This Week in Startups - Praying For Exits on Markets, Crypto, Startup Valuations + Anisha Sunkerneni of Cyphr VC | E1492

Episode Date: June 25, 2022

Today, Jason sits down with the anonymous account Praying For Exits — they discuss everything going on in markets, crypto, startup valuations post-crash, and even what was behind the All in podcast controversy (3:09). Then, Producer Rachel sits down with Anisha Sunkerneni of Cyphr VC to talk about NFT NYC and navigating tech events (1:13:30). (0:00) Jason and Molly intro today’s show! (3:09) Jason sits down with the anonymous account Praying For Exits (13:01) Microsoft for Startups Hub - Apply in 5 minutes, no funding required, sign up at http://aka.ms/thisweekinstartups (14:15) Valuations of crypto companies with no product in market: the fault of VCs or founders? (20:23) Intercom - Get advanced Intercom features and Early Stage Academy at a 95% discount https://www.intercom.com/early-stage (21:40) Mr. Exits on earlier stage valuations + remote work (35:57) Vanta - Get $1,000 off automating your SOC 2 at https://vanta.com/twist (37:06) Mr. Exits asks Jason some questions (1:08:11) Toss to OK Boomer (1:13:30) OKB: Producer Rachel sits down with Anisha Sunkerneni of Cyphr VC to talk about NFT NYC and navigating tech events (1:41:02) Outro

Hey, everybody. There's a lot of news going on today. It's Friday. And we were going into the weekend with a great episode. And then, obviously, there's been some absolutely crushing breaking news here on a Friday from the Supreme Court. So here's what we're going to do. Yeah. Skip it. Okay. We're just, listen, there is going to be a lot of conversation about this. We're going to have things to say. We want to be able to talk about this cogently. And, calmly and also put together some thoughts on the kind of digital surveillance atmosphere in which this decision is being made. But we talked about it before the show and we decided we have a great interview recorded. We have a great OK boomer. And maybe this is just the place where you get to take a break from this for today. Yes. And we also have a great this week in climate and VC Sunday school coming on Sunday.

So Molly and I will collect our thoughts. We'll talk about all the check. angles to Roe v. Wade being repealed and we'll be with you bright and early on Monday ready to discuss this. Today we've got a great interview with the anonymous account praying for exits. You know he's on

Instagram and Twitter and he takes it to the tech industry but in a very insightful manner we discuss everything going on in markets roadstocks, crypto, startup valuations and how they've reset post-crash and maybe some of the behavior of new venture funds

and a lack of discipline and what the next year is going to look like for both sides of the tables, investors and for founders. And we even talk a little bit about what was behind the old all-in podcast controversy. It's going to be a great episode. We also, as usual, have OK Boomer on Friday. We're just doing, you know what we're doing? This Week in Startups. We're just doing this week in Startups.

Yeah, that's it. So stick with us. It's going to be a great episode. And Sunday's going to be awesome. Yes. Stick with us. This Week in Startups is brought to you by Microsoft for Startups Founders Hub.

For the challenges you face as a startup founder, Microsoft for Startups Founders Hub is here to help. The platform provides founders with free resources like Azure Credits, development tools like GitHub, mentorship resources, productivity software, training, and so much more. The program is open to all and takes five minutes to apply, with no funding required. Learn more and sign up at aka.m.m.S. this week in startups. Intercom. If you're an early stage,

high-growth startup, you can get access to Intercom's Early Stage Academy today at a 95% discount. Join the program today at intercom.com slash early dash stage or email them at startups

at intercom. And Vanta. Compliance and security shouldn't be a deal breaker for startups to win new business. Vanta makes sense. it easy for companies to get a SOC 2 report fast. Twist listeners can get $1,000 off for a limited time at vanta.com slash twist.

All right, everybody. Next up is one of my favorite people on the show that I've never met. We've had two anonymous guests in the history of this podcast. One of them was Biffinxt, an anonymous crypto account with, you know, an axe to grind against tether and the fact that they won't release information about their holdings. We thought that would be a pretty good. public service to do that. Of course, with the disclaimers, that who knows what the agenda is, we don't know. And the other one is praying for exits, which is a satirical Instagram account

that, let's face it, you know, it takes the piss out of the technology industry, but in a very, I think, intelligent fashion. So this is the second time I'm having praying for exits on the pod. Mr. Exits, are you there? I am. Great to see you. And what a difference a couple of months to make so. Yeah, I mean, we talked in December, and we were talking about it being the peak of the market. And sure enough, here we are six months later. And it is hopefully the trow. Hopefully went peak to trow here. Let's start with that. In terms of the carnage, in your career, I know that you are in all likelihood a millennial. You're not like a boomer, that's for sure. So this is your first major

pullback you've seen, or perhaps your second, if you were around for 2008? Yeah, I think that was tangentially around for 2008. I didn't have a huge amount of money on the line. But this time around, it definitely is a lot more acute feeling for sure. How does it feel to see something blow up this dramatically, you know, for the first time up close and personal while you're actually working in the field? Do you feel like you're like landing at the beach like in that saving private Ryan meme video that they always make with everybody getting, you know, just absolutely annihilated landing on the beach? Yeah, I think, and this is something that we kind of talked about last time I was on. It felt like we were actually at peak

exuberance in December. And there were a lot of points that you and I both made where we couldn't necessarily really understand what was happening in the market at the time. And so, you know, while I do find it somewhat shocking at how violent maybe the pullback has been and how persistent it's been, you know, I think we've had maybe like 10 green days and, I don't know, a couple months at this point. So I think that that was very, very, it was new for sure. And I'm sure for most people who have been in the industry in the last 10 years, that was also a very new feeling.

But I can't say I was necessarily surprised. You know, you see all of the different kinds of speculation that was going on in the markets at the time. There was only really one way it could end, especially with all the money that have been pumped into the system. And we're just, I think we're just seeing a very natural pullback. We might have gone a little bit too far, but I do think it was necessitated by a lot of the things that we were seeing that, you know, people who have been in the industry for a while may not have been agreeing with. Yeah, and I think the way you framed it is exactly correct.

We knew that there was a lack of discipline, to say the least, in the market. We knew there was a sense of entitlement brewing on all sides of the table. You know, the founders, the investors, perhaps even LPs, this incredible sense. sense that like, hey, if you place a bet, it goes up and that's just how it works. And in fact, Dave Portnoy kind of made a joke meme about it that, you know, buying stocks when he was doing day trader, Davey, whatever he was doing was stonks go up. That's just the nature of stocks. Well, now here we are. A violent crash, it has been, 80, 90 percent retreat and obviously private market companies, they behave a little differently because they're not measured every day

in stock price. When we look back at this moment in time, and let's just say the peak market 2021, what stands out to you as the peak moments and the most confusing that now do not seem as confusing

as they maybe did that year? Sure. I think and one thing we actually touched on the last time we spoke was kind of the place that founders felt like that they were in, which was they, they had 100% of the power.

They were sort of the gatekeepers into their own rounds. You saw, you know, a high level of, just because nobody had experienced anything like this before, I think you saw an extremely high level of, like, confidence and sort of self-reverence that was present in the founder side of things that I think has been quite humbled. And I think that, you know, the playing field on who's providing more value in the situation, has kind of leveled out a little bit more because obviously when things were good a year or two ago, everybody had money, everybody had a fund, everybody had $50 million to splash around. And now that has constricted quite a lot.

I'm sure you being a capital allocator yourself, you're very aware of what the LP markets look like. And so I think that, you know, if you're investing and you have dry powder and you have a point of view that you can invest into right now, I think you have far more power than founders do in a lot of cases. And so it's really interesting to see how quickly that switched up. Yes, the dynamic built up over the last 13 years of bull market 2008 to 2021. That 13 year bull market, all of the power in negotiation just went to one side of the table of founders who could raise money and say, if you want to invest in this company, you can't do diligence. and I had many times this was the, to me, this was the one that was the

screaming red flag. When people said, hey, you're putting in 500K, you're putting in a million, you're the fifth largest check in this round, you're doing more diligence than the four people ahead of you, and you know, one of them's putting in five, and the other ones are putting in three, and nobody

has asked for customer references. Nobody has asked to see our bank statements, right? And, you know, we have like a standard diligence list we would ask people for, Mr. Exitson. Some people got, I dare I say, upset at me for wanting to do diligence. And I said, well, you know, there's LPs we deploy their money. They just at some point, you know, things might not work out for an investment.

And somebody might say, like, what did you do in terms of diligence? This is an edge case. But you might want to be able to open a diligence folder in a, you know, a document where you said, hey, here's what we check. This is what we knew. You know, if you were a Theranos investor, you know, you might go back and look at your diligence, say, hey, where do we go wrong? And that to me was just a screaming red flag.

Of course, cryptocurrency and startups that had yet to launch their product, raising at valuations that were larger than companies that had actual revenue and launch products, that to me was the other screaming red flag. Thoughts on those two? Yeah, I think first of all, there were multiple deals that I had to pass on last year because I was told that if I wasn't going to be a lead or co-lead, I wasn't entitled to the data room. So that is, yeah. Wow. So that is, you know, to your point, even if you're writing a million, five million dollar check, if it's a $40 million round and you're not putting in the most of the money, people were very tentative to share data rooms. And I think that that's a function of the other side of the coin that you just brought up there, which is a lot of people, if you actually looked at their data rooms, there wouldn't be a lot in there because they haven't really accomplished much.

And so, you know, they'd be super thin. And I think that they would actually, in a lot of instances, if you had to have like a structured data room put together for a lot of these companies, it would in fact work in the opposite way that it was intended to in the sense that you would be, you kind of see the emperor without any clothes. And so I think that in a lot of instances, not only was it because, you know, people felt like there was some benefit to being extremely secretive. But I also think that it was because a lot of these companies were raising on promises that, aren't necessarily visible through traditional financial diligence means. And so when you're betting on kind of like the exuberance of the market and the promises of things to come in the future, it honestly doesn't even make sense to have a data room because what would even be in there.

Exactly. I mean, there could be a couple of check marks like you've actually incorporated. you have an employee stock option plan, you have IP assignments. These are the things in a pre-launch company that you just want to make sure are in place, right? But you're correct. There's no chart in there.

There's no projections in there necessarily. Even if there were projections, those are future. So you're just making sure you're actually investing in a company that in that case just has like their IP assignments and basic legal X's and O's done properly. But this is like really indicative of a hot market when a founder can turn away money because they want to look in there. But to your point, what are you going to see in there?

