This Week in Startups - Silicon Valley Clones and Jersey Drones: Decoding the Signals with Nicole Wischoff | E2061

Starting point is 00:00:00 We're starting to see drones emerge again as a topic and part of the Zycos. And obviously this is all happening because in New Jersey, there have been a ton of drone sightings. And there are tons of theories of it. Politicians are kind of getting in on this. So now we have another layer to this weird information space we're in. I've never seen anything like this in our lifetime. But we have conspiracy theories, distrust in the media, citizen journalism, plus a layer of politics and gamesmanship. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:00:29 How does, and this seems like the ultimate raw shock test of what you believe about reality. So, F it, let's just go down the rabbit hole here. This weekend startups is brought to you by Ramp, the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and money. Get $250 when you join Ramp today at ramp.com slash twist. Dev Squad. Most dev agencies only offer developers. Why?

Starting point is 00:00:58 because product management is hard. Get an entire product team for the cost of one U.S. developer plus 10% off at devsquod.com slash twist. And DigitalOcean, whether you're just getting started with AI or seeing your project take off. DigitalOcean is the cloud platform that lets you focus on what matters, building killer apps. Right now, get up to $100,000 in free credits at DO.co slash twist. Terms and conditions apply. All right, everybody, welcome to This Week in Startups.

Starting point is 00:01:29 I'm Jason Calacanis. I invest in 100 startups a year I do two podcasts, all in this week in startups. Next year, three days a week for this week in startups, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Thursday, tape all in comes out Friday. So you get four podcasts per week. That's the upper bounds here. And with me, my co-host on This Week in Startups, Alex Wilhelm, you know him from his tech crunch days. And he is X.com slash Alex.

Starting point is 00:01:50 How are you doing, Alex? Good. I'm very excited about today's show. We were talking before, though, about how you're a better. skier than I am snowboarder and the fact that my children wake up too early. But the nice thing is, Jason, is that we don't have to sit here and vamp about BS for 30 minutes because even though it's late December or mid-December, I suppose, things are still busy, which is just, I don't know, a blessing for us in the news business. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot to talk about, a lot of information

Starting point is 00:02:13 for startups and we'll be recording through the holidays. I think we have two live shows during the holidays. So we'll be coming to you live a little bit over the holiday, just to keep you up to data on what's happening and maybe we'll do a twisty awards. And I think the drone story is where we should start, Alex, because this has taken over people's imagination. Yes. And drones were a major investment category, a major startup category that kind of died down when DGI took over the space and won all the hardware that, you know, consumers buy. But we're starting to see drones emerge again as a, as a topic and part of the Zikos. And obviously this is all. happening because in New Jersey for the last month, there have been a ton of drone sightings and

Starting point is 00:03:00 there are tons of theories of it. So let's get into it. First of all, this is not something that happened just this last weekend. I think that people are now paying more attention to it in the last week, but you're right. The sightings in New Jersey and the surrounding areas have been going on for about a month. So this is actually a pretty long running story, but there's been an increasing amount of noise. So one thing that people were curious about is, is this the government? And Jason, I think as far as we can tell thus far, the DOD has said that this is not the government to their knowledge, but it's also not a threat. And then the FBI has said that a lot of these drone settings are, in fact, just people misidentifying aircraft. I'm going to show a clip here of what this kind of looks like in the world.

Starting point is 00:03:41 So, Jason, this is a grainy cell phone footage of a drone. Yep. Allegedly. Yeah, allegedly. There's a couple of these clips out there, none of which I. I found to be super compelling in terms of convincing me that this is anything hyper nefarious. So I think between the two of us, we can scratch out the UFO tag as in aliens. Yes.

Starting point is 00:04:02 I think we should start with what are the theories. And, you know, I love what GROC has been doing. GROC 2.0 came out. And I've been using Gemini, 1.5 and 2.0 with deep research. And I have to say, I'm now realizing that about half my searches are no longer, on chat GPT, they've moved to GROC or Gemini, which are both exceptional right now. In fact, I think there's parody, but here is the GROC conversation. I just asked that what are the major theories of the drones over New Jersey? And you see, what GROC does is it goes and collects some

Starting point is 00:04:40 news stories and it collects some posts, aka or FCA tweets. Really interesting. And if you go through these, misidentification is the number one. So of course, some number of these are obviously helicopters or planes, etc. The second one is that there's some sort of military or government phenomenon going on, commercial or research activities, hobbyists and copycat. So that's definitely a piece of this. Whenever there is a phenomenon like this, of course, everybody with a drone is like, oh yeah, I own a drone. I'm going to go fly my drone and look for other drones. Right. And then drone to drone and then, yeah, exactly. And then there's the conspiracy theories, alien, extraterrestrial, And then there's adversaries, like this is some other country.

Starting point is 00:05:25 And my favorite, of course, is Project Blue Beam. I never heard of Project Blue Beam before this. Have you heard of this one? I saw it via the Grok summary, but I just read it and I was like, eh, okay. So conspiracy theorists have this belief that there is a project to destabilize. This is a conspiracy theorist by somebody named Serg Monson, 1945, to... in 1996. He is mostly known for his promotion of the Project Blue Beam conspiracy theory.

Starting point is 00:05:57 I'm reading off the Wikipedia, which posts a plot to facilitate totalitarian world government by destroying Arabic religions by replacing them with a new age belief system of futuristic NASA technology involving fake alien invasion or fake extraterrestrial encounters. So this is nuts, right? New World Order crazy stuff, but the idea being it's a Psiops, essentially. And so I think we can take out its aliens or sciops. It's obviously something's going on here, but there's too many, too much involvement here for it not to be an actual phenomenon.

Starting point is 00:06:32 I think we've gotten through that, right? Definitely, I think the number of drone sightings implies that someone is doing something with drones over the skies in New Jersey. No one knows what it is. I remain, though, in the camp of there's going to be some very boring explanation for this. But you're right. I do think that there's been enough that I don't think that people doing copycat drone flying and people just hearing about it and then misidentifying airplanes, star clusters,

Starting point is 00:06:56 or just satellites, like Starlink's pretty low Earth orbit, you know? So I think there's something else here, but I bet it's boring. And these are very low. And so I think, you know, one interesting way to look at this is, and there's a bunch of politicians coming in. And one of the things about the information landscape right now is because of a lot of conspiracy theories becoming true, which, you know, does happen one out of a hundred times, right? Statistically, something starts as a conspiracy theory. Then, you know, we get evidence that, oh, hey, it's true. And then people fill in their minds, very naturally.

