The Pomp Podcast - Brian Norgard, Ex-CPO of Tinder: The Architect Behind the Highest-Grossing Mobile App in the World

Episode Date: February 19, 2020

Brian Norgard is the former Chief Product Officer at Tinder and a current board member at AngelList. In this conversation, Brian and Anthony discuss Tinder, how he helped build the highest grossing app in the app store, what his views and ethos on product development are, why he’s so excited about the audio interface, and what he thinks venture capital and angel investing are heading in the future.  CRYPTO.COM-----The only all-in-one platform that allows you to BUY / SELL / STORE / EARN / LOAN / INVEST crypto all from one place. Join over 1 million users and download the Crypto.com app today to earn $50 USD using the code ‘pomp2020’ when you sign up for one of their MCO Visa Cards.  TAXBIT-----Refund-maximizing, cryptocurrency tax software you can depend on. Visit taxbit.com/invite/pomp and receive 10% off your tax plan today by signing up for a free trial. UNSTOPPABLE DOMAINS-----Make your crypto currency payments simple and build censorship resistant websites. Download the Unstoppable Browser to connect to the decentralized web today!

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to Off The Chain, simply the best podcast in crypto. Let's kick this thing off. Brian Norgaard is the former chief product officer at Tinder and the current board member at AngelList. In this conversation, we talk about Tinder, how they built the highest grossing app in the App Store, what his views and ethos on product development are, why he's so excited about the audio interface, and where he thinks venture capital and angel investing is going in the future. Brian's a good friend of mine, and I really enjoyed this conversation. But before we get into the episode, I want to cover the three sponsors that made it possible. The first is Crypto.com. Crypto.com is a pioneering payment and cryptocurrency platform that seeks to accelerate the world's transition to cryptocurrency. They have a vision to put

cryptocurrency in every wallet, which is frankly why we are all here. The Crypto.com app offers a full range of financial products with competitive pricing, well-designed user experience, and high security. It's the best place to buy, sell, and pay with crypto. These guys have been long-time supporters of Off The Chain and keep launching new product after new product. So do yourself a favor and go to Crypto.com to check them out. Again, that's Crypto.com, the people behind the plan B marketing campaign that you see in major cities, crypto.com, the place where mass adoption is occurring. Now, our second sponsor is Taxbit. These guys make taxes easy. The IRS released new tax forms for the 2019 tax year, which require all taxpayers to attest to whether they traded

cryptocurrency during the year. If so, you must file an IRS 8949 form, which reports your capital gains and losses. Taxbit automates your cryptocurrency taxes, enabling you to effortlessly track, calculate, and report your transactions. Easily connect your exchange to securely sync your transactions and run them through TaxBit's tax engine. You can generate your completed tax forms with a single click. Founded by tax attorneys and CPAs, TaxBit is the most trusted cryptocurrency tax solution. You can get 10% off your tax plan today with a free trial by going to www.taxbit.com slash invite slash pomp. Again, that's www.taxbit.com slash invite slash pomp. Go get your taxes done. And now our third is a new product. Unstoppable Domains is launching

a browser. That's right. The decentralized web is here. You can go to unstoppabledomains.com slash browser to download the Unstoppable Browser to connect to the decentralized web today. it's made for the non-custodial web where websites are built on p2p networks like ipfs and they support freedom of speech and decentralization you can get full content without censorship from your favorite creators and you can run a local instance of ipfs while using the browser to support decentralization and fight censorship while you browse so go on over to unstoppable domains slash browser again unstoppable domains slash browser it's built on Chromium and you can make a contribution. They've got tons of featured websites and it's just simply

a better new interface to the decentralized web, unstoppabledomains.com browser. Now let's get into this episode with Brian and hear what he's got to say. Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Guys, bang, bang. Brian's here. We got a lot to talk about. Yes, sir.

Are you ready? He flew all the way from LA just for this. Not really. Not true, but we're going to run with it. All right. You've done a whole bunch of shit in your life. let's jump right into tinder you are the uh now known but at the time somewhat unknown architect of making tinder the highest grossing app in the fucking app store um tinder was being used by millions of people but making zero dollars and it went from that to being used by tens of millions of people and making so much money that it's not fathomable for most entrepreneurs what happened Like, what did you guys do?

Yeah, well, first is it wasn't all me. It's a great team. Certainly a lot of hard work from a lot of people. I think what's interesting about the Tinder story is sort of we went across, we sort of went against every conceivable norm. In what way? At that point in time, dating first was small. the TAM of dating was perceived as something that the mature internet companies wouldn't

find interesting. Second, the dating industry was essentially a paywall industry. You would go in, potentially set up a profile, and bang, second a message came through, it would be pay us. We took a very different approach, and we thought of dating as content, as an experience, as entertainment. And when you think of something like that, why would you want to put a paywall in front of it? So instead of inventing a better designed way to push someone through the subscription funnel, we said, how do we extend behaviors that we already saw on the platform and productize them? And so this isn't, right now, I guess this is considered a pattern that a lot of people followed because of obviously the success of the app. But at the time,

it didn't feel irrational. It felt like the right thing to do. So instead of, you know, saying pay us 19 bucks a month, we wanted to introduce you to a super like, we would give you one free. So when you get a taste of it, you would feel that emotional energy of sending off a super like or even better receiving one. And then you would start, you know, you start to make that association of these, these little subtle super superpowers are going to help me have a better overall experience. So what you really did, it sounds like is you took things that people were already doing. They were used to using the application for liking swiping, all this kind of stuff. And when you say you extended them, give us some examples of like what those actually look

like. It's like, what is a super like, and what are some of the other things that you guys did? Yeah. So let's start from the top. People want cheat codes in life. And this is a gaming industry term. But when you think about Tinder, it really is a game of variable. It's a variable reward game. Swipe, swipe, swipe, match. Oh my gosh, that was amazing. Swipe, swipe, swipe, hopefully another match. So what we wanted to do is really take this idea of variable rewards and then pack them inside of this core experience alongside of also giving people these pseudo cheat codes. So if you think about Tinder Gold, it allows you to see who's right swiped on you. That helps you get to the sort of meat of the application faster.

And if you're serious about dating, you're serious about meeting people, you want that edge. So instead of creating a system that was very draconian and sort of 1998, we took a lot of things from the gaming industry and a lot of things from a lot of the user behaviors that were already embedded in our application. It's not like we sat down and said, hmm, I wonder how we can monetize this. We knew people wanted to stand out. We knew people wanted to go from A to B faster.

We knew what people wanted to understand how to manipulate their experience. So we just gave it to them. And we did it in a very subtle way, but in a way where a lot of people saw these paywalls. And as we all know, conversion is subject to how many times you see a paywall. And we didn't do it in a fashion that was super aggressive and made people mad. It was a way where people saw it as an opportunity on the platform rather than a tax. It almost feels like they don't think of it as a paywall. If I go to a media site and I get hit with a paywall, it's a fucking paywall because there's content that I wanted to read, but I almost feel tricked.

It's like, hey, I clicked on the link, and I thought I already had the article, and then bam, I get hit. And so it's like a negative experience because now it's almost like you took it away from me until I give you money. right whereas what you guys did is you presented it and it was like an easter egg like they discovered we think of it we internally as an achievement so you look at this sort of dichotomy between the words of you know a paywall or some forced action or an achievement that you can unlock everyone wants an achievement everyone wants to go a little further in the game and so um i think the other thing that we focused on is like ridiculous simplicity with monetization Another product that we launched that was extremely successful is called Boost.

And Boost just shows you to more people. Very simple concept, not a lot of mental energy that you would need to understand what this does, and it was one tap. Do I know before I get the Boost functionality, do I know, hey, I'm only being shown to 10% of the people? Was it measurable? Yeah, there's a little user education, but I think what happens is the proof is in the pudding.

You get more ride swipes, more people like you, and immediately you have this delightful experience and you look at the delta and you say, well, that was because I purchased Boost. And so when you can tie cause and effect together in a consumer tool, big things happen. Yep. Big things happen. Super like Boost, what else? Top picks. I mean, there's tons and tons of different ones, some smaller and some more important than others. But I think the theme always is simple products.

So if you think about even the branding, Tinder, super like. You really like them. Tinder boost, be exposed to more people. Tinder gold. So it's positive affirmation. It's always positive. It's always aspirational. And again, this goes back to sort of my product theory about no mind.

