The Pomp Podcast - #588 Delian on Space and Bitcoin

Episode Date: June 22, 2021

Delian Asparouhov is an investor with Founders Fund and a co-founder and chairman of Varda, a space manufacturing startup. In this conversation, we discuss Founders Fund, Varda, Bitcoin, DeFi, Original thinking, Miami, Red pills, and Courage to say what you think. ======================= Public Rec is on a mission to make comfort look good. Their fan-favorite Flex Short is the ultimate crossover short you’ll need all summer long. From the beach to the gym, this quick-drying short has you covered. Comfort starts with a better fit. Free shipping. Free returns. Visit www.publicrec.com/pomp and use POMP at checkout for 10% off! ======================= Whether you're an experienced crypto trader or just starting out, Kraken has the tools to help you achieve financial freedom. With the new Kraken app, you can easily buy and sell over 60 of the most popular cryptocurrencies in just a few minutes. Featuring a sleek new design and an easy-to-use interface, you can now take your crypto portfolio with you on the go, 24/7. Visit kraken.com/pomp to learn more or search "kraken" in the app store. ======================= Unstoppable Domains makes crypto easier by replacing your address with [AnyName].crypto. They allow you to send and receive over 70 cryptocurrencies, including BTC, ETH, and LINK with a single blockchain domain. Go to unstoppabledomains.com and get [YourName].crypto to make your crypto life easier. =======================

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now, let's kick this thing off. Delian Asparov is an investor with Founders Fund and a co-founder and chairman of Varda, a space manufacturing startup. In this conversation, we discuss Founders Fund, Varda, Bitcoin, DeFi, original thinking, Miami, red pills, and having the courage to say what you think. I really enjoyed this conversation with Delian 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 Public Rec. They simply make the most comfortable clothes in the world. No, seriously, the most

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specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I have the mayor of my... Oh, just kidding. I have Deleon here. what's up prince of miami the prince of miami exactly uh let's get started talking about space uh varda is a company that you co-founded uh while working at founders fund what is going on in space like why do you want to do this i've been thinking about space since like i don't know i was a kid maybe like 2007 8 like you know freshman year of high school and was just like fascinated with this world of like the commercialization of space like the end of the day the apollo era was

like super cool but it was government dollars and government dollars are limited they can't grow exponentially uh but it was like super cool to see i've been tracking spacex since like the very first launch i was like oh my god like if they figure out how to pull off a commercial rocket that makes it to the commercial satellites and all these other things are like so much more viable and so i've been tracking it for like sort of years and years and then finally maybe like 2016 i started being like okay i need to start considering like not just having this as like a hobby where i'm like reading books and like watching the launches like i gotta start to do this like actually professionally and so that was part of why i actually joined venture was because

like i found it to be the best way to sort of do it earlier on in my career because like i basically thought that there were a couple different paths one i had a bunch of friends from mit that actually went to like work at spacex right some of whom you know still work there but i'm like i'm a pretty good engineer i don't know if i want to be like an engineer like 90 of the day like what i like is like i can do the engineering plus business plus a little marketing storytelling like i kind of like a diverse set of like you know skill sets that like i work on so i didn't want to do that the other path that i thought was the only possible option was like you do the like chamath jervison elon approach i like make it big and like regular tech and then you get to do space stuff but i was

like man that path to you like is going to take too long and so that was where like sort of path three sort of showed itself to me where i was like oh the world of venture allows me to like actually kind of learn about space because like venture is one of the only jobs in the valley where like i feel you actually get paid to like learn whatever you kind of want to learn and so six months into like this role at coastal ventures which was originally supposed to be like a one-year stand. I was just supposed to like, you know, figure out how to like co-found a company and like kind of was like half EIR, half chief of staff type thing. I actually sourced a space company and I was like, oh shit, I can do the space stuff today. And so it's kind of this like

whole like, I don't know, like left turn in my life where I was like, okay, screw the being the founder thing. I'm going to do the venture thing, really lean into this. And I'm going to make sure that one of my focus areas is just like, I'm going to keep doing space. And so invested in that first space company, started spending a ton of time going to like space conferences, meeting everybody. And like when you see it from afar, it feels like a, you know, I'm sure, you know, crypto and other industries the same way where it's like, it feels like there's a ton going on, blah, blah, blah. But once you get into it, it's like, actually, there's like, you know, probably 20 companies that have raised north of $15 million that represent basically the entire commercial

space industry. And I literally just met basically every CEO except, you know, Elon, and got to know all of them. And like, you start to understand, okay, like, how do satellites get sent? What are rockets made out of? What are the components? What's the supply chain? How do you do all this? And you actually start to realize, okay, here are like the possible sort of angles of attack and like potential other ideas and, you know, things you could work on. And that's kind of eventually how Varda came about. But the thing that I kept tracking was like, you know, a lot of the like, let's say like, you know, mobile industry and a lot of like, you know, SaaS was enabled by AWS, you know, getting really, really cheap in, you know, 2006, 2007. And I always describe that

like Elon with SpaceX is basically the equivalent of AWS, where this asset that used to be extremely expensive, only accessible to government, like was a pain in the ass, iRocket launches, is now like dude you can book on spacex's website a 200 kilogram satellite you can send it up for a million bucks literally just like then there's like an e-commerce flow like they literally like you click through for sure you gotta like talk to a sales dude to like you know submit the wire but like you do like a little prepayment and like entirely digitally right um and then like one day that's wild that's wild like one day it'll be like full online like we're not that far away from like literally like you literally don't have to talk to anybody there's still a lot of like

hard engineering that has to go into like right now when you like book a spacex launch you still like, it's not like you just talk to the sales guys, like the engineers over there have to like integrate your satellite into it. But like, there's a lot of companies working on, okay, how do we standardize this? Make it to that? Like, you know, you can literally just do this purely, purely digitally. Um, and so that's what I started to track and got me really excited about Varda where I was like, okay, this AWS like cost, I launched costs are now cheap enough where it's not just satellites that are now economical. Space manufacturing is economical. Okay. So what is space manufacturing? That's the whole point of Varda is to do space manufacturing. So what is

that. Yeah. So I described it as like, we're doing space manufacturing for earth. There's a lot of people that think about space manufacturing in space. So it's like building stuff in space or doing like lunar ice mining and stuff like that. Like that's, that's cool. But that stuff's like sci-fi, like a venture capitalist can't really back that. Like there's cool government projects going on, but that stuff is again, very small dollars versus what we're doing is we're building materials in space for use back here on earth, which means there's earth size markets, very large commercial markets. And so there's already been a ton of research done on the ISS over the past, literally like 15 years that has showed everything from cancer drugs, like Amgen and Eli Lilly have

showed that they have better yields of their cancer drugs when they manufacture them in microgravity. There's been human organs that have been printed in space. Basically, the way you can think about it is if you try to print a human organ on earth, it like flops over because of gravity versus if you're in zero G, you can kind of keep printing it and you can see you can print a really complex organ. There are semiconductors that have been shown, fiber optic cables, basically a ton of materials that have been shown up there. And so in early 2020, actually before starting Varda, I went and talked to all these researchers that had done this type of microgravity stuff. And I was like, great, super cool. You guys have done this on the ISS, but the ISS is never

going to be like a commercial factory. NASA is not going to allow a bunch of fucking line workers up there. We got to do this independently of the ISS. And they're all like, yes, we need to do it independently. I'm like, great. Can I give you money to do that? And they're like, no. And I was like, well, why the fuck not? They're like, well, we don't know how to go independent of the ISS. We're researchers that rely on NASA for getting up there, running our research, and then coming back down so right now basically you can uh kind of workflow would be i want to run a test in space in microgravity for let's say a fiber optic cable development and so what i do is i get all my materials i book it on spacex rocket they launch uh my shit gets to the iss then somebody who's on

the iss is given instructions essentially do my test send it back and when a rocket comes back then I get my results and like, just do that over and over and over again. Obviously there's limitations around how much can go on the rocket, how many people are on the ISS, what's the complexity, what's their knowledge, et cetera. Exactly. I mean like from start to finish that whole process you talked about takes on average four years. The largest thing that you can send up is roughly the size of like a glove box. So really limited like total volume. And then there's extreme limitations on like, for example, in a lot of fiber optics, there's a toxic chemical that you want to coat the fiber optic with that protects it at the end of the process no fucking way is