Starting point is 00:07:33 We have inquisitive, great big brains. We think of every permutation. This is how the human brain works. It is a speculation fear-based machine. Why is our brains, you know, and I talked to a lot of different evolutionary biologists over the years, they believe that our minds speculate and come up with theories for a number of reasons. One is survival and one is to make tools and to evolve the species, right? So when we have these active imaginations, we come up with something like, I don't know, scuba gear,

Starting point is 00:08:03 or we come up with the concept of a drone. Sure. Or, you know, we speculate that, hey, that person who's missing from the tribe was eaten by a crocodile and that big thing in the lake that pulled the deer into the water and ate it could probably also eat a human, right? So, okay, that's what's happening right now. But what are politicians saying?

Starting point is 00:08:23 Because I know we politicians are kind of getting in on this. So now we have another layer to this weird information space we're in. I've never seen anything like this in our lifetime. But we have conspiracy theories, distrust in the media, citizen journalism, plus a layer of politics and gamesmanship. Yeah. And this seems like the ultimate raw shock test of what you believe about reality. So, F it, let's just go down the rabbit hole here. You can absolutely apply any mental model to what's going on. Because if you want to think that there's one world government coming, these could be cloud seeding drones or they could be, you know, surveilling people in the New York area over potential, you know, post-election discontent. The DOD, though, has said that these drones are getting occasionally closer than they'd like to military installations. That's their remit.

Starting point is 00:09:13 But they've also said that that happens somewhat frequently. It's irresponsible, they said. Didn't sound like a new shocking concern there. Hey, everybody. I want to tell you about an awesome corporate card and spend management software that's designed to help you save money. Basically, it puts money back in your pocket. It's called Ramp.

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Starting point is 00:10:52 I believe he's one of the most senior Democrats. And he said he's pushing for answers amidst these drone sightings, implying that at least at his level, Jason, which is high up in government, he doesn't know what's going on. I will say, though, that people are getting angry. So the FBI and the DHS have held some briefings with people in government. And according to U.S. representative Josh Gottheimer, he's a Democrat from New Jersey and on the House Intelligence Committee. So it should be very plugged in to all this stuff.

Starting point is 00:11:24 He says, quote, the bottom line is this, the FBI and DHS are not providing enough information to the public and the public is concerned. Now, right before we came on, right before we started the show, Donald Trump, the future president, said, President-elect. Here we go. The government knows what is happening. They know where it came from and where it went. And for some reason, they don't want to comment. Something strange is going on. For some reason, they don't want to tell the people.

Starting point is 00:11:51 And they should, because the people are really, I mean, they happen to be over Bedminster. We should know the truth. They're very close to Bedminster. I think maybe I won't spend the weekend in Bedminster. I've decided to cancel my trip. Have you received a teleger briefing on the drones? I don't want to comment.

Starting point is 00:12:09 Okay, so I wanted to play the last bit there. Well, actually, yes, Jason, he got to mention his golf course, how many times in there? Three times. He sounds like me on the all-in pod mentioning Founder University. Yes. I mean, very similar, Trump and I. Business guys talk their book, and that's not just how they will. Teams and a self-promoter for a long time.

Starting point is 00:12:27 Yeah. Says in that clip that the government knows, he says that the military actually knows where they took off and where they landed, we're not sharing. He doesn't think we should be so private about this, then declined to answer. the question about intelligence briefings, talked about his golf course, and then said, I'm not going to comment on it. Classic Trumpian both sides at the same time type thing, but the fact that he was so clearly indicative that he thinks that the government does know that ex-president club is only so big, Jason, and you and I are not part of it. So I don't think we have the same view into what the government would and would not know in this case. I was surprised by that clip because now he has to

Starting point is 00:13:03 release lots about it come January when he's back in chart. And he said, you know, he was going to release the JFK files. He didn't do that. You know, so there is like, you're right. Now we put a layer on top of this of Trump says everything. Yes. All permutations and gives himself complete optionality when dealing with, you know, making a decision. He might go to Japan and go skiing.

Starting point is 00:13:31 He might not. But he loves Japan. You know, it's like it never ends with him. And so here he's kind of like, you know, giving us both possibilities. But there's something going on here. I think everybody agrees with that. Yes. So then the mind wanders.

Starting point is 00:13:46 The one that I attach myself to the most, just with a curious mind, and I thought this was super interesting. And led to me doing a little research online was the dirty bomb. Yes. And that drones, flying at low altitudes with certain sensors on them, put sense radiation. And then there's always been this fear of a rogue missing nuke, Ukraine, Russia, who knows, it could be a Pakistani nuke. You know, they did a lot of research. They sold their technology to supposedly Iran and North Korea. So completely possible of rogue nuke could be loose in the United States for the last 50 years. I mean, that would make total sense to me that we have a nuclear bomb somewhere in Russia, somewhere in China, that we implanted at some point and hit. in a basement somewhere, why couldn't somebody do that to us and have that as an option? I know that sounds like crazy conspiracy theories, but that doesn't seem too difficult to do, especially with the size of tactical news.

Starting point is 00:14:50 All right, so there was a video of somebody who claims to be a drone expert. They have a LinkedIn page that looks like it has existed for a while, so I have no reason to not believe them. But this is my favorite theory. Why? Because it's the most interesting. And that's what our minds do. So here we go.

Starting point is 00:15:07 Speculation like Colombo, this is an individual who works in the drone industry's assessment of what's happened. Yes, this is John Ferguson, the CEO of Saxon Aerospace. This is pulled from a TikTok video that he made. But I want to give you the truth. Back in the 1980s, Ronald Reagan had dismantled the nuclear program. There were over 80 nuclear warheads that were in Ukraine that came up missing. I spoke to a gentleman a few months ago who was trying to raise an alarm to the highest levels of our government, which they had their ears closed, about this one particular nuclear warhead that he physically put his hands on.