You don't educate the customer. They have to come to the conclusion about what you're selling them immediately on their own. Why would you spend time doing all these things that people think, oh, this is super smart? Just give them something very simple, digestible, achievable. And most times customers will – you'll be astonished what you can actually achieve. So you – I can't believe I'm about to say this in front of you, but you're probably the best product person I know. Thank you. You have a bunch of these frameworks that you've just implemented over and over and over again in your career.

most people listening to this have no clue what any of this is, right? Or they're coming at, they understand product, but they don't understand kind of your framework. So no mind, for example, explain what that is. Cause I think that's one of the core things that you believe in that others might not even know what that is. Sure. So we live all of us very busy lives. We have our schedules, our routines. We fall, we all do certain things. We watch reality television. We scroll mindlessly through Instagram. People are somewhat predictable. And when I talk about no mind, I talk about, we always, I'm sure you've heard of the term the wedge, right?

Everyone always talks about what is the wedge of this product or the service, right? What people are really saying is how do you pierce into someone's attention stream and get them to change a behavior or modify it such that they're using your product or service? Very hard to do because really, I'm going to say it right here. Nobody cares. No one wants your product. No one needs your product. It has to find them.

How you find people, first, even above no mind, is ultra simplicity. People are not going to give you attention unless something is very digestible. That means perfect copy. That means really good visual branding. That means an understanding of who the customer is and where they live and being able to get to them in their natural environment. it. Second, and this is sort of my overarching theory about kind of consumer products that have succeeded. It's just something called no mind. People do not want to use your service and think they want the service to come to them. So we see this whole culture right now of, you know, we call it, you know, auto streaming or autoplay or whatever, tech talk, you know, just everything starts and you just, it's coming to you. It's very passive. It's very passive. And you're able to literally go into a specific psychological state where you don't actually have to process anything. You can just let it come. Steve Jobs used to talk about television as this ultimate

machine to turn your brain off. Tell me how Instagram or TikTok or any of these tools are any different. You're putting the user in a place. It's almost catatonic. Once in a while, you'll drop a variable reward like a like or super like or a match or something on Twitter. You get a ton of retweets and you get that great, that dopamine, that serotonin rush where you say, ah, that's fantastic. I feel good. But in general, what are we doing? We're going into a specific place where people just want to be left alone and they just want the content to come to them. They don't want to have to think about it. So no mind is the act of creating both products where they don't have to think and then all these decision trees that don't make people feel like

they're you know putting a ton of intelligence against the decision what is really shocking is when you talk about television there was an entire generation of americans uh really around the world but let's talk about america specifically that when they got home from work the way they relaxed was they sat in front of the television right they turned it on and they sat there yep And that sedentary state was turning off of the brain and passive consumption, and they just – whatever the cable provider decided they should watch, they watched. That's exactly right. Exactly what's happening on Instagram. It's exactly what's happening on TikTok, et cetera.

To kind of toss another framework at you without trying to make this too intellectual, what we talk about is these as cohorts of attention. So you think about television. This is probably, if we rewound time into the early 90s, we're talking about two and a half hours sometimes people would sit down. Then the desktop computer emerged. That was, you know, you'd have like 45 minutes to an hour session, maybe at night. At work, you would have two hours, maybe in the morning an hour.

Then you have laptops. It gets smaller and more narrow. Then you move, obviously, to the phone era. And now we have like 14 to 24 minute sessions per day. So these are all these new attention cohorts. And now we have this new one, which is this audio world that's emerging around podcasting and AirPods and whatnot, which is three or four 45-minute sessions. And so the power of any consumer application at any given time is to pierce into that attention

stream, find out and understand what it is people want out of that set environment, and then deliver them these amazing products. So, for example, long form wouldn't work on mobile, right? We went to this world where everything is Instagram stories and TikTok, and you see Hollywood trying to make that jump, but not really. It's because guess what? It's a new attention stream. It requires entirely new ways of thinking about the customer, new ways of engaging the

customer, new creators underneath it. So it's this beautiful sort of creative destruction cycle. And one of the things I look for in consumer, and one of the things that I pay most attention to is these new attention cohorts emerging. Because sometimes they creep up on you. This podcasting and AirPods thing, it came pretty fast. All of a sudden, six months ago, people said, wait a second, there's 6 million AirPods out there and podcasting is growing at this rate? How did that happen? In two years, who knows where we end up? Yeah. And part of that, when you look back at what happened over the last, let's call it two

years right uh in the podcasting and audio world there's two or really three things that stick out my mind one is the airpods actually launched so people got them in their ear realized whoa this is different even though there's just no cord whole different experience right freedom yep two is uh i actually think on the content creation side a number of people got woken up when they started to hear numbers like joe rogan's podcast both on the revenue and the viewership side etc and so it was like wait a minute i thought that was this little small thing this is massive And then the third thing is actually the content subjects started to prefer it. So if you look around now and you say whether it's CEOs of companies, entertainers, all these people, they actually are starting to choose to go on to this medium versus the television shows or whatever else.

So there's a lot of good stuff there. First, today voice is not a platform. It's an interface. It could become a platform, but it's an interface. It's a dang good interface. What has to happen for it to transition from an interface to a platform? There has to be much more connectivity on the developer side. There has to be ways in which specific APIs exist for people to hook in.

There has to be this nexus, this community. Right now, it's still pretty closed. Can't do much with AirPods. Podcasts are locked in these arcane RSS enclosures. I mean, this is still pretty, RSS was invented 20 years ago. So the interesting thing about where we are today is sort of backing up for a second, thinking about audio why is audio so great first ridiculous amounts of information density second ridiculous amounts of human uh you know what makes us who we are the intonation the

the you know the pitch all these things that we forget like we've been living in this text world which is incredibly transactional why do emojis exist they exist because we needed to add sort sort of a human layer to that. I don't think you need audio emojis, maybe a little bit. It could be fun. And the third, and this is the most important. And I think if you want to talk about Joe Rogan, I'll unlock Joe Rogan for you right now. Multimodal consumption. People are listening to Joe Rogan while they're driving a forklift, while they're digging a ditch, sitting there in a toll booth, whatever it may be, driving a car. Walking to work.

Walking to work, literally shooting baskets. You can listen to audio, consume audio in a no-mind state in a multimodal environment, meaning driving, walking, working out, potentially sitting there on your work laptop in Excel. And so I think what people forget about audio is how flexible it is. And you look at video, right? And video had this amazing curve to it with YouTube and whatnot and Instagram and snap, but you know, you still hear people today like, Oh, I don't want to get behind camera. Like it's, there's an uncomfortable, it's uncomfortable. Um, it's, it's, it's, it's very, it takes all of your attention. You really have to focus with audio. You can do whatever you want. I cook twice a week. You know what I'm doing?

Listen to podcasts half the time. You know, I I'll read a book and listen to a podcast at the same time. It sounds incredibly crazy, but I, my brain can consume that way. And I think I'm not the only one. So I used to listen to music exclusively when I worked out. I pretty much don't listen to music at all anymore. It's either audio books or podcasts, right? And what I think happened if I try to be somewhat intellectually honest is audio books came first, right? And it was an easier transition to go from, I don't have time to read right now or I'm moving, I'm doing something, whatever. Let me just have somebody read to me. So, okay, that's pretty clear. And And then now we've transitioned into, well, like, what if it doesn't need to be a book?

What if it can be more an interview, somebody just talking in 20 minutes, whatever it is. And so what probably has occurred is content consumption has gone through the roof, right? However you want to measure that. But what it's doing as well is it's changing the type of content, right? Going back to your idea of like, if we were such a text-based world, we added emojis. That's kind of an evolutionary type. How do we get emotion into this? Now, all of a sudden, if you take that same content and somebody reads it, it's a whole different experience, right?

Not only from what you're doing, but also the way that the content is presented to you ends up being very different. And what I think happens is we're just at the beginning of that. The content creators haven't even really figured out yet how do I create the content to best live on this interface or platform or whatever it ends up becoming. When they get that right, this thing is going to take off. Yeah. You know, what's interesting is I don't think we're, not to contradict you, but I don't think we're arriving anywhere. I think we've been here for 200,000 years. Humans started the art of storytelling around a fire 200,000 years ago. That's how we shared information. Sure, there was cave art, you know, 40,000 years ago or whatnot, but for a very long time, this was codified into our DNA. And I have this thesis, though it's unprovable. I think the last decade, I call it the eyes down decade or the glass decade, so it's like 06 to 20, we've been buried in our phones, transactionally communicating with text.

Text is really great at certain things. Grab my keys, here's the room I'm in, here's a cell phone number. Really great. but that human emotion that thing that drives us that makes us excited and sad and happy elated like text is not good at it it never was good at it but we've been conditioned for the last 15 years because this is where the tools were at and now we're sort of unlocking or pulling back the onion again so again i don't think this is traditional i think the technology and the stack underneath it is sort of, it's certainly new, but I think the behavior is absolutely like part of our DNA.