nasa going to let you put that toxic chemical on the iss if that thing gets out like you're potentially killing astronauts so there's like severe limitations on the processes the size how long it takes it's if you want to iterate on that process you're like sending it up and then four years later you're going to iterate on the process once again and so it just takes way way too long and so our whole idea was like okay how would we do this independent of the iss great we can still get up there via spacex rocket lab you know because they can just send the rockets and you can, you don't have to go to the ISS. You can go to any destination. Exactly. You can go wherever you want to. So that part still stays the same, but now, okay, we got to go independent of

the ISS. That means now we got to power ourselves, communicate with ourselves. That part actually also pretty easy because look at Starlink, look at, you know, Planet Labs. They, they power satellites up there. They communicate with them. They have batteries up there. Okay. So that part's pretty easy. The actual glove box, it's like, okay, well now we're going to take that same glove box, that fiber optic unit that, you know, whatever, or, you know, human organs that people are making. Take that same thing. Now we can go a lot bigger. Now we can put that toxic chemical in there. Now we can go a lot hotter. Now we can bring more materials up there. So that part, if anything, is like easier in some ways than it was on the ISS. The only like wrinkle is the ISS

is pressurized in atmosphere versus to keep it really low cost, we're putting everything in vacuum. Explain the engineering difference. Yeah. So in atmosphere, the biggest thing is actually the like thermal environment. So, you know, right now I'm in this room, right? My body is generating heat and it's getting moved away from me from the like cold air that's basically around me. And that's how most things get cooled down in manufacturing processes. So you have like a, you know, a really hot semiconductor, the way that it cools off on a typical, like, you know, Intel manufacturing line is the air around it basically just cools it down. Uh, in vacuum, there's no air. And so if something gets hot, it just stays hot. Um, and so what you have to do

is you have to use these, uh, what are called like radiative cooling tubes. And then the way that they basically work is like the little like, you know, semiconductor glows a little bit red when it gets too hot. The radiated cooling tube absorbs that. And then it actually sends it out to these like little wires that are on the outside of the satellite that are basically made to glow extra red when they get hot. And that glowing of that red light is the only way you actually quote unquote cool down. And so that's the really hard part is basically cooling down is really hard when there's no atmosphere. So basically what you're doing is you're taking the same principle of bring something here to cool this down.

The difference is that you're doing it in a much more kind of thoughtful, intentional way versus just allowing the air around it. Exactly, exactly. So that's the maybe tricky part. But other than that, everything in some ways is much easier when you leave the ISS

because you can go bigger, more materials, more chemicals. The ISS doesn't have those same, or you don't have the limitations from the ISS. But then the part that all these researchers were really scared of is, okay, we finished those materials, got to bring them back down to earth.

That's what everybody's really scared of. Because the counterintuitive thing is, right now it's actually quite easy to get up to space. Uh, what we do is we take a rocket, we get it out of the atmosphere and then we go really, really fast. Right. And that's how we actually orbit. And the hard part for a rocket isn't the getting out of the atmosphere. Like that's only like, you know, the first, like whatever, 120 seconds of the flight. The hard part is like, then the going really, really fast so that you stay in orbit rather than just coming back down. So when you think about it is when you're coming

back, you're going really fast and like, yeah, you could like send a whole rocket up there, slow yourself down and then hit the atmosphere. But that's really inefficient. The much better way to do it is just come into the atmosphere really fucking fast and use the atmosphere to slow you down. That process of re-entry has never really been done by commercial organizations other than SpaceX with their Dragon program, right? So whenever you see the astronauts coming back, the trickiest part of that whole journey is when they come back going really, really fast to the atmosphere. Same thing with the Apollo era days. That's the most dangerous part for the astronauts when they're coming back down. How fast are they going when they're re-entering?

You're going like, man, I hope any space engineer reading this doesn't correct me on this, but I think 14,000 kilometers per second. So you're talking like real, real fast. Yeah. Yeah. Multiple G forces in terms to give you a sense of like, uh, so, you know, we take these materials. Yeah. So you go through roughly eight G's at the peak. Um, so, um, in our type of reentry, cause we're not taking back humans. So the reason that like sort of our vehicle in some ways is much simpler is like, we are just taking back some like raw materials. We don't have to take back a bunch of humans. And so I sometimes describe like our thing that we're using to bring down the materials is like a, you know, delivery van versus like the SpaceX dragon vehicle is like a

gold plated limousine with like great AC and soft seats for the astronauts. You know what I mean? That thing costs a hundred million. We're making something for like a hundred K to bring back our materials. So I send up materials. Yep. There's a satellite or a vehicle there. Uh, and then I have to get back. What is the process to get the materials off of the thing that goes up into the actual like testing or manufacturing, uh, facility? And then how do I get it back? Is that all robotic? Yeah. So the first time we're actually just sending everything up already pre-connected in the future for sure we'll be doing docking and moving around but the first time we actually send the like satellite looking thing the factory looking thing and what we call

the re-entry capsule we actually just send that all connected already so that basically it's like already ready to go in the future for sure for a variety of reasons that actually gets much more economical to not send it up all together but to do sort of that demonstration mission we're sending it all up together and basically literally the raw materials pass from the factory into that like re-entry module the re-entry module comes back in but like to give you a sense so like you know we actually uh you know have to uh we have are regulated by the faa because like we're re-entering over airspace um if we like miss uh you know the atmosphere even literally by like three or four seconds you're talking about like rather than like landing in the united states you're like

accidentally like landing in like europe and so you're going so so fast like you have to be extremely precise about like where you re-enter and so a lot of the problem is like convincing the faa hey we're going to make sure to do a very sort of like controlled re-entry um in a very sort of tight area such that we don't accidentally like you know land in somebody's house and like kill them is this the whole it was a chinese rocket or something that was like coming back and people were like oh it could land in asia or the united states they're like wait that's a pretty big area exactly so that gives you a sense of like how fast you're going like think about like you think about like a 747 yeah that's fast that's 500 miles per hour when you're up there you're

going 14 000 kilometers per second so it's just like the speeds in orbit i think sometimes are like hard to comprehend because like you can't actually go that fast on earth like if you're going that fast on earth you melt basically instantaneously the only reason you can go that fast up there is because you're in vacuum got it and so if you miss even by a little bit and it's like kind of hard with like that rocket people are just using radar to try to figure out where the hell it was because like there's a little bit of atmosphere up there and so the drag and how you hit it like can just like buff it around that rocket and so that's why it was really hard part of what we're doing is we're coming in hot and fast on purpose that little atmosphere that's

up high doesn't sort of affect our path and we can actually much more precisely say hey faa we're gonna come down like right here and we're gonna make sure that there's no humans around and like not gonna hit anybody do you want to land uh on land or in the ocean um it is much simpler engineering problem to land on land and so when we when we fly we will be the first commercial re-entry vehicle to ever land on land um so dragon apollo all of those have landed like on water we would be the first ones to do it on land why do they all want to land in the ocean or spacex basically lands on like a drone ship spacex's original plan was actually to land on land so uh the dragon was originally going to have retro propulsive boosters that actually just landed it

on a landing pad on land um but um the qualification process for getting nasa comfortable with that uh was basically going to take way too long and so about maybe i think it was like two years into the dragon program they pivoted just being like screw it we're just doing the apollo style basically just like it's a lot easier to just like you throw a parachute up and then you just hit the water rather than like you know if you hit ground going those speeds that actually can be like you know harmful to the astronauts and so mostly it's like the reason we land on water is just like it's an easier engineering problem yep splashdown is a lot easier than hard ground yeah and it's funny because they're reusable rocket lands like oh the land thing there's

like regulation stuff why don't we just create a drone a drone ship and then we'll just use that to land on like that's wild yeah i mean that was part of the reason they did the drone ship too was just like you know it makes it a lot easier for testing you don't have to clear everything like it's in the middle of the ocean. Like there's no risk of like, yeah, the rocket blows up, whatever. There's nobody around. But over time, SpaceX does want to get more consistent and they do it occasionally, right? When they have enough fuel, they've gotten the FAA comfortable now with like landing the rockets on land. But for sure, I'm sure in the longterm, they're thinking about, okay, how do we eventually make it so that like when we're flying humans, they also land on land

because like the seaports are kind of a pain in the ass. Is the idea that SpaceX, you guys, whoever else, these rockets are going to take off like every 10 minutes? Yeah. I mean, with Varda, the initial product that we're going after, if we were to eventually satisfy the entire market that we're going after, we would have multiple of our reentry capsules coming down per day, and we would be buying a SpaceX rocket every other day. And that's just us. And so there's a world where SpaceX between Varda and all the other companies that are coming up are literally launching a rocket multiple times a day. And we're not talking about that being a decade away. We're talking about that being like, this year, they launched so far already 28 rockets. So it

means they're on track for you know doing on the order of like 50 or 60 um and so we're already talking about like we're already at one a week and like three years ago we were at like one a month and so you know you extrapolate that out in another three years um it wouldn't be surprising if there's like a spacex rocket launch basically every other day and another three years after that multiple a day yeah when you think about the cost so you take your device you want to get it up to space and then get it back is that uh you said i think the device itself is like 100k and then the whole round trip is like two, $3 million or how was the economics? Yeah. Um, so the way you can kind of think about it, launch costs, uh, basically $5,000 a kilogram today for like SpaceX. Okay. Um,

and so when we think about it, we think about, okay, how much of our entire, so I mentioned that whole thing, the satellite, the factory, the re-entry, how much of that is actually the useful raw materials, right? Cause like that's what we're really getting paid for. Um, in our early missions, it'll probably more look like 5% of the entire thing is going to be, uh, the useful raw materials. Part of why eventually we want to leave the factory up there and dock with the raw materials is it makes it to the, rather than being 5%, it's actually like 50% because then we're just bringing up a bunch of raw materials, docking with the factory and then taking them back down. And so the way that I think about it is sort of like the net cost of launch for the raw materials.

