This Week in Startups - E1067: Garry Tan, Managing Partner & Co-Founder of Initialized Capital, on dealing with downstream investors as a Seed-stage firm, software companies acting as governments, possibility of building IPO-level companies while fully-distributed & much more!

Episode Date: May 29, 2020

1:03 Jason intros Garry Tan and checks in on how his quarantine has been going 4:39 How does Garry look at Initialized's portfolio companies? What are his 3 groups of companies dealing with COVID? 8:04 How will VCs react to the crisis? Why does Initialized specifically focus on Seed-stage companies? 11:13 How does Initialized contact downstream investors about their companies, and how has that changed during COVID? 14:12 Thoughts on Posterous, data-storage singularity & more 18:04 Losing thousands of photos after getting banned from Flickr and how that plays into software as the new government, becoming a super-router 22:32 How Spotify's access to public capital gives them an acquisition advantage, collab concepts 24:51 How does Initialized size their follow-on investments? 29:11 For how long is Initialized planning on operating fully remote? Thoughts on going back to work 35:56 What skills has Garry had to improve during his investing career? 43:33 How downstream investors try and take advantage of early-stage investors 47:51 Thoughts on Clubhouse investment, how/if they can scale their exclusivity 56:27 Thoughts on founders selling secondary shares, and how Chris Sacca helped Garry Tan at Posterous 1:02:09 Structural inequality leading to rich-bashing, how Fiat currency impacts welfare inequality 1:07:09 Thoughts on UBI, Instacart, potential profitability of food-delivery companies 1:11:31 Perception of Tech in the Bay Area, commercial real-estate in SF, Facebook's game-theory remote pay scale 1:18:27 Could today's tech giants (Google, Facebook, Uber) have grown to the heights they did as fully remote companies? Can IPO-level companies be consistently built while remote? 1:24:49 Do the best founders appear ageless? New Twitter features: good or bad?

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Stop paying for unlimited data that you never use. Cut your wireless bill down to just $15 a month and get a plan shipped to your door for free at mintmobile.com. Hey, everybody, welcome back to this week in startups. We're recording this episode at the end of May on Bryant Street, somewhere in the Soma District of San Francisco in 2020. If you're looking back on this as a historical document, 20 years from now or 40 years from now or 100 years from now, yeah, we're in the middle of the pandemic. And it's confusing.

It was scary. Now it's frustrating. nobody can make heads or tails of what's going on. Nobody believes the statistics. The statistics are either being pumped up or they're being suppressed, depending on who you talk to, depending on the region of the world.

But the good news is it feels like we're learning a lot about this virus, and hopefully maybe we come out of this with some stronger themes about how we should run our government, our society, our businesses, and our lives. And on the pod to talk, about this as an old friend and just a great investor and a great human being Gary Tan is with

us again. He's been on the pot a couple of times. Welcome back to the pod, Gary. Thanks for having me. Always great to be here. How are you holding up on a very personal basis? How is your family? How are you psychologically? How do you feel emotionally? Let's let's chop it up. Oh man. Honestly, I think the first few weeks of not having child care was brutal. I think a lot of the parents are nodding their heads as they hear me say this. It's been pretty really hard. It's been pretty hard. But even after three or four weeks, I feel like we've really settled into this really nice groove. I think I've spent way more time with them. I've gotten to know my two little ones. It's actually my littlest one's first birthday today.

Oh, my God. Amazing. So we're having a Zoom birthday party. And it's pretty great. It's great that everybody's healthy. And yes, this crazy, the kids are home three months before the end of the school year and they're going to have a six-month summer, certainly is unexpected. And it's really having an impact on business. When you think about it, you and I are probably lucky enough that, you know, being in the business of raising funds that get deployed over three or four years and management fees and multiple funds, we're not looking at the world going, oh my God, how do I make rent? How do I put food on the table?

But there is the second order of, how do I take care of my kids if I cannot send them to school and I cannot have, I can't, it's not like you can hire a tutor and suddenly have them coming to your house. I don't think in a shelter-in-place pandemic. I don't know if you're allowed to do that.

I don't even, the rules are so confusing, I guess, when you look at the businesses in your portfolio, what are they going through? You know, without mentioning specific names, what are the type of conversation? conversations you're having with founders right now around, you know, month three of this shelter and place order in the pandemic? Yeah, the big question is always, well, when is the recovery actually going to happen? It's clearly three types of startups that are being

affected. One is the ones that are deeply affected, things that touch travel, and a lot of that is about surviving. Like, let's get to the other side because there is there there on the other side, but only if we have enough capital still in the tank at the end of it. And so when the recovery happens, matters a lot to that category one for sure. And when you're looking at category one of, okay, revenue has now gone to zero, you expect that revenue might start again in Q4. Maybe in Q3 there'll be signs of life, but maybe not back to normal in a year or two, I would guess. And that's one where founders who are really great, they find a way. So retooling,

finding another way, finding new revenue streams. You know, Zeus is a good example where because they had software at the core of what they're doing around, you know, housing. And they were longer term than really, really short term. They were able to keep their occupancy really high. They are back up to 70% from a high of like sort of 85, 90 normally. So there are ways to get around. You do need to be really, really aware. Okay. So that's group one.

All right. So Zeus Living, that seems to exist maybe in the second bucket you were about to get to, which is they didn't go down to zero, but they got impacted pretty heavily. But they were creative and they rebounded. Zuz Living for people who don't know, I think is like two to six month stays,

as opposed to two to three nights. 30 days enough. Got it. And that's one of your investments that initialized. So in that second category, unpack the second and third categories of startups that you're dealing with. Well, that second category,

I actually think could have grown probably 3x to 5x. I mean, Zeus was growing 4.5x year on year for I think three or four years running. And, yeah, they're actually only going to grow 2x this year. So even the middle of all is making this. Only doubling. And then that's sort of what we're seeing in that sort of second category broadly. But you can still grow, but you're going to grow a little bit slower.

And I think broadly for that category, how do you get to actually 24 months of runway? I was talking with a later stage investor recently. And they were sort of expressing some concern over all of our portfolios right now. Because if the advice three months ago was 18 months of. runway, then we're at 15 now, and when we come out, you're going to be at three, or two, or if it doesn't happen in 15 months, then what do you do? And I think that we are still going to have a lot of bloodletting in our industry in the next 15 months, and it's something that basically all of us should be hyper aware of.

Yeah, and when you think about it, somebody brought this up on the program, I forgot who, Nick might remember, one of the producers might remember and put it in there, but they were saying, you know, people might be investing now, but starting in this first quarter of next year or second quarter, now that they've done the triage on the most acute cases like that category one, you know, we might get into Q1 or Q2 and people are saying, you know what, all my dry powder in my portfolio has to go to save my portfolio breakout companies and I'm not making new investments and I'm not even looking at other funds investments to try to help save their falling knives. And then that becomes the, what we'd, I guess, you know, sort of

call a contagion where everybody just circles the wagon and says, you know what, I'm going to just pick my five best companies, my ten best companies, and I'm just going to go all in on them. You see that as having any validity? Yeah, I think that that's on the horizon. And the other thing I think you're going to see is VCs clubbed together a lot more. The past sort of five years or so has been a lot of knives out for each other at some level because people feel like they don't need a lot of dry power. around the table and times exactly like this are when new alliances are formed fundamentally.

So we're going to see a lot more of that. It's going to matter who your VC's friends are. And previously it did not exist because people had enough dry powder or the market was just so frothy and flooded with capital. You didn't have to make friends with downstream investors to build alliances. Now what you're saying is, hey, a seed fund like mine or initially, best described as a Series A or seed or both? Still seed.

Still seed. Series A is, we're pre-product market fit. So there are a lot of great Series A firms that we really like, but we think seed is where we do our best work. Yeah, same. Why is it that seed is so attractive to you? What do you think you do your best work there? What do you love about it?

Because you could actually have your choice, let's face it, right? You could say we're a Series A firm. You could be a seed firm. I think you have a ton of amazing options at Series A and at Seed, what you really need is almost a different set of expertise. You need people to help you with go-to-market, PR marketing, sales, even product design engineering. How do you actually build your first teams? That was one of the things I worked with Brian Armstrong at Coinbase on very early on after he graduated from Y Combinator was how do I build my first engineering team. And that's the stuff that I really enjoy.

That's what I know I'm good at. Yeah, as opposed to what you might delude yourself into thinking you're good at because the market's been up. Are you looking at new investments? Yeah. Have you slowed that down, sped it up, or tried to keep it the same, given the fact that your attention is naturally going to be joined to the portfolio companies who are trying to deal with the pandemic?

Yeah, we've slowed down a little bit. The good thing is the way initialized runs, Alexis is actually. actually remote. He lives in Florida right now. And so we've been able to build the whole firm around being able to move very quickly over Zoom. So, you know, now Alexis's experience working with companies, that's my experience too. We're all in the same level playing field now. And so we've been exercising those muscles for a few years now. So COVID-19 actually hasn't changed how we work. Have you invested in it? Yeah. Because we have to spend a lot more time with those portfolio companies.

And have you had companies that are shutting down because of this or just, you know, shattering being put on ice and how's that going? Luckily, we've been able to get more capital into the companies and that's where having good friends and good allies helps a ton. So that, but that's been a very high, a very large, high priority item on my calendar these days is make sure, you know, we are working for our portfolio. What does it look like for you to call another investor and say, hey, I got this great company. Yeah, they're struggling because of COVID-19, but the founder's amazing.

