This Week in Startups - Tarantino sued over NFTs + Twitch Co-Founder Justin Kan: YouTube, Entrepreneurship, Investing | E1329

Episode Date: November 19, 2021

First Jason explains why Miramax is suing Quentin Tarantino over his Pulp Fiction NFT collection (2:31). Then Twitch Co-Founder & GP at Goat Capital Justin Kan joins (19:19) to discuss lessons from entrepreneurship, what he looks for when investing, his YouTube channel, podcast and more!

Okay, today I am really excited to have Justin Kahn on the program. You know, Justin, an amazing, amazing founder and investor, thinker. He's got a great YouTube channel. What we did on today's show is we did a live re-stream with my YouTube channel, which is YouTube.com slash this weekend, and Justin's, which is YouTube.com slash Justin Kahn TV, which is you go subscribe to. And Restream let us publish to both. We had both of our audiences asking us interesting questions, and we just riffed.

Just two entrepreneurs, two startup. thinkers, two podcasters and two investors riffing for about an hour. I think went over an hour. And it was just great to catch up with Justin. And then both of our YouTube audience has got to see it. So I want to do these like once a month. I think we'll have Gary Tan do one. If you know of anybody else, I think downtown Josh Brown would be cool. Maybe doing pump would be cool. Anybody who's doing streaming on YouTube on a regular basis and understands how to do a live stream would qualify for this. So if you have an idea for somebody who would be a good co-lab, collaboration, Just email producers at This Weekend Startups.com.

I'll go to all three producers and me. But before we get to that, we have to talk about Miramak sewing Quentin Tarantino over his NFT project and my idea for the most brilliant Dow of all time, the QT, the Quentin Dow. Coming soon, I hope. Stick with us. It's going to be a great episode.

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And micro acquire the startup acquisition marketplace. Start the right acquisition conversations at your own pace. Get free and instant access to over 100,000 trusted buyers with total anonymity. Say goodbye to brokers and meet your ideal buyer today. go to try microacquire.com slash twist. Quentin Tarantino is being sued by the production company Miramax over his pulp fiction NFT plans. Yes, basically, so you understand, Quentin Tarantino decided to make some NFTs.

He's been getting pitched on this for some amount of time. I saw online in an interview. Somebody was explaining NFTs to him and he kind of thought it was interesting. So he took seven pages of the pulp. fiction script and was going to make an NFT out of seven pages that were left out scenes that are not in the movie. What a clever, great idea. Now, the only problem is Miramax owns Pulp Fiction, and the way these contracts tend to work, having seen them up close when I worked at Sony Music or other media companies, you buy a piece of IP, intellectual property like a movie or a song or an album

or a piece of art or a comic book character or a comic book or a book. And in that contract, it says, we have the right to develop this in the future in perpetuity in all mediums known and unknown in the future. In other words, if new mediums come out, we get to exploit this IP and that's included in the price we paid you for it. So I'm assuming, I don't know this, that his contract, when they bought Pulp Fiction, they bought all rights to it, including sequels and this other stuff, which is why sometimes you'll see a director say, I have nothing to do with the Exorcist sequel. I have nothing to do with the Jaws sequels beyond number two, whatever. Spil. I don't even know. Spielberg probably wasn't involved in even number two. So the sequel rights is obviously a big thing. And then there's what's called derivative rights, you know, things made like merchandise. And they're outlined in contracts. And you can negotiate that I get to keep the merchandise. In fact, George Lucas did that famously with Star Wars. That's why he became so rich. It's because he used to,

his money to pay for the creation of the Star Wars movies, but kept the merchandise rights, etc., etc. He wound up obviously selling all of that IP to Disney. And now Disney, if they want to sell NFTs, I don't think Lucas gets to sell his NFTs. However, this is untested law because there are a couple of issues here. Well, these are things Quentin Tarantino wrote but did not sell, right? These were not sold as part of Pulp Fiction. They didn't buy the original script.