And that to me was the red flag in crypto. Of course, I had many people on my team, my investment team, did 57 introductory calls last week. That doesn't count second calls or third calls. So just introductory calls. 57 in a week, Mr. Exits. And so we meet with every, we'll meet with anybody, right? we really want to meet a lot of people and kind of put plant a flag like, hey, we met them and we'll check in with them later.

It was just amazing to me over the last couple of years. The evaluations of crypto companies that didn't have products in market, $50, $250 million. And like you're saying, there's no, if you were to open the data room, that would show no customers. By some estimates over 90% of startups will go out of business in year one. That's why Microsoft created the Microsoft for startups founders, Hub. This program provides founders at any stage with up to six figures in resources.

Wait until you hear about this ridiculous list of perks. You're going to get up to $150,000 in Azure credits based on your stage and size. You're going to get free access to GitHub's enterprise tier. Technical advice from experts at Azure and Microsoft Cloud. One-to-one mentorship from their mentor network, exclusive benefits and discounts from companies like OpenAI, huh, very nice. And the best part is there are no fundraising requirements. So unlike others in the industry, the Microsoft for startup founders hub doesn't require startups to be investor back or third party validated to sign up and access benefits. It's truly open to any founder like it should be. And it's not about who you know. It's about what you're building. So any founder at any stage

can get up to six figures of value by signing up at aka.m.m. slash this week. startups. Take a minute to write this down, aka.m.m.S. slash this week in startups. No spaces, no dashes. Make sure you use that URL so they know you're a fan of the show. Do you find that to be the fault of the venture capitalist, or do you find that to be the fault of the founders that paradigm they described? Yeah. So I think in some cases, there were neophyte investors who did not want to upset a founder. Okay. So there could be multiple dynamics going on here, but just working this out, there were VCs who maybe were recently founders or they just have no experience and probably no mentoring because they started their own fund.

You know, they started their own $10 million fund. They rolled their own on Angel list, whatever, which is totally fine in my mind. But you understand that they maybe nobody, there was no Bill Gurley or no rule off or no Michael Moritz saying, hey, here's how we evaluate companies at Sequoia at benchmark. So with no mentorship or light mentorship, they might, they might just think, you know, I don't want to upset the founder. I'll lose the deal if I ask for information, et cetera. So yes,

they would have perversely been enabling their own demise because they just didn't feel comfortable and they wanted to be popular. I sometimes will be unpopular with a founder in the short term. I can give you one anecdote. I had a founder who we had an agreement that we were investing this amount of money. We had over a 10% position in the company.

And that came, with a board seat and they demanded we give up our board seat in this bridge round that was coming up because this new investor was going to put more money in a higher valuation, all this stuff. And I said, listen, you know, we have an agreement. So, you know, we're inclined to go, just go with the agreement for now. If we own under 10% shortly, maybe it makes sense for us to give up the board seat to somebody else. So maybe we go forward with that. And that seemed like a reasonable way to handle it.

And they got very upset at me that I was not being founder friendly, that I was like, this is not the Jason Collican. I said, well, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. we gave you, you know, millions of dollars. We have an obligation to RLPs as well. It's unfair for you to say we should now, having given you all that money, have no insight into the business and not be stewards of the business when we own such a large percentage. We're the third largest owner in the business after your two founders. Sure enough, company had all kinds of issues, investigation because of financial irregularities and problems, and the co-founder quit.

So, you know, it in fact blew up. the founder a year later, two years later, came to me and said, you know what, you explain to me why you need to have the seat. You then were correct. Things got off track. And then you wound up being my biggest supporter when we cleaned up all that mess. I really appreciate you, J-Cal. So it was like a little bit of an arc. And sometimes in the short term, the job is to not be popular. It's to be candid and honest. And to be a, you know, a real part, a true partner, which is tell people if, like, things are f*** up. You know what I'm saying? 100%. I think that your point, it resonates with me that I feel like venture, especially in the last year or two, was turned into a little bit of a high school lunchroom in the sense that you had a bunch of new kids, new freshmen at the school, and they were trying to figure out what their place was. And like anybody who's kind of trying to figure out their place in a much bigger community, you saw like a certain level of assimilation. And I think that was towards,

more negative things like not doing diligence, rushing into deals, co-investing just off the base of who you were co-investing with and not anything else. And I think that you see, I think a lot of people felt a certain level of imposter syndrome maybe over the last year or two. And to combat that, you know, the only thing that they could really do to validate, you know, their newfound position in this ecosystem is to be like, oh, yeah, well, I invested with the best, I invested alongside the best crypto funds in the world. We've done deals with Andreessen. We've done deals with Sequoia. But if you were to ask what the thematics behind all of that was, there's no real, there's nothing really there. And so I think that what you've seen is a bunch of people

assimilating into these negative habits that were kind of propagated by all of this money that was poured into our ecosystem recently. And that has just become a death spiral for a lot of people. And I think you're going to see a lot of these funds, these $10, $20 million funds that were given to a first-time manager who, you know, has some tangential relation to technology far far away. I think that you're going to see a lot of those turn into zombie funds. And hopefully, yeah, yep, totally. It's a really astute observation, especially for somebody of your age and generation. Like I think for some reason, you took this job more seriously than maybe some other folks.

And, you know, if you watch any of the shows, we were a we crashed about we were, the Theranos one, these were amazing shows. I, as super pumped I couldn't get into, I thought it was, it didn't click for me, I'll say, for whatever reason. But there's always some people in these stories who are around the table, we say, you know what, our unit economics or this is an issue, whatever, and they basically get run over. And they're the person at the party who's like, you know what? Like maybe we shouldn't light that couch on fire in the house or, you know, like somebody who's

pumping the brakes and just trying to keep things safe kind of becomes the killjoy, right? And I think a lot of people wanted to be popular. And they substituted, like you're saying in high school, being popular. But then they were conformist. And then they developed really, really bad habits. And now we're to see the opposite. Now is the age of the builder. Now is the age of real businesses, product market fit.

And I have committed now to doing twice as many investments. I'm working twice as hard now. As I said, we did 57 first round meetings. And I'm trying to get that number to 70. meet 70 new companies a week, get them in our database, and then start tracking them and see where in their life cycle they are. So we can make these investments. I had a company that was, you know, I don't want to say demanding, but was demanding, you know, let's just, I'll pick a number, $30, $40 million evaluation. And they came back and I kid you're not,

like closing around in the, you know, $10 million range. And this is in the matter of weeks. So the market has shifted dramatically. If you're in the startup game, you've been, definitely heard of intercom before. And you've used it because you know when you're at a website and the little chat bubble pops up, that's intercom. You know it. You use it. You love it.

Intercom's platform can help you engage and support your users through personalized chat-like experiences. And these are so powerful. We've all used them. Over 25,000 companies are doing these kind of interactions every day. When you provide great customer service, that means less customer churn. If less customers churn, you know what happens? Your LTV goes up. Lifetime value.

Your company becomes profitable. you get a bunch of investors, you IPO, your team makes a bunch of money. That's, it's basically what happens. And it all starts with Intercom. So if you're an early stage, high-growth startup, you can get access to Intercom's Early Stage Academy today at a 95% discount. Join the program today at Intercom.com slash early dash stage. Or you can just email them, startups at intercom.

Tell them you want to try the software and that you heard about it on this weekend startups. And on July 20th, Intercom is hosting another hybrid event in its. CX for Growth series. This event is called Localize Your Customer Support Experience and will feature experts from Intercom Linktree and localize talking about when and how to prioritize customer support in other languages and regions. It's a great topic. What are you seeing in terms of earlier stage valuations? People were investing 25 to 50 million pre-product market fit. They were investing 50 to 100 million at a 200 times revenue. So 500k in revenue could equal $100 million dollar company. What are you seeing now? What do you see now, Mr.

I'm seeing those multiples compressed quite a lot. I'm seeing, you know, say you have 500K in revenue. I'm seeing maybe like 20 to 25x. If you're a good founder, maybe a little bit higher than that, or like a multiple time founder or, you know, you've done something of note in your career, then that goes a little bit higher. Get a little extra credit for your track record.

So you're saying, just to reflect back to you, 20 times revenue. So 500K, 20 times revenue is 10 million. 30 times revenue, 15 million. Something in that range, yeah. And then if you're a multiple time founder and you have, you could probably maybe squeeze out 20 to 25. But like all last year I was seeing pre-product seed rounds,

50 mil all day long. Now explain what that means to somebody who's not in the business. You're seeing a $50 million evaluation on a business that's accomplished what, Mr. Exits? It has accomplished a deck and a good story. Like a pitch deck. Correct. Okay.

have the pitch deck. What else do they have? They have a pitch deck, maybe in the case of crypto companies, they have a white paper. They have assembled some sort of semblance of a team together of, you know, let's call it three to five people who are going to create the sort of foundation of the company. And then it's a whole lot of promises as to, you know, these are the types of people that are going to hire. This is how we're going to implement the product. This is the types of people we even need to hire to build the product. So they have a strategy. They've got a plan. They've got a pitch deck to sell you on that plan. And they have maybe two or three people who are now working on this full time or maybe contingent on closing the revenue.

For sure. And they've also drummed up some level of, you know, like interest in specific from like specific. You know, they'll say, oh, we have, you know, a few angel investors. And these angel investors have a tangential relation to this specific industry that we're tackling. They got an advisor. They got Jason Calacanus. They got Naval. They got Kevin Rose.

They got somebody with some Tim Ferriss, whatever. I mean, those were the original ones you tried to get in your passport. I don't know who the new ones are, but it might be, I don't know who the new pass. I call these the passport stamps in our business. It used to be Y Combinator, Naval, me, Kevin Rose, Tim Ferriss, Gil Pinchina. You get one of those, Ron Conway would be the best one. You get Ron Conway on your, you know, cap table. Okay, now everybody else can feel safe.

As you said, people were using, you know, affiliation as a proxy, like, you know, this bizarre term, social proof to get other people. to put their money down, but if you think about that, $50 million in value is supposedly created for a 20 slide pitch deck and three people saying they're in. I mean, it's like you're getting $2 million per slide of the death. That's how history will look at this, is that you've got $2 million for each slide in the deck. Basically. And the other side of it is that history will look at it as like the people who enable this kind of behavior really couldn't do basic math because the chances that that company has like a meaningful, a meaningful

creation of value from 50 mil to whatever. You're kind of like destroying the dynamics of your own fund if you do that enough times because you don't really get to leverage the power law in a very good way. This is really important to unpack. The power law says that the majority of your returns are going to come from the minority of your investments. So if you do 30 investments in a fund, your 95% of your returns will be the top two. and that supposes that they are returning 50 to 100 times your money.

