This Week in Startups - Podcasting, crypto and favorite finds with Acquired’s Ben Gilbert & David Rosenthal | E1337

Episode Date: December 2, 2021

David and Ben from Acquired.FM join Jason to talk about their favorite podcast moments from 2021 (1:29), valuations across startups & crypto (35:50), top content recommendations (1:10:00) and so much more!

Coming up on this weekend startups. This is the problem with what's happening in crypto. These valuations, like, oh my God, it's worth $10 billion in the market. But 10 billion of tokens have not been sold. $10 million worth of tokens have been sold. But people are buying in $100 increments. Nobody can clear their positions. There's not a market to sell all of those.

So what do you do? You're just going to be like, you know, dribbbing them out to sell them as you go. That is the thing about crypto. that I think people don't realize is that I would guess two-thirds of the valuation of crypto is unrealized and unrealizable. This week in startups is brought to you by Squarespace. Turn your idea into a new website. Go to Squarespace.com slash twist for a free trial.

When you're ready to launch, use offer code twist to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Mbroker's startup insurance program helps startups secure the most. most important types of insurance at a lower cost and with less hassle. Save up to 20% off traditional insurance today at enbroker.com slash twist. While you're there, get an extra 10% off using offer code twist. And Calm for Business can help your employees be their best selves at work. HR and benefit leaders can get a free year of Calm for Business at Calm.com slash Twist. Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of not only this week in startups, but I am officially welcoming Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal's amazing audience,

pretty sophisticated audience, I would say, based on the slack that I'm in at Acquired FM. Yes, this is a co-lab, a collaboration. All the kids are doing it on the YouTube. David and Ben, welcome back to this week in startups. Jake out welcome back to Acquired Is this your first time doing a co-lab Oh what is this episode like

Six, seven we've done together You guys are now in like the rankings Of most on the show Seventh episode together yes Who else is on that leaderboard Who we uh Who we have to battle here Brian Alvey

Who was my best friend from high school Who I did Weblogs Inc which has been on a lot of times There's some people on the news roundtable Like Molly Wood's been on a couple times Yeah I'd say the news roundtable Alex Wilhelm It's been on All right

So some formidable competition Yeah you're up there Zach's been on six or seven times Yeah Zach Coelius would be on a lot Because he does ask Jason and Zach Because I find like there's some people I just vibe with And obviously Ben and David You're two of those folks

If you don't know about Acquired FM Where the hell have you been Go to Acquire.fm And sign up for their Elite $100 subscription product in addition to their free Because you do, do, yeah, Jason,

we have big news. Yeah, we, uh, we changed our, we changed the model a little bit. So we started releasing all LP episodes for free after two weeks. Because we had such awesome guests that we were like,

you know what? If people want this information in a way that they're going to do something interesting with it, two weeks is plenty of time. Um, but, you know, it's incredible guests. They're saying incredible things.

It's a shame to lock it up for just a couple thousand people. So. That's always been the problem I've had with the paywall and the market for advertising is so vibrant right now for podcasting at least. You can't say that about blogs or other things. So, yeah, I think it's a good decision. We started playing with the, you know,

paid concept on Patreon, whatever. And I was just like, you know, this is like antithetical to my personal brand of founders don't pay and my audience is founders, mostly, you know, some investors and some tech enthusiasts, but mostly founders. I just, they've got a hundred bucks, or no offense,

you have a lot of capital allocators, so a hundred bucks is just like, whatever, someone's about the show. I'd rather they put it towards their startup or something. So, well, congratulations on it.

It was much more about, about the, well, A, it was people who are paying us, some people were paying for the content, uh, but it was a minority.

Most people were paying because they'd like us, wanted to support the show. They wanted to support the show. And then for, be part of the community. We do monthly Zoom calls with our paid LPs and, that's very cool. So we get to hear about their

crazy NFT exploits in the last six months. Oh my God. I mean, we, I don't know when the last time we got together was, but we have not really... When was it? I think it was right before your Italy trip. Oh, right before Italy. Okay, so it was August. Yeah, oh, thanks.

I've lost 20 pounds since then. You looked good. You were looking good. You were seriously looking good. You know what happened was David and I were talking and like, I don't know if you remember this all in where somebody had a picture of us on the golf course and the middle of pandemic in Cabo

because we had done this like I mean David had basically gone AWOL and it was kind of like a I don't know you guys ever watch

Apocalypse now like Colonel Kurtz goes like into the woods and like he goes kind of crazy so like David Sachs is missing and so people are like

hey David's kind of lost it in the middle of the pandemic he just went to Cabo can you go retrieve him and I'm like okay

so I've you know, it's middle of pandemic. I fly down private to Cabo. I find him in Cabo and he's like literally, yeah, he's kind of like, I don't know about this pandemic. Is this the end of the world? He's kind of, you know,

on edge or whatever. He's like Colonel Cards. He's basically gone Curl Cards. You're going into the heart of darkness. I'm like, this is, you can't live this way. You got funds, you've got family, you've got friends, you've got the poker group.

You got to come home. David, you got to come back to the bay. You can't stay in Kabul for the whole pandemic. So I brought him home. But anyway, there was a picture of the two of us in the golf course. And I'm like over 200 pounds. He's pushing whatever. And we started doing all in together.

And then, of course, fat jokes, we just fat shame each other incessantly at the poker game. But you can't do that anymore, can you, Dave? You're not allowed to fat shame. I have the picture ready to pull up if you want to see it. I mean, no, I don't want to see it. I don't know. It's okay if you do it yourself. Oh, wow.

There we are. I mean, there are. I mean, you're kind of leaning backwards. We're sucking it in there. We're sucking it in there. We're working the angles. I'm all in black. He made the terrible maneuver of putting all white on. And he's like, why are you wearing all black on the golf course and Cobb?

Slimming. Sliming, exactly. Why do I wear black all the time? Sliming. So. I love that we're looking at it through a, like, screenshot of a Zoom background while Sacks is talking over it. It's a very like the 2020 version of this photo.

Yeah, that's a peak pandemic approach there because you can see the aliasing around the thing is just terrible. That's when Zoom just started that feature. Yeah. So we look really fat. And so we were fat-shaming each other. And all of a sudden I noticed he's getting thinner. And he's talking about his weight loss. I'm like, oh, God.

Anyway, I'm 176 this week every single day. Congratulations. What's your secret trainer, Peloton? I am. No, I stopped working out, actually. And I, because what I found was in the research, if you're working out and you have a serious amount of weight to lose, which I did, you know, I was over, I was 198 or 190. I was my peak this year. I'm 176 now.

So I've lost over 20 pounds this year. When you're that fat and overweight, I'm sorry, obese, whatever, if I'm triggering people. But I consider myself a fat master. You felt you were, you were not happy with where you were. I was, I'll be, if I'm being totally candid, Ben and David. I was very disappointed in myself that I could be so successful at anything I tried

with the exception of weight loss. And it was like embarrassing to me and frustrating to me because I would lose 10 pounds, 15 pounds, and then 10 pounds, gain it back, 10 pounds, gain it back for 10 years. And it just basically, I was a marathon runner who stopped running marathons. And so my metabolism, you get older.

And then I kind of forgive myself. You gain a pound or two a year. That's not a lot. And you do it for 20 years. you're going to be overweight. So that's exactly what happened to me. Anyway, I just went down to 1.5 meals a day. That's it.

It's just little starvation. And, uh, it's, it's not fun, but thermodynamics, you know, are, are a fact of the universe. And, uh, it, I, what's the, there's some quote, I lost a bunch of weight when I was in college and I remember some quote, were you fat? Uh, I lost 40 pounds my senior year of college. You were fat. And I've been about the same.

Yeah. Probably. I mean, depends on, on definition, but I wasn't happy with, uh, with how I was. I mean, you're definitely in the obese category, which is 30 BMI or more. Thanks, 40,

I mean, no, I was obese too. You get to sense that David was never. But there's like those phrases like... I was a little kid. David actually played football in college. That's a long story that we don't have time for now.

Let's do that on the next twist. The next twist. So you, how did you lose the weight then, Ben? very similar. I cut all carbs. But at the end of the day, I think it's kind of a,

you know, it's a calories game. It's a calories game. And then I've done a bunch of research about this online. It turns out when you have fat on your body, there's all these systems in your body

that when you have fat, your body, which is, you know, an operating system from, you know, that's tens of thousands of years old, just says, oh, there's fat on your body,

put more fat on. You got to keep that because it's obviously of the winter. So let's keep it on. So your body basically just makes you, ravenously hungry to try to keep that fat on.

When you get like 10 pounds off, it's like, oh, something's going wrong here. Put more fat on. So your body actually actively starts fighting you when you hit that like minus 10 point. So you really have to just break through. And then once you break through, you're good. So David and I both broke through. And it's been great. I mean, he's 168. He told me.

And he started at 192 or 94. So we're both on the exact same journey. And we're going to do like a weight loss program and then start selling it for like, you know, whatever. I'm in, send me the DVDs. $149 or something. Me and him doing aerobics.

Third, fourth leg of the launch Empire stool? Wait, launch it? This is good. So we jump on, let's skip ahead a little bit here, but we wanted this to be like the holiday special episode. Yes. One of the questions we had for you. Okay, here we go.

Twenty-21 year in review. This is the perfect tee up. How's your relationship with Saxi Pooh? We all over the beef. Every, all good? You know, Sacks and I are like, others. And we, Sacks is also a leader. And, uh, before all in, we could break each other's chops about our position on, let's say, politics. Obviously, he's, I'm left leaning. He's right

leaning. I'm kind of more of a centrist and he's becoming a little bit more centrist. So I feel like we're both sort of coming closer on this. But then you throw in the all in podcast. And that was not, you know, that was just to have fun. And now it's obviously gotten larger than, And we thought it would. It peaked at the 41st episode in the country of all categories. Oh, that's crazy. Wow. Episode 56 and 57 were like 41 and 55 or something.