Starting point is 00:15:50 He physically touched this warhead that was left over from Ukraine. And he knew that that thing was headed towards the United States. Okay. Okay. So, first of all, everybody, if you're thinking nuclear warheads don't get loose, they do sometimes. For example, when a major government collapses, for example, the Soviet Union chasing, and I either hearing about lost or missing nuclear weapons, visible material, or even just the nuclear batteries that they put in those far north lighthouses in Russia that they used to generate power over a long period of time. So the chance that there is physical material or just a lot of radioactive material that could enter the the U.S. from, let's say, the Eastern Seaboard, doesn't shock me. And your point is that this could be what the drones are looking for. Seems like a great use of drones. So I did a little research. He said, this sounds like a very interesting use of drones, right? If you're in a helicopter or a plane, those are expensive. They're loud. And sending 50 Cessnas across New Jersey

Starting point is 00:16:54 you know, at 3,000 feet or 2,000 feet, whatever it is, that's going to create a lot of noise, a lot of ruckus. And sure, they could put on the bottom of them some sensors, but I don't know if it's low enough to actually pick up the radiation. I'm no expert on this, but sending drones and having them do it at night, which he said that's when in the part of the video, again, who knows, this is all pure speculation. But if they were looking for the signature of radiation,

Starting point is 00:17:21 is there a startup that does this? I asked myself because there would be multiple reasons to look for radiation. A dirty bomb would be high up there, but- Absolutely. Leaks and other, you know, material, you know, I'm sure these, the Israelis have some technology here trying to monitor what Iran is doing with stuff, with their nuclear material, Pakistan, North Korea. There's all kinds of reasons to look for this.

Starting point is 00:17:45 So we did see there was a startup when I was doing some research. That does this, yeah? Yeah. So the one that I found is a Swiss company called. called Arctus Radiation Detectors, and they use UAVs to detect radiation, $15 million in known capital raised per crunch base. This is the company. It exists in the world.

Starting point is 00:18:03 And they talk about, in their detection system area, they talk about using drones to do this sort of thing. Okay, here we go. Arcus Airborne FPG Radiation Detection Dron. This radiation detection drone can map an area of whatever in a single flight of 20 minutes. The system is about 50 times more sensitive than typical drone-based detectors. A central alarm station. This is, I think, kind of like the software for the different drones to actually go in.

Starting point is 00:18:31 But they do a number of... But why are they doing it? Did they explain why they're doing this? Because they're doing gamma radiation? Commercial. Oh, for ports. For security reasons. Okay.

Starting point is 00:18:42 Yeah. So this has been the fear. Ports have radiation detectors because there's always been this... I think this was the subject of 24, right? Like the TV show was there was a rogue nuke, a loose nuke. And so they said ports on a container where it would come from. So I guess the drones fly over containers or the containers, my understanding is go through machines that check them. This is a theory with some level of credibility.

Starting point is 00:19:07 Now, on top of all this is the next theory I love. So anything else on this theory that is notable or that we should? If, man, if there is loose radioactive material that we're worried about and we've done this much drone discussion as a nation on TikTok and social media and government briefings and in Congress, I'll be disappointed that we weren't a little bit more open about it. I just wanted to say that. Okay, let's game theory then. Okay. Okay. You suspect there's a 1% chance that this Ukrainian former Soviet Union nuke is in New Jersey at the port. somewhere. Do you tell people if you're the government? One percent chance? I said to myself, yeah, one percent chance. I said to myself on Twitter and I got a bunch of people saying I was fearmongering.

Starting point is 00:19:56 I saw that. But you know, Twitter's for spitball and stuff. I said, you know, if it was me and I saw all these drones and I thought there was a one percent or even a one in a thousand chance, that it was actually a nuclear thing. I would take a vacation from my family. Now, of course, I have the means to do that or whatever. But if I was seeing these things over my house, over and over again, whether I was a middle class person or upper-merclesper, I would get the heck out of Dodge for a couple of weeks. Just go to a family member's house. I would leave. All right, take a second and picture the ultimate all-star team for your startup. Okay, you got that mental image, maybe the Avengers, maybe even X-Men, Wolverine, Cyclops, pick your favorite

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Starting point is 00:22:03 No. No, we would. We'd talk about it. And then we go, oh my God, can you imagine packing up for two months, sorry, two weeks for the three month old? And yeah, if our kids were two and four versus zero and two, I can see us going to the weekend house. But you would have the discussion. It's not a crazy discussion is what I'm saying. No, because with my children, a 1% chance of death is 10 million times more than I'm

Starting point is 00:22:29 willing to stomach. And I think that's the point you're trying to make. Precisely. It's the same thing with like, I don't know, taking a small plane. I get offered all the time to go in little prop planes. I bring the girls, go fly around New York City, take a helicopter here. Hard note. Thank you.

Starting point is 00:22:44 I'll take a pass. I get invited to go hell skiing. I just say, you know what? I've done the actuary tables. I get to go scuba diving 100 feet. Nope. Motorcycles, nope. I just took all this stuff off.

Starting point is 00:22:54 No. Hard no on cave diving. Sounds fun. No, it doesn't. I'd love to cave dive. I'd love to helloski. Hard no for me. I got three daughters.

Starting point is 00:23:01 I don't want them to wake up one day and get the news that dad died helliskeying. and then have them say, or wonder in the back of their minds, you know, dad took all this crazy risk. Did he love us or not? I know I'm sounding overly dramatic. But isn't that what everybody would think? Or am I different? I think that people, there's an assumption going back to our thing about our brains

Starting point is 00:23:23 and how we think about risk and so forth. I think there's another element of, oh, it won't happen to me, right? That's happening somewhere else. It's a theoretical risk. Now, the reason why I think people are so upset is because now that these drones are over their houses, it does make it very personal. It brings it very much close to home, literally. So I think that you're not that crazy, because if you were, then we wouldn't be seen so much interest in this story, some of the people talking about it. But clearly, they're at least

Starting point is 00:23:50 upset, and they're also by cognizant that social media algorithms reward exciting material. So this is probably also a hit on TikTok for a reason. Actually, Jason, here's a fun question for you. There's no TikTok. Imagine the world. Does this story get even half the attention as dead? Yeah, I mean, without social media, probably not. I think in the era before social media, it was much easier to control these kind of situation. When something happened, you know, in a city, whether, you know, God forbid, a shooting, a mass shooting or something, it was easier to contain stuff, right? And to control the narrative.

Starting point is 00:24:29 but when everybody's got a broadcast capable satellite truck in their pocket and they can pop up any number of services in live stream and be citizen journalists, you're going to get the good and the bad and you just have to be media savvy. So the question then becomes, you know, for me, every consumer, people listening to this podcast and other ones, you have to become really good at doing what we're doing here, which is handicapping the situation, thinking of probabilities, thinking, probabilistically, and maybe stitching together some facts. Here's another fact. Do we have tools to know the drones that are flying everywhere? Does that exist? Are there satellite companies? Are there radar companies? Are their camera companies that monitor drones? How do local police, how do military bases, how do airfields and airports, how do they know if drones are coming in? Because even a recreational drone, certainly a larger commercial drone, that could take down an airliner. And we've seen just this

Starting point is 00:25:38 week some dipshits in Boston kind of- I mean, are we shocked that it was around Logan Airport? I mean, it's kind of obvious what's going on here, Boston folks. So a bunch of guys in Boston may have been drinking. Probably Celtic fans or Patriot fans decided to take their commercial drones and fly near Logan. They got picked up in two seconds. They got pinched immediately for being idiots. And they do this during a drone scare. And you know what?