The first time is if it's 5%, it's basically, well, okay, you're basically paying 20X the launch costs rather than 5,000. It's like $1,000 per kilogram to get up there. But once it's 50% of the actual payload, then it's only $10,000 per kilogram of the actual raw materials to get it up there. And so that's kind of the economics. But then when you think about it of like, okay, well, how many very useful materials are there that you could sell for more than $100,000 a kilogram? Turns out, if you look at semiconductors and fiber optics and human organs and things like that, most of those things, if you weigh it on a per kilo basis, they actually sell for a lot more than that. And so that was basically what I was tracking in the back of my head. I'd been thinking

about space manufacturing for like a decade. It just didn't work if it was $100,000 a kilogram, because again, that net cost of taking things to launch was like millions of dollars a kilogram. And there's not many materials that sell for millions of dollars a kilogram, but there's a lot of things that sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars. So really the equation it seems like is

what's the cost of the raw goods? What's the cost of getting there, manufacturing, getting back? And then if you add up those two costs, if you can sell it for two, three times that, whatever you bring back, then you've got a business. That's literally what we get kept up at night,

all night, every single day. We're in the midst of digging into this right now. All right. And then really this idea of like a reusable factory. is really what you're building, right? And so right now, you've got to set it up all connected. But the ideal thing is literally there's a factory there and you're just bringing the input of materials.

There's some process that happens and then there's the output, you bring it back. Exactly, exactly. And that makes the economics a lot better because right now, each time we're paying for the factory with each mission that we send up. But the factory, once the re-entry module leaves, that thing just unfortunately burns up in the atmosphere

because it doesn't have a heat shield and all the things you need to bring it back down. But over time, we'll just have factories up there and we'll start off with one and then we'll start off with two and then 10. And then like the thing that gets me really excited about FART is again, we scale based off of commercial markets, the size on earth rather than just pure government dollars. And so if you track that exponential equation of like, once you need one factory and then 10 factories and a hundred factories, you're talking about,

you know, I think it wouldn't be totally unrealistic to say that by the end of the decade, we have something that is bigger than 10 times the size of the entire international space station. That is just our factories that are all connected together. And then that also makes it much more economical. For a long time, they'll be purely robotic. But once you have something that large, it's actually not that expensive to then be like, okay, well, why don't we add a human compatible module to it? And then it gets a lot easier to think about, okay, actually having permanent humans stationed up there on the factory. Because it turns out it's actually a lot easier to get to space than it is to build a robotic arm that it's as dexterous as

a human is. When you think about this, you're going really, really fast after a massive market. one of the things that uh i noticed you do i've seen keith raboy on the open door uh i'm sorry open store uh deck he recently had is the number of days since you started and i don't know where this came from but i've now noticed on multiple people doing it uh why do you guys do that why do you track how many days it's been and then i also noticed that you have a countdown clock to i guess the first launch so walk me through kind of the timeline thought process and why so obsessive about those timelines. Yeah, it actually started with one of our portfolio companies, Ramp. And I think part of like their, you know, culture and why they've done so well is because

they're so obsessive on days. It was actually the first board meeting. I think it was like day 59 of like, you know, Ramp's life. Like Keith and I went to that first board meeting and it was literally like the first thing that you see in the deck. And Keith and I just both turned to each other. We're like, this is just fucking brilliant. Like this is the best way to institute an ethos because at the end of the day, the thing that is always difficult about startups is early on, it's easy to move super fast. When you're like six people in a room, you all can communicate it really easy, et cetera. Once you become 600, all of a sudden just decisions start to slow down, things start to slow down. And so in some ways you can almost always predict how successful a

startup is going to be just off of how fast they move. And this is just like a really simple cultural way of enforcing very fast movement. Cause when you're measuring things on the order of days, then it's a great, like, you know, I sometimes joke, like, you know, we have like a big deadline at Varda, for example, like that's like, you know, this Monday. And I think today is like whatever Thursday, Thursday to Monday pre Varda felt like a, you know, a snap in time versus now with like the Varda mentality. It's like, oh yeah, Thursday to Monday. That's basically like a month.

Like I have plenty of time to like, you know, all the things that we need to do. Like we'll have like six meetings between now and then to discuss all the progress. Like Saturday and Sunday, everybody's going to be like totally online. And so I think it just like, you know, forces this just mentality of just like extreme speed.

And then also it's even more relevant in the world of like space stuff. Cause there are all these just like such clear delineations of like, you know, in a software company, you like, you do have like launch days, but like in a space company, you have like launch days. Like, you know, those are a clear delineation

to like marker in the company's life. Um, and so, yeah, it started there and then it's, I feel like it is kind of spreading amongst other founders that I know that are also now starting to be obsessive about it. But yeah, every single all hands, uh, you know, at Varda every single Monday morning, we start off with like, you know, it is day X, Y, Z, this number of days till launch, um, you know, where, you know, whatever, 15% of the way, you know, to our first launch. Why is the all hands on Monday? Most companies in Silicon Valley have done them Friday. People can ask questions. It's kind of a Kumbaya, whatever, uh, calling it an all hands and doing it on Monday seems more like a kickoff meeting for the week or what is that? Yeah.

It's funny. Um, you know, uh, I'm not the CEO of Varda and, uh, the CEO comes from SpaceX and a lot of the early engineers come from SpaceX. Uh, so through them, I've got to learn a lot about sort of like, you know, uh, I'd say, you know, let's say 60 to 70% of our culture is kind of like SpaceX as culture. Um, and so there's just less of this, like, there's so many things that I really love about it. One, like I walked into the factory one day and there was like a 70 foot American flag hanging in the factory and i was like this is amazing like in the san francisco bay area being patriotic is actually like somehow a polarizing topic versus something about your when you're working in the world of aerospace it's by default patriotic and we're just asking i was like i love

that i didn't like ask for this at all and i was like who did this and like a couple of engineers were like yeah we just got drunk last night got a big ladder order this off amazon and like you know immediately installed it i was like this is i love that part of the culture and the second is there's just less of like a culture around like i don't know there's not this like yeah all hands need to like ask questions feel like my feelings get petted etc it's just like mondays we start it's like this is what we got to do like you know everybody like checks in like yes this is what we're doing it's like definitely like a kickoff meeting and then fridays it's like no there's no questions like if you have a question email the ceo he doesn't have time to like sit around

and have everybody like you know have a kumbaya moment like there's no time for fucking kumbaya like email did you get the thing done that you said you were going to get done on monday and then we rinse and repeat the next week and so yeah i like that style are there free snacks We're limited. Yeah, it's definitely closer to like, you know, Apple culture of, you know, no free lunches. We do actually do free lunches, but. All right.

You work at Founders Fund and spend majority of your time investing. So Varda is a big piece of what you're focused on now, but you do spend a lot of time investing. I feel like everyone at Founders Fund is red pilled. Like just everyone has unique views. They say what they want and what they mean. Is it self-selection or is there something going on?