When you think about that's where we're at today, walk me through how you analyze the various aspects of audio, right? So there's, um, obviously communication, but then there's just kind of, you know, single player consumption where somebody is created content that I'm consuming. Are there other things in that category or is it pretty much just I can communicate or I can consume one way? Yeah, there's a lot of striations to this. Let's not forget, outside of texting and photo sharing, probably the most prominent activity on the phone is still calling. So calling is audio. I mean, it's old and it has the ring and the buzz and the address book and all that stuff that's no fun. It works, but it works. It works and it's still a scale behavior. But I

think what we're going to see happen, what's going to emerge is these form factors that fit into people's lives in different ways. For example, I love your podcast. I find it interesting. I'm not going to listen to your podcast when I have 20 minutes. This is two hours on a Saturday or Sunday, throw my AirPods in, take a walk around the block. I know I have that window, but there are other times in the day, say I wake up where I may want something choppier, faster give me you know five minutes yeah some burst of information and i think we can't sort of negate the fact that how we connect with humans mostly is through talking so uh there's going to be something really important bi-directional there as well and so audio is going to find its form

factor in all these different cohorts of attention and i think the thing that's also most interesting is this the impact of hearables cannot be denied i mean you talk a lot about the creation side like Joe Rogan, you, Sam Harris, there's a bunch of people producing incredible content outside the media machine. But now talk like sort of back up for a second and just look at all, like this is like a kaleidoscope of opportunity. There's so many different places to basically create products and services where people can do it on their time. Talk a little bit more about the hearables. Like what do you mean by that? Yeah, so the hearables, so I think hearables are really fascinating. When Apple launched AirPods around two and a half years ago, they were

universally panned. Shows you what consensus knows. I think it's safe to say I've studied Apple pretty aggressively for the last 10 years, almost every day. I think this is probably the second best product they've ever launched. There were people that thought that the watch was potentially more important to the overall business. But I think AirPods are now in that pantheon of right behind the iPhone. And when I think about hearables, and I'm using AirPod as a proxy, but there's plenty of competitors, what you have is this amazing world where the computing is inside you. And a lot of people bet on the computing being on your face. And what we've learned about items and hardware on your face is that a lot of people don't like that yeah you're

talking about like glasses glasses like helmets heads-up displays all that sort of stuff that things that are visually literally includes your vision yep and i think the key is humans for many many years did not have things on their face other than sunglasses right so then to put this like really heavy architecture with circuits and this that and the other like on your in front of your eyes, really, really hard, really, really hard for people to digest. So you think about where are the computing paradigms, right? There's something in your hand, there could be something on your face, and now you have something in your ears. But when you have, people are pretty much okay with having something in their ear. It's not something that bothers them. And so what Apple got

so well is just this idea of they're just the best at hardware and services and putting them all together, right? They made this pretty well, beautifully designed device, put it in your ear. It worked magically with your phone. Now your phone is an edge server in your pocket, and all of a sudden you feel free. And I think people looked at hearables first as a cordless identity. They said, oh, that's a cordless thing. And as you said, it's kind of hard to explain until you use it, but it's so much more than a cordless piece of hardware. It's an entirely new way of thinking about the world. You don't realize it until you try them, the freedom component, Because you literally just think, oh, you just removed the cord from the phone to my ear, but it changes everything that you would do with headphones when you remove that cord.

It's undeniable. I think the other thing that's so fascinating is the trajectory of technology always goes from big, medium, small to invisible. That's the way technology works. If it isn't rendered invisible at the end, it's probably not a great piece of technology. And you think about communication and you think about information consumption, it just keeps going down this curve, smaller, smaller, smaller, smaller. And now we have it in the ears. It's almost invisible. We're not at Neuralink yet. That's probably six years out. Do you think that that's the end state of this? Like literally the AirPod or its competitors are as close to an embeddable as we're going to get before we get the embeddable? I think right now, if you look at where Neuralink stands on a continuum and where the phone is as an edge server, I think AirPods perfectly bisect that moment. I think it's going to be an incredible

ride for them. Tons of new services. But again, getting back to core human behavior, we don't want a bunch of technology all in our stuff. We want to feel free. And I think it took AirPods and it took some time like six it was a year before people really understood how good these things were to realize you know what it's really nice to not have to have this bulky device somewhere a laptop or a tablet or whatnot do you think that when you and i have always talked about this always been audio is kind of the the thought process or kind of this um you know hands-free type experience face up eyes up etc yep but as i'm sitting here thinking about it So the voice interface with the Google Homes, the Alexas, whatever the devices are, and Siri to some degree, but really kind of the in-home devices, you've also changed the way that now you're communicating with the technology.

Yeah. So you bring up an interesting thing about Alexas and whatnot, and I'll present to you kind of a user experience case study. the people who love alexas are very young and very old and it tells you something about the strength of the environment the strength of the tool these are people who are probably less concerned about computing right these are just people who are doing something uh functionally and so you know my nine-year-old daughter can use alexa flawlessly she does homework with it my parents use it you know 75 years old you think about sort of the barbell there and it tells you about how versatile this new interface will become. And another thing I think about

that's interesting about voice that isn't widely distributed or thought about is this idea of it works in environments and thrives in environments that people don't talk about very often. What about Android Auto or CarPlay? I mean, a captive audience, an experience where people basically have hours on end

to turn off their brain, everyone commuting these days is just listening to interesting podcasts and Spotify, and they're mixing it together. And pretty soon, all of this stuff, like let's be honest, the voice technology, at least presenting commands to a piece of hardware, it doesn't work that good.

It's still not that great. Google has the best technology today by far, but it's still clunky. But where will we be in five years when it actually understands true natural language? It doesn't matter what dialect, it doesn't matter what's going on in the background or what noise when a computer can truly understand your intent and you have you can do it effortlessly

all sorts of new things happen so the one thing about the consumer internet is every time you reduce and make something more simple amazing things happen does the phone eventually disappear like can we get the phone itself as the edge computer i get i get asked this question a lot I think the phone has tremendous utility. It's still a great device for getting work done. It's still a great device for consuming video. And until we have a new display, a true display, I think the phone is here to stay. But I think it's a beautiful complement.

It's like peanut butter and jelly. I believe the phone will fade away, much like the phone did to the laptop or the tablet. I mean, there's a joke around Silicon Valley about running your business off a cell phone. I don't want to touch a laptop. Do I think you could run a business off your AirPods? Probably not. Not in the foreseeable future. But I think it just diminishes that attention window on bigger devices like the phone. But I've been saying all along, think of the phone, again, as an edge server. It's this powerful device in your pocket, can do lots of things, can do a lot of compute, but it mostly stays in your pocket.

Yeah. One other device that I'm really fascinated by, and I think it kind of intersects with a lot of these voice and audio, et cetera, and visual is things like mirror, right? These kind of in-home gyms that there's the entertainment component. There's a functional component of I'm actually working out, but I can see something that isn't actually real, right? In terms of, it's not a real trainer human standing there telling me, but there's this kind of virtual person that's working with me. And I have a very unique relationship with it, right? Because it's almost like a coach, right? Or a boss telling me to do something and I do it. And so I'm somewhat, I work for the machine to some degree. How do you think about that in this world of kind of more passive consumption and the

technology really kind of, again, going big to small to invisible? How does that work? Well, if you think about it, what the mirror is just miniaturizing is that workout facility where, you know, 40 people are riding on a bike. This is back to the thesis, again, of it getting small and potentially invisible at some point. So it's taking this, you know, a class environment and making you feel like, you know, you're doing it even though it's really single player. So it fits thematically along that same line. And I think the interesting thing is we've been blessed in the last 15 years with really bringing production quality up. You don't need a Hollywood studio to do this stuff again.

So if you think about sort of the value chain of the product, everything's getting better. The hardware is better. It actually looks like a real mirror. It doesn't look like some crappy device in the corner. The video fidelity is unbelievable. I mean, at some point, it'd be all 4K. It looks like it was shot on the Warner Brothers lot. The speakers are great.