If they did buy the original script, they certainly didn't buy the notes or pages around it, but they do own the title pulp fiction. So then you would make the argument, while you're trafficking in RIP and using RIP to sell these things that are adjacent to it. Now, if he just took the seven pages from the script and he sold them at an auction,

I don't think that Miramax would care, but I think Miramax is owned by Disney. I believe somebody can fact check me on that. Therefore, Disney probably wants to put their foot down on this and say, wait, we got to stop this before, you know, Stan Lee's estate or, you know, somebody who drew Ironman starts going in their draws and says, listen, I got a hundred copies of sketches I did of Iron Man. I'm going to start selling them. Okay, so the Walt Disney company owned Miramax from 93 to 2010. It got sold to a couple of different holding companies,

and now it's owned by Viacom CBS. According to Disney.fandum.com. Now, if you owned a copy of a comic book. If I owned a comic book and I cut each of the pages and I made 60 pages of this graphic novel and I framed them and I sold them page by page, am I allowed to do that? Yes, I am I bought that comic book? I chopped it up. But now if I make another work out of like a digital work, am I allowed to make a new story of it? Am I allowed to cut them up and make a montage and then play that into a film? Of course not, right? So these laws when they hit new technologies always get tested. It's not really a big deal. This happened with DVDs and CDs and streaming famously.

And generally, there's a negotiation if people feel like to get in the raw end of the stick, because you want somebody to maybe participate. So the right way to do this, and what you'll eventually see here is the director, Quentin Tarantino will then go on to Miramax, and they would cut a deal where Quentin would say, listen, I have this archive of all of this interesting stuff. I want to NFT. Do you have an preferred NFT? They're like, yeah, we do it with this company, or we see it.

started our own NFT platform. Great. So Quentin Tarantino's collection, Ridley Scott's collection of Blade Runner and Gladiar stuff in partnership with Disney would then sell them, right? So that's how this stuff tends to work out. And so according to the Wall Street Journal, Bart Williams, who is a partner at the law firm of Proswar Rose, I think is how you pronounce it, on behalf of Miramax stated, quote, it was profoundly disappointing to learn of this deliberate, premeditated, short-term money grab by the Tarantino team to unilaterally circumvent Miramax's rights to Pulp Fiction through the illicit development promotion and distribution of NFTs. So that's a pretty over the top statement. I don't know why they would be so aggressive about this. They, I'm assuming, went to Quentin

Tarantino and said, like, hey, let's, uh, let's work something out first, but Tarantino probably told him to pound salt because maybe he, uh, doesn't agree with them or maybe he's got some past friction with them and this is part of an overall negotiation. Remember, we saw something similar with none other than Dave Chappelle and the Chappelle show and he was like, hey, don't watch the Chappelle show. They're screwing me out of money and then I guess Comedy Central and Chappelle figured out a way to bury their beef, which is good because then Chappelle gets to work on this IP and support in the future. In fact, when Howard Stern left Terrestrial Radio, part of him leaving and I think staying for an extra year or something was when he negotiated

is for the contracts. He said, I want to own my tapes. I want all of my tapes for history to be owned by me, my masters, basically, not these other Westwood One or whoever he worked for previously, I'm not sure. And he actually owns his archive now. And I think with his deal with Sirius, he owns a company that then gives them the show, but he still retains his IP and all that. So as you move up the stack, you can then reacquire your IP and use your current partnership as bait for that. So what Tarantino should do here is, you should go to Miramax and say, listen, I want to have some ownership in my archive or something like that. Is there some deal we could cut here?

But, you know, there's really no reason for the movie studios to do that. So, you know, he's only going to do one more of these. You know, I don't see it as a money grab. I see it as an experiment and maybe they should collaborate on it. If you're trying to nail an important project before the end of the year, you might need some extra help. I know I do. Well, look no further than Fiverr business. Fiverr business puts a world of expert.

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That's right. Go to Fiverr.com slash business and don't forget the promo code Jason. J-A-S-O-N. That's F-I-V-E-R dot com slash business. Remember, there's two hours in F-I-V-E-R-R dot com slash business. Use a promo code Jason. Mr. Tarantino announced his plans early this month. A release through Tarantino NFTs.com promoting the auction says the artifacts will get a quote

glimpse into the mind and creative process of Quentin Tarantino. The seven unused scenes from the movie will also contain audio commentary according to the release. Now, audio commentary, he would be allowed to do. So if he wrote a book about his experience writing about the characters, that would be really hard for them to stop. So what he should do here is not called Pulp Fiction. It should be called the Tarantino Sessions. And he should just sell the Tarantino Sessions,

where he talks about every character he's created in every movie. And that would be just his commentary like a novel. And I think they would have no leg to stand on. It's just his commentary on my inspiration for creating a character. How do you, I mean, if George Lucas made an NFT on where I came up with, you know, the character Boba fat and what was my thinking at that time, well, he could do that on an interview show in a book and a blog post.