I don't know. Like, I look at it over the weekend. And that's crazy. So it's gotten extraordinarily popular. So then you should get chartable, by the way. They send you alerts on when you're ranking on different. I think my team has that. I have to get them.

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So go to Squarespace.com slash twist for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use that offer code twist to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. And congrats to the team for going public back in May. What an amazing journey. Great job, Squarespace team. So anyway, that has created another level to it because when we break chops, Everybody sees it as a 10x, what in reality we're experiencing. We do this as a course of action.

And I basically started it because I grew up in Brooklyn where we break each other's chops as sport. It's kind of a way to show love and affection. He buys into that 100%. We've been friends for 20 years. We've been doing it for 20 years. So it makes everybody uncomfortable. We go out with our wives or at a party. Like, our wives will take us square and say, can you guys stop ribbing each other to

making the other guests uncomfortable? I'm like, why would be uncomfortable? I'm sorry. Why would it be uncomfortable of this like, sympathizing, this fat bastard and I argue. And I said, please stop.

It's making you worse. So we just, you know, just beep, beep, beep, beep, be that in the post production. So,

um, it's actually never been bad, but we do argue over things. And one of the arguments has been, and I'm curious, your position on this is how much politics on all in? You know, when you talk politics on any podcast,

you, you probably have seen it on yours. You're, all of a sudden, You got all these thumbs up, thumbs down. The comments go crazy. The tweets go crazy. You're an idiot.

You're stupid. You know, it's polarized like anything else. So it becomes like Thanksgiving dinner during the Trump era. And so I've been the other three besties who are not David Sacks. Freeberg doesn't want to talk about any politics. You see him like just zone out. If you're watching him on the stream during a politics session. He just goes and does like real science while everyone's throwing bars.

He literally walked out off on the, I thought he left the program, but he's like, oh, this is perfect time for me to get a cup of coffee. I'm like, you can't leave. in the middle of the tape. He's like, I just had a cup of coffee, whatever. I was like, okay, fine. So he hates it. Chamoth is fine with it if it's in relation to,

same position as me, markets, tech, you know, science. Can't argue it doesn't impact our world anymore. And then David would like to talk about the insurrection. You know, he wants to talk about any, you know, he wanted to talk about written house. You know, and that was something like a big debate. Or are we going to talk about this or not? And so anyway, that is at the core of it. And I think we've worked through most of it.

I mean, you asked for our take. on it. My quick one is I actually love listening to All In for that reason. I thought I was going to listen to it for like business and tech stuff and I excited. I tuned in a lot for like COVID updates and a lot for what's going on. I don't live in San Francisco but like San Francisco politics because I didn't really understand it until then. And I feel like it's an intelligent politics discussion. I mean there's

Barb's but uh, uh, Sacks is the first conservative to make arguments where I I become amenable to them and then look at myself and I'm like, no, what are you doing? But like, it's, it's smart. It's well-reasoned. It's not incendiary most of the time. David? I totally agree. And I go back to, you know, you can't separate anymore.

Like, tech and our world and our industry is so much more a fabric of the whole world. And so, like, to pretend that politics and world events and stuff, you know, don't impact our industry and vice versa is silly. there's no place else where you can get a good discussion of these things, then all in. So I think it's great. I agree with Ben. I think it's a core part of the show. I appreciate that. And I agree with you both.

I mean, to say it's part of the fabric of society, capital allocation, wealth creation, technology and science are our society as far as I'm concerned. I don't think almost anything is important now. Entertainment, media, like, religion. I mean, all the movie studios are owned by big tech. like literally owned by there are are no more independent film studios so is that enough yeah so i you know i i i appreciate it what i'm what we're trying to do you know we have uh we play poker most weeks or have dinner together you know every couple of weeks you know during poker and we really as a as a

quartet have had discussions about hey what is the what is what is what is a vibrant civil discussion right and so like interruptions comes up all the time like how prepared week. And so that was another big discussion. Like, you know, hey, are you interrupting people? It's like, it's a conversation and, you know, Sacks would show up with a monologue. And I, you know, we had to have this like discussion. Like, are, sacks has researchers and writers who are, you know, giving him notes and none of us are doing that. I'm like, listen, I don't want you monologuing on the show. I'm going to interrupt you monologue. So you can get 90 seconds into this. But when you get to two minutes or three

minutes, I'm going to ask you a question. You got to pass the ball. This is not ISO ball. This is not like 90s basketball. You're not Alan Iverson or Carmeload. Hello Anthony. I want warrior-style basketball. I want the ball passing. He agrees with that. By the way, I don't know how this did in your analytics, but one of my favorite all-in episodes, if not my favorite for this year was when you had Draymond on. I don't know if that was a deep cut or if that was high up on the charts, but it was awesome. It was in the early days. We have to have them back on after the season. All right. So, Jason, can I ask you one before we move to another topic? One final question on on all-in.

how has your thinking evolved on the sort of Jason Calacanis media and investing empire since adding all into the mix? Like, how does it fit in with launch and twist and how you're thinking about the next five and ten years now? So, I love doing it. I love doing it. I am now, you know, I turn 51 on Sunday. I have now oriented. I've just oriented my life. How old are you guys, by the way?

32 and David, you're 35. So I focused my entire life on performance, you know, success, trying to be somebody, be important, get money, get power, get status. And I just made the decision after Tony Shea passed away, which is just now the year anniversary and after, you know, COVID, that I am going to put an equal amount of effort into my personal enjoyment with my friends and my family, which, you know, has been a journey of my 40s, is trying to. trying to just put more effort into my friendships and families and relationships. So I bought a ski house, you know, like, and I'm going to spend a month in Tahoe skiing and doing the show from there. So actually, I'm orienting the empire around my personal enjoyment of life and, you know, my relationships and the success is going to take care of itself because it has my, I was that like maybe 300,000 followers or something? I think I had it

100,000 followers since All In became popular. I'm getting a lot of offers to do other media stuff now because people saw me in a different role, I guess a moderator. So you might see me on some other, you know, mainstream media stuff or other projects.

So it has changed things for me. The things I love doing, investing in startups, performing on air, like doing podcasts and writing, and being a great friend, you know, to the people I love.

Those are the things that I've taken stock of my life that I enjoy doing. And so that's what I'm orienting. everything around. And you know what? Like, media is what I love to do. I love to create media. And it's really that simple. If I like, and like this, you know, like last night, I was like, can't wait to be on the show with you two, you know, and it's like, I really enjoy our time together. We felt the same way. Chopping it up. And I, you know, I get a little tingle, uh, you know, before all in or before certain guests. And, you know, uh, as part of that, since this being

starts about five days a week this year, uh, we're bringing Molly Wood on. Uh, and so Molly Wood is obviously very famous podcaster from NPR, New York Times. And before that, she kind of pioneered streaming media on CNET. And we've been friends for a long time. And she's joining us in January as the co-hosts of this week. So we'll take a little pressure off me and kind of add to them. Oh, great. Awesome.

Yeah, I was a two-year thing. Yeah. I've been talking to her about it for two years. But she wants to be an investor. And so she was like, hey, how do I become an investor? And I was like, well, you quit your job and come work with me. And so she wants to do climate. So I don't know if you saw the syndicate launched the SaaS syndicate.

and I'll just break a little news here. We're going to do a climate syndicate next. Oh, sweet. And Molly Wood did this great podcast this year called How We Survive. It became the number one business podcast for a couple of weeks. And she's passionate about that. So she's going to spend the first half of the day working on this week and startups with me. Second half of the day, investing in climate startups and other startups.

And I'm going to teach her how to be an investor. And we'll actually do that on air. So that's going to be really exciting for me too because I just think she's awesome. That's great. How are you guys thinking about your media empire? that's a great question um i mean it's gotten very popular i see you guys in the rankings like we're both right there in the top whatever top 15 tech podcast 10 to 15 it's right it's uh it's well hey it's been a wow i mean we never expected any of this like yeah but um you're good at

it so it's it's been oh thank you it's been awesome um i don't we live in this golden age right like i used i'm i'm full time monica like acquired is like what i do it's my my job quote unquote now, I used to be a professional venture capitalist with a hobby podcast on the side. Now I'm a professional podcaster with a fund hobby venture capitalist on the side and like never been happier. I mean, we live in this golden age, right? Where like media broadly define what it's become. The internet, you know, media influence is the key to, you know, we were going to talk about

Sequoia on this episode and the state of the VC landscape. as we always do. Like, just, you know, being capital by itself is not enough anymore. What we do, what you do, what All In does, you know, that you tell us, but I'd imagine for all of your, all four of your investing on All In and you with the launch and twist empire, it's the best thing that you could do for your investing, right? You know, it's something you can do. It's not for everybody.

I think you have to want to put yourself out there. You want to have an opinion. And it does take a lot of time, right? If you don't have business insurance, you failed one of the first steps of being a great founder. Startups should look no further than in broker. Broker's technology saves you time and money. Prices are like up to 20% lower. And they got better coverage than all these slow incumbents.

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Embroker, E-M-B-B-R-K-E-R.com slash twist. All right, thanks for supporting the show, I'm broker. Love you guys. I'm doing six podcasts a week, two hours approximately of effort each one. But for me, talking is my superpower, so it's not that hard. How is your business being impacted by this, Ben? Yeah, it's been interesting.

So I think a thing that we were really worried about for a long time is, so we started as like the normal podcast that everyone says you should do, which is 30 to 40 minutes. And we started bleeding longer and longer. And we got into this territory where like, we do these, like we need to do 50 hours of research on a company to produce a three, three-hour podcast on the New York Times or TSM, which went nuts this year.

