The Startup Ideas Podcast - How Building in Space Will Improve Life on Earth with Delian Asparouhov

Episode Date: August 11, 2022

Are you stuck creating on the couch? In today's episode, we explain how one small group can change the world, debate whether these people need to meet in real life, and Delian shares why he feels start-ups must hire based on merit. Hosts Sahil Bloom and Greg Isenberg are joined by guest Delian Asparouhov, principal at the Founders Fund and co-founder of Varda. Delian explains the secret to running a billion-dollar fund while simultaneously launching his first company, shares his take on where the venture world is headed and explains how China is taking control with TikTok.►► Want more community? Learn more here: http://trwih.comSPECIAL THANKS TO OUR SPONSOR►► This episode is brought to you by Wealthfront, a saving and investing app that can help you earn more on your money and build wealth for your future. The Wealthfront Cash Account grows your savings at 1.40% APY, and offers unlimited, fee-free transfers to your external accounts — plus, a ton of other features that help you optimize your cash. So, if your money is earning less anywhere else, now might be a good time to make a move.Wealthfront is offering Where it Happens listeners a free $50 bonus with a $500 initial deposit to a new Cash Account. Go to wealthfront.com/Happens to claim your $50 and start growing your savings.Cash account is offered by Wealthfront Brokerage LLC, Member of FINRA/SIPC. Wealthfront Brokerage is not a bank. We convey funds to partner banks who accept and maintain deposits, provide the interest rate, and provide FDIC insurance. Rate is subject to change. Investment management and advisory services--which are not FDIC insured--are provided by Wealthfront Advisers LLC (“Wealthfront Advisers”), an SEC-registered investment adviser.THIS EPISODEDelian Asparouhov: https://twitter.com/zebulgarSahil Bloom: https://twitter.com/SahilBloomGreg Isenberg: https://twitter.com/gregisenbergProduction & Marketing Team: https://penname.co/FIND US ON SOCIALTwitter: https://twitter.com/_trwihInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/_trwihWeb: https://trwih.comSpotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6aB0v6amo3a8hgTCjlTlvhApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/where-it-happens/id1593424985SHOW NOTES00:00 Sneak Peek01:11 Welcoming Delian02:23 How a Small Group Can Change the World07:54 Hiring Based on Merit10:14 Did ESG Create Change?13:40 TikTok Data Rights17:36 You Can’t Change the World from Your Couch21:55 Greg's Unique Perspective On Working Hard and a 10-Year Bet28:33 What is Varda and its Origin Story?37:31 Separating Design (+) Manufacturing = Innovation42:51 How to Become a Leader and Expert in Space45:34 The Secret to Founding a Start-Up and Running a Fund50:48 Delian’s Origin Story and His Prediction for the Future56:04 Thanks for Listening

And, you know, for me at the time I was in high school, and I think it sort of sparked this fascination with Woe, you know, at the time I was already, you know, very obsessed with Elon with SpaceX tracking every single rocket launch, we started to realize that, okay, you know, a part of this, you know, sort of painting of this, you know, multi-planetary, you know, future for humanity also requires, you know, industrialization and, you know, sort of economic, you know, incentives. If you think about, you know, what is life like, you know, even on the earliest days of a, you know, cis lunar base or a lunar base or, you know, It's the equivalent of basically like living on an oil rig. You're on a piece of industrial equipment that's basically there to help you, you know, survive. But even worse so than an oil rig, you're not only isolated out in the Gulf of Mexico, but there's also no water, no sky, no nothing. However, there are a set of people that choose to live their lives of like two weeks at a time on, you know, these industrial outposts in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico. But part of the reason why is because, like, they get, you know, paid a lot of, you know,

money to do so. There's very strong economic incentive. It's not that they're, you know, paying to do it for tourist reasons. You know, you get pretty bored of sitting on an oil rig even after, you know, a couple days. And, you know, space is even worse given that, you know, you got a shit in zero G. And that's not particularly fun. First off, Delian, thank you for taking the time to join us. Man, we've been wanting to do this for a while.

I feel like we originally started DMing the three of us back in December. I think Greg and I were going to be down there for Ard Basel and we just didn't quite overlap to get it done for a variety of reasons. But excited to now have you on. And thanks for taking the time. Yeah, man, of course. You know, bummed that we didn't get to do that, like, cool couch setup that you had for Art Basel, I think was cool.

Although everyone got COVID from that. So you avoided it. You narrowly avoided. Actually, funny, funny story. Literally everyone got COVID from that except me. And, you know, it was like Greg had COVID. I sat there with him for multiple days. A bunch of our guests had it.

I mean, Art Basel was basically just like a petri dish of COVID. The same way, I think NFT week in New York was the same thing this past week. So avoiding crypto events actually feels like now your way to avoid getting COVID. Yeah, I know. At this point, living in Miami, where there's been no masks for, like, you know, basically two years, I, uh, you know, technically I don't think I've, like, you know, tested positive for COVID, Wiki, you know, face, but yeah, there's definitely, I must have had a multitude of times at this point. If you're keeping cash anywhere that isn't paying you a high interest rate, listen up. Wealthfront is a saving and investing app that can help you

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Earn 2% on your cash today. Visit Wealthfront.com slash happens to get started. Again, that's Wealthfront.com slash happens. This no-brainer good news has been a paid endorsement from Wealthfront. I talked about this. I think it was like a month ago, Greg. I released that episode with Josh Wolf, who I know you know. He's an investor actually as well in Barta.

I did an episode with him where you were talking about building in the world of Adams and we were talking about the importance of that, you know, real. It's like hand-to-hand combat, right? When you're building real things, you actually have to be using your hands. And you can't do that in the cloud and remotely. And so I think it's like, you know, for Tesla, for SpaceX, for the boring company, like all of these things that Elon is working on, I totally get it. and the perspective of like needing to be back in person and wanting people when you're building

something world changing to be there in the trenches with one another because that's where a lot of the learning happens. Yeah, I forget where this quote is from, but you know, it's something along lines of like, you know, a small group of highly motivated people all working tightly together can, you know, effectively, you know, change the world or in some ways, you know, a lot of, you know, Peter's chapters in zero to one talking about how, you know, the only successful startups, you know, look a lot like cults. To me, it's just insane that we ever pulled away from that reality that there was some belief that, you know, one could build a massively impactful startup where everybody was, like, you know, sitting in their like, you know, PJs on opposite sides of the world from one

another, you know, barely even on, you know, the same time zones. And I think, like, people got ever even more so, you know, convinced with that as there started to be a handful of startups that were started during COVID, there were hyper remote that had insane, insane growth trajectories. Most of those have completely flatlined, if not, you know, totally died, but that were like, you know, heralded as the, you know, pinnacle of, you know, remote work. And so to me, all of this is just like, it's a reversion to like the mean and reality, which is that it's almost impossible and especially so in the early stages. I'll always caveat that, of course, any successful tech company, even pre-COVID, was effectively hybrid the moment that you got to above, call it like,