He could monetize it. I don't see how that would be illegal. As long as when you start using. the name Pulp Fiction, or you start using imagery from Pulp Fiction, which this does in a very clever way. They don't have the actor's faces on the website. They just have the iconic suit and a little bit of blood, and the font style evokes Pulp Fiction. And so I think that's probably what they are objecting to. Miramax alleges that Mr. Tannatina Reserve Rights were limited to the film's soundtrack, music, publishing, live performance, print publication, comic books, and theatrical

and television sequel and spin-off rights. So that's super fascinating that he owns the rights to theatrical and television sequel and spin-off rights. So an even easier thing for Tarantino to do here would be the further adventures of, you know, name of Pulp Fiction character. Super easy. And that would be worth more or what happened to this person, you know, so you do some sequel or whatever.

Quote, Tarantino's limited reserved rights under the operative agreements are far too narrow for him to unilaterally produce market and sell Pulp Fiction NFTs, the suit says, I don't know if I agree with him, given that he owns the spin-off rights. Because these seven pages contributed to the original Pulp Fiction, I think that's where he's getting himself in trouble. So he should just burn those NFTs and he should just stick it to them by doing all of the spin-off rights. And then he could say, you know, I had an original idea, but I changed it, and here's my new idea, right? Boom. So how are they going to stop him there? Miramax parted with Mr. Tarantino in many of his movies, but none of the research

ones, I guess Jackie Brown and Kilville volumes one and two. Miramax was run famously by the Weinstein brothers. Here's the thing. There's a certain subset of rights as I talked about. You can negotiate all kinds of things. But forward-looking stuff, it's very hard for people to control what you do in the future. If really

Tarantino wants to get in on this cryptogriff, there was a much easier way. And I had written about this with crowdfunding 20 years ago. I may even talked about it on this podcast. I had the idea that if Quentin Tarantino, I think I wrote this in Silicon Island Reporter at some point in a blog post, or maybe I wrote it on my own personal blog, Quentin Tarantino were to say, I'm going to write, I'm going to write 10 more movies.

I'm going to write, produce, or make 10 more movies. Because he said he was going to do 10. And he's working on the last one now and he wants it to be a slam dunk. And then I've heard him in these interviews he did recently. Shout out to Brian Coppelman's The Moment, Joe Rogan and also Freddie Sinellis. They did three really great, very long interviews with Tarantino. And it was fascinating. I would watch all three of those.

Freddie Sinless is buying a paywall, very much worth paying for his podcast on Patreon. If you were to go out and say, I'm going to create a Dow, and the Dow is for me to make 10 more movies. I'm X years old now. I'm going to do 10 more. I said I was going to do 10,

but I'm going to do 10 more, and I'm either going to produce them, write them, or direct them. Some combination of those. So no promises here, but I might hire a co-writer, write it with them and let them direct it. I might, you know, let her have a story idea, whatever.

And if you buy into these, I'll make them. And we will put them into the public archives or you will have some governance or voting in this. But he would have a hundred million dollars show up immediately because he's got that large of a fan base that wants to see him do this work. And if they had some upside in it where they got to be a producer, let's say anybody who did that got to have a frame in the movie at the end with, you know, over $10,000 they get their own title card. If it's five, if they're $1,000, they share it with five people. You could actually do a formula for that, right? Like 10,000 and above, you get your own title card, uh, which, you know, calls you

something. If you're $1,000, you share it with five. If you're $100, you share it with 10, 100 people, whatever it is, would be kind of cool. Um, and then at the end, it might be 20 minutes of producer credit. How funny would that be for 20 minutes of producer credits that they had to run at the end of every film. and you could sit there and know when yours was going to come up. It would be kind of fun.