How do you have that phone call with a downstream investor? What does that phone call sound like? People probably haven't heard that phone call, obviously. Well, the question is always what's initialized doing and are they putting more money in? And so as long as we put our money where our mouth is, I think that it's pretty clear where we stand. What is the expectation from those downstream investors that you'll keep going pro rata, you'll put in a 250K check? What do they expect to see to know that you're serious?

Yeah, pro rata is usually sort of what people are looking for. And then the tricky thing is, and I think a lot of fund managers right now, will run into this. You don't have infinite reserves in those older funds. So for the new vintages for us, we've explicitly put aside half of our initial check. for every single one of our companies. I've heard that other firms like Benchmark do the same thing. Certainly first round came out recently publishing how they deal with reserves for outside leads.

So that type of clarity is just what you really need. I think it's table stakes for a lot of people. I think it's something that people should ask their lead investors at, you know, seed in Series A. You know, get something, maybe not in writing, but have that conversation with your lead when you sign that term sheet or before you sign that term sheet, to have an understanding for what's the criteria, how do I get my follow on, and what do you usually reserve? It's a question that founders don't really ask. When we get back from this, I want to know what is initialized policy on when to follow on and when to hold them and just stay pat with what your investment is and not put additional capital in. When we get back on this weekend

service. As we navigate unprecedented time, Silicon Valley Bank believes that collective action is the best way to overcome the challenges we're all up against. This is why Silicon Valley Bank, in partnership with founders pledge, has formed the COVID-19 Global Impact and Innovation Fund. The fund will deliver resources directly to organizations around the world that can help make the most immediate impact in the fight against COVID-19. Silicon Valley Bank has made an initial $1 million investment to fund this critical work, and it invites you to join them in helping those in need. Silicon Valley Bank continues to offer solutions that support small businesses and the innovation economy. For more than 35 years, Silicon Valley Bank has supported countless innovators with a passion

for solving the world's biggest problems, and today remains committed to helping its clients and employees and our communities manage through these uncertain times. To learn more about the Silicon Valley Bank COVID-19 Global Impact and Innovation Fund, visit SVB.com slash impact. All right, Gary Tan's on the pod. I've known him for, God, 15 years or something I knew when he was started a company called Posterous, which allowed you to email a secret email address and then have it post automatically to your Instagram, Twitter, WordPress blog, live journal, anything. It was a brilliant piece of software. I miss it. You know, somebody emailed me and was like, I heard you talking about posterous. I made a new posterus. Here's how it works. And they literally have copied posters. I got to buy it. Flipso. Is that it? Yeah. So, flipso. Is that it? Yeah. So you. post there and then it just goes everywhere. Well, I made one too. It's called Post Haven.

Ah. So I'm a VC that's also a bootstrapper. Does it actually, what does it do? It posts at all services like Buffer does or whatever? We stopped doing the auto post and now we're just saying we're going to keep your website online forever. I wrote it into my will actually. So there will be a foundation that's spun up if I die. And, you know, we're going to, the whole idea here is, I mean, we're just talking about data

and ultimately the cost of storing data will come basically down to zero. And for now, there's sort of this in-between time where we still have to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for terabytes. And that's going to go to zero. So really, what we need to do is take the data that you really care about now

and sort of time warp it to the time when it costs nothing to store. And it's within, you know, hopefully our lifetimes, you know? I think it's a decade out. Yeah, I mean, if you just look at how it's going, as long as you don't keep upgrading, Like if we upgraded the studio cameras to 4K, those get ginormous in terms of size. And they're completely unnecessary, I guess.

I mean, people might look at it at me, clip this and say like, yeah, just like HD was unnecessary. But we were talking before about our struggles with network attached storage and, you know, the best hack that I've ever seen. Nerds. Exactly. The best hack I've ever seen is people upload videos to YouTube and make them unlisted. And now you've got a backup for all time for free. Oh, yeah, I do that. Yeah.

As long as Google doesn't shut down your account, you're good. And they might randomly do that. Which was another startup, BackUpify that I had invested in. And what BackUpify was doing is they would authenticate with your Gmail and then copy your Gmail file out every night at midnight. So if your Gmail got hacked, like my friend Scott Hiferman from Meetup got his like personal Gmail hacked and the hacker deleted all the email. And he lost a decade's worth of his email, which is almost like every photo you ever took

being burned. You just lose this archive over your life. And I also wonder like, are these archives work? anything. We spent all this time archiving and no time pulling up the photos in the archive, you know? It seems like that's going to be the big opportunity. I'm looking for a service. I guess Google does this to a certain extent with Google Photos where they surface stuff. I almost wish there was a paid service where somebody would look through my photos for me, make a photo book every year for me based on my archives, and just do it as like some sort of

like service where you just went back 10 years ago and said, here's a, here's a, photo for you of your daughters and here's their life and just like almost like a hiring like what does the president have the president has like a presidential photographer yeah like imagine you had a couple's pretty good at this i mean google's pretty good at this too but i uh surfacing it like the apple one yeah they give you like here's your day on apple tv yeah yeah here's your day yeah it's really good yeah it's pretty neat but yeah i think that we have to think about um our data as something that needs to be sort of cryogenically frozen so that it can reach the singularity. And for data, there is a singularity, which is the time at which storing all data becomes basically

free. Right. And an entire lifetime worth of data is less than a cup of coffee. Yeah. Or something like that. Imagine imagine that situation where your entire life's data would cost less than $10 to store. You know, I thought about all of this because I actually lost thousands of photos and all of my followers on Flickr when I started Posterous. So I got banned. I started Posterous. I thought the thousands of followers were my followers. So I actually started messaging them saying, hey, I started the service that works with Flickr to post your photos by email. Would you like to try it? And they deleted my account and all

of my photos and I had no backups. Was this before or after they were bought by Yahoo? This was before. So you were doing a growth hack. Yeah. Somebody said like, hey, is this person spamming me or whatever? And they basically put you into a spam folder. Yeah. Only it was death.

It was death. First offense was death. And so from then on, all the things that I ever did had a unbanned button. And this was one of the first brushes with the fact that software is sort of the new government. And what that means is we have to recreate all of the systems that work in society. You need a court system. We're just talking about Google. Google will ban YouTube accounts left and right, and unless you make a big stink in social media, you lose it forever.

I mean, I'm sure there are people listening to this who are nodding their heads because they lost their account for some sort of incidental or even maybe accidental flagging. And there's no appeal process. And there's no appeal. Like there's no one listening, right? Right. And that's a problem. It is. And it's the problem with being able to buy into any of these platforms and why people.

Well, don't trust them. And I think the fundamental nature of email or RSS feeds was so important and such a loss to the industry that Facebook and Twitter just basically said, you know what, we're never going to support RSS. I think Twitter removed it. I'm not certain of that. Somebody will fact check me. But I know they deprecated it at least. And now you see this with Spotify saying, hey, we're going to buy Joe Rogan's podcast. It's going to still be free.

But what happens to Joe Rogan's RSS feed, right? What are your thoughts on the Joe Rogan deal in relation to this bigger, broader topic of open standards? It's the most interesting take on Twitter that I've been reading as people think that he's going to regret it the way the Instagram founders regretted selling for just a billion, which is really interesting. And I think that that speaks to something that people aren't really paying attention to, which is the power of the influencer. Like when I am talking with someone on YouTube on my YouTube channel, what I realize now is when they watch me every single week, I'm actually a character in their life. You're a friend.

Yeah. Yeah, they're my friend. And the reality is they can actually DM me on Instagram. I started this new thing where any founder can actually DM me and I will respond. I can't guarantee that I will respond forever because I just can't. Yeah, good luck with that one. I tried that about 10 years ago. What was that like?

pros and cons how do you make it work here's the thing you know making yourself accessible is a great way to have great deal flow right and then at certain point you reach a breaking point where you cannot keep up with the inflow and then yeah it's overwhelming it's overwhelming and then you risk either losing your mind ignoring your existing portfolio or being the guy who doesn't respond yeah and you know it's i think people are genuinely uh overall understanding of a super router, which you may not be yet, but you're on your way to. You're kind of like probably in the early endings of that. You have seven or thousand followers I saw on your YouTube account, which I watched before the show. You know, that will, you'll see in a

year, it'll be 70,000, and then it'll be 150,000. It's kind of how it goes. You're going to add a thousand a month or something I would guess you're adding. Ballpark. I'm growing 30-ish percent a month, but that can't hold, so we'll see. Well, you know, it's, I think it will actually, because all you have to do is do two videos a week, right? Or sometimes you'll have a breakout video where you didn't expect it, right? Like some breakout episode. For me, it was like the Chris Saka episodes

before anybody knew who Chris Saka was. Yeah. Well, yeah, and it was like a two-partner. And then a lot of people didn't know who Chris Saka was before that. He was kind of underground, right? Like, you may know him in San Francisco, but not publicly. He does three hours in the podcast. We split into two episodes.

And then as much as it made Chris famous, it made me famous because people were like, oh, who's that guy interviewing him? He's got some good questions. And then when Travis was on all the kind of stuff. to get these unexpected moments. With Spotify, the reason I love what Spotify is doing on a business basis is they have that public market capital where they can buy stuff or, you know, in the case, it's a licensing deal. So they're buying him essentially for three years or five years.

I don't think the term is public yet, or I haven't read a term. So let's just say it's for five years. It's $100 million, $20 million a year. That's probably on top of the $30 million he's making now. So it's perfect for Joe Rogan. he gets an extra 10 or 20 million a year. It's perfect for Spotify. They get all those users who come,

and some number of them are going to go buy subscriptions to Spotify. So if Spotify is, what, $10 a month? So $100 a year maybe? Yeah. They need only get a million more subscribers. I'm going to argue Joe Rogan brings a couple of hundred thousand subscribers. What's great about it for everybody else is I think Joe Rogan goes from being the number one podcast on iTunes and other platforms.