Or is there something in the water at Founders Fund that gets everyone kind of, a lot of times, not even necessarily agreeing with each other, but just having the confidence, courage, and conviction to say what they actually believe? Yeah, I mean, I'll front run this by saying also, I think you'd be surprised that probably, I mean, I don't want to put an exact number on it, but I'd probably guess like 60 to 70% of the investment team in the last election, like almost certainly voted Biden. and so there's for sure some amount of like red pilling but i don't think that also necessarily correlates with like people's exact underlying politics because there's actually a wide array of politics for sure maybe certain people on the team are a little bit like you know louder than others and so you might think that we're like all biased in one direction but actually the entire team i'd say is quite you know diverse in terms of politics and you know yeah very willing to be you know sort of very upfront about that and it's absolutely sort of like self-selection both in

terms of like when we interview people there is sort of just like that does the person fit the like founders fund ethos, which is just like, are they very comfortable being themselves being actually like quite divisive? Like I, in some ways, like love our team in that very willing to like disagree with each other, both publicly online. Right. You've seen Keith and I even like get into arguments online, but then just imagine that like, if we're like shielding a little bit externally, internally, it's like, you know, people will, yeah, it is full-time war at all times. Right. Uh, but I really like that because it forces, like I said, of like intellectual honesty where it's like, it doesn't feel like there's any politics at founders fund. Like

everything is just like very intellectually open and honest and like can be very disagreeable. And there can be people that have like, you know, really significant arguments for extended periods of time. But at least it's sort of like out in the open. And I think it is self-selecting both in terms of people that want to choose to work in that environment. But then also I feel like during the interview process, we're like, man, is this person going to like, you know, survive the like intellectual battlefield of Founders Fund? Yeah. And so when somebody comes in new or somebody who's been there for a while, let's use Founders Fund as an example. But I think there's other firms that have some of these dynamics as well. You've got very well-known

people, right. That are, uh, participating in the investment process. Uh, you've got kind of legacy investments, legacy LPs, legacy, um, kind of reputation, all this stuff. Uh, and then you've got this like zero fucks, like everyone say what you want. And, uh, and let's kind of have that of attrition of ideas, et cetera. How does that work in terms of making investment decisions? Is it just like, Hey, Delian, here's a pot of money, like go invest it and like, come back and tell us what you did. Or is there like, no, we all have to vote and everyone has to agree. Or So like, how do you think through that? And what do you like and not like about the process?

Yeah. So I'd say in the grand scheme of Silicon Valley, there's like sort of a bell curve of types of firms. I call them like consensus-based investing and like conviction-based investing. And both Coastal Ventures, where I worked prior to Founders Fund and Founders Fund, I would describe as like on the extreme end

of conviction-based investing. I.e. if one person really, really loved and is like pounding on the table, like the thing sort of like gets done. For sure, there's like an amount of rope that is given to you, right? Like if Peter is pounding on the table, that is like a larger check than like if Delian is pounding on the table, obviously.

I thought it was the opposite. That's funny. Okay. I learned something new every day. But like, at least there's that opportunity to sort of like pound on the table. And then what I like about Founders Fund is Cyan Bannister actually did an interview on this, maybe like, you know, a year and a half or like two years ago. And so we actually like relatively publicly share this, but we actually have just like a very strict and regimented, you know, process around how investments get made, but we're actually not very strict and regimented on how to go through that process. That makes sense. Like as an investor. So like basically from like zero to 1.5 million, any two people on the team, basically thumbs up 1.5 to

five. It basically becomes like three people, five to 10 becomes four people, 10 to 35 people, 30 and above six people. And so basically as the checks get larger and larger, you need basically a thumbs up, but the thumbs up is closer to like, you kind of need, like, let's say for the six people, you know, are the super large checks. It's more like you need like three people to be really enthusiastic and three people that are more like, it's not a no. I like, I don't think this is a bad idea. Not like I'm also as equally like pounding on the table as you are. And so for sure, there are times where like, I've seen Keith like basically say like, I wouldn't do this investment, but I'm giving you my thumbs up to be clear because like, I don't think it's like a bad

investment. I just wouldn't necessarily do it. And I'm assuming some of that is like, let's say you really understand space and let's say that keith i don't actually know what how uh into space he is but let's just say he didn't understand anything about space if you could make the argument and say hey i want to do the space investment he's like oh i don't really know that much about space but like yeah that makes sense to me okay i'll give you the thumbs up but like i'm not gonna go pound the table because i don't i'm not an expert in space for sure that's partially why like you'll see it even in my portfolio i kind of say that like i feel like there's like two or three different parts of my portfolio there's like a third that's like the

pure space stuff there's a third that i kind of describe like kind of space ish stuff but it's on earth, like whether it's like robotics or industrial automation, or it's like still kind of like hard tech. And there's like a third of the stuff that I do that it's like, I literally just say like shit that I learned from Keith. And partially because it's like, it's easier for me to like work through the investment process when like I'm investing into a financial services thing, like, you know, ramp, for example, because I know that Keith will also understand it really well and we can work on it together. And when the two of us are like, Hey, here's a financial services thing. Both Keith and Delian are excited. We really want to do this.

It's like actually, you know, quite easy to get the deal done versus let's say, you know, in the world of space, there's like less people on the team that understand the space stuff. it's really like Scott Nolan and I are the only ones. And so at some point, like it's kind of hard for other people on the team to really give a super strong feedback. And that also makes it so that it's like a little bit less likely that we'll take a super, super big swing, you know, in the world of space. Like our, you know, interest or willingness to take a $50 million check into a space thing, probably less likely. Like, you know, we did recently invest a lot of money into SpaceX, but at a relatively late stage, lots of revenue, Starlink was going online. And so

it's like easier to understand now there's also like revenue flowing and like numbers. And so more of the team got that. But yeah, so there's definitely domain areas of expertise. And then what I really like about Founders Fund, especially in comparison to most firms, most firms are not super willing to give a lot of rope to junior investors. They're pretty restrictive. You really can only report to one particular person or they really limit your sectors. Founders Fund, we sometimes describe it as almost like the blockchain of investing, where it's just like, we don't have partner meetings. We don't meet up on any regular basis. Everybody kind of goes off and does their own thing. And the way that Keith runs his investment

process versus I run it versus like, you know, Brian or Peter are like wildly different. At the end of the day, you get to get that same outcome of like the votes. But like, for example, if I'm working on like a space thing, I might like go first, go to Scott and then maybe rope in one other person and then one other person versus maybe if it's like something that I know a lot of the team understands, I'll have it meet four people at once, right? It's just kind of up to you how you want to take a founder through that process as long as you do eventually get to that very specific like set of votes. So there's no Monday meeting. There's none of that. Yeah. There's no, like we never have a, like, you know, basically every other firm in Silicon Valley has

like a monday meeting where like they have companies come in and present to like the entire partnership uh we almost never actually the only time that we ever have full sort of partner presentations is actually uh only for incubations interestingly enough partially because it's just like hey this is our company let's all meet and like see how things are going uh but we never do that for external companies hereticon is uh i think the best manifestation of everything you just described is kind of internal then you guys are willing to put like a stamp on and say like no, this is actually what we believe. Like we believe we should go talk to people who everyone else thinks, you know, aren't worth talking to or whatever. Like there's this conference and

I don't actually know how much of this is like Founders Fund backed versus like people at Founders Fund are helping to organize it. But like talk a little bit just about the public component, because there's almost this element of like there's lots of trolls. There's lots of like kind of the woke crowd and like all this stuff that I think most people now are just kind of saying like, look, there's things that legitimately our society needs to improve. And then there's like all the virtue signaling stuff. That's just like a waste of time. It almost feels like you guys are trolling the trolls to some degree and like saying like, look, like you guys are being ridiculous. So like, okay, cool. We'll just ratchet it up and we'll be more ridiculous on

the other side. And that's not something that most venture funds do. So like explain kind of your viewpoint on that. Yeah. I mean, it's been interesting to see, you know, obviously I've only been a part of Founders Fund for the past, you know, whatever, two and a half years now. But the firms like, let's say both public viewpoints and the way that it's presented has shifted as sort of like the media landscape has shifted as well. Right. So if you think about like, you know, 2010, publishing the manifesto, you know, we wanted flying cars. Instead, we got 140 characters. The brand was much more the firm, but that was sort of the ethos at the time, right? This was pre-Twitter. This was pre sort of individual creators being as much of a thing. Institutions

were the brands. But now over the past decade, right, things have shifted. Like, you know, people are much more interested in talking to the CEO of Tesla. They don't want to hear from the Tesla brand account on Twitter, right? And so I feel like we've just sort of embodied that same thing, which is like, you know, it probably flipped in, you know, honestly, maybe when Keith and I joined, we're all of a sudden, okay, the like core Founders Fund Twitter account was not as much of like the voice anymore. It was now all the individuals that are at Founders Fund that represent like the like online voice. And what I like is like, we're just much more willing to, you know, unlike most other firms, there's almost, and you'd have to really push the bounds.