Starting point is 00:26:07 Drones in Ukraine, we have now videos of drones dropping grenades on Russian soldiers and vice versa. So this is obviously on everybody's mind. These idiots go, they shut down Logan, they get pinched. But how do we know? And it turns out drone detection is a category in and of its We found a startup that does drone. So actually we found, well, there's a bunch of startups that are working on drones.

Starting point is 00:26:32 And I just wanted to give a shout out really quick, Jason, to two that we've talked to on the show. One is frontal dynamics. These were the students from University of Toronto who were working on anti-drone technology using sound waves, if I recall correctly. And we've also had, of course, Skydeo on. Skydeo was sanctioned by China over providing Taiwan with some drones for their fire department. Great interview. We recommend watching that.

Starting point is 00:26:55 We'll have a link to that in the show notes. But elsewhere, earlier, I chose in tweets from Senator Schumer. And he has also advocated for a company called Robin Radar. And they have a number of drone detecting systems. And I have a clip from them, Jason, right here. Okay, here we go. So here we go from Robin. Robin Radar Systems announcing on the move capability for Iris drone detection radar.

Starting point is 00:27:23 So that's the radar. And now you can put them on your truck and drive them around. Mobile. It attacks and tracks rogue drones carrying improvised explosive devices and unauthorized drones surveilling mobile forces. So this is a company that I think is super cool. And if you are watching the video, what they showed was, Jason, a large cake container sized device on top of an SUV that does mobile drone detection.

Starting point is 00:27:50 And now you can take this on the road with you. I think especially in light of the violence we've seen in our nation's political landscape in the last 12 months, let's say, Jason, that we're going to see a lot more stuff like this. And then finally, one last one, there's a company called Apollo Shield. It's a YC company from 2016, and they're also doing anti-drone stuff. So there's a lot of startups that are building cheaper, faster, better drones, and startups that are working on keeping us safe from drones. So it's kind of like poison and cure. So this is really interesting, you know, the ability to have essentially air traffic control for drones.

Starting point is 00:28:25 then there's the ability to take the drones out. And there's multiple ways to take a drone out. One is to screw with their electronics. Another is to hit them with another drone or a missile. There's all kinds of different lasers and heating them up, frying them. There's tons of ways to take them down. But first you have to track them. And this to me is shocking that we don't have this technology in the field,

Starting point is 00:28:45 which then leads to the next theory. Oh, interesting. Just to be clear, Jason, you mean why don't we have a satellite pointed directly straight down over New Jersey, just counting each drone that's flying and giving us a live map of, okay, I see your point. Well, I mean, we have air traffic control. Why don't we have drone traffic control?

Starting point is 00:29:01 Because if we know the next, you know, assassination attempt, the next terrorist attack, the next, God forbid, 9-11, is probably going to be drone warfare. I hate to say it. But that seems like the most obvious next thing for a lunatic,

Starting point is 00:29:18 a terrorist, you know, an evil person, an evil group to do if they wanted to terrorize people. Sure. If you did what people are doing in Ukraine and you started dropping grenades on people waiting for a bus in Manhattan, this would be super terrorizing. I bought a DGI drone the summer. I was in Manhattan. I've talked about it. This thing's incredible. And I was just flying it around Manhattan. And I was shocked that you were allowed to. Well, there's a lot of money at state here. Whenever there's the countermeasures, as you're pointing out to the measures, that means there's an opportunity and there's a business opportunity. So we talked about all these different startups. We have Nicole on the pod later in the program, talk about the opportunities and seeing a lot of duplicates. We're going to see this is going to be a good beach for founders to surf. We now know that drones can help in construction, inspections, all these kind of really great

Starting point is 00:30:09 awesome use cases. They're also entertaining and fun. They're great for photography. Okay, great. But there's going to be a downside. So now there's a whole industry of detecting and countermeasures. and those are, you know, we're going to see a lot of them, but geopolitics now plays into it. So we have conspiracy theories, we have reality, and then we have all these startups playing, but then there's going to be gamesmanship on top of this to get government funding. Okay, everybody, I'm about to give you $100,000 in free credits on DigitalOcean. Listen to this quick ad read to find out how. If you're running an AI startup, you already know. It's all about compute. And that means training your models, building AI agents, and of course, crunching

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Starting point is 00:32:03 discounted rate of $1.90 per hour. That's about a 20% discount on the rate in addition to all those free credits. Visit d0.co slash twist to get started and view terms and conditions. that's DO.co slash twist. So Schumer came out and said he wants this technology. Okay. There's also a bill. So maybe we can talk a little bit about the bills that we've seen and what's going on

Starting point is 00:32:29 there because there is a bill or an act that I think got signed into law that Biden signed in where you cannot, if you're a government employee, buy a DGI drone. DGI drones, like the TikTok ban, is a major issue that we should all be aware of because DGI drones are made in China. and they could very easily be sending all the information they've got back. And maybe there's like a zero-a-day exploit, you know, where all the drones could be controlled or taken over at a certain point. Same thing with self-driving technology. Do you want BYD cars on the road in America?

