This Week in Startups - Google ends WFH, $SNOW earnings + Stillmark's Alyse Killeen Angel S6 E7 + Pallet CEO Kai Han | E1400

Episode Date: March 4, 2022

First Jason and Molly cover Google is bringing employees back to the office three times per week starting in early April (1:41), Snowflake dropping 15% after reporting strong earnings, Slack’s slowing growth within Salesforce. After the news, Molly sits down with Alyse Killeen of Stillmark to continue Season 6 of Angel: First-time funds (38:10). We wrap with Producer Rachel's interview with Kai Han of Pallet, which is building a platform for creators to curate job boards (1:11:50). 00:00 Jason and Molly intro today’s show, Google back in the office, the Jason and WeWork saga, Angel w/ Alyse Killeen, OKB w/ Kai Han 01:40 Google sends employees back to the office 14:43 Ourcrowd - Check out the deal of the week at https://ourcrowd.com/angel 15:53 Snowflake stock repricing, Slack's product velocity, managing a remote company 29:43 LinkedIn Jobs - Go to https://linkedIn.com/angel and post your first job for free. 31:16 Jason and WeWork, donate medical supplies to Ukraine at https://flexport.org/donate 36:44 Embroker - Get an extra 10% off insurance for your business at https://Embroker.com/twist 38:10 Angel S6: Alyse Killeen of Stillmark, a $30M Bitcoin Infrastructure fund 01:11:50 OK Boomer: Pallet CEO Kai Han Donate to Ukraine: https://www.flexport.org/donate Check out Stillmark: https://www.stillmark.com FOLLOW Alyse: https://twitter.com/alysekilleen FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis FOLLOW Molly: https://twitter.com/mollywood

All right, everybody, it's another Friday variety show, getting you ready for Happy Hour. First up, we do have some news, lots of it. Google is forcing employees back to the office three times per week, starting in early April. And this is going to be a great thing for startups. I'll explain why when we get to that new segment. Then we got a little rapid fire on the state of the tech industry, snowflake dropping 15% slack slowing growth within Salesforce, and a little update on Jason's continuing spat with WeWork.

Yeah, very interesting. And after the news, Molly is going to sit down with Elise from Stillmark for a great first-time founder interview as part of our season six of Angel. And then we are not done. Not done. Friday. No. Big show. Just keeps given this show. Then we wrap up Friday with another edition of OK Boomer from producer Rachel. All right. It's going to be a great show. Stick with us. Season six of Angel is brought to you by Our Crowd. Our Crowd helps you invest early in PREA IPO companies alongside professional VCs. If you're interested in investing, you can join our crowd for free at OUR-C-R-O-W-D.com slash angel. LinkedIn jobs. A business is only as strong as its people, and every hire matters. Post your first job for free at LinkedIn.com slash angel. And in broker.

And broker's startup insurance program helps startup secure the most important types of insurance at a lower cost with less hassle. save up to 20% off of the traditional insurance today at imbroker.com slash twist. And while you're there, get an extra 10% off using offer code twist. All right, we have a lot of news to get to today. We, of course, also have a great angel interview. We've got Rachel reporting. First, though, I want to talk about all that traffic in the Bay Area. I was not making it up.

People are going back to work and in some cases whether they want to or not. Okay, here we go. This is going to get interesting. weekly office attendance is spiking across major U.S. cities as offices start to fully reopen and restrictions start to end. Google, this was the most notable one I saw on why I put it on the docket, Google just announced they are forcing all employees back to the office for three days per week starting in April. On Wednesday, Google told employees in the Bay Area they would have to be back at work three days a week starting April 4th. In contrast, Twitter and Slack have allowed employees to work from home indefinitely. Interestingly, Google employees who moved out of the Bay Area had their salaries adjusted based on where they moved to.

This is a move that is complex. And I could argue both sides of it, but it does seem fair that if people, if two people working in Austin and one of them came to the Bay Area and got an extra 25K a year for a cost of living adjustment, if they go back to Austin and the person who never moved, why would they get paid more than the other one? But incredibly hard to execute, I can't imagine those conversations, but apparently they're happening. ultimately you're taking money away from people according to the Washington and potentially taking people away from these states according to the Washington Post. Some Google employees wound up leaving North Carolina. Employees in North Carolina wrote a letter to management protesting the salary updates and then left North Carolina after they moved there because they realized their salaries

would be lower than they expected. I mean, if you went there with the salary that you had and bought real estate appropriately, you know, or structured your life appropriately and then Google said you're getting a pay cut, I could imagine that being difficult for folks. All right. Well, I looked at this. And of course, I just thought selfishly about myself and the advantage that startups would have. Yep. If you think about, you know, what's happened here, the most talented people moved to Tahoe or to North Carolina or wherever they moved, they have options. knowledge workers have options, especially since

if Google's going to say you've got to be in the office three days a week, that's tantamount to saying you have to live in the Bay Area. Or you have to get a hotel two nights or something or commute two hours from Napa if you moved all the way up there. So they're basically saying, come back, but you can work Monday and Fridays from home and just three days a week. And you know how this is going to go. It's going to be three days a week and there's going to be four and then it's going to be five.

We'll try to get everything back to normal. Yep. But this is great. As I tweeted, it was great for us. My startups, startups we invest in who are offering full remote are going to have countless Googlers to choose from. Because ain't nobody want to get on a bus and commute for 2.5 hours.

No. That's not a question. Not going to. Now, I missed the office. I'll be honest. And if I had my druthers, I would like us to be in the office twice a week. That would be what I would do. I'm not telling anybody on our team we're going to do this.

So don't worry, everybody. things are working phenomenal, but you think it would be cool if we had like a Monday, Thursday thing, or maybe a once a week thing, who knows? But for now, you know, I don't see how you practically do this. So this is brave. I don't know, Molly, what do you think? Are people going to quit en masse? Or do you think people want to go back or it's a mixed bag?

I'm sure it's a mixed bag. And I'm sure some people will leave, you know, and or leave. Some people might like their jobs so much and be so wedded to their salaries that they'll leave the states that they move to and move back. that's incredibly disruptive and difficult. If you make a life choice to relocate to a different state, especially if you have kids or you've really set up a life somewhere to decide to move back just so you can be in the office versus stay where you are and get a job in a hot market that's also remote,

I think you're going to see some people leave. It's also, it's sort of like, it's up to every company to set its own culture. And if Google is saying, you know, kind of like, Coinbase said, we're optimizing for the employees that we want. That's certainly Google's prerogative, but I think your point is the larger one, which is like, great, awesome, we'll take them. This is like a crazy game of chicken. We got a lot of companies that need engineers.

Yeah, it's a crazy game of chicken. Or marketing people or whatever, yeah. None of us operate, this is one of the interesting things about business, life, society. You're not operating in a vacuum. You have to play the game on the course. it as it's designed. And the way the game is designed right now, the more talented you are, the more opportunities you have

and the majority of companies would trade you being at home to have access to that level of employee. Yeah. I mean, there's an iOS developer in short supply and they make a quarter million dollars a year or something fantastical salary and they work

from home or they are forced to come to an office. I mean, that means they might just say, you know what, I'd rather work at a startup that's chill and go on two or three retreats a year and that's it. Yeah. And I just don't, yes, right? Like, as much as I say, every company has the choice to set their culture, I also think I would quit.

Like, if I were a Googler and I had moved or even if I hadn't moved, I mean, you know, previously managers of this kind of old school variety would make the argument that you weren't as productive at home and maybe not everyone is as productive at home. But I don't think you can look at the American economy or Google. or any of these companies and say, huh, that giant work from home experiment showed that everybody's like a lazy turd

who won't work while they're at home unsupervised without a middle manager walking by and tapping them on the shoulder every time and being like, did you get that report done? Yeah. That's not what happened. No, quite the opposite.

Quite the opposite. People were more productive and if anything, more productive to their own detriment. I think like Americans ended up working like 11 hours a day or some crazy thing like that. I think people stayed in front of their

computers because they couldn't go out because of the pandemic. So work just became pervasive and so did binging on Netflix. And so, you know, people are going to go out into the real world. Obviously, if you look at the metros, this is a great site that I love called socket site.com. They cover real estate. And this is a report on weekly office attendance through selected metro areas through February 16th. So not that long ago. And as you can see, man, they were really cranking over 50% of people in Austin were back in offices and we were just getting above 25%

for some other cities like Los Angeles. San Francisco, the lowest. Yep. They didn't nobody want to go to San Francisco. That's a disaster. That has more to do with the crime than I think, the fear of COVID even, or probably a combination. That's a little bit of both.

It's a profoundly unpleasant experience either way. But yeah, I mean, you can see that Omicron Cliff hit so hard. It just stops it all cold. And I think that there are also people who really do miss being in the office and who do perform better in an office. It's sort of like there isn't, there's no one size fits all solution. And it's also, I would, it's tricky as a CEO to make this call, I think, either way. Because if you say it's optional, you're still going to put people in a position where like some folks have meetings in the hallways where decisions get made and, you know, maybe the single mom like me, it's not that optional or that easy to come in.

And so I get left out of that decision. And there are inequities that are introduced by the hybrid model and there are inequities that are introduced by the force everyone to be in the office model. Like there isn't really a great, it is a tough call for a business. It's a really good point because if you're near the locus of power, if Zuckerberg or Tim Cook decides, hey, I'm going to be, or Reed Hastings, like, I'm going to be in the office every day and I'm going to go have lunch. and you're the person who decided

and it's a hybrid situation you get to choose well the people who see Reed Hastings at lunch and get to sit with them for 90 minutes Reed Hastings knows who they are and if everybody at Square and Twitter is working at home well then to Jack running Square block well everybody's the same

thumbnail postage size Zoom window and so it's it is going to create inequities and you know you're going to have to shine I think if you're remote in that hybrid situation where you get to choose. Yeah. So I get it.

I get that companies are in a bind. It's a tricky one. But it is hard. Look, after two, two and a half years, if you had people change everything about their lives, move away, go to different places, like, all of a sudden being like, we can flip, you could have flipped back to where you were a year ago, even a year and a half ago, but two and a half years of living in a certain way is a routine. That's an embedded routine.

And to just sort of try to turn that. off and be like, get back in your cars for an hour and a half each way, which is just a waste of time and gas and all of that. Like, that is not necessary. If it was a two and a half hour commute total every day, you take that two and a half hour commute and you just split it between the employee and the company, which is what I thought basically happened. In some cases, employees may have worked more. In some cases, people might be screwing around at home and, you know, doing like bursty little bits of work and then, you know, taking three hour breaks, whatever.

If you just look at it, I think net net, employer gets one hour of it, employee gets one hour of it, everybody's cool with that sort of situation. And then what it did for me, I think as a manager, you had to adapt. And I just started really looking very hard at results and figuring out how do you actually track people's results? And I looked at the inputs, you know, in venture, it's pretty easy. How many meetings did you do? And did you write coverage of those companies?