There's almost nothing that you could like say on Twitter that would get you like fired at Founders Fund. And so people are willing to sort of be much more intellectually honest with their like core values. But then what I like about it is like we follow up with it, right? When, you know, people complain about oh they're coming to miami and they're like xyz not you know appreciating the locals whatever and then it's like and then we're actually like funding the largest series a in miami right we just back it up you know with our actions and so um i like that when we like discuss these ideas it's not just like just for sake of trolling the trolls it's also because there's like i feel like real substance behind it and i feel like that's why people seem to

you know enjoy enjoy the voice it's like i feel like most of the voices that i feel like on twitter are either packaged corporate like you can tell like this went through compliance committee to like get out. Not super interesting. You have like the just true virtue signaling, like, you know, talking about like, you know, social justice. Then you have like the like troll accounts that are just like the memes and like humor, but there's no like substance behind it versus I feel like we do for sure do some amount of trolling, but I feel like there is like substantive, like when you read like, you know, Mike Slana's Pirate Wires, he's talking about like, you know, fundamental like society issues, right? In those. And then we follow up with that with like

fundamental societal investments, right? I think like Anderle being like the perfect example of this. We believe that in order to maintain Western society and democracy and allow individuals to have freedom, you need to invest in capabilities like the future of warfare. And most VCs are not even willing to touch the idea of that. Anything that is like, oh, military, contractor, government, something like that, complete unwillingness to you. Versus we've had phenomenal returns between Palantir, SpaceX, Andral. We've, if anything, forged a new type of company that can do technologies that both benefit the government a lot, but then also end up benefiting the end consumer a lot.

Solana is probably the best example. Mike Solana, who we're talking about, is probably one of the best examples because he can very expertly navigate complete shit posting and trolling on Twitter to then you read Pirate Wires and you're like, wait a minute, that was actually very intelligent and well thought out and well articulated.

And I think that's part of what makes Founders Fund Founders Fund, right? It's basically what you're saying is the ability, no, we can go shit post and troll everyone and yell and scream and be idiots on the internet just like everybody else. but then oh by the way like we're actually very thoughtful and we also can put money to work and do the things that we need yeah i mean there's like team discussions that we have and obviously

like you know peter being like the epitome of this or just like extremely intellectual broad-ranging discussions right even when we're like debating a particular investment there's a lot of times where it's like in the framing of like this like extremely large like i wouldn't say that we're like super thesis driven but we think about like the macro environment and why this is an important investment to get done and then sometimes we even debate like oh are we investing in this just because we have this macro bias towards x y or z and we want this to exist in the world. And we're investing this, even though maybe it's not a top tier founder, but it just matches our ethos. There's a lot of these, I think, very interesting discussions that

we have. And I think that is definitely something that the team optimizes for is both somebody that's capable of doing that, but then also grabbing a drink at the bar and having fun. The founders fund offsites, let me tell you. They're a fun time. I enjoy those quite a bit, both the intellectual discussions at dinner, but then we're getting trashed after dinner. All right. Three people that I want you to tell me what you've learned from them, and then we'll move on uh one from peter one thing from keith and then one pick somebody else on the team that you're like i really learned a lot from this person here so that it is yeah i mean the peter um like single nugget that i always think about and this actually like kind of comes from

uh you know trey stevens who sort of says that this is the same nugget that he shares from him which is both prioritize having very um unique thoughts but also how difficult it is to do so Like most of the time, even like most of the ideas that I reiterate, whether it's like crazy out there space manufacturing or talking about why SpaceX is like the AWS, most of those aren't my ideas. You know what I mean? Like they're almost certainly something that I've read somewhere, pulled together, and it's like very rare that I'm like coming up with like an actual truly unique individual formulation. And doing that actually requires extremely deep thought while also having very broad ranging intellectual curiosity, both in terms of the people that you meet, that you talk to, that you read. And so that's definitely, I feel like the thing that I both admire the most from Peter and aspire to. And I think that is something that he does. Obviously, he's like, you know, world class at, but probably prioritizing that is something that I feel like I learned the most. And sorry, who's the... Keith is probably like that there's actually a science to operating companies. Like I feel like, you know, so I was his chief of staff for, you know, basically almost two years, a year and eight months.

and, you know, watching him across all the variety of companies that he's involved in, right? Whether it's, you know, open door like PropTech, you know, Affirm, Fintech, Consumer Social, all the types of companies that he's done. At the end of the day, building a company is actually the same across all those verticals. It all comes down to the people that you're hiring, the operating cadence that you maintain, the way that you set your goals, the way that you communicate in the company, how you run interviews, like all of these things, actually like there's a just best way to do them. And for sure, you like kind of need to adapt them, right? Any rule obviously needs to be broken to like, you know, fit into your company,

but like actually that they're all the same thing. And I feel like it took me like, you know, I sometimes joke like the way that I sort of learned from Keith is like, he has this like gigantic tree of knowledge. And in some ways he probably couldn't even describe that whole tree himself. But each time we meet one particular founder in one particular situation, I get to watch him traverse that particular branch. And then I see that branch and then I see another branch the next day and the next day and i feel like my job and part of why i wrote this like series of i think it was like six or seven essays at the end of that sort of like two-year stint where i just tried to distill like there were some things that keith has done like a really

good job of like distilling over the course of various like podcasts and interviews um and for those i mostly just like stole his previous frameworks but there's one that i was like kind of proud of which like um uh you know how to be in effect how to interview uh executives effectively that one was actually like keith had never really talked about or written down his framework for interviewing executives but having watched him like interview like 15 cfos and 15 VPs of marketing and 15 VPs of sales. I was like, oh, there's actually a pattern to how you're doing all of these. And this pattern is actually quite useful framework to think through. But this isn't something that he had even thought about. And I remember showing him the essay. I was like,

is this framework correct? And he was reading it. I was like, huh, that is correct. Yes, I hadn't thought about framing it this way. But yes, this is basically the decision-making framework that I go through. And so, yeah, I guess the science of operating is, I feel like, what I learned from him. Yeah. It's fascinating that once you understand the science, then you just replicate it over and over and over again. That's why he's had such success is like, the reason that Keith is a successful investor, obviously, there's some amount of like reflexivity to it of like, when you've had such success, the best founders want to have you on their board. But then part of it is like, I think

people have different philosophies on this. Some people are like VCs are useless, blah, blah, blah. But the reason that really, really good founders want to have Keith on their board is like those very, very difficult situations where even like the top tier founders can't quite figure it out on their own. Keith has seen the situation, knows how to deal with it, and like actually gives you like meaningful advice. And like, you can talk to everybody from like, you know, Tony Hsu at Jordache, to Max Roads at FAIR, to like literally any company that he's involved in, I will guarantee you that they will say there is at least 20 instances of really critical moments in the path of the company where Keith changed their mind on a particular topic or candidate or like

something that was actually quite core that actually ended up helping the company become much, much more successful. And is he perfect? No, but he's right like 90% of the time. And so if you're disagreeing with Keith, you better have like a really good reason you're disagreeing with Keith. One time I was getting coffee with him and I said something and I was like, yeah, you're a pretty good investor. He goes, actually, I've averaged one unicorn every year since I've been investing. And I was like, okay, you're really, really good, right? Like, it was just, when you start to actually put data around it, it's unbelievable. It's like 20 years, 20 unicorns or something. Yeah. He had, I think, eight IPOs over the course of six months last

year from whatever, June, 2020 to December, 2020. It was literally just, you know, back to back to back every single one. And it's not even like, oh, he was like a small angel check. It's like, no, Airbnb, he was the first investor. He put in a decent amount of money into that seed round and then like brought it to Sequoia for them to do the seed. DoorDash, seed round of DoorDash, right? Like, you know, there's like all these companies that have been extremely great IPOs. It's like when you get to the like eighth one down the list, you don't even think about it, but it's like, oh yeah, Wish, also one of the early angel investors in Wish, right? But that's not even like something that he even like talks about or most people like even realize.