Starting point is 00:33:00 Do you want TikTok, you know, available in America? Do you want DGI drones? The Chinese could, at some point, just say, okay, have all the BYDs crash, have all the DGI drones, you know, kill people and then let's use TikTok to create chaos. You start thinking about these attack vectors could be a little scared. On the geopolitical front, a lot of people have been talking about the American Security Dron Act of 2003. Effectually, that got fused into the NDAA or the National Defense Authorization Act by 2024. What's going on here for folks who are not familiar with how the U.S. Congress spends money? Sometimes when there's a must pass bit of legislation, like the NDAA,

Starting point is 00:33:41 other things get taped to it so that way they can make it through. So this bill does mean that the federal agencies are prohibited from buying or using drones that are made in countries that are deemed to be threats to the United States. This means China. This means DJI, who has, according to our notes, 73% market share here in the U.S., which is a simply astounding number. Now, Jason, for most folks out there using a drone to take a video with their dog at the beach, really, I'm not that concerned about it. But I can absolutely see how if you're a startup wanting to sell to the government, and now they cannot purchase from the leading company in the space, it opens up a ton of opportunity. So I'm kind of hoping, and I know we'll talk to Nicole about copycats in a bit, but like,

Starting point is 00:34:23 I'm kind of hoping there is a can-brain explosion of startups working on drones across the gamut, because I think this is a place where we need to lead. And so I think more people taking shots on goal versus fewer makes me feel safer. There is a theory we left out. There was one theory this could be a military exercise. That seems plausible too. So I'll put the military exercise pretty high up on this list. And a military exercise with copycats could be like a really viable explanation here. And lest you'd think that our government is coordinated, I need only bring up 9-11 where hijackers in Florida were taking lessons and didn't care about learning how to land the planes. They only cared about learning how to fly them. And the FBI there knew about it. And it just kind of got lost,

Starting point is 00:35:13 you know, across agencies, et cetera. We were tracking some of the hijackers long before 9-11. This kind of stuff happens all the time. So it's completely possible. Wait, I want to be a point about this. We live in a very particular nation with a particular set of government principles and rules. One is shared power at the federal level and then distributed power at the state level, this does create a less unified government. It also works reasonably well, as we've seen over the last couple hundred years. I've been a little surprised at the criticism of our patchwork of authorities from people who are, frankly, coming into power soon, because I kind of thought that it was a bit of a feature

Starting point is 00:35:54 or not a bug that in our government, the DOD is saying, we're tracking military bases, and everyone's kind of watching their own area of policy or protection. And if we wanted to have a more centralized approach to this, we'd have to have a stronger federal government. And Jason, I thought that was what we were moving away from. So I'm just curious your thoughts on the government agency response to the situation and if it's actually bad or working as intended.

Starting point is 00:36:20 What do they say? Like, success has a million parents and failures in orphan. If something successful happens, we're going to say, oh, my God, the federal government, you know, stepped in and it was as incredible what they did. And then if it fails, we're like, oh, my God, the government failed. So, you know, if you look at something like education and we're falling behind on education or health care, you know, you're going to be like, you know what, screw the federal government, move it back to the states. The states are failing at something like, why don't we have a federal mandate for, I don't know, abortion, or why don't we have a federal mandate for school vouchers? You get the idea.

Starting point is 00:36:57 And so I think the best feature, if I'm being totally honest, is having two options. And in management, one of the theories is to keep switching things up so that you don't hit stasis and calcification doesn't happen. So you go from building up all these middle managers at Facebook and Google and product managers, etc. And then you say, you know what, rip it all out, flatten the structure, let's have more chiefs, more Indians, not a bunch of chiefs. Do I get canceled for saying that? I just think it's, I think it's, I think it's goche versus cancelable.

Starting point is 00:37:30 Okay, great. What's the word? Well, canceling doesn't exist. More worker bees, less queens, whatever. You know,

Starting point is 00:37:38 some, you know, structure, and then you change the structure. You go from, you know, Uber having, you know,

Starting point is 00:37:45 little fifdoms where each city, when they were growing, were running their own city, running their own marketing, had their own little fifdoms, and they were battling it out.

Starting point is 00:37:54 And then Dara takes over and says, you know what, let's bring the decision-making central so that we're not ruffling as many feathers and turning over as many tables in the bazaar. And that was better for Uber at later stages. Maybe it's better to let a bunch of country heads go crazy again and, you know, have their own fiefdom. So that's, I think, how do you look at management theory is the best thing to do is to switch it up from time to time and crack any calcification that could be occurring there. Actually, I really, I'm glad you said that, because I've been a little bit, I kind of laugh at how management theories changed inside of Silicon Valley.

Starting point is 00:38:31 I think we're talking about this last week, how Google had so much money for a while that they were onboarding talent before they could use them to hoard them. And that was considered smart for a while. Then Google got bloated and that was considered bad. So then they got smaller. That was considered good. And then I'm sure in the future they'll hire too many people again and go through this cycle. But I guess to your point, though, about just needing to rip out what you were doing and

Starting point is 00:38:50 replace it with something else, no matter where you were on the extreme of that cycle, up or down, it's okay because you're going to end up going back anyways. So it's more of an oscillation versus destination. That actually makes sense to me. All right. Next on the show, we have a guest. We love to have a guest on the show. Who's our guest today? Our guest is Nicole Wiskoff, the founder in GP over at Wiskoff Adventures. She also back in the day helped found one finance, a neobank that Walmart bought. Then she became a venture capitalist. Her first fund was $5 million back in 2021. Then she raised a fund to fund two worth 20. And Nicole, according to pitch book, at least your fund three worth $50 million has closed. Yes, it has. And thank you so much for

Starting point is 00:39:27 having me on the show. Yeah. So we wanted to have Nicole on, Jason, not only because we love talking to investors about what they're seeing in the market, especially after they've raised new funds, but also because she had a very interesting comment all about what she's seeing in the startup market today. And whenever someone manages to go viral with a bit of startup chatter, I love to talk to them. So Nicole, why don't you talk us through your tweet here and then we're going to ask you about it. Yeah, of course. So I should catting out this with, I do. specifically precede and seed investing. So sticking a number of the same pitches from that lens, just wanted to call that out there. The point I'm trying to make is that the number of pitches,

Starting point is 00:40:01 and maybe this is the case for you guys as well, coming from startups, even at the earliest stages, are almost always the same. So while this job can seem glamorous, I find that I'm hearing the same fintech idea or the same supply chain idea where people are building a digital freight brokerage over and over. The commentary was super interesting, Alex. I am sure you saw some of it happy to speak to it and give a few hot takes, but I will maybe let you guys lead with what you think could be interesting here. Nicole did a tweet yesterday about 3 p.m. saying honestly shocking how many startup pitches are nearly exactly the same, building any market that's saturated, similar product, similar GTM, etc. The number of companies building something that doesn't exist

Starting point is 00:40:41 or that is truly unique is far less than 1%. And this begs my first question, which is, what was this like three years ago? Has there been a proliferation, a doubling or a triple of the number of startups you see pursuing the same idea at the same time, Nicole. I would certainly say if you look at the data from 20, especially 2021, just about anything was getting funded. And so I'd actually say that it were, you know, it would have been much easier a few years ago. I think the bar is obviously much higher and especially as things get to the Series A. And so folks are probably a lot more, you know, gun-try to go do something super audacious.