200 people. But at that point, you're like, you know, post product market fit and like, you know, true scale. Obviously, like, you know, Yelps, you know, product engineering team is in San Francisco, and, you know, their sales team was, you know, in, you know, Phoenix. And that was because everything from, you know, cost of living to the type of talent that they wanted to get. It's obviously the moment that you're going to a multiple office. format, you're by default in some ways, you know, sort of hybrid remote, whatever you want to call it. I think at that point maybe you're optimizing on, you know, per team basis, what exactly they would like to do. But you're by default, obviously utilizing, you know, Zoom calls, phone calls,

video calls, et cetera, to do so. But in the earliest days where you're like really trying to, like, forge product market fit and we, you know, I found it's definitely believe that it's not something that is like, it be tested into or lean startup into, you truly have to, you know, forge it and believe in funding, you know, companies that think about product market fit more, like, you know, developing a Hollywood movie than, you know, running a scientific experiment. I, you know, when you think about a Hollywood movie, you think about writing the script, and then once you got the script, you think about who are the main actors that fit each perfect role, right? And you want, when you're, you know, doing, you know, top gun, you definitely

want like Tom Cruise in like the, you know, pilot seat. You don't want Tom Hanks, you know, in the pilot seat. You know, you want, you know, the appropriate actors. It would be a ridiculous movie with Tom Hanks, you know, in the pilot seat. He's not meant to be, you know, you know, maverick. And so we tend to think that, you know, startups look a lot more like that, where there is a script that is written ahead of time. You think about who are the ideal profiles for each one. You put them all together. You lock yourselves in a room for six, 12 months, forge product market fit and emerge with basically you're a fully produced, you know, Hollywood movie. You might write some trailers and things like that to get people excited about it,

but you're definitely not AB testing it, you know, along the way. And I think that process is just like effectively impossible. So I would actually argue that it's not just like these, you know, Adams-based companies that require in person. I think if you take any industry, any field and you take two different startups. Hell, even if you're working on something like deal where it's like, you know, remote payroll, I would even then argue if you had two different companies that were working on remote payroll and one of them was in person, one of them was remote, the in person one of them was remote one of the in person. It's so much easier to create like a like, you know, sales culture that is, you know, much more

incentivized and the highly motivated when it's in person. That was actually the original tweet that Elon liked. I basically had a board meeting that day where, you know, one of our portfolio companies like moved their entire, you know, at the time, it's not massive, so it's not perfect data point. but like eight person sales to you moved it in person, quota across the board basically went up 4X. And these are people that were like already highly effective. Like they were meeting like really aggressive quotas.

And even then, it was 4X across the board. And so the moment the founder today was like, holy shit, I thought I had product market fit. I have insane product market fit. Like I have people that are doing like two mil, three mil of ARR a year as individual sales reps before they were doing 500, 600K, which is again, not bad in the grand scheme with things. But again, you 4X that and all of a sudden it's like a game changer for the business.

And so yeah, I just, I think like, the world went into this like mass psychosis, someone induced by like, you know, our institutions, you know, breaking down and thinking that everybody had to be like, you know, completely isolated. I did not subscribe to that philosophy. I lasted about a month and a half, you know, in isolation. And I was like, fuck this. I was not built to like sit at home and like, you know, work on a computer all day. So I've been back in an office since May 1st of 2020.

And I've been on a flight on average every basically like four or five days since like August 1st, 2020. And, yeah, I'd like to think that my last two years were amongst the most productive years that I've ever had in my career. And I think a lot of that was due to the fact that I had such a differentiated view on work where I was actively, you know, in person. Yeah, there was a lot of alpha. Yeah, there was a lot of alpha because the baseline, I mean, the baseline went to something. I thought about it was off the way.

The baseline went to effectively zero. You know, these like, you know, millennials that, you know, got accustomed to being, you know, totally coddled and they got even more coddled. And even these, like, Gen Z years growing up that have never even, like, really experienced a real real workplace. They've only ever experienced like this, like, you know, crazy bull market, you know, sitting in like their, you know, casino, you know, on their, you know, mobile phones and are now going out of the real world and suddenly realizing, holy shit, it might be, like, hard to find a job and, like, people aren't just going to, like, you know, pay me to, like, you know, dick around all day. So, anyways, I think there's, you know, going to continue to be this splash of cold water of reality

that people have to face for the coming year. One of the, one of the things you said in your tweet was hiring, hiring based on merit. Can you expand a little bit about what you mean by that? Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, maybe the most, like, practical, you know, legal example is that California did try to institute a law that required companies to discriminate on the basis of race for their board members before, you know, going public. That law was ultimately, you know, stricken down and it shows in some ways that like when people try to, you know, take these things to extremes where you're filtering candidates off of the basis of, you know, things that have

nothing to do with their ability to do the end job, that even California, the most woke, progressive, you know, government in the world, even they are striking it down. Yeah, it's a challenging. I mean, that's obviously a controversial thing right now, you know, and always, just as you think about, like, you know, opportunity playing field's not being even. And so I understand why that becomes a hot button thing for people to talk about because, you know, the reality is if opportunity were equal and if everyone had an even kind of playing field coming into the game, then no one would have an issue with anyone saying that ever, because that would be the reality. But that's not the job of startups. The job of startups is not to even the playing field. That's the job of like educational institutions,

government, things that are much further in the top of funnel. Startups are like the most desperate, barely alive, default dead, requiring like, you know, extreme. And again, this is where I think we got into this like coddled world where there was infinite capital. And all of a sudden you could pretend like you were a fang company when you did not have the monopoly or the moat or they like insane revenues of fang

company. Sure. If like Netflix and Google want to invest into DEI offices, they can afford to. They're effectively, you know, almost state institutions at this point. But again, these points were specifically about early stage startups where you just can't afford to you. Like you do not have the resources of a state institution.

Yeah. And on the flip side, again, you can say that there's some level of like moral obligation that like large-scale institutions, you know, have on, you know, continuing to level the playing field. But I believe that like the best way of enacting that is through our republic democracy and like, you know, doing that via votes and policy and trying to, you know, in some ways. Also if you're, you know, a hyper-rich billionaire, you can just that via philanthropy if you got, you know, particular unique views of the world. But expecting that like, you know, startups are going to that, you know, catalysts have changed for that. It's just in some ways, you know, doing, I think your, you know, startup to death. You have to just do what allows you to survive the best,

you know, each following day. There is a fair, there is a fair amount of evidence that some of these things, like ESG in particular, I see a ton of now that, like, effectively people just BS it and use it as like, you know, I mean, you've seen it now in like private capital markets, like the private equity world. Every private equity funds LPs, all of a sudden we're like, what are you doing on ESG? And the reality was like, people. P.E funds didn't give two shits about ESG, but all of a sudden they started having to report out on it. And so then there was all these initiatives and there were teams and people put in place. And like, nothing actually changed. It just became a reporting line that like you were going to have to go and talk about and do to make your LPs happy so that they could make, you know, their institutions happy.