Yeah. Well, they only list the top four, right? So like the rest just get forgotten. All right. I feel like we talked a little bit about being red pilled. I feel like you got orange pilled or whatever you want to call it with Bitcoin and crypto for a little bit. It seems like you had conversations with a few folks. You can say who they are if you want. And you started to go down and then you kind of have like slowed your role a little bit on crypto. So if you just talk about like what your thoughts on crypto were before, how you started to get a little bit interested in and then what you think now. Yeah, man. I'd say my first foray into crypto was probably like 2013 or 14. Like definitely got convinced. I was like, cool. Bitcoin is a store of

value. And I definitely debated and like invested some amount then. And I was like, maybe I should just hold this for the longterm. And then I was like, eh, I'm like 22. I'd prefer to spend my money on like beer and like startups and like, just like kind of enjoying life rather than like really investing at the time. And so I kind of put it on the shelf for a while. I maybe held on to like one Bitcoin or something like that for a while. Whole coiner. Yeah, exactly. Whole coiner, one coiner. Exactly. And so, yeah, I kind of put it on the shelf for a while. Then I'd watch it and I'd like, you know, occasionally catch up with friends. And I have this friend, Arjun Balaji, you know, we've known each other, I think since, yeah,

fall 2011, literally basically since like, you know, freshman year of college. And so he's obviously gotten very much into crypto. I don't know exactly when he started, but most recently, he's now one of the investment partners at Paradigm. And so I've been watching crypto from afar, occasionally catching up to him. Generally still felt I was like, store value still really feels like the only, I don't know, what I call business use case, where I felt like there really was something that made a sense for a business to use. And then we were grabbing lunch maybe three or four weeks ago, and I'd been kind of poking into DeFi a little bit, but it was that lunch with him that really convinced me that algorithmic liquidity pools were this aha moment

for me where I was like, whoa, there is actually a second true business use case. Because there is a long tail of assets. The example that I always like to give, I won't say who it is, but I have a friend that is now working on this extremely interesting startup, basically trying to securitize musicians and artists, basically future earnings, and create a way for that artist to basically sell some of that future cash flow upfront. But then ideally also have a market where people, you know, can trade them along the way and do that not only for all their future cash flows, but even down to like particular albums.

The problem is for creating a liquidity market for that, you can't afford to have like a trading desk behind it, right? Jane Street's not going to invest in some random Joe Smoe, you know, R&B musician from Chicago's, you know, trading desk for his like album. But DeFi and liquidity pools felt like a way I was like, oh, okay, here's a way where you could actually create, you know, an algorithmic, you know, liquidity pool.

And real quick, just so for people who are listening who don't understand what this is, Basically, there's an entire idea of, let's say there's a couple of different assets, liquidity providers put the assets into these pools. And then there's literally a decentralized protocol in an automated fashion that says Deleon wants X asset, and he's willing to give Y asset. And literally, it takes Y, gives him X. And the different pools provide various returns to liquidity providers as a way to incentivize more or less assets in the pool. And the way that it was sort of like pitched to me, which is slightly different than how you pitched it, which is part

of why I got maybe slightly unenthused with it was that let's say that this was actually, let's say, you know, Kanye drops a new album and there's a share price. The way that like typically share prices are generated is like you actually have a little like market maker, i.e. somebody who's finding buyers and finding sellers and finding the basically like middle price. And then that's how the price gets determined. And instead the way that I was pitched the liquidity pool was instead there's just like, as you buy a share and actually rather than getting given to somebody else, it actually gets put into this like pool of money. The larger the pool of money goes, logarithmically, the price of the stock goes up so that each time you want to buy an individual

sort of new share, it gets more and more expensive until it basically gets infinitely expensive at the final share. And then the reverse happens is as people are selling, they just take their money out of the pool. And then the price logarithmically goes down and the price actually never reaches zero because it just keeps shrinking, shrinking, shrinking. So the liquidity pool also never really reaches zero. In practice, I basically started to play around with this. And there were some parts that were disappointing where I was like, oh, well, I do kind of understand, yeah, there needs to be a sort of counter token, let's say. And I found that some of the liquidity pools that I was playing around with, it was more that they were like playing

around with the fact that there was actually volatility on both sides of the markets. If you had like a, you know, an ether uniswap liquidity pool, well, the problem was like, it didn't really feel like I was trading into one or the other. It was mostly like dealing with the volatility of the two assets. Now you can obviously fix that if instead you had like a, you know, what I understand to be like a stable coin and then, you know, Kanye's album on one side, great, the stable coin should stay stable. And therefore the like, you know, volatility only comes from Kanye's album price, basically like moving up and down. But after playing around with it for a weekend, I purposely like, you know, I'm a relatively

decent software engineer, you know, started playing around with it. And it kind of started from scratch. Honestly, if I hadn't done the KYC from Coinbase, it would have taken even longer. I did that obviously six years ago. But like, it literally took me like, I think almost like 36 hours from start to finish from like buying Ether, buying Uniswap to eventually actually getting those into a liquidity pool. And it was like, obviously not continuous 36 hours, but like waiting for one thing waiting for you know whatever you know gas prices that day were super high and things were taking forever blah blah and even then just like understanding like what is my LP position in this pool and the fees that I'm generating from like liquidity anyways I came

away from it being like this is still probably a little closer to DARPA net days and it is like ready for like Google to get co-founded and so I feel like my like net conclusion was like I'm not short crypto I'm just more like I'm gonna probably put it on a shelf for another two or three years wait for like the true crypto believers to make it a little bit more mass market and then I'm like, great, I'm ready to like fund a company maybe in another two or three years. It almost feels like, and I'm cheating because we talked a little bit about this already off air, but you see the light at the end of the tunnel to some degree, right? It's like, okay, cool. Like if this continues progressing, like there is going to be a lot of value created

here and there's Bitcoin, there's other stuff, whatever. Right now though, it's hard to use it. The user experiences, the interfaces are different. Like it's just going to be really, really hard to go build a multi-billion dollar or multi, you know, tens of billions of dollar company based on that idea with that said uh do you think at all about like that's company right like a centralized entity versus these protocols that get created and like let's hold constant for a second like uh there's just some you know manipulation that goes on or like you know dogecoin ends up being you know 60 billion dollars everyone's like ah maybe right um but the protocol have value like have you thought yet about uh kind of protocols or market caps versus

like company valuations and like how you how they are similar or different yeah i mean somebody had a funny tweet on this and i might not be able to like remember the like exact wording but it was basically like if you're thinking about how you're going to make a lot of money off your protocol it's probably a company and it's not a protocol that's a great way to look at it because if you look at smtp nobody made a lot of money off of smtp or sms or all these other protocols that like you know people talk about um and so i guess that's where you know i agree there's maybe something like yes you want to incentivize early adopters of a protocol via token etc but um i'm maybe more skeptical of the like world of yeah decentralized companies i think at the end of the

day like really great things only happen when a small group of people come together have an aligned vision and like build it together um and protocols don't necessarily totally you know satisfy that do you think that makes bitcoin an outlier in terms of like this thing got built with like millions of volunteers on the internet or however you want to describe it like is that because it's uh vying to be money versus like a productive decentralized like entity yeah i mean it's like store value feels like something that's like yes that does feel decentralized in some ways like you want it to be like that's part of why gold is such a great store value is like nobody like owns gold gold is just like a material that is fully independent versus with like

decentralized liquidity well you know if i'm kanye and i'm listing my album somewhere i'm probably only going to do that if i've got like a support number to call you know what i mean like they want they still want a corporate entity as like a part of that. I think we're a ways away from people being willing to like trade such large assets. Again, why does Airbnb go IPO on the NASDAQ and not in like some, you know, crypto equivalent? It's like, there's somebody to call at the end of the day to like, you know, deal with these large assets. I sometimes think about when people talk about like, and this is the thing that I always like, yeah, I was actually pushing Arjun, you know, from Paradigm really hard on this. I was like, how does a crypto transaction eventually

happen where I buy a physical asset? Like I buy a home. At the end of the day, like it still feels like mostly what happened today is it gets converted into fiat and then fiat is used to go like, you know, buy the home because it turns out like, you know, people, there's both regulations around buying homes, there's, you know, titles and things like that. And the world of like all of that shifting fully to crypto in some ways requires the government buy-in. And so you need the government to somehow start to issue these tokens. But at the end of the day, there is a backing entity behind this. It's not like there's like some decentralized protocol for real estate, partially because it's like, well, okay, so if somebody like, you know, steals my whatever,

you know secret key and then literally do they get to like steal my house and is there literally like no retribution for that like with bitcoin i get it somebody steals your bitcoin there's no retribution that's fine same thing kind of you know honestly in the real world there is at least some retribution for gold like the u.s government will try to like investigate on your behalf but man if people can like steal my house if they just get into my secret key and the government's not going to help me like that seems and that's the world of like a decentralized protocol that seems kind of tough and so i still think there's going to be some amount of centralization uh speaking of houses last thing i want to talk about is miami uh you have a house here um

you are one of many people who came to visit uh i think kind of as like let me go check this out let's see um and then you're like no i'm actually gonna move and i remember you dm'd me and i was like wait is he kidding like like no way he just got here like three days ago and then you're like no no like seriously like i'm doing it so walk me back to you tweet while in san francisco you get retweeted by the mayor and he's like how can i help it's this whole thing now what's your perspective on the whole miami thing and like your role in this yeah i mean we originally started debating like where would we open a second office in like july 2020 because keith was really looking to like leave the bay area and finally maybe like september october we like settled in miami he