Like every piece, it's the cumulative effect of all of these technologies, obviously networked underneath it that then create this experience that could never have existed. And I've heard a lot of stories about Peloton. I'm not an investor. I don't have one, but I think it's a really cool device. And I heard people the early days saying like, it was such a hard leap to think like a tablet on a bike with a service and video was going to work. And he had to presumably make like six things connect and he did, but look what happened. It's like this magical experience where you feel like you're actually in one of these boot camps or a class, but you're doing it outside or you're doing it in your garage or your, you know, your, your bedroom. It's, it's, it's,

it's amazing. Yeah. So there's a big difference between building hardware products, software products, and then combining them on the software side. How do you think about kind of product design in today's world? Right. So, um, it, you know, 10, 15 years ago, kind of pre iPhone, longer attention spans, you know, all kinds of different components to society and the way that we interact with technology today looks a lot different. Kind of how do you walk through as you're building a product? Here's the things to pay attention to. Here's how to actually design the product to be successful. Well, I think there's a lot more cultural landmarks now. People understand the true talent of like a Tony Fidel, a Johnny Ive, Yves Behar. Like these are

people that like normal people within the industry respect and admire so there is a totem pole if you will and you can look up and say look that person designed the nest wow that's amazing good design is always going to is always going to be scarce and it's a function of many many many different things there's an aesthetic discipline there's people understand weight and size they understand how to work with certain materials they're interface designers graphic designers user experience designers like there's all sorts of stuff but i'll say the bar now is through the roof design even 10 years ago couldn't hold a candle to what it what is today and even 20 years ago you know someone posted the other day on twitter you know the loading animation where the

the the paper was going into like the this little like the bin or whatever bin and they danny twin called it the greatest animation on the internet it was like that was at one point high design and so design is accelerating people are getting better but it's multi-discipline now there isn't like one way to say like oh like it really requires um a really in totality someone who has an unbelievable aesthetic sense um and that that will never ever ever be a commodity how do you balance uh kind of a design driven world where uh human intuition human decision making is really important and um my words not yours but you almost have to feel what the right thing to build is how do you balance that with this world of like

data-driven iterative development where hey we're gonna run a bunch of tests and then the computer's going to tell us the answer and let's make this change, this change, this change. Right. So there is no right answer to this. It depends on the DNA of the organization and the people, the composition of the people. So if you look at, for example, Snap, Pinterest, Apple, you're talking about high design, like people who literally the founders of Snap designers. I mean, this is something that they hold very, very true to themselves. Same thing with Pinterest. So I think it starts at the top and it's a tone. When you come from a design org, you know it.

When you come from a multivariant product, sort of is this massive math problem organization, you know it. And each, you know, being that type of org for Google was an incredible competitive advantage when they were trying to test all the different ways of doing auctions because that was the type of skill set you needed. But then fast forward and you look at like the Snap era. That's much more of a painter with an easel and some, you know, beautiful watercolors. Everything there is basically just a tapestry of creativity. It's people trying stuff. And, you know, I don't think there's a right or a wrong, but I certainly know what side I'm on. Yeah. And you've started to do a lot more investing. When you were looking at these early stage teams, do you look for kind of this founder product fit? Do you try to tease this out? Is this more of a data-driven versus a design-driven and this is the type of problem they're going after and there's a certain approach that is the right thing?

ask explicit questions about it, but all I need to know is if I look at their materials, I look at the webpage and I speak to the founder for five minutes, I can tell. And so this is not something where it's sort of pass fail. It's the composition of all the different artifacts that they share with me where I make my investment decision. If I see something extremely beautiful, I know what type of team this is. Also on the other side, if they say, oh, we really need a designer. Can you help us find a designer or this great product person? I know exactly what they're not. Um, so it does factor in and I feel like I get lucky when I find a great design sort of first startup. If there is any out there, please hit me up. Um, I feel like

I get lucky when I find them, but it's not something you encounter every day. Why do you feel like you get lucky? Um, well, first is like when you have the eye, you can identify it. Um, and so it's because it's not everyone. Um, it's just a function of seeing a lot of deals. Um, And I'll say this, the design bar and the overall product experience bar has gotten better and better and better. I mean, some of these SaaS websites are beautiful. I mean, this is, you know, like seven, eight years ago, you know, it wasn't that way. They look like 1999 Yahoo sites. I mean, yeah, I'm on this, I mean, I'm Stripe or Clearbit or any of these sites and I'm looking at them.

I'm like, these are, these are pieces of art. going back to tinder uh how much iteration and data kind of uh testing did you guys do versus you know a lot of the design uh product thinking that you're talking about earlier we we got better at testing uh later later in the history of the startup a lot of it first was purely intuitive really yeah the founders of tinder were uh sean sean and and he just had this innate feel for what made sense it was it was almost just again it's the note you know it when you see it kind of vibe and him and jonathan's sort of ability to kind of understand the swipe and to create a card structure that felt alive that was all design thinking it was all first

principle design stuff there was no you know prior art whether we're going to go do xyz because this worked over here it was purely intuitive but again good design allows you to go into a no mind experience it allows you to go into this almost transcendental state and when you go into that state what are you doing you're giving your time you're giving your attention and it's this kind of like whole virtuous loop where if you can do that over a protracted period of time and keep people happy you know for weeks months sometimes years you develop something you know a franchise that, you know, lasts for decades. Yeah. Talking to me about kind of all the work with AngelList and Spearhead, you've been spending a lot of time on that. What's going on there?

So, you know, AngelList has always been at the absolute cutting edge of venture capital. And that's why I was an angel investor and a board member now. Naval and Nivi, I think, saw the industry with extreme clarity a decade in advance. So they, you know, that classic tome of you go to the future and then you come back and you develop it for the people of today. That's what they did. So they were a decade ahead and still are. And I think fundamentally, venture capital, it's been around, roughly speaking, since the 1960s, has not seen a lot of innovation. But things are really starting to accelerate right now. And if you think about the impact of Y Combinator, and you think about the impact of AngelList and the amounts, the sheer

volume of capital flowing into startups, it's a whole new world. Right now there's about 600 unicorns on the book. And I believe someone said to me, and don't quote me on this, but it was seven, eight years ago, there was like 35. How many private companies are going to be worth a billion dollars in 2030? More than 600 is my bet. More than 600. And so fundamentally reshaping venture capital to be more entrepreneur centric is like been my goal always and i i the first person i ever met in the valley that was an investor was ron conway and if anything no anyone knows anything about ron conway it's it was entrepreneur first and that's old school i don't know if everyone believes in that anymore

but i sure do and nival and navy angelist and now spearhead which is our program where each year we we give up to a million dollars to 30 leads these are founders who are in market with series A, B, and C companies. So actually we have someone in this class that's a public company. And we give them a million dollars to seed investments in their friends and the people in their network.

Like the best proxy for success in venture capital is find someone who knows what they're doing and to distribute money to five of their friends. Now, sometimes that's hard to do because people are in and out of jobs and maybe they're locked in or they got handcuffs or maybe they're going to Bali for two years and deciding to find some peace.

Or Tulum. Or Tulum, yeah. Or Iceland. Iceland, right. Whatever other place. Pick your place. So the thesis here is that we wanted to create a frictionless environment with Spearhead

to enable founders on the ground to fund the most interesting people and projects at the very early stage. And is the thought process that those people being funded, right, so whoever you give the million dollars to that lead, whoever they end up funding, those individuals would go to other founders first and have a different type of conversation than going to investors? Founders on the ground want to deal with other founders, period. Other founders know what's going on. They understand the challenges.

They understand the stresses that it puts on them. They want to go to other founders. And I don't think I've ever met a successful founder that didn't have at least a small cohort around them because this is an issue of mental health too. It's staying sane, someone to call. So why shouldn't that person also be able to identify key talent in market or soon to be in market? It could be even pre-cap table. We have this idea now where we want to fund people within our lead structure where their best friend might not be ready to leave his job. Here's 50K to leave your job. That's not even a joke. That's something that we're actively pursuing. So pre-cap table investing fascinates me. And it's literally the idea of you don't have a

company yet, but you're the right person. And it goes back to when I first started investing, a number of different people in some form or fashion said, at the end of the day, early stage investing comes down to backing the best people because everything else that they're telling you is going to change. What they're building, the market conditions, their competitor, all this other stuff can change. But if that individual is good, they'll find a way to win. And you guys are almost taking that idea and putting it on steroids and saying, you don't even need the company. If you're the right person, there's somebody there who could fund it. Yeah. We're systematizing. We're building an institution around it. All we needed to do was

rewind the tape and look at the vintage of like 06 to 12 and our peer groups. And I mean, we have five to $10 billion companies in that peer group. And at that point, capital was somewhat hard to get access to. Someone had to run your back end. So you would have to pay a lawyer. Then you would have to figure out how to deal with the filings with the SEC and whatnot. It was very complicated. I mean, Angel Investing 10 years ago, there was only three or four people out there doing it. You know, Ron Conway, Mike Maples. I mean, it's a small group of people. And the reason why is it was just a, it was, it financially was not possible. So again, reduce friction, find people who already have that access, and then give them the ability at times to fund people that they believe in. And you mentioned it best, like things change, everything changes. All the most complicated and biggest businesses of our time have went through severe 180s

in their sort of gestation period. But that's okay when you're betting on a person and you're betting on someone you trust and you know that they can potentially get through that, cross that chasm and that next level. A $50,000 to $100,000 investment early stage is an absolute incredible option on the future. But I think also what we're seeing too is just the entire venture capital industry is just being completely reshaped. We had Y Combinator that has done absolutely worlds for entrepreneurship. And you had the SoftBank incursion, which hasn't really played out. It's unclear if it was good, bad, or terrible, but it certainly has had its ups and downs lately.