But like, did it actually create change? Unclear to me. And maybe time will tell. But like, you see it now at the at the broader scale. And does it disrupt free market economies and how they operate too? Sorry, dumb question. What is ESG? Environmental, social, and governance. It's like, you know, this whole kind of world of like, Yeah, you have to, you know, it's not just about making profits. It's also about doing good by those things. And this is where it's like, I just tend to believe you should be studying and optimizing for like, you know, the net outcomes, which is like in the world of DEI, absolutely for our portfolio companies. You don't necessarily all just want like the exact same, you know, professional background in all the co-founders, right?

of anything you look at in a lot of our top portfolio companies, they're marrying co-founders with wildly, you know, different backgrounds. And so I 100% agree with like, yes, you want to be, you know, it's like optimizing for whatever the core risks or the company, finding the person with the best possible background. And typically companies have more than one risk. And so the backgrounds for the ideal person look different, i.e. diverse, sure, for those different things. But again, you should be optimizing for just like what is best for that, you know, very particular role. And again, ESG to be the exact same thing where, you know, I wouldn't be surprised if the, you know, sort of, you know, my long-term view on this is actually the person that is likely going to

contribute the most to climate change is going to look like a heavily capitalist, like, venture-backed private, you know, startup, not through some, you know, large, you know, global, you know, public policy, especially when you have things like, you know, the 19th government, you know, forcing people to, you know, shut down nuclear power plants while, you know, supporting, you know, slave labor in, you know, China to build, you know, solar panels that get shipped out that both, like, you know, negate some of our national security priorities and obviously violates human rights, but, you know, allows for some California liberals to sort of like, you know, feel like they scratch the right itch.

Or then obviously in the most, you know, recent, you know, a few months, obviously Germany has gotten totally hammered where they went from like shutting down all their nuclear power plants to becoming, you know, dependent on a, you know, genocidal or maybe not genocidal, but, you know, territorial dictator, you know, that is, you know, invading basically just to the, you know, east of them to now spinning up coal plants where the majority of the coal is entirely, you know, Russian sourced. And so because you're seeing the ruble actually gain against the U.S. dollar over the past few months is they've basically been able to, you know, strangle hold, you know, Europe with their, you know, sort of energy supply. And so, you know, to me, I definitely agree with, you know, Peter gave this, you know, Bitcoin week, you know, talk in, you know, you know, talk. And his one of the liner, you know, at the beginning of talk is just like, anytime you see ESG just think equals CCP. Because most of the time, you know, the groups that are, you know, doing this, you know, ESG work in the United States are largely, you know, Chinese and Russian funded. And if you look at where a lot of the funding goes, for those ESG groups, at largely is getting funneled into these, you know,

dictatorial regimes that violate, you know, human rights and, you know, have no interest in the top, you know, priorities in the welfare of the United States or its citizens. I am absolutely blown away, by the way, in terms of like just general cognitive dissonance of governments and of policymakers, the TikTok one, and I've seen you or Keith, you know, talk about this and, and I've certainly been tweeting about it more recently is baffling to me. The fact that the FTC, the Justice Department, is effectively put a like moratorium on any big U.S. tech company doing M&A. They'll basically block you or say it's anti-tri—you know, say it's anti-monopolistic, whatever. Like, they'll try to shut it down.

But we're basically just allowing, you know, a Chinese effectively state-owned company in TikTok to own the data of tens, you know, eventually hundreds of millions of Americans is the most absurd, underreported, of our decade, I would say. The weirdest thing is, like, we wouldn't even be the innovators by implementing this policy, right? Like, India clearly showed that you can just ban all the Chinese apps off your app store. Trump tried to. And, like, India seems to be doing just fucking fine. Like, you know, it's not like their country's falling apart because they don't have,

you know, TikTok. And especially now with like the recent, like, you know, bike dance, you know, reports of them, you know, clearly being able to, you know, not being able to, you know, prevent data from being sent to China. It's also continuously expanding. someone, I think it was like Rex Woodbury maybe, who's at, I think he said index, tweeted like a image from, from Bloomberg that was showing the number of hours spent per month on the different social apps and how like TikTok is now at 29 hours per month

from the average US user. And that's like absolutely absurd spending that many hours. Yeah, if you were Xi Jinping and you were thinking, you know, in 2010, okay, how do I cripple, you know, the United States and insured its demise? You know, one, you know, make sure that we produce enough opioids and, you know, deliver them at very low-cost prices and bribe people in the United States to prescribe them to people that absolutely don't need them in order to get them addicted to them. So you basically decimate the middle of the United States. You know, to send my, you know, top, you know, STEM graduates to the United States to study, put them in the best technology companies. And then, you know, have them steal all the trade secrets and then come back, you know, to China. And if they don't do that, then threaten their, you know, to basically decapitate their families in China if they don't. So either way, it doesn't matter. how patriotic, you know, the Chinese national is. They're going to have to do what they need to do to protect their families. And then, you know, third, you know, cripple the next generation, you know,

by giving all of them, you know, depression and social anxiety disorders and convince them that, like, they shouldn't be having kids because, you know, the world order is, you know, failing and, you know, climate change is here to end us all. It's a pretty effective strategy, right? If you just and all those things are just like things that are true that, you know, China has done. And yet, you know, somehow, you know, everybody thinks that this is like, you know, oh, you know, by chance, not a coordinated strategy by Xi Jinping, i.e., you know, the leader of a regime that, you know, plans their plans over the course of, you know, 10, 20, you know, 50 years. So two things. First off, do you like Atlas Shrugged? Are you an Atlas Shrugged fan?

Yeah. Do I like breathing? Well, if anyone hasn't read Atlas Shrug, I actually think it's just you get like, you tweet this out and people I'm sure will freak out about it. But like, it's actually a book that just everyone should read, even if it's just to have a negative perspective on it, it's a book that's worth reading because it is like, you know, it was written however long ago, you know, like decades and decades ago, 1950s or 40s, something like that. But like how relevant and applicable it feels for our modern era is absurd. Like the same debates that it hits on in a story and with allegory are what we're talking about today. I mean, it's truly remarkable. It was actually that and

Fountainhead, which is Ayn Rand's other book, were the two books that, Mark Cuban recommended to me the first time I, like, had DM'd back and forth of them. I was like, if you could recommend one book, it was like, that was what he said. So, interesting. But anyway, the other point I wanted to just like re-raise was with respect to this whole thing of like working in real life. My perception of in real life versus remote work is that what basically happens with remote work is that work becomes transactional. you don't have the like idea sex for lack of a better way to put it that occurs in real life where like people are there you're in the trenches random things get said there's like

serendipitous uh contact that happens over a coffee and you're chatting about some random shit and it leads to some new spark of innovation or some idea that doesn't happen what happens is you go like here's task a i work on it and then i complete it i ship it off here's task b do it whatever and you know a combination of that and people don't work as hard like one of the great things that people love, at least the young people I talk to that they love and are obsessed with remote work and never want to go back. The reason is because they have so much more flexibility in their lives. They go to the gym at 2 p.m. for whatever bar class they love or yoga or whatever it is. And that's actually great. Like I get it. And if you want to do that and that's the lifestyle

you love, I totally appreciate that and you should do that. And if that makes you happy, I think it's great. But I don't think that lifestyle is for people who want to change the world with like extraordinary innovations. I just, I personally don't think it's possible to create like unbelievable world changing innovation without working extremely difficult, extremely hard and long hours. I just don't think it's possible. And I think it's like Sam Altman wrote this in one of his posts way back in the day and basically said, you can get 90% of the way there by either working hard or smart. But to get the 100% you have to do both. You have to work smart and hard. And I, that like really always clicked with me and resonated. And so that's, I mean, just for me, like, that's how I've always been thinking about it.