And you can do something like that. I think you'd raise $100 million. I don't know. What do you think? All right. Congratulations to Quentin Tarantino on getting in on the amazing crypto grift right now. Sell those NFTs as quick as you can because who knows how long there will be a line of bagholders out there who want to own JPEGs that have no function in the real world. I'm joking here, but if these NFTs actually had some IP associated with them, that would be

cool. So I do think the board ape yacht club allows you to have IP in your monkey, your ape. And so if the board apes keep going at this pace, I could see somebody doing a cartoon or something, a board apes or somebody making a board apes, I don't know, DJ or T-shirts or merch. And maybe who knows you, if you bought it for $10,000 and you sold 10,000 t-shirts and made a dollar on each, you could actually be. profitable. So if the board apes look at themselves like Marvel, who knows? Maybe there's some crazy comic book world where 10 of the board apes will get together and develop a series. Would you be allowed to do that? I think you own the IP. So could you take 10 people who own

board apes like Jimmy Fallon owns one, Alexis O'Hanning Owen, Steph Curry owns one? If you have 10 of those people together, somebody email producers at this week in startups.com or just at mention me. Here's an idea. If you do in fact own the IP, 10 of you get together and make the board apes super friends, you can call it that, board apes, super monkeys, could you then sell that to,

you know, I don't know, the cartoon network and write your own scripts and make them have superpowers and then somebody else could take 20 monkeys and do a comic book

and call it something else and give them different superpowers and have a different story line. I think you own the IP, so I think you can do that. That's where I think some of these things get interesting is with the IP included.

So NFTs are garbage. They're a total grip. It's a total scam. You're going to lose all your money in 99 out of, of a hundred of these. But if there's IP associated with them and that IP becomes valuable, then I think there's something there. If you don't have business insurance, you failed one of the first steps of being a great founder. Startups should look no further than in broker.

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And while you're there, you get 10% off. They're already amazing prices by using the offer code twist TWIST. broker, E-M-B-R-O-K-E-R-com slash twist. All right, thanks for supporting the show on broker. Love you guys. Okay, everybody. Welcome to our first co-lab, collaboration. My man, Justin Kahn, is with me.

He's got a YouTube channel. He's an investor. He's an entrepreneur, and he's got opinions. In other words, I think we do the same thing for a living. We talk, we invest, and we make stuff. I'm just copying you, J-Cal. I'm just trying to, everything you're doing, I'm trying to be doing. You know, I think live streaming-wise, I'm now copying you.

It's really interesting. This company restream that we're using is like your vision from Justin TV, which is now 14 or 15 years ago. When did you start Justin TV? 2007. So, yeah, 14 years ago. 14 years ago, you have the vision. Yeah. Well, I mean, I remember using Justin TV.

Was it the Nokia N95? Was that like one of the first streaming phones? that allowed Justin TV? I forgot about that, yeah. Because there was no iPhone, I think, there was no iPhone when Justin TV came out. There was no apps. So there was a Nokia N95 was this like flip-up phone.

And I remember Robert Scholde were running around, like taking jerky videos. I remember seeing you. I think Leo Leport at South by Southwest live streaming with backpacks. Is that right? I think that's right. Yeah, we had backpack.

There was like a backpack with a computer. were in it and a whole like camera webcam set up and then that was that was how we made our content and then eventually obviously uh twitch came out of justin tv yeah twitch exactly so we had justin tv sort of as us trying to make our own show the show was not good to put it kindly and then luckily we opened up as a platform anyone could broadcast and eventually people were like hey we want broadcast games and it became Twitch and the rest is history. It does say something about when you're an entrepreneur, the ability to pivot or just as you're building stuff and your being of action and listening to customers that sometimes

you'll just fall into a gold mine or a diamond mine. I mean, it's basically what happened. You had no idea that video games would be the concept here. You were making a modern day Truman show. yeah we drove the clown car into the diamond mine as the same goes as the famous for people who don't know that reference Zuckerberg once said Twitter was like a clown car

that drove into a gold mine or something and it was so cruel but in some way so accurate and so on brand for Zuckerberg that it stuck because it is true they started people forget audio

was the original idea that Evan Williams was working on, and he wanted to build a platform for podcasting. In the earliest days of podcasting, like, again, 14 years ago. Before anyone knew what podcasting was. Nobody knew what podcasting was, and nobody wanted to do it, basically. People thought it was stupid. It was like, you want to do a radio show? Why don't you just, like, what's the point of that?

Just do a radio show. And then famously, I think Evan said, we need to come. come up with something here. And I guess Jack was working on just updating your status. Just what are you doing right now? So the idea was, I believe,

inspired by the, remember Yahoo Messenger had like you could pick your status. Yeah. I'm out. And AOL. AIM had that too. You can have a status bar and then put a message on it.