And now you have this whole new cohort of investors coming in on both sides. So you have institutions who are coming in and bypassing VCs and are doing secondaries direct and trying to build structured products to get access to private companies. And then from the bottom, you have this whole class of investors who are now able to raise funds, smaller funds, 5 to 15, sometimes 20 million, who have experience in market, who are basically becoming the pro VCs, but they're not VCs. They're just individual fund managers. So this market for venture capital, where it used to be seed, A, B, C, public, the notion of all of these stages and intervals, it doesn't even compute anymore. I can't even keep up with all the different pre-seed, pre-cap, seed, seed plus, seed extension.

And it's because there's so much capital. There is so much capital. There's so much opportunity upside in the market. Everyone sees it. And guess what? Public market investing, as you know, it's just not as sexy. People have seen these Airbnbs and Ubers and SpaceX and Lyfts and they say, I want a piece of that too. So everyone's going for it. Well, and we've got a friend who I won't name because I'm not sure if they're comfortable with it or not, but one of their ideas is basically why is this happening, right? And the way that he articulates it is basically what better thing to do than to give money to a highly entrepreneurial innovation-driven team and have them go work to grow it, right? Right. And that same sentiment from kind of a venture type investor is echoed in a lot of the

data that we see in large institutions, right? So if you look at whether it's the Dietrich Foundation in Pittsburgh, Yale, et cetera, they have very high level of allocation percentages in their portfolio to private alternative investing, right? Whether it's traditional private equity, venture capital, et cetera. And I think for a long time, that's kind of been taboo in the institutional world. But that conversation drastically shifted in the last five years. It used to be a pejorative saying you were going down market. It was like, what are you going to do? You're rolling your sleeves up to go deal with a bunch of people in a garage. But that all changed with the last decade. And I think, let's be honest, this is

just the pursuit of yield. Everyone's going after yield. The public markets, even in this bull, it's still really hard to come by, very concentrated. So if you think about sort of asset allocation theory and you're being smart about it, of course, you're going to go down market. You're going to cut out a lot of these people that were charging you two and 20 for access and you're going to go direct. And it's happened on every side. I mean, half of these operator angel funds are funded by institutions. So they're coming in below and they're coming in on this side. What's your take on kind of this idea? There's been a couple of people who have recently said, look, the venture capital institutions are the very top ones will

always be around and kind of continue to thrive. But the next wave of really good investors are actually going to be where founders want to take money from the individual rather than the institution. Yeah. I think it's already happening. I mean, like you look at the compounded success a Sequoia or Excel or a Benchmark. I mean, they're not going anywhere and it's an incredible brand and it means a lot. If you get series A funding for consumer startup from Benchmark, this is a high potential that the outcome for this company is in the multi-billions. So agree with the first part of your thesis. Second part is, this is back to no mind, human nature. You're in a startup, you're working hard. Do you want

want to take money from someone who has no idea and they're just basically kind of like an institutional money manager that plays golf at four o'clock and doesn't understand or empathize with you? Or do you want to take money from someone who just did it, who just scaled or was the lead growth at blank or has an incredible eye for customer acquisition and can tell you everything about customer acquisition on this platform or that platform? Of course, you're going to go to someone who gets you. And those people just weren't there because of all of the issues associated with raising funds, but now they are. And I think it's only growing. One thing I've noticed too is a lot of these people that are helping companies are really

young, really young, like late 20s, early 30s. And you ask yourself, well, do they have the wisdom and experience to do this job? And the answer is, I don't know. Maybe they do, maybe they don't. But what they do have is a human connection with the founder. Well, and I think actually what I've seen is a lot of those people not only have the connection with the founder, they actually have experience. Now, whether it's good experience or not, can they translate and kind of give good advice? That's different. But many of those people, you know, I'm 31 and I literally ran one of the growth teams at Facebook for one of the biggest products, right? And so when you think about that, there's 100 people like me that were at Facebook, Uber, Pinterest, Airbnb. You just go down the line, all of them. And so, again, it doesn't mean they're going to give good advice, but the fact that those large companies, whether they were small and then grew or they were large, let those types of people who are younger and had less experience in those roles, it's almost like they've accelerated that kind of flywheel. in terms of, well, if you have the experience, then you start to invest. If you start to invest

and it goes well, you continue to invest more, you share advice, et cetera. And that's been the secret of Silicon Valley for a really, really long time. That's the ethos of the Valley. And so it's, again, productized, institutionalized. And I think in a broader perspective, capital is always looking for yield and always looking for talent. Anything that gets in the way of yield and talent is a problem. And the wall used to be 20 feet high. Maybe it's four feet high. Soon enough, if sort of the vision of AngelList is realized, it's just, you're going to put a deal on the platform. It'll be funded with all high quality individuals that you love immediately. You'll say if they get their pro rata rights or not, the money will be wired in 72 hours and you're going

to be in business. And listen, I'm not sure if we need a purely digitized world. That's not what I'm trying to point out as a future vision. It's just the idea of accelerating talent towards a vision and getting rid of all of these draconian, arcane rituals of going in and pitching and spending two or three months and having people pull term sheets and put them back. It's super distracting for founders. It's super distracting. And the best entrepreneurs also oftentimes aren't the best at that endeavor. And so you think about how many great companies have been missed because the founder wasn't that person. Or I'll flip it on you. Not only the ones that were missed, how many companies got funded because the founder was good at that game and not good at building the company? Right. Right. That number is probably actually probably bigger because people have have really kind of understood now how the games play. It's one of my favorite things I've read recently is Paul Graham wrote this piece, Learn to Unlearn. And he's talking about in school, everyone's told, you know, we're going to go through class. At the end, there's a test. That test, if you want to study for it, doesn't rely on you reading like the best books on American history. Right. And getting the actual knowledge. And then you get a good grade. The test is reliant on did you read the notes that the teacher gave you?

Right. And that knows maybe good notes, bad notes might be the right information may not be, but that's how you pass the test. And so when people go into Y Combinator, what he sees is people basically ask, okay, the test is fundraising, right? Because I have to fundraise to be successful. Give me the answer to the test. How do I fundraise? And he's like, look, I could sit there and I could tell you, you know, okay, go to 20, you know, companies or funds. Here's the deck structure. Like here's all the little, you know, quote unquote cheat codes to doing this. But actually the right answer is build something that people want. And if you build something people want, they'll be throwing money at you. Well, that's the reductionist answer, but now the tools are in place. I mean, we haven't even begun to scratch the surface of how it's so much easier to build a high-quality startup than it was 10 years ago. Why do you believe that? There's everything from AWS to all of the amazing collaborative tools that we have. I mean, just the ability to ship daily and use a product daily and get feedback and understand what customers want. Like it used to be you had to build something and then you would launch and you would do a commercial launch with an agency.

You didn't hope and pray that anyone cared. It's the opposite of what people are doing today because everything has been streamlined. There's software for deploying. There's software for testing. There's all these great design environments where you can actually look and feel and touch and everything can be, you know, you can actually put something in your hand that isn't even code and say like, how would this feel if this worked? It's just, you know, we're just getting, we're advancing. We're advancing as a civilization. The technology is getting better, faster, cheaper, more invisible.

And that's why 600 unicorns will be a laughable idea in 10 years. Laughable. What happens in this idea of these private companies? There's so much capital right now. they're staying longer in the private markets, et cetera. They're not going to the public markets. Is that a function of just kind of late cycle type behavior and that kind of self-corrects itself? Or is that an actual trend that you think persists over the next couple of decades? All bets are off because this is all really tied to the macro environment. So the window's open

when the stock market is doing well. As we know though, the stock market and public equity investors started to pay a lot of attention during this WeWork phase. Because instead of wanting to by pure growth, they started to think about the viability of the business. So that was some sort of texture in the market that couldn't have been predicted. So I think this is all somewhat like trying to predict the weather in May. Who knows? We know now, right now, that people value good businesses like they always did, but they really value good businesses. And if it's purely a growth story, you're going to pay a discount. Yeah. The Airbnb situation, Bill Gurley was just highlighting it. And we're very small investors through an SPV there, but they were doing

fantastic. They were profitable. The unit economics looked great, kind of growth looked great, etc. They didn't kind of hit that window, right? And what he's basically pointing out is they just reported some numbers that aren't horrible, but they're not great, right? And he's like, look, you get a WeWork situation, you get numbers change, and all of a sudden that window closes really quickly or becomes less attractive. And I think what he was highlighting was kind of this idea of these markets don't stay in the same form factor forever. No, it's totally dynamic. And I think one of the other things about staying private for a long time is the rules of the public companies and how people think about public companies get imposed