And we were getting a lot of feedback. Taiwan Semiconductor manufacturer. No, a company, Taiwan Semiconductor Company. Right? Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. Manufacturing Company or corporation. The ninth largest company in the world by market cap, they make all the chips, all the most advanced chips in all smartphones.

and um this is a key asset in the world and it is a geopolitical lynchpin it's like it's a geo it's like literally like it is a keystone or a linchpin like you pull the linchpin out or you remove the keystone the arc collapses like this is literally modern life like disappears it's it's a really significant business that is more important is let me ask you this of having you guys doing the deep dive on it is it been more important than the actual Taiwan, like the country itself? Like, if you think about China and the U.S. interests, if we're being totally cynical or candid,

do people care more about the people of Taiwan and the state slash province, however you look at a country of Taiwan, or is this more about or equal about Taiwan semiconductor? I mean, we cannot compare the value of human life to the value of the market capital corporation. The thing about how the communists think about it. thing is that it's not a, it's not either. It's the same thing. The country, Taiwan started,

this is the whole history that we tell the episode. Like, it was government policy, domestic policy, that they wanted to start this. So they recruited Morris Chang, the founder who was by that point, an American citizen. He's from China originally from mainland China, uh, recruited him to come take over like a, a ministry. And then that led into one thing led to another than they started at TSM, the government owned it. They were outside shareholders and there obviously still are now, but it's the same thing. It's like the most strategic asset, political asset that the government has. Yeah.

I guess the point that I wanted to make there is, so we do this three-hour episode on TSM and we've done these three-hour episodes on these other companies. And it finally dawned on me that you can just go be weird in a corner of the internet. And the internet is now so big that if you just... just keep at it and you have reasonable distribution channels, you will find all the other people that are weird in the same way that you're weird, who will come conglomerate around you. So while the conventional wisdom is,

don't do three-hour podcasts, like 160,000 people who like three-hour podcasts have found their way to us over the last six and a half years of banging our head against a wall, so I find that inspiring for anybody who has something where they feel like they want to go and operate in some pseudo-obscure corner. I think that's exactly right. When people started telling me, like, try to get this to, you know, an hour and do this. And, like, I had the original producers on this weekend startups.

We're trying to, like, fit it into, like, a TV forum. And I was like, turn the microphones on. Like, how long is it going to be? We got to tell the guests, I was like, tell the guest to just book two hours. And it might go over, might go under and we'll get a hamburger or a coffee after whatever they want to do. But just look at this as a conversation. It ends when we both think it should end. The end.

Love that. If you don't have constrained, why would you add? it, you have to ask yourself. So if there is no constraint, you would add constraint because you think it makes the product better. Right? And people are just so used to things being a certain length or they look at the, you know, top rankings and they're like, oh, well, Ben Shapiro and the Daily Show, you know, and all those daily things are exactly 25 minutes each day. And it's like, well, yeah, they're done by the New York Times or somebody like, there's some reason there, but you don't have to. Right. They're fitting into a traditional media format because they're also going to be distributed on traditional media. that is actually what happens. They're on a regular radio. They're being syndicated in some cases.

So, yeah, they're, and they, you know, they just may come to it with a little bit more of a rigid thing. But that's what I love about all of this. And, um, I, so, so, so, and then to answer the last part of your question, sort of like, how, how does it fit into investing? So I'm a general partner in a fund in Seattle called Pioneer Square Labs and our, our investments with PSL Ventures. And, uh, David in last January, despite much pushback convinced me that we should do

Bitcoin episode, which was our first crypto foray. Amazing, it took us till January of 2021. But since then, I've gone like way down the rabbit hole. We're on our seventh Web3 related episode and a bunch more in the pipeline now. And I, we have five partners at PSL, but I am personally exclusively looking at crypto and Web 3 investments now. And that's fairly new. It's in the last month.

But it's just been a total, total, total change for me. and that wouldn't have happened without sort of having acquired as the vehicle to pursue that curiosity. I tell people, podcasts can be like your graduate school. And literally, like, every year you get a new degree or every like 10 episodes, it's like, here's your new, you know, minor in crypto. Here's your minor in smart contracts. Like, it's like literally taking another couple of credits. And I always tell people it's a front for me to build relationships and get smarter.

I think maybe it's a good segue into crypto. Is that somewhere on the docket that? we're talking about crypto? I don't think it's explicitly on the docket, but it's like, hey, Jason, are we talking about mobile? Are we talking about social today? I mean, probably not. Well, but I mean, like, I guess I'm trying to make the point.

It's like, it's in the fabric of everything now. And, and at least, uh, specifically in investing because I literally was looking at a Dow company, um, and I'm looking at the Dow comes. I'm like, somebody's going to make a Dow platform. I think for me, I looked at the, I look at the, I look at the four, uh, stages of crypto. And I covered Bitcoin when it was, you know, trading in the sense. And I wrote a seminal piece like the most dangerous technology project I've ever seen turned out to be pretty correct. Is this public? Like it's a blog post from... They'll pull it up right now.

When I have my email newsletter, it was the most dangerous technology project I'd ever seen. And I had, and I'll ask my producers to pull these for the future. We'll talk about them on the pod. Maybe somebody on the producing team can look at when we first talked about Bitcoin. This was around that time I had a Bitcoin episode. The four stages I saw, putting aside like the underlying technologies, in terms of use cases, store of value, not interesting to me. Interesting to somebody who's in a communist country, somebody who's got runaway inflation, somebody who's doing money laundering, whatever. Somebody like me who just bought a hardware device to specifically put my store value on. Yeah, somebody was geeking out, store a value, whatever.

I would rather store my value in a ski house or, you know, something else. like, I don't know, the, you know, a Vanguard fund. Like, there's all the places to store value that I think are much better for somebody in the developed world

in the United States. Second one, uh, money transfer. Again, we're in the developed world where money transfer is not a non-issue, and this stuff is more expensive,

cumbersome, harder to use. So that was a fail for me as well. NFTs, collectibles, uh, I kind of like those when there's, and that was when I was when I,

when I kind of got like crypto curious or like crypto like okay maybe I'll do something here and then finally DAWS which is really about company formation governance it's kind of like a new LLC structure it's kind of like venture funds it's kind of like running a company it's kind of like culture uh and capital formation on a global basis that to me was just like man that was just like fentanyl for me right into your veins right into my veins I just yeah was like I smoked that Dow right up and I just collapsed. I was just like, give me more Dow.

And so now I'm just like a junkie. But the problem I had was I sort of look at these Dow companies. And I kid you not, I just start every conversation with, hey, can you show me a product demo? And they're like, yeah, here's a Figma, you know, design. Or here's our white paper or here's our six pageer in the, you know, parliance of Amazon.

And I was like, where's the product? And they're like, well, there's a Discord server. You know, and there's a database. And I was like, can you work with the product? Nobody's got a product. And product will be ready in three weeks. And I keep hearing that for people. And the valuation was, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars, raising, you know, low millions of dollars for, you know, basis points of like, this does not make sense as an investment.

That's my... But this is what happens every time there's a new, a new paradigm, for lack of a better word, like, you know, back like in the original Web 1.0 bubble, you know, Web 2.0 mobile. Like, there's tons of people... Valuations never disconnected from reality like this, no. totally get disconnected and there's tons of fraud and there's tons of companies that go nowhere and just Figma designs that never become products. But there are a few. Like, this is the moment. They're going to be, they're going to be the next trillion dollar companies, quote unquote companies. I'm not sure. That emerge out of this moment. I'm not sure I'm going to be trillion

dollar companies. It might be one or two, but I'm not sure like these platforms will be. I think they'll be, I think their value, I think in the likely case when I've seen on crypto evaluation and Ben, I'm very interested in hearing what valuations you're seeing and how disconnected they are from reality. business leaders know that healthy and happy employees create successful companies, no matter what the industry. Com for business is going to help your employees be their best selves at work, even as the end-of-year deadlines approach. Com wants to help kickstart your mental well-being initiatives, like empowering your employees to stress less, to help them rest better and to build that resilience, that mental resilience that you need, to just come to work and crush it every day as we finish 2021 strong. Com has a library of specifically designed content that includes lo-fi music playlist, quick breathing break, guided meditation.

They even have programs tailored for mental health and productivity like their mindfulness at work series. It's exceptional. And hundreds of soothing sleep stories, which I use with my kids and myself to put myself to bed. You're going to be tight if you get a good night's sleep. Millions of employees at over 600 companies like Lincoln and Universal Studios, they use Calm for business. and this shows your employees that you love them and you care for them and that you recognize that mental help is important we all know it is but how do you show it to your employees well you show it to your employees by going to com.com.com slash twist right now com for business is offering a free one year

subscription for hr and benefit leaders at com.com slash twist that's right i'm not kidding a free year of com for hr and benefit leaders so you can experience what com can do for you and your company every day So get started today, C-A-L-M dot com slash T-W-I-S-T, and get that free full-year subscription. When companies get these kind of valuations, a billion dollars are more in value, and there's no product in market. Remember Jason's rule,

it's either a fraud or it's going to fail. Whether it's Quibi, Magic, Magic Leap, Quibby, Magic Leibon, Theranos, Nikola, Fisker, any of these companies that become worth over a billion dollars, but they don't have customers or a product in market, I shouldn't apply.

Which one? It probably shouldn't apply to any biotech. Yeah, I mean, biotech. Yeah, that would be different. I agree. It was the whole Zimmergen, uh, uh, whatever. But there's been lots of multi-billion dollar no product in market company, like

Moderna that then became products in market and were super viable. I think they did have some products like actually in the formation of making drugs, like their platform to make the drugs was the product. So if you look at that, that product did exist. The drug did not go through the approval process. So we might have to workshop Jason's love with that caveat, but I think it is a good edge case to caveat. I mean, tell me a company that became worth a billion dollars, Quibi, before the product was

launch. I don't know that they ever hit a billion, but what was Jason Kailer's company? Oh, yeah. What was that called? That was another one of those that was like huge valuation. Vessel. Well, that was in the era where like there were very few billion dollar companies. So I remember he raised, I can't remember if it was a 40 or an 80 million.

dollar seed round. And that was on a few hundred million dollar valuation. And that was like, you know, three X an outlier of anything else anyone had ever seen. So at times are different now. What valuations are you seeing? To answer your point. And how do you reconcile them? Because I don't know if you saw Fred Wilson's post that said, listen, $100 million, pre-launch product, market fit. You cannot have a winning portfolio, buying it at that price, knowing what we know about exits, even the extraordinary exits we're seeing today. I thought that was one of the most cool-headed, sober, rational posts I've seen. It also nicely flies in the face of this sort of Andresen Horowitz's philosophy over the last decade of

this is all going to be so much bigger than anybody can possibly imagine. So, you know, on our Andreessen Horowitz episode, I can't remember the exact number, David, but someone was making the case that for Mark's, you know, fund actually return, these companies would need to have an aggregate enterprise value of over $15 billion or something. And he was like, well, yeah, of course it is. And it seemed crazy at the time and was totally, totally true.