Sure. So how many 100 Xs are you going to get on a $50 million company that just has a pitch deck? Well, if you were diluted 50%, right, you could actually do the math. If it was a $50 million, if it's $50 million, you own $10% of it. So you own 10% of it. Over time, you'll be diluted. You'll, instead of own 10%, you probably wound up owning five on an exit. Five on an exit for you to break even becomes a billion.

exit and to 10x, to 20x, you would have to be a $20 billion company, right? So you're really, it's not going to happen unless you hit Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, and time perfectly your sale. It's just not going to happen. For sure. But all of those companies, by the time they had reached a $50 million valuation, were far more accomplished than anything that we see sort of comparable in the market. And so, like, you know, I just think that there's nobody really taught all of these new fund

managers how, like fund return dynamics actually work. And so you also. Such an disaster. Yeah, it's just very, very interesting. And, you know, I think that that's one of the things that I've really maybe touched a lot upon a lot of my content is that we really enabled a lot of people who didn't know what the fuck they were doing with a lot of money for whatever reason. And I don't know if it was exuberance or ignorance or just trying to be cool. But I do think that, you know, the world as a whole is paying for it in one way or another if you look at, you know, the NASDAQ or anything else. We literally just talked about it on an all-in, which we taped.

right, the new episode 84 of all in the comeback episode, we taped right before I came on air with you. And you look at the three big asset bubbles, stocks, you know, three big asset bubbles, you know, for, you know, this cycle, you know, growth stocks down, whatever, 70, 80, 90%. You got crypto down similar. And then the last one, I think, that's going to really show some gnarly scars is going to be real estate.

And it always is kind of hard with real estate because people can live in their homes because they have some intrinsic value. But, you know, for me, this is when I did my best work the last time around. 2008 to 2012 is when I hit all my big hits. And if you were, if you were investing and placing bets during that period of time, you were going to win. I don't put any of the success or mine or Naval's or Gilpin Sheen, anybody who did well in that period, it was a function of being in the right town.

It was like being in, you know, New York in the late 70s into 80s and you were a musician. Like punk was happening. New wave was happening, hip hop was going to happen. Like, you were just as a musician in the right place. And this has happened, you know, for poetry in San Francisco during the beatnik era, whatever, you know, television in, you know, being in L.A. during the, you know, 50s into the 60s, you know, like if you were a television, if you were a writer and you could get on a television show, you were going to be successful because it was such a giant wave. And I think the wave's gone. And now I think a lot of tourists are going to be gone, which will be great for the rest of us who want to do real work.

What founders, what VCs are going to succeed in the coming years in your mind? And how are you strategizing your own career? Sure. I think that the people who I believe to have the most sort of prescient thought process right now would probably be founders fund. And I think it's because they've maintained such a contrarian point of view this whole time. And at the end of the day, they were actually right on a lot of things. Like Keith called a lot of this out at the Q3, Q4 last year. And a lot of the bets that they've taken.

and have kind of been these sort of counter cyclical bets where they're betting on real people doing real work in person. And that's, I know, a somewhat unpopular opinion on Twitter, at least right now. But I do think that people like that who are really investing from first principled thoughts are going to continue to do well in this environment because it's an environment where obviously following the leader doesn't really get you anywhere. And so you follow him off a cliff? Correct.

I mean, if you follow crypto people, it was Delman Louise. You should be literally behind the Delman-Louis car and you watch them crash and then you crash on top of them. Exactly. And so I think that, you know, to prevent sort of this mindless going over a cliff, it's going to be the people who can really dissect the world and sort of have mental frameworks around what's important and what creates value in the world. Yeah. That will really do well. And the people who are kind of like pontificating on these abstract ideas that don't necessarily have any grounding in reality are going to continue to get hurt because that's, that's not. not like,

it's just not an intelligent way to invest. It is far from an intelligent way to invest. And I do think the work from home one, we'll just touch on that for a second, is a pretty good tell. Teams that are super serious and go to an office and demand that, that's a pretty bold choice in today's era when people are entitled and or they've opted to,

you know, stay at home. And man, managing work from home folks is really hard and getting the most out of them. And we hear all the anecdotal stories. people, anytime we go to a party, people are laughing about doing four hours of work or doing two jobs and getting paid two salaries is like one of the big, you know,

elite jokes among developers, or I've had people who tell me they're doing free, they're getting paid, you know, 75K to do social media here, and they have three clients paying them $4,000 a month to do social media on their spare time, but they're obviously doing it all at the same time during the day. So, super weird moment in time.

Yeah, and I think that, you know, I'd like to make like a, I'd like to sort of put a line in the sand here about how I feel about all this. And I think that, you know, if you want to have an amazing lifestyle, then the work from home movement is perfectly suited for that. But if you want to build something great, I feel like it has to be at least done somewhat in person, whether that's, you know, hybrid model or whatever.

I do believe that the beauty of a lot of the stories that maybe I came up with and you came up with while you were sort of early on investing, were these stories of these 12 people in an 800 square foot room hacking it out until they had customers and until things actually started working. And I think that this idea that we can just be all remote all the time is it plays into these narratives of just kind of following what the trend is. I think that there are some businesses that actually can't be built remotely because you need the kind of energy and you need the back and forth between, teammates to really make these kinds of businesses successful. And I think that you'll see a lot of businesses that would have succeeded were they in person fail simply because the cohesiveness of the team wasn't there.

And so, yeah. Mr. Exits, I think you're exactly right. You think about what it takes for an employee to switch from one job to another if they're a remote worker. They literally log out of one Slack instance. They log into another Slack instance. They change their email address. And, you know, they return one laptop and fire up their.

new MacBook, M1, and they're back in the game. It's literally can happen in a 20-minute period of time. And then you think about the cost of leaving a company where you go to work every day and you've built this fabric and you've got this habit of working with these people, going to lunch with with these people. They mean something to you. The relationships mean to something, the mission of the company. And so, yeah, that is one of the reasons why I think culture-wise, it's very difficult to obviously build culture, you know, over Zoom constantly. And then the other piece to it is like, I think there's maintaining a product. So if you're maintaining the Google search engine,

if you're maintaining Facebook's ad network, if you're maintaining the algorithm at Airbnb or doing customer support, do you need to be in the same room? Do you need that vibe? No. You need to just do your job for eight hours and like you're saying,

have a good lifestyle. So it might be that the core management team is in a place together. And then, you know, each of the verticals or it's kind of like having an outsourced firm, inside your firm. It's like, yeah, you're just a widget. If you're not at the HQ, you're not with the CEO,

you're not with the founders, you're not with the product manager. You're kind of a widget. You're just like an AWS service. You're like a cron job in this giant machine, which maybe you would be as well if you were in the office. But given what's happened, the upper hand now goes back to companies to get people to come in person. Yeah, you think?

Especially at the earliest stages. I think that if you're building important businesses, those early moments really define the foundation of what the business will be at its most ambitious point. And I think that if you're consistently allowing this level of like, I don't know, this level of like disassociative community is the way I almost look at it. If you allow that, then that's the way that your company will be until it's reached its full scale because that's all anybody has ever known inside those walls. And I think it's really important. I feel like a lot of the amazing aspects of company culture that Silicon Valley had in the 2010 era has been just destroyed by work from home. And me, as somebody who got to witness how great the businesses that were built within those contexts were, it really kind of makes me sad, to be honest.

Yeah, I mean, I'm really missing going to an office and having that kind of structure. I do also like the fact that in the winter I got 40 days of skiing in and I was a. able to do four days of skiing. I would mark out three hours in the afternoon and ski and then do my meetings again at four o'clock and do the show before 12. And it was a pretty great lifestyle. But again, people are at different points in their lives and have to make different choices. But everything becomes, you know, an advantage. So if you think about this from first principles, if a person wants to come to an office and engage and put in 10, 12 hours a day to change the world, you know, that's kind of addicting.

And if the founders do that and you self-select for that, how does that company not have a big edge against their competitors? I think Bill Gurley tweeted about this just recently. It's like, if you want to know what it's like, just listen to Frank Sluteman from Snowflake and ask yourself, like, what would it be like to be competing against him with his, like, crazy, you know, wartime CEO all the time. And if you want to know what it's like, take a look at Uber versus Lyft

and how that turned out when my guy was in the CEO seat. Like, you wanted to go up against Travis. I could tell you 10 founders who call me like, hey, your guy is just too hardcore. And I was like, yeah, that's why he's my guy. For sure. And that efficacy would have gone down a lot if he was trying to be as hardcore as that over Zoom. Like, it's just, you know. How could you be that hardcore?

It's really important for founders to understand what SOC2 compliance is. Basically, if you're a SaaS or a service company that stores customer data in the cloud, then you need to be socked to verified from a third party to close major customers. It's that simple. If you're not sock to compliant, you can't close big deals. But sock two verification is brutal. The process is tedious, time consuming and expensive. But now there's Vanta.

Vanta software makes it much easier to get and renew your SOC2. On average Vanta customers are SOC2 compliant in just two to four weeks compared to three to five months without Vantan. And they partner with over two dozen. and audit firms who have been trained to file SOC2 reports directly within Vanta. And congratulations again to Christina and the team at Vanta for raising $110 million Series B. What an amazing company. And my investment firm, we got a little taste. Yeah, no conflict, no interest.

They advertise, we invest in their company, all my startups use their product. Here's the best part. Vanta's going to give you $1,000 off your sock, too. That's Vanta.com slash twist for $1,000 off your sock too. All right, you got a lot of questions. You told everybody you coming on the pod. You got a couple questions. So it's a good time for you and I to maybe take some questions.

I would love to. I think that you probably can't talk about this too much. We never know. I'm an open book. Okay. So one of the biggest questions that I'm sure most people have been asking you and have been asking me is maybe you could give a little bit more context to the disappearance and reappearance of the pod and how you feel about, you know, how you feel about just how publicly it was sort of displayed for everybody. Sure.

I would not normally talk about it, but literally at the opening of episode 84, which will come out before this. We've literally hashed it out because I didn't think the fellas wanted to talk about it. So All In is a phenomenal success, obviously, you know, going to the top 25, I think was our peak, 25th largest episode in the world, I guess, on the rankings. pretty crazy, right? And you can see what it's done inside of our industry.