on you, right? And so they're staying private to try to improve their numbers, improve their margins, get their unit economics in place, get their growth numbers at that level where everyone, you know, it can feel consistent quarter over quarter. But guess what? You know, like just the rules changed. And when I remember when Uber went out, I mean, remember before Uber went out? I mean, people were thinking it was going to go out at 95 billion, 120 billion. I heard 150 billion. I believed every bit of it at the time. But now, sharpen the pencil. So it's a Dynamic environment. It's incredibly awesome to be an entrepreneur. Money is flowing. Access is flowing. People are incredibly excited to be on the ground floor. And if you're an entrepreneur

doing great things, I mean, I want to hear from you because I've never seen anything like what's happening right now. I don't know if it's sustainable. Nothing is. But the velocity of companies, the quality of companies, and just the sheer variance. I mean, it used to be there was consumer and enterprise and a little hardware, and that was kind of like the world. There's a mismatch of everything now. Now there's companies like Notion where it's not even clear whether it's a consumer company or an enterprise company. It's like this incredible Cambrian moment in this startup cycle. Certainly, it's not going to last forever. Price is not going to last forever. But right now is an incredible time. But the one thing is if you're starting a company,

it's great to get a good price and get into your round and start building your company. But it doesn't matter. It's going to take 10 years anyway. You live in LA. There's a lot of magic in Silicon Valley. Why are you in LA? Well, I used to live in Silicon Valley and still kind of think of it as my second home. LA is just creative. It's interesting. I like the beach. I like to surf. so there's other things in my life besides technology um but i think the la ecosystem is really blossoming um i've never compared it to silicon valley and i never liked the term silicon beach because it makes an immediate inference happen i don't like that i just

la is its own thing it has incredibly creative people um you know elon's doing his thing down now peter teal's doing his thing down there like we really are in this like new phase and i can tell you that for about 120 years, the studio system reigned supreme in Hollywood. It was all studio system, actors, producers, people who helped on set. And it feels like in the last five years, it's just evaporated. And I think the technology business came in and there was winners. You have Snap, you have Tinder, again, SpaceX. And I think, again, you look for sort of these cultural idols, right? It's like if Snap did it there, we can do it there. And so you get this new kind of class, not only aspirationally, but you get it off kind of the edges of the

company because the great engineer leaves, the great designer leaves. And so we're now starting to see, you talk about the flywheel, the flywheel effect happened in LA, which is people who've been successful, maybe not the founders, are now spinning off to do their own thing. I think the other trend that's kind of interesting to point out is a lot of amazing people from San Francisco are migrating to LA. I mean, I think it's a quality of life situation. It's a cost of living situation. And it's just purely a different place. It's different and cool. But you get a ton of that intelligentsia down. And we used to have this whole debate about Silicon Valley and LA and Silicon Valley so far ahead. And like, you know what? I don't even think I've heard anything like

that for the last 12 months. It just doesn't matter anymore. Yeah. Do you think that that's not just an LA thing? Do you think it's more of a kind of macro? I totally believe it's a macro trend, but I think the proximity makes LA just that much closer to that Silicon Valley hive mind thing. And I see a lot more of the dynamics and ethos in the Valley starting to merge in the LA where there's people who just want to help out. That was a weird thing in LA 15 years ago. Why does this person want to help? But that was something that would happen in Palo Alto or Soma or whatnot. So you see that. And I think this is all just sort of like this connective tissue, like Berlin, London, all these startup hubs are emerging. And it just takes a couple of

successful companies. And look, we have YouTube and we have Twitter and we have all these amazing tools now where everyone feels like they're getting information at the same exact time. Whereas before, the Valley had it always, had just a monopoly on information. And I mean, I don't know what I don't know. So I'm sure the Valley does still have things that nobody knows, but those secrets are doing well. Yeah. What, what is, um, kind of your thoughts around this podcast stuff and, and kind of how it

intersects with the technology, right? Cause two of the things that I spent spending a lot of time thinking about is one, uh, all of the monetization around audio is like 1990 type monetization, right? As you'd expect. Yeah, of course. Right. People are literally, I do it, right? Yeah.

Literally reading a ad read and there's no dynamic pricing, there's no dynamic targeting, there's none of that stuff. So that's one. And then two is also the distribution of a lot of this has not kept up with the multimodal, the hearables. There's a lot of innovation going on there, but the actual distribution platforms themselves, Spotify's probably out in front of a lot of people, but everyone else seems to be pretty stagnant.

What's kind of your thoughts there? Yeah. So a couple of different things to point out. The first is monetization tools always lag scale. So scale happens before monetization. If it doesn't, there's something really, really weird about the market. And that almost never happens. Maybe we'll see the day in the future in crypto when it's all integrated and happens at that

same exact moment, the promise of tokenizing everything and it being like this is a unity. But that's not how consumers work for the last 30 years. Scale happens. then the tools come in because the companies that want to service the scale get invented and get funded. So when you think about where we are on the curve right now, we're climbing up. I mean, podcasting is still niche. It's still small. It's still small. Exactly. If you look at it in comparison to terrestrial radio, it's a lot smaller, but it's climbing. And you see the moves that Spotify is making.

And I think you have to think about the distribution for a second and how it exists. So first, you know, everything has been basically an oligopoly between Google and our friends over at Apple, right? But now you have Spotify. So you got three companies that are kind of competing for attention and that, you know, the best place to be is obviously the rapper, the house, right? The company that can serve it up and then ask you if you want the ads. That's what everyone's trying. Everyone wants that systems level control. I'm not sure if that will change so much

because there's still like, creators know that they need to be, they need to go through Apple. They know that, you know, literally you have to go to Spotify. You're like, how many hundreds of thousands of losers, users, not losers, sorry. That was not a Freudian slip.

How many hundreds of thousands of users would you lose? But I think what happens as this technology matures and as this form factor matures, people are going to find new ways to sort of sharpen the blade. So we think of podcasting right now as this sort of like bi-directional, we're sitting in front of a mic or maybe it's Zoom. That's what podcasting means right now. Just like blogging meant something in 2004, it was movable type or type pad. It meant like you sat in front of an editor. And all of a sudden, Twitter comes. And what's Twitter? Is Twitter microblogging? I don't know. I'm not...

The name Gomes doesn't even matter. It doesn't matter. But what I'm telling you is that when there's people excited about a form factor, incredible electric things happen on the edges that you can't predict. And so right now, we're doing something... Like I said, RSS was invented by Dave Weiner and Adam Curry 20 years ago. So 20 years ago, they've been working on this. They really weren't working on it that much lately, but back in the day. So it's 20 years old. Now we're at this inflection point where people like Sam Harris, you, Joe Rogan are scaling, right? But we're still so early on that curve. So podcasting as we know it, fast forward five years, maybe 10 years, I don't think it looks

anything like this. I mean, this form factor will exist, but I'm not saying in this exact rapper with this exact distribution method. So what's crazy to me is I agree with you that we're early. If you look at the numbers of what, Rogan's probably the one that everyone knows from the public numbers, 2.5 billion listens slash downloads views last year. And so if you look at many of his episodes just on YouTube, million, 2 million, 3 million views per video, that would put him as the most popular television show on a nightly basis right and it's funny to hear us say we're so early right because it's already the top of this kind of audio podcast etc world is eclipsing what is an old form factor but he's also been at it for you know 10 plus

years yeah right so it's it's not like he's an overnight success he's put in a lot of time and effort in building this. But for the overall podcast or audio market to be so early and already see some of this scale happening, 10 years from now, it's going to be nuts. So one of the things about thinking about, another sort of framework that I think about when it comes to product is really trying to understand what real people are doing. And there's one sort of belief of follow what the nerds are doing on the weekends. Chris Dixon used to say that. It's a really good place to start. Just whatever the nerds are doing, productize. The other thing is keep your eyes open if real people are actually doing something with new tech.