Right. You could be like sleeping or in a minute or whatever. And so it's just to update your thing. But they too stumbled into it. It says something about entrepreneurship. I'm trying to think of a company that didn't stumble into their eventual business model.

Uber went from black town cars to ride sharing and then food. Airbnb, they were doing something else too. What was their original business? They were trying to, they had a, no, I forgot what their original businesses, but they had a different business and they were trying to make money to survive and work on their business. So they decided to rent out their apartment, like, their matches on the floor of their Department for Design Conference that was in SF to like generate income so they could pay the rent.

Now, just think about that. You're so desperate to make your rent that you come up with a business idea that then becomes arguably one of the five best ideas of the last two decades in Silicon Valley. I think so. Yeah. That's that is incredible. That's incredible. It just proves if you have the right people who are like highly motivated and relatively small. smart and they're, and think of desperation, then they're going to figure it out if you give them enough time. You know, you're going to figure something out. And there's like enough time and then there's sometimes too much time. If you have too much money, you've probably seen this. Company's got like infinite amounts of money. There's no

pressure to make the diamond, right? Yeah, you got to exactly. You have the, that's the problem with all the people who are successful and try get like, you know, yours truly where, you know, you have a little too much resources and there's not enough desperation. You have that. I have that ticking time bomb of like how much money is in the bank. That's a sub one year, you know, to keep you motivated. I find that founders, I think founders do their best work somewhere between 12 and 24 months. So I'm agreeing with you. If it's over 24 months, they're just like, they put the infinity symbol for their runway.

Like, we have infinite. And I'm just like, okay. But there is something about that 12 to 18 month window because fundraising is a, in a normal market, what, three to six months. So you have 12 months. That means you got to get some shit done for six months. And then you got to clear market with investors again. And they're going to want to see some progress. Yeah, you have a clear window to figure it out. If you don't figure it out in this time, then you're clearly going to be dead. So you got to do something. And when you look at the companies you've invested in, what common traits do you see in the people who figure it out in a major

way. Not like get to a couple million in revenue, but the ones who get to tens to hundreds of millions of revenue is there something you can think about with those founders that was unique in some way. Because we get this all the time, right? Like new investors ask us, like, how do you pick founders? And there's so many different types. Like if you look at the Airbnb founders, they're designers, right? They were, you know, not developers. And then you have people who are hardcore developers. You got people who are hardcore business operations. People can be different archetypes, but do you see some trends or behavior patterns?

I'm wondering in the early days? Yeah, I think it's like it's those people who like you say, your technical background or whatever doesn't matter, it's people who are like business people are successful, engineers are successful. But the attitude that I look for that I think is like, it's the people who are both humble enough to know that they don't know most things and they are always learning from people around them

and always trying to iterate their process. but then they're also confident enough to keep going or potentially ever. So it's kind of like that right in the middle of like there's there's a humility, healthy dose of like low ego humility and then there's a, but there's a deep well of confidence that's like I'm going to figure it out and they have, you know, sometimes that comes from some chip on their shoulder or whatever.

They have some insane drive, but like there's something, it's a combo of those two things. Like the best founders I know, yeah, they're always like learning from people around. I remember watching like Drew from Dropbox or Ryan from Airbnb, and they would always have like new mentors or new people they were learning from who were like a couple steps ahead of them. You do see that a lot.

The people who seem to be incredibly successful are sponges for information. They seek out knowledge. They ask really great questions. They listen deeply. They take notes. They're just rabid about that. But there's a humility to it, which is, hey, there are people who figured this out before me.

I'm not as well asking. And then there's this sort of resiliency. and you get the sense that somebody like Travis or Alex from Calm, you know, they're just never going to give up. You know, Vlad from Robin Hood, you know, just starting from our portfolio, you just get this like, it's like

inevitable, they're going to be successful in their lives. They're just not going to give up no matter what happens, no matter how hard it gets, even if they run out of money, they're still going to show up for work and figure it out, you know, as opposed to a lot of the people I thought were strong. I invested in and they're like, they hit a bump

and you're like, well, if you just cut your 12-person team down to seven, you would add this much runway, you'd have more time to figure it out. And I literally had one of them say, I just don't want to do that. I'd rather just wrap it all up and close the company. Exactly.