And I can look at the documents. If you can do 20 meetings a week as an associate, three a day, four a day, whatever it is, and you can write them up and you spend two hours on each, I guess I'm happy. Yeah. And if you do 15 or 30 or 20, does it actually matter? I'll just factor it into the model that there'll be some people who are better, some people who are slower. And it just all comes out in the end and just got to look at outcomes, which is challenging

because we previously didn't manage people pretty well. It was like, we need to have four people in this department. That's what the budget says, but did we ever look at what's the output? And that's, I think, the key. With developers and salespeople, specifically, the output is clear. There's lines of code and commits, and there's ringing the bell. Did you sell or did you not sell? Then for middle managers, I think, are the ones who were perpetrating the big fraud.

Having been a middle manager, work with middle managers. They're in their office. the door, they're watching the Yankee game, they're surfing the web, just fucking around all day. They're being strategic. They're, I'm going to do some strategic stuff. They're not doing anything. And so what I like about this is it kind of, you can eliminate this management because

you, if you're working at home, you have to self-manage, period, full stop. Yeah. And not everyone can. And that's okay. People are different. And then you... Oh, that's a great point, too. I mean, legitimately, not everyone can, right?

And that is understandable. And that's why. And so you eat... So maybe they need to work at a place where, like, what it's really going to come out to is a great shaking out. Where do you want to work that fits the way that you want to work there? I will always, turns out after five or six years of working from home, I'm going to optimize forever for flexibility. Because now I can self-manage. Yes.

Because I have no chill when it comes to work, as you may have noticed. But not everybody can and they should work at companies that can support them and who they are and how they work best. Great. It now forces you as a manager, though. If somebody needs to be managed, you just cut the ripcord. We're done here. You're fired. You need to work somewhere else.

I like the purity of this. Like, it really makes it pretty simple. If you're going to be a remote company, a person's got to self-managed. We have a simple tool for doing it, which is the SOD and the EOD. Five minutes at the end of the day. I had two or three people fight me on doing this. And it turned out, maybe they were the people who were the people who were, and actually pulling the weight that the other people were not mentioning any specific names,

but they're watching the show. I've only let go of a couple people. So they're probably, and it did great irony of ironies. You know, we had a mini civil war at this company where a couple people were like, we want work from home and unlimited vacation. I was like, I'm Jason Caliganis. Have you not been paying it to me? I also, did you Google my name?

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The huddles have helped. Where you just get into a huddle and talk about stuff. It's been almost confusing for me as somebody who was like the only person working from home. And so there was no community building. I'm like, what's happening in the huddle? Is it serious? And it turns out it's like, it's hanging out. Producers hang out in a huddle for two hours a day.

The investment teams, they hang out in a huddle for two hours a day. And the huddle could just be like, you're on mute. And then somebody says, hey, I'm working on this. Just want to deliver everyone out. Boom. And then it's silence for a little bit. Yep. Really cool feature from Slack is the huddle feature.

The huddle. Casual audio works really well. I do wonder about people like what's lost in terms of mentorship and what's lost in terms of, you know, the water cooler talk. But it is what it is. Now it's forcing me to think about professional development. And we're going to do two days of professional development after the Allens Summit in Miami. I'm just going to fly out the investment team at a minimum, probably some members of the podcasting team too.

And just go over professional development. Here's our philosophy of investing and how we work with founders and how we say yes, how we say no, and how we do pro rata. So that, again, puts it on the senior folks to be better managers. So I kind of like that. It does. And to be intentional about those moments of being. being close to the nexus of power, saying we're going to make sure, you know, we may have a remote company, but we're going to make sure that we have twice a year or thrice a year gathering

where everybody comes together and gets to know each other. And that's all, maybe that's all you need. I don't know. I mean, you save all that time. I'm laughing and being like, that's 14 minutes on remote work. Okay. So let's keep moving. Has this topic been beaten today? I think it's, you know, we, I think this is actually the moment of truth. I think like April is the moment of truth. March and April is the moment of truth because unless there's some crazy variant, we've clearly moved on from COVID as we can see. The news, I haven't seen one COVID story in six weeks. Like, it's over. And people are going to get mad at me. It's not over. If you're vaccinated, it's kind of over. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry to, I mean, you compromise people sincerely.

I mean, seriously, though, it's, you know, they have a reason to be terrified. If you're in America. People are scared. I mean, that's the other thing is people's fear. It's a fear thing. And it takes, fear takes a long time to get over. It really does. I mean, we put people in a, I think about our kids, like the kids who my son told me, he was like, yeah, my friends and I talked about it and we still want to wear masks. Because we told them for two and a half years, there is a thing in the world that will kill you. And it's hard for them to code switch into, okay, well, that's gone now. Because we're like, well, it still exists. But, you know, the vaccines were. Like, it's just. to, it's just a fear is a really, really hard thing to get over. And it takes normalizing and it takes modeling and it takes time. It takes time. And if you look at what happened during the AIDS crisis in the 80s, we were the first generation who went to sex ed class and they were like, you're going to die if you have sex. Here's condoms. Here's dendal dams. Here's everything. You're going to die. Sex equals HIV. Like they, I mean, it was, I don't know. It was scary. Right. You went through the same indoctrination. Like, probably you don't want to have sex.

Like, it's just not worth it. You're going to die. I mean, people were scared. It was really scary. And people think you could get it from kissing. I don't know if you remember that window. Like in the early to mid-80s, they're like, hey, don't be careful kissing. That could do it too.

Yeah. If you got a cut in your, remember that? If you have a cut in your mouth, if you have braces, you could get AIDS. Like, literally there was a, I remember that dialogue. Like, I had braces. And now these kids are going to go through the same thing. They're just going to think that, like, every time they get a sniffle, they're going to wind up on a ventilator. It's like, it's not actually what's happening here.

I got to look at the statistics. Okay, let's move on. Speaking of numbers, after this week in Sex Ed, let's talk about some numbers. Let's talk about a tech company, shall we? A tech company that we like, who's CEO we were beyond impressed with. However, Snowflake reported earnings for Q4 and projected slower growth in Q1. That growth was projected at 80% year over year. And yet, if you're watching this on video, you could see this chart.

It says a drop, the stock drop, like 15%. That's my bad ear, Molly. You said they were, the growth was going to slow and then you said it was projected at 80% year over year. Yep. That's going to slow to 80% year over year. In 2021, Snowflake generated $1.2 billion in revenue, which was more than double. Got it. 2020, about 106%.

One of the last tech stocks hanging on to a large multiple. They were trading at an 80 billion. dollar market cap about 67 times their 2021 revenue. As of Thursday's close, as we are recording this, they are now trading at a $68 billion market cap because apparently we hate that pathetic, shameful, appalling 80% growth. You should be ashamed of yourself, Sluuteman. This is the, we knew that companies would as earnings came out. We saw it with Facebook.

We saw a Peloton. Everything's been reset. the concept of 50, 60, 70, 100 times your top line sales is over. And so now everything is being, you know, re-evaluated. And this seems reasonable. 50 plus times is still a huge multiple. I mean, it's a ginormous multiple, and it's based on them almost doubling year of a year in the future and only 80%.

So fantastic. It's fantastic. I mean, do you think it's a, is this just a normal reproval? pricing, do you think? I mean, nobody's that super bum. I mean, it's so great. To be fair, it's a 20% decrease in growth from the prior quarter. So if you were to project that out over a couple more quarters, 20% drop. Yes, it could slow. That could get concerning. But I love the idea of Frank Sluteman, by the way, if you heard his interview, this will make perfect sense, sitting over there being like, suck it up, team, rub some cold water on it, get back out

in the field. Wait, is that exactly what happened or that's your interpretation? No, I'm just assuming. I'm just assuming. That's exactly what he said. And then it kicks a guy off a ledge and is like, this is smart job. Like it's, you know, but I mean,

look at Zoom. Imagine you're working at Zoom. Stocks trading at whatever, 400, you know, market caps over a bill. And, you know,

now it's trading at 113, market cap is down at 33 billion. Right? You had, you know, let's say you're some employee and you had four million dollars and stock options over the next four years and now it's a million.

And you were thinking, oh, I'm going to pay down my mortgage. and my kids are college, just taking care of it now. Like, you're going to pay half your mortgage and you got half your college,

you know, tuition set up. And so this is why, you know, it's, we always say, you can't eat IRR. You have to,

at some point, trade these lottery tickets, known as stocks and equities, in for cash to buy the things you want. And so, you know,

it's an important lesson for folks. Trees do not grow to the moon. They're trees. And there is an upper limit. and now everybody learned the lesson that we learned in the dot-com error or other errors. And now things are on sale. So, you know, we'll start to see that phenomenon as well

where people go, you know what, Zoom, at 33 billion is maybe a buy. So bargain hunting. And then, of course, the pandemic ends. The repricing happens during Omicron. And then now we're in what some people consider the potential prelude to a world war. It's scary out there, right?

And the interest rates going up. So it's a perfect story. but this two shall pass and valuations will up and down. And if you're a founder, focus on your team, your product, and your customers, it all works out. Yep. Another interesting SaaS story to keep an eye on Slack grew revenue 15% slower after becoming a part of Salesforce than it did in its last year as a standalone company. Remember, Salesforce, I had actually totally forgotten this, that Salesforce and Slack agreed on that acquisition back in December 2020. Salesforce paid $27 billion for Slack.

That was roughly 27 times ARR at the time that deal was agreed upon. The deal was cash in stock. And that at the time again was a pretty fair price given the market. And it looks great for Stewart and the Slack team now, considering the multiple compression. And yet that growth has also slowed 15%ish. There are a lot of headwinds here. And Microsoft Teams,

You know, being, I think, essentially a free product attached to Microsoft Office or 365, you know, created a lot of fear, I think amongst people buying the stock. And that's why they sold. They just felt headwinds, headwinds, headwinds, and maybe the product isn't that differentiated. Yeah. You know, if you're in startup land, you're just like, Slack's the only possibility. But if you're in corporate America, you're like, I'm sorry, why would I use Slack if this thing is built in, these features are built into office? I've been spending 20 years using Excel and 30 years using Word and PowerPoint. Like, what?

You want me to log in a second time to something else? No. Corporate IT departments did not. They were not comfortable with the security situation with, you know, I mean, I think they like a thing that they know. And Slack, I think, didn't necessarily have the security tops. You would have thought that those would go up as being, you know, being part of Salesforce. But it's absolutely true.

If you've got synced products that are all in the same. same family, it's just a lot easier. The biggest problem with Slack, product velocity. Product is not improved. They edit huddles. And that's it. And that's it. I can't really think of any feature.

They're like, the whizzywig editor changed. It's like, it changed 6%. I can't tell you what's the new feature. And this is where product cadence is something we talked about in terms of investing in founders. Slack did have pretty good product cadence early on and great beautiful design, a great team and they were adding features, they were adding features. They raise a bunch of money. Everybody gets rich. People are selling in secondary. The team loses its edge. You don't have that like hardcore

driving. We need to add features. Like how did Slack not create Zoom like features and make them free and like own that business? How did they not take the wiki business, that notion and code and other people have, you know, dominated in and incorporate that. You just see no massive uptick in product velocity or what we call product cadence. The product velocity was low. The cadence was non-existent. And that is when companies, sadly, start to wane. And, you know, I love Slack, but, you know, if there was a better product that came along and they had better product cadence, I would use it. Sure. I mean, I like Slack. Fine. It does the job. It's multiprope. platform, not a great interface.