And because he's not updating that feed or he's putting short clips on it, I think it's going to go down. So that gives somebody else the chance to be number one. Then maybe Ben Shapiro becomes number one or somebody else becomes number one. Then they get bought out. So it keeps the top 100 lists on those other platforms with gives everybody a chance to move up one rank, basically. Yeah. And the person on top gets paid.

I'm excited about all this new content. I actually am trying. My side goal with my YouTube channel is I'd actually like a thousand other people to also start. And then we can all do collapse together. And then that's how we truly hack the YouTube algorithm together. Yeah, I'll do a collab. Well, this is sort of a collab. This is a collab.

Well, I mean, it would only be a collab if... I need you to come on my YouTube channel and then... I don't think that's it. No, what we have to do is we have to come up with a concept for a piece of content. All right. That would fit both our formats. So if you took this episode and then you put some stock footage in it and a drone, and then you and I did something in your format with a blurred background for me,

and it would be about you coming on my podcast. that's a crossover, I think. Yeah, totally. So, permission granted, if you wanted to chop this up and anyone, you're going to get into your co-lab. That sounds great. Co-lab. Is that how you pronounce it, Nick?

Collab. Collab. Collab. Yeah, it's going to be great for podcasting, I think. I had a question before we went to break, and I forgot what I asked you. Oh, we were talking about follow-ons. Follow-ons, yes. So you typical, typical check size for you is a 500K, a million?

What do you put into a company? A million to five million, which is a pretty wide range now, I realize. That's pretty wide range, yeah. So let's just put it at two million. Product market fit. Yeah, two and a half. That's about right. Okay, so we'll say two million for ease of math.

What would you then say to the founder of, hey, here's what you can expect from initialized when you do your Series A? Yeah. Off the bat, we're going to set aside 1.25 million. 1.25 million. That's right. And then anything beyond that, we might be able to do more. It just depends, obviously. And then, you know, the other thing that we try and do is, look, you're going to get punch in the face.

That's how startups go. You know, we think we have product market fit. We think we're on the right direction. And then it takes longer, right? We don't get our three-x-a-year growth. Something goes wrong. We're going to need, you know, another 18 months, another two years to figure it out. Well, that's where the 1.25 also comes into play because if we still believe,

believe, you still believe, we're gun-ho. Like, that's the lead of a seed extension, right? And that's actually turned into product market fit for several of our companies. You know, I know a lot of people say no seed extensions, but if we have deep belief, that's people are, these are like 10-year overnight successes, right? It just takes so long for a startup to actually work. And it's so short-sighted for investors to just abandon founders who sometimes it's the first time they've ever managed people.

Sometimes it's the first time they've ever shipped a product. We really see people grow over the course of five. You know, I've been doing investing for, you know, I'm still a new, you know. How many years are you been? How many years are you doing it?

Especially for eight years. Eight years, yeah. Me too, I'm doing it for like, just a couple more years than you, maybe 11, 10 or 11, I guess. So I'm learning stuff every single day, but. When we get back for this quick break,

I want you to tell me things that you did terribly in the first couple of years, that you've now fixed in your game, the leaks in your game as an investor that you've really worked on fixing and why when we get back on this business business startups. All right, I'm really excited to welcome Twilio back to being a partner here at this weekend startups. If you don't know them, they're obviously the cloud communication platform that's used by people like Uber or Airbnb, Shopify, I use it at Inside. And they're joining with us here at this week in startups to bring

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Go to Twilio startups.com slash twist. Twilio, T-W-I-O-Sartops.com slash twist. You have to go there and go there and go. grab these credits. It's $3,500 waiting there for your startup, and they're doing this because they love the podcast, and they want to support it, and they want to support startups because they're big fans of startups, and they're big fans of this weekend startups, which I appreciate. So get the $3,500 now, Twilio startups.com slash twist. All right, everybody, welcome back to this week in startups. I hope you and your family are safe, and we're coming out of the pandemic now

here in San Francisco. We've been very lucky that people wear masks and have really respected the shelter in place rules. And you feel safe going back to work? You feel safe going outside, Gary? How do you feel now as a parent, as a founder, etc., about going back to work? How do you feel? I mean, we're going to stay, whatever Facebook does for their office,

we're going to do. And the reality is we're sort of prepared to stay working from home through maybe all of 2021, actually. That's sort of the conversation we're having this morning. Wow. Just because we need a vaccine. And, you know, I was just talking with Alexis about this this morning. The amazing thing about America is that we are free.

Right. Like, God bless America. Honestly, I am like so proud to be an American. I'm proud to, you know, be in a place that has freedom. But, you know, the flip side of that is, shoot, how are we going to control a pandemic? And we're going to have another spike. It's pretty clear that there will be another spike. The hope is, since young people seem to die very infrequently from this, and with masks and some basic social distancing, I actually believe, and listen, I'm no expert here, but it does seem like the herd immunity or resiliency might be a better term, where, you know, if 25% of New Yorkers have it and you run into three, we all know coefficients, like at a certain point, if 25% of people have already installed the Uber app,

or the Coinbase app or Facebook, you can't get them as new users so it slows down, right? Yeah. And so it does feel like that's happening as well. We're not out here, but in New York. So I'm wondering in New York, if people start going back,

you know, we might have gotten this completely wrong. We should have sheltered in place anybody at risk. And then, I'm going to sound like a Trumpian here, but it might actually be just a fact. That's the argument on Twitter, right? People are drawing very strong lines around it's so stupid.

You know, closed versus not. Why do you think it's become a political issue when it's just a matter of science and technique? As founders and as investors, we look at this. I assume you look at this this way as well. Well, what's the experiment we can run here? Like we ran the experiment in New York where people have a subway. That didn't work out so well. We ran the experience of total shutdown in San Francisco. That didn't work well for the economy, but sure did work for people not dying.

Like, how do you look at the experiment? That's the true. Yeah. I think we just have an incredible amount of, anger, frustration, and rightly so, because, you know, we are here and we're privileged. We have incredible privilege to be able to do our jobs without really in effect. We can do, be as effective as knowledge workers as we were before, but a lot of people can't and a lot of people aren't, and a lot of people don't have jobs. So I really do feel that level of pain out there. Yeah.

And then the difficulty is it's very natural for humans to take that frustration and put it into, they have to sublimate it into other things, whether it's shouting at each other in, you know, I'm sure you've seen videos, like people shouting at each other, right? It's tough. I mean, if everyone could just take a breath and realize, hey, we're all human beings, we're sort of heroes of our own story, certainly.

Yeah. We have to make space for each other as heroes here. And I think it goes to politics. It goes to people freaking out about masks or not wear. wearing masks, refusing to wear masks, sort of both sides just get so dug in. And it's such a simple solution. Like the police officers who are like dragging people to the ground and jumping on their backs because they're not wearing a mask, you could simply hand a person a mask.

And I've said it on the podcast 10 times and say, oh, I'm sorry, you forgot your masks? Here's a complimentary one. I'd hate to have to give you a $500 ticket for not putting this on. Right. The same way a cop pulls you over and is like, hey, did you know you were going 75 and a 60, 55? I'd hate to give you a ticket. Should I give you a warning this time? And like it kind of works, right?

Like you get pulled over by the cops and they let you go. You probably don't speed, you know, for six months or six weeks or whatever it happens to be. I mean, you can do that in South Korea because there's societal cohesion. And you can do that in Sweden because there's societal cohesion. But they're also basically societies made up of people who are very similar to each other. Right. And we are a very diverse society. So that's why it's so much harder.

I think that that's part and parcel with the diversity. The diversity is a strength because we get all these different viewpoints. We have this very rich fabric in the country of 50 different states. But boy, is it difficult to get everybody on the same page, especially when the president is kind of the opposite of Bush or Obama, who were trying to bring everybody to the center and say, hey, Clinton as well would fall into this. Hey, we're all, we're all in this together. We're going to solve 9-11 together. We're going to solve the Great Recession together. Now it feels like we're, you know, not to make this political, but I don't think Trump wants to make, you know, everybody solve this together, nor do I think the left wants to solve it together. They seem to want to, you know, blame Trump for it and, you know, shelter in place. And definitely, and your point about how privileged we are to work as knowledge workers and then tell people whose businesses are about to go a business, they can't go to their pizzeria. They can't go to their dry cleaner. They have to shelter in place. That's just ridiculous, right? Like, especially if it's a young,

If a young person wants to take the risk and go out, I don't see how we should be able to stop them, unless the ICUs were overwhelmed, which does make total sense. Yeah, I think that's how we think about it. If we're knowledge workers and we can be as good as we were before, then we probably should stay in simply because that are not becomes some are not but an essential worker or someone else who has a business that has to happen physically. They can't do the same business. Like, they can go and do their business.

Right. And if I open my doors and I start taking pitches in person, that's contributing to like the commons problem. Right. This is a problem of the commons. Right. And I don't want to be a part of the tragedy of the commons. Right. So if you can stay home and you go to less Warriors basketball games, I know the Warriors need to make money too and there people who work there too.

But, you know, if you can take yourself out of the, you know, virality of this, yeah, that helps everybody. It makes total sense. Let's go back to the original question, which I tease, which was, you know, you're in year eight now. You guys are, I think, are in your third fund maybe. What have you learned about yourself as an investor, your own blind spots, things you say, hey, you know, I could get better at this. I need to be better at that. Well, you know, I've always been known as a super, super nice guy. And I'm happy with that.

