The Startup Ideas Podcast - The Unlimited Potential of Web3 with Alexis Ohanian

Episode Date: December 23, 2021

Web3 is here, but all of the ways it will change the way the world works is not yet fully understood. In this episode of Where It Happens, the OG of community, Alexis Ohanian (@alexisohanian), Founder of Reddit and Seven Seven Six joins the show to share his early lessons from Reddit, stories from Y Combinator, and why he's betting big on Web3 communities and technologies. While co-hosts Greg Isenberg (@gregisenberg) and Sahil Bloom (@sahilbloom) place their bets on the future, and explore the idea of "minimum viable community."Want more community? Learn more here: http://trwih.comFIND US ON SOCIALAlexis Ohanian: https://twitter.com/alexisohanianSahil Bloom: https://twitter.com/SahilBloomGreg Isenberg: https://twitter.com/gregisenbergProduction & Marketing Team: https://penname.co/SPECIAL THANKS TO OUR SPONSORSMERCURYhttps://mercury.com/partner/rwihIf you’re a founder, Mercury is the banking product you need. Traditional banking is broken. Everything from the UX to the complexity of the benefits you care about most. Mercury is disrupting the old model. They offer FDIC-insured bank accounts, virtual and physical debit cards, international and domestic wires that are free to send, 3-click payment flows, and more. We personally use Mercury for our business banking with the podcast and Sahil is an investor.​Get started in minutes from anywhere.COMMONSTOCKhttps://commonstock.com/Why settle for the old model of investing when new options offer you so much transparency to help you grow your wealth? Commonstock is the home of smart money and an innovative social media approach to investing. We both love the platform and have used it to enhance our financial strategy. Commonstock is a social media platform like Reddit, but it removes anonymity and adds transparency. The app lets you see what smart money investors are buying and selling – in real-time – all while letting you see their reason why. This way, you know whether investors have skin in the game, or whether they only talk a big game. It’s a great way to get insights that support your investing strategy.To learn more and sign-up today go to commonstock.com.

All right, guys, we just got done filming a crazy episode with Alexis O'Hanian, founder of Reddit, now the founder of 776, a new venture capital fund that's building very differently. I had a blast. Tell me. Tell me about it. I mean, there was just so much to take away from it. His storytelling around the Reddit experience, building that. The early days of Y Combinator and the early days of, you know, completely changing the game of the incubator ecosystem was really, really cool to hear. For me, the minimum viable community stuff that he talked about was my biggest takeaway

and how people that are really building community-first organizations are going to continue to be the ones that win in the long run. Yeah, Alexis is an absolute community legend. I think, you know, I remember people telling me like, hey, stop playing so many video games, stop like spending all this time on internet forums and stuff like that. And we're realizing now in 2021, 2022, that those. skills around bringing people together through the internet are the crucial skills for how to build companies of the future, community-based companies. So I absolutely love every word he said around

community, around designing these community-based experiences. And he's just dropping bombs after bombs. Yeah, it was crazy. He's from the future and he drops a bunch of bombs from the future that make this episode an absolute killer. So we know you guys are going to enjoy it. Let's dive right in. I hate banking. Most banking products suck. So when I was starting all these new businesses

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And this is like a day we've both been looking forward to for a while. And the reason is because we've got a community legend on. And I've got my community friend. And we're going to have a community legend in Alexis O'Hanian. Founder of Reddit has built a bunch of other online communities. And I'm personally just excited because we're going to be able to get in a room with two people that I think really, really understand community at a depth that I definitely don't. I think a lot of our audience will benefit from. Yeah, and he understands community, but he also is,

like me, equally obsessed with Web 3. And I'm excited to dive into, you know, why he's interested in Web 3, the relationship between what he's learned, building community at Reddit, and what that, you know, what is the relationship between Web 2 and Web 3? And, you know, and what is the relationship between Web 2 and Web 3 and just get into lessons learned. Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, so I want you to talk to me a little bit before he comes in to just prime me because I consider myself a little bit of just like, I don't know what they're right, like a Luddite or whatever you want to call it in terms of understanding what the

difference is going to be with Web 3 as it relates to community. And so help me understand it, hopefully help some of the audience, hopefully I'm not the only Luddite out there. Just like tell me a little bit more about what that means. Like why why does Web3 matter for a community? I think what Web3 does is it just supercharges Web2 communities. So look at Facebook groups. Like there's over a billion active users on Facebook groups.

Think of like moms in Miami. Think about, you know, soccer team in Brooklyn. in. There's just millions of these groups. And I think what's lacking in some of these groups is ownership. Like these groups and these leadership groups and community organizers often don't own the group. They're renting the group from Facebook. They're renting the group from Discord. And I think what Web 3 unlocks is just a supercharging of Web 2 communities. We've seen, especially through the pandemic, how important communities and digital communities are into, you know, people's lives. And I think what you're going to see over the next five, ten years is when you

insert a token, if you insert, you know, a JPEG, a video, an NFT, and you allow people to share upside in the group and allow them to vote on where this group could go, that's when magic's really going to happen. So go a little deeper on this with me to help me understand. So in Web 2, a community, say it existed on Facebook groups, wherever it was. In that ecosystem, if I'm in this group, say I'm in the Miami Mom's Facebook group, and I'm a Miami Mom, imagine. And in that ecosystem, I am the creator of all the content. Me and the other 50 moms that are in this Miami Mom's group are the creators of all the content. But we're just, like we are creating value by creating within this thing. We're getting hopefully some value from being a part of this community. But the reality is that Facebook is capturing most of the value of that from our presence on the platform.

If Facebook shuts us down for whatever reason, because we're organizing something, they can do that. We're not really participating in the value that's being created there. So is the whole premise here, as you talk about Web3, basically that suddenly now we actually own that platform. and we have shared ownership and we also have shared skin in the game of wanting to see it expand.

So now I have an incentive to bring in the most amazing other moms that I know because they're going to create a bunch more value that's going to make the value of this community we're building more impactful. Yeah, so let's talk about the main problems of the Miami mom group. So the first is, if you're the admin

and you're the community manager, that's a often very time-intensive job that you're often not seeing any financial upside for. So when there's ads on the side of that Facebook group, you're not seeing any money from that. That's Facebook taking that money. That's Facebook taking that money. So I would argue that a lot of the groups on, let's say, Facebook, are unsustainable. just people doing it for the love of it, which is awesome, and not everything needs to be about finances, but imagine what the Miami moms can do if they had a shared bank account that they can throw events for,

let's say. So that's one problem. The other problem is if you're a member of the group, there's no real easy way to vote on the direction of where the group could go. So for example, maybe the Miami moms group wants to the admin decides to expand it with Miami Fort Lauderdale group sorry the Fort Lauderdale mom's group and all of a sudden there's 5,000 new moms in this group and it changes the whole dynamics of of what made that group so special in the first place and it was just because the leader of the group had a friend in Fort Lauderdale

and it was doing a favor to that particular mom if there was a vote that everyone had a say in should we actually merge groups, maybe what would have happened is that 97% of people didn't actually want that merge to happen. So I'm excited about the, you know, that's what people call governance, the governance of it. And then the third piece, which you've mentioned, really is the shared ownership. If everyone has skin in the game, you know, that reduces the problem. of it's really hard to build a community and there's how do you build a viral community and when you have a token or you have an NFT or you have something that makes you an owner turns community

members from members to co-owners all of a sudden you do get a lot of virality so I think that I mean most of these things I honestly just don't still really get and I stare at them and I'm like, okay, yeah, but not really. Like, Facebook's not going to de-platform some Miami moms group. Like, I don't really get it in a lot of use cases. The one piece that I definitely really get, as you're talking about it, is this idea of, like, shared ownership in the thing and your incentives, your skin in the game,

to create value for the thing that you're a part of now. Like, I think that is a really big idea where if Twitter, if you were a member of Twitter and you had skin in the game, the game for creating amazing content on Twitter because it creates, it makes the community more amazing and it's sort of like owning stock in Twitter. And suddenly now you're a part of this little micro community where you own stock in it effectively. And by contributing engaging content to that community, you were enhancing the value of your stock. That is like where I see some really cool, still in like a pie in the sky way for me because I haven't fully transitioned

to my mind towards it, I think that's a really interesting concept where you can take these little micro communities and people suddenly have skin in the game where it's like a public company and I own liquid stock in this little public company and can now actually contribute to its value and have an incentive on a daily basis to contribute value to it growing and expanding over time. That's really cool. I want to speak to the point which you mentioned, which is like you don't really see deplatformization as a problem and I agree with you until it becomes a problem. Like, I've, I've had a Twitter account that was just a meme page basically in a particular community that they just, Twitter just shut down.