It's super hard to cross in between things, putting in your weird URL every time you need to log in. It's just not, it is, and it should be easier for me to make a calendar invite from there, do all the things that like a super human can do. And you're absolutely right. Like it just, they got acquired. And this

does happen, I think, right, when a company gets acquired by a big company. Or the founders get rich. Or the founders get rich, right? Or both. You know, have enough. Things just kind of You have to be a particularly driven founder when, you know, you make a billion or two billion dollars or ten billion dollars, whatever it is. And, you know, you got to come to work and keep pushing, you know, and I think that's where you have to find meaning in what you do. So we've talked about this as well.

If the founder finds tremendous meaning in getting to Mars or Google indexing the world's information, like if they have that desire, they're not going to stop until that mission is completed. And they're going to come to work with that, you know, crazy zeal every day. I didn't get the sense that the Slack team had much product left in the tank. Like, they basically opened up that app store. I never installed any apps. None of them were great, you know? Couldn't figure it out. Or rather, like, didn't want to take the time to figure it out.

A lot of times I say I couldn't figure it out. And it's not because I'm not smart. It's because I don't have that kind of time. I'll tell you the crazy. Yeah. The crazy stupid thing was I gave them the greatest idea ever of the most obvious one. Like, why don't you have, you know, Slack.com slash P. for person slash Molly Wood.

And I have Slack.com slash P slash J-Cal or Jason Callicanis. And then anybody who wants to DM with me in a business context who has a paid account could talk to each other. Why didn't they make it like that? It would have been like this. Or A, you know, or A, you know what?

The reason was, oh, privacy. Like if we do that, people are going to get things they don't like. And it's like, okay, then flip everybody and then get people's settings to turn it Right? It's very simple. Like you do it at the company level. So if IBM doesn't want to support that, fine.

But what if everybody could have had essentially their Twitter handle, their email address, be very easy. And then you attach your instances to it because I'm looking at my Slack here. I got this week in startups, launch founders inside, inside public. I got one for my family. I mean, I got one for the syndicate. If all of those, I could just check off for this one. I want it to be listed on my profile page. So I have that Slack profile page.

So I have that Slack profile page and it says community as I'm a member of. Boom. Boom. Companies I work with, Slack's I'm in. And I can say, yeah, don't show launch. I don't want people to even know launch has one. Or I do want people to do it because I don't mind people contacting people at launch, right? Here's all the partners at launch.

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Because when you create a free job posting in just minutes, you're going to reach the world's largest professional network of over 770 million people. Wow. Use screening questions to filter out all the non-serious candidates, right? Hey, if you're going to hire somebody to be a video editor, you can say, hey, what tools do you use to do video editing? If you're hiring them to do podcast video editing, you'd say, hey, what's your favorite podcast out there? If they can't answer those two questions, they really qualify for the job? Probably not. And you can use LinkedIn simple tools

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LinkedIn.com slash angel. That's right, for free. LinkedIn.com slash angel to post your first job for free terms and conditions do apply because it giving you a free job posting. Um, Jason has in other news invited WeWork CEO Sande Mithraini onto the podcast. I did. After WeWork. Unfollowed him on Twitter. This was in response, of course, to yesterday's conversation about WeWork. quite astonishingly tone-deaf response to the situation in Ukraine saying not only are we going to continue to do business in Russia, it's going great. We're killing it. We're killing it in Russia. You evidently also Jason made it on Big Tech Alert. Oh, Big Tech Alerts is on their radar now. Seems like we work unfollowed you and then started following you. And then Jason was like, make up your mind, chumps. But seriously, founder, come on. Explain yourself. Or not the founder, the CEO, if you want to.

But I thought it was a number of people have paused or canceled their memberships. Listen, I have feelings. Somebody said, hey, I thought you don't support cancel culture. Well, boycotting a company to send a message is not cancel culture. I'm not saying we were could never exist again. What I'm saying is if you think profiting in Russia right now is not the right thing to do, you could pause, I specifically use pause, you could pause your membership. Send that screenshot to the CEO.

of the company and maybe they'll rethink their position. If enough people do that, you can cause change. Just like if... Or you can cancel it because voting with your dollars is actually your freaking right as a consumer and not emblematic of censoriousness in any way, shape, or form. 100. It's not censorship. Like when I said, I am never going to use coffee pods again. Give me a break.

Because coffee pods are destroying the planet. Boycotting. Earn it, Tamingway. Boycotting is to cancel culture as. soft rock is to rock. Okay. No, it's voting with your freaking dollars. It's the power that the consumer has always had. Nobody is saying that this company should not exist.

That's cancel culture. They're canceled. They can't operate in the world. Shut it down. It's over. I'm just saying like, you don't have to support a company that isn't in line. Exactly. But if I'm being candid, I do think we should cancel those pod companies.

I don't look to cancel. You should cancel those pot companies. That's awful. It's absolutely awful. It's just so it's indefensible. And you get aluminum in every drink you make, by the way, because it just like punches through. I mean, it's just as like it's poison and it's terrible. And it's not easier, folks.

It's not easier. You get a one touch. You put the coffee in once every two weeks. You put a pound in. The hopper holds a pound of coffee. You press the button. It's cheaper. It's better for the environment.

Please stop using pods. Get a brevel. It's the best. I love my brevel. Brevel's great. Or the Terra Cafe, one where investors in, any of them are better. Get that one, yeah. Get that one.

But I had a bravel. It was, oh, no, I had a juror. Jura, bravel, whatever. You get one of these. No moss, no fuss. Nick says, get a pot of coffee like an adult. Grow up Nespresso nerds. Exactly.

Exactly. I like to have different flavors in my pod. And then they're like, oh, we have a recycle program. Like, really? No, you know. Really? People are recycling pods. They're bringing them to the Nipresso store, the espresso store in Union Square.

Every week, they're 10 pods for you to recycle them. And then what are you doing? You're washing them in the store? and then filling them, no, you're not. No, I hate those companies. That's a company I wish we would die. Nisresso. I mean,

espresso store is gorgeous. I hope they die. It's beautiful and you can get a free coffee and that was lovely and also Canada's going to kill them. So good news. Yeah, that's your canon. We'll kill it too.

So listen, I don't want to cancel. We work, but die, Nispresso, die. I hope that company goes out of business. The end. All right. In other news, my friend

from Flexport just DM'd me and he was like, hey, pal of mine, we're doing this thing, can you give us some support? And I just want to encourage everybody to go to flexport.org slash donate if you were so inclined and you got a little extra chatter laying around. I don't know, maybe you want in a poker game,

maybe got stock in a company. It's $4,900, $4,900 to fill a truck with supplies, he told me, they're flying the stuff in, then they're sending the trucks for the refugees. There's a million refugees out of the Ukraine. I can't go over there and fight. I'm too old. I've got three kids.

You know, you guys need me to do the pod. I'm not going to enlist. But the least we could do is maybe send a little bit of supplies over there. So again, if you got the means, flexport.org slash donate. You follow fluxport. They've done this before. They did it with COVID. Now they're doing it again.

They understand logistics. So they actually know what they're doing. They will actually get the stuff to the right person. A million refugees. Think about that. And an AHA 44. million. A million people displaced after a week.

I like this guy Ryan Pearson a lot from Flexport. He's a super fan of this pod. He's been on this pod. He's been on All In. Nice guy. I went skiing with him the other week. We skied a little bit. We hung out.

We talked. He's just like, he's a legit dude. And, you know, I think he's like, his heart's in the right place. And he's really trying to do some good here. So. And he's putting his money where his mouth is and putting his time into this. And he did the same thing.

when it came to COVID, he was flying ventilators, flying PPP and really, when that thing was in the you know, acute phase and people were dying by the thousands in New York alone. He was really helping flying stuff in the seats of cars. So flexport.org

slash donate. If you don't have business insurance, you failed one of the first steps in being a great entrepreneur. Startups should look no further than a broker in getting great insurance that will protect you and your team and your vision and your engagement

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Here's your call to action to instantly buy custom-built insurance for startups. I want you to go toembroker.com slash twist. E-M-B-R-O-K-R-com. slash twist inbroker.com slash twist. And while you're there, you're going to get an extra 10% off if you use the offer code twist, TWIST. That stands for this week and startup. Okay, thanks in broker. Great job. Okay, Molly, you did an interview for season six of Angel. Tell us about it. I did, and it was so interesting, especially coming on the heels of our conversation with Molly

White about Web 3. I interviewed Elise Killeen of Stillmark, who is a first time fund manager. She recently raised her first fund at $30 million. And she is interesting because she's a solo woman GP and Stillmark has a very specific laser-like thesis around investing in startups that are building Bitcoin infrastructure. Not crypto, broadly, not NFTs. She's hyper, not even what you would call Web3. She's like, I invest in Bitcoin. Bitcoin Lightning Network investments, Bitcoin infrastructure, Bitcoin enabled companies.

And it was very, I called her the quiet. at Storm by the end of the interview because it's just, it's this very, you know, she's like, it's not about what you sell. It's about what you buy and it's about what you make. And she's just like, all the potential is there. And that's where we're putting our money and we're just going to ignore all of this like train wreck situation over here. I can't wait to listen to it.

I'm going to listen to it on the treadmill today. And I think it's a, you know, really solid idea. If you do a fund like that and people want to be concentrated, plus you have all these people who made a killing on Bitcoin. If you made a killing on Bitcoin, investing in this fund is like voting in support of your existing investment. So if you bought a million dollars with a Bitcoin and it's now worth a billion, why wouldn't you give this person a $5 million worth of Bitcoin or money to invest in the Bitcoin network because it would theoretically make your Bitcoin more valuable in the world?

So we saw this with, when Google Glass came out, there's a famous picture of Mark Andreessen and John Doer and one other investor will pull it up here for the people watching on the video and in this picture they're all wearing the Google Glass and they look like huge nerds and there's a hundred million dollar venture fund

just to invest in Google Glass and this is an ecosystem fund and these ecosystem funds are typically done by somebody with an ecosystem to try to jumpstart and so that's a lot of crypto projects do seem to do foundations for this function but doing it in a venture

formats even better because it could become Evergreen. If they hit something here and they returned four times the fund, boom. So there you go. Is that Bill Morris in there? Oh, wow. Look at that. That didn't age well. Two out of three of those folks

have been on the pod. Only one has not made it on the pod. Interesting, the one who's not on the pod was an LP in my first fund. Also interesting, the one who's not on the pod does not have hair. Maybe a correlation. I don't know. I don't know. used to have great, luxurious hair.

But it looks, you know, iconic picture. I feel like that's a T-shirt. I think actually, if we're making T-shirts and somebody's going to make the, but what if it works this week in Start-Ups T-Street? Somebody should take this photo and make a T-shirt out of it, like a rogue t-shirt and say two out of three of these people have been on this weekend startups.