I was like, okay, well, thanks, you just told me you're bluffing. You don't have it. I don't need to invest in your company ever again. Like literally, you don't have the ability to just cut five people to keep the dream alive. Well, then this isn't a dream.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think there's a lot of people in Silicon Valley. You know, when we started off, people weren't coming here necessarily to get super rich. It was like they were coming because they were interested in technology. They wanted to try something new. They wanted to be an entrepreneur because they couldn't get a job anywhere else. You know, like, it was.

And then over the course of Silicon Valley becoming very successful and very, very common job path in the last 15 years, you attract people who were like high functioning people who could be getting paid a lot in, you know, Wall Street or on Facebook or maybe they came from those places. and then they want to start a startup, but they don't necessarily have the same tolerance for pain that some of their, you know, that other people do when they like have no choice or they're like a misfit, or they're just like, this is like the only shot I have, you know. Microacquire is a startup acquisition marketplace that cuts out the middleman. Basically, that means they help startups get acquired efficiently.

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I mean, it could make you a high performance, it also make you paralyzed. How do you mentor this next generation as you invest in them and build companies with them to manage their own fear and anxiety? Well, people ask me that a lot, right? Like, because, you know, I've been to this whole personal journey, kind of along those lines and come to a place where I'm in a much healthier mental state. And a lot of times people ask, like, hey, would you ever have started a company or could you be successful with that your present mental state, right? Where I'm like a lot more accepting of whatever the universe delivers and I'm not happier

with myself, like, accept self-accepting. And I think there's something, you know, what I love about startups is the journey, right? A lot of people come in when they're in their early 20s, maybe early 30s and they're super twisted. They're like, I have to be successful. I'm going to die. It's like, get rich or die trying like 50 cents or whatever, right? And they're like, I have this huge ship.

That was me. Like a huge chip on my shoulder. It was like, I never accepted when I was a kid by my peers. And now the only way I'm going to do it is like, I'm going to be super successful and I'm going to prove something to the world, right? Obviously, it's not a very healthy mental state because anytime we'd hit a speed bump on the journey of entrepreneurship, which for a guy starting a company with a camera on his head, was like every day.

You know, I'd feel horrible. I'd be like, this is the worst. I'm like, you know, my life is over. Like, I've, you know, ruined it. I'm like, everyone else is ahead of me. I suck at this. I had huge imposter syndrome. And what I found is like the people who I know that are the most successful,

they start somewhere there. They start with that chip. They start with the drive. But over the course of, like, you could start a billion dollar company, you know, 10 years ago, I always said 100 million, but now it's a billion dollar company and like pretty much anyone in the industry can make their company worth a billion dollars probably. But so once we go the real distance, the guys who I know who are my friends or CEOs of 10, you know, deco-corn companies or more, they always transition to like instead of doing it

from a place of fear, which is where they would start off, doing it, finding their true purpose in there, inside of there. And they don't have that like scarcity mindset or fear-based, you know, decision-making anymore. You know, and so there's a, it's a journey that goes through that. And, you know, that, that, that initial, like, scarcity mindset, like, need to prove something. That's, like, the rocket fuel that gets you launched, but it doesn't keep you in orbit, you know.

It's very interesting that you bring up motivation like this. And you think about the hero's journey. I immediately thought of, like, Star Wars and Joseph Campbell and some of the stuff. And, you know, you're called into this life to build something. You have this fear. you have this, you know, preternatural desire to be successful, to be somebody to put a camera in your face, to be the editor of a publication for people to know your name, to maybe put some numbers on the board. But those motivations, the fear motivation, the competitive motivation,

the self-doubt, self-loathing, all that stuff, it's great short term. But like you're saying, once you've made a little bit of money and all of a sudden you sit there and you have some success and you bought your house or you have money in the bank, now you're sat there and you go, okay, wait a second. What's the next? level here. And that's where you have to become a Jedi and maybe be the elder statesperson, statesman, and find another level and become a missionary, you know, and like have some higher calling. And I think if you, did you watch by chance the Michael Jordan documentary? I didn't, but I heard a lot about it. It seemed like, it's really required for anybody who's

a founder because he's the highest performer in the history of sports in all likelihood. In terms of competitiveness and drive, he clearly is. So, you know, there's obviously people's arena or, you know, in baseball, other folks, you know, but in terms of like drive, he's kind of like a sickness at him, like a deep sickness where he cannot enjoy the winning, nor can he enjoy the journey, nor can he enjoy the people who went on the journey with him. And he has him, you know, played basketball for decades. And he is loved by everybody. And he's still bitter towards his teammates and the people who got him there. And you, you come away with it with this profound sense of sadness

that he never got to evolve into that next person as we're discussing here that we see in other leaders. Yeah, and that's a tragedy, right? Like, that is, that's, like, you don't want to be there. You don't want to be there. You want.