I can tell you qualitatively, Mr. Eggs, it's like even a magnitude more than my previous notoriety in our tiny little vertical tech and finance. So I would get at a tech conference, I'd get asked to take five selfies.

You know, walking around a random city to get a cup of coffee over two hours, I will get asked to take five selfies. So it crossed over into mainstream. So this is a new level of attention for all of us. And even me, who had the highest profile before this, and I guess Chimov with the SPACs was also going in that direction, I think it was just a lot of attention.

And everybody wants to know all the possible things we could do with All In. People see All In, they think, okay, well, this is the future of everything. They project into it, right? And so we've had a bunch of people, you know, who want to take the show to whatever podcast platform network. We have people who want to do, you know, all kinds of affiliations with us, right? It's very rare that you create a top podcast. It's the number one podcast in our space. That's a big deal.

Also, it's not monetized. That's also a big deal, right? We're just leaving probably $10 million on the table a year without ads. But we all agreed. It not having ads kind of is part of what makes it cool. So you agree with all that, I think. Yep, yep. You have my agreement.

Yeah. So then we decide, hey, maybe. we should do an event. That'd be fun. The fans want to meet us. So I said, okay, I'll do it. Here's what my vision is. We kind of make it like TED or, you know, like a summit. Not for, not thousands of people, not 200 people, but let's call it 400, 600, something in that zone. It would depend on the space. We do the All-In Summit. This thing becomes a juggernaut out of the gate. Three million dollars in ticket sales almost instantly. Then instead of selling the next three million, we decided to do the scholarship program and basically cap the revenue at

three million. Didn't sell any sponsorships, could have sold a million or two. It was modestly profitable. We spent over a million on the parties. And so I said, hey, listen, guys, I'm doing all the work here. You guys just show up. I think I should get a little bit more in terms of getting paid, like being the producer of this, and equity. And for a while, like some people wanted to do that, some didn't. And then we agreed that I would get a little bit more equity, 20% more equity, no, 10% more equity than everybody, everybody else, and just get a simple, you know, low six figures fee for producing the pod and the show and everything. Then everybody was like, no, this is unfair. And so literally what's happened over the last month is this negotiation.

And I said, listen, it's important to me if I'm going to do all the work that I, you know, get recognized for that. And then we realize, you know what, we're ruining the whole pod by making it a business. Let's just go back to a four-way split and it makes no money. And we just do, 48 episodes a year, whatever it is. And so that's where we wound up. That's great. That's far less chaotic and crazy than a lot of people were making it out to be. So it's great to...

Well, it was actually pretty chaotic and crazy. I mean, you have four... Here's the other thing I've learned through this whole thing. These are my friends, like my best friends in the world. And negotiate... I don't negotiate hard against my best friends. You know, like, I'm just like, these are my best friends. Totally. I just told them like, hey, do you think I deserve a little more? because I'm doing all the work.

And some of them were like, yes, some of them were like, no. So it kind of tells me where I am in the friendship. So it was actually a good experience for me to see where people were at. And then doing business with your friends kind of sucks, especially when your friends are all masters of the universe maniacs who run their own fiefdoms. This is like Game of Thrones, the four of us, like all four of us run businesses, all four of us run funds, all four of us have strong opinions. So to try to make a decision like the All In Summit results in absolute utter chaos.

An event takes thousands of decisions. The podcast each week takes dozens of decisions. It's just very hard to get consensus among four really smart guys who are very strongly opinionated and are used to being dictators. So there's another sort of lesson. So, now we're not going to have another All In Summit. The podcast is just going to be the podcast. I'm going to do more podcasts, as I always have.

I've done maybe six or seven podcasts. I have a couple of them running right now, Angel, the, speaking startups all in. I'll probably launch another two or three podcasts, and I'll be doing my events again. I'm just not going to do them under the all-in umbrella because it just seems profoundly unfair to me that I do all the work and then give 75% to them.

And all I asked for was 10% more. So I thought it was a pretty reasonable ask. But, you know, it's just the whole thing is a good learning lesson, I think, for all of us, for me especially. Because I thought, and these are my friends, they see the value I'm providing. They would want to give me 10% more. And, you know, I learned something different.

For sure. And, you know, that's, it's kind of like one of those lessons you take away from a poker table, right? You know, sometimes the people that you're playing with aren't necessarily. Your read on them isn't necessarily what it ends up being. So totally. And so, yeah. And then after three weeks of this, I was just at a certain point, I was like, you know what, whatever you guys want to do. I'm done lobbying for myself. I'll just take my energies and I'll put them over here outside of the all-in umbrella. There will be no all-in spin-offs.

There'll be no all-in summit again. I'll just, I'll do my own summit. They may come speak. We may do an all in live episode at my event, but we're not going to do anything else under the all-in brand. And I just signed a reality TV deal. Or I'm sorry, it's not signed yet.

It's, I'm negotiating the last couple of points to do a reality TV show, which I had done one previously with NBC. That didn't make it on air. But, you know, I get these offers all the time. So instead of doing all in stuff, I'm just going to do it in my own little bucket on the side.

Got it. Cool. Yeah. And then I guess maybe speaking on a little bit of the strong opinions, side of things. Obviously, you guys dropped a bombshell of a pod last night. Kind of wrapping up the All-In Summit. Yeah, saved the best for last.

Yeah, had to. And so maybe I guess, I think a lot of people were interested in, do you feel like your perspective on maybe Varda as a company has changed? Obviously, you know, like Palmer is... Oh, Andrew?

Yeah, Andrew. Sorry, Andrew, my apologies. I have always been a huge fan of Palmer's work. I think the Oculus is unbelievable. Couldn't believe it when I put it on because I have motion sickness, the fact that it's gone so far. And Andrew, I am one of the few people probably in Silicon Valley or maybe in the minority, maybe it's 20% of us who believe technology companies have an obligation to work on weapons systems and to work on protecting the country because that's how democracy works. Now, if you're a pacifist, okay, fine. But, you know, when Google didn't want to work for the government to build software systems or whatever, or people don't want to build weapons systems, You can make that personal choice, but I'm in favor of us having the best weapons in the world to defeat authoritarian who torture people and commit genocide. So that's my personal feeling. So as I told him many times, I tried to invite him on my podcast many times. I invited him when he got fired from Facebook.

I invited him when he started Andrew L. Many times I invited him. And he was very offended by what I said about him when it came out that he was doing this posting and backing these. like gnarly memes about Hillary. And all I said was, you know, if you're that high profile, you should not do things under a pseudonym like this because it's obviously going to get leaked and you're going to look like an idiot. And your family and the coworkers and their families are all going to bear the brunt of you

doing anonymous, you know, anti-Hillary memes and all the stuff. It has nothing to do with voting for Hillary or Trump. Just the act of like starting an edge lord meme army covertly in his position. I thought it was dumb. And so, you know, I decided we should release the episode, of course. I don't hide away from any fight. But I was like, people don't understand what happened. So for people who haven't seen the episode, Palmer gives his whole talk.

It's great. She talks about Andrew. And then he says, and Jason Calcantis is the worst human being in the world and tried to kill my career. And here's how he did it. And here's what he said about me. And this was like, you know, can you imagine Mr. Exit's doing that in front of 750, 850 all in fans? brave guy.

That's brave. He came into my house and was like, it was like going into like the Warriors Arena and it was like, let me tell you why Steph Curry sucks. You know, like the place is vote with Steph Curry fans. Like, I'm going to tell you all the reason Traymond Green is the worst human being on the planet. Like, it's pretty balsy. I mean, I think we'd all say that I took serious footspah in Cajonais to do that. So I give him credit for that. But, you know, I stand by what I said.

I don't think you should do this kind of meme army stuff. And I also think like what Palmer's doing is dope So I was like listen Palmer We can agree to disagree on this And I wish you well in your career And you know Trump I think is like the ultimate trolley car problem

Where like Trump just brought the worst out in all sides And created this you know Polarization where You know I think it's like hard I think a lot of families are dealing with us right Like you had somebody who voted for Trump And you know somebody who felt like Trump was gonna

You know result in their life, you know, being at risk. And so, you know, maybe it's a little overdramatic, but I think that's one of the things the country's working through. Totally. And I really appreciate, because I personally am an Andrew investor. And my entire thesis behind supporting Palmer in what he's doing is because I do believe that the most prescient, some of the most prescient problems that we have that could be solved with technology exist within the military industrial complex, just for the preservance of our way of life, basically. like yeah and I think that um you know people like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin aren't well equipped to

to hire the engineers necessary to keep up with the kind of our global adversaries and so um you know I think that what you guys agree by I think it's a great bet too I think it's a great bet he's a smart cat what did you think of him doing that like as an investor because I had one investor was like Jake how what's going on with this like is he so thin skin that you got under her skin this much Like people were a little shock that he did it. I kind of like it. It's kind of gangster. I don't mind.

Yeah, yeah. No, to me. It's not like something I would do. Yeah, yeah, yeah. To me, I thought it was super gangster. Yeah, okay. I did think that it was, I always overallocate to people who are desperate to tell the truth because it's so much better than investing in somebody who's on the opposite side of that coin. One thousand.

So desperate to hide the truth. And so, you know, although I think that, you know, sometimes there are more nuanced and better ways to handle things. I do think the fact that he was able to step up and stand behind what he believed with such you know, like such sort of ferociousness. It takes a lot to do that, especially when you're playing an away game, like you said. And so, you know, to me, that speaks to a founder that that's willing to stand up for his company, even in the most intense and kind of like, you know, just situations. And so for that, it kind of gave me a little bit more. It made me want to support him even more because I know that he's always on the up and up and kind of trying to keep it straight with everybody as far as it relates to Andrel.

So I don't know what the perception is of each of us after that. If it's negative, positive, or neutral. But based on just looking at the 24-hour reaction on Twitter and I saw the first couple of comments come in, which obviously is the hometown comments, people said, you know, I think overwhelmingly people said it was a great moment. and they liked the fact that we had this really hard discussion, which I think, you know, Freiburg made a good point about this. Like, hey, I think the whole point of our podcast that might people like it is that we disagree with each other and we try to come to some sort of understanding of each other's positions and still remain friends. And so people said this encapsulated, Freberg's position was this encapsulated.

Every reason Freeberg loves to do the podcast, which is to have those hard discussions and try to all advance our understanding of the world. And, you know, and that's why he wants to do. do the podcast every week and it means so much to him. And he was begging me to release it. Of course, I was a little dramatic. I was like, we're going to release it last. And I kind of held it because I got a little showmanship in me too.