Starting point is 00:41:15 Oh, Jason, please. No, I was going to say, you know, this phenomenon is very interesting. I've seen in many years, you know, going into my second decade. I think I'm maybe a couple of years ahead of you in this career. I remember during mobile and social, everybody had a check-in app like 4Square or Go Walla, and we were investors in Go Walla, got sold to Facebook. It wasn't a major outcome, but everybody was going to do a photo sharing app. And then there was the sort of everybody was going to do a food delivery app.

Starting point is 00:41:44 I think there's a kind of two phenomenon here. One is, when there's a new technology that's going to be applied, say apps emerge, GPS emerged, that becomes the why now. So everybody's like, whoa, Steve Jobs just launched the iPhone, or there's an app store in the iPhone, or the watch is out. And so everybody says, well, what can I do with that new platform? There's a new Y now. There's GPS, there's Stripe. There's some new headset device, and everybody rushes in. And of course, there's only a small number of things people do in the world. They eat. they sleep and they go to work, they try to be productive, they laugh, you know, you can fit into a certain number of buckets. So new technology applied to existing problem sets in the world, eating as but one example. And then I think the second one is people see funding for a category like we saw in SaaS, Nicole, and they're like, oh wow, SaaS companies, there's a playbook here. I can learn the playbook and I can speak SaaS to Jason Lemkin or, David Sacks or people who've put out a shingle saying, we do SaaS and people who are looking for

Starting point is 00:42:51 an idea say, seems like SaaS is getting funded. Seems like there's a lot of people hanging out on that beach surfing those waves and everybody runs to that beach, whether it's the VR beach, the AR beach, the SaaS beach, the on-demand beach, the apps beach, consumer beach. So I think there could be two phenomenon happening here. I think what's unfortunate is that in the short term, it definitely makes that first round of capital easier to raise. Right. Like if you're someone it posted an article I thought was well written that they called venture catering, which is like every year, BCs come out and they say, here are the things that we want to see, you know, next year, what we're looking for. And then a ton of founders race is check those boxes, right?

Starting point is 00:43:28 And again, in the short term, because it's familiar, there's a lot of companies, hey, I'm going to go after that thing that they've thought about for maybe two weeks and they go raise money and it's easier. But then come the Series A, there's about a hundred of those to sort through. They have very limited traction and metrics. And then you see the fallout, which is obviously makes our job as BCs start to sink. You know, you get a single markup or maybe none, and makes it more difficult. I just want to underscore the point Nicole's making. So one thing that I keep seeing over time is people building exclusive credit cards with like access to events and hotels and perks and such. And here's another one from December 12th, so four days ago. It's called Atlas Card. Just raised 27 million.

Starting point is 00:44:05 And I'm sure in two more years, there will be another one that I have to read a release from. Seems to be a never-ending thing. Yes. Why? Like, I mean, my God, there's other problems in the world that I can't get a table at pick a restaurant. Like, that is not the thing that's going to save the planet from climate change and war. Yeah, and I want to call it too, Alex, you know, so a lot of founders responded. And Jason, I don't know if you got to catch up on this, but a lot of them said it's the VC's fault, right? Like, they should be looking for new unique things. Like, how dare they blame us for, you know, for this. And I think what actually makes this even harder and I think about this a lot is as a pre-seed and seed manager, like trying to lead rounds and maybe put companies on the map to get

Starting point is 00:44:40 moving, what then happens is I have to go around and think about, well, who will mark up this deal and continue to support these companies, right? Like, well, I have a new $50 million fund. Is that enough to really back up the truck and continue to support these companies? Hopefully, but right, there's not a lot of metrics in the first two years that would say, hey, LPs, can I put 20 million into this company and do it by myself? With that said, is when I started asking around, people say, well, I remember I made an investment more recently in a company called Frontlands, repeat founder from the one of the one finance company that sold to Walmart. And they're building, think of the Avan card, but for mineral rights. So no one's.

Starting point is 00:45:15 ever done this. Her property-based rights. Everyone wants to buy them. P.E. is huge in the space, or they're trying to buy these rights from people, but no one's actually letting you lend against them. And every multi-stage fund said to me, love it, but like with the Avan card, they didn't actually, to go get the credit facility, they didn't have to come up with a net new financial offering, right? It's the HELOC. It's a home equity line of credit, and they're just attaching a card to basically spend against it. With this property-based line, this is a net new product, that's going to be tough to sell a partnership, like boo-boo, right? And so it makes stuff. I think you said that this is new, so we can't do it.

Starting point is 00:45:48 I thought that's what Vising was before. No, and that's exactly right. So I think what's tough is, and one, thankfully, we have these early stage funds that exist and that continue to support these until they kind of create or get to this escape velocity where it's a series B and that same partner saying, like, oh, the market exists. It's there. Thank goodness, you know, let's invest. But again, it makes it hard to go against the grain as an early stage fund and say,

Starting point is 00:46:08 let's take an even bigger risk here by doing something that people probably won't support for two to four years. Jason, does that impact how you think and how you invest? Well, yeah, I am a bit of a lunatic and probably an outlier. And I think you're a function of the bets that you've previously won. So if you were to tell me the top three investments you would have would be a taxi company, a meditation app, and a stock trading app where you don't charge people to trade, those were obviously UberCom and Robin Hood, you know, three of our major outliers,

Starting point is 00:46:42 those were non-consensus bets. And those were things people did not want to bet on at the time. 19 of 21 people I introduced Uber 2 did not invest first round. Cyan Bannister and myself did the investment I had introduced first round and cyan to it back in the day. And so Nicole is pointing out something called pull through. And so for seed funds like ours, and we have same size seed fund and we do essentially the same thing, although we have I think, you know, an accelerator and a pre-accelerator. So we have more programs, I think. Nicole is you're doing individual deals, I would expect maybe only one in three to half of our companies to pull through to the next round. Now, that would be low by other people's standards, where if you're a Series A firm, you expect 80% of your companies to get a Series B. If you're a seed fund, I don't know what Nicole expects, but I would guess two out of three to get to Series A would be the hope. I'm actually hoping the opposite. Now, why would I be hoping that two out of three don't make it to the next round. Well, that means we're being more audacious. We're taking more risk. So, just based on my career, I would rather swing for the fences and hit

Starting point is 00:47:55 another Uber-Robbin hood com and work the power law than, you know, play it safe and do 10 more SaaS companies. That doesn't mean we don't do SaaS or whatever, but portfolio management is part of the game here. You know, you do have to show in fund two that you can get half your companies to Series A or whatever it is in order to raise Fund three. And that's because, Alex, if you're a new VC, you know, my, it's only my first fund is really hitting the 10-year mark now when you can actually look at returns. And so how do LPs judge how Nicole's doing or how I'm doing or how Parv is doing, pair VC is doing? If they don't have outcomes, where companies, are going public or, you know, and you're distributing, they look and pull through. And so that does

Starting point is 00:48:45 drive a little bit of this, where everybody is circling the wagons and marking each other up. But at the end of the day, your career will ultimately be defined by your power law outliers. Yeah. Nicole, I'm curious if there's an AI element to the level of startups that are doing the same thing, because we've talked a lot about over the years how it's easier to start a company. like you don't buy servers anymore, you have the cloud. Well, now you can have maybe fewer developers because of AI, blah, blah, blah. So does that mean that we're just seeing more total companies appear? And that's making them seem to be more similar to one another than we might have seen five years ago?

