh, this, yeah, this global currency that they can use to be able to transact, get paid in store value in. Um, but I think what gets just in my mind, there's a bunch of other things that are just difficult about it, or it's still, I find kind of flummoxing. And one of those things is just the notion that you should invest in Bitcoin because it's a store of value, but it's a store of value that's also going up like a speculative asset that if it's a store of value, at some point it will be a stable asset in which it's not giving you crazy

returns. And it seems to me like all of the investors investing today on it as a speculative asset are the people who would not put a dollar in it when it's a stable asset and it's a stable store of value. So I think there's still some things there that in my mind, we are, I do think we're certainly, I mean, you look at the stock market, you look at almost any market now, we're certainly in some sort of a speculative moment in time. I'm not going to call it a bubble, and we're seeing that play out, but I will tell. Where does this all go? Do we just disrupt the entire system and we end up in a decentralized digital world? All the assets are digital, every application's decentralized and it's just literally the system has a reset or kind of how

do you see um maybe maybe not the end but kind of the you know the next big milestone um kind of environment yeah i see it i i am not of the mind that this is going to displace the traditional company or the traditional currency or the traditional centralized way of operating because honestly if you look at and study um you know like why companies operate in a centralized way most of the time, it becomes really obvious that typically that actually is the superior way to operate, you know, and so I think that, in my mind, what crypto is, is kind of a beautiful new model that I think will stand alongside the ways that we've always thought about currency and companies and and kind of entities and stores value and all of those things. And I don't think

it's Yeah, so I don't think it's going to displace that at all. But in my mind, that that means that it's kind of, it's almost like booting up another planet with a different series of, you know, kind of environmental conditions with it that support different ways of doing things and different ways of thinking about things. And I think that's what's super interesting and fascinating about the crypto space is that because it's different, one, it doesn't need to displace anything that exists today. It can be a new thing that is a new environment these things can operate in. It can operate via different conditions. You know, you can get to really different outcomes because of that. So I think it's just a really compelling,

very different way of thinking about the world. And we'll see how it plays out. But I think that the underlying technology behind it is fascinating. And I think that if you're an investor and you're someone who wants to make bets on the future of technology, I think there's a lot of really interesting things happening in the crypto space. Yeah. What other areas are you interested in? I mean, yeah, my main areas are really, I love studying businesses. So all the time, like I was just reading a paper the other day, it was kind of a case study about Louis Vuitton and how they think about booting up their businesses. And that's because I'm super interested in LVMH and kind of luxury brands like that, because I think they're incredible

businesses with huge moats to be able to get into. So I love studying businesses. I love uh, you know, studying investors and the different ways that people approach investing. That's how I've gotten to, you know, kind of my model. And, uh, I think really the thing, I don't know if one thing I would share there that has just really hit home for me over the last two years and has made a huge difference in the way that I invest is just getting really comfortable. I think the best investors, if you look at it, if you study investors, I think the best investors, one, know how their brain works, know how they're wired. And what I mean by that is what companies, what businesses inherently make sense to you. You know, is it a blue chip type business? Is it a

value type business? Is it a disruptive growth business? And really understanding kind of your nature. And what I mean there, and this is maybe a good example is, you know, for people that are investing in crypto, like if you're investing today and your experience, and say you invested three months ago, your experience has been amazing. Your experience has been riding up this almost unstoppable train of returns. It's very different from someone who invested four or five years ago, you know, where I remember starting to invest in, it was 2,500 and for a very long time being, you know, significantly underwater and, uh, you know, holding onto that in order to kind of get the returns that we're at today. And so part of my nature is I know that I can experience

a ton of pain on investment if I really believe in it. That's why I also believe that everybody has to start with, how does your brain work? How do you view the world? What kind of, and then understanding what investments snap into place with that. And, uh, I think if you do that, you then you can bet on things with a tremendous amount of conviction because you can never borrow conviction from anybody else. It's just not a thing. So you need to do your own homework, invest in things that make sense to you, and come up with your own formula. And that's why when I see people on Twitter debating whether value or growth is the right approach, it is an idiotic conversation. You can make great money being a value investor. You can make great money being

a growth investor. There's success stories to show for both. There's failure stories to show for both. And so in my mind, it just all goes back to all of us are wired very differently. Our brains are wired very differently. We're interested in different things. We are triggered by different things. So why don't we start there? Stop kind of demonizing different ways of viewing the world and just understand that there's a tremendous amount of ways to win. You just need to figure out what your way is. Yeah. I think that's a fantastic thing and way to think. if you had to go and you had to look at early stage investing, what's the one thing that you look for in an early stage company opportunity or team? Like, is it the market? Is it the product?