Yeah, but to be clear, I think there's a very large subset of the world that remote work is extremely beneficial for, right? You know, there are people that, you know, maybe didn't have access to any, you know, real financial opportunities, you know, in the Midwest that, you know, need to be, you know, staying there geographically for familial or whatever, you know, personal reasons that all of a sudden can now work at high growth technology companies and actually make a much more reasonable salary than any of their local jobs. And so I think there's, like, democratization of opportunity, especially there are clearly, like, like I see jobs at a series D plus company where you're just like a front engine engineer that is

implementing, you know, this fact. There's not like, you know, quote unquote creativity in the role. You're truly just like a line worker. Absolutely. I think that stuff, you know, makes a ton of sense to be, you know, an IC worker. And I think it's, you know, the improvement of the tools for that type of work over the course of COVID has been phenomenal, right? Doing that, you know, pre-2020 was, you know, possible, but honestly more of a pain in the ass. Now there's a phenomenal suite of tools, everything from the IBEs to the Zoom calls, et cetera. But if you study in human history, when does that sort of game-changing impact happen? You know, as a handful of my favorite examples, probably, you know, Princeton in the 1930s

with physics, you know, Xerox Park and, you know, Bell Labs in the world of computer science and computers. All these things, you know, were, you know, physically co-located, highly multidisciplinary, top-tier people that were working incredibly hard and incredibly smart. And almost all of the best innovations within those various groups came from the cross-pollination and in particular unexpected cross-pollination from two separate and completely disparate fields that by default probably would not have interacted with one other, if not for that sort of spontaneous in-person, you know, gathering.

And there's types of organic connections just don't possibly happen if you're entirely remote, right? You can try to do these types of like Zoom, happy hours, et cetera, et cetera, but it's just never quite the same as the camaraderie that you can build. And having that camaraderie in an early stage startup is what leads to those, again, similarly in-house game-changing innovations that happen when product meets with some, you know, customer support representative or meets with somebody in BD that they typically wouldn't necessarily talk to and they hear some, you know, quip about like, you know,

oh, X, Y or Z thing that, you know, happened. And, you know, all of a sudden ends up being, you know, sort of the breakthrough and game changing, you know, sort of technology that the company ends up developing. And so I think it's like really, you know, effectively impossible, you know, to simulate that. So are there some companies and some things that can be built remote? Yeah, sure. Okay. If there's nothing to innovate and it's pure execution and, you know, there's, you know, no creativity required. Sure, like, you know, go build the company or go do that job remotely. But obviously there's very, very few things that are, you know, sort of game changing in the world that don't require, you know, some sort of creativity, spontaneity. And in particular, cross-pollination amongst multiple fields.

Yeah, I got to give my perspective, my perspective on this, because I think it's very different than both of your perspectives. Hit it. So on the working hard bit, I just come from a completely different school of thought on working hard. And, like, Delian, when you were talking about being on a plane every four to five days, like my, inside I was crying, you know? Like, I just got off a plane. Like, I go on a plane once every two months and I have to, like, mentally prepare for, like,

you know, getting on the plane and the whole thing about it. I think... Greg, do you play video games at all? Of course. Do you play League of Legends? I do play a little League of Legends. How often do you think Faker plays League of Legends

and how many hours a day do you think Faker plays? Not sure. He has basically played 12 hours a day, of League of Legends for the past seven years in a row. And is why he's like the world's almost highly paid video game player and the most successful. Yeah, I think, I just think it's goals. If you want to be an Olympian, I understand that you're, you know, you're competing. It's, you know, we've talked about this style.

It's like we're, you know, it's a, if you're a runner and it's a 50 meter dash or whatever, you're trying to, you know, it's one millisecond that you're competing globally against the world. But I think, like, to say that, um, that there's, you know, for me, I think there's a ton of businesses that could be created that do require creativity. I know you, you know, you might, you might not think that it requires creativity, but do, it does require creativity that a group of people can come together, create, create remote, have some IRL experiences. Like, like, for example, we just did two off sites or on sites, I should say, you know, we're about 40 or 40 or 50 people. We did one in Bali and one in Montreal. all. We had, you know, everyone come together working for a week. We recently had a Matt Mullenweg on the show. Obviously, you know, he started WordPress remotely. And he's, he's like, you know, the grandmaster of building remote and how you can build remote. And I think there's, you know, there's definitely instances, like maybe if you're trying to cure cancer or you're trying to send people to space that you need to be in a room. But I still think that there's a

ton of potentially venture backable businesses that could start remote and then potentially move into keep actually potentially stay remote or eventually have like okay we've got a lot of people in New York we've got a lot of people in Miami let's go build offices it just seems like it's it's I just like was going to say it just seems like it's a like you're almost in violent agreement here that it's just like what's the goal and like what are we trying to do I completely agree with you Greg, like I think there are, and honestly for the vast majority of people, I actually completely agree with your perspective. Like, I don't think most people want to work the way that Delian is working or travel that much. I would guess 99% of people don't want to do that. I would guess like

the vast majority of people want to and would be perfectly happy building like a seven figure a year business that doesn't require them to travel and they can spend time with their family and they can, you know, coach their kids little league team, like all of those things. And I don't know where I fall. I might fall into that camp actually. But what I think what Delian is arguing, and what I sort of agree with is like, that's great. But if you want to be that 0.01% and you want to create that one thing, like you do want to cure cancer or you want to build factories in space, which we're going to talk about, or you want, you know, like you want to do some, one of those things that is potentially world changing, which has its own set of pains of, you know,

the work and the effort and the energy and the depression, like all the things that might be required to get there, then working hard and putting in that energy and effort is like a prerequisite, that it's effectively impossible to do, you know, to have both. And like I sort of think you guys are agreeing and it's like agreeing to disagree around, you know, whether there's alignment around that. Yeah, I think, you know, Greg, you said, you know, it's possible to build venture back, you know, companies. I do agree with that, again, depending on your definition of venture back. If it's like possible to generate, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars of returns doing that, absolutely. I think it is incredibly, incredibly difficult to be generating billions and billions of

returns, you know, doing that. And fundamentally, working at a fund that, you know, effectively, just to return the fund requires returning $1.6 billion requires that you think in a very different way than somebody that's running even a $200 million, you know, dollar fund in that, you know, we basically need to be thinking about, you know, it's very simple math. And we return to $1.6 billion fund, we got to own 10% of a $16 billion company right now, especially with this, you know, current recessionary environment. There's not that many companies that make it to being, you know, $16 billion companies over the course of seven years, it truly is only that 0.001%. And so, sure, as an angel investor, we're like, you know, you're not necessarily carrying it out

about absolute returns. You might just be optimizing for IRR on, you know, sort of small dollar amounts. For sure, there's definitely a return to be had there. But as somebody who ultimately needs to return, you know, raw dollar amounts in the order of billions, the only way to do that is by, you know, setting, you know, sort of, you know, criteria around optimizing for that 0.01%. I also think, like, that's, you know, that's your, that's your, that's your, that's your, that's, That's the Founders Fund and that's your perspective. And I think, you know, there's going to be, you might be right and I might be wrong. And I think I want to put a bet on it.