Starting point is 00:49:23 I feel like I'm seeing, well, I mean, it's obviously a smidge quieter, but pre-seed seed really hasn't. If you look at any of the card or angelist data, it's been super active. I think A's where the friction is where like there's a massive falloff of companies being promoted. With that side, I'm seeing a similar number of deals. It's just a lot of the same application. And I will say to, and I guess to founders credit, but a lot of really talented people that I meet are just now considering leaving their company, and they don't have an idea.

Starting point is 00:49:50 And so they're constantly doing this tour of duty, which is talking to a lot of people trying to come up with an idea. And I think they do go to these VC spreadsheets and say, what are people looking for? And, oh, that's interesting. Like, let's do that. And cherry pick something, which also definitely is happening now. I mean, there are a million market maps coming out of every fund.

Starting point is 00:50:08 there's all these flashy AI fund fundraisers. And so it's also a function of, I think, people looking for ideas, and those are just readily available. Yeah, I call those, Alex, the beach to surf at. So what beaches have good waves right now? AI, defense tech, obviously. What beaches do people maybe not believe in as much? Consumer, VR, SaaS, people don't believe in anymore. Entrepreneurs rightfully will look for where the action is. And the action, sometimes, is based on just following, you know, Uber and DoorDash and Lyft and saying, oh, there's a lot of energy over on On Demand and Airbnb. So they do Airbnb of everything. The Uber for X was an Uber for X, right? I mean, how many of those pitches do we see? Which one still exist? Which Uber's for X still

Starting point is 00:50:57 exist right now? And then even with the copycats, you know, and you look at, say, food delivery, man, all of the food delivery companies are consolidated down to how many players, how many players, There's now two or three. Uber eats, DoorDash. What else is there? Now, Toast, I guess, arguably is a public company that was private. So anyway, things consolidate down as part of the race. And if you were an investor in Lyft in the C round or the Series A or Series B, even, you're pretty

Starting point is 00:51:24 happy even with, you know, the fact that Lyft, you know, maybe isn't Uber, but it still became more $10 billion or $20 billion at whatever point in time. You still did phenomenal. So sometimes even hitting the number two or the number three can be a match. massive grand slam for a fund. People forget that. Yeah. Basic math, you know, especially for seed funds. If you were a seed fund and you were in Postmates,

Starting point is 00:51:46 or a Series A investor and it got bought by Uber, for a couple of billion bucks, you feel pretty good about it, right? Nicole, I know we have to let you go in a second, but I do want to ask. We've seen a lot of people that went out and founded new venture capital funds in the last couple of years to struggle to raise a fund too, even. Clearly with your fund three now raised, that's not you. So I'm just kind of curious if you could tell us about the state of the venture capital

Starting point is 00:52:08 fundraising side of this. How hard was it to raise a third? That's what I'm asking very politely. Institutions or individuals, where did you have success? So look, I went out expecting this would take a long time. My legal team is Wilson Sincini. I think they're in the top three like law firms that represent funds. And they openly told me, Nicole, you should update your LPA, even the really big mega funds are doing this, which is your limited partnership agreement as a VC, you need one to, you know, raise money from LPs. And they, it traditionally says, said, you have 12 months from the first close of the fund to close the rest of the fund. And they said, you should update that to 18. So I thought, well, I better get to the market super early here because

Starting point is 00:52:48 it's going to be a bit. I don't want it out of capital. So I went to market and within five months, I had all of it raised. I'd say at three months, I had all commitments and we had a few months of legal back and forth. I even, I scratched my head and wonder, you know, like, thank you. You know, how was I fortunate? The $20 million fund took seven. I thought that felt like three years. just because you meet so many LPs. So I pitched, I put some data on this on X, but I think I pitched just over 120 firms. I do, I will say something that I think helped a lot, which was one.

Starting point is 00:53:20 I mean, I think you have to, I've also tweeted about this, but I think you have to, there's sort of this game of half and half-nots. Like, you have to be a network, right? Like, I think LPs really want to know that you've got like, you know, notable at least initial LPs and notable deals that you've done. Jason mentioned this earlier, but when you don't have much of a track record, they want to see that like blue chip funds have marked up your deals. So how are those pressing?

Starting point is 00:53:40 That's an early signal. And so I was fortunate to have a lot of that. I also think a big theme right now for folks is that they want super early stage true venture exposure, not the series A plus exposure that all the multi-stage funds have gotten bloated and there's tons of products for that now. They want people. Why? What's that? Why? I think they want real alpha, you know, for some ones.

Starting point is 00:54:04 I think they're- Turns, yeah. Yes, yes, and returns, right? There's, if you are, and definitely if you keep a disciplined, even seed fund size for another time, but I don't understand these $150 million plus precedency dedicated funds from a returns perspective. And so I think that if you have a super disciplined fund size, so let's say it's 50 million, if you're going after precedency, again, you have great, you have an opportunity to like, you know, have 100 extras in there.

Starting point is 00:54:28 And Jason's had a few of those. And you are getting high ownership. That seems to be like what everyone is looking for. and I checked those boxes. So the last thing I'll say on this in terms of strategy for raising the fund is I went out and I took 78 first meetings in about three weeks and I hammered it. They were all hour-long calls. I got all of the VCs in the pipeline and the data room at the same time.

Starting point is 00:54:51 And then I wouldn't say it was necessarily bluffing that I didn't know if it'd work out. I kept saying we're going to have a first close in June and a final close by the end of August and I was holding my breath and it worked out. But I think if you create a sense of urgency and you tell people like this, I think it's a matter of expressing this will get done. It's just a question of when and not if. Which is the same for founders, right? Like if they have a definitive goal and they're saying, hey, the train's leaving the station, I'll talk to you for the next fund. You know, did you start before or after Silicon Valley Bang went under and then had to reboot?