Is it the founder? Is it something else? Just how do you think through that? And kind of what's the one thing? It's, I mean, in my mind, it's absolutely all team and really there it's almost all soft skills and what I mean, soft skills or, or intangibles. And what I mean by that is I think, you know, so my experience taking over a declining business and turning that around over the last two years has just hit home that, uh, succeeding in business, it, it, you have to be in it to win it. And this cannot be something that you're trying. This cannot be something that you're giving a shot. This has to be something that you were like, I am building this, whatever it takes, I will figure this out and I will build this because what you find out

really quickly. And, you know, I think we're in the, I think it's fair to say the most competitive time in human history, in terms of if you look at almost any industry, there are now more competitors vying for market share with you. There are, you know, more disruptive new entrants, I think it's harder to, if you have had success in the past to sustain that success and change with the times and hold on to your users and your customers. And so if all that's true, I think what that means is that, um, it takes a lot of very intangible things to be able to succeed. And so what I look for is I want to know that this person like has honestly put themselves in a situation where their backs up against the wall. And ideally they've done that via their own accord. And they're like,

this is what I'm doing. I don't care what it takes. I'm doing this for the next two, two years, five years, 10 years. And I'm going to be successful at this and make this successful because I think as well to what you, one thing that I've been fascinated by it, I think like One of the insights I've had of investing in, you know, 100 plus early stage companies is it is the winners that you have are typically you wouldn't have picked those or you wouldn't say, I think this is going to be my 100 X return investment. When I made that investment, you're often very surprised by who wins and who fails and who blows up along the way. I think you also realize that, you know, take a company like Uber, getting to the point where you're actually a trading sustainable business. And we could debate whether that's Uber yet or whether they still have time to go.

But that's now taken, what, five, 10 different chapters in Uber's history of trying different strategies, having different leaders, having different teammates on, focusing on different markets, adapting to different competitors. And so you just really realize that building a company is a multi-stage thing. And what does that mean? That means that you're going to have success with something, and then it's going to stop working. And you're going to have to go and figure out what that next approach is, what that

next turn of the wheel is in order to get things moving. So again, just all of those things, I think, boil down to the fact that you need to have somebody that's in it 110%. You need to have somebody who's very gritty, who's very determined, who's very disciplined. And I think that more than anything, honestly, determines whether you're going to survive. Because founding any company, building any company, it is like being thrown in the deep and you're either going to sink or you're going to swim. And so you want to find the people that whatever it takes, they're going to swim and they're going to make it a successful thing.

So I usually wrap up with three questions. I actually want to ask a couple of different questions for this because you've just got such a unique view of the world that I really enjoy it. If you had to pick one market for the next 10 years, you had to put all of your money in that market. It's not a company, but an actual market. What's the market you'd pick? That's a great question. I mean, first thing that comes to mind, although I'm sure I would change my mind and give it enough time, is investing in kind of innovative, disruptive fintech brands. Some examples of those that I find really fascinating in the public markets today is a company like Live Oak Bank, which I'll just stop there. People that are interested can go and

can look it up. I think they're doing really interesting stuff. I think another example there is Upstart Holdings, which does kind of payday advance loans and loans, but they do it in, I think, a really interesting way. And the thought there is, I think, one, I'm sure for a lot of people, they're like, oh, it's an easy answer. There's so many fintech companies. There's so much money happening there. And again, it goes back to, I think, just you can either look at that and say, oh, all those opportunities are done. That means that it's overcrowded, it's overhyped, and there's going to be consolidation. There's going to be stagnation there. I actually look at it very differently, which is money is one of the largest markets on earth that you can be in.

We're at a period of time where Josh Wolf of Lux Capital, I think, has this really great idea that really what you witness in any generation, if you look at public companies, is almost no public company survives long enough to be in business 50 years later and have their same position in the market. So what you're always seeing is this perpetual trending out of what's worked in the pass with the newest models that are coming in and are displacing that. And so I think fintech is a massive market. It's a ton of disruption. That means that destruction is going to be value destructive. There's going to be a lot of things that go to zero or go out of business. But that also means that I think the players that are the big players are going to

be very different 10 years, 20 years than they are today. Interesting. Could not agree more. The second question that I always ask people is about their sleep schedule. And this is brought by, uh, the guys over at, uh, eight sleep. Um, I sleep in the bed every night, this thermo dereg or thermo, not deregulation. We need deregulation with thermoregulation, uh, of just having a, uh, a colder environment to sleep deeper. What's your sleep schedule? Do you sleep, you know, five or six hours? Are you a nine or 10 hour person? What, what, uh, what? Yeah. So my question, my answer is, uh, people aren't going to love it. Probably eight sleeps, not going to love it. But so I've got a, uh, a four week old baby at home and, uh, we've,