It was just, they felt that, you know, I don't know why they shut it down. I think, like, we retweeted another meme that they didn't, you know, like or whatever. But the point is, like, you're still rent, at the end of day, you're still renting, and there's a difference between renting and owning. That's a good way of putting it. Renting versus owning is a great way of putting it. And I agree with you like Twitter announced today, I think as we're recording Twitter announced that they're not going to do me like you can't post pictures of someone else's likeness without their consent. And it's like that's what memes are, which is by the way what Twitter is. And it's like, how are you possibly going to say that? It's kind of a crazy thing. And communities are built around these memes and ecosystems are built around them. And so for a platform to come out and say that, I don't think it's going to happen because it seems ludicrous. But that's crazy that they can go and say that. It's just like restricts free speech and it restricts the ability to express yourself in the way that you want to. So I don't know.

I agree with you. I think that like that makes it more clear to me of the idea of renting versus owning and you're just renting time on this platform and they can do whatever they want. If you want to control your destiny, you own. So we need infrastructure to actually be developed to allow people to do this easily. That's the key. And that's honestly years. And it's to be honest, years away. Yeah.

Like, it's going to roll out over the next few years, like community software that allows you to own this. And also, some of the large platforms, maybe Twitter, ends up decentralizing some of what they do. But I still think we're years away. So hopefully some of the capital inflows into Web3 from this hype cycle that we're going through actually lead to really fundamental things being built on the ground. And whether the hype cycle comes down, who knows. but basically all of the inflows that are coming from this actually build something lasting where people can go and take more ownership over the long run, whether it's like 1% of communities now, hopefully it becomes a much bigger chunk.

We should get into it with Alexis because he is fundamental. I mean, he's built, but he's also investing in this future meaningfully through 776 and other things he's doing and really creating a lot of the infrastructure that we're talking about that could enable the community-based future that you're talking about. I can't wait to dive in with him. Let's do it. Yeah. I'm going to be like just sitting in the back.

with the two community guys here. So let's get them in and we'll dive into it. Perfect. We've been friends for a while. Internet, we were like, we were like, we were originally,

I mean, the funniest background story. I heard that story about that. The funny background story to all of this, which I do feel like, have you seen that, you know the, the photo?

Yes. Well, we have a picture of the two of us. Oh, we have a picture, there's a picture of me and Tim Cook who was the one that brought me to this event. And you're like in the background

in between the two of us. And so every time, like I posted it a couple times. That's the funny picture. Because I posted it a couple times. And everyone's always like, I spy Alexis in the background because you're running between us. Creeper in the background. We like, we knew each other tangentially because you worked out at a gym in Florida, Eric Cressy, who was my, I was his first client. So back in my baseball days, when Eric first branched out and started his training, I was his first client.

And then they told me like, oh, this guy, Alexis, big business guy. He's like crushing it. I was like, oh, we should really meet, but we'd never connected. And then we ran into each other at this party, and that was the, like, context for me approaching Alexis. But then we became Internet friends. And it's like a classic story of the modern era. Like, we've, like, you know, gone back and forth. Are you meeting me in followers now?

I'm going to get you. I'm going to get you soon. I'm going to get you soon. I said, you jump within a year. Like, I had like 25, 30,000 followers at the time. And I talked to him and he was like, you're going to pass me pretty soon. And I think we're like a year later. And I'm getting close.

I am going to get him eventually. I'm going to step on my Twitter. The picture with you and Buffett and Alexis in the background, Alexis, his face is basically like, who the hell is this guy? Wait, seriously? I was like, oh, we got to put that up. I was full imposter mode at that party, and it was like, it was the funniest thing ever. That's so cool.

But, seriously, like, the one thing, yeah, here's a picture. It's very. Stop it. Yes. For anyone to see this. I was having a conversation. We are going to add it on there. There's definitely someone who can't see.

over there who I'm making a face at. He wasn't just lurking. God, that's a great face at. Who the hell is this guy? Shout out to Tim. I love it. I also love the fact that Tim and Alexis both have name tags at that the same way as us because like big stars

are the same as all of us. Men of the people. Men of the people. No, but one of the things that I've been always just embased by you and what I want to talk to you more about is like you have consistently and I don't know how you do it. Maybe you're from the future. You've consistently found ways to

not only predict and write about, but also actually put skin in the game against things that have become the future. And so you mentioned you were a history major. That's kind of an interesting thing for me, because it's like, was that a part of it that you feel like history repeats itself and you've been able to use that? Or what do you think is kind of the genesis of being able to do that? Okay, admittedly, a lot of it is the right place, right time in a lot of really formative moments. like even just being in the first batch of Y Combinator in 2005, that was a fluke. Like being in, being at such a pivotal moment in this new wave of software development. And then I think I've gotten a lot of reps, seeing a lot of stuff,

being, then becoming a partner at Y Combinator starting a venture firm, and then just really ruthlessly seeking out people doing dope. shit. And most of the reasons, like you found some of these old tweets where I'm talking about, you know, a whole host of things from crypto to creator economy, whatever stuff, early, it's largely just because I'm listening to people smarter than me who I really respect and then trying to parse together where the dots connect. And yeah, I do think I gave the, it was virtually, unfortunately, but I gave the commencement speech at my alma mater, UVA, Wahua, this past year.

And I talked about this a little bit. because I do, look, let's be real. Learning to code, it's something I wish I'd spent even more time on in college than I did. There are valuable skills to be learned across STEM for real, like very, very valuable. There is, I will argue, a very important role that the humanities plays. And in history, in particular, you just got to have to dig through a ton of content. You have to read a lot. You have to synthesize a lot of data that is very, very, very, very much.

Very subjective, right? Even primary sources are subjective. The whole story of history is like the fact that you have to synthesize a bunch of different points of view, a bunch of different interpretations, and try to arrive at what is the closest thing to truth in a lot of the cases. And so I think it did prepare me well because it was four years spent having to try to parse together a bunch of different versions of history and turn it into a compelling story and then communicate it.

Why Combinator? You just touched on that. And I need to know. just because it's changed so much over the years. Why Combinator at the start, early days, becoming a partner there, what was it like going through that first program? Remarkably unremarkable. The first batch of YC was, it was an experiment.

So I had pitched Paul Graham at the end of a talk that he gave at Harvard, had gone up during senior spring break with my co-founder, and after this talk, Paul, and he posted online. It's called How to Start a Startup. And it was the perfect talk for us at that time because I had just decided I wasn't going to law school. I knew I wanted to start a company, convinced my roommate to start this thing. And after the talk said, hey, Dr. Graham would love to get a cup of coffee with you. It'll totally be worth the cover of the cost of this drink to take you out.

And he said, really? And I was like, yeah, look, we came all the way up from Virginia. And he was shocked, even, that we had come all the way up. from Virginia because maybe he didn't think we had trains or planes, I don't know. But he agreed to it. We met him that night. I pitched him on this idea. It was a totally different startup. It's called My Mobile Menu or M for short. It would let you order food from your phone without having to wait in line. But this was before smartphones. So it was like text-based. It was janky's hell. He was really excited about it, thankfully, but would later reject us. In the meantime, he

announces Y Combinator and says, hey, I think random college kids, when given $6,000 per founder, much it was. Spending an entire summer, just building, like writing code, talking to customers, can one day build billion-dollar businesses. And that was the premise. It happened perfectly because we didn't even have to decide to drop out because it was senior year at UVA. So we graduated, went up to Boston. I said we had gotten rejected, came back the next morning because he called and he was like, look, we don't like your, um idea. But we like you two. So if you change your idea, we'll come, we'll give you a check. And I was like, let me think about it. But I was just playing it cool.

Got off the train, called them back, said, look, we'll take it. $12,000 in our bank account later. We had our initial funding. And that first batch really was Paul and Jessica. And then Trevor and Robert were the other two friends who were founders, but not as engaged. They were pretty engaged those first couple years. But it was an experiment. It was Paul, mostly I think just Paul's money saying, hey, I got this wild idea.

And then the key insight they hit on, though, was forcing us to meet up. once a week, every Tuesday for dinner. Because now you had this cohort. You had this mindset of, we're all on this together. 05 was a weird time to start a startup. No one was doing it. So you felt like you finally had some people who can empathize with you. And back then, every week, they'd invite a guest speaker to sort of let you hear from

inside the room or the room where it happens. So see what it is. Yeah, there you go. Good book. But it was just Paul, this is the benefit of hindsight. As a 21-year-old CEO, first time, I'm just like, oh my God. this is great, I'm getting such exposure. It was just Paul's friends, like his lawyer friend,

talking about how to, like a term sheet and basic stuff. And then like his finance friend talking about, this is what venture capital is. But it was so abstract, so not tactical, so not helpful. Today, right, it's like the founders of Airbnb riffing about their business. No, back then it was just Paul's friends. But bringing us together once a week helped because it kept us honest because of the peer pressure of having to talk to like Justin and Emmett

and be like, hey, what do you work? would you work on last week? And, you know, when you have people who are also very motivated and sort of giving you that pressure to get shit done, it forces you to actually do the work. And, I mean, not everyone ends up doing it, but, dude, it was a shit show. The whole thing. And even the demo day, I pitched for 20 minutes and took questions. You know, today these startups pitch for like 60 seconds?