That photo is great because, I mean, Mark and Jessica, you bring it back up. Mark and John look like they're just posing for a picture. Bill Maris looks like he, He's about to travel to the future. He's serious. Bill looks like he's about to shoot a laser. Yeah.

He does. And he looks... Blow up a building. Like an android. Like he actually, too, his skin is very waxy. Like, he looks like he could be the own... He could be the... It's the shoulder tilt.

Yeah. The humanoid robot in the bunch. Yeah. It's the fact that he's three-quartering it, you know, both in the vest and both in the shirt and the sweater. It's more flattering. He's just got that, you know, Terminator twist going on there. I mean...

Yeah. He's from the future in the... He does look like the Terminator 2 one where it does those crazy shoulder movements. But anyway, that's kind of the concept here. So, okay, let's go to our interview with Elise from Stillmark. All right. Joining me for Angel Season 6, Episode 6 is Elise Helene, who is the general partner at Stillmark, one of the only Bitcoin-focused venture firms.

Elise has been around the VC industry for a while and then became as befits our theme here on season six of Angel, a first time fund manager. Welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. So let me start with the pretty obvious question, which is what made you want to raise your own fund? Well, it was really at the time the only way to be able to focus on what I thought was

the most important technology of the period, which is Bitcoin and Bitcoin technologies. And so I had come from two LA-based traditional generalist funds. that were focused on deep tech, frontier tech, but not on Bitcoin, not on blockchain technology. And so I needed to carve out a space for myself by launching a fund. When did you start? And how long did it take you to really develop a thesis that you were ready to take to LPs? Well, so the thesis was developed. So I started in Bitcoin in 2013. And I started in venture capital in 2012. So the thesis was developing, you know, really since 2013 and as the technology itself was developing. The fund launched in late 2019. But the thesis had been in development

for years ahead of that. And the timing of the fund launch was meant to be consistent with the underlying protocol technology and what that unlocked in the entrepreneurial ecosystem and what could be developed on those protocols. And the idea was to time that right so that the risk the LPs would be exposed to would be really traditional venture risk versus an unnecessary burden of regulatory risk or of protocol risk or security risk, anything that was atypical. We wanted to see the tech mature beyond that point and then to introduce the fund and thus 2019 is the vintage year of the first fund. Let's break that down a little bit. What were the markers? What were the milestones that you set up to determine that this was mature tech.

I feel like there are some who would sort of still dispute that from a product or usage perspective. Well, so first it's important to note that we're focused on Bitcoin versus cryptocurrency. So these are categorically different things. Bitcoin has been around and with a similar vision, mission, and development ethos for over 10, for over 10 years, 12 years. What I was waiting for, I thought it was the right time to start a fund in this space. after Segwit activated and was adopted. So now I'm using technical jargon. Let me look that down.

That's cool. I was going to ask you to translate any minute now. So the reason why I was waiting for Segwit to activate, which it did in 2017 and to be adopted, which we saw happen in 2017, 2018, early 2019, was because it allows us to build more sophisticated smart contracts, including on higher layer protocols built on top of business. Bitcoin. So to put that simply with popular terms, it allowed for Lightning Network, Bitcoin's

payment network to be more robust and to be more scalable. And so once that switch flipped, we launched the fund. Okay. And let's go all the way back to SeguiP, because that is the transaction format of Bitcoin. That Lightning Network that you talked about makes it cheaper and easier to transmit Bitcoin, right? And more accessible. Yes, right. Exactly. So really what it means is that you can send Bitcoin free, basically for free, and nearly instantly around the globe. And you could do that up into a certain scale on Bitcoin, the core protocol. But what Lightning does is it unlocks that potential for billions rather than thousands. And I don't think we are at the billions point yet, we're not, but we're on a march there.

So right now we're at millions, but with lightning, we can get to billions. And so that's what the fund targets. It targets technologies, applications that can affect millions of people. And once Segwit activated, we saw that possible through Bitcoin as a payments tech. Now, to fast, to rewind ahead of that, Bitcoin was establishing itself as a store of value. So now what Stillmark does is an invest in both buckets. So in invest in companies that are, financializing the Bitcoin space or taking advantage of Bitcoin as a great store of value, a great hedge against fiat currencies. And then the second bucket, which is our moonshot bucket, of investing in higher layer protocols and the applications or companies built on top of that. So those built on top of lightning. So give us some examples. You invested, for example, in Lightning Labs, which is layer two blockchain for Bitcoin,

which is right. Yeah, exactly. That's a popular one. and kind of right on target for what you're talking about now. That's right. So to make that real and practical when you heard the news of El Salvador adopting Bitcoin as legal tender in September, the way that that practically happened was through Lightning and largely through L&D, which is Lightning Labs implementation of the Lightning Network.

And so when the president provided for the population an airdrop of Bitcoin, so where he gave adults in the country a wallet that had Bitcoin preloaded to it. The way that people were using that Bitcoin to do grocery shopping, to go to the pharmacy, to go to Pizza Hut, or other restaurants was by transacting on the Lightning Network. And so millions of people have been served in El Salvador and Central America by Lightning Network. And what that means for El Salvador in particular is that more people have been banked by Bitcoin through Lightning than use the local banks in aggregate. So it's a big deal. Bitcoin has done, Bitcoin and Lightning has done a lot. Lightning Lambs has done a lot. Well, and I feel like not to stray too far from,

you know, your fundraising process and your thesis, but it sounds like what you're investing in is the fundamental question is, can Bitcoin go from a store of value, a trillion dollar asset class to a currency? Right. Exactly. So we're investing, although if Bitcoin were to stay only as a store of value, there's still a robust ecosystem there. So to give an example of another portfolio company, we invested in a company called CASA, which basically allows people to have a bank in their back pocket. So it's a mobile app that allows you to bank your own Bitcoin. And that was one of Bitcoins, Satoshi's core promises of Bitcoin. It was that you can store value on your own and not be gated from accessing the value that you store by banks, by

credit card or debit card providers. You can do it yourself. And, Paza allows for people to do that, regardless of how sophisticated they are technically. And so even if Bitcoin stays just there, it's incredibly valuable. But Stomark is focused on not just that, but also on the payment space. And as we're talking in Q1, 2022, it's a great time because my expectation, our expectation, is that 2022 is a massive year for Bitcoin and payments. And that a lot of the work that was done last year, including an onboarding, El Salvador to Bitcoin puts us in a position to really make great gains in the payments market.

Yeah, it must be nice to see a plan coming together in such a specific way, especially since you were so intentional and deliberate about the timing. It is. It's just paying attention to the development space and to being realistic about what the technology can do as an intended to do versus overly optimistic. So here's a contrast on that. payments is ready today in 2022 and perhaps as early as last year, 2021. But in 2014, there was a lot of investment going into the Bitcoin and cryptocurrency

payment space before the tech was ready to scale in that way. And so the timing of all this is important because companies are building on technology that they don't fully control themselves because they're reliant on these open source technology is an open source developer networks, those that are building Bitcoin, those that are building lightning. And so when we're investing, we're really looking for teams that respect and understand that process. And so are setting goals that is consistent with what the protocol can do. I wonder too, as part of your thesis and your pitch to your LPs as you were raising this fund, you have been very intentional about timing, but also very specifically laser focused, like you said,

on Bitcoin. It sounds like you do not want to put your yourself in a position to be distracted by all of the kind of shiny objects that are cropping up around this space. Right. That's true. So there's so much opportunity in Bitcoin and it's so nuanced that it really takes a full-time focus. And then the other interesting thing about this space, one of the things that makes it so special is that a lot of the founders, maybe the majority right now of founders building in the space, are not mercenaries. They have a a target to grow big businesses to accrue, you know, billions in enterprise value. But they're doing so because what they're building changes the world or advances culture in some positive way.

Now, when you're working with missionaries versus mercenaries, they care about who's in the portfolio with them. And so it's important that we be consistent in how we're investing, how we're communicating our investment hypotheses, not just to limited partners, but also to founders. And it allows us to work with the best and most promising founders, for sure. And those that are really proud of the rest of the work that is happening in the portfolio, Stoneworks portfolio. Right.

So it really is in keeping with the community ethos. How do you tell a missionary from a mercenary? Because like sometimes it's a little fine line. We like a balance of both. I think it's a lot in the world. that people use. And this is why we have to really understand the technology and have a network around us that helps us diligence, deeply technical things, or, you know, the future of where these protocols are going. We want to make sure that when founders are talking about their

roadmaps, what they're going to do between rounds, for instance, that all of those things are achievable, not just by way of what they've built, but also by the ecosystem around them, the protocol underneath them. And I suppose that missionaries are building consistent with the ethos of the space in general. And so they're thinking about the impact that they have on their end users, the populations are targeting. They're taking feedback from early use of their apps and infrastructure and incorporating that into their roadmap. And they're optimizing for long-term sustainable gains versus short-term promotions. And this is different from the cryptocurrency and token space, where, of course, tokens can

appreciate without there being an appreciation of the enterprise value of the associated company. And so some of the behaviors of the companies can be more oriented towards short-term gains or be more marketing focused in their nature than focused on long-term product development or creating a company that will be around in two decades versus a couple of years. Right. How did you, back to nuts and bolts of your fund, it closed in December at $30 million, there is an incredible amount of interest in this space. How did you determine that fund size? And was there any pressure to go bigger?

So we could have gone bigger. So what we do is we're focused on preseeds and seed. And so that was the right size fund at the time. And then we are also active in SPV investing in later stage companies. And so our total AUM is significantly higher than our fund size. We want to make sure that the fund size allows us to be. backing founders that can build billion dollar public companies where we can discover them over the course of a three to four year investment period. And so 30 million made sense then.

I expect that our next funds will be a bit larger, but we're really focused. So we're aim, aim, shoot, shoot versus shoot, shoot, and then try to make the investment hypothesis fit to the portfolio. We're not like that. So the idea is, is that fund one will have something like 15 to maybe 2021 companies in it, the portfolio. And that requires a discipline in how we deploy capital. Yeah, definitely. Is it fair to say that these are not hugely capital-intensive businesses other than, I mean, it's software development and at scale, like mining is expensive, for example,

but what is the primary cost breakdown for a business like this? Is it closer to SaaS in terms of a low upfront cost that's really? really about coding. That's a great question. So there are hardware companies in the space. We haven't been focused on hardware companies. We have been focused on software. And here's another interesting element of this space is that this is a specialized developer. And so it's not about having 50, 60, 70 strong lightning network developers, for example. It's about having those four or five people that really understand the tech and how to progress it. And so the costs are constrained in a way by the size of the teams required or even possible to achieve.

So yeah, these are traditional software teams. They are not capital intensive businesses. And in addition to that, I think that because these companies are largely serving very acute needs, So we talked about El Salvador, 70% of the population was unbanked. These companies are serving really acute needs. So the demand for marketing is muted in a way because the products are things that, you know, people understand when they have them in their hand. Interesting.