I would love it. You know that like the famous, you know that famous? I think it was like Warren Buffett. Like there was a bet of like would a basket of, it was Buffett and someone. And it was like, would a basket of hedge funds outperformed that S&P 500? And Buffett said no. And whoever the person was, maybe it was like Ted Seinfeld. said yes, and they made like a 10-year bet. I would love to do a similar bet of a basket of

in real life startups today and a basket of remote startups today and 10 years in the future who returned more for their investors. And you could like take a little index. It would actually kind of be fun to create a little index of like in real life versus, you know, not, versus remote and track them over time and see who delivers a stronger return. Especially if you compare them like if they're like the same industry. Yeah, totally. Totally. You'd need to figure out the right way to index it, but it could be a kind of cool bet to set up publicly because there'd be some pretty big proponents on both sides of it actually right now. I'm going to think about that a little bit and I'm going to circle back to it. I think that's a good pausing point in transition to something I alluded to, which is what you're working on in your other full-time job, Billion, in Varda space. So maybe just set the stage for us a little bit around like what was the insight that led to this in the first place. reason I asked, by the way, about whether you knew Elon is because it struck me that, like,

a lot of the principal thesis around Varda is, like, what SpaceX has kind of unlocked via the reusable rockets. And so I would love to just hear a little bit more about kind of what VARTA is, the insight that, you know, led to its creation and how you're thinking about the future there. If you're keeping cash anywhere that isn't paying you a high interest rate, listen up. Wealthfront is a saving and investing app that can help you earn more on your money and build wealth for your future. The wealthfront cash account gives everyone a 2% APY interest rate, which is 20x what traditional banks pay today. So if you kept $10,000 in a wealth front cash account for a year, you'd be on pace to earn an extra $200 a year instead of like $10. That means while

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There's everything from, like, driving a lunar rover on the moon to manufacturing things in space, trying to do astrid mining. And there's a whole set of, you know, companies that started around that time to try and, you know, tackle, you know, some of those, you know, problems made in space, planetary resources, moon express, you know, a few. few others. And, you know, for me at the time, I was in high school, and I think it sort of sparked this fascination with, whoa, you know, at the time I was already, you know, very obsessed with Elon with SpaceX, tracking every single rocket launch, but started to realize that, okay, you know, a part of this, you know, sort of painting of this, you know, multi-planetary, you know, future for humanity also requires, you know, industrialization and, you know, sort of economic, you know, incentives. If you think about, you know, what is life like,

you know, even on the earliest days of a, you know, cis lunar base or a lunar base or, you know, Mars base or orbital Mars outposts. It's the equivalent of basically like, you know, living on an oil rig. You're on a piece of industrial equipment that's basically there to help you, you know, survive. But even worse so than an oil rig, you're not only isolated out in the Gulf of Mexico, but there's also no water, no sky, no nothing. However, there are a set of people that choose to live their lives of like two weeks at a time on, you know, these industrial outposts in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico. But part of the reason why is because, like, they get, you know, paid a lot of, you know, money to do so. There's very strong economic

incentive. It's not that they're, you know, paying to do it for tourist reasons. You know, you get pretty bored of sitting on an oil rig even after a couple of days. And, you know, space is even worse, given that, you know, you got to, you know, shit in zero G. And that's not particularly fun. And so, you know, I started to become obsessed with this idea of like, how do you start to introduce these sort of economic incentives in this industrialization in space? And, you know, convinced myself and still believe that there's this, you know, the fastest path to a multi-planetary future isn't necessarily just building larger and larger, you know, infrastructure for, you know, launch. But it's also building larger and larger economic incentives.

for humans to actually be in space. And so, you know, spent the following, you know, seven, eight years tracking how those companies were doing. I think at the end of the day, most of them basically just got founded like seven to eight years too early, you know, as much as you do want to have these economic incentives, their fundamental union economics were based off of the cost of launch. And in 2011, the cost of launch was prohibitive. But then, yeah, as you alluded to, you know, Elon and SpaceX, you know, went from, you

know, taking it to be prohibitive to making it, you know, quite attractive to in the future, you know, insanely attractive, you know, union economics as they, you know, shift from the early days of Falcon 9 to Falcon 9 being highly, you know, reusable. There's now been, you know, Falcon 9 cores that have flown and, you know, landed 13 times to obviously eventually, you know, Starship, you know, making it, you know, extremely attractive. And so I've been thinking about this for a long time. And then, you know, in sort of early 2020, I was talking with a bunch of, you know, I went to MIT and a lot of my old fraternity brothers ended up working at SpaceX on Falcon 9,

on Starship, et cetera. I was talking with them about the potential of both those projects. And it felt very clear. I was like, it feels like the time has come. You know, these trends have hit, these things that, you know, you know, have been talked about for years and years have finally hit. Now is the time to go aggressively pursue this. And so it originally started off as sort of an investment thesis, trying to see, okay,

you know, sort of which of these industrial use cases make the most sense, can I find somebody an invest in? The obvious answer to me, and I think it still has retained, you know, entirely obvious over the past two and a half years is that of these various industrial use cases called lunar ice mining, asteroid mining, anything that one could do, these sort of manufacturing, high-quality materials very close to Earth in low-earth orbit and then bring those materials back down is just the sort of most viable near-term one in some ways because it is the most like physically you know near near term you don't have to go you know too far you know off earth or too far away from

earth in order to pursue this um there's probably like 20 or 30 different groups that have been you know working on this over the past few decades but all of them are these just like hyper-academic groups that grew up around NASA the ISS research grants etc they had no conception for just like what would it be like to take this manufacturing and really like scale it up and what does it mean to actually bring not just like a research paper to market, but actually bring a material to market for a commercial customer. It's actually put the idea on the shelf, you know, when COVID hit in like March 2020 after meeting with a bunch of these various groups. And then, you know, as I mentioned, I kind of lost my mind after a month and a half or so of sitting

bored, you know, in quarantine and decided maybe the right answer was to, you know, go and actually, you know, start this damn thing myself and do it the right way. And the right way required, you know, two things. The first was you needed to really disentangle yourself with up until now, all manufacturing has always been done on the ISAS, which is like a great, research station, but fundamentally is not the place to scale up a commercial supply chain, right? You have multinational, you know, geopolitical issues with operating up there, right? You still split the, you know, station with Russia. The ability to navigate near to it is, you know, highly, you know, limited, even that you have

humans on board, the materials and the processes that you can do on board, given that there are humans on board are highly limited, right? As an example in the world of, you know, life sciences, you're not allowed to bring organic solvents on board. So anything that has carbon effectively in it in a solvent is not allowed to go on board on the ISS. As you can imagine, given that most of life is carbon, it's really difficult to do the appropriate experimentation you'd like to with that type of limitation.

So in order to really scale us up, you have to take that type of manufacturing and do it off of the ISS. So then I started to think through, okay, like, so what is the difficult part of doing it off the ISS? Taking that sort of Hollywood, you know, movie, you know, sort of analogy of, you know, what are the core risks of the business? Well, in order to go off the ISS, one, you got to get up there. Okay.