And I'm incredibly curious. I'll give you an example. So I went down to Guitar Center in Los Angeles. Is that where real people are? Well, yeah. To pick up some mics, to pick up some stuff for a project I'm doing. And I went to the guy and i said you know where's all the podcasting stuff he said it's gone i'm like what do you mean it's gone he's like we can't keep it in stock we really just we put it on we put it on the shelves it's gone the next day and i'm like well do you order more he's like yeah we keep ordering more and it keeps selling it keeps disappearing and i said well what are they buying like show me the rigs. Base level, $130 setup, roughly. We're not talking about $5,000 or $15,000 setups

in a beautiful place like this. For those that are only listening, we've got a new light in here that Joe ordered off of Amazon. And I feel like we're in a new home now. He's smirking in the corner. This is like the Taj Mahal. Except for we have no art. We got to fix the... It looks like a prison cell back here, but we're going to fix that. So you have real people buying cheap hardware and what are they doing? They're starting their own podcasts. That's significant. And this isn't people who are trying to find the bleeding edge to build a billion dollar company and apply to Y Combinator. this is just kids in the basement, college kids at UCLA. And what I think is so interesting about

this trend is there will be, this is really the, we always ask for the unbundling of traditional media. When's it coming and what form factor? And we saw some of it with traditional media, maybe like Business Insider or Buzzfeed or stuff like that. But those things are starting to feel like the parents, if you will. Now, we have potentially hundreds of thousands of people covering these specific niches, building these beautiful audience pools. What does that look like? It's fascinating. It's really fascinating. Part of the beauty is that we don't know what it ends up looking like. If everyone knew what it was going to look like, that would completely take out the experimentation, the innovation, kind of all the exploration that goes into

discovering it. And to me... Well, you know what? I actually think I do understand what it looks like. So I follow this podcast called Desert Oracle. Desert Oracle. And it's this crazy sci-fi podcast that this guy... Farb's in the room and Farb's laughing. Go buy CoinMinds, Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, this guy, Ken, basically conducts this sort of sci-fi meets future meets 50 years ago in the past, stories from the desert. Okay. And it's just this amazing electric podcast.

It's so interesting. And I don't know who exactly listens to this, Desert Oracle. But if you put it on, you're like, this is amazing. And he's going to have this thin, I mean, who knows if this becomes a phenomenon, maybe Maybe it doesn't, but my point is he has this audience of rabid fans that love it. And when you listen to it, you'll know it. And I think for every vertical, why can't that exist? For people who are interested in home improvement, fitness, there should be someone daily just talking about growth stocks.

I mean, I'm sure there probably is. Well, I mean this is what blogs did 20 years ago, right, where you could almost find other people who were weird like you and interested in what you thought nobody else cared about. All of a sudden the internet brought you a community, right? If you could – if they could discover you, you could discover them. What you're talking about is now you can do that again in a new form factor and actually this one is much more intimate, right? Because there's a voice in your head. Right. This is, yeah. Yet another piece, sort of bullet in my framework was everyone wants to be a part of something, no matter how narrow. Everyone wants to be part of something. For

some people, it's PTA. For some people, it's- Yeah, it's part of their identity. Yeah. For the Desert Oracle crowd, it's like weird desert sci-fi. There are people like you out there, and someone will satisfy you with amazing content because of podcasting. Yeah. And the other thing of this, too, is we haven't even seen yet like the quote unquote greats enter into this yet. Yeah. Like when Disney comes, what the fuck are they going to do? Yeah. You know, so maybe I'm a little less optimistic about that. With every new creative landscape comes a new set of creators that displace what we knew as sort of, you know, the best of the best. So, you know, obviously there's the YouTubers in one side and now we have the TikTokers, right? And I'm not sure if podcasting wants Larry King. We have Larry King right now and his name is Joe Rogan and there'll be someone else and there'll be a Mike Wallace and there'll be an Oprah Winfrey and maybe they already exist.

But my point is, I think I'm not sure if like the Disney model of high production value matters here. The axis that matters here is an authentic, honest voice and someone that gets at the truth and someone that builds a community. And I'm not sure that Disney is any better than you. So there's this guy, Matthew Ball, who used to be the head of strategy at Amazon Studios. And I read a piece that he wrote recently. And one of the things that he brought up that I thought was really interesting, he said, look, these studios, especially like the movie studios, have created movies. Then they've started to try to take the movies and turn them into TV shows or pair video games with them, et cetera. Yeah, it's a multi-platform approach to IP.

How do they basically get this out? And so the one thing that to me, a Disney would be really, really well positioned to do, but I don't, I don't have enough insight into the, how they work to know how they do it. But imagine if your kids could watch Mickey Mouse, they could play their games, they'd get stuffed animals, et cetera. And then they could have somebody with the Mickey Mouse voice cover stories, news, whatever, right? You almost take the character and put it into this environment. Because I agree with you that just taking the Mickey Mouse movie and saying, hey, I'm just going to rip the audio and put it on a podcast, nobody cares. But if you can start to almost personalize or humanize the characters in a different way, they're the only ones who have the IP. Yeah, no, I don't think it's – I wouldn't deny that they're capable of doing tremendous things.

But I think, again, each new medium has a form factor. It has strengths and it has weaknesses. What are audio's weaknesses? Well, you can't scan it. It's sometimes hard to get through. It can be long. Can't click. Yeah, it's hard to click.

We have speech-to-text, but no one really wants to read a transcript. That's not what audio is for. So audio has its own little areas that we'll call them needs to improve. But what audio is so good at, this emotional connection, this feeling of being in this room together, Disney will find a way to make this just yet another platform extension. It will fit into their entire offering, their entire portfolio. They'll have the app that does this and the game that does that and the Stuff Animal and the podcast piece will be right over here and i i think though my belief is the people who do the most amazing um emergent cool new

things are going to be people like you experimenting on the edges um and you showed me something a few minutes ago which i thought like i'd never even seen that before that mix of oh uh so there's a guy uh akira the don yeah who has created he calls them meaning waves which is basically mixing or overlaying audio with kind of psychedelic music is how I would describe it. And so it's not a song, but it's not a podcast. It's that kind of mix of somebody talking with music underlying it. I mean, it's crazy. It's crazy. I mean, I heard like someone pitched me the other day about they were just going to create essentially a near real-time podcast of like everything that's happening in their pursuit of whatever creative endeavor

they're doing like documenting the entire thing but bringing the audience in and he's going to do video with it as well and i thought like just justin tv style like justin tv meets podcasting you know and all that and i was like that's crazy i've never seen that before but i want to see it so it's it's a wild world did you watch um uh there's a new documentary on a netflix called the pharmacist i have not so uh long story short guy has a son he's a pharmacist he's got a son his son gets killed trying to buy drugs in the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans. He then realizes, hey, the police aren't going to solve this. He goes on this crusade and ends up being able to solve the case. Guy goes to jail. And then he doesn't stop and realizes, oh, wait a second,

there's an opioid epidemic happening. He finds the doctor who's writing all the prescriptions. It's this whole thing, right? So it's got kind of like a serial type storyline to it. Um, but what is absolutely nuts? I mean, this happened, uh, I want to say like in the two thousands, he had an audio recorder and he did what you're talking about. He ever, you know, he recorded conversations on the phone. He would just be out walking and be like, you know, I'm starting to think that blah, blah, blah, whatever. And some of it sounded like he was note taking a little bit, but also like, it was almost like emotional therapy. He didn't have anyone to talk to. Well, what they were able to do was get at this massive file of audio content he had created,

you know 10 15 years ago and then they overlay it now with image or imagery and it's incredible i mean it's literally like somebody in real time telling the story and i'd never seen it before like that that style um but it's really really fucking powerful awesome yeah it sounds great i mean this is probably just like a tiny little microcosm of what's going to happen yeah um any areas that you're excited about right now in tech that maybe people aren't thinking about you know i'm i'm a generalist um so i look at a lot of different stuff um i'm i don't have a particular vertical right now because i'm kind of listen i do a lot of investing a lot um i haven't seen tons of consumer stuff i've done a few things here and there um i've

been doing a lot of fintech investing but as we know the fintech uh window seems to be kind of closing. It feels like there was an incredible period of innovation starting with Robinhood, and that seems to sort of be dwindling. So I'm mostly entrepreneur first. I look for interesting people. If we want to call them oddballs, we can. I don't know if that's okay, but I like people who march to their own drumbeat. And so nonconformist, attacking big markets, good science, good product background. Maybe they don't have both at the same time, I really look for people thinking independently because as we know, that is really hard to do today. It is incredibly easy to fall into that conformist trap and you think you're unique and

you think your thing is different, but you realize you're just like everybody else. And so I think the key variable is I want individuals who see the world differently and who are not afraid to dedicate five, 10 years of their life to pursuing that vision. And so, you know, we say this all the time, like, you know, what if we could find, you know, even five of those people a year? Wouldn't that be amazing? It's hard. This is really hard work. And we're doing a huge velocity of deals. And it's, trust me, it's still a rarity. Two questions and I'll let you go. Sure. Thoughts on Bitcoin? I love Bitcoin.

What an answer. Yeah. I love Bitcoin. I love Bitcoin for... I think of Bitcoin as a product. I don't think of it purely as a technology. I love the built-in scarcity. I love the idea of the decentralization and the network impact, how the miners interact with the individuals on the exchanges and all these different parties that are trying to get access to more Bitcoin. And I love, this is going to sound crazy, but what I love about Bitcoin is the type of talent it's attracting. For 20 years, I've seen different waves, the SaaS wave, the consumer wave.