I don't know, 60 seconds. No questions. And they figured out how to scale it, I think, pretty impressive. But believe me, it started out janky as hell. And that's something that I think often gets lost in the myth-making. But the first few years of YC were very janky. It was seen as, I think most people were quite dismissive of it. And frankly, PG and Jessica were not that sophisticated when it came to Silicon Valley VC.

Because they were based in Boston. They didn't even move to San Francisco until maybe a year or two later because they were splitting the batches doing winter in San Francisco because the winters of Boston were so were often in summers in Boston. And then eventually there weren't enough investors coming out. If you can believe this, there were not enough investors coming out to Demo Day, who missed out on some amazing companies. So they moved the whole thing to SF and the rest of this history.

What do you think, I mean, starting a company now is so different. Dude, right? Right? Right? Like, I'm just thinking, you know, my founder friends, even younger founders just graduated college or in college starting companies versus what it used to be like. I hate to sound like the old guy, you know, we're like, I don't think you're allowed to sound like the old guy.

You know, remember the good old days. But I think, you know, I'm curious, like, from your perspective, what do you think has changed for the better or for the worse? I think it's almost all for the better. The 2005, so the initial users of Reddit were mostly us with pseudonyms. But the initial real humans were a few hundred people that I'd recruited from a forum, a PHPBB forum that I ran in college called Eyes Wide. and it was a place to discuss politics and news and technology. And I ran this forum for fun because I just liked the idea. And there's actually an old clip that I dug up of me talking about it.

And you can very much hear the sort of ethos of Reddit in that discussion or in that video, in that little monologue welcoming users to the forum. But like those were the initial users, just an email blast to say, hey, come join, please. And like maybe 10 of them signed up. But that was enough to sort of get things started and then a Paul Graham essay helped launch us a month later. You know, today, getting those first hundred, those first thousand should be table stakes. Like that, if you can't figure out a way to muscle in that many users, there's a deeper problem with what you're trying to solve or how you're communicating it. And I think that's a great thing, right? Product hunt exists.

Twitter exists. A social media infrastructure that did not exist in 2005 is now so robust. People are so comfortable testing out an app, even test flight, and early access is becoming so much more viable. Basically, you throw that in the sort of ubiquity and fluency that people have now with technology. 2005 had to convince people that they would want to spend time posting links on the internet and talking to strangers. The average person did not think you could build community.

at scale online, let alone with pseudonyms. Online dating was still a weird niche thing of like OKCupid and a couple others. It's wild to think about it. So it is a great thing that now people are so much hungrier and more ready. It also means you can get to market a lot faster and so can your competition. So then the war for people's attention now is so much greater. And that is where it is now much harder, but I'd still take that any day over what it was in 2005. because it means founders can focus more on the stuff that I know you two care about around the community building

and a lot less on, let's say, even product or getting those first initial users. A good example, this is whether it's no code or just the fact that everyone has just been programming for longer. Modern web development in 2005 was weird. It was a milestone just getting the upvotes and downvotes to change the score in real time on Reddit, because Ajax and all this stuff was new, new web technology, essentially. And so what a 15-year-old today can do is already so impressive. And then when they're building on top of libraries, not to mention no code, you can get that MVP up much easier.

And so that's why I've been pushing, and I pushed it on Twitter before this interview. The minimum viable community is going to become the new standard. And you're already seeing it in PFP projects. You're already seeing it across crypto. So I think you all are clearly building a business around this concept. That is the new challenge. And the core reason for that is everyone is overwhelmed with options. Attention is scarce as a result.

And one of the best modes for that is community. And I know that because I lived it. Like Reddit for five years between, I left in 2010. I came back in early, late 14 as exec chair, had almost no investment by Khan and asked in the product. The product didn't improve for half a decade, barely stayed online. Okay? There's no business on the planet, let alone in tech, that should be allowed to do nothing for five years, five years, and grow every single year. That should not be allowed. That breaks every rule. And the reason it broke those rules is because of community, because we got just

enough right that there was a self-fulfilling little flywheel of users who just cared about spending time with other random anonymous users on the internet in these communities. And it not only kept the site alive, it kept growing and thriving. And so as I watch everything that now unfolds under Web 3, I'm like, I've seen that I know this very well. Like the thing that drives all the success for this next wave of internet is going to start with community. And that's a big fucking deal. Big deal. Well, that's like, to go back to Y Combinator and draw a parallel to this, why Combinator now happens on

Twitter and in group texts and the telegram. Like we, I mean, we originally connected, you and I connected, all of these things of like people pressuring you and the peer pressure of wanting to build something and move faster. We had a group chat that was all people that were trying to grow our audiences and grow our presence. And it was the pressure

of it of like, okay, I need to keep leveling up the content I'm creating, continue to build that community that I'm building. That's stoked at least for me, the fire. And also drove me to want to think about, okay, what am I actually trying to build? What's the equity that I'm trying to build in something, not just like numbers and continuing to be performative?

And so I think it's really interesting because you think about like completely taking and completely blowing up this old centralized infrastructure that existed around building businesses. And that's what Web 3 promises is that we all of a sudden have new sets of infrastructure completely decentralized that open up the opportunity playing field for anybody. A kid on the streets in India that now,

because of geo and everything they did, is now online and able to grow up at digitally native can go and build something, go become an artist, go do whatever they want to do, build a company in the exact same way that a kid that grew up going to country clubs in Greenwich, Connecticut did. Yeah, and the

cheat codes of it, they're not obliterated, but they are getting challenged. Those institutions are being eroded rapidly. And it's wild to see, because it's going to mean more innovation. It's going to mean I think this feeling of like, oh shit, these things keep moving faster

and faster, it's not going to go away at all. We'll get better tools to manage it and we'll start to care more about the specific communities that we care about. So we're actually going to recede, I think, more into those sort of new tribes, those new communities, those new bubbles. I have all kinds of thoughts on the impacts that this is going to have on society. But on the whole, being an entrepreneur right now, it could not be a better time. 16 years doing this thing. I'm very happy to be clear to my investors, I'm doing seven, seven six the rest of my life. Don't worry. This is it. This is my startup. But there's never been a better time to be a startup founder, CEO. I just remembered. I tweeted about Y Combinator about a year ago.

I'm curious your reaction to this. Hit me. I said, what would YC look like if it was created today? If YC was created today, it would be remote first, a tokenized community for founder support, partnered with creators, cohort-based courses for learning, Dow. beautiful spaces all over the world to collaborate. And actually PG responded to. What did he say? He actually trolled me a little bit. What did he say?

You got to read it. That's the funny part. You got to read it. What did he said? And I kind of chirped him back too, but I'm just having fun on the internet. He responded, it sounds like a dis... And in his defense, it was a year ago. Dow's was like, no one was talking about Dow's a year ago.

Living in the future, bro. Yeah. I learned from the best. It sounds like a description of how a big company or government would, quote unquote, improve YC in the process of attempting to reproduce it. Interesting. And then I wrote, nothing screams big government or big company like a tokenized community. Good point.

There is a lot of tribalism around YC. I'm completely outside this ecosystem. Totally. Like a couple of my close friends started this thing, Hyper, which is like, you know, I'm a supporter. Oh, your friends with Josh and Hooker? Yeah. I mean, I'm involved in Hyper. I'm an LP.

I think it's amazing. I think it's very cool. And I'm also very pro entrepreneurs having more options to do all these things. So I don't think it has to be one or the other. But those guys got a lot of crap from the YC community for starting that thing because it was very explicitly trying to create a YC of the future and a different angle on it. And so there is a lot of tribalism around it and there's a lot of defense. I like Paul Graham on Twitter. I think he says a lot of interesting things.

A lot of my frameworks that I've come up with are written about have been PG-derived. Could I get a glass for some tequila? Absolutely. I'm going to need some tequila. Some ice. Yeah, some ice, please. Yeah, a little bit ice in there. The, so.

Tech tribalism. Oh, that's, I mean, it's a real thing. Look, again, you're talking to the guy who made Reddit. Like, I'm, I believe firsthand in all the strengths and all the weaknesses that this entails. In short, right, as a species, tribalism kept us alive for a very long time. We only, our species only really got to understand it at scale with a one-way lens for the last 50 years of mass communication and travel and all the things that kind of gave us one view into like building tribe or understanding someone else's perspective. Ice. Ice is in the, it's in the sink.

I'll take it neat. I think it's in the sink. Yeah. Yeah. Get some ice. Yeah. And so they've only understood it that one way, right? And so now we as a species are going to have to adapt to a situation where we will feel a sense of bond that I would argue is even stronger than we had over the campfire.

Because when we're all hanging out the campfire, the next day, a couple of us are going to go hunt. Someone else is going to go get some gathering berries. I don't know. Like you're actually not connected 24-7. But now we have a sense of intimacy of being around the campfire that never ends. It is a 24-7 campfire of people who, again, for hundreds of thousands of years, our species was really stuck to basically family and, like, trusted circles. So we had things that bonded us, but we didn't all love the same video game or the same movie or the same sports team or all the other modern creations we now have to build tribes. But now we can actually curate that tribe around the campfire for exactly how we're feeling.