like bought the house decided to move the entire time i was just like dude like how is he going to be as like top tier investor how's he going to win really competitive series a's like this in-person stuff really does matter that's going to come rebounding back like it feels totally impossible and then in december was just like sitting there and this was like in deep in the grata varta you know what i mean like i've been working on like basically pulling the company from scratch dealing with all the, you know, uh, convincing the co-founders that we should work on this equities plates, business plan, fundraising, et cetera. And it was like, it was rough doing that while also trying to do my founder's fun job at the same time. Like I felt like I was working crazy

hours. The one thing that was keeping me sane was I could go have outdoor dining at the fucking wild seed restaurant next to my house. And it was like a nice way to like cap the night. And I remember just seeing the like, you know, announcement of like, we're shutting down outdoor dining. And I was like sitting on the can. I was like, are you fucking kidding me? There's no scientific evidence that there's any outdoor spread. Why are they doing this? If anything's gonna make things worse because i guarantee you people have now started to become accustomed to being social outdoors now they're gonna all go all indoors it's gonna be even worse than if you just kept the outdoor dining and so i sent what i thought was like very obviously a pithy tweet to

my followers because i've been tweeting about like anti-miami things for the past like you know month and like arguing with keith about it like publicly and i was like oh fuck it like what if we just like picked up silicon valley like moved to miami so we don't have to deal with this like outdoor dining stuff and then you know lo and behold like the mayor quote tweeted it and he was like you gotta come visit like this went viral blah blah and i was like dude like i just started this company. And like, we have 14 people that are starting in like in our LA office on like whatever Jan 19th. I don't have time to fucking like think about a Miami trip. But anyways, Varda sort of got off the ground. We got everybody onboarded. We had this first, you know, whatever board meeting

early March. And like Keith's birthday was like, you know, second or third week of March. And I was like, you know, maybe I can afford to go like visit Miami for a week, go check it out. I remember talking to my girlfriend like that Sunday before we arrived. We're like, there's no fucking way we're moving. Like Varda's in LA. Like all my friends are in San Francisco. Keith's totally wrong about this thing like there's no way and then over the course of the week a couple like you know cracks started to appear in my argument like you know on wednesday i remember like going out to dinner with keith and just like looking around the restaurant being like jesus like this is like uh the deck uh which is like this you know restaurant that's actually like pretty close here

and i was like this is a more vibrant and happy and like laughing like lifestyle and vibe in this restaurant than like even like the best restaurant and like choose your favorite evening san francisco whatever you want, New Year's, anything, it is like less fun and less happy than like how happy I feel right now. And I care a lot about being happy because I think it does make you like work harder. And I found that in Miami that I work a lot harder. And then the following night, I went to this like a tech party that you were also at like whatever in March, where I just walked in the room and I remember just being like, oh my God, there are more top tier VCs, builders, like, you know, engineers, founders in this room than what

I've seen in San Francisco for years. San Francisco used to have these like very fun, ostentatious parties. Like I remember in like 2014, 15, going to these like crazy pool parties in Woodside. You'd see like everybody, all these types of builders. And like, it sounds kind of silly, but I actually do think those parties are important because like those spontaneous interactions sometimes lead, you know, somebody who maybe works in space to talk with a D2C commerce thing. And it turns out there's actually some sort of collaboration. And like when those sort of parties started to get canceled over the course of like, you know, cancel culture in San Francisco, you just lost out on that. And so people didn't have these like spontaneous

interactions nearly as often. And I do think that's quite important. Like I remember from that party in March, I knew that like six or seven investments happened, like multiple deals got signed, like a lot of things happened from that party. And I walked in and I sort of like, I said it originally as a joke to a friend, but then the moment the words left my mouth, I was literally like, I don't know how the fuck I'm getting on that return flight to San Francisco. And the moment that hit and I said it, and like, I had not been thinking about it until that moment. And then I said it and I looked at my friend, I was like, oh my God, I'm moving to fucking Miami. I was like, I think I am. And then Nadia, by the way, my girlfriend was having a completely

like parallel experience where she had actually left Miami for two days to go to Disney World with all of her friends. And I kind of describe her as like, you know, she's much more like the public intellectual writer, researcher, like much more, you know, creative than I am. Smarter. Much smarter than I am. You know, she was having this parallel experience where one, all of her like friends had already moved to Miami. And she just felt like her like creative energy was so much more unlocked by being in this place that was much more intellectually diverse, physically diverse, so many more colors and beauty than she was seeing in San Francisco.

and so she had actually been having this whole discussion with her friends as she was driving back down from Disney World for like this dinner that we're gonna have Friday night together which was like oh my god I need to have this like very serious conversation with Delian we're like I want to spend more time in Miami because I'm really happier here and I'm enjoying it here and I know he really loves San Francisco but like I really I can't go back to San Francisco I need to be like spending more time here and she's like arrives at dinner and it's like Delian I think we should spend more time in Miami and I just like replied to her I was like I think we should just move to Miami she was like what I was like I think we should just move and I was literally

like we basically like didn't talk about it after that we were like great we're moving to Miami that was like it that was the extent of the discussion and sunday morning we woke up took a vespa around the city went to a couple open houses and basically like bought the like you know second house that we visited and we're like great put in the offer the next morning and you know started planning the move and that was the extent of it 48 hours from you know deciding to uh uh moving what was keith's reaction when you told him um he was at first i think like almost like uh in disbelief that like it happened um but there was actually a sort of nice text that i got where the actual moment that i texted him um that we got the offer accepted he actually happened to be on a

zoom call uh with a like mutual friend of ours the mutual friend said like that was like the happiest he'd ever seen keith in a long time uh so it was nice to you know it's nice to get that text i i uh i feel like he really really stuck his neck out there like put his reputation online and said hey like this is real and your story is very common where even myself i came and i came because i just wanted to get out of new york for a weekend right yep and then i was like wait this is like weird like i think it was uh mateo and alex from eight sleep uh steven from cameo keith like like there was enough and i was like wait a minute like there's way more people here than i thought there were and then we came back the next weekend uh for a whole week and i was like are we

gonna do like you almost are like am i getting tricked like like what's the catch exactly and then the it's funny you say happiness because that's how i describe people i say i'm a happier miami that encompasses a whole bunch of different things uh i don't know if it's the sun if it's the people, if it's just the environment, if it's the diversity of, you know, kind of, this is like the capital of South America, some people describe it, whatever it is. I do feel like people are happier and there's higher energy. And some people will look at that from a work perspective and say, I work harder. Some people just look at it like it's a higher quality of life. Yeah. I mean, for me, I'm like, all I care about is, you know, my number one goal in life is I want

to be one of the best investors of all time. And I want to build a lot of very big space companies over the course of my career. And when I'm happier, I just work harder. And so I just like, can't imagine like ever deprioritizing that and like moving somewhere elsewhere than Miami because just like there's no fucking way I like work harder here than I did in San Francisco moving back would involve like compromising my productivity and I have like zero willingness to do so and then yeah also it turns out like the weekends are a lot more fun and then like part of the reason I'm also much more productive is like I'll work a 12-hour day and then like you know in San Francisco if it was 9 p.m. it's like you're going home all the restaurants are

closed you're Uber eating like some shitty burrito and like you're watching Netflix with like your girlfriend versus here at 9 p.m. it's like I can go to Mila I can have a quick like one hour meal and by the way there's like fire dancers a dj i'm having a great fucking time and like what i've realized is like this took me a while to figure out how to articulate like why it was so refreshing is because when you're in that like burrito netflix watching mode in san francisco it's kind of still like the same delian that was like the work delian like it's not like change versus 15 minutes or so into mila like for sure the first 15 minutes i'm still kind of in like in work mode and then at some point you just like have so many people laughing around you and

the lounge music and the fire dancers that about like 20 or 30 minutes in, you just kind of transform into like what I call like vacation Dalian. And it's like, you're happier and you're excited and all the stress and like the shit that you had to deal with all day, like totally melt away. And just being able to sort of have that like literally like daily reset of like having everything just totally melt away allows me to like then approach the next day. I feel like I'm much fresher, clearer mind and like work super hard again. Everyone in San Francisco knows the tech industry is there and everyone's in tech. And therefore like you go to the bar, everyone want to talk about work stuff right uh especially if you're public on twitter like if somebody sees