Before I ask you more about your portfolio companies, tell me about some of the SPVs. How does that operate for you as a follow-on opportunity? Sure. So how we've been using that is to allow our limited partners to select access to break out portfolio companies. So our SBBs aren't public yet, but our portfolio is performing well. So we have companies that are raising rounds in the later stages, and we have good relationships with the teams we work with. And so through that, we're able to bridge the gap between founders, that are raising money and would like to do so from people that are aligned in their values, their understanding of the tech, and are limited partners that grok what's happening and want to

make sure that they're participating. And the way I think about this is that in addition to a lot of money being made and a lot of that flashy stuff happening in the cryptocurrency space, there's also a lot of exciting and could be flashy things happening in the Bitcoin space, but what's different is that the sustainable long-term brands. So the PayPal's and the Amazon's of the world are being built today. They're being built in Bitcoin. So in this blockchain paradigm, you know, the Amazon's and PayPal's are being built on Bitcoin. And it's a good way to make money.

And our limited partners are interested in making money by backing companies that will be culturally relevant, not just in five years, but in 20 and 25 years. and that's SPV opportunity. It feels to me like that's an interesting, for purposes of our first-time fund manager conversation, like that's a bit of an interesting hybrid, is to be able to say we have a $30 million fund, which is a good but modest-sized fund,

but we have this somewhat unique follow-on opportunity with our LPs specifically. Like, is that common? Well, so this is actually something that we did at the firms I worked at prior to launching, Stillmark. And so the idea is that we want to make sure that the exposure that our investors want in the Bitcoin space that they can have through Stillmark. And then vice versa, we want to make sure that we're following our founders so that we can support them in a really healthy and

productive manner across their life cycle. And that will include SPB work until, you know, we have a fund that has a broader mandate in terms of stages. It sounds a little bit. similar to what we do with the syndicate, but the syndicate is more like an angel investment network. Is it similar in that way, though, where you sort of go to your LPs and present them with these deals and say, we'll spin up an SPV if enough of you want in? That's right, except with one little difference, which is that we're, we don't have a million LPs, so we have a really reasonable sized group. We know folks well. And we know what people are interested in. in what they want exposure to. What we're trying to do is have long-term meaningful,

non-transactional relationships with our limited partners. And so one of the things that a limited partner can get is in addition to hopefully outstanding returns is informational alpha. And so they know what's going on in our portfolio. They know what's going on with the tech and the ecosystem and the story behind the news. So when they hear El Salvador, they know it not just through the news, but actually through what our portfolio companies in the ecosystem are doing and what they're finding themselves. So ahead of a company raising a later stage round, we have a sense of where our LPs are interested, which investors are interested, and to what degree? And it's a pretty quick and smooth process, I hope. And what does your, what's your team like?

Are you the only partner? I'm the founding and managing partner. And we are, growing a team this year. So right now we have two people on the investment team. I'm talking to a little bit before we're announcing the second person, but nonetheless, we have, you know, someone, a second person on the, on the investment team that's deeply technical and is coming from a background of both technical research and production engineering and has built teams himself. And so this adds another layer of what we can do for portfolio companies. And it's nice to be able to support teams in their hiring and organizational maturation processes. And this allows us to do that more broadly.

So there will be not necessarily a full-fledged services aspect, but a team that can converse, a team that can help, a team that can guide that really understands deeply the technology and not just the monetary opportunity. Exactly. That deeply understands the technology. And also what it means just to build a business, how you scale an engineering team. This is something that differentiates Stilmark

is that we're not learning on the job, the function of venture capital. And where that is valuable for founders is that we've worked with several hundred companies over the past decade closely. And so there's common, struggles for all companies, regardless of how well they do. And there's also common opportunities. And so our work is to, you know, point that out for founders if they want it so that they don't

have to learn each lesson on their own. And they can, you know, have some ability to foresee the challenges down the road and how to address them even proactively through our experience in working with other companies. And then in addition to that, of course, we have to understand the tech. And so that's how I'm aiming to grow the team, is to be really thoughtful about the venture capital expertise we need in addition to the special insight on Bitcoin and Lightning and side chains. I'm guessing that you yourself are pretty technical, having followed the space so carefully and been so precise about the development of the technology to a point where you were like, okay, it's ready. Let's throw some money. I don't count myself like that, but I've had that feedback. So I'm on a few. Why not?

Well, because of the level of people I work with, to be perfectly honest. So comparatively, it's a spectrum, yeah. I'm really lucky to always never be the smartest. I'm never the smartest person in the room. And it's a great way to work. And so we're always learning. It's important in this space. I think this is something that is different about the Bitcoin space than traditional

venture capital is that it's really important that, you know, there's no ego. So a lot of the founders that we work with are deeply technical people. And if you go into the room wanting to make sure that you know everything in advance of beginning the conversation, as VCs have sometimes had the reputation for doing, it's not going to work in this space. And so, you know, when we entered the room, we know that we're there to learn and feel grateful for that opportunity. Yeah. But I mean, I must say you're a bit of an awesome outlier as a solo GP, which is a hard road, a woman, and a very specific, very technical thesis. Like, are there others like you that you're encountering every day? Do you mean other, I'm not sure what you mean exactly. Do you mean other

women in the space? Super smart, Bitcoin focused women who are solo GPs, yeah. Well, so, Not that are solo GPs, but that are leaders in the space. So for example, Lightning Labs is run by a woman and the CTO is an immigrant. It matters who are building these things. The insight matters. And we can, I hope, I think that we can partner with everyone across the spectrum of folks in the space. But actually, Bitcoin is quite diverse. I think maybe it doesn't have that reputation, but within our portals,

portfolio and without making any effort for it, we're backing several women founders, including technical women founders. Elizabeth is very technical, but she's not the only technical woman founder in our portfolio. There's several and we're not trying. The last investment that we made is in a company that the entire team is from Central America. The talent is just incredible. So this last investment we made These, I would say, are top 5% or higher caliber of founders if they had come from Silicon Valley or Miami or whatever the new Silicon Valley is. Bitcoin really shows that talent is evenly distributed. And then our work is to make sure that we are also distributed so that we're seeing it, whether it comes from San Francisco, Miami, Central America, Southeast Asia.

We're trying to make sure that our network covers that all. And it puts us in a position to a really enjoy our work and our jobs because we get to interact with so many different people, including with some really amazing women. You know, it's interesting as I'm listening to Talk. I mean, there certainly is not that reputation. And I think it's sort of about where the noise is. But it seems like that's something that can apply to you and your fund and your approach in comparison with something like A16Z and the NFT craze, right?

There's like a bunch of noise over here that seems pretty homogenous and maybe a flash in the pan. and you're, it's, you're almost like the quiet storm. Like, you're like, we're just going to stay in this lane like a boss and build incredible teams and, you know, we'll still be here when the dust settles. We want to make sure that we are honest with ourselves about what the metrics are saying. So when we look at the NFT space, we want to look at it from the perspective of acknowledging that not all of it is sustainable. and then trying to pull out the pieces that are.

And so an example of that would be that a lot of what's happening in the NFT space is probably speculation or something that looks pretty close to gambling. And maybe it's a bit of a regulatory arbitrage play. That doesn't mean that all of it is. And so when we look at the metrics, we just want to be really honest about what's happening, what elements of what is happening is extendable. and what we expect to be short-lived. And, you know, same is true of what happened in the ICO bubble.

And so in each bull cycle for cryptocurrencies, we see these new seemingly really promising trends emerge like ICOs in 2017. But then if you dig into the numbers, the metrics, you start to see a story. And what we're looking for are things that have long-term value after the regulatory arbitrage play are roads, that's how we think about what we're investing in. So it's consistent with what I said earlier about looking for the PayPal's and the Amazon's. It's about the companies that we expect to shape culture over the course of decades versus a bull market. What are, before I let you go, the risks to your part of this sector? So I think of risk in a different

way. I think of risk in terms of what can slow progression. And so I think, you know, the most obvious and may be important is the steps that regulators will take and, you know, to sort of either curtail or advance the space. And so because Bitcoin is distributed, including that the developers that contribute to the core protocol are geographically distributed, they are under the domains of a variety of regulators and some not at all because they're anonymous. All of that is important. And so there's not a risk that Bitcoin goes away as a result of regulation. The same thing is true with lightning. And that's because it's distributed. But there is a risk, of course, that adoption can be curtailed or that innovation in a specific geography can be curtailed as a result

of regulation. On the flip side of that, there's certainly a risk that because Bitcoin has paid more attention to protocol and product development and less attention to the sexy, flashy marketing announcements. That adoption can be slowed. It's almost like a

DDoS attack, some of the cryptocurrency stuff because everyone has a limited amount of time that they can spend in figuring out what they want to try next. And so I think that's not a risk to Bitcoin, but it's a risk to the pace of

adoption that I take seriously. And so I, you know, I think about that too. But the timing for the launch of the fund was really around, you know, being conscious and purposeful about what risk we took. And so I think today when we're talking about risk, it's not about does Bitcoin make it. It's more about the pace of adoption and innovation. Elise Killeen building Bitcoin to last GP and founder at Stillmark.

Thank you so much for the time today. Thank you, Molly. I appreciate. I'm calling you the quiet storm. Well, I'll take it. I've been called worse. Wonderful. Yeah, I'm sure. I know. What is your life on the internet like? Great, I hope.

You know, people are pretty cool. The message about, you know, Bitcoin being categorically different from cryptocurrencies does not resonate with folks that are trying to sell cryptocurrencies. Yeah, I bet. I bet. That is super, I mean, I felt like we could have spent an hour on that alone if we were not talking about fund management. You know, it's not about what you buy in terms of cryptocurrencies. It's about what you sell.

And so it's the people that sell things that they know they should probably not be selling that, you know, sometimes feel threatened by talking tech. Right. Fascinating. I like that. Thank you for your time, Molly. I appreciate you. This is great.

I'm sorry Jason couldn't make it, but I'm glad we got to talk. Likewise. All right. That was a great interview with Elise from Stillmark. What's up next, Molly? We got such a beefy show. Our Friday shows take you through the Sunday, the Saturday drought and get you to the Sunday show. Next up, we have OK Boomer with producer Rachel with Kai Hahn, the founder of Pallet,

which helps creators create job boards. I know you thought I was going to say, like, funny videos where they jump in pools or whatever, but no. This is actually very cool. It helps creators create job boards for their fans. So that they can connect their fans with employees. with employment and be a productive ecosystem. It's just delightful. Absolutely a great idea. Can't wait to listen to this one. Enjoy everybody.

Okay, Boomer. I understood the assignment. Thank you, Kai, for coming on an episode of Okay, Boomer. This is Rachel reporting for everybody. I actually met Kai over Twitter, and we went out for coffee, and he was so interesting that I actually went out for coffee with him again, almost directly after, because he was just somebody with a lot of really interesting things to say. He is one of the co-founders of Palet. You might remember that Palet was mentioned by Paige Finn Doherty on Angel Season 6, episode 1377 of this weekend startups. She let Jason know that she actually invested in them.