If we're thinking, if we're feeling rock and roll, we can go talk to our Metallica fan. community or if we want to dive you can go to a plethora of examples that is radical and amazing it also means that tribes we wouldn't normally have interacted with or come to terms with are now just as prevalent and accessible as the ones that we love and how we deal with that both the good and the bad of it is what's going to determine thank you how the hell this all turns out wow that's a damn thank you yeah and so I'm just looking at where thank you I'm looking at looking at how much YC has evolved and I think, okay, there is a strong tribe there, but none of these are, cheers, are, none of these are forever. And if you even look at the early YC, you know,

again, these things, I really believe so many, companies are, are an echo of their founders. PG, a very smart guy, did not understand the sort of marketing brand story. telling side of business. They still obviously were very successful. It didn't matter. But, you know, I had, I mean, I'll never forget. The biggest disagreements that I had with PG and I mean, I really respect them. This was our main investor.

I'll never forget. He wrote, I had an early draft of, even before I had named Reddit, I had drawn Snoo. And he said, you need to get rid of that bug thing. It looks like a joke. It makes your company look like a joke. Get rid of it. And I said, no, you don't understand.

Like, this is the mascot. people are going to be able to sort of imbue their own personalities on SNU, we'll be able to customize it in the future. Snoo will feel like everyone will get to feel like they're a part of this bigger community. I remember, he was just like get rid of it. Like put it. If you insist on keeping it, I wrote this email in my post, this email in my book. If you insist on keeping it, put it at the bottom of the website.

So it looks like a joke. Told me the name Reddit was like poison for potential investors. Said the name, so I came up with Redditor because I was like, oh, these are editors on Reddit. said it was the dumbest thing he had ever heard. Like, I, there were times when even, like, I, amidst my own co-founder and the YC batch, I just felt like a little alien because I'd be advocating for stuff like this and community building and like, no, I think people will call themselves Redditors one day.

If we just, if we say it, we can invent it, if we own it and make this a hospitable place, they'll feel this sense of identity. They'll want to create their own snooze. The first revenue Reddit made was merch. again, that was actually the first fight we had had as founders. And I said, no, we're absolutely doing it. And I, you know, I ordered like 400 shirts that were sitting in the bedroom, had to hack together a storefront because there's no Shopify.

There was no stripe. So PayPal and like a janky checkout for sizes, got a couple friends to take photos with the shirts. We sold out in 24 hours. I hand wrote thank you notes to every single person who bought one of those first edition shirts, drag them down in garbage bags to the post office, mailed them out the next day. That was 05 community building. And people, even though it was a brand new website, no one knew anyone's real name, no one, they just knew we were a couple of dudes in an apartment.

They wanted to support. They wanted to give us space on their torso to advertise us. Like, that's amazing, right? That is a gift. That is a blessing. And I'm talking about this stuff at YC and people look at me like, dude, you were crazy. Like, why don't you just go back to writing some code and just like, calm down. You're going to kill the company. And so I think the things you're talking about here, the ideals of Web3 and the ethos of being bottom up and community led are just not a part of the YC DNA. Will YC still be successful for the next 10 years? Yes. I think as they expand the sectors and geographies, YC, I think globally is one of the most no-brainer investments you can make in early stage investing. If you just invested in an index fund of all of the

non-US, all the global companies that get into YC, I think you'll do phenomenally well. Because it is a magnet for top, top, top, top talent. Now, in five years, maybe sooner with crypto, maybe things change, right? This world is shifting rapidly. But now that I hear you describe this idea, I really want to do it. The part that's most interesting that I, so for years, YC founders have, hacked together sort of an equity swap, not all of them would, but they would on their own say, okay, look, let's all swap equity in each other's companies, so now we have a stake in what we're doing. And any time your users are hacking together a solution, it's a really good sign that if you just actually provide it, they will be really excited. And so bringing those

token economics to a batch feels powerful. It feels kind of obvious. There's a company called, Bando, the two Stanford Business School, guys. They originally did it with pro athletes. It was like baseball players. You put them into it. It's really good. Como tequila. Shout out. Joe, Joe Markezi. Are they a sponsor? Huh?

De facto's sponsor, I suppose. Joe is a close friend. That's really good. It's so good. Joe, why is that so smooth? I'm looking at Joe, this is just a good one. It's amazing. It's amazing.

We'll hook you up with a few bottles. So Pando. They originally did it to pool ownership of future earnings with your fellow cohort for baseball players because minor league, like it's such a a hit-driven thing. But the original, they tried to expand it into startup founders.

I think it's a really interesting idea, but they're not Web 3. It's still very web 2 and how they're doing it, but it's a very cool way to do it would be a tokenized version of it. Yeah, we're just workshopping this live. But I think, like, I love your concept of NBC,

minimal viable community. And if we just like, if that was the program, which is like build an MVC, MBC step one, step two, it's like, I also love the idea,

like if you can sell merch, if you can sell out of merch in 24 hours, you're onto something. So it's like these kind of like community metrics like that as like KPIs. And dude, here's the thing, right? So NFTs, everyone obviously is like very excited to talk about NFTs right now. Three years ago, you know, starting to invest in companies. You mentioned Skyweaver about bringing NFT gaming and that felt very obvious as a gamer. because like, yeah, you should own the shit that you spend money on. I played a lot of EverQuest in World of Warcraft, and that all felt very obvious.

But it wasn't until last year with the profile picks. Once, you know, I bought a bunch of crypto punks that looked like my wife is a nice investment. But then around April, May, whenever the apes started, when I bought in, it felt like there was something different happening because of the conversation and community around it. And then as I started to watch this community play out, I realized, holy shit. not only did they pull off the MVC around, you know, art and vibes, but these NFTs, these profile picks are in a way a kind of merch because with way more upside, right? So the first 400 or however many people bought those Reddit shirts. Now, I still have mine just for, you know, sentimentality. If any of them still have it, maybe you could make a few bucks off of it on eBay, right? But you

didn't actually benefit from the upside. When you bought that shirt, it was entirely, you community-driven and to support the creators. But today, you buy that shirt, that merch when it's an NFT that is an asset that actually can appreciate and value, you're really getting, it's not a security, you're not a security, but you're getting the upside of the potential growth. And so now you're even more incentivized to recruit people to the tribe. You're even more incentivized to identify as one of these. And so then you play this out and you're like, okay, well, wait.

So, yeah, 2005, I walked around and my identity was the clothing I wore. 2021, even if you're not in the metaverse, you know, everyone has been trained now to understand a profile pick. And that was another thing I took for granted. So 2005, I deliberately did not have a profile pick in the designs for Reddit, simply because we had usernames. We felt like that was good enough. I did want to put snoo in. Took a little longer than I would have liked. But it was important to not have people.

upload photos because Facebook at the time was so strident about a real photo, real name policy. And so it was easy to be the exact opposite and just say, no, fuck it. You can have a username, whatever you want, and don't use a photo. But over the next 15 years, as everyone was building social networking sites, social media sites, whatever you call it, 99.9% of our attention and product was towards everything other than the profile pick, because that was so ubiquitous. It was an afterthought. You're building a social network, of course, let people upload an image. you can't play Xbox or PlayStation without having a profile.

Your Netflix account has a... It is such an afterthought to account creation that I realized only after Apes started moving that this is... It makes sense that this is the first place to really take hold for this minimum viable community idea because, yeah, your most basic, the atomic unit of identity online

is your profile picture. Everyone's grandma has one chosen and has some of the... opinion about it. And in the same way that a bunch of Redditors in 2005 were excited to buy some merch, people are excited about the potential of these communities based on nothing more than an image and the potential for what it could unlock for them. And I love this idea. Maybe we're workshopping some live thing that we should actually do because I am such a true believer here. And I can think of a few other people who understand this as deeply as you all do. All this stuff, that's the,

man, this stuff has never seemed, nothing I've done in tech has seemed as obvious as what is happening right now. And that's the part that scares me a little bit. Yeah. Because it shouldn't feel, this is the shit we learn about as kids. And you think of, oh, there are all these really formative moments, right, in history, whether it's technology or society.

And you kind of think, oh, it would be nice to be a part of that. Like, oh, I wonder what it would have been like to have been there for those times. But we're actually, I really, I really do believe. And I wasn't talking this way until like a year and a half ago. I really believe we're in the midst of that right now. And that's a wild feeling. I was flying to New York a month or two ago. And in front of me were these two people wearing Bordeaux hoodies.

And from a distance, I saw them kind of come together and just like hug. And I was like, oh, these must be like, they must be like brothers. and I went to the bathroom and I was like, oh, like, I started, I was like, oh, nice hoodie. I was like, are you guys friends? Are you guys going to something? And they were out there were like, no, we literally, I just saw that he was wearing a Borde Ape hoodie. Yes. And I just like gave him a hug.