you at the bar like hey let's talk about this oh space found a fund whatever i got a startup let me pitch you like all like all the craziness here nobody gives a shit exactly like literally there's not a person in mila who gives a shit about the tech industry they're literally here from every industry all different cities uh some people from the united states not from the united states whatever like there's there have a good time and i think that's what you're kind of getting at is like you don't feel like everywhere you go from the coffee shop where you see all the VCs and founders to then work, to then you go to a restaurant and then you go home and you do it all over again. Like it's just, you just are seeing the same people that are in the same

industry over and over and over again, San Francisco and Miami is completely different. There's such a melting pot here in so many different ways, right? Like I love the fact that you have people that are like Barry Stern, like one of the best real estate investors, operators of like all time. You have Thomas Bravo, one of the best PE firms of all time. You have like Antonio Gracia, one of the best deep tech investors of all time. And you have Keith, right? Boy, one of the best like FinTech, healthcare tech, like, you know, more consumer venture investors of all time. Those never were ever like, it was impossible to get all four of those types of people in one room anywhere in the world. Cause like the likelihood of them actually

coordinating travel or going to the same conference is quite low. Whereas in Miami that happens all the time. So you both have this like intellectual melting pot, but then obviously also you have the like cultural, like diverse melting pot. Like what I love about Miami is like, nobody's talking about race because there's just so many different people from so many different types. Like why that like nobody it's not even like ridiculous to even like talk about it i went back to like san francisco this past weekend for like a friend's birthday and i remember it was like shocking me like i walked on chestnut street literally for like five minutes and like the thing that just kept going through my head i was like there are so many fucking white people here and i never

appreciated it until like now living in miami we're like now it just feels like so jarring where i'm like oh my god i just like my olive skin does not fucking fit in here and now i get why i feel so much more relaxed in a city of immigrants that is much closer weather to bulgarian weather where like nobody asks me who i am where i'm from etc because it doesn't fucking matter everybody's got a weird name and has a weird accent and like has you know weird colored skin and so it doesn't fucking matter nobody's gonna ask you about it nobody's gonna judge you based off it versus in san francisco they're all fucking looking the same and they're the ones that are constantly talking about like racial politics critical race theory and it's like the only reason you guys are talking

about that is you'll fucking look the same i wish i had a microphone you could drop all right i got three questions before i let you go you could ask me one uh most important book you've ever read oh man probably god i just love i mean i don't know if it's like important that it changed me but i just love seven eves by neil stevenson it's about this uh basically this like they call it like a critical event where basically um uh what is probably like a small amount of antimatter passes through the moon causes the moon to start breaking up and basically causes like an Armageddon type situation where eventually a bunch of meteorites from that basically collision two years later are going to rain down onto the moon. And it's just like this

amazing story of just like the whole like, you know, world having to coalesce around, oh my God, the earth is ending. We have two years to figure out a ton of different interesting space technologies and figure out how to make ourselves a spacefaring, you know, civilization. But I like it because it's like written in a very like hard science, very realistic way based off of like today's technologies like it's not written with some like crazy we have nuclear whatever you know starships like it's like if we like literally today had to figure this shit out and figure out how to like you know make it so the entire human race could survive off earth like what would we do basically for the next two years and i always think about that because i'm like that's

almost like the pace that i want varda operating at is like if we don't fucking make varda work and like make ourselves a multi-planetary organization like a civilization like you know we could actually end up in the scenario where you know an asteroid comes and kills us all that's very deep all right eight sleep uh i sleep on the thermoregulated bed i'm assuming you do as well what's your sleep schedule uh i'm pretty diligent about it i'd say it's probably like you know in bed at like 10 30 10 45 asleep by basically like 11 uh 11 15 uh i have i think at this point i was counting it up i think it's like six eight sleeps uh in my life so i have one that sits in the varda office in la so every time i fly there i go directly to the office pick it up

and then I go install it at the hotel room that I'm at. There's not enough hotel rooms right now with eight sleeps near the office. I have two in my parents' house in Utah and then two here in Miami. So you're a believer. Yeah, I'm 100% a believer. I actually slept on the very first eight sleep

outside of the Founders. It was like a jumble of wires, some sketchy looking pump. It woke me up a couple of times because it was like way too cold. Did you think you peed in the bed or something? Yeah, exactly, exactly. There were some rough moments

the first couple of years of prototyping. yeah but it's great i love it uh aliens believer or non-believer that's a good question i don't know if i believe that the ufo stuff that we're seeing is caused by aliens but i for sure think that there are sentient aliens that are probably much closer to us almost certainly for sure in the milky way and also much closer to us than probably we expect uh so i agree difference between ufos and aliens the odds that the ufos are just things that we haven't identified or figured out yet but not aliens probably pretty high uh if they're in the milky way or closer than we think do you think in our lifetimes we'll be able to communicate even from afar or like

recognize or do you think it's something where they're probably out there but it's just the technology barrier is too big and we won't be able to actually find them i don't think in our lifetime but i mean yeah when you're doing these far up projections kind of hard but next 300 years absolutely if you like you know just track the pace of our exponential progress in space in are just like sphere of influence and how quickly humanity can grow and just say okay imagine that bubble just continues to expand for sure over the next 300 years almost certainly at some point that bubble will get large enough where we will eventually interact with a uh with another you know alien species all right you could ask me one question to finish up what you got for me

okay uh what is your favorite part about dating somebody that's bulgarian or sorry married married to somebody that's bulgarian and maybe least favorite as well yeah but ask me bulgarian specific can't you be like polina specific yeah due to the fact that she's bulgarian i think that well there's the bulgarian experience that's what i'll call it so uh there's this element of like toughness which um i actually can't separate is it just like the immigrant element of it versus like the bulgarian specific element of it but there's uh many situations where uh you just kind of like you you didn't complain you didn't whatever like just the way that you handle that situation is very very different than almost any other person i know that in that situation

uh and like that toughness to me has to be from the experience whether it's immigrant or bulgaria together uh and one of the funniest things i think of in terms of i've been to bulgaria now i think three or four times i know enough words to be dangerous to like tell her mother like i or her grandmother i love her and she's beautiful and like you know whatever right uh but polina's father lived through the hype and hyperinflation in bulgaria uh literally at one point his salary ended up being equivalent like 30 cents a month and so he just like stopped going to work yeah and talking to him i get reminded all the time of the american ideals and like the ethos and the freedom and like democracy and capitalism like all the things that sound so stupid like why do

you care about that stuff like no go talk to somebody who lived through communism like they literally will be like that sucked this is way better exactly and so like polina has an element to it too where uh she's not as vocal about it but like there's you know a lot of stuff happened over the last year so she's just like man there's a lot of complaining going on but like uh i came from a country like that wasn't so cool compared to this country it's kind of pretty cool uh and so i think like you just get that constant reminder of like hey there's a lot of things that can be improved but we got it pretty good right now yeah i think that's partially why i love miami so much just like it's a bunch of people that all hate communism like i remember

i was just like political event like this like old cuban guy comes up to me he's probably like 55 or 60. And he's like, it's like, you know, why are you here at this event? Like, why do you like it so much? And he was like, well, I grew up in Bulgaria and then he cut me off. He's like, that's all you got to say. And I was like, okay, yep, that's it. It's crazy because I do think that there's this element of like, America was the upstart. America was the challenger. And we did such a great job and we ascended to this position of power and frankly, privilege, right? In the world of just like, I was born in the United States and I never had to worry about hyperinflation never had to worry about communism never had to worry about this stuff and also we

were indoctrinated into like well democracy is good like yeah no shit right like okay capitalism whatever but there's a different appreciation for it when you come from a place that doesn't have it and now you have it right like you almost uh you get to understand what the other side looks like versus like reading it in a book and so just like there there is this element of many immigrants that have experienced that they just they understand that's why we're so fearful of like you know when you start to see things that like diverge away from what we believe to be like democratic capitalism i feel like there's much more of like an adverse reaction to that as an immigrant versus i feel like some of my friends that are born and raised here have become somewhat

complacent with the idea of like oh well maybe we can do like universal xyz you know benefit and just pay everybody to not work xyz and like all the people that have come from there you're like no no no no we know how this starts and where this game ends like no fucking way are we going down that path we're not gonna go there uh where can we send people to find more about varda founders fund or you on the internet um so for varda it's just varda.com so pretty easy we put up a you know a bunch of interesting stuff we'll have a new website coming pretty soon uh for myself probably my twitter handle at zebulgar z-e-b-u-l-g-a-r and then founders fund probably foundersfund.com and the founders fund handle at founders fund awesome man thank you we'll do this again

absolutely thanks pomp