And you may also have seen Palet used on a substack by Not Boring's Packy McCormick, who was also just on Angel Season 6 on episode 1372. On there, Packy wrote that he had handpicked jobs from Not Boring Capitals, portcos and other high growth companies that he thought would be really fun places to work at. So thank you so much, Kai, for jumping on this Zoom call. I know your schedule is crazy busy. Before we dump into Palette's story, I'd love to hear the story of just how you became a founder. Yeah, well, I excited to be here first and foremost, and thanks for having me.

Yeah, I mean, I guess how I became a founder. I think it was one of those things where I was probably like always trying to cook up some stupid idea in my head when I was in college, when I was in high school. I remember even like when I was in college, I built this thing called like only grants, which was like during COVID, uh, you could type in a friend's number and then it would like anonymously text that person like a bunch of pictures of old grandmas and it was just like, hey, your friend thinks you're being like irresponsible, like stay home. Um, so it's always something that I enjoyed doing. Uh, and then I remember when, you know, I was actually going out and trying to find a job on my own and trying to find my own role, um, feeling like really frustrated with, with the sort of process behind that. Uh, I would consider myself to be like a complication. Uh, I would consider myself to be like a complication. Um, in general. And so when I found myself complaining about something and found a lot of other people complaining about something, seemed like there was good space to, you know, make something happening in the space. And so that's how we got started, really. But it's been something I've wanted to do for a while and just, you know, took the opportunity when I saw it. That's awesome. So this is

your first job, though, directly out of college, right? First job directly out of college, yeah. Do you advise people to start companies directly out of college or do you think that there's something to be said about getting, like learning, or at least learning to fail under somebody else's dime other than your own. I feel like now failure is completely on you if you mess up. Yeah. I mean, I guess it'd probably be strange if I didn't advise it.

I would say it just depends on how well you know yourself and how well you sort of, you know, how well you can drive under, you know, kind of high pressure, uncertain situations. I think when it comes to like the actual sort of like decision matrix and like ROI of doing this,

once you get at least a, you know, like a prerequisite amount of traction on an idea, on a startup, it's basically going to be the best, like, professional decision you could have made in any context, realistically. So I would say, like, hey, like, if you believe in yourself, if you're cool with the possibility of tons and tons of uncertainty and chaos, go for it. And the downside risks are quite low.

And past a certain point, it's basically all upside after that. So this was your first job out of college. more importantly, and what's even crazier is that you went to college because a lot of Gen Z founders that I've been meeting have just totally decided to either drop out of college or not enroll in general, which is increasingly becoming more popular ever since, you know, the pandemic hit. Nobody wanted to do remote learning? And now we're starting to realize, like, do you really need a college degree? I know that you really enjoyed your time in college. Why did you decide to go to all four years? And why did you decide to pick the university and degree that you chose? Yeah. I mean, so I think it's interesting. I think like the, you know, do you need to go to college to learn how to do stuff? Probably not, right? Like that, I think that's, that's a valid enough point. I think what college lets you do, though, is, is effectively, um, sort of delay anything, right? Like, like, you have, like, college is like a unique product and like a unique experience where you could basically not do anything for three or four years. And all the while you're sort of improving, um, the sort of out. outcomes that you could expect later on in life, you're improving like your network, you're meeting a bunch of new cool people. So I really enjoyed college. I really enjoyed college for, you know, just like the social experience. I really enjoyed college. I was like an econ major. I think it's actually quite like a valuable way to like approach problems in general.

And I also wouldn't have started ballot without going to college. So I'm not like the type of person that sort of thinks that college is like a useless thing to do. I think in most cases it probably makes a ton of sense because, listen, like, if you're 18 years old and you have a really great startup idea and you decide not to go to college and then, you know, two years later, you find out it's not such a great idea. You sort of, you could have just done the same thing basically while being in college, right? It's like a very low commitment effort. Obviously, assuming that you have like this financial means and it's not going to be like a real stretch on that perspective, yeah, I would probably recommend doing it 10 out 10 times. So you said you

studied econ, how did that help you become a better founder? Because a lot of times when I speak to founders, they studied stuff like computer science or something a little bit more technical or pursued the traditional like MBA or business route. As econ helped you at all? So the college I went to is a kind of like weird place where you basically have to like apply for a specific degree. And you went to Oxford, right? Yes. Yeah. So I was at Oxford and like the way that Oxford works is like you have to apply with a specific degree in mind. You can't take any courses outside of that degree during your time there. Wow. And you're basically like competing against all the other people who are sort of applying for that same degree. So I picked econ just because,

to be honest, I thought it was like the thing that I could probably like talk about the best and like interview for the best. But I do think it was a good experience. I think it's kind of it's a relevant sort of framework around, I would say, like, problem solving and just looking at things from the perspective of like, hey, like, what are the input variables that make up this sort of situation? What happens if you move things certain ways? I'm obviously like not really out here, like, you know, making economic models if you look at palette, but it's a helpful way of thinking, especially when it comes to like startups, when it comes to anything business related, because you sort of, you force your brain to put like at least some kind of,

mathematical framework on like real world activities. Probably should have done computer science. I assume that would have been a really good decision for myself. But, you know, it was worth it. And I enjoyed, I enjoyed the experience. That's so interesting how they don't let you take classes outside of your major there. I feel like asking an 18 year old, like, what do you want to do when you grow up? So like, obviously I assume for most people that that changes, especially throughout the time in college.

I didn't change my major in college. I know a lot of people who did. So good thing you chose something that you were actually interested in and were able to study for four years. Yeah, it felt like one of those things also where it's like, hey, you do econ, it sort of applies to whatever. Yeah. You know, barring actually doing something like really like technical and skill oriented. If I was going to continue to be like a soft skills type person, econ seemed to be like, you know, kind of apply it to whatever sort of use case. But it is weird.

Like I saw people like if you want to switch your major. you basically have to start from being a freshman again. So it's like if you wanted to switch from econ to history or whatever, you had to just start from square zero. And I saw that happen. But luckily, I didn't have to go through that. Yeah, no, I don't think I'd want to do that. Like I said, like, I don't know.

I definitely think if I was told that I had to stay in one major, though, the urge to like change majors would always be inside me, just because they tell you like, you've got to stay put. But that's really good that you were able to use like your problem solving skills. to start palette. Like, like I said, this whole segment is about Gen Z. What are your thoughts on the Gen Z founder landscape? Yeah. I mean, I probably don't have too many specific Gen Z specific thoughts, I would say. I guess there's probably like, you know, there's the one angle, which is like aspiring founders, right? And like for potentially like aspiring founders who are in college, there's probably like a list of like 10

ideas that you just really don't want to do. And I would say for any sort of Gen Z founder who's thinking about building a company, you know, it's like anything that's like meeting up with your friends in real life, for example, like, so a social app that has to do with that. Some sort of like, the other classic ones are some type of like study guide slash sort of social education. There's like a list of 10 things. I think it might even been, I don't know.

Someone tweeted it out and it was pretty relevant. So I would say if you're sort of like aspiring to be a founder, look into the things that you just definitely don't want to do because tons of people have tried them before and they don't work out. But I think seeing like the sort of entire landscape right now is really cool. And it's cool to see how, you know, I mean, it's like the bubble that I'm in is like tech Twitter. But how many different things are being attempted and are being worked on right now across a bunch

of different spectrums, right? Like you have, you know, people like Alex Mazmej at Showtime who's doing, you know, NFT, crypto stuff. I saw some company that was like tech for like fighting fires. Just a bunch of really interesting things that I guess just speaks to the younger. You know, we get exposed to so much information so early on that like you could formulate ideas around and formulate passions around a bunch of different spaces in a bunch of different sectors. So that's something I think is pretty cool. It's not like, you know, the Silicon Valley of like 2010 where everyone was working on an app of some sort.

like there's a real sort of variety of things being worked on. And that part's just pretty awesome. That's so funny. You mentioned Alex. He was actually on a previous episode. And he just absolutely blew my mind with how he saw crypto and his thoughts on that. Definitely a great episode to check out. And I think the most annoying app that is constantly made is the one where you check how long the line at bars are.

Personally, I don't think anybody else needs to try to create that app. I've seen that app tried to be made so many times. That's my number one. Like if you are in college and you're trying to make an app that tells us how long we're to be waiting for lines in restaurants or bars, we don't need it. It doesn't ever get adopted.

Please don't do it. Don't do it. Yeah. It's like how long lines are, like what places are like really popping off right now? Yeah. Where should you go out tonight? All that type of stuff.

Yeah. It's like join a group chat. But no, seriously, Twitter is the Twitter universe. Like, I feel like I've mentioned that quite literally on every episode so far because the tech world is no longer for our generation, just based in one location, like you said, Silicon Valley.

Everyone was working on apps. Everyone kind of lived in the same place. We are now so distributed. I think there's a lot of us in New York. I know you're based in New York as well. But I think where people are living, per se, is on Twitter. So I think that's great advice. I think if you want to become a Gen Z founder,

the first place to try to learn more about the community would be Twitter. It's amazing. The fact that it's free, it's open. You can learn from so many different. different people. It's literally a stream of consciousness, too, from some of the best founders out there. So pretty incredible stuff. But now I do want to pivot into actually talking about Palette. So starters, what is Palette? Yeah. So Palette is, I guess what we call ourselves right now is like a recruiting infrastructure tool, right? So we enable individuals to like spin up their own miniature

version of like a LinkedIn or like an Angelist or an Indeed. I guess. like the sort of core theses that underpin this idea is that when you look at recruiting and you look at this sort of talent space in general, there's been a lot of effort made, I guess, in like the last five, 10 years to like improve matching. I would say like that's where the bulk of like talent platforms have gone. Right. Hey, we're going to, we're going to do software engineering to company matching really well. Or we're going to have like this sort of psychometric test that's going to determine if you're a really good fit for a role or not. And while I think all of those are sort of valid innovations, obviously none of them have ended up being sort of like extraordinarily

large outcomes. And it's because I would say like any sort of matching component is probably like the sprinkles is on top. When in reality, when you look at recruiting in general, when you look at talent in general, the key ingredients that you need are just like trust, attention and engagement from candidates across their career lifecycle. And this is really hard to do at scale, right? The only real way to do this at scale is to build a social media platform. You could do this in like a sort of services oriented or great by having a bunch of recruiters that sort of message people all the time and build those relationships up. But it's very difficult to do at scale. And so the sort of thinking behind palette is rather than try to build a platform that has attention and trust or engagement on

our own, like we'll go and plug into the spaces where that's already implicit. Right. So, I mean, this podcast would be a good example. A substack writer like Pacu McCormick like you were mentioning, right? There's all of these pockets predominantly online right now where people are hanging out or spending time for some reason or another, not related to finding jobs, that we think can make for really excellent recruiting pipelines. Probably like the easiest example here would be like Lenny Richitsky, who's like a substack writer who covers product management. He's got like 100,000 subscribers who all want to read his stuff on product management. And if you could plug into that as a recruiter, like that's a really valuable asset. So we let Lenny build his own suite of like

recruiting products where he can recommend candidates to recruiters. He could post jobs from companies to his audience and make some money while doing that. That's awesome. So how do you guys make money off of that? So we just take a 10% take rate. So any sort of money that flows through our system, we try to provide like a robust set of tools for these creators of these communities to plug into. Right. So Lenny might say, hey, it's a thousand bucks a month if you want to get access to like my 30 recommended PMs who are on the market. And then we'll take 10% of that on every transaction, basically. And would this be like at the bottom kind of visual?

it for people, would this be at the bottom of, like, each newsletter, a bunch of different jobs from like a bunch of different companies that, like, might pertain to you? Is that how it would look? Yeah. So that, I guess that's like one manifestation of it. There is like a, like an actual core app, like a pallet doc, like Lenny.com app. But then depending on where your community hangs out, where your, where your content is, it can happen a bunch of different ways, right? So for most newsletter writers, yeah, like at the bottom, here's a list of jobs. Are you looking for a job? Like, fill out this forum. I'll connect you. If you're sort of like a TikToker, We've seen people like do a post in terms of like, hey, sign up here.