You know, I want to do business that way. But we've definitely had to learn the hard way that percentage ownership matters. matters a lot, actually. And you know, you know what? We're worth it, actually. Right. Like, we're going to go to bet. So there's that, that's probably the number one thing that I had to learn going from, you know, writing small angel checks to growing up as an institutional fund. Look, like, we're going to do a lot. And, you know, the resources that my LPs have given me allow me to hire great people on, you know, I can hire Kim Mike Cutler who used to work at TechCrunch. And she is amazing at policy. Like, she's, she, she's the one who told me that COVID was going to hit in February, you know, her embology, right? Yeah. And so, you know, there are people on my team who, um, they're worth it.

We're going to go to bat. But, you know, as a result, we actually need to be partners on the cap table because that's how we actually provide that value back to our LPs. So you can't be a 2% owner. You got to be a 10% owner or a 20% owner. What do you, what do you think? 10 to 15 is. That's exactly what I'm going for. That's really interesting.

I mean, I think we all learn the same lesson, which is, you know, you and I have many billion-dollar companies. That we put 25 or 50K into, and it's not meaningful, right? Exactly. I mean, it is, but then it isn't, right? It is for an individual. It is not for an LP. Exactly, exactly. You need to get to, I mean, we have one, that's a unicorn that we have substantial ownership in, which would be calm, which we own five or six percent of.

It's a great one. Which is a great one, and it's just, you know, but, you know, would have been nice to, own 15% of that one, but now we're correcting that with FitBod, Stizi, other things. We're trying to get to that 10, 15% ownership. And that seems to be also sustainable. You can maintain that percentage. If they raise another 10 million, well, you need only be a million of that or 1.5 million of that round. So in terms of being a nice guy, getting run over and getting your allocation crammed down because other VCs came in swinging their elbows, or later round saying, you have to give up your prorata, what do you say and have people tried to take your prorata away from you?

And what have you done? It's a good question. You can tell me the truth. Tell it raw. I'll tell it raw too. You should have to say the name of the person who's so offensive that they try to take it away. But this is a legit issue for guys like us, I think. I think the good thing is being a brand means that, hey, this isn't, people can be long-term greedy this way.

Yep. So you know that, you know, we're going to be around this year, next year, five years from now, 10 years from now, like, and we have long memories. Right. But you've had people try to take your pro rata, correct? Yeah, that's right. How often does that happen? And out of 10 deals, how often do you get asked as a seed stage investor to give up your prorata?

You know, what's interesting is most of the time it's actually YC taking their programmatic pro rata, and they've actually stepped that back. So that's actually worked out really well. Explain that. That's the right move. They were trying to maintain their 7% indefinitely. That's right. Which seems reasonable.

It's not reasonable? It is. But the interesting thing was I actually raised that fund. You raised the continuation fund? I raised the first couple hundred million dollars of the YC continuity fund. Will it was interesting to see. That was the big. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. So. Mike Bloomberg. People don't know that, I guess, that he was the anchor for that. Yeah. So they're, I mean, great LPs. I mean, this is what great institutional LPs get to do, right? Yeah. And so now they're saying they're going to do it on a case-by-case basis instead of blindly, because they were just doing a blindly. You raise around, we take our prorata. Now they're saying they're going to look at it and examine it, right? I don't know exactly. I think they're still going to take partial. That still makes sense. But, you know, for too long, it was definitely difficult for people who didn't get their percentage ownership. the seed and then as things take off in the A, it's like, that's the round you want to be in too.

And I think that they've made the right moves. What's the worst behavior you've seen in this regard to people trying to elbow you and other seed investors out? Tell us the story without saying the names. Take us through it and then how you tell that person they got a step back or not. I guess we just sort of point at all the things that we did to get to there. And often what we'll do is we're the ones who, introduce the founder to that VC. So that's where I think there is sort of a white glove aspect to this business. You just got to look at them in the eye and you just know, hey, we're both going to be in

this business for a while. So let's make money. So, yeah, we're taking our prorata. Thank you. We're not stepping back. But, you know, if we were going to give up our prorata, we would love to give it to you. But no, it's our fund. Yeah.

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do it right now. You're going to thank me later. All right, let's get back to this amazing episode. Yeah, it's never the founder who wants to have the earlier investors get screwed. It's the later stage investor saying, hey, screw your existing investors. They got, they're lucky to be long for the ride, give, we take everything in this round. And what I always tell founders is, I tell them on the way in now. By the way, here's something you can expect. We're going to invest in the company. You're going to meet a lot more people. We have a brand name. We're going to introduce you to a bunch of people. And at some point, some downstream investors are going to ask you to screw us. And what I want you to understand is those are bad actors who eventually, if they succeed

in screwing us, there's only one more person left to screw in the stack. That's you. And so it's a good indication if they want to screw the person who brought the deal to them and helped the deal get through year one or two, if they want to screw that person, they will have no problem screwing you, the founder. And boy, does that work as like a little, you know, inocuation? That's my vaccine. That's my way of inoculating the founders to it.

And boy, it does happen on a pretty regular basis. And I tell people just, I've had it happen three times, I think, in the last five years. I tell people straight up, because I'm not a nice guy, as you. know. Like, I'm a full contact guy. I'm like a barbarian. I just tell them, if you, you want, no, we don't give up our parade. They're like, well, we're not going to, I have one person say, we're not going to do the deal if we can't hit this ownership person. I said, let me explain something to you. I am the point guard. And I am world class, all-star point guard with many championships. I will never pass you the ball again. And not only will I not pass the ball to you,

this is what I told one of the most famous VCs in the world. Like, when I say top three, I mean three in terms of the name of the person. If I said their first name, I didn't have to say their last name. Put it that way. And I said to him, I said, listen, beep, not only am I never sending you a company again, I know that these three competitors of yours are the ones that you compete most violently with. I'm sending them proactively to those three going forward. And you can be certain I'll hit another Robin Hood, Uber, or Com, or Thumbtack, and you will not even know that I told them that I am not a fan of your firm. And this person was like, you're insane.

And I was like, yes, I am. Like, type Calacanus insane into fucking Google. Yes. How dare you like try to like roll over the existing investors? And this firm, I should say, changed their position on this. But they were, that was their initial position. Thanks for fighting the good fight. Well, I mean, it's, I find it ridiculous to, for this, for these folks to think the

people who did the hard work of, you know, the first year or two, it's a really hard work. Like, why would you want to screw those people just to make an extra? What is the actual incremental they're getting? Yeah. We talk about... That's a tricky thing because it's a, you know, I had to tweet recently about this where it's really like, you know, long duration is one of the main ways to get smarter, right? Explain. And so just literally if you're in it for longer than everyone else, then, you know, people can't screw you like this, right? And there are a lot of people in venture broadly who are sort of, they want their, you know, billion dollar exit and then, you know, they got their home. They're gone. Like, you know, they're not going to work again.

You know, people treat this business kind of like a lottery ticket. Yes. And that's really wrong. It's interesting, yeah. The good thing is, you know, this is where my argument, hey, we're going to be around this year, next year, 10 years from now, 20 years from now, right? Yeah. Do you want to burn this bridge? Because, you know, we could probably make a lot of money together. But if that's how you want to play it, then that's how you want to play it, right? Yeah, people don't normally see this kind of, you know, sharp elbowedness until people like us bring it up.

But it used to be the expectation was, you will get screwed. I don't know if you saw the Giffy tweet storm, but an angel investor who had invested through one of the platforms, $2,500, never got an update from the Giffy founders, never got an update on their investment for like five years or something. They see the $400 million sale and they still don't know if they made any money. And they probably are going to make very little because there was a $100 million overhang or something. So who knows what exactly happens? What did you think? Speaking of outliers, you and I spent some time on the House party, explain to people why House Party has such strong product venture capitalist fit?

Clubhouse, you mean? Clubhouse. What did I say? House party. House party. No, that's different. House party is the one where I went on. I logged in once and they were like the old guy, old guy, get off.

Old guy, log out. Like, don't be here. Old guy at 40? Are you even 40 yet, Gary? I think I was like 36 when I logged under the house party. The first. I'm 39. You'll be 40.

Wow. Yeah. That's wild. It's pretty wild. But Clubhouse, I mean, credit to Paul and Rohan, honestly. Yeah, pretty amazing. But why does it have product venture capitalist fit? Like, there's so many venture capitalists inside of it, investors, and they're so addicted to it that I said, this is the greatest example of product venture capital fit I've seen since Lux or Uber, for that matter.

Yeah. Because, you know, VCs would take Lincoln Town cars. They wouldn't take taxi cabs. so they understood Uber immediately, right? They were the first users. Here, it seems like the first users of this platform are founders and more often than not investors. Why does it appeal so much to investors, you think?

I mean, it felt like, it still feels like Foo Camp, you know, or South Buy, you know, South Buy behind the velvet ropes in the VIP room. So the exclusivity is actually what makes that community work really well. And you're going to see the next step for that kind of. company really will be, can they open up and have the type of incredible long-term cohorts? You know, what you need is sort of the long-term asymptote for your long-term retention. And theirs was off the charts.

It's just, you know, Facebook level, right? Right. But with 1,600 users. So the real challenge will be how do you go from there to 10,000 users, 100,000 users? And you probably, you know, I'm just spitballing. But my sense, if I were Paul, and I'm very envious of that position because being able to create a social network from scratch, it's like I would undo all of my mistakes from Posterus because we had a shot, you know? I think that's a challenge. Can you have an invite system that is almost as white glove as what Paul does when you first join that platform?