So I think Fred makes the well-balanced point that either we have a problem here or these things are going to, there was going to be way more multi-billion dollar companies than anyone has, you know, than possibly exist today. Anyway, in crypto, I'm seeing a bifurcation where if people are raising on the,

traditional structures where they're raising equity, they're a little overpriced, relative to the regular insanity that's happening in the fundraising market right now. Things pre-product, pre-launch in the $15 to $30 million valuation range. That's not that bad. No, exactly.

Double or triple reality. Right. But then you get into when they're issuing tokens from the get-go or doing SAF, the simple agreement for future tokens, or things like that, where there's never any equity structure, and they're purely starting by selling some number of the eventual fully diluted total number of tokens.

And the valuations make no sense. Like, there are 3, 4, 5x because they're not, uh, the argument is, well, it'll never get diluted. We're never going to, you know, the fully diluted tokens, that there's already a set number and you'll never get diluted again. And you're like, you kind of have to... Yeah, that's interesting what. It's like there'll never be another secondary offering. There'll never be like an IPO. There's never going to be a Series D or a bridge round.

There's never going to be a punitive bridge round with warrants that are 10 to 1. The idea is it would be like, your startup has a billion shares on day one, and they're trading for a fraction of a penny or a penny, and then, you know, we'll take it from there. And there's also a different notion where tokens have a second or third use case other than just representing sort of ownership in the value that is created because so many of them you have to have at least more than half, often more than 60%

allocated for the eventual community of the thing that launches. So all the founders, all the investors, all the employees of, and they're not really employees, but all the people working on the project are going to be a minority. And so that's different too. That's going to make it at least two or three X more expensive because you have to save a certain amount for the community in the future. So I have found, and I'm new to this process,

I've found that it just requires a very different way of thinking and I'm still working through like, what's my framework to evaluate if something is a reasonable price because price means a completely different thing in that token world. Fascinating. You buy any of this, David?

You smoking this? I think, I don't know. Are you mainlining it? Are you got tinfoil and a straw? Are you free-based this? craziness. I think any time you're talking about, maybe this controversial, I think anytime you're talking about valuations or where the market is right now,

it's just like, it's a noise. It doesn't matter. Like, I go back to like, this is like, this is like, actually price doesn't matter for investing in the law. Okay. Like, all of this that is going on, Web 3, Dow's.

Say you're 21 years old right now. You're in college or even a year older. Like, what, like, this is so amazing. If I were that age, Now, I'd be like, oh, okay, I could go like work for a company, get a job where I'm selling my labor for money, do that for a while. Maybe someday I'll start a company with equity. Then all my eggs are in one basket.

This blows all that up. You'd be like, okay, cool. I'm going to like give my efforts to a bunch of projects. I'm going to get tokens in those projects. I can diversify. I can work on where my interests take me. Those projects can do well. It's just a whole new model of labor and capital.

I agree with that, but I'm talking about in our day jobs, like entry price, investing. But I like your further point, which is the great resignation and young people becoming entrepreneurial. So let's put a pin in that and get to that. But before we get to that one, there's a thing, David, that I know you want to say that, or that you've said to me before, which I think is a reasonable and succinct way to put this, which is because we are elephant hunting in the game of venture, all that matters is that the entry place that you get in is sufficiently low below some reasonable number such that you're still

early stage. And like, do you care how low below that? Not really. Just like, go put wind in the sales of the company. But as long as you're in early stage in a winner, that's what matters. It totally depends on the style of investing too. Like, I used to be a professional venture capitalist for over a decade, you know, very traditional. I'd make one to two investments a year. I'd sit on the board, you know, I'd like, my model is completely changed now. And I think back on that, that's a great, totally viable model.

But like, you're betting on so much to go right with every individual investment there. You are threading a needle every single time. And now I just think about it more as like, okay, I and my partner Nat and my fund in kindergarten, we're going to make 50 to 100 investments a year. They're going to be small. Small checks. And most of those, we're not going to make any money. But some of those are going to make so much money that it'll pay for.

for everything and we have so many chances to be right. And what I'm saying is that like, what Web 3 and Dow is that brings that same dynamics to companies themselves, to founders, to employees. And I just think that's like, like, we had, we did a great special episode a couple weeks ago with NZS Capital, which is a hedge fund based out of Colorado. Those guys are so smart. They're so awesome. And the whole premise, uh, they, they spent a lot of time at the Santa Fe Institute, which is an amazing. Yes. And their whole premise, and starting the firm was like, we don't know what the future is. If you just have that as your baseline, we don't know what's going to happen.

Then what do you do? They've culturally outlawed the word conviction. No one's allowed to come and say, I have conviction in this investment because they're like, you don't know the future. That's a ridiculous thing to say. And now when I think like traditional venture investing, caring about valuations, all they're like, that's like, you're kind of betting on yourself that you know what's going to happen.

But if you're just like, I don't know what's going to happen, you know. Like, so these valuations are probably crazy right now. Sure, right, but they may not be crazy. And as long as you're investing through time periods and up cycles and down cycles, it's all going to balance out. Interesting. I might take the other side of this that some price discipline matters and that outrageous valuations could be a sign of a founder who is optimizing for the wrong things.

And if you're optorizing for the wrong things, like, I've seen founders turn down like top tier firms to get plus 10, 20% on evaluation. And then they're, they just don't have benchmark or Sequoia, whoever on their thing. But they got some second tier or third tier firm to, you know, go 30%, 40% over what those firms offered. I had one founder who got offered to vest all of their shares ahead of time. So no vesting schedule and control of the board.

And I was like, but don't you want that person on your board? Because they've done this 100 times. Isn't that the value? You're framing it as that's... I totally agree with you under that circumstance. Let's compare apples to apples, though. Great firm offering you ludicrous price

and two to three X as much money as you actually need in this round versus taking a more reasonable valuation and selling it pretty much the same amount of the company. Yeah, you go for the higher valuation, obviously, right? Yeah. So I don't blame founders for taking advantage of this moment in time. I do think a lot of firms I'm seeing are going to have a hard time reaching the valuations they hit. I don't know about crypto because crypto is just so wild that, you know, having the public,

having a global day trading base of users that is completely unregulated, participating in startups, I think I'm just sort of like stitching this together here in my head, but let's see what you guys think and you can riff on it. you know, we had as the venture community angels a lock on accreditation and investing in startups. Then you had this equity crowdfunding, which is very interesting, and kind of opens it up, and syndicates opens it up a little more. But then you say, hey, we'll let anybody invest in this token, which is a proxy for a share, but, you know, we're just going to circumvent all security is. Careful there, buddy. It is, obviously, a share because people are buying it to refer to appreciate

and nobody buying them is actually using them for the utility of them, or 99.9% are. So if it looks like a duck, it quacks like a duck. It's a duck. And so it's a duck, period. Sorry, folks. You look at that. What that shows to me is there's a global appetite to participate in company formation.

But then imagine if when Uber was starting out or Robin Hood or pick the great firms that you guys have invested in, if all of a sudden the public, when they saw the app, and download it and, you know, Twitter or 4Square went viral at Southby, Southwest. Everybody could just take out their Coinbase wallet and Robin Hood and just start trading it and buying into it. They're like, what are you using? Oh, yeah, I'll buy 100

tokens of Twitter. Okay, what is that? This year at South Buy, it's Lyft and Uber. Okay, you'll buy 100 tokens of that. People just... No wonder they get so valuable so fast. Well, basically, you're taking the virality of Twitter and social media and the algorithm there, and then you're combining it with finance and private companies.

So you literally are going, I just, I'm putting this together in my head. Like, I think these tokens are like the equivalent of going on to, going viral on social. And the real, like, next layer on top of that, that compounds the whole thing is, if it's not just I open up Coinbase and, you know, or FTX or whatever, and buy some of that, assuming it's traded on a centralized exchange, if it's actually something where the token has intrinsic value in the network and I decide, ooh, I'm going to start. participating in the network. And I'm going to own some of that part for speculation value,

because I think it's going to go up. But the mere fact that I then adopt it grows the network and grows the intrinsic value of the network. And so you do actually have this thing where the price is growing. It's the old Buffett aphorism. Price is what you pay, values what you get. Sure, the price is going, because it's this public thing that everyone's buying in a mad, speculative rush. But in this ideal scenario, the value is also growing because the network is expanding. Salana or Ethereum. Are you using

Solana and Ethereum or your day-to-day life or professional one? I just held up my weird little hardware wallet but I just got to do defy stuff. Okay,

showing people your crypto is not to try to like... Have you guys seen these memes of people showing girls in the club their Robin Hood accounts

or Coinbase accounts? Oh, come on. That's so... I swear to God, it's so great. This is to show you like, look, I have coins. This is to show you like,

well, I have an application on my computer. Peter, I use my phantom wallet on Chrome. Okay, but you're not doing anything. You're not solving a problem in your life with these coins. That's where this whole thing. I got a great example.

We invest in. You should have these founders on the show, Rain Trust. Have you had Adam and Gabe on the show? I don't think so. You should. Full disclosure, we invested at kindergarten and then be a kindergarten invested. Whoa, pump in his book. I don't.