No. Like, to me, in my journey, like, going through and starting Twitch and being successful and, you know, that was actually only a vehicle to like learn about myself. All the things I talked about were like, oh, I was like super twisted and I did have all these hanging

ups and then just like have a be in a position where I could release them. You know, and that's what I see that true value is like I like all the things I thought I wanted like that way I would be delivered by being successful like, you know, being popular or like having people accept me, whatever. It's like, and that turned out none of those things really made a difference in my life. It was really about the lessons that I learned from once I'd gotten there and seen that it wasn't that important. You know, it's nice for sure, but it wasn't that the most important thing.

Then I could like move on to other, you know, maybe. higher purposes for myself. It's a very common experience. I had a similar one. After we sold our first company, I watched, I don't know if you had the same experience when you do your first sale,

and all of a sudden you go from this fear of never having money and being broke all the time, and then all of a sudden the wire transfer comes in, and I was sitting there refreshing Bank of America, and the wire came in. You know, I'm sitting there for an hour, like an idiot, refreshing my Bank of America account, and we sell Weblogs thing to AOL, and boom, this big wire comes in.

And my wife, goes by the room and she says, why are you crying? And I said, what? And I didn't notice it, but a couple of tears had come down. And I said, I didn't realize I cried. And she said, you're crying because you got the money. I said, no, I'm crying because I never have to worry about not having money again. I just realized, like, I spent the first whatever 10 years as an adult and 20 years in the

pond, it just constantly having this strange fear of never having money. And to have all that money, then it was like, oh, well, I've checked that box. And then it was like, okay, well, what now? Right, what now? Yeah. Yeah, it was like you're happy for a week or whatever. And then... Yeah.

Yeah. But it is freeing in that you then feel, if you can find something else you'll love to do, you're free now to not have... You can start to think in a decade. You know, I started thinking in like five, ten years. I don't know how you think now about your career and the time you have left. I'm 50 now. How old are you now?

38. You're 38, right? So, yeah. Do you now start thinking like, where do I want to be when I'm 50? Where do I want to be when I'm 60? You start thinking like in decades or just think, what do I want to do this year in terms of a project? How do you manage your own psychology and your own time? I think it's still, you know, I never was a long-term planner, to be honest, when I was, you know, younger and startups do.

And then now it's the same. I just think about like, what do I love to do and who do I love to spend time with? And I have a rule that I only want to work on things that where when I see the people I'm working with, it puts a smile on my face. I like it. Yeah. And like, because it's like short, like you got to spend time with certain people. Like I want to spend time with people where I enjoy their company. And, and then that's it.

Like, I just work on things that are interesting to me. And hopefully they intersect with things that I think are good to put out in the world. And, you know. All right. To everybody who's listening, this is a collaboration. First time we're trying it, we're streaming to both of our channels on YouTube. If you were part of the this week in startups audience, you can go to YouTube. com slash Justin K-K-A-N-T-V.

and subscribe to your channel. And there's a little bell next to the subscribe button. You click that bell. You'll get notified whenever Justin goes live or post the video. You can do the same at YouTube.com slash this weekend if you're so inclined. Tell everybody about what you're doing on YouTube now and how, what the response has been from young founders who obviously look up to you in a tremendous way. Yeah, well, so on YouTube, I started thinking about a year ago and I was making this podcast. I am still called The Quest,

which was kind of like inspired by my own story of trying to go through being successful and then finding it a little bit hollow and then find some other things that were more meaningful to me. I noticed all these people had similar stories of entrepreneurship or like in all these different categories, sports or entertainment. So I started doing this podcast and then

I was trying to hire someone to help me promote the podcast and I ended up posting in this Gen Z server, like a Discord server, to try to find someone young to help me out with it. And I got this response by this woman, Jen, who's like, you know, very young product manager in tech. And she was like, you should have a YouTube channel. And it's kind of like, I don't know.