You know, your friend comes in and introduces you to their friends. What does it like to be at a great party? that has to be the replicated product experience over and over. Is that even possible? Is that ever happened in the history of social media where a white glove service was able to continue like that? The only thing I can think of is superhuman that maintains that onboarding effect, the VIP.

You have to pay for that, right? So can a free social network do it? No. Absolutely not. We'll see. Yeah. Well, how about this? What if you had an invite system that only gave you more invites

if your previous invites converted. So they have to log in on a regular basis, right? Yeah. So it is a little bit of the modern version of the Ponzi scheme for, but not for dollars, for engagement. That's a fascinating way to look at it. People don't remember,

but Gmail was just a crazy innovative product when it emerged 20 years ago, I think. And the whole concept on Gmail was they gave you two invites. And people were like, I only have two invites. You really thought about, you know, does my mom need one or my brother or my spouse? Like, you don't want to waste them. Or just eBay.

Or selling them on eBay. People were doing that and flipping them. And here, that's actually a really interesting way to vector it is. That's what I would do. Yeah. If the previous person did that, how soon before Facebook copies the entire format and replicates it? Oh, I'm sure there's a team working on it right now. What does that make you think of Facebook as an organization?

or Zuckerberry as a founder? I mean, we felt the same way about Microsoft back in the day. It's like, you know, Bill Gates has always been legendary. We always looked up to him. But, you know, there's a real stifling forced innovation. I think the difference here is it's much harder to do that in social. I realize that the reason why there's buzz about Clubhouse is people talk about Clubhouse the way they talk about discovering the Beatles.

And they're like, I found it first. Right. And before it goes mainstream. And there's a cachet in that. And people actually think about these consumer social teams in that same way. I mean, I think Posterous for a time was like, you know, because I was on your podcast with Michael Arrington and Mike actually launched us on TechCrunch and left it up like the top story all weekend, like 48 hours on TechCrunch.

And what do you get 10,000 people, 20,000 people signed up? Yeah, it was 10,000 signups, which is, you know, what you get now when you're top of product time, which is, by the way, that is escape velocity. When you think about it, like, if you, if the product does have product market fit, getting to 10,000 is enough. That's enough to, you know, just 5% of those users stick around. Now you've got 500 people who can actually make it happen. Did you try to get that Series A? Did you be able to make any headway with Clubhouse? I tried to like invest and obviously, you know, and Dracing coming over the top for 100 million. Don't need my. I just put it as well. We really like that team. They were great.

I think Andrew is a great partner there. And Andrew is a good friend of ours, and we love Andreessen. So, you know, it's a great get. They have amazing things, you know, wind at their back. COVID, you couldn't ask for a better reason to exist. And they have incredible... Should have been $100 million? Is that, like, just ridiculous for a service with 1,600 people?

You know, not to get all crypto on it, but, you know, money printer go burr, right? So what is a dollar? And what is the nature of your financial reality? Do you ever question the nature of your financial reality? Is Joe Rogan worth $100 million over five years? Well, you would argue if he's getting 10 million people per episode to watch each episode over time, that you could actually make a quantificate, you could quantify the value. Like I said in the early when we were talking about it, if 5% of his viewers convert and he's got

50 million viewers a year, it's 2.5 million. If he's got 10 million viewers, it's 500,000. If they stay for three years, it's paid for itself. So there is actually, you could actually compute it. In this case, you have 1,600 people. It basically means you're paying, you know, whatever it is, $700,000 a person for active users, which makes no sense, since it's a free product.

Unless it becomes Twitter. Unless it becomes Twitter. And if it does, then that's the bet. That's how you square the circle. Would you make that bet? If they said to you, listen, Gary, We love you more than anybody. If you give us $5 million at top of your range,

at $100 million, we'll give you 5% of the company. Would you make that bet? At $100 million valuation. At a $50, I know the answer is yes, right? Safe to assume at $50, you would have done it. If you're going to do $50, then $100 is actually not that far off. So would you have done it at $50 then? Man, you put me on the hot seat, man.

Well, I'm not asking you if you offered $50. I'm asking if you would have. But based on that pause, you would have, yes. Okay. So that's where, like, here's my thing on it. I would have certainly done it at like 30 or 40 because, you know, like, well, you're paying a 5x premium, a 10x premium. Who cares? Like, there's obviously something very special here about it, right?

And something very unique. And then I was like, yeah, no, I would never have invested in 100. Then I rethought that. And I was like, you know what? If they said to me right now, hey, we have 200K you can put in. you can own 20 basis points of it or whatever it is. I would say yes, only because Indrisen Horowitz now has so much reputation on the line

to make this work having made such an outlandish bat or outlandish outlier, let's say. I don't want to charge language too much here, but it is an outlier for sure. They are going to be super motivated to make it work. And boy, I mean, Ben Horowitz's wife has been holding court like every night on it. and they're pulling out every stop in the Andresen Horowitz arsenal to get this going.

I wish them super well. And, you know, I love the product. What do you think of the $2 million secondary? Well, when you look at Rohan and you look at, you know, he has a sick kid. So that does mitigate it. I change my position on it. Yeah. So one of the two founders has a sick child who has a very serious illness.

And so the million dollars. For each founder, you couldn't give it to one and not the other. And then giving a million dollars to somebody with a sick kid who's going to be pursuing this and probably needs a little bit, it doesn't seem as outrageous given that mitigating factor. Yeah. Look, the reality for every founder, every person in our capitalist system is that the first few million dollars in your bank account is going to sound like crazy, crazy privilege. But, you know, I grew up without a lot of money and sometimes food insecure.

And, you know, I know what it's like to sort of be face-to-face. with not having money and, you know. What was it like? Sometimes being worried that, you know, are you going to eat tomorrow, right? What was that like? For you? I mean, I was a kid, so I was just trying to 12, 14. 12 or 14 and didn't know if there would be food on the table.

Well, my mom worked at a nursing home as a nurse assistant, and there were days where she'd have to go and get bread from, you know, Someone would come up with a, come, uh, to the nursing home and deliver a bag of expired bread, uh, to the back of the nursing home. And, you know, that would be how we, yeah, that would be how we ate that week. Expired food. Yeah. Yeah. That'd get me and, uh, I understand that. You know, I, you know, I can recall that and I can go back that, back to that moment at any time. And there are real times when I was 22 Stanford graduate and I had, you know, that in the back of my head. And in In retrospect, that made me take less risk.

The fear. Yeah, the fear, right? And, you know, that's a real thing. And it's a really important moment when someone's made something to be able to take a little bit off the table. And then that lets you swim for the fences. You know, I'll tell you, Chris Saka, let me do that with Posterous. Pee brokered a deal that let me get married to my wife. You're kidding.

You let you sell some secondary? Yeah, it was, you know, enough to pay for. for a wedding. So I'll always be thankful to him for that. It's a nice aspect to the ecosystem. It was something that I believe at the time when you were doing postures, I think Fred Wilson, also Ron Conway, a lot of people were very concerned about it. You remember this debate of like secondary is going to kill venture? Why did that, why is it tricky? Why did people feel that way and why have we worked out, you know, some sort of equilibrium on this issue where it's not controversial, except maybe in an outlier case like Clubhouse?

I mean, having been in those shoes, it matters a lot, right? To have that a little bit of cash in back. It's easy to forget, right? At some, you know, you hear very successful people, people who are peers, like, I'm sure, like, the two of us have even said this. Like, we just use money as a way to keep score. Right. But for the majority of people in society, that's not true at all.

No, they use money to put food on the table, literally. Right. Yeah, no, I mean, I had moments where our family was negative and in danger of, we lost the business. And my mom also a nurse and in danger of going bankrupt and my dad almost going to jail because he couldn't pay his taxes. Like, these were very acute things that in my mind, this is why I asked you like, how did it affect you, that fear? Because I had that fear for a long time. Oh, I still have that fear, which is very irrational. You have that fear still of losing everything.

everything and having no money. It's, I mean, and it's very irrational, right? Completely irrational now. But it's in the background, right? And I don't think you ever lose it. I think it's really hard to truly forget. I have not lost it, but it definitely has not manifested itself as acutely now, because when I was younger, I was like, I have to get money and power quickly.

Yeah. So it wasn't, it was, in your case, you said you mentioned it was a fear. For me, it was a fear that led me, I think, to be hyper-aggressive. and cutthroat in I have to get money and power as quickly as possible before this all collapses and burns around me. That was actually my mindset for a long time. I was like a gladiator who just, I literally, this is why the movie, Gladiator is my favorite film and along with Blade Runner and like resonated with so much because I felt my whole life. I was a moment away like a gladiator in a ring from dying. So I just had to put my best fight on the table every time.

Every time out I had to fight to the death. That's probably why I had a weird reputation in the industry because everybody's like, why is this guy fighting on it for every single point of contention? It doesn't make any sense. I mean, if you make some money, it does take that away. But it hasn't gone away for you. You're still thinking about it once in a while.

I mean, I'm able to look down and look around and I can put everything in perspective, but way back in the background, right? You know, you wake up and you're like, oh, you know, oh, it's actually okay, right? But, and then where it really matters for me is like, I want that, I want people to create wealth. Yes. I want people to be able to create wealth.