Well, thankfully, you know, Mr. Elon, Mr. Peter Back, you know, Mr. Tim Ellis, et cetera, are all solving that problem, mostly for me. Is it perfectly commoditized? No, it's not quite AWS, but at the great thing of things, it's way closer to AWS than it is to like running my own data center, right? You know, at this point, you can basically book a rocket launch, you know, online. And you talk to like a 25-year-old. You don't talk to like when shot well to COO.

You know, it's actually relatively limited like negotiations back and forth. So rocket launch is pretty easy. Once you're up there, you've got to be able to do the manufacturing. But that's remarkable, by the way. Like, just that is totally mind-blowing to think about, you know, relative to like five, ten years ago. Agreed. I mean, hell, even three years ago, right? Like, this is the craziest thing for me is, like, you know, I basically started focusing and thinking about aerospace, you know, basically over the course of my venture career, which was, I guess, like, five years ago. And yeah, you know, it went from like, again, you could book a SpaceX rocket launch five years ago, but it was like a massive, like, you know, enterprise negotiation, et cetera. Like, maybe you can get onto some right share type thing, but it was very much the early days that, like, incredibly difficult. And again, it was because, like, they were launching like, five times, seven times, eight times a year. Right now in 2022, they're still on track for basically launching once a week. It's just like a very different, like when the liquidity in the marketplace is, such that there's a launch every week.

You know, if you slip your hardware by a week, that's fine. You kind of get bumped to the next one, right? It's just so much easier on both sides of the marketplace where there's so many more people launching and there's so many more, you know, launch providers and they're all launching more frequently. And so part one, getting up to space from a space manufacturing, relatively commoditized. Part two, okay, how do I do the manufacturing in space? Okay, well, that part, you know, it's been done on the ISAS, but you do it at a larger scale.

It's going to be a little bit more difficult. But honestly, you can take a mix of it. like SpaceX engineers and a couple of those microgravity material scientists that have done on the ISS. So recruited a handful of those on the founding team. And then the third part, which is like sometimes, you know, in some ways, the most counterintuitive wouldn't I describe it to people. One of the most difficult parts of once you're done with them manufacturing is you got to bring those materials back to Earth, right? You know, in some ways, far as trying to tackle venture-scale markets. We're not manufacturing things up there to leave them up there for buyers in space,

because there's not that many buyers in space. There's very few. Most of the buyers for all of, you know, economic capitalism, we're down here on Earth. So we've got to bring materials back down here to Earth. bringing those materials back down and that reentry process is actually, you know, in some ways, just as complex is effectively the rocket launch process. And that's not something where there's any commercial off-the-shelf provider, right? There's nobody that I can go and call up and say, hey, I'm going to use your reentry vehicle. SpaceX has built some reentry vehicles, but they've only built basically four of them, the, you know, dragon. They're not planning on mass manufacturing them, and they're really optimized for the ISS, which makes them insanely inspects of vehicles.

And so it's the equivalent of basically just being on the ISAS. And so the sort of, you know, other, you know, core risk of the company was how do we actually build our own hidden house reentry vehicle? Is that even possible? And so that's where I ended up basically, you know, recruiting my co-founder from. You worked on the, you know, sort of crew and cargo dragon project at SpaceX. And, you know, now, you know, VARTA is effectively a 60-person team. And I'd say, you know, significant chunk of the sort of, like, call it, you know, our leadership executive team came from relatively senior positions all within the crew and the cargo dragon project in order to be able to build basically the same equivalent vehicle. In some ways, optimized for a very different use case, right? Bring down materials,

humans, much cheaper, meant to be mass manufacturer. So that was sort of the spark of the, let's say, idea and how I then, you know, put together, you know, sort of the founding team, you know, August, you know, 2020. You know, pause there for a second. Yeah. You're about to ask me a question. Yeah, no, I mean, so the, the correlate, I always think of like analogs with these, you know, new and fascinating business models that helped me kind of like frame them up in the context of something I already understand. And the one that kept coming up to me as you were talking was like Morris Chang with TSM, Taiwan Semiconductor manufacturing company for people that don't know it. And the reason I say that, it seems like, you know, very different is like his whole innovation

and what he did was in separating design from the like manufacturing of semiconductors. And so by creating a manufacturing only apparatus, all of a sudden, all these designers who were like brilliant chip designers and had all these innovative ideas around design were unlocked because they didn't need to raise the $50 billion required to go. create a fabrication facility. And so what happened was amazing innovation was sparked over the coming decades and now, you know, 50 plus years, you know, since, or sorry, 40 years, since something like that was created because he unlocked it with, you know, creating something like that. And I think about that with what you're building in the sense that like all of a sudden by creating something

like this, there are going to be all these new innovations that are sparked of people thinking like, okay, now it's actually economically viable to your point. There's an economic incentive. It's economically viable to go do, you know, kind of near-earth manufacturing in order to, you know, go create whatever it is, medical innovations or, you know, industrial innovations, et cetera, because you're creating the apparatus for them to actually execute against it. Yeah, in some ways, if you think about it before, you know, the design process involved, you know, years of design, you know, painful timelines and schedules with the ISS.

and then, you know, months and months sometimes of delay of, like, actually getting your, you know, materials back. And so the subset of designers that were actually interested in, you know, going through that difficult process was, like, relatively low across all the various, you know, types of, you know, materials that have been studied on the ISAS, everything from pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, fiber optics, you know, human organs, a lot of work that's been done there. In some ways, you can think of VARTA is like, you know, by ripping it independent of the ISAS, making everything, much faster cadence, you know, much cheaper costs. You can now go, again, you know, following your analogy,

to those set of product designers and start to say, hey, you know, we could do this on the order of months and like, you know, some of a million dollars, you know, what would you do, you know, with that capability? Now, in the early days, we might kind of have to look a little bit like the product designer ourselves as well in order to show the utility, you know, the platform. But, you know, ideally over time, we start to look a lot more like a TSMC, as opposed to, you know, an Intel, where we're actually, you know, both designing and developing, you know, the chip ourselves. Yeah. But yeah, you know, whether you call it TSM or Foxcon or, you know, throw a official. in the pharmaceutical land, AWS. You're like AWS. Someone's renting capacity from you to go to go do this long term. It's kind of cool too when you think about like you then, you know, having the optionality of vertically integrating across some of these areas. Like, you know, if areas start to become really interesting and, you know, you're able to take ownership or be a part of part of the like more vertical process around it.