We're all going to make it, man. We're all going to make it. So here's what's special. That would not have happened at a Reddit meetup. Okay. That is a, what you're talking about is a very special encounter. And I think the reason. ownership matters so much is because what you're talking about now is we are all in this together

and the more that you and I believe, the more value it actually creates for us, like value that we can buy a house with, right? Cash money value. And I keep coming back to this as an idea because if we know it works without value assigned, like beyond the merch, you know, I borrowed from video games to think through leaderboards on Reddit or even the awards. The awards I ripped off from Gold Nye. I don't remember at the end of the Gold Nye matches, you'd have these awards. And you didn't always know what they were for, like, most

cowardly. 24-7. But they were helpful because even if you lost, right, there's four people playing. Only one of you can be the winner. But the other three gets something to feel good about or maybe feel bad about, but start a conversation. So I'm like, okay, we need awards on Reddit every day.

Because now, after maybe three months, the leaderboards, like if you were a top Redditor, you were posting every day trying to be the top that day, that week, all time. And so eventually, you know, the first couple people hit 100,000, 200,000 karma points, a new user shows up and says, I'm never going to get to 200,000. It's not worth that there's no incentive. Enter daily awards. And these little badges became really special.

They still, these trophies for like best comment of the day or end year club become a status symbol. Again, in a community where it's purely just for the vibes and it feels good. I meet people to this day who don't introduce, they don't introduce themselves with their government name. They don't use their Reddit username. They say, I'm a 12-year Reditor. I'm a 14-year Reditor. And it's a badge became a status symbol, right?

And it even transfers offline. But all of that is not real. Like there are no real points. There's no real ownership. And so when some board ape owners see one another in the wild and know that they are in it together, and they see another sale that increases the floor price, they actually know that the value of the thing that they own has gone up as a result. That is powerful, dude.

And it's not just Axi Infinity in the Philippines. It's not just like, oh, hey, there are a lot of people in the developing world who are making more money playing a game than they would in their jobs. Like, this is going to affect and radically change every layer of society. And there is not a precedent for it. It looks weird. To the average person, to someone who does not, someone watching this who doesn't understand

internet communities is going to be like, why in the hell would someone, if I saw a fan, the closest parallel is like a fan of your favorite sports team, all right? And you saw, I gave up on the watcher,

saw an Angel City fan. I wouldn't hug them. I mean, I'm an owner in the team. Shout out, Kristen Press, Stanford, one of my classmates, let's go.

I mean, we could not have done better with the first pickup. But like I wouldn't, even if I saw someone in the wild wearing, I mean, I would say something to them. I'm like, thank you for reppping the team. I wouldn't give them a hug, right? I wouldn't feel that close. I mean, that's, that's a boundary, right? But you're seeing this emerge now among these communities because it's changing lives. And here's what gets wild. Okay. So I go through this thought exercise of what would it take someone not, okay, like I have different economic incentives. I'm never going to, why would I sell a crypto punk that looks on my wife? Like I have no economic

incentive to ever do that. But someone who owns one of these apes and where this has quickly become maybe one of the most valuable assets they own, today they don't want to miss out on the community it creates. They don't want to miss out on the utility that it's starting to have, like access to parties, different things like that. That's all still, like, that's sort of loss of version. They don't want to lose that. But in the not too distant future, let's say they want to go buy a house and get a down payment and borrow money against that ape, they'll be able to do that. There's an entire financial services ecosystem that's going to be built as derivatives of the value, especially as stability forms. I mean, there should be an index fund of NFTs where I can take an S&P 500 of NFTs where it's literally just tracks the floor of the top five hundred projects, and I can go buy that because I don't have time to go focus on the million different things and understand rarity and all the different stuff, but I know I want to participate in this ecosystem.

in this building, I should be able to go do that. Yes, and that will happen. We're, back to a company called Alt, doing this around trading cards and other, like, physical alternative assets. We're already letting people borrow tens of millions of dollars against their collections of trading cards that are vaulted. So we have ownership. We believe our pricing, our valuing is best in class.

We know the value of these assets. And we can let them borrow money against it. Now, here's what's wild, right? Wealthy, spoiler, okay? And I didn't learn this until pretty, recently. I did not learn how to, I wish no one gave me, no one gave me a book when, when I sold Reddit, I became a multi-millionaire, which was earth-shattering. Like, it was a revelation, right? No one gave me a book that was like, okay, you're rich now. Here's how rich people do stuff.

The local people don't know about. Yeah. You're just talking about this. Because, you know, this was more money than my parents had made their entire, they were ever going to make their entire working lives. And it's not like they could be like, all right, son, let me tell you what to do. there was no blueprint, right? So, I mean, I learned this shit as I go and I keep going down the rabbit hole and I'm like, man, this is, this is ridiculous. So to answer your question, or to actually get to the point, I only learned after accumulating some wealth that if you have a portfolio of valuable stocks, you can borrow against that portfolio of stocks so that the money you use to live your life can come on, especially these days, really low interest rates.

And you never pay taxes. And you never pay taxes. And you never pay taxes because you never have to sell. So you're incentivized to hodel to hold these assets. And it works because people believe in the stock market. People believe, I mean, it's easy to sell. And they believe that it's valued reasonably accurately because the market has so much liquidity. Okay. But that is just a byproduct of the first mover advantage of the stock market having been around for a while and people trusting it. I will argue my very high caliber Serena Williams training card collection is very valuable asset, going to appreciate over time. And that collection has value. If it were art, like traditional art, like a bunch of Picasso's, I could probably borrow against it. Take a little bit more work,

but I could still do it. But you have all of these new assets that have just showed up that are really valuable, that have way more incentives to Hodel. Like, yeah, if I have a Picasso, I want to keep it up because it's a nice flex when people come over. But I don't get any utility from that Picasso, not like I get from a board ape. So here is what no one is prepared for. It is inevitable. And on the order of months,

let's say years, if not months, for all those board ape owners to never have to actually sell. So if you're already incentivized to Hodel for all the reasons we talked about, and now financially you don't have to do it, why would you? And so if that's going to happen,

what happens to the price? And this is wild because I know stocks don't only go up. Zoom out and they do. But fair, fair. And now I'm looking at this and I'm going, okay, we're breaking the models for how these financial systems work. And we're on a very, and I want to be a little cautionary here. Like I still, I believe in business cycles as a concept. I'm not saying this just breaks the whole game.

But I'm looking at enough examples of things that really do not have. apply, do not have any precedent. Dogecoin still has a $30 billion market cap. It is literally worth it. It's a Joe cryptocurrency inventing on Reddit to make fun of Bitcoin. But it has enough value. I think about it as it's Gartner hype cycles, right? Like we've all talked about that. We've seen it on Twitter. It's all over the place. Like you have these hype cycles. But the cool thing about with Web 3 and with crypto with

it is the hype cycle actually drives the future growth and value of the ecosystem because the hype cycle drives a bunch of greed, which pulls. a bunch of capital flows into it. All the VCs are like, you know, they took creator economy and like threw it on the ground and now Web3s in every VC's bio. I love that meme. Yeah, that was a great meme. Like, I'm done playing with you, whatever. I think Josh tweeted it. Our Fred Josh maybe, and metaphor who we all are associated with was so good. And it's like all this money flows into the space. There will be a pullback at some point inevitably because that's how these things go. But that money is now being deployed towards building something in the future. It's not just like

caching out whatever, there are people now that during that darker period that's going to come are going to be building whatever the next wave is. The same people that after the crash in late 2017, early 2018, we're still building in the darkness of 2018. Those are the people who are now profiting mightily in 2021. And no one wants to talk about that. It's not like this overnight success. Axi Infinity was being built in the dark. They were grinding in the dark. We have Gio coming in actually.

Oh, fantastic. I'm super stoked for that. Right. And that's, it's such a, that is such a perfect example, right? All of these success stores you're seeing now, so rare, grinding in the dark for years. There's another company that I had back, I haven't announced yet. Well, that's fine. Coin tracker, which is about as unsexy as you could get. Taxes, right? Yeah. I love. But, but like, such an indispensable business. And for years just said, like, okay, we're going to build this because we believe long term in the value of this asset class. when you all see the announcement about their fundraise, they'll be like, well played.

But well earned because they grinded for years when no one cared. And when we did that seed round, I actually had a couple LPs ask. Like, you're really sure it's a good time to be investing in crypto? And it's like, yeah, no, it's the best time to be investing. Because the serious builders who are building right now are building for the next. It's a good transition to talking about 776, actually,

because it was something I wanted to ask you about, which is, as a. builder, and now it applies to you as an investor. The idea of variant perception. You have a variant perception of what the future looks like. You get paid when you're proven right for what that variant perception looks like. Toby at Shopify had a

variant perception in the future, all of the e-commerce, so he built a product that would exist in that future. It kind of seemed crazy at the time. Ten years later, he seems like an absolute genius because he was. And you did that as a builder. You were community first with Reddit. You did everything you did there. Now you're trying to do the same thing with 776.