Right. They're not actually pushing the jobs. They're just trying to get people to sign up and like all showcase your profiles of different companies. So really depends on I guess like the medium. In a Slack channel, it'd probably be like in a little jobs channel. But yeah, right? Like whatever the natural medium where the people spend their time.

And I know you've seen a lot of people in the Stack space really adopt this because it's just the best platform. It looks the best. I definitely see a palette quite. a lot, quite often on really popular substacks, which is really cool. I know Paige herself, who invested in you guys, has a pallet site that I definitely checked out as well. Are there other places besides substack that you guys haven't broken into yet that you think palette could just absolutely explode?

Well, yeah. So I think the reason that substack took off so much is because like the first product we released was like a job board, right? So super simple. Hey, if you want to post a job, post it. And in that context, substack makes a ton of sense because you have this like really consistent

text-based distribution channel. Right? So having like, hey, here's like three or four jobs. You know that people are going to open it. Where the job board, I would say,

struggled a little bit more was in sort of like audio mediums or like video mediums or, right? It's like YouTube, TikTok, podcasts, right?

Like it's hard to sort of say like at the end of a podcast. And here's seven jobs that you should apply to. Like check out the link below, right? That's kind of like a weird foot a segment there.

So then the next thing released, which we're actually rolling out now and we're really excited about is what we call like a talent collective, which is like, hey, this is a group of people that sign up and then companies pay to access the people, right? Like, any sort of content creator would say, hey, do you want to, do you want to get connected to opportunities in my network? Like, sign up here and I'll connect you. And then, you know, there's like a like vetting or curation layer. And I'm really excited about that when it comes to those more audio visual mediums, right? because this is a super easy call out. Are you looking for a job? Sign up to the link below.

Fill out your profile and we'll connect you to roles immediately. So I'm excited about that one. I think obviously LinkedIn is probably a big one for us, which we haven't gone after too much. Twitter accounts in general, just like someone like Gabby Goldberg does a great job with it right now. Yeah. But I am excited to move past those sort of strictly text-based kind of channels

and move into more of those. audiovisual places. I love the idea of talent collectives. I actually just saw a tweet from somebody whose username is at J underscore Foster underscore J. and the tweet was, what if homies applied to jobs as a package deal? And that is literally like,

and it's like, it has like 953 likes right now. Like I just pulled it up. Like I think it's doing pretty good. So I think talent collectives are obviously something that people would enjoy it. And I think that's actually a really good idea to tap into networks

of the other people that are like tapping into collectives as a whole. I feel like I'm I guess it would be better to use this as an example. So I get a lot of people being like, oh, we are a Gen Z startup and we're hiring like to know any other Gen Zs that are like looking for jobs.

And I always get those messages. And sometimes I have people that I think would be like really good and sometimes I don't just depending. But it would be so convenient if I could just have like almost like a master list of like these are all the best designers I know. Like here is the talent collective and send it their way. Like I think that would make my life quite a lot easier. So definitely a lot, a lot of things to do there. And I said in the beginning of this episode that you're one of the founders of Pallet. Pallet has quite a few founders. How many founders are there total, by the way? Yeah, so we are actually like a founding team of four, which I guess is like on the large, on the large side of thing.

It's a collective. Now that's a collective. No, but yeah, that's a lot. So how do you guys navigate being a founding team of four? Like, what is your decision making process look like? I think it's important to give people their own space for things, right? So, so I'm the CEO. So right, like if there's ever sort of like an impasse and there's a decision that's not, not being come to, like it's very important that there's, the ability to just sort of make a call and move forward. In general, I would say people have like their own verticals that they're responsible for, right? So someone like Jake who leads ops, sales partnerships for us, like Janelle, who's our CTO, is probably not going to get too involved in the things that he does. And so you give people the space they need to operate. You accept that, hey, not every decision made is going to be a consensus one.

The important thing is like once the decision is reached that there's no no looking back, right? It's like I'll speed ahead. So I'd say broadly speaking, right, there's kind of people have their own domains and their own responsibilities. If there are sort of like larger scale company-wide decisions, like we'll obviously talk about it. And if there's not like a sort of agreement reached, like, you know, I'll just come and tie break the decision and we'll move forward.

That makes sense. Jason has adopted something that I believe Amazon originally did called single-threaded leader. So each member of our team has like a specific topic or a specific project within the speaking startups or launch that we spearhead. And it works out really well because if there's decision to be made on something, obviously Jason is like our boss boss. So he makes the final say on everything. But it's nice to have ownership over like you said, like a certain vertical, makes things go so much more smoothly. Do you guys have people on your team though that are a lot older than you because you guys are a team of really young founders? Yeah. Um,

I would say like the entire team is relatively young right now. So probably ranging from like 22, 23 to like 30, 31. So no one is is like so much older yet that we've had to kind of like encounter like, no one on the team is like a family and like has to like do that type of stuff. Obviously that's something that we're going to have to adopt to and then like adapt to as we want to scale up. But for now I would say like the overall overall energy in the team's pretty young and it's pretty sort of energetic. Yeah. So not anyone that's too much older at the very least.

Have you found any challenges in being such a young leader? Not really, no. I think it's right, like, you know, for anyone that's in this position, like, if someone comes and decides to join Pallet or join your startup, like, they made that decision on their own, like, they're opting into it. So you're not, you're not like forcing any sort of like young child leadership energy on people, right? Like, like, you went through an interview process. Like you got to know each other.

they decided there was something worth doing. And just like, you know, I consider like my, probably my number one responsibility is like earning the trust of the team and maintaining that trust like every single day. And so as long as that's there, there's nothing really uncomfortable. But, you know, that's probably my outlook on it at the very least. Yeah. I think it's important also to qualify, like,

it's important to know the things that you don't know, right? So like our lead designer is this guy Parker Henderson, who's worked in the industry for four or five, six years now. I lean on him a lot for making sort of decisions and for getting advice on things. I think it's okay. I don't think anyone expects you to know everything and have all the answers. And so being able to be like super honest with yourself and honest with your team about like, hey, like, I just don't really know what the fuck is what's going on here is, is like a useful

skill to have. And I think it actually probably builds further trust. And you guys are in office. I know you're in your office recording right now. is your whole team in office and is that something that you think is important? Not the whole team, like 10 out of the 12 of us are in office.

So Parker, who I mentioned, who's our designer is out in San Francisco. And then we've got one engineer who's in San Francisco as well. Is it important? So for me personally, I work much better when I'm around people. Like I think being able to feed off that energy is really good.

We want to have the best people in the world on the team. and if that means that they don't want to be in office, like we're happy to sort of make that exception. But in general, we probably skewed hordes hiring people who are in New York, keeping the team local. It's just good to sort of know each other and it's good to be able to see like the faces of the people that you work with all the time. That being said, it's really funny.

Like I think from like a like a macro perspective, remote work is super beneficial to our business. Like it's really good that the remote work is trending everywhere now. Right? Like, you know, if you were recruiting a PM and you were going to Lenny's newsletter, to be like, all right, well, I need this person to be in Alberta. It complicates the process a lot, right? But if things are remote, all of these little sort of audiences and these little networks

become much more valuable when it comes to recruiting. So we're, I'm macro level really bullish and really excited about remote work. It's just, it's just not my personal favorite way of working. No, I totally get that. I feel like I have to get out of my, my thing isn't actually like the one on one communication with my team per se, but it's getting out of the space that is like home. Like sometimes I just need to go to a coffee shop and sit down and grind and get in my flow state because it's a lot more difficult for me to get in my flow state in the same room that I sleep in. Like right now I'm in

my bedroom. I record for my bedroom. And whenever we have recordings, like this is where I am planted. But if I'm doing research for one of the shows or sending updates or things like that, where it requires like a lot more attention, I don't like to be here. Like, I try to go to a we work. I try to go to a coffee shop. So I definitely agree with you where there's like a time and a place for remote work. Because you are looking, though, at these jobs, I imagine, quite frequently. Have you been seen, like, any trends popping up in certain positions or, you know, certain fields?

Any sort of trends in certain positions or, well, I guess like locationally, definitely, like, the sort of results that we've gotten have been, like, remote work is, is for sure on the rise. I think anecdotally, and from some of the customers we work with more closely, really early stage startups are tending to actually skew back towards being in person. And then when you get to that sort of like 20 to 50 person range, things look really remote generally. In terms of actual trends of roles popping up, it's hard for us to really say, right, because a lot of the sort of palleted spin up are role specific, right? So like Lenny does product management.

Someone like Femke does product design roles. Or then you have someone that's like, I'm specifically doing like, Web3 jobs. Obviously, crypto is huge right now. So if there's any trend in talent that's going on right now, I'd say there's a pretty huge migration. I know people on Twitter talk about this all the time, but like there's a pretty big migration of like sort of non-crypto people moving into crypto. We've seen like in the various talent collectives that are sort of crypto-oriented. Like we've seen like C-suite executives of like super well-known public Pintech, prop tech type companies.

put themselves forth saying that they want to get they want to move into crypto. So that's probably where the most amount of like, whoa, like holy shit type energy is going on right now. But in terms of specific role trends, like not at the top by head at the very least. Yeah. Oh, that's that's super interesting. I've definitely seen a push too in like the Web 3 space in general. I've also seen a lot of people and Jason's even mentioned this, I believe, on something

else, another team that Jason is affiliated. He mentioned that there was a bunch of people who. had the opportunity to like resign and I think work for like do NFT things and things like that. Do you think like the great resignation or whatever you want to call that has impacted Pallet's business? Yeah. I mean like you know, it's funny because it's like right like from a sort of purely logistical standpoint, people leaving jobs is good for us, which is kind of, it's kind of interesting

to think about, right? Like if someone leaves the job, it means that there's a new person that wants a new job and there's a new role that has to be filled, right? So like all of this sort of activity and also this sort of motion is something that we look out for in general. I would say probably the interesting thing is like how how much the like acceptable window has shortened, right? Where it used to be like, hey, it used to be default like three years at a spot. And then it was sort of two years at a spot. And now really it's just kind of like one year.