Yeah. I mean, I would describe it as like the only place where the AWS analogy, you know, breaks down is before this people were, before AWS, people were running scaled down. data centers themselves. And so that was a pre-existing market. Before us, nobody was doing sort of scaled manufacturing, you know, in space. And so, you know, I described these sort of full vertical integration as less of optionality and more as a requirement due to desperation through survival, given that we need to prove that scaled manufacturing is viable and then can act as the platform to convince other people that they should also do scaled manufacturing on top of us. And so, you know,

we'll talk about it more over the course of, you know, this year as we start to announce some of our early customer partnerships. But you'll start to see that if you like, you know, squint at the early days of Arda, it looks a lot more like a fully integrated, you know, sort of design and manufacturing, you know, firm in one very particular vertical. And then, you know, over time as we proved that out, you know, becomes the platform. Super cool. You know, planning on, you know, making our first manufacturing run, basically, you know, eight,

nine months, I think, roughly, you know, from today. How much money did you have to raise to go execute against this? Like, how much have you raised to date if it's public? We publicly announced that we've raised 54 million total, and that was sort of more than enough to get us through both the first and the second manufacturing run. And then you have more announcements to come in future. Are governments doing anything to, you know, make this kind of stuff more, more, like, are there any government incentives in the same vein of like what governments have done around, you know, electric vehicles in the early days of Tesla? Is anyone doing that around space economy stuff? You know, not exactly yet, given that I'm not sure that, you know, some of the policymakers

recognize the, you know, potential of it. But we do have some, you know, irons in the fire. You know, I recently, you know, tweeted a photo of me, you know, out in, you know, D.C. And so we have a relatively significant, you know, lobbying effort, you know, going that is getting a lot of, you know, reception. And so, yeah, again, later this year, you'll start to see a couple announcements from us with, you know, some interesting pieces of legislation in this upcoming, you know, cycle that start to reflect that there is sort of a reason for a lot of what we're working on to be, you know, sort of a national security priority and some of the incentives that should come with that. If you were to just...

Yeah, go ahead. More about, like, I'm fascinated about how someone becomes like a leader, an expert in space, basically. And you talked a little bit about how, you know, you've been thinking about how, you know, you've been thinking about this maybe for five plus years. How did you ramp up from being, you know, someone who is interested in space to becoming an expert and finding teammates who are world class? Yeah, what was that learning process like? I mean, how did you go down that rabbit hole? Yeah, I mean, it probably starts in like, you know, seventh, eighth grade where I started doing

my first sort of like embedded software, you know, engineering, you know, small robotics projects, working at, you know, local university labs that had, you know, aerospace background out in Utah, at the University of Utah, which actually has a decent. That's where a little bit north of us is where a lot of rocket engine manufacturing was in the United States for quite some time. So it sort of started then. And then the sort of original life plan for Delian was supposed to be, you know, go to MIT, study, you know, computer science, embedded, you know, robotic engineering and undergrad. And then go to Caltech for grad school and go work at JPL on the robotic mission. And the whole sort of startup entrepreneurship, you know, sort of life was very much, you know, an orthogonal left turn.

where I realized I could maybe just have impact on space, you know, much earlier. The first set of entrepreneurial activities weren't that, you know, you know, focused in aerospace given at the time, all the archetypes that I had that had influenced in airspace were all people that had made it big in like, quote, unquote, normal tech and then applied that wealth to space. But, you know, as basically the like, you know, input costs all just massively dropped over the course of like five, six, seven years at my time in the valley, I realized that I could actually do it in a, you know, much near term, you know, time frame.

And so, you know, probably that initial shift, you know, for me started in about 2017, when I actually joined Coastal Ventures. Part of the reason that I joined was that they were actually one of the major investors in Rocket Lab. And we're on the board there. And so, you know, got to be a board observer for a handful of Rocket Lab board meetings, got to invest in a variety of different aerospace companies. The firm paid for me to go to a lot of different sort of aerospace conferences, meaning aerospace CEOs. And thankfully, because of that early, you know, sort of MIT background, both going to MIT and then also working in embedded software and some of the robotics, you know, projects there had had a bunch of sort of, you know, acquaintances and friends from MIT end up at SpaceX. And so during that time as an investor, just, you know, make sure to continuously, you know, sort of grab lunch with them.

And so I was kind of trying to attack it from all angles of just, like, really getting to know the up-and-coming, you know, talent, getting to know all the CEOs. They were building companies. So I understood how they thought about business models, going to all the, you know, industry events. So I don't know if I have like a great answer outside of like, you know, starting in 2017. It just became like 30, 40, 50 percent of my time, nights and weekends, et cetera. We're all, you know, spent on that. And it definitely came with a lot of travel, given that these conferences all happen in person. How do you manage, I mean, today, and it kind of relates to Greg's point, like, you know, today you are a full-time partner investor at Founders Fund.

Principal at Founders Fund, which is in Miami, I assume, given Keith. Yeah, I didn't say in Francisco. Okay. And then you're, you know, full-time with Varda, which is in Hawthorne, which is right near SpaceX, right? I imagine it's all kind of, it's like the space hub. How are you managing your time across those? Like, what are the basics of how you're kind of balancing that? Yeah, I'll answer it, you know, both like conceptually and then also, you know, tactically.

Like conceptually, you know, I did have to pitch my partnership, right? And, you know, whenever it was, you know, August 2020 on like, you know, hey, you know, my MSA team members, I would like to basically quit half my job, but I'd like to get, you know, paid the same, you know, cash and carry. Ultimately, the argument was that this was actually the best move that I could make to, you know, optimize for my IRA at the firm. And the arguments that I made that have largely played out, you know, had a couple different dimensions to it. First, part of what I was trying to do in my, you know, venture career was index off of the aerospace industry, even though I truly believe that it's

going to be a massively growing industry. And one of the best ways to, you know, have phenomenal returns is just to, you know, bank yourself off of sort of the next technological trend, right? In some ways, it was really easy to make money. If you were a mobile investor in 2009 and 2010, basically didn't matter what you were investing in because, like, everything was growing, you know, so quickly and want to do that in aerospace, what better way to have access to every single aerospace investment than start an aerospace company myself? The second was even outside of aerospace, I still lacked some level of credibility with founders where, you know, I did go through YC with my first company, but it failed after like the seed stage and as a relatively junior investor, I wasn't having necessarily the easiest time

with, you know, competing against, you know, other competitive firms, the, you know, Alfred Lins of the world, if there was ever a competitive term sheet, obviously there was no chance that I was, you know, ever, you know, winning that. And that, you know, VARDA would increase that, you know, credibility, you know, with founders by having somebody who was like a, you know, near peer, you know, building a large scale, you know, ambitious company. And those two things have, you know, largely, you know, played out. I'd say, you know, sort of, let's say the, VARTA two FF synergies have made it to that in 2021 when I was spending, you know, sort of far less time on investing than I was in the prior years. It was my most active year.