Whenever I start to see really smart young developers paying attention and voting with their time and their money to build products and services, I pay attention. And so though there's a lot of uncertainty about Bitcoin. If you think about how much debt there is in the world today, I think $17 trillion in sovereign debt. I look at Bitcoin as this amazing financial instrument, but underneath it as a product, it's just so fascinating to me. I mean, especially the built-in scarcity is one of the most interesting things I've seen happen in tech in forever. And I've read Satoshi's papers. I spent a lot of time thinking about the space. And all I can say is whoever invented Bitcoin, they were for 50 years in the future. It's amazing to me. So anyone who's built these technology products at scale, when they understand Bitcoin in kind of its totality, most people walk away and just say, it's beautifully designed.

It's… Right? Like the complexity that goes into a network like this between the difficulty adjustment and kind of the early seeding, the founder stepping away. I mean just all these different components is amazing. It's poetry. Yeah. It's not technology. It's poetry.

It's one of the most interesting things that I think has happened. And the reason I'm so optimistic, it's actually really simple. It's completely reductionist. I'm optimistic about Bitcoin because young people are optimistic about Bitcoin. They trust it. That's all that matters. This is all that matters. One of my favorite memes I've seen on the internet recently, I saw one of these stats.

let's say it's $17 trillion. And it basically said the world has $17 trillion worth of debt. And I think I said, who the hell does the world owe? You got to step back and say, wait a minute, how do we all owe each other money? Very complicated set of incentives. Aliens, believer or non-believer? Big believer. Why? I've read a lot about the subject. I want to believe because- Well, he hit us with Desert Oracle. Yeah, I'm a believer in it because I'm fascinated by the propagation of technology from the 1960s forward. So I don't necessarily know whether or not the aliens came with fiber optics and semiconductors and heads-up displays and oxygen devices and all these things.

So there's a few good books. There's one about Roswell. I can't remember the title. I'll have to put that in the show notes. um he's a podcaster man he knows about the show notes yeah yeah okay um but i'm fascinated by aliens more so about the potential of what could be and less so about this conspiratorial side of the whole puzzle um and you know it's also something to captivate your imagination because when you're in technology you want to believe anything is possible yeah and so i've

always been extremely interested and i love ancient aliens the show i mean listen what do you believe uh well i definitely believe um so one of the ancient alien researchers yeah came on the podcast and uh you know not eric von donnegan no bruce fenton uh so he had i don't know 60 70 percent of it like was very science-based hey there was this change at this time and all that kind of stuff he went a little off the rails in my opinion in terms of like you know there was a crash with the spaceship and you know that whole thing but one thing he said to me just seared in my brain which was uh every human has two questions are we here alone and what happens when i die because at some point every single person will ask those two questions in their lifetime and what that leads to

is uh joe's brother actually um alex uh we were talking one day and he says to me probably the most important discovery we as a civilization could make is that there's aliens right or some sort of intelligent life like that's fundamental if you think of anything else like i mean we'd change your cancer do all this kind of change their entire disposition on earth it just it pales anything else compels in comparison to getting 100 scientific confirmation that there is other intelligent out there um and i don't think that people usually position it that way You kind of talk about the conspiracy side of it. A lot of people like to focus on that.

Well, that's also falling into this trap of people can research that and this is – they believe it's knowable and if they're a good enough – Internet sleuth. Yeah, internet sleuth. They're going to be the ones that crack the code. Tom DeLonge, the Blink-182 guy, right? Tom DeLonge, yeah. I mean, he's got, he's putting a lot of time and effort into that. And there's the tick, the, the Tic Tac video that they say is being released because of

some of his research. So, I mean, listen, it's, I find it fascinating, if not an interesting way to go. No mind. So, um, I love it. Um, you get to ask me one question to end this thing. What question you got for me? Okay. Uh, he doesn't know that's coming.

Yeah. I didn't know that was coming. um what do you think is going to be the first practical use case of btc outside of a store of value so i have two answers to this uh the first is what's it's actually public now so i can talk about it um there's a company called zap that uh the founder jack mallers and his team has built the ability for me to send you U.S. dollars across the Lightning Network. So I send you 20 bucks, you receive 20 bucks. We know nothing about Bitcoin. We know nothing about Lightning Network. We know nothing.

Just fiat to fiat. On the lightning rails. What he's built is the cheapest and fastest way for anyone in the world to send money to each other. So that doesn't sound like a big deal to an everyday person. It's a big deal. When you think about Visa, Cash App, Venmo, having the cheapest and fastest way to send money around the world is like the holy grail. Sure. Right? And the way that he does it is very nuanced and very technically kind of savvy, et cetera.

But the reason why I bring that up as one of the answers is because it reminds us that there's a difference between Bitcoin, the asset, or anything like that. It's like lowercase bBitcoin versus Bitcoin, the network, the capital B Bitcoin. Whoever named those two didn't do such a hot job in terms of deciphering the difference. But we always talk about the asset. What can you hold? The store of value, right? And all that kind of stuff. But if you think of the payment rails itself, it's a fundamental leap forward in technology when you have a decentralized payment rail that's actually faster and cheaper than the centralized one.

And it's no different than any other technological evolution in other industries, etc. The only difference here is we can't point to somebody and say, you built it, or you own it. And to me, that use case is almost never spoken about in terms of the rails, but sending fiat currencies, et cetera, across. So I think that's one that will kind of surprise people, and Jack's doing a great job there. The other is actually country-to-country trade transactions. And what I mean by that is- I don't know anything about that. So like it's happened,

I think there's been two of them so far. Argentina, I believe, has been involved in both of them. So Argentina traded, I think it was with Turkey. It was very small, $7,000, $10,000, whatever it was. They bought some pesticides from Turkey. Well, if Turkey's lira is being screwed around with devalued hyperinflation, you know, whatever's going on,

and I, as Argentina, don't trust you as Turkey's currency, well, you also don't trust me because same thing's happened to my currency, we opt into something that we both transparently can see that neither one of us controls that we can audit and know is verifiable. So that's who's been doing all the mining. Well, so that was one transaction.

Another transaction, I believe Argentina and Peru, and it was a little bigger, $100,000 or something. That type of transaction, I think, is actually going to happen faster than the kind of everyday retail user. buying coffee or whatever. And the reason is to buy coffee with Bitcoin today, for you and I, the dollar works great, right? In most places in the world. There are some places where the dollar doesn't work very well or hyperinflation is occurring, et cetera. But when you get into

the geopolitical game theory of like, I don't trust you, you don't trust me, but we need to still conduct trade, that whole world feels really unexplored right now. And you're starting to see like really it's not just argentina right you're seeing russia and china and a lot of these people start talking about getting off the dollar system etc what i don't know is like is it a one big country doesn't everyone follows immediately or is it kind of one of these like slowly you know and then kind of all at once i don't know how it plays out but to me again that's an inflection point in the use of bitcoin where you're now taking it from like speculative medium of exchange to like, dude, there's countries doing this and they're doing it

for something that's not just monetary value. It's actually a security or a confidence type thing. I have one last question. Your last guest was Jeff Lewis, right? Yes. Who has better hair, Farboud Nibi, the CEO of CoinMine, or Jeff Lewis? Man, this is a hard question. We're going to have to do some sort of overlay in the background at some point. We should. I'm going to say that they both are the best in a different way, and here's why. Ready? Oh, my. This is called phoning it in.

No, no, no, no. Here you go. I'm going to make an accusation that I think Jeff Lewis puts product in his hair and Farboud does not. So you get two different answers of product or no product. We're going to have – I really hope that we can impose some sort of visual where we – we'll let the user decide. Come stand in front of the camera just so we can see this ridiculous. Thank you, Pom. Listen, where can people find you on the internet? If you're a – wait, hold on. I've never done this before.

Thank you. If you're a founder, Brian is probably the best investor in terms of literally pre-cap table investing. Thank you. There is nobody that I know who can, one, be more helpful to you in terms of product, two, what I'll just call the game of building a company early, so all the things that aren't around product, and three, the people he knows and the people he knows who respect his opinion. So if you're building something, you should absolutely go talk to him. Now, when you get all of those DMs and emails, you're going to yell at me because you're

not going to want to answer them all. Yeah. But I genuinely mean that. Thank you. That was very kind of you. Best way to follow me is on Twitter. Twitter.com slash Brian Norgard, B-R-I-A-N-N-O-R-G-A-R-D. That's it?

No email? You should give me your cell phone number. Well, I want to enjoy my quarter. All right, man. Thanks so much. We'll do it again. Hey, everyone. Pop here.

If you like this episode of Off The Chain and want to help us take crypto to the top of the Apple, Spotify, and other podcast charts, please do us a favor and rate, review, and subscribe. To review, simply go to the Off The Chain homepage, scroll down until you see the five blank stars. Taking 15 seconds to fill those stars in and leave a quick review goes a long way in helping us take the entire crypto ecosystem to the top of the charts. I appreciate you listening and see you next time on Off The Chain.