You're building a different venture capital. ecosystem, something that is fundamentally different, it seems like, than what most VCs have been doing. Can you talk about that, what your vision is for it, and where you're headed? I am glad you think that. I still feel, look, we're a year in. So I'm trying to keep perspective here to be like, all right, look, we still haven't done anything yet. But the foundational work was, first and foremost, taking all the experience I have designing product and marrying that with a deep understanding of community, but also broadly, you know, people and culture. And that's something my partner, Caitlin, who we had hired, right ahead, like 50 people. No one wanted to work there. And

she became our VC people and culture. Took us to like 600, 700 people. And the reason for that is venture somehow, all these VCs, we all talk about investing in startups, disrupting antiquated industries using software. That's what we love investing. We do that all day long. Yet, most venture capital firms are run devoid of software. There is, no one has looked inward and said, hey, wait, shouldn't we be thinking about ourselves as something that needs to get disrupted? And as a software builder, I can just think, okay, well, let me think of all the things that we do that constitute work as a venture capitalist, build software so that we have literally

an operating system, we call it Cerebro because we're going to be the X-Men, that makes the work we do collaboratively as a team, but also with our founders, way more efficient. So like, don't ask me, hey, do you know someone at Shopify? That is a waste of my time. It is a human brain is not good at that query. A database is great at that query. So instead, every founder gets to log in anytime they want to and run that search amount, I think, of 44,000 contacts right now. That's dope. And just type in Shopify or type in whoever, or type in whatever character is going to actually see the, not only all the people that were connected to and the depth of the bios, but then with one click, get an intro. That intro gets routed to the partner

at the firm who has the best relationship with that person. And that's because in every meeting, those notes tag individuals and companies. So that data stays forever in Serreiro. No one human should think like, hey, when was the last time I met with so-and-so, I'll do the intro, or some other partners like, no, I met with their last week, I'll do the intro. No, it's a waste of time. And so when I think of the entire job of venture capital, it is a people sort of network-driven business. And so how do we spend as much time as possible getting our people, spending their time, doing the things that humans are great at, and letting software do everything else? And I think it does dovetail into wherever this thing is going, because I keep seeing more

and more people in rounds that I mean, I love leading rounds. I want to be that high conviction investor that I dreamt that I dreamt. of as a CEO, as a first-timer, like, who just says, I'll do the whole round. I don't care. Like, I don't want to know who else you're talking to. I don't want to know who else is involved. I don't give them a fuck. I make up my own decisions leading this round.

But in the last three years in particular, more and more folks have shown up on cap tables where it's like, oh, hey, I've got, you know, 50K from blah, blah, blah, 100K from blah, blah, blah, and I'm like, okay, they're real. Like, they do shit. They will actually be valuable, whether they have operational expertise or, like, distribution, expertise or ideally both. And that framework is where I see this model keep going. Because, look, the world is a washing capital right now, especially as we move into more and more token-based companies. And the best founders with the best companies are going to have their pick. And so as

a venture capitalist, I think the onus is now on us to prove why we are exceptional, why we're differentiated, to be building actually with software, and then be prepared for the fact that that this is going to be a much more collaborative effort, right? Like, I don't know, even if you look at, I don't know, some stuff I can't announce yet, but the, the, not only will VCs have to get comfortable having other folks in the cap table who are, let's say, individual investors, they'll have to get comfortable with like a bunch of random strangers on the

internet who have just bought into the token. Yeah, who are totally pseudonious, exactly. And again, I just feel like, I feel like Bain, in Batman when he's like you barely adopted the darkness Batman I was born in it molded by it that's pretty good that's really good

but that is that is how I feel because I feel like I've been born in this darkness like this is what this is what made Reddit work the idea that I mean I've I've funded companies where the founders met on Reddit in DMs just

going back and forth with one another that's literally what we're trying to to do, by the way, with what we're building here is like a community where we talk about an idea in here. Someone in the community might want to go start that and we can go fend to that. We can go form a Dow to go build something with people in the community and go actually execute against it. And I think that is so powerful and it's so lacking in what we're currently seeing. And what's wild is all of the precedent for it exists. And again, I know you're a student of Reddit, so you know this especially, Greg.

But like, we have seen versions of this play out before in the internet, in the social internet for the last 15 years. Like my favorite first example was just in 2008 when Reddit pull-bombed Greenpeace for Mr. Splashy Pants. And that was just purely, hey, let's all troll this thing so that the funny name wins. But over time in the last decade, we've seen everything from, I mean, communities trying to pool money, well, successfully pooling money together for philanthropic efforts, hundreds of thousands of dollars raised for donors choose just to get Stephen Colbert's attention

in like 2010. We've seen examples of this, but they're using, they're using off-the-shelf tools. They're kind of hacking it together. It's the perfect example of people finding that way to just make it work because the best tools weren't available. And in many ways, I think Reddit will be looked at as a kind of proof of concept for a lot of the stuff that Web 3 is just going to run away with in the next few years. We're going to form a Dow to take a Twitter board seat. We were just ripping before. To go fix Twitter.

What would you want to do to fix Twitter? Oh, so many things. King of Twitter. What would you do? What would I do to fix Twitter? Okay. Let's actually go through it. I would first off, like probably bring in.

a bunch of new product people who would radically hasten the pace of new product testing and delivery so that you could actually drive more signal through the platform because right now their ad platform sucks because there's no signal being drawn out of the whole thing. Forget ad, forget ad, podcast. No, no, but that's the revenue. The stock is going to be $200 if you just drive more direct response.

If I was a PM at Twitter, I've spoken to Kvon about this, first of all, messaging. The messaging product. That's pretty broken. It's pretty broken. Like, even if we look at it a lot too. Yeah, we use it a lot.

In spite of the fact. It's like our entire relationship is Twitter DMs. Exactly. Exactly. So like, if we think about, you know, even like the Web 3 ecosystem, Twitter owns broadcast, right? So you broadcast out and you try to attract people and you bring them into Discord where you have these intimate conversations.

What if Twitter own that whole stack and use messaging to expect? upon that. So fix messaging, expand into intimacy is really interesting. All right. It should be where Twitter should exist as the central point for all knowledge creators, information creators. If you're not a visual creator where like TikTok, snap could be your center point, Twitter should be that. You should be able to take everything from massive discovery of like viral content, threads, things you're doing, drive down to more monetizable streams like review, superfollows,

ticketed spaces. You should be able to take to messaging for more like group chat and intimate messaging. I mean, it should all exist there and you should be able to do it as a super app. And they haven't been able to execute against that vision. I love, I, look, I agree with the things you're saying. I love how unsympathetic you are to their large companyness. I look at Twitter and I still say, like, wow, they actually ship and try new products. compared to their peers.

I agree. I mean, I went on CNBC last week and literally said that. They were like asking me about this Walmart live stream that they did this past weekend. They did like a shopping live stream with Jason DeRulo, and it was this big deal. And they were like, oh, it seems kind of stupid. And my whole point was, at least for the first time in 10 years, they're doing something. They're shipping new product. They're trying things.

They rolled out blue. They rolled out some new things. And so they're actually showing some willingness to do things. It's just the pace of it is still so slow relative to a startup. And this is why I fucking love this job. Because that word or that phrase hopefully has never come out of my mouth, which is like, well, what if Twitter does this or what if Google does this or whatever? Because there is nothing that can compete with a focused, relentless team building to solve

a specific problem that's not being addressed by an incumbent. Like they're just, I would never bet against that. And as, like, as successful as those incumbents have been at a certain point, you just get good at like one or maybe two things and then all the bureaucracy, all the everything fills up around. It's still a great business, potentially. But the reason this industry is so amazing

is that a new entrant can show up with something 10x better and win market share really quickly. And that's before crypto. That's before the earliest adopters have an economic incentive to bring more people on. So if it worked before,

man, it's going to work now. Yeah, this is like the Clay Christensen model of disruption. Like you go in and provide the best solution for that niche sub-segment and you just use that to go like just penetrate the entire space. And if you can build the community. Yeah. And that is, I think, the greatest blind spot that exists right now among the

incumbents, whether it's Y or others. That discipline does not exist. And it didn't, again, it's not their fault. It's just that skill set has now gotten really, really fucking valuable. And a lot of the other historical ones, whether it's around product or sort of traditional growth marketing drivers, all that stuff. Again, they're not commoditized entirely, but they're sort of table stakes. You need to have those skills. You need to have that discipline.

You need to find that expertise. I'm telling you, this minimum viable community thing is a thing. It's a thing. I like that you all are thinking this way. So I know we're running up against the end of time. I need to hit you with not a lightning round. but like you live in the future. Okay.

What's your... He was... First of all, this history... I didn't know your background was in history. History major. History major. But just before you get into that, do you still, are you still like a history buff?

No. Just a future buff now. I mean, I... I mean, I love a good documentary, but I don't spend nearly enough time reading. Do you read books? Most of the things I read, yes. But most of the things I read, yes.