I think also that you guys releasing that kind of presents an actual more realistic view of the duality of venture capital in general. Because obviously, you know, a lot of it like a lot of people's perception of venture capital is what happens on Twitter, which is for the most part pretty sanitized. But once you get into these boardrooms and once you get into these discussions about rounds and, you know, firing people and et cetera, it does get to the point that, you know, you guys got to and even much worse in some instances. Of course. And so I think that you guys being open about, you know, people get along, but they can still do dope things in their own individual careers and still contribute to the venture capital system in a very value accrued way. Yeah. Is it a great way to kind of be a little bit more honest about what actually happens behind these closed doors. Yeah, it can get messy And overall, you know, people who build stuff in the world

And that, you know, are the people that matter And so I think if you're building, capital allocating is, you know, part of that function You're building by the nature of placing the bets and sorting through all these crazy ideas And figuring out which ones deserve the capital. I believe it's an act of building as well. So I feel pretty good about releasing it and the reaction it's getting. Great. The next question that I wanted to touch on that a lot of people wanted to talk about is,

how do you feel about managing your own psychology as an investor in this kind of macroeconomic situation? And what do you focus on yourself to not try or to be able to not fall into the traps that you see a lot of other people falling into? Yeah. So I believe in a core set of principles around the companies I invest in. And I am willing to evolve those principles. but I think some of them are quite fundamental

and they work for me. Second, and we can go into what those principles are, but I have a very clearly defined set of principles. Writing the book, Angel, help me codify those and then teaching this Angel University course every couple of months helps me stay sharp in that way. So I really examine my process. So I am obsessed with process.

And so for the last couple of months, coming into this, I said, what are the things about the process that we can evolve, that we can refine, And I went on a bit of, you know, a mission to make everybody on my team, both at Inside.com and launch, the two companies I run, but they're separate entities, to be 5%, to be 10% more efficient for each of the next four months, which would make each organization 50% more efficient, you know, because of compounding,

not just 40. So looking at the processes, I just thought personal time management and what you're focused on could be 5% of those gains and then 5% of those gains could come from professional development, training basically to get better at your job. So I believe if you have a process and you constantly refine it, that's the best way to manage psychology. And you've seen this. The people who, if you've ever read Victor Frankl's Man Search for Meaning, really, have you read

that before this, right? Yeah. Wonderful book. Yeah. So if you have purpose and you're realistic about what's happening, this makes anxiety go away. So why am I here? Why am I doing this? And then what is the actual state?

affairs. Let's define reality. The reality today is most of these companies are going to go out of business. By the way, it's always been the reality, but it's just going to happen faster. And the reality is the money is going to go to the people who are builders and who can build efficiently and get to profitability and throw a free cash flow. Once you understand that's the reality, well, you can build a planner and then you can build a team to work towards those goals. Now, your psychology should be okay because you've taken what you have control over and you've mastered it, you've refined it, you've done the best you can. You don't have control over external events. So dune scrolling or looking at stock tickers is not going to help you. You have

to, if you're a coin base right now, like, what do you do? What do you have control over? The number of employees you have, what your spend is, how much cash you have in managing that, and then how good is the product? If you're Peloton, what do you have control over? The customer experience, the product, how many your balance sheet, and just surviving and then delighting customers. So that's how I manage my psychology. What do I have control over? And I'm doing everything I can to set myself up for success with those things. And then you're fine, you know, because at least you, and people who've been in emergency

situations, I worked on an ambulance and, you know, you really start to disconnect from the reality of, you accept the reality that you're going to be called when people are dying or have died. So once you have that, then when you get to the scene and you have to do CPR or somebody's been stabbed. My first ball was somebody got stabbed right above their heart. Or it's a car accident. People are mangled. Like, okay, that's the job. So therefore, let's just focus on what we can do from this point forward. We accept that death. We accept that injury as part of this. We're here to get people to the other side of that. And so then all of a sudden, the anxiety of the phone ringing

at the station for the first couple of months for me was like the scariest thing ever. And then it became, okay, this is part of the process. This is the job. We pick up the phone. Where's the emergency? Bravo, where's the emergency? I had to answer the phones. Bravo, where's the emergency? Great. And then we just go try to solve the problem. So I think that's the best you can do. What do you do to manage your psychology? Yeah, and I think, well, I mean, maybe reading in between the lines a little bit of what you said, I think that there's, for me, the thing that I've been trying to get a lot better at is emotional detachment. Because at the end of the day, when you're in the trenches with people that you're working with, people that you have evangelized, people that you've

supported from their earliest sort of state of being as far as companies go, it's hard to not get emotionally attached to ideas, to people, to teams, to moments and time. And I think that one thing that I've learned that I've been getting a lot better at and has been making me a better investor overall is being able to sort of emotionally detach myself from those moments. and look at them kind of in a vacuum and say, hey, listen, this guy's a great founder. I love him. He's extremely smart or he or she is extremely smart. But would I invest in this business again today, given the macroeconomic climate?

And if I didn't know this person, you know? And I think looking at companies from an emotional standpoint is never the place that you want to be. But I do think that's sort of the flywheel of social media and kind of like this sort of position that founders were put in before has created a very emotional space for all of us to be investing in. And you consider FOMO and you consider all like you consider all of these other emotions that people deal with on a regular basis in our industry. Yeah, I think that the best people moving forward, and you've seen this in the past, too,

through other crises, through other crises, is the people who have been able to detach from their ideas and consistently evolve the way that they think and the way that they look at things. So they're constantly up to date from like a practical standpoint, not an emotional standpoint. I think is a really, really important lesson that the people who are going to continue in this industry are going to have to either accept or, you know, involve in their own investment DCs. You know, when I started in the business, it's such a really good point. You know, the amount of work you had to do as an early stage investor to get your founders past the next hurdle of investors was extremely high.

So I was calling and emailing people about Uber or whatever company to try to get somebody else to invest after us, right? And Uber wasn't that hard, but other ones were very hard. And then over the last five or six years, that part of the job went away. We would just get notices or if we're on the boards, we would help them pick which investor they were going to have, right? Now we're going to have to work back for early stage seed investors, angel investors. the job is going to become, yeah, can you help your seed stage company clear market with the next downstream investors? We didn't have to do that for a long time.

We're going to have to get back to that, right? So things do change. You have to adapt. It used to be just make as many bets as possible and, you know, watch the write-ups come in. You know, I was getting all these crazy emails from funds I didn't invest in that existed for 18 months and they were sending me updates like every month of their portfolios going up. And they're like, we're now 4x cash on cash. like, what? Did you start this fund? And they're like, yeah, you know, our token. There was a

secondary sale for these shares in this company. I'm like, that company doesn't have a product lunch. How are their secondary shares being sold, you know? Like, it was very weird. And I can't imagine, like, I never send those kind of markup emails. I sound like, you know, here's the audit, super conservative. I'm old school like Sequoia and other folks. I try not to markup these investments, you know, if I don't have to unless people are, I'm kind of forced to, like there's a priced round. But people are getting pretty frisky with their markups. And, I've seen some insane new types of valuing companies that I have never, I've seen completely made up versions of valuing companies as of last year, which, you know, I think, again. Do you have them what's the most insane you can mention?

Is it like based on the number of employees or like a competitor or? No, it's, I saw one deal where they were, because the employee, because one of the employees had sold 25K in secondary to some random. family office, the whole company was now priced at what that 25K worth of secondary had gotten sold to this one random investment firm that I'd never even heard of before. So you saw a lot of weird stuff like that where like the volume would be super low, but somehow that would still manage to mark the company up to whatever that traded price was. So stuff like that thought really weird last year.

The emotional detachment thing is important. I had, you know, a couple of founders who had maybe two and 350. investments that I didn't see eye to eye with where we had like a meaningful position. And it was just like, you know what? I shouldn't be on your cap table. You know, in one case, you know, people were doing things that I just thought was like, you know, borderline, you know, could be legal issues. I was just like, you know, I don't need to be on this cap table with you.

You can just buy me out. I could redeploy the money somewhere else. And other ones were just making high risk, doing high risk behaviors that I was just like, this is not why we're here. Like, let's deploy the capital properly. And in one case, I'm still an investor. the other case, I'm not. And I just tell people when that's the case. And this is, I think, what you'll learn when you get into your second decade. I think you're still in your first,

Mr. I guess it says, you don't have to be on every company and you could leave. So, you know, I've had situations that you don't buy half my shares back. I'll give them to you at whatever this last round is, the next round. We'll come up with something. Get me below the threshold, have a board seat. I'll keep idiot insurance. I'll keep 4% of the company, sell 4%. Get me out of You know, it's actually happened three times in 350 companies, which I think is pretty low, actually. Yeah, no, that is pretty low. You haven't had to do that yet. You haven't had to have that conversation.

I've had those conversations, but they've come out a lot less than me getting my money back. So, yeah, that's usually when there's, when the thing is crashing. Okay, any more questions from your amazing audience that people really need to hear the answer to it? Yeah, I think that the one last thing that we could touch on, and it seems like, you know, this was, this was a pretty constant question too is, what sort of verticals over the next couple of years do you see a lot of value in?

And which ones do you feel like will fall to the wayside because they actually never had any value to begin with? Yeah. And when I saw that, what are you optimistic about? So those two are really good. So I am seeing that the consumer package good businesses and the consumer hardware businesses are really, really out of favor.

and some might argue unfundable. Now that might be obvious to everybody because they have lower margin. They're not software-based businesses typically. So you're seeing the DTC stuff that went public is getting demolished. Obviously, meat has never been a good business. BuzzFeed, you can see that there.

Peloton is a hardware product with a subscription, so it was a darling for a while. Now it's probably too out of favor. There's something in the middle for that business because it's kind of hardware as a service. I think if they did it as such, it would be better. And so those categories are really Fubbard. The things that are classics for all time

are making software that make humans that take away pain and suffering for humans or make them bionic or superheroes. So any software that can make a human in their personal, private, public, professional life better at what they do. And better can come in a lot of fashions. You can do something faster.

You can do it better. You can do it cheaper. You can make it more delightful. Like some software is not much different than what came before. If you look at Coda, you look at Notion, I love these products. You know, you look at Slack. I love that product. Are they much different than the IRC chat rooms that came before them or the wikis that came before them?

And some might argue, no. Others might argue they're completely different. I would argue their design and the thoughtfulness of the user interface. makes them dramatically different. It's a completely different experience to use MediaWiki to edit a Wikipedia page than to use Coda to use Notion or these modern document sharing stuff.