And I find like people even will leave their companies even if their sort of equities vesting, even if they're sort of equity is vesting, even if their stock is vesting, even if there's like a cliff. So I would say like that that sort of acceptability window tends to shorten a lot. And we see a lot of people that just have like, hey, I've done my year, like time to find the new thing. So in that sense, yeah, I guess it is impactful for us and it's something that we look at. And it's probably even heightened even more in crypto and web three, right? Like there's tons and tons of churn across these different companies and people bouncing around and doing all this type of stuff. Yeah, I actually like that, Honestly, I know there's a lot to be said about being loyal to a company.

And there is definitely, especially if the company that you work for a small like a startup, but there's something to be said about having the power to actually do what you want to do. And on the company side, I think it's really beneficial because I think sometimes people hold on and like stay at a company for like they overstay their welcome almost where they're extremely burnt out. They're no longer performing at their job. But because they've been there so long that they've been there so long, the company doesn't, feel like or see that that person should be replaced. So I know that a lot of people really dislike the fact that there's been a pretty high turn rate happening over the past few years in particular with especially young people

in the workforce. But I do see benefits in that. Do you think that this is a good thing or a bad thing? I don't really know if it's either good or bad. I mean, I think in like, right, I'd probably even lean on like towards the good side of things, right? Like, I think if you're if you're at a good place and you're at a good company, um, the responsibility, like what's beneficial for both the company and for the sort of employee is for the company to continue to push the bounds of responsibility that person has, right? So it's like, hey, my first six months that I was responsible for this and now I'm taking on more stuff or taking on bigger stuff. And you want to constantly be pushing that and constantly figuring out like what people's maximum capacity is.

And if that's happening, there's probably naturally going to be some turn, right? Where you should have saying, cool, you know, this person has sort of scaled up to this point. And now they have the decision to either, I guess, like, move down a level, right? And sort of be consistent in like a slightly less scaled up role. But they're not quite at the point where they could take on that next step, right? And we're going to have to fill that from somewhere else. And so I think if that's the dynamic that's going on, then that's a good thing, right? Because it's like, hey, people are coming in.

They're learning. they're growing as fast as they can. And whenever that growth point stops, they have the decisions either sort of flatline for a little bit or move on. I think that's great. I think if it's one of those things where it's like, hey, I'm going to sort of try something new and I'm not going to, like, because I, you know, I think sometimes people take this attitude, right? Like, I'm going to go to a new place and I'm going to kind of do my time and I'm going to do my thing. And then I'm just going to bounce around and move to another place because I got bored, right? Like, then that's probably net negative. But I think there's, right. So that's what I would say probably. There's

like positive turn and negative turn? Like, are people leaving because the company's a shit show and they, they want to get out of there or are they leaving because it's like legitimately like, hey, I've done the most I can do. I've grown the most I can. And like the next spot is going to help me level up even further. In that case, it's, it's all positive, basically. Yeah, two companies come to behind and I hope I don't get like dragged or canceled for saying this.

But I've met a lot of people that I've been like X, these companies and dealing with positive been negative. The first one being, I have a lot of friends that previously worked at Morning Brew, and it seems like it was a really good experience. I think it was a positive there. Like, we learned so much at Morning Brew. It was a really cool experience. We just now feel motivated to start our own thing, go off, just do something else. And it is really cool to see that even people that weren't at Morning Brew for maybe like since the beginning, I've had a lot of people that had like a really good experience and a great learning time over with that team. And I've also seen a lot of people that were ex-coinbase that had a complete opposite experience, where I met quite a few

people specifically over the past like two weeks that are like, yeah, we were starting new projects, we worked at Coinbase. And honestly, like, we were just, like, we were pushed to the point of burnout. And that's why we left. And it wasn't necessarily that they were pushed to the capacity of being able to take accountability for so much that they felt that they were able now to like juggle their own thing. It felt like they were pushed to the point of like just being overwhelmed. And it's so interesting, I think you're right where there's like positive and negative turn. And I think the older generation sees turn almost always is negative. It's like, oh, like these young people are only here for a year. Like, they're just taking like the company's title and leaving.

But I actually, I don't think that's the case at all. I like to think, like maybe this is just me being positive that most people and most young people aren't just bobbing around these companies for only a year at a time, two years at a time. Because, um, they want to like take the company for all their words and like just get the get their you know like get vested. I'd like to think that that's not like what everyone's doing. I think that the reason that young people are changing so quickly is because they're hitting their cap of like what they can learn. And now that there's so many opportunities with remote work and with just different types of work that they have the opportunity. Like it's like if this position is no longer serving me and I'm no longer serving this position, why would you stay? you're no longer bound by a location.

You're no longer bound by a pay, especially with Web3. A lot of these Web 3 companies are constantly hired. I get approached like multiple times a week by these Web 3 companies. And they pay crazy amounts of money. Like there are no bounds to what you can do anymore. And I think that's really interesting. And the learning is just uncapped. Like it's a very interesting space to see.

But I'd like to see how this impacts us, I guess, later down the line, like this is just the beginning of this quick turn rate. Like I think maybe our generation is probably the first generation to see jobs changing this quickly. I don't know how this will impact the economy down the line. I don't know how this will impact employment and companies themselves, especially in a startup landscape where like your day one employee might only be there for a year.

I don't know how that will impact things down the line, but, you know. I mean, it's interesting. It's sort of like, I do think that that kind of to your point, though, like, as a startup, as a company, the people that you have, like, you should at least be giving them the chance to prove that they could take on more work. Like, I think very often that you see startups hiring and like sort of layering the early team and bringing in sort of more senior people without even sort of giving that shot, which I think is important. Like, I think that's kind of a, if you can promote from within, right, or like give the team that you have more responsive. And then I think that's a great thing. But I think to your point, like, if you find a place where you're continuously growing and you can really be like almost like like a sports team, right?

Like every sports team has the sort of superstars on the team who are there for six, seven, eight, nine years. But then there's a lot of like role players, right? And I was like, are you, you know, playing a role is a really good thing. It's a really important thing. So I don't necessarily think it's going to be too bad like for any sort of like long term effects on the world. you know, generally speaking, it's like a lot of roles at companies are quite similar, I would say, like, everything is, everything is the same in some cases. And it's only once you start to get to like that, those higher up kind of like more

high level managerial type roles that things really start to defer. So I think like doing a year or two as a SDR somewhere and then moving somewhere else and being an A.E and then, you know, so on and so forth, like that type of stuff I don't really think has a huge impact on, on like a company's bottom line. So I'd say it's only beneficial for people, right? Like if you could keep on bouncing until you find the spot that's really good for you. We were just talking on a previous episode about how in Netflix, there was somebody, I'm blanking on her name right now,

but they talk about how they're a team, not a family. And specifically, they're like a pro sports team, not a kid's rec team. Netflix leaders hire, develop, and cut smartly. So we have stars in every position. And I actually really like that. That was in the Netflix culture deck. I believe Reed Hastings put that out there. But I think that's really interesting that you sit sports team because I think you're

right. Like obviously we see people again, like really need to the sports world that have been with the same team forever. And they're like a legacy there. And I do think that that will continue in the work world where if you find your spot, like we're all creatures of. habit, like we're going to stick, right? If you find something that's not broken, why I try to fix it. But again, I think more companies are operating less like families, more like sports teams,

like Netflix is saying. So I also think companies are a little bit more eager to draw people if they're not performing. Have you seen that at all? Yeah. I mean, I think like, I think it probably depends on the stage of the company, right? Like, I think probably one of the most, overused cliches is like, every startup says they only hire A players, right? I'm like, sure, like, I think it's like a nice thing to say. Um, and sure it sounds good. Uh, but in reality, like, that's neither true because then you, your hiring cycle would take forever, nor is it necessary, right? Like, I don't think you need your team to be all A players. Like, um, in fact, that'd probably be like slightly counterproductive in some cases, right? Like, if we're,

if we're talking about A players is like a sort of default. line set rather than like within the scope of role, right? But I think it's more than okay to have, you know, build a team of people like, this person's really good at this thing and this person's really good at this thing. And, you know, it's not like we're all crazy superstars in our own way, but more so like is the, is the sum of the parts greater. What is the, whatever the saying is. Yeah, the sum of its parts greater than its whole or something like that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Or the whole, no, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Oh, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. There we go. There we go. That makes, that makes a ton of sense. Yeah. And so, right, so it's like, it's, it's, I,

I think that's a more important way to kind of construct a team. And it's like, listen, like we like us being 12 people growing really fast right now, needing to keep things up. We're not going to be like ruthlessly firing people for like small mistakes. Like just not a viable strategy. Obviously, if someone consistently puts in like substandard work, like that's not going to, you know, that's not going to fly. We've had to let go of people in the past.

So I would, yeah. So I would say in our case, like maybe. But I think it depends on the stage of the company, right? Once you're 100, 200, 300 people in the machines going, then yeah, then I think you could sort of implement those slightly more rigid structures and then like ruthless structures. But right now, like the most important thing for us is that everyone on the team can be the best version of themselves and like contribute to the overall,

to the overall growth of the company, right? It's not quite as important for us to be like, move up or move out, right? It's just like, how can we all get better collectively at the job that we do and how can we all get better collectively at like improving the sort of outlook of the company? Yeah, definitely. I mean, like you guys seem like you're absolutely killing it. And thank you again so much for coming on because so many people have spoken so highly of you guys. And obviously, in your hiring, even though you guys are a 12-person team, you are just taking it by storm.

I feel like the substacks that I've seen you guys on in particular have been very interesting. Again, going to plug Packies, not dash. boring.pellet.com slash jobs is Packy's. That's the first one that I saw and I just thought really, really cool and great use case, how it was their port codes and just companies that Packy likes. Where can people find you, Kai?

Probably Twitter is the main place. What's my handle? I think it's like Han Kai in 1998, I want to say. H-A-N-K-A-I-1998. And then on Twitter for Palet, where Palet underscore H-Q. I had my first tweet get a thousand likes yesterday.

Dang, what was it? It was some stupid, like, not thought out tweet of, like, I did, like, Maslow's early stage startup, like, hierarchy, like, hierarchy of needs. Yeah. I was like, engineering and sales are, like, basic needs. And then design and product are, like, psychological needs. And strategy is, like, a self-fulfillment need for, like,

where to hire. And people just misconstrued it in, like, all sorts of ways where they're, like, startups need strategy. And I was like, yeah. Oh, my gosh. You shouldn't, you shouldn't hire for, strategy. Anyways. So I'm dealing with my first dose of

micro niche internet celebrity and it's, it's I'm getting a little bit roasted in certain places, but it's fun. All in the days, work of a niche micro internet celebrity. All right. Well, thank you so much for coming on and I hope everybody gets the chance to check out

Palet. All right. Awesome. Thanks much for having me. Hey, everyone. Producer Nick here. I want to tell you about the SaaS syndicate. If you're a founder of a SaaS company with a product and market our investment team wants to talk to you. Head over to the syndicate.com slash SaaS, SAAAS to apply to raise from the Sass Syndicate. And you can join Jason's syndicate of over 9,000 accredited investors at the syndicate.com.

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