Here we got. Here's the plugs. These guys are awesome. So it's, um, Adam was the founder of Doctor on Demand. Uh, you know, like super legit. Silicon Valley guy, he's been around for, you know, many generations since Web 1.0. And, uh, oh, I know about this. Yes. It's yeah. Keep going. And so this one is interesting to me. Next generation labor marketplace. Yeah. It's like it's much more than this, but the gross analogy is

Upwork or, you know, Fiver or whatnot, but with crypto and it makes so much sense because. So explain it to somebody who doesn't understand crypto. Great. It does understand Fiver. Okay. So on Fiverr, you, you know, get a job. You work. a job, it's like, you know, temp jobs, labor, et cetera. It's low-paying jobs because so much of the value is going to the network. Like, you're working these jobs. You're not really building anything. Like, a lot of the values go into the company. They're taking a big take rate, et cetera. On brain trust, you take a job, you work on there. Brain trust takes de minimis. I think it's like, might be five or 10 percent, like very low take rate. And they want to get it lower,

ultimately get it low, I think, down to zero. And you get paid in whatever currency. you agree with with the employer, but everybody also gets tokens on the network. You work, your labor, you get tokens, companies get tokens, people who refer people, labor in, jobs that happen get tokens. And then you are becoming an equity owner in the network by working there. You can work lots of different jobs. And as more jobs happen on the network, that token increases in value. And so you're incentivized to do everything through the network versus, where Fiverr or Upwork or whatnot, you're incentivized to take that offline immediately. So imagine you got paid in Bitcoin, just to, since everybody knows what Bitcoin is, you go and

I'm a writer and I write a press release for somebody. I'm good at writing press releases. I write a press release. They say, hey, that would be, if I was going to charge somebody to write their press sales, I charge them five grand, but most people probably charge a thousand. So let's say it's a thousand bucks. Okay, here's a thousand dollar press release. Boom, I wrote it for you. I get a thousand Bitcoin. Instead, of $1,000 in cash, I can then cash it out, or I could spend it with other people on the network and the idea is, in order to be a contributor on this, you have to own a certain amount of these tokens or something.

It's not even that complex. It's, you get paid, but you want to get paid in USD, you get a thousand dollars in cash. You also get brain trust tokens. And the company gets brain trust tokens. Yeah, exactly. I just like the creative thinking here, right? Because then if you could use those tokens to do other things and. And as those tokens grow in value, then you're like, oh, crap, that job that I made $1,000

USD on, now in USD equivalent, two years later, if the token appreciates its value, wow, I made $10,000 on that job. Or, Ben, and you can relate to this, sometimes we buy extra fuel for jets, you know, like three years in advance. So if we think jets will slow now, you'll just buy three years worth of jet, I did it last week looking at your PJ and you're like, you know, I'm just going to buy, sorry, beat that. You got to get to that ski house somehow. Well, exactly. No, I'm driving. I'm getting snow tires right now. I don't have a PJ. I have snow tires. Like, that's the level I'm on. I'm getting snow tires. They're really good. They're really good snow tires from a model Y. But some people will buy three years where the jet fuel. So actually, if you think about brain trust like Fiverr, if I were to do, if I were able to buy $10,000 worth of Fiver credits now and had a reasonable expectation that it might go 3, 4, 5x, my buying power would go from 10 press releases.

If it goes to $50,000, now I have 50 press releases sitting waiting there. So it's almost like paying in advance, I could, you know, spend it later. Totally. Kind of cool. This is an example, too. Like, you know, I mean, shoot, valuations are, have, maybe they're too crazy now. But back then, we invested pre-launch. Uh, I think the valuation was like $166 million or something like that.

Crazy, right? They launched. You invested in this company at $166 million. Yeah, but listen. Listen what happened. They launched. and they list on Coinbase. It trades up to an $11.5 billion market cap.

It's now down a lot since then, but it's still, you know, one to $2 billion market cap. Did you buy shares in the company or tokens or both? Saft. So you have future tokens. Did you get your tokens? Got the tokens, yep. Are you allowed to sell them or are you locked? We're locked.

Yeah. So, okay, so that's ridiculous. I mean, the people who bought the tokens on the free market can do whatever they want. but the VCs who put the money in early are locked for how long? Oh, you must have gotten a much better deal. Well, we invested, we invested pre-launch at, I think it was $166 million valuation. It should be a lower valuation than whatever the to-ins are trading for most of the point of this life. We bought in at $11.5 billion, then we wouldn't be locked, but we wouldn't have bought in at, you know, we were bought in a $11.5 billion.

This is the problem with what's happening in crypto is these valuations, like, oh my God, it's worth $10 billion. Put aside brain trust, just to call it ACMI corporate, because I don't want to derive this company. So ACMI tokens are worth 10 billion, the market cap. But 10 billion of tokens have not been sold. 10 million dollars worth of tokens have been sold, but people are buying in $100 increments, nobody can clear their positions.

So when we look at Solana and a lot of my besties have big positions in Salana and other, you know, that famous fund, what's the name of the fund? Multi-coin. Multi-coin had that in the pot. Yeah, yeah, had Kyle in the show. So Multi-coin. they're in this very unique position.

There's not a market to sell all of those. So what do you do? You're just going to be like, you know, drip-drabbing them out to sell them as you go. And so that is the thing about crypto that I think people don't realize is that I would guess two-thirds of the valuation of crypto is unrealized and unrealizable. Because there's not deep liquidity to actually trade your position. It's not enough liquidity to do it. And I think if you look at Bitcoin specifically, I mean, maybe a third of the

wallets and tokens are dead? I keep asking this to people. People keep saying low double digits are lost coins. So when you look at the market cap of Bitcoin, 20%, chop it right off. Let's say some people have told me a third, but let's just take 20%. How much does Satoshi have? I don't know. It's like $2 billion. They never touched their wallet. Three million of the $21 million. So that wallet's been dead since day one. It's never sold. So that's crazy to me. Like here's a question though that I was thinking about the other day. Like we can observe if there's ever actually been a transaction. So we're like, oh, the coins haven't left that wallet. If I were Satos, in some ways, you're like,

well, that's proof Satoshi's dead, because no human could actually resist the temptation of being able to go make that much money or spend that much money or do something with that money. They could totally take a loan against that as collateral. Oh, there's something even better they can do. There's something easier. Because then it's not on chain. Here's how you do it.

It's a little secret that happens sometimes in our industry. You may not have to come across. I didn't want to bring it up, but I am one 16th. I'm 116th. I'm 1.15th of Satotian. If I was Satosh. Is this like when you were, uh, you said you were B.C. Brags? Yes, which I thought was great. And people still to this day, they got VC.

Braggs. It's so great. Oh, so great. Well, I coordinated with V.C. Braggs. You know, I'm like, I'm DMing with B.C. Brags all the time. I'm like, this is hilarious. Please keep done. Because it was like, we're the original targets. And then you take out your other phone and you're like, thanks, Jason. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.

So anyway, I was like, um, I was like, okay, how can we make people believe this? I'm going to tweet something from the V. and then I'm going to delete it and then use screen capture it and then share it somewhere else to prove it. So we were like going through a whole like deep, how do we convince people

that I accidentally tweeted from at Jason or at this weekend startups? Anyway, putting that aside, here's how you do it. This is like Q and on for startups. Basically, yeah, it's a little pizza gate or something. Aliens, reptiles, Illuminati.

So you would create an LLC then and you'd say, I'm contributing of my, you know, 20% of the Bitcoin, I'm going to put 1%. I'm pledging 1% into that LLC. And then if you all want to buy it, I will sell it to you for half price under the concept here that you can't sell for 10 years. So they could have done all kinds of off-market transactions like that. It could be doing them all the time with a non-disclosure.

Yeah, people used to do this. I don't know if they still do with employee equity and startups, right? What happened to me was I owned equity in a high-growth startup at one point. and it was a very coveted share and that company was not allowing people to sell them because the founder ruled with an iron fist and that was why he was so successful. I don't know who you're talking about.

Once upon a time in startup plan. Somebody said to me, listen, don't worry about it. F that guy. We'll make an LLC. You sign this piece of paperwork. You contribute your stuff. I contribute into that X number of dollars. We now own your shares

and this amount of cash, anytime you want cash, you take it out, and then I own a couple of shares, and it's just a liquidity pool for you. And nobody has to know. And I was like, huh,

I'm not going to do that because he's my friend, and I'm just, well, that when people were doing that, at least with startup equity, there was a lot of risk because if the company found out, they could cancel those shares, right?

Theoretically, they could cancel those shares. That has never gone to the test. And so this person was like, no, it, it would go to Supreme Court or whatever. I'm like, yeah, that's exactly what I want to be doing. With one of my besties, going to the Supreme Court, like, I trust my bestie. I'm looking at the data, like liquidity. Illiquidity is a feature.

It was very beneficial for you to wait. Yes. This may, uh, may or may not be. The LLC was not based in Wyoming, by the way. It was not a doubt. May or may not be relevant to this conversation. I'm just curious, popped in my head. Are you still in touch with Travis? What's he up to these days? Thank you for asking. I don't talk about Travis publicly and I don't talk about the guy with the rocket ships publicly anymore

because the press now, because of reblogging, if I talked about the SNL thing and the amount of blowback when you have a high profile front like that, it's just like it's back channel blowback. It's people asking me like to ask, you know, high profile friend. to, you know, solve some problem like their kids benefit. And the other problem is, you know, and I basically told my team,

sorry to bring it up. No, no, it's totally fun to bring it up. I actually like talking to you about it. When you start having some, okay, I have, I have acquaintances and friends. And then there's like very close friends. When I have close friends and I was on CNBC in the early days of, let's say, specifically Uber and Tesla, I say, listen, I have the roads. It's amazing.

I was out there. stumping for my friends. Hey, Uber's great. They're going to get to their problems. Hey, Tesla's amazing. Yes, the Model S is late. But I have the first one. It's incredible.