But most of the things I read are... are just like nonfiction geared towards. I mean, it's a lot of business books. The last great book I read, it was like a few months ago now, I've lost all track of time because of Web 3. Hot Hand. Oh, yeah.

But it's fun. It's like it's, you got to read, you read sci-fi? I should. Project Hail Mary phenomenal, if anyone has read it. It's so good.

Sci-fi plays a very important role, might I add. Yeah. See into the future. All right. But the, the whole idea of just like my hot take on reading and consumption in general

goes back to a lot of things we've been talking about which is like our as content has increased and there's been just like a ubiquity of content attention spans have gone like this 100% and so like what I channeled into honestly when I was building Twitter and I was writing and trying to build this community was that exact fact.

People don't have time to go read a 10,000 word article so I'm going to deliver the like most like just super concentrated value in a very short little chunk. That's why I told you you were going to have more followers. Because if you can do that, I think it's really valuable. Someone in five minutes or two minutes can leave feeling much smarter. They didn't have time to go do the long form thing.

So, okay, so I should say then, when I read books, I'm listening to the audiobook on Audible, usually at one of the effects. This is the thing. People aren't reading books. They're listening to audiobooks. And they're great. The experience is great. And if they're read by a good person, I've heard the new Will Smith book. is awesome and it's read by him and it's supposed to be awesome.

It's not the same though. I do audiobooks too, but it's like, you know what's the equivalent of? It's like I prefer eating in a restaurant and like versus delivery, although delivery is so convenient. Yeah. It's there's still, God, there was just a, what the hell was the book that I just ordered on Amazon? Oh, is the 1619 project? Okay, so I'm doing a little bit of history. I order every now and then I get a book that's like hardcover because I'm going to make an effort to read this thing because I feel like I want to It's a meal I want to enjoy in the restaurant.

80% of the books that I read I'm listening to while walking my dog. Yep. What three books would you make mandatory for your daughter to read as she grows up? Whoa. Someone asked me this recently. I didn't know you were going there with that. This is like, but I think it's a great question. Someone asked me this exact question.

So I'll give you my three while you're thinking. All right. When Breath Becomes Air has been one of the most impactful books in my life. It's about Stanford neurosurgeon resident who gets diagnosed with lung cancer, terminal lung cancer, and he finds out he has a few months to live and how he rationalizes an entire life spent building to the future, and then the future is taken away from you. And it's true, and he's writing this book, and he has an unborn daughter. It's terribly sad.

And the woman next to me on the plane as I was reading it had to ask if I was okay because I was sobbing on a plane reading it, but one of the most impactful books in my life. So that's one. Man's Search for Meaning. Incredible. Frankl, survived Auschwitz, wrote the book while there and I don't mean to get super heavy with all this stuff,

but hugely, hugely impactful. I need to think about what the third is. Maybe something a little more positive. That's hard to follow, man. I think, okay. I just like, I always find it interesting. Like, when you think about raising a kid, I'm having my first child soon. I know, but you also...

I mean, I appreciate that there's lessons in there. I would also... I don't know. I'm such a positive polly kind of vibe. Like, I'm just like, I don't know. I feel like something positive. But knowing your more talent, I personally like Memento Mori, the stoic philosophy of like knowing your death in order to live your life. I think personally I find death to be one of the most motivating, the like inevitability of death to be one of the most motivating things in my life. I, it's funny. So I would definitely class myself as a positive person. As a high school kid, I had a thing, because you know high school kids do this stuff, on my wall that was lives remaining

zero. Because like old school video games before they were easy, which they are now. Like you'd have a limited number of lives. And then when you're on your last life, I always felt like I played better because I knew like, okay, it's the last one. Back against the wall. And I had that on my wall as an angsty high school kid. And it's something, it's a thing that I come back to over and again.

So I vibe with the stoicism of it for, I mean, I have a four-year-old, so we're just trying to work on sight words right now. But when I think of books that had a huge, huge impact on me, the last, sort of in the vein of the breath book, which I need to read because I've heard. I should read. It's short. It's a couple hours. The final speech, final by Randy Pausch, butchering the name.

That is something I actually feel like I should revisit now that we're having this conversation. because along the same lines of like, okay, what is at the end of the day life well lived? What are the things that are going to matter to you? Yeah. When you get that sentence. And from a...

Zero to one. Zero to one is amazing. Peter has a lot of things writing that book. And I think, although he didn't technically, I guess he didn't write a person.

It was his, note from his lecture. Still, um, the, from a, From a business standpoint or a, okay, from a, I want you to be aware of the world standpoint, uh, influence by, um, God, it's been around forever.

It's basically the like, the shorthand for how marketers manipulate your mind. And, and it's a great book that I revisit every few years just to understand and remind myself how I'm being, like, fucked with. because at the end of the day like all of these things matter so much it's not just like don't think just Dom Draper it's it's all the even subtle decisions that are made even around your favorite Web 3 project

that are giving you some sense of I need to be a part of this that I think drives more of our decision making than most of us would like to admit especially folks who are maybe overeducated would like to admit I love hearing folks who are like, I'm not motivated by brands.

I don't believe in brands. I'm like, motherfucker. You absolutely are. I just saw you pull out your iPhone and wear your all birds. Exactly. Get out of here with that. You're thinking of Gucci and Versace, but no, no. Everyone is making, even the profile pick you chose is you being influenced by branding

or the design of it or the Instagram photo you just posted. Like, we're all, all influenced by it. And then, gosh, okay. The other one that comes. of mine, which is not a book I'd recommend necessarily, but like the one that I think about a lot, because I didn't for like 15, 16 years of my life, is science of sleep. Oh, so good. Why we sleep?

Why we sleep? Thank you. Matthew, yeah, I took his class at Stanford, actually. Amazing class. Yeah, blew my mind too. That's the other one that during COVID, I end up reflecting on a ton because I think like a lot of people was like doing an inventory of myself and realized like

if I'm really thinking about longevity here, I'm not team baby blood. So I want to do it the old fashioned way. Turns out sleeping. Actually one of the best ways to do that. Eight Sleep is a sponsor of this show actually.

I'm a huge eight sleep fan. Shout out to Mateo. Bravo. It's been a game changer for my sleep as well. But yeah, Waiwi Sleep was amazing. He has an amazing podcast that he just did with Huberman on Huberman Lab. That was phenomenal where he goes deep on that stuff.

If I were him, I would end every podcast with like a soothing sort of outro. Where you can sleep? Yeah. So good. Well, I know we've taken up. What was the lightning round? To your time. Yeah.

Oh, okay. No, I actually do want to hit that. Now you're reminding me. I know we're getting up against the time. Lightning round. Might as well be a producer. Give me your, yeah. You can be an investor in it if you want.

It would bring you in. That's after. We're going to pitch you on this after. We're going to do tokens. We're going to pitch them on it after. That's going to be off screen. Lightning round. You live in the future.

Give me one to three things that are your predictions for where we're going to be in the future. How future. Define like, five years. Five years. I think everyone in five years will participate in a Dow. They won't know it necessarily. I don't think that branding is whack. But they won't care right.

user experience triumphs over everything. So, yeah, I think it will be pretty commonplace. Not, maybe not everyone, but like for all intents and purposes, it'll be a pretty normal thing for people to respite in Daos. Five years. People will, in five years, agree with the statement that a famous VC asked me like 10 years ago, what's something that you believe that the rest of the world were? And I told them that people will care more or,

do care more and will care more about their online identity than their offline one. They'll care more about some pseudonym they made up than their government name. And so I think in five years that will be true. And then... Give me a play to earn one. Oh, great one. Okay, in five years, no one, 90% of people will not play a game unless they are being properly valued for that time. And so the idea, if you're messing around, you're on Candy Crush right now, you're listening to this thing in the background.

I caught you. You should be paying attention. Kev got a cut. That'll be a good cut. And I caught you because in five years, you will actually value your time properly. And instead of being harvested for advertisements or being fleeced for dollars to buy stupid hammers you don't actually own, you will be playing some on-chain equivalent game that will be just as fun. but you'll actually earn value in. You will be the harvester.

Yes, yeah. Instead of the harvestee. Yes, and you deserve it. You deserve it. You've been crushing that candy for too long for free. Or getting charged for it. Amazing. That's good.

I feel like those are clips that in five years, you could do a nice retrospective. We are. We're going to check the receipts. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. But one right.

And you got paid for it. We're going to check the receipts on it in five years. I loved it. This was awesome. Thank you so much. Thank you guys. I'm very, very excited to see what's happened down here. And I'm still like, I'm still trying to be cautiously optimistic about this whole thing.

But guys, this is this very much feels like we're on the verge of something that's drastically going to change. What? Everything. Oh, no. Three, man. Dude, what? I thought he was talking about it. I thought he was talking about it.