Even using Google Docs, which made Word look terrible. You know, like now using Grammarly and using, you know, Notion and Coda, it's just so much more delightful. So there's always room to make something more delightful to make people more efficient. Marketplaces will always be in favor.

I think FinTech is out of favor now because of Robin Hood and Coinbase and all this cohort that I think maybe their valuations got pretty robust because there was a lot of activity in them. I think that's still going to be a great category. So that's one that's probably went too high and now is too low. Yeah. And then in terms of who is going to get funded and who's going to thrive, I think we're back to builders instead of storytellers.

You know, people could actually build product. So, you know, the Elon Musk's, you know, the jacks of the world, you know, I think they are really good at product design and making great product and we've spent the last five years of people who are really just good at telling a story. Maybe not actually acting out the story. Does that make sense? Totally. Totally. Yeah.

I literally got the domain name we backbuilders.com. And I'm thinking about changing everybody's email and the company to that. And then that would just forward to launch or whatever. Because I want everybody to be really focused on that. Like we back builders. We want to back builders. If you can build the product yourself, man, it's such an easier bet for me to make. I think it's one of my big secrets is, you know, the people who I invested in, you know, Travis, you know, Alex from Com and Michael from Com, like when we would look at the product, we'd have these really rich product decisions.

And then I would talk to crypto kids and I don't want to like, you know, bash them too much here while they're down. But they didn't actually talk about their products or have products or talk about their customers. The customer obsession and the product obsession is just such a tell, you know. like if you're obsessed with the customers and the product like Elon is, you know, like Jack is, your, your chances of the winning go way up,

way, way, way, way, way up. Yep, I think you hit the nail on that with that, for sure. All right. Now,

we think we know who you are, but we'll never say. But, uh, when you do come, when you, are you going to uncloke at some point? That's what the audience wants to know.

And then some people know who you are. Does your firm know who you are that you're doing this or not? They kind of, yeah, so it's, it's kind of a moving target. Got it. You know, there's some people who know, some people who don't.

For the most part, like, I really enjoy privacy. And the whole entire point of even launching a fund via the page was to really show people that you didn't have to fall into the same trap of like this egocentric venture capitalist to be able to win allocations. And to be, you could really just be an anonymous person with strong ideas and a good perspective on the world. And people will resonate to that even more so than, you know, the person who publishes 100 medium articles on random. aspects of industry. And so I think, you know, my whole point with all of this was that I really found the sort of egocentricity of the venture capital industry to be kind of gross in a lot of ways and misaligned with the whole point of creating value in this space.

And so, yeah, I mean, my preference would to never be, would never have to, would never have to reveal myself because to me, it doesn't really, wouldn't really change my life in any type of meaningful way. I'm able to compete for the best deals. I'm able to talk to people like you and other people who are sort of reverential in the industry. And, you know, I'm able to do that all without having anybody know who I am. I love it. I hope that you, if you happen to be one of the few people who know, don't spoil it.

Be cool with it. It's kind of cool to have like a voice out there that's kind of fun and precocious and intelligent, right? And I think you do prove a meta point, you know, even an anonymous account again, raise a fund and, you know, based on the merit of their ideas and their approach. and your approach seems solid. I can't wait to meet you in person, have lunch. If you want to unclope with me and have lunch sometime, let me know. But your secret is safe with me forever. Cool.

Thank you very much. I appreciate that. Just do a Google search. You'll find them. Praying for exits is one of the more entertaining. I'd say the most end. BC Brags and praying for exits are my top two. And I have good relationships with both.

In fact, people thought I was VC Brags for a while, which I was more than happy for them to think it was me. All right. We'll see everybody next time. Take care of yourself. Mr. Exits. All right, thanks again to Mr. Exits, as I like to call him for joining the show. Now it's time for OK Boomer. And it's NFT week in New York City. So let's see what's going on with Rachel reporting, producer Rachel, living Molly and I's best life while we suffer away

working. Rachel's out there at the party. How is the party? How you feeling? Yeah. I'm feeling really, really good. Yesterday I was, I got really nervous. I got a COVID test right after, But we're good. We're back. COVID negative, too. So hopefully all is good. But we got to talk about all things NFT, NYC this week with Anisha from Cypher VC, which is a Web3 VC. And she's also host of the Crypto Podcast Pilled.

I met Anisha going to some different events earlier in the year. And I know that she's really plugged into the Web3 space. So I got to talk to her not just about attending Web3 events, but what you should do is a young person and somebody hiring a young person. attending these like IRL events. These events seem to be a big part of the crypto culture, the parties, the after parties, dinners, etc. I wonder though, Molly, if these are being done as opposed to maybe building products.

I could be wrong, but it feels like a little too much partying and not enough producing. I mean, it is interesting. And Rachel, let me know your perspective because it, like, this is all of everybody says this in the NFT world, that it's in particular the NFT world, that it's all about community. And so at what point is the community just like too drunk to get anything done?

Yeah. So I am actually not a big fan of large parties. I like it when they do smaller things, maybe dinners where you can have more of a conversation with somebody. And from a hiring perspective, I think this is really important because I didn't know anybody on our team before I joined. I am somebody that has never worked from an office before

because I'm young and I'm guessing that there's going to be a lot of people coming after me that are in the same use case as like not only Web 3, but like tech as a broad hole comes into hiring. And I think it's kind of important to meet people in real life before getting hired onto a team. So I definitely do see a benefit to having events, meeting other people like doing things like this, just to kind of get the lay of the land. I think you can vibe check somebody a little bit better in person before jumping it to a role full time. However, I don't necessarily know if I see that much of a benefit outside of maybe community building and showing off your brand with these giant parties. And maybe that's just out of the nature that I don't tend to

really go to these giant parties that often unless they're for NFC events. But that's just my opinion, I guess. But no, I mean, I like that you guys got tactical. Like you and Anisha got tactical on that topic. Like, how do you maximize events and just save yourself from COVID or burnout or nonstop hangover? Yeah. Yeah, a big tip that she gave is, and I think this is a really good one that we both got to talk a lot about, is before attending these events, do not try to buy one of the tickets because they're crazy expensive in Web 3. We saw there was something like seven grand for certain tickets coming into it. There's always a Google sheet that gets passed around. So if you're a young person trying to find a job, find the Google sheet first.

I think was a really, really good takeaway other than don't attend. The Google sheet with what? How to get in for prey? No, there's just a, there'll be a master Google sheet. All the events will be listed. It'll be like the event's name. Who can go, say, if it's for Web 3, it'll be like, you're a holder. If it's for a hackathon, it'll be like if you're a software engineer, a VC, etc.

A party list, got it. Yeah. So definitely find that. That was like a big trend that came out of South by Southwest. People started building lists because the parties were happening, like, you know, being planned same day. You know, on the other side of the table, Molly, you know, some people are saying that it feels more fair, not meeting people in real life because you lose the bias. of, you know, how tall, attractive, well-spoken the person is, things that can influence people, how they present themselves. And for some roles, maybe it's not about presentation and just looking

at the person's work is a better thing. So this is a big debate I'm hearing in back channels amongst founders of like, you know, I just look at people's code. I just look at people's copywriting. I just look at their designs. And then I hire them. I don't care what they look like, where they're from, how long their commute is. So it is an interesting debate, but it is important, and I think for real-life interactions to kind of get the vibe. I mean, I sound so weird saying that, but you could catch a vibe. No, you definitely again. It still matters.

It still matters. And I like the idea of prioritizing like a good conversation, a small gathering, a targeted interaction as opposed to just this like, like, that's what I'm all about. A previous, OK, Boomer guest actually successfully hired a ton of really great soft for engineers, too, from doing Miami. Hack Week, organized by Jodan, another former OK Boomer guest, the one that hired a bunch of really great software engineers was Eric Button from TAP, which is a fintech company. So definitely see a very excited to see where these are.

Once you hire these people, then don't let them go to parties anymore, we founders out there. Keep them doing code. Enough with the parties. A couple parties. Maybe a couple. Yeah, like I did three in a week. All right. Okay, Boomer.

Up next. Thanks, guys. Okay, Boomer. I understood the assignment. Thank you so much, Anisha, for. coming on this segment of OK Boomer. Anisha is from CipherVC and she's host of the Crypto podcast Pilled. And I asked you to come on today because I want to talk all things, NFT NYC. Thank you so much for having me on. I'm really excited to chat. So first things first,

can you explain a little bit about what NFT NYC is and why are a bunch of people flocking to New York to go to a bunch of parties about JPEGs? I mean, I think what you just said explains half of it. A lot of people are flocking to New York to go to parties about JPEGs or just generally have an excuse to party, right? There are a number of crypto conferences that happen every year. Some of them are recurring like NFT NYC. I think New York is also a hot spot for a lot of growing crypto communities. So there are a lot of people that already live here. A lot of people are coming here regularly. So when conferences are here, you just get an influx of people. So I think it's a great time for communities to come together. And, you know, so much of the crypto community is

online and all over the globe. So I think conferences are a time when people can come together in person and really get to connect and have excuses to, you know, party and network and all the ways you can imagine. Yeah. And especially with how many companies, not only the Web 3 space, but in the startup space are still fully remote, especially with a bunch of young hires. I'm like, it's a lot cheaper to hire somebody fully remote, for example, that lives. in like Ohio, then have them, you know, move all the way out to New York City and have them in office and have the space. I feel like going to events, whether their Web 3 or not, are really important for young people to kind of get that networking interaction. However, these events aren't just your typical networking events.

My first Web 3 kind of conference style thing was at Art Basel. Obviously, Art Basel itself, I actually didn't go for the NFT wave. I went just for, you know, the regular, the boring art. But while I was there, I was able to experience a ton of different things in the NFT landscape. And I was like, dang, like these networking events are more like parties. How do you think Gen Z's in particular, like young people, should be using these weird opportunities to their advantage? Besides just having, you know, like a bunch of free food and free alcohol. Yeah, I mean, there's always that.

So I would say that it really depends on what you're optimizing for and what you're optimizing for and what you're looking for. While these are different than what you might think of your run-of-the-mill networking events or job conferences, I do think that they are a great opportunity to network. But the different types of events, too, very, you have events that are more like smaller, curated little dinners or happy hours. And then you have things that are during the day that might be more panel-like

and you're not really interacting with people as much, but it might be an opportunity to learn and see speakers that you otherwise would never really come in contact with. And then you do have the larger parties, which do have the free food, free alcohol, and they're like ragers all night long and you may wake up hungover, right? So I think if it's a time for a young person

to be like, hey, I want to meet my team in person, I want to bond with them, I want to go to some parties with them, it is a great time to be able to do that in real life and in that context in a bonding way. I do find that some of the larger parties that you are just, you know, it's basically like going to a club and you're there all night. It's really difficult to have conversations that you feel like you're digging any deeper or you might even not remember people's names and it's really, really loud.