It's transcendent. I was doing that. My friends were on high profile and I was supportive. So, no problem. Then if your friends become too high profile, if I mentioned something about a Chamath SPAC now, like, if I had Chamoth on earlier, I'm like, hey, meet my friend,

Chimoth Poly Hopatia. Here's how you pronounce his last name. That was like, you know, five to 10 years ago, and I was introducing him to the world on the pod. I could say, well, now if I would say something about Chamoth and then bring up one of the IPO spaks, it gets reblogged and people say, well, he's an insider, he's his bestie, he has inside information, this is a publicly traded stock, and then all of a sudden, I am trading on a friend's reputation, as opposed to supporting friends. So now I support my friends. If they become so high profile,

I've now just learned to just turn off the spigot. So everybody keeps asking me about Travis. I spend time with Travis. I know a lot. about what he's doing, I say nothing. Because he has said, I want nobody to talk about what I'm doing. And I said, great, I respect that. And then people are like, are you an investor? Are you involved? Are you on the board?

And I say, I don't speak about it. Yeah. You know? That is 100% his rate. That is great. And you're a good friend. I try to, you know, one of the things I've tried to do in my life is be the best friend possible for my friends because it gives me joy to be.

able to take a phone call from somebody who is having a hard time. And I took these texts from Tony, you know, you know, leading up until a suicide. And, you know, it's like something that's stuck with me. And like, did I do enough in that situation? Could anybody have done anything in that situation? And, you know, it's, it's like heavy stuff to be somebody's good friend and then have them kill themselves, you know, in a really disastrous way.

And so I've just, this, this is like, you ask me like what I'm thinking about and top of mind for me in my career at 51. It's that. It's like I have a lot of friends in high pressure situations or friends who, you know, have died early from, you know, like Tony from drug abuse and mental health issues. And like that's what I think about is like my friendships and whatever. Because I'm not going to be here much longer. I'm 51.

I got whatever, 19 to 40 years, hopefully. I want to really enjoy these and be supportive. So I don't mean to bring the show down. but that's how I think about it. It's, yeah, I mean, well, and it kind of, you know, I don't know, weird to connect this to Dows and everything. But like, I do, I just, I think that's what's so cool about Dows and Web 3 is like,

you get to do stuff with your friends. And that leads to awesome stuff, you know, like. I love that about Dows and crypto. Let me, let me throw this up there. You said earlier, I think Ben, no, maybe it was you, David, that there's always fraud, there's always, craziness, and then something real comes out of it. I agree with that as a premise.

I've been super critical of crypto. I was like super enthusiastic, and I became super cryptical with all the grifts and the ICOs. And these like stupid like NFT painting the tape and market manipulation. And then now I see NFTs that have IP included with them and residuals and smart contracts. And then I'm seeing DAOs. If we are in a journey of where this becomes legitimate technology that people use every you know, and just pure speculation.

If that was like a nine inning game, what ending are we in? That's a good question. I saw a stat. I don't know if this is correct or not, but I saw it somewhere. That's something like two or three percent of the U.S. population owns an NFT at this point. That may be an incorrect. Wait, wait, what number? Two or three percent of the U.S. population.

I don't buy that, but that's incredible. Yeah, that seems high to me. But if that's true, then like, wow, that's a lot farther along that I would have thought. I'd be nine million people. It was $27. 70 million adults? 300 million adults now, something like that. This is not the number of adults, but this is a tweet that I saw yesterday.

Someone did an analysis of 6.1 million trades of 4.7 million NFTs, which is interesting to see like one and a half trades per NFT is the average, shows that the top 10% of traders have traded 97% of NFTs, which definitely puts meat on the bones of the hypothesis that a lot of NFT trades are wash sales intending to artificially boost prices. 100%. There's some interesting graphs that they should. Show. Define wash trades for people who don't know.

Selling something to realize the loss and then very quickly thereafter buying it again and resetting your basis. Right. So you bought the NFT for $10,000. You sell it to another wallet for $100. You've got $99,000 in losses, but you still own the asset.

Yes. Yes. But then when you do those watch trades, you get the tax. Well, the proposed tax regulation for next year that has passed the House but not past the Senate will make digital assets subject to wash trade rules. So that, you know,

in all likelihood, there's only another month left on that being an unregulated thing. So where do you feel? Nine innings. When the ninth inning hits, this is as, this basically becomes 2005 using the internet. Everybody uses it. Everybody's got a

mobile phone with the internet on it. It's the moment when like the iPhones in people's pockets, Blackberries, and everybody is used to the internet. Here's the, yeah, so I haven't defined it in terms of innings. I've defined it in terms of years. And the thing I keep going back and forth on are, are we 1994 or 1999? Because you could make an argument we're 94 because like,

the real heavy use case things, the Amazon's of Web 3 are just now starting. But the craziness level feels pretty 99. Oh, I like that framing. So the technology development. is 94. We're at Mosaic browser, Netscape 1.0. Yes. Oh my gosh. You look at MetaMask like that is

mosaic. Yeah, okay. So we're like mosaic going into Netscape. But the hype and the finance is like peak 99,000. I think that's exactly right actually. Everything is so much faster now. Every cycle is so much faster. Every trend is so much faster. Information disseminates so much faster that like the hype and the bubbles and the bubbles popping and the bubbles coming back.

Like, all of the cycles are just massively accelerated now. Wow. I think that is the best framing I've heard a long time. And I was writing a blog post called crypto, um, cognitive dissonance. And I think you just gave me the supporting point, which is, you know, you have this cognitive dissonance, which is there are so many scams going on here. And this does not, there's no way these valuations match reality because there's no use case.

But then you look at the underlying technology and its potential and it doesn't take a genius. In fact, it just takes somebody with a base level of understanding of business and technology, David, to understand that this is going to change everything. At some point, these things are too powerful as a collection of technologies to not be highly disruptive. It's just obvious. And that's the dissonance we have on podcasts or on Twitter is like holding two ideas at the same time in your head. Ah, it's the hallmark of intelligence. Well, yeah, tolerance for ambiguity certainly is.

Yeah. Oh, no, there's a famous quote. Oh, shoot, who said it of the hallmark of intelligence is holding two conflicting ideas in your head at the same time. I remember your wife, Jenny, told you, David, so that came from a good authoritative source. Well, cognitive dissonance is the psychological phenomenon. And then a tolerance for ambiguity is, I think, you know, how I think people explain it in academia, which is when there's an ambiguous, ambiguous situation, which is typically because you have conflicting, thoughts. If you can hold them in your head for a little bit of space, like Ben just did

eloquently, hey, it's 94 in terms of the technology. It's 99 in terms of the hype cycle. Great. Okay, now that gives you a framework to hold it in your head and say, okay, that's a really dangerous place to be as an investor. It's a really great place to be as an investor if you're not caught up in the hype and you're focused on the tech. Right? You can actually develop a strategy by holding conflicting thoughts in your head. what yes absolutely i mean we did three three hour episodes on the complete history of berkshire hathaway at the same time as doing deep dives on bitcoin and ethereum in the first six months of this year and like that i think is the that that is how i got smarter that this year was doing

those things that are that couldn't be more diametrically opposed like pure value investing versus mostly speculation and like believing that there are true intrinsic merits to both I just got this from one of my producers. F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote, The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless yet be determined to make them otherwise, which is Victor Frankel.

I don't know if you guys have ever read Man's Search for Meaning. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. It's amazing. Great late holiday read. I've read it three times in my life, and maybe it's a good idea for me to read it. over the break again. But yeah, I'm not even going to explain what it is.

If you've heard the name Victor Frankl and Man Search for Meaning, I'm going to just give every young person out there a gift. Don't think, don't read reviews. Just buy the book. Put it in your draw. And when you have a, you know, a time to read it. That's like 40 pages, right? That's more than that.

But it's a quick read. It's a thin book. Yeah. It's a thin book with a lot of deep and important ideas. Okay, rapid fire. We've got to get out of here. Amazing. episode. If you are listening on the This Week and Startup stream, just type Acquired FM into your

podcast player, click subscribe, write a review, and then go ahead and follow the YouTube channel, maybe consider subscribing if you want to get into their awesome Slack. And likewise, if you're listening on Acquired, go subscribe to the JCal Empire, all in, twist. You just browse the top technology shows. They'll all come up. Do you have a preference of how people consume? Something we're thinking about a lot these days, a video versus podcast versus... I am focused on building a great team right now

and training that team. So we now have three full-time producers on This Weekend Startups. You can reach them at Producers at This Weekend Startups.com and then empowering them. Excellent producers. And putting them in charge of specific projects. And then I have Charles who does AV and then Molly coming on board. And so, you know, six-person team plus two salespeople, eight people.

I focus on the team and then people can consume wherever. And we do live streaming. We do clips. And we just look at the data and, you know, I kind of feel like Ben, you know, did before, which is if you, I think you were talking about making something crazy obscure, maybe that was your David.

And then the world finds it. It was Ben. Yeah, I think that that's the right insight. It's just you make something you're passionate about and then people find it. And, you know, this week in startups is a niche podcast that's gotten, I never envisioned it as like about 10 or 20. podcast intact. I thought it was a niche podcast

just about startups, but it's expanded and, you know, five days a week, I can't talk just about startup. So it's kind of got a bigger mandate now. Okay, rapid fire. What didn't we hit on the list, Ben, that you wanted to hear from David and I? Our rapid fire favorite carveouts, our favorite books, movies, TV shows, things we read

of all of 2020 that we would recommend to listeners. Well, for TV shows, I am obsessed with secession. Oh, it's so good. I'm glad you caught my PJ reference earlier. Yeah. I mean, the three,

the last three episodes of secession is just extraordinary. Like, they, they just keep peeking and peeking and peeking. And I, are you also in on this day of its secession?

I don't watch enough TV. So, no, I need, I need to do at some point. It's just, it's not even TV. It's more like Dickens.

Yeah. Well, and it's about, uh, news corps and the Murdox, right? Affictional, who I used to work for.