I thought he was talking about the fact that like, like, like, you're talking about. Like, people, usually you're supposed to get the, like, you're supposed to have the comeuppance when you're really feeling, you know, this time it's different, all the other shit. And so I'm trying, I'm really trying to be responsible here, but it's hard because I'm watching shit happen that, like, feels, it feels like I see the Matrix right now. Yeah. And the thing that is changing is affecting every major institution we know. Totally.

And the fact that it's changing the one that drives. like wealth creation is the the game changer because everyone needs to fucking pay their rent at the end of the day and yeah yeah we're we're working with like so many major brands like on web three and everyone is calling wait for for not for this for lay checkout which is because we have like an agency that yes and it's it's crazy like everyone is trying to figure it out yeah and and but now they're taking it seriously. Like I would say over the last like 60 to 90 days, people have been like Nike, Fortnite, you know, all of like the big boys are kind of like, you know, what's our role in this future?

Man, I mean, some of them just need to hang on. And some of them, and some of them, it's like, you know, the recommendation is like, it's not in your DNA. Yeah. I honestly don't think that you can make the leap. and in which case it's like, okay, let's incubate our own, let's just incubate our own product. Oh, yeah.

No, that makes a lot of sense. I really, we talked about one company in particular at the start. This is innovator's dilemma times 100 because it's such a different way of thinking that I just don't think incumbents have a chance. And it actually, the irony is it becomes a lie. to have had or to have the incumbency. So like you saw it with Discord. I think Jason's a smart dude.

They're there to the facto home of real-time Web3 conversation. Yeah. And look at the reaction to a minor feature. Yeah. Like that's a liability. And and and I think they'll still navigate it okay. But like, holy shit. Like when has there been like if Facebook,

Zuck had done the famous, hey, only show me mockups that are mobile, because this is a mobile first company now. And every, or, you know, a loud enough cabal of users were like, no, desktop is everything. We need, we don't need mobile web or mobile apps. Like, that would have been a really difficult thing to navigate. But thankfully, users didn't really give them a fuck. And, okay, I mean, stayed ahead of the curve. I don't know what you do as an incumbent if you have this kind of. of sort of, I mean, frankly, baseless opposition to a thing that's as world-changing as, like,

desktop to mobile. And you know you need to make that shift. And I don't think every CEO has the courage or conviction or the understanding of community to know how existential the threat is. Yeah. But they're going to find out in six months to a year. Totally. Like, if you're a CEO and you're not spending 20 to 30 percent of your time in a Discord server.

Yeah. You're not going to make it. You're not going to make it. No. No. For real. Like, you're not. Yeah.

And the irony is some of the CEOs who ostensibly should know this stuff don't. Yeah. And I, yeah. Like I said, I think the good news is, man, technology, the market does not care about your feelings. Yeah. People just move towards where they get value and it's going to happen quick, man. So, yeah, I mean, we fundamentally believe that podcasting is broken. The traditional, first off, because of COVID, the, the,

minimum viable product of podcasting has come way down because you can just record it on Zoom. And so everyone went down there. And there's a bunch of cool innovation happening. Riverside's a really cool product. Are you an investor in that? Super cool product. And like being able to, it's so, we were talking about this last night. So are you all you, I hope you're using Riverside for this. We use Riverside for all the people. Oh, right. You're in person. Yeah, we're in person. But for the, for the people, like we have Gary Vedemart. Like, we use Riverside for all the stuff that's remote. But we basically believe that the conversations, the minimum viable community of it has come so far down. And so the opportunity here is give community access to this so that they can feel like they're a real

part of the conversation, give mics to more people, and open up all of the opportunity that comes with that. And so that's what we're trying to build. This reminds me, here's a little gem from the time capsule. You remember when cereal went viral. I remember early in, you know, that community on Reddit was like the epicenter of all the conversation around that podcast. Whether the podcast wanted to admit it or not, like that was what was driving all the interest, all the extra content. Like articles were being written about the conversations from within the subreddit. And I remember reaching out to the team there saying, hey, you all should really engage with this community. Like this, whether you know it or not, is the most valuable part of your podcast.

No offense. And to say that they were dismissive, was an understatement. And I think of the really exceptional sort of breakout podcasts that have existed, whether it was sort of a limited run window, like a particular season of cereal, or whether it's the more mainstay ones like the Joe Rogans of the world, you're talking about community at the end of the day. That is where all of the value was. Was it being properly accounted for in most cases, not really?

and I do think I mean look earliest investor in Patreon I think they cracked an important part of it but did so at a time when the on ramp was still Fiat

right that was just the way to do it in 2014 or whatever Patreon launched and so this is an opportunity for sure I think to get that right and it doesn't even have to just be podcast

I guess audio is just a it's a good gateway in it doesn't have to be but the whole I mean though whole idea of like right now the revenue of this is our sponsors who we love and they're great and they're sponsor revenue for the podcast but think about the value that could be created out of a community of 10,000 people who are all motivated around these ideas deeper in the conversation what are they going to go start what are they going to build what are we going to incubate and the fact that

we can then create a community and because of web three we can create shared value and the value that comes out of that community that's insane and that's not hundreds of thousands or like low seven figures of value from maybe having sponsors, that's like there could be tens, hundreds of millions of dollars of value that come out of this community that is being built around amazing future looking ideas. And just replicate that with, so like, yeah, just create pillars to it. Different verticals, right? People with audiences, bring them to a community space. Have a media asset, which is basically an excuse to, or a ritual. And then create on-chain revenue that is on chain.

And NFTs for ticketing access to special events and you create a special channel that people have access to where we can share deal flow and syndicate things, create a fund around it. I mean, there's like almost endless opportunity to it. And just like what's our run rate on this show? I mean, over a million and a half probably. And without. We hadn't even released anything yet. If we could just do that in different verticals with and then add on chain.

Yeah. It's pretty crazy to think about the opportunity that exists here. But the coolest thing is like, we haven't done anything yet. And there's a community of 2,000 people that are hyped and talking about the things we're talking about because people love these ideas and they want to be a part of the discussion. So when we release this episode and we're like, we talked about a bunch of cool shit about the future, let's go jam on it, go deeper on it. What are the cool ideas people have? What can we be building around this? And we can actually go support those people? It's a super democratizing and empowering idea. Yeah. And we can even build like eventually like tooling for this. Like just like you're building tooling for venture. Yeah. Like why wouldn't we build tooling? Yeah. And for other creators. The barrier to entry is that no one wants to do the hard part of it, which is so true. We're here in Miami. We have to we have to pay for all of the film crew to make it really high quality to build the community to spend the time on it. Like the messy part of building community is that you actually have to be there and spend time in the amount of hours I spent building out Twitter commenting on things, responding. to people, DMs, like, full-time job. All of that. It's really messy. And it's like the, you know,

it's like the Paul Graham, like do things that don't scale early on. And that's the messy part of it. And I also just think most of the people that try to do this stuff are not community native. They're just, what they're grounded in, you know, think boy stuff. They're like really smart, probably much smarter than we are.

Think boy. I like that. But it is like the tech think boy thing. But they're very smart, probably much smarter than we are. But we understand community. Yeah. And that's where we're going to ground all of them. Reddit was built in the comments.

I mean, countless hours. I used to play a game where, because I got all the contact at Reddit emails for the first, like, five years. And I would play this game where, because there'd always be fucking emails, but just random stuff, customer support stuff. And I would, every now and then,

respond, but starting from the top of the inbox, just so that someone, like the first, I know, 5, 10 people would get replies that happened within, like, a minute. so that they would feel like superheroes. Like, oh my God, I just got a response from Reddit.com, from the founder. Like, this is amazing just to create that experience, even if I was just saying, no, we're not going to do that feature. Or maybe one day we'll do that feature or whatever.

Those in the trenches stuff, no one wants to do, but has to happen. That's how you, if you're hosting the party, you're the first one there, you're the last one cleaning up. Like, that's the part of the job that's not sexy, but mandatory. and I can tell you from years and years of doing it, the R-Y, the way that compounds is amazing. It is amazing. Well, let's talk.

Okay. All right. I'm going to go do business things. Yeah, you got to go to your next event, man. Thank you so much. All right. Takeaways from the episode with Alexis. Finally, by the way, got Alexis into the room,

which is crazy because he hasn't left his house and compound in like two and a half years, he said, to do a live thing. So crazy that we were the first ones that got to do that with him, which is awesome. Yeah, that was incredible. What was the one big thing for you? The one big takeaway? I mean, there was a lot, I will say.

But I think I was happy I got to go through that tweet that I did a year ago about what would YC look like if it was invented today. And despite, you know, his allegiance to YC and how much he loves YC, he kind of was like, yeah. Like, it makes sense that, you know, a Web 3 version of. YC should exist. It makes sense that it should be remote. It makes sense that it should be global. So my big takeaway was, you know, I was on the right track and definitely something I'm

going to explore. So my big takeaway is going to be a slightly tongue-in-cheek one. But after we got done, he was like, hey, hit me up. I actually want to invest in this. And so we're going to have to have a conversation with Alexis about potentially investing in the future. of community-based podcasts. So if you're tuned in and you want to be a part of this,

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