So I don't think that all of the events are best for facilitating conversations and networking the way that you may think may be helpful down the line. But I think some of the smaller events like dinners are smaller happy hours. if you really are mindful of talking to people that you have interests in or even recruiting for jobs, a lot of that does happen at conferences. I think there are opportunities to do that as well. I believe I spoke to Judan, who created Miami Hack Week. He was on an earlier segment of OK Boomer about that same thing, going back to hiring,

how I think this is such an incredible way for companies to hire people. And mind you, Anish, and I are not just talking about Web3 conferences. I would consider most tech conferences to be different than other networking conferences in general. My other conference that I've been to that wasn't for tech was called Shop Talk. I've gone to a ton in college, but none as a young adult other than Shop Talk that wasn't tech. Shop Talk had to do a lot with the commerce space, right? And I went and there were like little, there are parties here and there and things like that. But overall, it was like a convention center.

A lot of people, like it was very professional, going back and forth. more of people trying to like sell their products to other companies and less of people trying to recruit. And I think tech events are so incredible for that because you have so many talented people spread all over the world and a lot of people in tech don't get out very much. And by having these events, I think it's really incredible to meet people like IRL for lack of a better term because you can really gauge how they are in person. And I think it's a little bit better at least to interview and get to know somebody in person before hiring, at least I would have felt way more comfortable if I was able to meet, like, Justin and Nick and Jason and Molly in person

beforehand before starting. Like, luckily it turned out great, but like what happens if it didn't? I also think that for both the candidate as well as the person who may be recruiting them, it's a different context in which you're seeing them, which you really can't replicate during an interview, whether it's like an online interview or an in-person interview. You get to see them interact with other people, you got to see them in a more social setting. And I think that depending on the role that you may be hiring them for or how they, like, you know, the candidate may be evaluating the company, you really get to assess and be aware and exposed to different things that you might not be able to, whether it's like soft skills or company culture or how a team interacts with one

another or how the individual person, if it's a candidate, may interact with others. I don't think you always get the opportunity to see that in a traditional interview setting. So I think there's a benefit there as well. So from what I know, you're fairly new to the Cypher team, correct? Like, how long have you been over at Cypher right now? So I've actually been working with my current boss, Manal Hassan for almost like, you know, a year and a half, two years. So it's actually been some time, but I only joined full time at the end of last summer in August. And prior to that, I was working with her part-time while also working as a software engineer. Okay, so you're obviously very badass.

Like, you are a jack-of-all-trades. For everyone listening, I've been trying. I've been just making up excuses to get an e-shot on this podcast. She was one of those people who I met. I don't think we met actually in a tech atmosphere, but we met out like kind of a, like a dinner-drink situation with other people that work in tech. And I was like, immediately, I was like, okay, we're getting around sometime. So it's super pumped that you started your podcast.

I love it. So I was going to ask you, but I guess I don't know how much you would be able to apply because I didn't realize that you were working with her part-time while you were still a software engineer. But how would you advise companies at these events, especially VCs, to go in and hire young people. Like, how would they approach it? Because I don't necessarily think that just, although I'm like, I'm not going to lie. Like, obviously I'm going to these events, but I don't know necessarily how much a big good outcome it is to bring a bunch of young people together, a sick DJ and then throw alcohol out there and be. like, yay, like how, what should VCs be doing and how could they be hiring during these events? I think this is going to partially answer your question, but this is also just kind of like a general opinion I hold.

Having been to a lot of these conferences over the past year, I've increasingly found that I really, really appreciate the more curated smaller events, which don't really look like the massive ragers that have a sick DJ, tons of alcohol, and you know, you stay in the line to get in after midnight, right? I guess that's not the purpose of those events either. Like, I know they're not the purpose, but. But I think that the events that I've been able to really foster connections at have actually been sort of the more sit-down settings,

or if not sit-down, even a room of 20 people. Maybe you do have dinner and drinks around, but you bring together a curated group of people where there are, overlapping interests, whether they're in the same field, whether you may be considering them as potential hires or they just have overlapping interests and you facilitate actual conversations and you play host, right? And I think sometimes recruiting in this field, especially on the venture side of things, is kind of a long game. It doesn't happen in a traditional, you know, hey, I'm going to just give you the first interview and then like three interviews down the line.

you're at your offsite, right? And sometimes it does. But I think if you're using these settings to really see candidates in different ways and just get to know them and be comfortable with them and see how they interact with one another, I think providing environments and situations in which you can just have them talk to each other and you get to talk to them, they get to talk to members of the team in a relatively organic way. Obviously, everything can be kind of curated, kind of guided if you will. But I think let's say you have a small happy hour. And I've seen a lot of these where you do dinner first with a smaller group of people.

Maybe it's like 20 to 30 to 40 people. And you give them enough time before dinner to chat with one another. And then you do do a sit-down dinner. So everyone gets to sit down. It's not crazy loud. And they can talk to the person next to them. And then after that, have a sit-down. a larger, more open kind of happy hour drink setting

where maybe some other members of the community come and join and you get to facilitate more conversations that way. And I think just organically, if you as the recruiter are trying to talk to specific candidates just over the course of the night, you will be able to find time to speak with them. And hopefully it's not a really busy or loud environment that you're able to get in some really valuable conversations.

You get to see how they interact with other members your team. And it's a little bit, you know, just more organic and it's a little bit more conducive to having such conversations than in a loud club environment. And I think a mix of those or, you know, even brunch kind of settings, just like smaller curated settings where there is, I think events, like organizing events is kind of an art, right? Totally. If you put together like the different factors that can make it more conducive for the kinds of conversations and interactions you want to happen, that is what is important. So if you're optimizing for really assessing different candidates for roles that might be people facing or social, and you're like, hey, I want to see

how they are going to interact in these settings. And I also want to make sure that they have an opportunity to talk to different members of the team, how they talk to other potential candidates. how do I curate events that have different variables that make it more conducive for me to observe those things or for me to have those conversations that I'd like to have with them in a relatively organic way, right? So I think being mindful about how events are curated and how events are thrown and being very intentional about it is important because, you know, given enough money and resources, like you can just throw a party, right?

And it's very easy to be like, hey, happy. or send out invites to like everyone on this list, we'll have alcohol, we'll have food come through. But that doesn't necessarily like make for the best setting if you are trying to be intentional for a specific purpose. And I think we, when events are very curated and very thoughtful, it's very clear. I totally, I definitely agree with you. And I think, first off, shout out to Zara from Republic. She was on a previous episode. I think she would actually be a phenomenal contacts for people to reach out to. Zara from Republic

previous episode, a previous segment, excuse me, of OK Boomer. Anish and I actually both went to one of her dinners and it was so tasteful. It was an Iftar. It was my first one, which was quite incredible. We had a bunch of good food and the conversation was really awesome. I got to meet a bunch of people on the

Republic team. This wasn't like a hiring event per se. It was just to kind of like connect other people from the Republic team to people and other industries really well done. and another person that does events really well is my boss Jason. Jason is notorious for having really good events. Even when I was able to help out with the All-in Summit,

which passed last month, we were able to talk about things like how to punch up the event by doing things like, say, there are two different rooms, make sure one of them has a lot lower music than the other rooms so people were able to converse because people were, there was somebody there I know in particular. She went. She's like, I'm here, I'm a scholarship.

I am on like a sabbatical. Like I left my job and I'm kind of doing like my adult version of a abroad right now in Miami. And I've decided that like this is a good place to network for work. And I'm like this is actually so incredible that Jason was able to think like kind of two steps ahead and like really put these intentional spaces around the after after parties for these events for the talks. So people were able to converse. And I think it's great. Last night I talked to a ton of people about hiring and mostly they were asking me if I. new other contacts for hiring. So if anyone's looking for a job, let me know because there are

a ton of companies out there that are hiring, mostly bigger, due to, you know, a bunch of changing things, which is great. But unfortunately, the event that I was at that we were talking about hiring was a club. It was Tao for an event for the in-betweeners, NFT, and an awesome DJ was there, blondeish. She freaking killed it. Not necessarily the police. I want to be having a discussion, though about like, oh, do you know any young software engineers? Like, that's, that's really not conducive of those kinds of conversations. And again, like, I know those places aren't necessarily, like, that's not what they're meant for. But, you know, that is something I think that I wish more companies in general, whether you're in the Web 3 space, whether you're an NFT,

whether you're, I don't care if you're Brex, they have a ton of events at the corporate credit card. It doesn't matter who you are. I think having, like, intentional spaces to kind of foster conversation are really important because you can go to Tao any day. But when are you able to converse with a bunch of people that are interested in the same thing as you? You know what I mean? Absolutely. I couldn't have put it better myself. And I think I, when I was new to the space, I was enamored or just excited and kind of in shock of all the events. And I was just trying to go to hit all the big parties because you hear, hey, this person's playing. This is supposed to be the biggest party. This is like so fun. You go with their

friends and you just get wiped out and you're like, hey, I wanted to do some networking. I wanted to meet some people in town. And even if you like briefly bump into people that you would otherwise want to have a more intentional conversation with at these larger club like events, it's really difficult to get any conversation in when, you know, you have a DJ blasting and everyone's minds are elsewhere, right? Yeah, totally. I think those intentional spaces are really, really important.

And as someone who's even going to the conferences, you, see all of the events that are out there, you make your choices about where you want to go. Yes. But this week especially, I've been trying to optimize for those lower key events and specifically going to the ones where I know that people I want to speak with are at. And if they happen to be old friends or people that I've been trying to get in, you know, meet up with for a while. I even, I'm like, hey, I know that we all have like multiple events lined up for an evening.

What time are you going to go to this smaller gathering, right? I want to make sure that I'm there. So that way we have a chance to talk. And so I think every little bit that you make it more intentional, whether on you as like a person attending an event or if you are curating an event, I think every little bit does add up and it can make for a much better experience depending on what you're optimizing for. And I've had that experience myself. Yeah, definitely. And it's, again, like I'm going, there's a concert tonight. Diplo is going to be there.