So I got, I gotta go. It's ostensibly about that. Watch it. But what it's really about is power, privilege, family. How money corrupts? Corruption, society.

And the characters in it, I don't know where you are in your power rankings or who your favorite characters are, but you can't make a few, you can't make it on a tomlitt without breaking a few Greggs. I'm like all in on the Greg character. A cousin Greg? For me...

Cousin Greg. You know, obviously, Logan's amazing. But, you know, I feel Kendall is a snowflake and annoying. And I feel Shib is like a super woke lib, but who also wants power and is kind of like disingenuous. And for me, it's about Roman. I feel like Roman is like a pragmatist who wants to win, who loves his dad, who knows his dad is flawed, but cares about the empire and building the empire and maintaining and growing and it doesn't matter what the costs are. It matters what the

outcomes are. And he's... You're saying like the ends justify the means for Roman. I think Roman is looking at it and he's almost like an edge lord shi-poster, where he's, you know, slash, like, so that would be how you would describe him in today's parlance and you previously described them as a rabid, capitalist CEO, a marauding pirate, those two things are kind of the same, which is, you know, nothing matters. It doesn't matter who's running for president. What matters is we are influential in helping put that person in power and we have a

relationship with them. So if it's Trump or it's Obama, all that matters is, how does that benefit us? And where is our seat in power in relation to that? But yeah, I'll go out on a little and say that there are zero people who are pure likeable on the show. Greg's probably the closest, but it's because he's kind of a bumbling idiot until the moments that he's not. Yeah. I think he might be, I think he might be, they've kind of been teeing Greg up to have his moment at some point. You get that sense? Yep. I think the ultimate thing would be for him to just get absolutely demolished in that moment to never arrive.

Like, I think that's actually what they're thinking is like, oh yeah, he's going to save the day. And the best possible thing is he doesn't have a trust fund. He gets fired and he has to go start his career over and he's never important. And he's, you're going to sue Greenpeace? Is there a way for me to sue like my grandpa, like in a loving way? No, it's not. Okay, so anyway, so session for us, what do you got, David? What, you said you don't watch TV or movies.

I don't buy it, but okay. Well, I do, I got one TV. I finally, this is how much under a rock I live. Finally, Jenny and I get into Ted Lassow, big fans. So great. Perfect pandemic. Yeah, so great. But instead of TV, my

used to be my guilty pleasure is no longer guilty. I have fully embraced it. I don't think there's anything to be ashamed of. I love playing video games. Wow. So I got a after like a 10, 15 year hiatus, I got the new Xbox.

They came out this summer. Is that five or something? Where are they at? It's the X and the S. I got the S, which is nice. It's real cute. It's a little.

So they don't even number it anymore. They're just like, it's the Xbox. and it's the latest. And you bought it. And all the games work on all the old ones, too. It's just like how good a graphics. It's kind of like how dialed in do you want to be?

I love it. And Xbox Game Pass is the best because like you can, you get access to dozens, hundreds of games. You only. It's like Apple Arcade or Spotify for games. Yeah, exactly. Do you have a game that you love or a genre of game you love? Oh my God. Halo.

I, so I grew up on, on Halo like kind of high school college years. and hadn't played in so long. And then they have the Master Chief Collection, which is a remastered version of all the old ones and there's Halo Infinite, the new one coming out. So I've just been playing with all these older old millennials. I will confess as well. I have been playing the new age of Empires 4, which was re-release.

And this is my little tradition. I get the girls to bed, whatever. I have the Knicks game. If it's an early Knicks game, I just record it. I get everybody to bed. And then I sneak back to my office and I pull up Age of Empires. the Knicks game and my slack and email and I'll play a little age of empires

do a little slack in email, watch the Knicks game and I just have my giant 49-inch monitor three windows set up and I can just have two and three hours of watching the Knicks playing a game, grinding because I can't be focused on one thing anymore. My brain is just forever corrupted and tech has broken us. Yeah, my brain's broken. You guys got a book you like?

You got a book? You like this year? Let's hear it. Earlier this year, After doing all the research for the Andreson Horowitz, a couple of episodes that we did, obviously they based that a lot on CAA. And so I was like, I should learn about CAA. And I read Michael Ovitz's book,

who is Michael Ovitz? It is so good. I mean, if you, like, shoe dog or ride of a lifetime or any of these, like, unbelievable, like, business thrillers, it is definitely one of those. And I don't think enough people in our world know about

how powerful CAA and Michael were in their heyday. I have the ultimate build on that. The oral history of creative artist agencies your next listen. Yeah. And I'm in the middle of right now. I am in like 12 hours into the audiobook.

So that's a great compliment to the Ovitz one. And then the other compliment book ends up. There it is, Powerhouse. The other compliment to that is right of a lifetime. Oh, so good. Oh, you both your business. So if you take those three and you put them together as like a little, you know, sash, you will get all the Disney stuff and the building of

Cap Cities and ABC and whatever. CAA is involved in all that stuff going on in Jurassic Park and this and that. So you get like, it basically gives you the 80s and 90s in Hollywood and then how you got to the Disney mega corporation, which if you were to think. It's like shining a flashlight on these like different corners. Like it's like lighting up different corners of the universe as you read each one of these books. Yes.

And it's, it's, it's Roshaman, like five different versions of the truth to kind of get to what actually happened, right? So if you don't know the reference

for folks listening, Kurosawa, famous Japanese director, famous director, period, had a film Roshaman, which is about a crime that occurs and there's different

people's perspective. So the movie is shown from their different perspectives, and it is about the ultimate nature of truth. So great. Other books. It's been recommended to me that I need to read as part of our, you know, learning about this space in Hollywood and all

the analogies to tech. O.G., have you ever read the genius of the system? I was recommended to me years ago. I got to read it. It's about the OG original studio system. How did that get built up? And then, of course, that's what it was already starting to fall apart, but then really went over its left, William Morris and started CIA.

And that really blew up the studio system and put the power back in the artist in the agent's hand. Amazing. I on the fiction tip, I really like The Martian and the follow-up to that project, Hal Mary came out from Andy Weir. I just bought it. That's my holiday reading. It's great.

I really enjoyed it. Yeah. And which one's better? I, well, the Martian was so unique in terms of his style. I feel like he is like a standard bearer for Michael Crichton, where Crichton would very much get into the science and the technology and then create a great, really fast-paced story to go with it. And I actually had Andy Ware on a program.

Oh. Before the movie came out, but after the book came out, because, you know, he was down in San Jose. And I actually went to his apartment. He's like, yeah, you can come to my condo and film me. And I went to his tiny little condo before he became a Hollywood guy. No, that's awesome. Yeah, I don't know what episode is. I'm going to throw it into the chat.

And then I hosted a screening of the Martian with him. And I did a Q&A after in San Francisco at the Metrion. And I invited all of our fans to come. So anyway, I think you're going to really like Project Hell Mary. And then, as mentioned, Oh, and then on the bio tip, I finally got around to grinding it out, the Ray Kroc story.

Oh. That's absolutely fantastic. If you've seen the movie, the founder, have you seen the founder? Yep. I have not, but I... Incredible. It's slightly fictionalized,

but I think it's really good. Well, if you watch the two, it's pretty tight, and then I'll add to it, Mark Knopfler's, the leader of Dire Straits, song, Boom Like That, is a song,

that the director and writer of the founder, it turns out Mark Knopfler read Ray Krocks biography in whatever years ago, wrote this song, boom like that. And then the directors heard the song boom like that, read the biography. And so just do those three together. Oh, sweet. So great.

And so I'm giving you a little trifecta there on the pop culture tip. I also reread, because I started writing my next book, I re-listen to when I was in Italy on. Can we can give us some teeth? It's going to be about money. And that's as much as I'll say. But it's not a tactical book like Angel. This is a book like Big Think book.

And so it's for everybody. But on writing by Stephen King is a really, really great practical book about writing combined with his story. And there's just a great moment. He's the best. Well, there's an amazing anecdote. I'll just tell briefly here. He was doing, he was a teacher.

He wrote like three pages about Carrie and just about how this girl had had her first menstruation cycle and the girls made fun of her or whatever. And he was very frustrated with it. He just crumpled it up and threw it away. His wife pulled it out, read it, said, you got to finish this. I love this. This is like incredible. Please finish it. He finishes it.

He sells it for like essentially two year salary. as a teacher's making like 4,000. He got like $8,000 or $9,000 for this, you know, paperback. Back then, paperbacks and hardcoverers were two different deals. So he gets the paperback deal. The paper back takes off. The paper, the hardcover takes off. He sold the hardcover.

And then the paperback rights are still out there. He gets a call from his agent, the publisher, because the publisher then would split with him, whatever they got. The publisher course says, hey, listen, we got you $400,000. you get half so you get 200,000 goes, oh, $20,000, you're kidding. He goes, no, no, no. $400,000, you get $200,000. Okay, so you're telling me I'm getting $20,000 for the paperback.

I got $8,000 for this. It's five times as much. That's like $40,000, $20,000, you realize it's like five times a year salary. I can quit. Shabby goes, no, no, Stephen. We're getting $400,000. You're getting $200,000. dollars.

And he can't process it, which I related to because at one point, with the Uber shares, they had done a stock split of like four to one or something. And so somebody, you know, on my team is like, hey,

you know, here's the update on this. Because they were not giving us too many updates. Everything was kind of close to the vast. And I was like, whoa, that's a lot of money. And they're like,

yeah, it's actually four times that. And I was like, what? Yeah, it was like, you know, it was like a couple million dollars.

And then like, you know, tens of millions of dollars. I was like, you're, kidding. And they're like, no, we're not kidding. And I was like, okay, there we go. All right. What do you guys got on books?

Real quick on Stephen King, though. Quick shout out. His Gunslinger series, not as well known, but it's his magnum opus. It's so good. So, so good. Have you ever read it? I've never read it's fiction. I got to get in there. Oh, so good. And then I had working backwards, by the way, which is the Amazon book, just because I'm trying to institute the writing culture inside of my companies. Great. I got a real quick one, sticking with the fiction and the sci-fi building off the Martian, The Expans.