this is our second kid. And so what that means is I'm in the period now where literally I'm probably sleeping 10, you know, uh, 30 minutes at a time, 10 times in a row over the course of the night, and that's being broken up all over the place. So my sleep schedule right now is atrocious. That being said, I do focus a lot on having a kind of making sure that I get great sleep. And what I do there is I put on literally about from the time I get home, I'll put on red light blocking glasses and use those the entire night, uh, to have on, even if I'm not looking at a screen. I'll use something like the juve, uh, which is an amazing kind of near infrared red light instrument that if I'm ever feeling just super amped up, like I had a big day or

dealt with a lot of stress or anxiety using that before I go to sleep. Oh man, I can feel just that heavy feeling in my body after turning on that light and using it for 10, 15 minutes. Um, you know, and then I use a, like a mantis sleep mask and a few other things. But, um, my answer right now is my sleep schedule is not great, but I aspire to get back at some point to having unbroken in eight hours. The one thing that I always tell people is the one excuse that you're allowed to have is I have a kid. Because then it's not an excuse. You're just, you're just trying to survive. Exactly. Well, and you're trying to make sure that your kids survive so that you can survive, right? And that your spouse, you know, has help, has help and support. And so, you know, I, we,

we sleep, my wife and I sleep in the bed with our, or in the same room with our kid every single night. That means that we're both up all night long, but I think that's the best way. I love it. Before I let you go, I got one more question. You could ask me one aliens. Are you a believer or non-believer? I mean, I, in my heart of hearts, I'm a believer. I think there's the skeptic side, the kind of rational side that wants to overwrite that. But I mean, I saw that there was a new story recently of, I think it was like the former head of Mossad or something like that for Israel said that there's a galactic federation. They're just waiting for us to be ready. I hope that's true. I hope that's true. That's the role that I want to live in.

I'm with you. I don't know about the Galactic Federation, but I'm there. What's the one question you got to ask me? I mean, so, and it's probably a little bit of a, just kind of, I don't know, right up with your, it's like a, I don't know, a base hit for you, but I'd be really curious. You know, I know you're obviously an incredible proponent of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency. And I know you've, you made a huge bet on that. Um, and, um, you know, you made a good, a great call there. How, so I guess my question is, let's say we jump forward and I'll just get to make up a scenario that is our wildest dream. Say Bitcoin is at $50,000 or $150,000 per individual Bitcoin. It ha it is this established store of value. We, you look at public

companies and you see something like 10, 20% of those public companies have some portion of their treasury in Bitcoin. It hasn't been annihilated by the central banks. So at that point, it's less speculative and it's more of a universal ubiquitous store of value. What, I don't know, what would your thoughts be? What would your message be? How would you think about holding it and investing it at that point in time? Yeah. I mean, I just value or denominate my wealth in Bitcoin. And so it's just, I just think of it in Bitcoin and it's just because over the rest of my life, let's say I'm very fortunate I could live 60 more years, right? It is going to continue to preserve my purchasing power better than any other asset that possibly could have. And so I think that that's just

generally the way that I think about it. And so it's less about like, oh, it went up a lot in US dollar price, I got to sell it. Like, sure, you can measure appreciation in dollars, but I never will plan to go back into a dollar denominated world, right? It's just like, no, I am going to continue to hold this because it will preserve my purchasing power. And I think what becomes even more interesting is like, okay, then what happens when you denominate the rest of your portfolio? So rather than holding stocks, you hold these digital or tokenized stocks, right? What happens when this gets tokenized from this and this, and eventually you just have a hundred percent digital portfolio. And so I think that like, we're moving towards that world. Again,

I think people are just drastically underestimating like the sentiment shift that has happened in the last, you know, four or five days. Uh, and so we're going to see what happens here, but I just think like that world is going to become much more attractive to people than a legacy kind of rigged game world. Last question. Do you think the aliens will be interested in Bitcoin? What was it? Didn't somebody ask? I think somebody asked Elon what is, uh, you know, what's like the currency on Mars. And he said, I think he might've said crypto. I don't think he said Bitcoin, but like whatever he said, you know, uh, I don't think we're going to bring gold. I don't think we're going to bring dollars. So I guess the only thing left is, uh, there we

go. There we go. That's it. Uh, awesome, man. Well, listen, where can we send people to find you on the internet or, uh, or find more, um, of, uh, of the work that you're doing? Yeah. People can follow me on, uh, on Twitter at, uh, Daniel Scrivener. They can also go to danielscrivener.com. And my last name is S C R I V N E R. It's a harsh German name. So a lot of people misspell it. Um, and, uh, for anyone that's interested, um, I have a podcast where I profile, um, investors and entrepreneurs that are building the future called outliers. People can follow that at my website, danielscribner.com. And for anyone that's interested in flow, um, we would love to have you give it a try, um, at getflow.com.

Amazing, man. Listen, thank you so much for doing this. I really, really appreciate it. And I think people are really going to enjoy this one. Um, so we'll have to do it again in the future. Thank you for what you do. Thanks for having me on. Awesome.