I know that that's the core of what you're doing too. And I think that's why I'm, you know, actually a venture capitalist is I actually want to find people who are just like me who experienced this, but are capable of sitting down in front of a computer making a thing for a billion people. And, you know, there's a way out, right? It's exhilarating to think that a person coming from. nothing can sit behind a keyboard and make something that changes the world and changes their fate and yes, makes them wealthy. Why do people hate the rich now? Why is it that when we were growing up, people wanted successful people to exist in the world and we're rooting for them to succeed and rooting for them to become wealthy and famous? And we almost were excited for Bill Gates to

become a billionaire. We were excited to see Jeff Bezos win. It was an exciting and now it's abhorrent. What's happened? Where do we go wrong? I mean, the wealth inequality has been pretty insane and that's structural and you're sort of almost a salient feature

of fiat currencies. So that's where we're at, right? Unprecedented wealth inequality. Well, explain what that means in terms of the fiat and currencies and why this is a feature of the system, maybe not a bug. Or maybe it is a bug.

I don't know if you feel it's a feature or a bug, but why does this system we have set up create this possibility? I actually first heard about this problem when I was working at Palantir, working on hedge fund software for Peter Thiel's hedge fund, and one of the books they made us all read was this book called The Dollar Crisis, which is actually a really interesting book. The other one that everyone knows to read is the sovereign individual, obviously. But between those two books, you get actually a really interesting view on What is a dollar and did it mean something before and what does it mean now?

And the really interesting feature of fiat currency is that it is not backed by anything. And that was true up until really normalization of relations with China and then Nixon taking us off of the gold standard. Not saying that we need to go back on the gold standard, but this is historical. Suddenly the US dollar was the reserve currency for all of the other nations. That's how we do our trade. people buy oil and dollars. And honestly, the U.S. is massively the beneficiary of being able to print as many of those as possible. And if anything, we're in the middle of such a crisis that, hey, let's print more.

Yeah. That's, I think, actually, a really strange situation to be in. You know, we want more money printing right now because that's actually staving off what could have been a worse Great Depression than the Great Depression. Yeah, it's easy to be cynical about those $1,200 check. or whatever it was, or raising the unemployment, 50%, whatever the basic was, 200 to 600, depending on state you're in, making it whatever, 500 to 800 to these things seem like small things, but they're big swings when you think of the tens of millions of people receiving them. And you would agree the standard for the entire world, though, has gone up.

So we have in some way an optics problem for entrepreneurship and the polarization of wealth. People are looking at the example of Jeff Bezos and saying the entire system is broken when they don't look at, oh my God, look at all of the jobs created in the world. And that before COVID, we were at record unemployment at a time when they told us automation was going to lead to massive depression era unemployment. and it never happened. And the opposite happened. So strange, right?

Yeah. And there are all sorts of crazy macro effects from the printing of money and just, I mean, look at every growth stage company with the crazy valuations. You know, we work in others, you know, SoftBank Vision. And all of these things are connected to just this idea that dollars are seeking yield at all costs. And the only pure yield there is is what happens with our portfolio companies and some of the the ones too. But some of them are sort of, they just look like the other stuff. They look like what could provide yield. And that's the difficult thing about late stage valuations today. You know, there are Theranos is in there too. Yeah, you have Theranos or Fab.com, which was an

interesting startup that went to a billion. I knew somebody who had like 5% ownership of that. And, you know, they were buying net jet cards thinking that they hit the lottery. And they couldn't. They were basically in a position where that went to zero before anybody was able to sell any shares. Are you a believer in UBI? Do you think that giving people some base amount of compensation or money each month would give them the ability to be more entrepreneurial? Do you think it will create sloth and people will not be motivated or have purpose

and, you know, create opioid abuse and, you know, people just giving up on going to work? Because I see coming out of this COVID that there are people who are just saying, you know what, staying home is easier. And it's easier for me to just stay home. and maybe I won't go back into the workforce is too hard. Yeah. What do you think of UBI? I'm curious, your take?

I never got your take on it. I mean, my more hopeful view is that things like Patreon could exist, but for all things. So Patreon is that platform that actually supports creators, and they support incredible creators who get to basically self-actualized by, you know, humming show tunes and all kinds of stuff on YouTube. So they're creating, right?

And they're living their best lives, you know. And I think that that's really important. That's the good, version of it, right? And the tricky thing is, I'm not an economist, and so I probably don't know enough to weigh in one way or another. It sounds like a promising experiment. Things like give directly actually were illegal, I've learned in the United States, but are suspended during a pandemic. So that's an interesting experiment. Giving directly. Oh yeah, there's a nonprofit called give directly that literally just gives money to people initially in Africa and they're starting to do

some more operations here in the United States. They're just like, screw, we don't need to have like some big, you know, bake off to who should get the money, some big thinking through or scholarship process. Just give everybody a little bit of money. Take the edge off. And they're going to use it to actually better their situations, right? They're not going to, you know, just drink it away. They're actually going to make capital improve.

They're going to be rational self-interested actors generally, right? There will be extreme cases of people not using it properly. but by and large, people are, you know, smart. They're actually, they're trustworthy with money, and they're going to try to invest it, especially if you give it to the woman. It turns out, yeah, women actually are better stewards of capital than men. Yeah, I think if you're actually worrying about it getting blown on booze and beer,

I think giving it to women probably have a better outcome than just giving it to guys who maybe don't think this through as well. I think we can say that. How's Instacart done during all this chaos? I know you're an early investor in Instagram. it. How are they doing through the pandemic? I know that their service went 10x or 3x, who knows, what it is. Yeah, it's been amazing. I mean, I use it all the time and we're really thankful for it because, shoot, it's just, you know, less. It's, I can use it with my parents. You know, they're still in

Fremont. I know my wife's using it with her parents and I think it's been really, really great. Yeah. And what do you think about the profitability of that sector? Can it be profitable, Uber Eats, Doordash, Grubhubh, Instacart. People have been talking and a lot of hand-wringing around, hey, is this delivery ever going to be profitable, or is it just a venture-backed competition that's causing it to be unprofitable? How do you think about that in Capital's role in it?

Yeah, I mean, I've seen the models, and the reality is, and the thing that people aren't talking about that they should be is density. So these models are highly unprofitable when you start off, and they become very profitable once you have density. And density is a function of how much money you have for tech. and for customer acquisition cost, right?

Yeah, for customer acquisition cost and long-term value, right? So this is a little bit of a spreadsheet exercise, but, and this is the hard part about being a startup founder. Like you are actually running almost a scientific experiment and you have to, you know, work towards the metrics. And, you know, the best companies out of this space will be profitable and they will be really great businesses. But, you know, as you know, competition is the enemy of profit.

profitability. Especially when there's unlimited capital in the world and Masayoshi son or whoever is deciding, hey, I'm just going to give money to Uber and to DoorDash. And you have the same investor giving money to two parties. I think he might also be, is he also an Instacard? The interesting thing is Masayoshi Sun's part of his plan is actually to buy large chunks of competing different concerns and then have them not compete. right which instantly

it's what he did with telecoms back in the 90s so this is something that has happened in the past that will continue to happen

yeah so maybe he'll tell DoorDash hey and Uber I know he was pushing DoorDash Uber to buy DoorDash at some point now Uber's looking

at Grubhub it might be a better deal for them do you think that the that government should be trying to regulate

the food delivery business at this early stage or and do you think that why are people thinking that these are predatory

services are still losing money. It doesn't make any sense to me. Yeah, it's tough. Some of this is mixed up with the politics around how is tech being perceived, certainly in certain local jurisdictions like in San Francisco. And I think it's tough. Like I grew up in tech. I grew up in the Bay Area in tech. And so tech is actually what got me in to, you know, it changed my life. Right. It gave me the privilege that I have now. And that's the difficult thing being caught between that, because I see both sides, right? All the people who I grew up with, they either work in tech or they left, right?

And that's the tension. And you have a lot of people who have been here for 30, 40 years, a beneficiary of incredible amounts of wealth creation in their home. And that's been protected by Prop 13, which means they can stay there forever. And I think that that's actually really good for it. these are retirees. These are people who don't have a lot of free income. Their tax basis doesn't get raised. So if their home value, if they bought their home for 50,000 in the 70s and it's now worth two million, they're paying tax on 50,000, not two million. And that's the unintended consequence,

which is then you have people who their entire net wealth is in their home. Right. And do you want more building? You know, if you build a duplex or triplex that makes space for millennials or makes space like you know unfortunately the only people who can actually afford it because there's no building is tech people and so then you connect you know do we make space for young people no they're only tech people we hate tech people right it's just a straight line between personal interest and hatred of a group which is really weird the people who you really I mean it's what they really should do is have some kind of maybe it's like a trailing 20 year tax thing so you know if you bought your home in 1970, you know, and it's 1990, you're paying 1980s taxes, right? So you just,

you're, you get a 20 year mulligan or something or a 30 year mulligan on your house, which would be the equivalent of when you stop working and you have the 30 year retirement, right? You could come up with something reasonable where, you know, anybody who's, you know, got a home that's that much older could move on, but it just seems to me like for this city to be anti-tech now when Twitter and Square just said, we're a work-from-home first company. Not you have that option. We're work from home first. Commercial real estate in San Francisco is going to go down.

What percent do you think? I mean... You know, what's tough is I think the big ones are going to leave. And I did a quick survey on my Twitter. And only 20% of people said they were going totally remote. 70% said they were hybrid. So what do you think that number was previous? If you had, if you done that survey,

5, 10% maybe tops, you know? Or hybrid or, yeah. I mean, it's been a hot market for a long time. So I think prices will come down, but occupancy, I bet, will actually stay pretty constant for, I don't make space for people who are going to stay. Interesting. Yeah, I've been talking to a lot of companies and they're just like not renewing our lease. and that to me is like, whoa.