I've not watched the TV show, but the books are so good. I feel like not enough people know about these. And people don't know. James S.A. Corey, the author is a pen name. It's two people who write it together. And either both are, at least one of them, is George R. Martin's assistant.

What? So literally, this is Game of Thrones in space. It is exactly that. It is so fantastic. I started watching The Expans, but I think we fell asleep during it. I got to give it another shot. The books are so good.

They're so good. And the last book just came out. Wrapping up the whole series, nine books. It's excellent. All right. So I think we got all the books. Any more books?

Okay, let's go on to podcasts then. Any podcasts that are non-obvious that you guys have gotten into? I'm trying to think. David, did you have a favorite podcast this year? I've got a few,

um, uh, two video game podcasts, video game nostalgia history podcast that I love. Actually, three. One OG that I've been listening for years, Wizard and the Bruiser is kind of like a fun poppy take on nerd culture. Retrograde amnesia is my new favorite.

They go through old school RPGs like PlayStation era RPGs and they play them and then they like talk about the experience like beat by beat. They do like 50 episodes on a game. And then Resonant Arc is another one in the same vein. That's also great. Mine, I think, is actually a late, a late 2020, but I'm going to recommend a single episode of the Tim Ferriss podcast where he interviews Jerry Seinfeld. It starts slow, but by the end, it's maybe the best podcast episode I've ever listened to on Jerry, the creative process, building habits, sticking to habits, what makes a great comedian. I had Tim famously on this week in startups, a live episode when I would do live episodes every month in San Francisco or every other month.

and famously during that episode, you know, because Tim and I have a personal relationship and he talked a little bit about like his, you know, depression or other issues or whatever, mental health issues. And then he talked about for the first time, live in the room, we kind of took everybody back,

his suicidal ideation when he was in college. He then wrote a blog post about that and talked on a show and it became like a top search term. And then somebody who was listening to this show, show emailed us both that he was going to kill himself, listen to the episode, got help. Oh, wow. Yeah, so pretty heavy stuff. Wow.

But Tim and I are good friends and, yeah, I got a lot of respect for him. I added The Watch, which is a ringer podcast, where they talk about TV episodes, but in a long way, and they do every secession episode. The night after secession. So now my new habit is, I'm about the debrief. So now I watch Secession and then I listen to the watch talk about Secession. And I'll listen to some of their other episodes as well. But they go deep. So you have to have watched the show or else you get spoiled it out.

And then I will watch, I'll add a streaming show to this. I will watch the Nix game. And then Nix fan TV comes on. And it's like a call-in radio show using this stream technology we use today. And it's just changed by Nix viewing habit because I find the debrief is kind of like, I'm in it for the debrief now. after secession, I like to talk about secession after. Totally.

You know. I think that's enough show. Anything else you guys got on the podcast tip? People should subscribe to your show. I think if anyone's, I retweeted it. The acquired account has been streaming this the whole time. Fantastic.

Yeah. I can't say enough. I've been a long time twist listener, but all in is just brain candy in every way. You light up all the different parts of the brain and keep going. Yeah, it's, uh, you know, it's really, uh, five-person team there. You got the four of us, and then producer Nick has done an amazing job.

Just giving up every Friday night. So shout out to producer Nick, who is, I got one real quick holiday wreck to end on is a question for you. We actually need your help. We need to give a very nice gift to a fellow podcast or friend of the pod. And we hear that we hear that he likes really nice wine. we don't know what to do. I hear you might, you might have a recommendation. We're thinking like, really nice,

like a few hundred dollars, super nice gift. If we're thinking about the friends, I have a few hundred dollars, I'm not going to do it. Okay, so cheap in your league, but expensive in our league.

What's the cheapest bottle of wine you would bring over to like Sacks's house for dinner and be like, this is okay? Yeah, I mean, you know what he likes is Pappy Van Winkle. And I don't know what a bottle of papy van Winkle.

That's like 35, $30,000. Sorry. I basically was on his plane. He had a Pappy Van Winkle, and I literally just took the bottle. It was like three-quarters fallout. I was like, I'll just take this home with me. I didn't do that. That's just a joke. I make jokes like that sometimes just to tweak him. He thinks that he really does think I took the Patrick off his plate. He's like, that's a $5,000 reserve bottle. I was like, that's why I took it. And he doesn't know that I'm joking. And now he's talking to these people like, is that bottle missing?

They're like, yeah, we actually think one of the bottles is missing. I know his pilots are taking those bottles too, by the way. Can I ask a question about Sacks' plane real quick? Oh, good. I don't think this is a good topic. Does he just have, like, an incredible liquor cabinet, like, stored on his plane or is do you bring it on for every flight? All right.

I don't want to speak out of turn. You're not supposed to talk about private aviation. It's like rule number one of private aviation. Is that an out of bounds question? Totally. You never talk about it. You never take pictures of it unless you're Phil Helmute. It has no, we call him, I nickname Philhemmed at the Duke of Discretion because if you watch,

and I love Phil, so don't know it's wrong way. But we call him the Duke of Discretionion. because like literally he got to Miami yesterday and he walked through this giant J-Lo house and talked about the helipad and everything and he just talks about P.H. Nice life. So every time he's on a plane or I've been on a plane with Phil Helm Youth, he's like taking pictures out in front of the plane and I'm like, oh God, like this is a high profile person like the tail number and you know, like it's sometimes it's his friends in sports and it's like I wouldn't say Michael Jordan's plane, but it's a Michael Jordan level person, you know, and you're like, Phil, no pictures. And he's like, no, it's not. It's not. It's not. It's not. I don't say, it's not. It's not. I don't know, it's not. for Instagram and then you earn his Instagram. Of course it's there two days later or whatever. It's on a delay. I think what I would say, Nick is when you do take these

the meal and the wine would be somebody's assistant would have bought that through and probably curated that. So that's kind of one of the fun things about when you have a plane or at least I've some people just get like the standard food but I've been

you know it's just terrible. but serviceable. What some people do is, whatever city you're in, the flight attendants, I've seen this a number of times, the flight attendants will source whatever the best restaurant is in that town or whatever, and they'll say,

hey, can I get a to-go for this flight? And so one time I was flying out of Boston, and like, we literally had the best chicken palm, yonkees and whatever from like some North Beach, like, and it was just like,

this is, that was Chimot's plan. I can not say that. But anyway, Chumat sent this person to, you know, like find the best Italian place. We're just pounding chicken palm, you know, whatever.

Yeah, and of course it's paired with something nice. Amazing. Okay. All right. It's been an amazing episode. We can't let you go. Sub a thousand dollar bottle of wine. I have to think of, think of it through it.

I'll get back to it. Or send us your wine person. Oh, you know what I'll say? I don't really drink is the thing. I would actually say a dessert wine is not a bad call because they do pop out. So Chateau Yakem, is that I pronounce it? I'm learning about a new thing, so I don't know. It's basically dessert wine is a whole category.

Okay, okay. Chateau d'Iquem. Yes. And so I would look at that chateau yucam. Salterran. Okay. Basically, they take like the late grapes. They're very sweet.

And you can get into one of these bottles, like the small ones. They're kind of like the half-sized dessert wines that you might see at a fancy restaurant. They bring out and give you a small little bit of it. It tastes like honey and raisins and fruit. it's very dense and fortified. So it's kind of like a port, but it's a little bit lighter. And if you have a significant other,

I would just buy yourself a half bottle list and crack it open after dinner one night. And, uh, absolutely delicious like skip dessert and have this. 275 to 750. So perfect. Yeah, that's perfect. Because there are half bottles,

which will be small. And then there's the full bottles. You probably want to go with the full bottle. You know, and spend the 750 or five. Right. You don't want to look like you're cheaping out on it. And what's very important about these,

I'll just say is, is the year, can have very different profiles. So just go on wine.com or one of those wine rating sites and just find out which is the good year to get because that's how these wine people think. They know all the brands of wine. They're on the next level of knowing the vintages and which ones were great. So if you had a choice to get a half bottle at twice the price but the right vintage,

that would be the power move in a wine gift. Make sure you get the right thing. The other thing I would pair with it is a dandelion chocolate, which is a chocolate company in San Francisco. Yeah. I do all my gifting from them and I just made a small. angel investment in the company very privately

but they have chocolate bars that are all high percentage dark chocolate. We're talking $12 bars of chocolate that are artisanal, but that are kind of life changing because you have, you break open one of those bars, you know, at dinner after dinner and just crack it open

and everybody have a little piece, boom, just really delightful. All right. It's been an amazing episode of the Acquired FM podcast and this week in startups. You know what to do. Have a great holiday, everybody. It's just great to know you guys. We have to bro out. Like, we have to, like, are you guys going to Miami for our Basel and pre-money?

We're not in P.J. League yet. Oh, no, that's what we should do. Why don't we do? This would be a great 2022 for us. Why don't we do this live? Yes. This weekend startups acquired crossover live. 100% point.

Where are you guys based? Seattle or something? I'm Seattle. He's San Francisco. So your neighbors. All right. So then you fly to us and we'll do it in, like, uh, the, we'll do it in Redwood City or something.

There's a nice theater there or something. Or we could do it. in the city if there's, you know, Chesa Booth doesn't arrest me. And let's just do like an intimate, like, I don't know, 100 to 200 people. Sell the seeds, you know, break even on it and then maybe

have a little party afterwards, you know, like post-COV or whatever. That sounds amazing. That is a great 2022, like, plan. All right. Anywhere for people to follow you at Gilbert? Very nice. At Gilbert or at E.J. Rosent or at acquired FM or just search.

required in any podcast player listen to acquired watch us on YouTube we're on YouTube now oh fantastic excellent yeah we got these nice professional video setups yeah you guys look great really good lighting and everything all right listen this has been great thanks guys thank you