Starting point is 00:55:23 After. Oh, yeah. So this was, it was this year. So I started raising in, what was it? It's good to hear. March of this year and then closed it in August. So it was really tight. I started right of Silicon Valley. Like imploded literally one year. Was that 2022 or 2022 when that happened? I was just thinking the same thing. I was like, was that 22? God, it's like such a blur now.

Starting point is 00:55:45 March 10th, 2020. So a year. Yeah. Yeah. It started right before that. And oh my Lord, for six months, I just had to pause everything in the middle of it. I was like, you know what? This makes no sense.

Starting point is 00:55:56 I had already gotten in, you know, 10 or 20 million from my accredited investors and some early LPs. and then everything blew up. Every single person thought it was the end of days. And they just said, we'd love to meet with you. Don't want to waste your time. We're not doing any funds this year. This is 2020.

Starting point is 00:56:14 We're not doing any funds in 2023. And we're comparing our names. We're going to lower the number of LP number of funds that we already have. So we're going to cut names. And it was like, you're going to cut names of people. You just did their first or second fund. And they're like, yeah, because we don't have money because there's no DPI in the world's ended now.

Starting point is 00:56:33 all we need is a couple more service nows and reddits and these kind of things and maybe the end of the wrath of Lena Khan will change M&A and then all of a sudden when singles and doubles happen that's when people get frisky when you return you know 50% of your fund early you know year four or five they get half their money back or they get you know a full turn one X people are like oh yeah yeah I'd love to support your next fund but if you haven't returned man anybody who had that fund in 2020 to 2019 to 2022, that vintage is going to be really hard pressed to raise again. And so it's a great point, Jason. Yeah. So Nicole's first fund, 2001, her second fund, 2002. So I know we have to go. But those were $10, $20 million funds you did? Yes. Yeah. Five and 21, 20 and 22. And then I skipped as TV.

Starting point is 00:57:23 I guess I just got really lucky. And then I raised in 24. Yeah. I mean, timing is everything. If you went out in peak ZERP, you raised, you know, three times as much and half the time. If you raised during, you raised half your target. And then if you raised after, you raised your target. So it's just like for founders, it's really difficult for VCs right now. And congratulations on doing that. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Keep it up. Yeah. Thanks to Gold. We appreciate it. And next time you land a hundred bagger, come back on the show and tell us all about it. Yeah. Yeah. Any promising startups. Yeah. Love you. Love you. Love you. Love you guys. Cheers.

Starting point is 00:57:58 All right. Bye. She's awesome. Although I got to say, Jason, I was going in there for the, what is your IRR from your 2022 fun? Oh, yeah, you could have asked her that. She probably would have said. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:58:09 Most, you know, here's the easy thing you say. I'm in the J curve. Yeah. So most people would just say, I'm in the J curve. Like for our fun three, I'm in the J curve. Right. We just deployed it. So who knows.

Starting point is 00:58:21 And then for fun one and two on paper, 4.9 and I think 4X on paper. And then in terms of returns, ballpark, I don't have the exact number in front of me. It's like 1.2 and 0.5 or 0.6 return for the first two funds, which is great. And now my job is to close the gap between the paper gain and the actual distributed. And what's crazy is sometimes you have a startup that's, you know, 20% of your paper gains and it goes out of business. You know, like, oh my lord, now, you know, I was 5x on paper on 4x. And then you have some company you thought was, you know, just dead or was, you know, in zombie state. And the founder's like, yeah, I don't know if I, and then all of a sudden they pull a rabbit out of the hat and they raise a Series A and you're like, oh my God, that's incredible.

Starting point is 00:59:10 So these markups, you know, paper markups are just that. And it really comes down to can you get any kind of a DPI? Can you distribute? And so great job, Nicole. And it's hard. And I like keeping the fun size smaller. That I think was the other point in the discussion, Alex, is, you know, she's like, why would you have a $150 million seed fund? Yes.

Starting point is 00:59:32 You know, if you do a $50 million, you can get 100 names in there, you know, or, you know, 150 names or in our case, maybe like 250, because we have this Founder University, very unique product in the market where you give 25K checks for the first check that a company even gets to incorporate. You know, if you have something unique like that, the chances of hitting an outlier go way up. And then if you do hit the power law in a smaller fund, the ability to have a multiple on that goes up. So the smaller the fund, the greater the chance of having a four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, 20x fund. Whereas if you've got a big number like 500 million dollar fund or a billion dollar fund, you're going for two times, three times the amount of money, which means it's probably, you know, going to be very similar to the stock market in the same period of time, which is why venture is. such a troubled space right now is, can you beat the market is the real question and the market gives you liquidity. So VCs are having a really hard time because they have to beat the returns of a vibrant stock market. Yeah, the stock market's been on fire lately. But just to your point about

Starting point is 01:00:42 larger funds, larger returns, this Jason Limkin, was actually some that I saw earlier today. and he does some math in this, and he points out that VCs need about $2 billion in exits for about each $50 million they raise. And he has his own math for that. I'm sure you could tweak the numbers around, but it does go to show how much liquidity you have to generate to make a venture capital fund makes sense financially. And it's, it's been tough. Well, the back of the envelope math would be, you know, you get diluted 50% if you're a seed investor. So if you owned 5% of a company for 500K, let's say, you invested 500K a $500k a $10 million evaluation, now you're down to 2.5% ownership.

Starting point is 01:01:23 Two and a half percent ownership at a $2 billion valuation is $50 million. So for every $50 million, you need to have one of those become worth $2 billion. How many companies do you invest in in your life that become worth $2 billion and that you have the ability to exit? Because both things have to happen. It can't just be marked up on paper. you have to have the opportunity to exit. You know, those are few and far between, which is why when you get an opportunity to sell in secondary,

Starting point is 01:01:47 you know, at $500, a billion, $2 billion, as a seed fund, you really are encouraged to consider that deeply and maybe sell 10%, 20%, 30% of your position to lock in some DPI and keep your fund in business. Okay, great job there with a great guest of the moment. We like our main characters.

Starting point is 01:02:07 All right, everybody. We'll see you next time. Bye, bye. Bye.

This Week in Startups - Silicon Valley Clones and Jersey Drones: Decoding the Signals with Nicole Wischoff | E2061

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