Like, I'm freaking, it's a Web 3 event. I'm definitely going. Exciting. Right. Yeah. Super pote. But it's like, you know, you're just not going to be able. to get those authentic conversations

like you were mentioning before next to it's a balance. It is a balance. And I hope that young people, though, in the tech community in general, we don't get, most teams don't get a lot of IRL time. Obviously, there are some incredible teams

that have chosen to go in the office and have office space. Some previous people that were on the podcast that I know work from an office. Our party round has an office in Manhattan. So does Pallet. Kai was the founder of Pallet who was on for Party Round. We had Josh.

So one thing that I think that young people don't, maybe not young people, one thing that I think people that are like native to the tech event world that they don't realize is a lot of these tickets are so expensive. I saw somewhere that tickets were like seven grand. So I'd like to preface this that we are not buying tickets. Like if you're listening, this is, I don't even know if I'm supposed to say this, but there are normally sheets, like Excel sheets, Google sheets, whatever. Like Google sheets of events that get passed around before weeks.

like this that circulate and there'll be columns like who can go to these if you have to be the holder of the NFT if you have to be a VC, a founder, whatever. Or it's open to all. If it's open to all, right? And you just need an ISVP ahead of time. Yeah. And there's these giant Google sheets. So if you're a young person or somebody that's new to the space, what I would do is I would

go on Twitter and literally find other people that have been posting about these events, find them and say, hey, do you know what's happening and find those. I wouldn't buy tickets. These are really expensive events. And it just would absolutely kill me if somebody sheld out like a bajillion dollars. to do this. And I saw somebody tweeting, they were like, wow, like, you paid seven grand to go to this. And I was like, absolutely freaking out.

Can't do that. No, no, no, no. So find the Google sheet. And then from that Google sheet, what I would do is I would go into normally, it's a party full link, although I did see some event bright links, which I thought was interesting. Go to the party full links. Yeah, yeah. I was like, okay.

They're like more and more part of full links. I also sometimes see Luma. Yeah, and I see like, posh. Posh, a scattered view, which are like, go to my website. and they tried to do their own thing, and I'm like, can you just do the same thing as everyone else? If everybody can do Partyful, producer Justin and I talk about this all, like, quite frequently. We love different ticket. I talk about ticketing.

I don't know if he loves it, but I bring it up freaking all the time. Like, Justin, what do we think about ticketing apps? But part of, yeah, standardized Partyful. But what I would do if you're trying to find like smaller events is I would go find that Google sheet, go to the Partyful link, and then see how many people are RSVPed. And sometimes you're able to see who already RSVPed in Partyful and see their like Twitter accounts, which is really nice to see like if you have mutual friends going. But that's a really good way to like kind of scout out those smaller events, which are definitely more beneficial. If you're somebody who's either looking to hire or looking to be hired or if you're just somebody trying to network because it's really freaking hard to network as a remote person.

Before I had this job, I reached out to one person every day for 100 days. It was like a little personal challenge of mine. And it's documented like somewhere on my Twitter. Because I was like really bad at reaching out to people like cold turkey. No, that must have been so helpful. Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. I used to do that too a long time ago.

And I still occasionally do it, but far less. But I remember when I was really, really new to the industry, my background is actually in medicine. And then I was like, whoa. What can you not do? What can you not do? Let's hear this. What can you not? Okay.

So I'm hearing like, I'm not. things. 20 things. Dr. Software Engineer VC podcast host Anisha. It makes you feel any better. I can't navigate for like at all. Like to save my life.

Who can't use Google Maps? Who can't use Google Maps? I can't use Google Maps. And I don't get any pop culture references. So I hope that I hope that makes you feel better because it's like shocking how bad I am. Dude, no, I love it. I love it.

You're good at everything else. So that's the one thing you have to give up. Anyway. But yeah. But yeah, what I was I was also just going to add like with all of these events. Sometimes I've definitely done this in the past where I think I can hit like four events in a night. And then I'm like, wait. And then I do use Google Maps because I have no sense of direction, even in the city I live in in New York.

And so one thing that's been really helpful is like I'll RSVP. And I'm like, okay, these are the three events. What is the vibe of each of these events? Like how much do I want to go to each event? And then like where are they located, right? And then like take into account like how long it'll take to get there. And realistically, when am I going to get? get there, how long do I want to spend there? And I think in the past, there have been times where I

would be like, okay, there are whatever, like three happy hours that are each like from five to eight or six to nine or something in that general time range. I can probably hop between all three and stay at them for like, you know, 30 to 45 minutes to an hour each and then go to the next one. And that's something that I've done in the past because a lot of these events do sound really cool. They're in like insane locations where I normally would never, you know, pay to get in or it's like, you know, a more rare occasion kind of thing. Totally. Or artist is playing or you are trying to see people that you would like to have a conversation with, but they are only at these different events, right? Yeah.

But this time around, I've been like, you know what? I'm going to pick like one, maybe two events that I'd like to go to every day. And there might be like a few other events that, you know, if I make it or if I go to it after, that, be great. But I'm not putting pressure on myself to go there because running around takes more time than you think. And sometimes you go to a party or happy hour and you do have these really good conversations. And then you're like, wait, I can just continue having good conversations here. I don't need to go somewhere else in the hope and pursuit of having good conversations at another location. If I'm having that here, like, why do you need to do that? Right. And, you know, there's always,

like the grass is always greener. Maybe there's like someone you'll meet at the other place that'll be like cooler or better or more beneficial for you to meet. But it doesn't always play out that way. And I think sometimes when you're like in pursuit of way too many different things, you just get exhausted. You don't actually have all the good conversations. And you might just be like running around talking people for five minutes because you're like,

oh, like I need to go to the next thing. And that's what I've been trying to do this week. And sometimes even like not going to events that I was like interested in or excited about. like that's actually okay too. Yeah. Last night I went to like a happy hour and a dinner and I was supposed to go to like a late night party like thing that a friend's company was hosting. But I was like, you know what? I'm just going to go home and like hang out with my roommates. And I did that and started going to the party.

Probably felt great. Yeah, I slept in my bed at not a totally insane hour. Yeah. And I was like, I'm not mad. And I'm good to go for today. Yeah. I'm good to go for today. So we went to the bar next door to my apartment.

I was like, this is also a vibe, right? And sometimes when you're chasing the most exciting thing, you run yourself ragged and there's so many people that have gotten COVID after conferences or get like super sick. I feel like I'm already sort of losing my voice. But I think like sometimes it's okay to keep in mind that you don't need to go to everything. Even if it's like, even if you're like, I flew to the city to network or to meet all these people, it is possible to still do that without doing everything.

Without burning yourself out. Without burning yourself out. And that's okay. It might even be like for the best. Yeah, yeah. Well, these are great takeaways. I think for people interested in attending tech events, and attending NFT, NYC.

Again, don't buy tickets. Don't burn yourself out. Find the Google sheet. A person, I want to have to plug the absolute king of dishing out where people are going to be on the weekends, Andrew Young at A.N. D-R-U-U-N-G, I believe is his name on Twitter. He has a link in his bio.

He didn't tell me to, like, promote this or anything. This is just, like, I met Andrew one time, and he is just somebody that is normally really on top of the tech and business. If you're not interested in tech, I know he works at Facebook, so he does have, like, more corporate-y kind of events that happen as well. But if you're interested in networking, I know a bunch of tech companies are laying off right now. So if you're interested in looking for a job, I would highly recommend going to, his page, even DMing him.

I've gotten coffee with him before. He's a really great person. He would be somebody that would, he gives me, I don't know if he has the Google sheet, but he feels like somebody that would have the Google sheet. She's like in the know. It's funny you say that. I actually met him at another one of Zara's events. Of course.

Maybe Zara is out here. Like, maybe she's like, is a tech promoter? Is she a tech promoter out here? It was another Republic event. Cool. So I did meet him there. And he, I think. the vibe check is right.

Yeah. He definitely knows people. And I think because he's more, like, he's at meta and he throws other events himself and not like exclusively like in the niche. Yeah. Like rabbit hole in. He's a great person to reach out to. 100%.

Yeah. So I hope everybody has an enjoyable NFT, NYC. This is coming out on Friday. So almost all the events will be done. But if you're on the off chance, listening to this right when it comes out, hope you have a good weekend. Or for the next one. Or for the next one.

Any other events, I know, Jodan, again, who's previously on this weekend startups is in town, but he was telling me Miami Hack Week, you know, another great networking event. When I was there, I spoke to Eric Button from Tapp, and he was my interview for this weekend startups for that week, and he actually found a bunch of really good software engineers

from that event. So Miami Hack Week, if you're interested in attending another one, would highly recommend looking at that, taking these little bits of wisdom on how to, navigate like the event space and I hope everybody stay safe and has fun. Thank you so much for having me on. Thank you so much, Anisha. And oh, before you log off actually, where can people find you? Yeah. Can people find you on Twitter? People can find me on Twitter. My Twitter handle is literally you found Anisha spelled as Y-O-U, F-U-N-D, A-N-I-S-H-A. Cool. And it's Pilled the

podcast on Twitter, right? Your podcast? I think it's at P-I-L-L-E-D. did such a good how did you get that handle how did you get that handle you must have killed somebody for that i i i get lucky once in a while i i don't i don't ask too many questions awesome but i snagged it amazing so at pilled the pod and at you found anisha thank you again so much and talk to you again hopefully next week let's grab a drink absolutely thank you okay everybody thanks for listening to friday's edition of this week in startups yes remember we have a great sunday show coming up with VC Sunday School and this weekend climate startups where I get to talk to the electric sea glider people.

Wonderful. You don't want to miss that. So many cool companies in climate sustainability and so many great business opportunities. My God, I just love the SaaS software companies that are in climate. To me, that's the huge win when you combine those two. Marketplaces, maybe too. So anyway, we'll be back Monday and you'll hear from us on Sunday, obviously. And Monday, we will have a fresh news show for you.

If you want to join us live, ask us questions, be in the chat room. just go to YouTube.com slash this weekend. You hit the subscribe button right next to it's a bell. Just try turning that bell on. You'll get a notification on YouTube. YouTube works great in the background. You click it. You listen to us in the background while you're at work.

And you may have a question for us and you'll see probably three, four, five hundred other fans of the show. Just tuning in live, chewing the fat. And we'll have a lot to talk about on Monday. Yes, Molly? We will. So hang in there, everybody. It's listen.

We got you. We got you. We got you. It's going to be okay. It's going to be okay. We're going to get through this together. All right, everybody. Have a restful weekend and you'll hear from us on Sunday and Monday. Bye. Bye.