So the big companies might not add, maybe they'll sublet on the margins, so you're probably right there. But I just think a lot of these companies are like, you know what, if employees want to work from home and our second line item or third line item is facilities, well...

We can do something about that. Yeah, people are going to just cut it. And then this is what I think is the route. I'm curious you think of my theory of like the route out of... This, you know, will be certainly a recession and could be worse. You're a company that has 100 employees. You go full remote.

You get rid of your office space costing you $50,000 a month. You say, or you wind up saving a million a year on that. Okay, well, that's like 7, 8, 9, 10 people. You know, highly paid six figure salaries, 10 people making $100,000 that you could add or you could just be more profitable. You could throw a million to the bottom line. Then you stop having to pay the San Francisco premium, which was $20K, on top of a salary?

What do you think, a remote salary? The difference, 20, 30K, 40K? It might be more. Might be 50. It's pretty significant. Yeah. So if it was 20, 30, 40K extra, now that goes away. And Facebook already said, Zuckerberg said, if you leave San Francisco, we're adjusting your

salary down. Yeah. I'm not curious to see the numbers from that. That is pretty, I mean, Zuckerberg is so hardcore. Yeah. He makes everybody else look like softies. He's just like, yeah, no, you can totally work from home. taking back 30% of your salary if you do.

It's crazy. But this to me means companies will be that much more profitable. And that means they will then start investing again because they'll be sitting there saying, oh, you know what? We cleared a million dollars in rent. The next 10 hires cost us 30% less. And 10 people left the company. We reorged during COVID.

Now we're like lean and mean. Are you seeing that possibility of like lean? Well, the good thing is there will still be a marketplace. And so the interesting thing is Facebook can, Facebook is I think probably anchoring at that because they know that it'll actually play out in the marketplace. And if it's not legal for them to talk to the other companies and collude about that.

But if they come out and publicly say it, then more of the other companies will choose to do that. And it's actually a form of public collusion, which is kind of interesting. So I didn't think of it that way. So they come out of the gate and say, you're going to be up to 50% you can apply to your work from home

but in fairness to people who didn't get the cost of living adjustment that you got moving to San Francisco if you choose to move out you're going to lose that cost of living that we gave you coming here because it would be unfair for the other person living in Tennessee or Austin

to not get it. So the game theory is put it out there and then we'll see if it sticks if other people adopt it too it'll stick and if other people don't I bet you they get rid of that they just, you know, it's going to be a market price, whether they're remote or in the Bay Area either way. And right now it's about what other people are going to do when they get remote.

This is like high-level game and gamesmanship with Google, isn't it? And Apple, they're basically saying like, okay, Google, Apple, because those are two companies that have not been worked from home either. Yeah. Well, those, they go there. Yeah. And, you know, they got the stake in the ground, right? And, you know, it's not legal for them to have a email conversation that'll come out, in discovery, it's already, you know, that has already happened before. That happened before. That happened before. Yeah.

So the only other way you could do it is, you know, publicly do it. Trial balloon. That's unassailable, right? Yeah, it's a trial balloon. It's like, here's what we chose. You choose what you want. Yeah. Do you think Google, Facebook, Instagram, let's just go with Google, Facebook and Uber as

outliers, do you think they could have been built remote and they could have grown to the heights they grew as a remote organization? or did they need to have that energy in a building somewhere with a car driving leader to hit those notes? What do you think? I actually think that you needed Slack and you needed a lot of these tools that actually now enable it and you just didn't have those tools before.

Yes, if they had those tools, you think it could have been built? Probably. Yeah. See, that's the thing the big unknown is, I think it's very easy for a company like Facebook or Twitter to say, hey, we're moving to when they're in the, that we're growing 30% year over year phase. You're scaling.

You're scaling. People know how to do it. It's not like there's this intensity where we have to beat Friendster and MySpace. We need to be in a war room. And that war room mentality, I think that that's going to be the big unlock is everybody's going to leave San Francisco.

Everybody's going to go remote. And then you're going to see this like group of crazies say, we're only hiring in an office. We're going to be here. We're going to do it the old school way. And they're going to just start kicking ass. And maybe then people are like, oh, that's just too much of an advantage for us not to have.

Do you think it's an advantage that everybody's in the same room or a disadvantage? Oh, it's definitely an advantage. It's definitely unproven yet if you can get to an IPO class company consistently. I think it's possible. It's almost certainly possible. It's just a matter of how much harder it is

to actually implement the systems and actually do it. And so I don't think there's absolutes here. But if you have choice, choices. People are just making different choices because they have to make choices. And I think we're going to find out. Well, that was the question about WordPress. And I'm a huge fan of Matt Mullingweg's and somebody was like, listen, they built a billion dollar company. And what somebody said, and it was a little bit crass in this conversation, that should have been a $10 billion company.

And if it had been work in the same place, it would have been a 10 billion. And the 37 signals folks are like, we should have, you know, we work from home. It's been working for us. But let's face it, Asana became a much bigger company than Basecamp. So, I, I think what these lessons of the people who've done it before have proven is you'll have a happier workforce, you'll have an easier life, you will have a smaller outcome. That's, I think, what the lesson will ultimately be. And I think you're right, the jury's still out on, can you build a, let's call it a $10 billion company, a hundred billion dollar company in this regard? Do you think people working from home give up opportunity if the CEO and the management team are

in a central headquarters? In other words, they're out of sight, they're out of mind, they're just not going to have the same opportunity. I mean, I think that's why hybrid is actually the hardest possible way to do it. It's way better to be perfectly in one location where everyone has a level playing field or perfectly remote where everyone has a level playing field. I mean, it's one of the reasons why we funded around like two years ago. We didn't know that COVID-19 was going to happen. Around for the people who don't know is a Zoom competitor that's built specifically for hybrid teams.

So you can actually open your laptop and your designer sitting right next to you will open their laptop, it puts you in a session automatically. You click that link over to someone else, and there you have three little chat heads of you talking and collaborating over a document, a design, whatever you need. And it can be persistent, right? Yeah. Yeah, the whole idea is that it should be as easy to jump into one of these sessions, a Zoom with echo termination without sort of the rigmarole of, you know, getting into this. If you can have as easy as tapping on someone's shoulder impromptu conversations about collaborative docs, then that's actually how you can do hybrid well. And it's basically power distance, right?

If you are remote and you're on Zoom and everyone's looking at a screen, well, in the meeting, they can just read cues and have a much faster conversation. And over there, you're like reading a transcript, right? So actually the medium matters a lot because it sets management sort of distance. I mean, these psychological factors matter a lot in social software, which is kind of obvious at some level. But I think that in social software, we don't think about these simple psychological facts enough. Yeah, it definitely is going to take a major adjustment.

I don't know if you saw like the away founder was derided because she was like hardcore. and I was like, you know what? Just looking at the transcripts of what she said, if somebody said those out loud in person, they would not seem horrible. They seem maybe crass or, you know, maybe Kurt is the right word in a slack room. And it's almost like, yeah, you know,

the away founder maybe needs to like, as people call it, the is-s sandwich, say something nice, say something that needs to be improved, i.e. criticism and then say something nice. And literally like, if you just do that on Slack, hey, great job on X, terrible job on Y, good job on Z, you can like literally avoid half the problem is like just some basic, you know, level setting of little things.

They don't remember what you say. They remember how you make them feel. It is true. It is true. Like literally that there is nothing truer than that. And I think for this next generation there. they have a different view of work. What do you think?

You're the tail end of Gen Z, but you're investing, of Gen X, but you're investing in Gen Z, Millennials. Yeah, we're sort of right in there. Gen Y, I'm Gen Y. No, you're definitely Gen X. Really? You were born 1980? I'm the youngest Gen X then, 81. Yeah, I think you're still Gen X.

I think up to 84 is Gen X or something like that. I'm on the cusp. You're on the cusp. What do you feel more like an alternative gen X or more like a... I definitely love, you know, some of the gen X, you know, some of the gen X's next band's a little bit more. Yeah, okay. Yeah, let's go with the music part.

I'll go with that. So you like Nirvana or... Yeah, yeah, Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins. Smashing Pumpkins. Yeah, there you go. There you go. There you go. Yeah. Perfect.

I'd say most underrated rock band in the last 30 years is definitely smashing pumpkins 100%. So you... How do you... How do you find in the millennial workforce that's different, if at all? From the approach that we took as Gen Xers who wanted to like, you know, take our seat at the table and kind of, that was enough. Do you feel there's

anything different or do you, maybe all these like self-selecting founders, they're all the same. They're just founders. It's funny. I actually can't really tell when I talk with people, sometimes I can't really tell what age they are. That's fascinating, yeah. But, you know, around Y Combinator, we would spend time with 22-year-olds, 27-year-olds, and we'd talk to them all the same. And then the best founders, you wouldn't be able to tell, right? That was actually one of the tests was the absolute best founders, it doesn't matter what, you know, they might actually, you might find out later that they were 20 or 22, but, and you might be surprised by that because, you know, you couldn't tell what their age was. So the best founders are sort of like that.

It sort of doesn't matter. Yeah, that is definitely the case. I think if you look at founders, they just self-select for people who want to change the world and who are driven. And so you don't get this millennial kind of like, they're too soft, they're snowflakes kind of thing because they're not part of the millennial. It doesn't work. As a founder, you end up learning that you have to go after the thing that actually works. And there are lots of things that don't work that, you know, they don't give you the outcome

that you want. And if it doesn't work, then the whole thing doesn't work. Yeah. And so the sooner people realize, the better, honestly. All right. We're sitting here a year from now. What's our conversation going to be looking back at this time? Oh, man.