And then there were a handful of investments. There were highly, highly competitive investments that I don't think I would have been able to win, if not for Varda, that, you know, have so far, you know, at least played out, you know, quite well. Then let's slip the equation. So, you know, why are there, you know, synergies between, you know, FF to Varta? I say there are a variety of times where, you know, when I'm working on Varta, whether it's, you know, on, you know, the Hill and D.C., where, you know, they take me more seriously because of the, you know, founders fund cachet, the brand name behind, you know, Poundeer and or all, et cetera, that get us access, to certain doors. Obviously, you know, running fundraising processes as somebody who is still

active in the market, I have a really good sense for where the market is, what pricing should be, when is the appropriate time to fundraise? And so I think because that has made it, it's that, you know, Varda has timed our fundraisers, the amounts, the pricing, you know, et cetera, you know, quite well. And so I think conceptually, the only reason it's possible is because there are synergies between the two jobs. And so there's a lot of times where I'm spending an hour, like today is a perfect example. Are people going to be watching this because of Founders Fund, because of Varda, maybe a little bit of both. It makes it so that in some ways I'm, you know, kind of working on both jobs versus if the two things are wildly disparate, I don't think possible,

right? I think I can imagine a lot of incubations and investment jobs that just have such different, you know, feces and methods of attack, right? I work at a firm that is, you know, a little bit more, you know, targeted and likes to double down on particular investments. But for example, if I worked at a seat stage firm that is much more like 100 investments a year, spray and pray, a little bit harder to actually see that there's, you know, synergies between the two, given it like, you're not trying to win, you know, series A. You're not trying to win, you're trying to put in, you know, 250K, 300K checks, you know, would an incubation actually really really help with that. So that's, you know, on a conceptual level on a very like,

you know, tactical geographic level, it involves obviously a lot of travel given, you know, my whole spiel on, you know, in person. You know, over the past year, it's been, you know, roughly, let's say, a week a month, you know, in L.A. And then, you know, three weeks a month in Miami or most of the time also traveling, you know, Fort Vardo, it's called two weeks in Miami and then a week in D.C. for lobbying or a week in Utah for, you know, some of our Air Force, you know, partners. And so a lot of traveling back and forth. And, you know, I think as I've gotten to know, sort of the, you know, team more, we've established more, you know, reports, especially with some of the direct reports, you know, the org that I'm, you know, sort of sit within at Varda.

You know, I think the goal is over the coming year to maybe do just a little bit less frequent, but, you know, longer schint. So as an example, you know, I'll be in L.A. basically for like all of July and August. I'm the hope is maybe I do a little bit more continuous on the other end. So the goal is to hopefully ramp down from, you know, right now, you know, flight every five days. So maybe I can get away with like more like flight every 20 days. I don't know if I can quite get away with like flight every two months. Maybe something. I think part of that is yeah, part of that is also at this point, you know,

real cashier with the exact leadership team, especially because I mostly do like BD comms, IR, et cetera, that stuff mostly involves travel anyways. And so with like a lot of the BD team that I like support, we're meeting up in Washington, D.C. or Miami for customers or Boston for customers, et cetera, anyways. And so I'm not going to be an ally, you know, anyways. And ideally in the next 18 to 24 months,

we also start to open up, you know, East Coast offices. And so that makes a little bit easy. or two. So long way to answer, but hopefully that gives a sense of it. How old are you and what do your parents do? I am 28, right? Yeah, 28. And my parents are largely basically like academics. So my mom is a professor of microeconomics at the University of Utah and my dad is technically like a statistician programmer, but he effectively also does like research in academia as well. And most of the customers of his

statistical research are, you know, academics. And so if you look up... I know. My dad's a professor of economics at Harvard. He was the chairman of the public health school for a long time. Wow. Well, yeah, if you look at my last name on a Google Scholar, I have one, you know, co-authorship in one paper in the middle of nowhere. My parents have thousands. Have a lot. Yeah. Lots of seconds, especially my dad.

I know we're right up against the end of time. Give us, just like one prediction. So, like one year from now, there's obviously been a lot of turmoil in markets and a lot has changed over the last, you know, 90 days, even 60 days from a narrative standpoint. One year from now, do you think we will be looking back at all of the like, you know, all of the things we've talked about, remote work, you know, kombucha on tap, you know, all of these things? will we be looking back at them as a relic of a hilariously long, you know, free money-fueled bull market or something else? You know, my rough prediction is like, it's just, again, reversion of bean. I think like 2020-3 is going to look a lot like 2013. It's just like, yes, there was kombucha at Google, but Google had like insane, you know, modes and insane, you know, profit margins, which most startups don't. And in 2013, the, like, early stage startups were, you know, in the grunge of like, you know, downtown on

Market Street in San Francisco, Twitter, Uber, Square, et cetera. We're all just starting to, like, you know, build up their offices. Everybody was broke and doing whatever it took, basically, you know, to, you know, build their companies. They were all in person and innovating. And, like, yes, there wasn't infinite amounts of, you know, capital. And at the time, it was insane to think about people leading at 80 to $100 million round. But, you know, people were able to build, you know, massive game changing companies.

And so to be clear, like, our perspective at Founders Fund is that, like, there are still clearly generational companies to be built. You know, the capital markets are very much compressed relative to price. prior times, but it is not like, you know, the world is ending and, you know, this stuff will never return. I just think it's like a return to like sanity and reality, which is that like when you're an early stage startup, your primary focus should be on making money, forging product market fit, you know, scaling that in a way that is, you know, sort of capital, you know, efficient and ultimately delivering returns to your shareholders and, you know, therefore VCs also need

to be focused on, you know, delivering returns. And yeah, I think we'll look back on this aberration from call it like, you know, maybe early 2019, you know, through, you know, early 2022 as just a time where like capital was artificially hyper, hyper cheap. And because that it introduced a lot of, you know, flub and, you know, blumber on a lot of different startups that probably could not actually afford to, you know, have that, you know, blubber. And, you know, we're still in the beginnings, I think of like a variety of different, like, high profile failures that you'll see. Right. I think like the, you know, call like the fasts of the, you know, world, you know, shutting down. You've still got more of that given that in that sort of hyper, you know,

cheap capital environment, there are a variety of people that built up massive balance sheets that don't take a long time for these types of things actually play out for them. Not that long when you lose money on every transaction. It's true. It's true. Yeah. Money burns. Plenty more gloves to come. All the 15-minute grocery, you know, go-puff for every single region in the world. I'd be curious how those unit economics are going to work out. So, yeah. Now, thank you so much, man. this was awesome so much to think about here and a good bet too i am going to follow up on that

figuring out a way to do that index bet of in real life versus remote startups i feel like that could be a cool thing to uh to talk about publicly so yeah if you figure out to make it a fair bet i will happily happily provide money on the line i'd also be i'd also be curious that who which founders live longer is it the founders who do remote work yeah or the founders who do i mean lower Stress definitely correlates. What is the lifetime expectancy difference between those founders? Yeah, I mean, lower stress and, you know, lower cortisol levels certainly leads to longer. I'm sure there is medical research to back that. And so I am generally sure that, you know, being a founder of like a world changing company is probably not good for your health long term. Well, I'll recommend that you guys read the upside of stress, which actually, you know, has some data points to suggest that, again, not, you know, insane levels of cortisol, but actually elevated cortisol.

Interesting. improves lifespan. Interesting. Have you heard of the Yerkes-Dodson law? It's like the law that like stress and basically stress increases performance and like vitality up to a certain level. And then once you go over that level, it becomes a bad thing. But there's like an actual optimal, you know, level where it actually enhances performance

in the way that your body operates. So maybe it's in that same vein. Yes, no, very much, very much in that, you know, same vein. And then my other one-liner response is, you know, I'm here for a good time, not for a long time. It's a good spot to end. Oh yeah, rock and roll baby. Good spot to end. Thank you so much, man.

Really appreciate the time. Thank you. Cool. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. If you have any questions that you want featured in a future episode, email us at high at t rwih.com. Leave us a review at Apple or Spotify to help us grow the reach of this podcast. Until next time, we will see you soon.