Hopefully we have a vaccine. That would be great. I'd be truly great. Things are sort of returning to normal, right? To me, it's like, I hope the money printers work. So all this stimulus we're putting in actually amounts to something other than just debt. Yeah, that's right. Yeah.

It's interesting to watch like the PPE loans and all this stuff. It feels like the government did. This is the thing that's confounding about our federal government. It seems like they were able to so quickly send money. to companies. I saw, you know, a bunch of companies getting PPE, this payroll protection stuff and these other loans in three weeks. And then we can't get the country to wear masks. Or we can't get testing done. And it's like, we can really mobilize. I think it was 500 billion in loans and, you know, trillions and stimulus overall. They really moved quickly with the money printing, but they couldn't get consensus or, testing or masks. So weird. Yeah. I would argue it's the filter bubble, right? You know, our societies are becoming a lot less intermingled. And the result is you hang out with, you you know, basically hang out with people who are just like you all day. And actually the only

interaction sometimes people have, especially right now because we're all locked in, you know, in shelter in place is that, you know, meeting people who we disagree with on, Twitter, Facebook comments, you know? And now the solution on Twitter is now you can write a post. And this is actually my idea from like five years ago. I wrote a blog post about it. What if you could tweet and only your followers could reply, people you follow? Or people, yeah, people you follow as opposed to people your following could reply.

And they just launched it. And I thought to myself, oh, no, what a bad suggestion I made. The best part of Twitter is getting challenged by people who disagree with you. Yeah. So now we're going to change it a lot. It's going to be an interesting. effect. What's going to happen, you think? It's just going to get boring? We're going to be a lot more in our echo chambers and that'll make us feel safe. Maybe a lot of us need to feel safe right now,

especially people who have a lot of followers. It might be an engagement hack. Like they might be finding they have to do it. And that's probably what their tests are showing them. What do you mean by that? I mean, if the experience of people who tweet the most degrades a lot, engage Broadly will go down simply because they won't tweet as much and you know, that's a spiral that you don't want on a social network like that So when you tweet you get pain and suffering Yeah, therefore you don't tweet I think a lot of people like have stopped tweeting simply because of that, right? It's a lot more intense people a lot more anonymous accounts and BOTS are just brutal

Yeah, they're just brutally just a I mean I went to the YouTube comments on my CNBC hit recently and I was delighted at the level of the discourse. Yeah, YouTube comments is actually a little better now. Like, literally, it's the flippening, right? Like, we had the flip. It's a flippening of Twitter was the intelligent discussion. YouTube was the trolls and chaos where they were just like, screw that fat guy, screw that fat Greek,

screw that Asian guy, fuck him, you know? Like, it was just literally personal attacks on how you looked. Like how literally people were like, fuck Jason Calacanus, that fat Greek. and they're like, Gary Tan, four eyes, just like literal personal attacks. I know, it's de-evolved, hasn't it? And this is something that's solvable. Yeah.

I mean, why does Twitter not just solve the bot problem? I should have a button that says, I don't want to see replies or I don't want reply. The easier button would have been, do not allow replies to people who've been on Twitter for more than less than X days or years. So I can say, I don't want replies from anybody whose account is under a year old. And so in order to participate with me, you've got to be a year old. Yeah.

Or I follow you. Well, Twitter's a public company now, right? Yeah, that does change. It's actually that much harder to shift something. It has to be existential for a public company to switch on a dime. It's not a startup anymore. And that's why startups can exist. Exactly.

All right. Listen, Gary, it's delightful to have you on the pod. You're always interesting. You can follow Gary Tan. That's two R's G-A-R-R-Y-T-A-N or his amazing YouTube channel where he's publishing weekly, very beautiful videos, which is at YouTube.com slash Gary Tan. Yep, that's it. And then you can DM me on Instagram for now as long as I can reply to everyone.

You're encouraging people to slide into your DMs. Yeah, and I will try and help, you know, startup advice. It's actually given me a lot of interesting ideas for tweets and an episode. So this is my version of talking to my users. It is a great way to find out what is a good topic for. So limited time only. I'd like to keep it open, but, you know, Jason tells me it's not possible. No, you can.

You just people, what you'll find is one out of ten people will berate you for not getting back to them. And then you have to, what I do with that case is I write back, I'm so sorry. I was on deadline for the next book or I'm so sorry. It's been a little bit crazy for me now. And then they almost universally apologize for flying off the hand. There's a human being. There's a human being on the other end. When people, sometimes people are like, this is the fourth time I've emailed you.

And I'm like, okay, you email me a list of four startup ideas and it's 6,000 words. Like, I have books I need to read. You know, I have books I need to write that are 6,000 words is a big piece of. Like, come on. This is where Instagram helps me a lot because there's a character limit. Is there? And so they, and people are always trying to say, can I send email you, send me a deck? And what I'm saying is, can we just talk about it here?

Which is actually a mirror of what a YC interview is like. like. You actually have to, you actually bring down the aperture all the way down. And then you can have a very high bend with conversation. And it forces them to be a lot more thoughtful about what they're putting out. And then we can have a conversation. So I think that that's an interesting discovery. But that is the number one complaint and bad feeling I've had as I'm not a competitor, YC, we're co-existors. There's too many startups really for it to be competitive. But universally, when people say they went to their YC and they had a bad experience, which typically a bad experience means I didn't get selected. So it's sort of like it would have been a great. experience if they were selected, but they say, oh, they didn't understand it. They spoke for three or four minutes and I only, they didn't understand my idea. Only at six minutes. But you're saying the way you guys designed that was to purposely see how they do in just 10 minutes. Every billion dollar company that has ever passed through YC passes that test with flying colors. I mean, obviously. What is the test exactly? Describe the test for me, which is. In 10 minutes, can I understand? I actually did a YouTube video about this. So how to ace your

YC interview. But high level is in 10 minutes. Can I, can I? Can someone who's reasonably smart understand who's it for, what is it, and do we believe that you're the ones to do it? And that's the bar. That's it. Has YC become? Can you have a conversation? That makes total sense.

Has YC become too big? The number of companies each year, do you think? Classic YC is amazing. And then the hard part for me is like, I don't know how to fund things that are not software. So I think they're experimenting. And the reality is we go back to the first principles, which is there's two. much money in the world. And this is actually a very direct, like what you're doing, what YC is doing, all of these things

are very important in the world of infinite capital because everyone downstream from us believes that there aren't enough good ideas. And that's ridiculous. There are so many things that are broken in society. Why are they not being fixed? Well, they're not being fixed because we have educational systems and funding systems and all of these things that are ossified and stuck, right? go into these organizations and they never come out, right? And what a founder can do, and when

we work at a startup, what you get to do is do something that's brand new. Crack it open. Yeah. So people are, you know, here's this like giant infinite pool of capital and then here's this like infinite number of crazy ass problems that need to be solved. And in the middle is like, we need to help these people. Like, you know, you need to like, how do we put them in the right place where they can start these businesses, they employ thousands of people and make like a billion $100 billion in GDP. You know, the thing is, it's so easy to write that $100 million check in Twitter, Facebook, Uber, Coinbase, whatever, when they've hit scale and they're at past 50 or $100 million

in revenue. But then taking that same $100 million and writing what would be, I would say, $101 million checks or $1,100,000 checks. Like, it's so much harder to write $1,000, $100,000 checks. It takes so much more effort. And that really is where I think the log jam is and where TechStars and YC and Launch Accelerate. This is where I think these sorting, I consider what YC does, what TechStars does and what we do is a sorting mechanism, an angelist. It's just a first level sort on the deluge of 100,000 pitches and getting it down to 2,000.

And then it's up to seed funds like yours or Alien Lee. or Hunter and Homebrew and Hunter doesn't follow me on Twitter. Really? What'd you say to him? I said you're never coming on this week in startups again. I really had like a...

No, I didn't say that. Oh, man. No, he can come on this week, start at every once, but I was like, he only follows a thousand, so I think he's one of those precious people. And I'm very...

I mean, we post, I think, five clips of the show every day. So I guess that could be annoying to people who are not fans of the show or me. And I don't think Hunter likes me, so, no, he does. I think... I've had him on the pot a bunch of times.

Anyway, he did his whole thing where he tweeted. And he said, only his people can reply. And I was like, all right, well, I guess that's the end of our relationship. There we go. All right, listen, you've been very generous with your time. Thank you for hanging out. I really appreciate it.

And just, you know what, it's just, thank you for coming on this, just because I'm lonely. And aside from the fact that people get benefits. This is just like us, two-person room on Clubhouse, but instead. This would literally be us hanging out with Bill Lee, having drinks in the lobby of the St. Regis, like we did, whatever, 10, 15 years ago when we're hanging out. Like, this is what I miss most about this shelter in place. It's just the ability to hang out and just chew the fat, right? Well, so we were able to do this with us and our, you know, 100,000 friends on the internet. 200,000.

We'll hear this episode. 200,000. Sorry. For sure. Many hundreds of thousands of people. Many hundreds of thousands. All right, everybody. Follow Gary Tang.

Subscribe. Please go subscribe to his YouTube. YouTube.com slash Gary Tan, G-A-R-R-Y-T-A-N. He's one of the greats and it's great. You know, I've always been. one of the most considered and smartest folks I met in the industry and it's just great to see you winning. I like to see good people win, you know? It's a nice feeling. All right, Gary, continued success and we'll see you all next time on this week and serves. Bye-bye.