I don't know if I want to do the work. Sounds like a lot of work. It is a lot of work. And so she was like, look, look, I'll help you make it. I'll do all the editing. All you have to do is buy camera, put it in yourself and tell a story. And so I was like, okay, I'm someone who's like, I'm often very much like a yes and person.

And I'm like, hey, let's just try it out, see what happens. So I said, okay, I'll try it. So bought a camera, record a few stories, and she edited them, and they turned out really a lot better than I ever thought they would. And so we threw them up on YouTube and they got a pretty good response. And then I just had a lot of fun with it. So I've been making videos ever since for the last almost a year now. And it's got a pretty good response from the tech community.

I think I'm very vulnerable and open about the things that happen and whether it was shutting down atrium and, you know, laying off 180 people or the wins as well and things I learn, things I'm not good at. And so, you know, it's kind of an experiment. But it's pretty cool because people, people like it. You know, I get a lot of positive feedback. I got texted this morning from a friend I had on the podcast. Harry Shuck is the founder of, um, uh, fuck a blank on the name, $30 billion enterprise sales company. Um, and, uh, well, that in ours had down to 67 companies right now in this market. So many big companies and says.

He was texting and telling me, he was one of his employees, he was in Israel, Israel office and one of his employees was like a huge fan and like said that, you know, I inspire her. He was like, if Justin could do it, I could do it. I was like that's so meaningful to me, you know, like to get that feedback from people around the world for the content I've created. So really happy to be doing that. And then I've also been making a YouTube podcast.

I basically copied, like I lost. like I watch All In. By the way, I'm like the biggest all-in fan. Oh, really? Thank you. Yeah. Dude, you're, you figured out. You're a great, by the way, you're a great host.

And sometimes your co-hosts don't give you enough credit for it. They started to more recently, but like for a long time they'd give you the credit for it. So I want to call that out. I appreciate that. It's interesting because they, the public has been saying like, why are they giving you a hard time about your moderation skills. Like, you literally keep the show moving. And right as I think somebody's getting boring

or the old thing's dragging, you ask a good question, you're pivoted or whatever. It just comes from having done 1,200 podcast episodes. I kind of get a sense of when things are getting boring and when to move on to the next subject. But, um, so, yeah, they all in is some weird, it's weird how popular it's gotten so quickly. It's like creating a super team or something in the NBA.

And it's become more than the sum of its parts, you know? Well, it's really, it's funny because I spent a lot of time thinking about it because I'm a big fan and I love the content. Like, I drive a lot between Northern California and L.A., right? So I'll eight hours and I'll listen to like a couple episodes on the drive. And then I saw, I was like, he's having so much fun doing this or like these guys are going to have time having so much fun. So I made a YouTube show. Like, we'll do a show. I've got three of my other like kind of YC related friends.

Yeah. Yeah, I kind of copy. I was shameless. I was like, look, I'm just copying. It's been about 10 people who have said the same thing to me and they're kind of trying to figure out their quartet and I'm like, that's great. Get your besties together and do it.

Because usually just, I mean, it was primarily motivated because you guys seem like you're having so much fun. Oh, it's hilarious. Yeah. Yeah. But like people don't know behind the scenes.

It's so much work to like if you can like corral your rich friends that get in one place and have like sound like show up with like equipment and like upload the videos. No, I have all the idea because I've done it with like. You know. Yeah. The public doesn't know. Yeah, with like Cyble, Michael Seibel and Emmett,

she heard my co-founder as a Twitch CEO and like getting people to like, like upload a video on Google Drive or like to like have a headset. You know, like, it's crazy. It's, it's surprising how. Yeah. The first 25 episodes was me trying to get people to commit and then sending them headsets and I just said, you know, I'm going to commit to doing this. I have my own podcasting team.

I got seven people on the podcasting team between ad sales and producers and editors and everything. And I said, like, listen, just send them the equipment. And if they lose it, just send it to them again, go down to the, run to their place, you know, install the software, show them how to use it, walk them through it, do a tech check with them, get them to upload it, all this stuff. And something happened after the Robin Hood episodes and that whole thing, where we had this, that whole, when Robin Hood shut down trading, yada, and then Vlad came on the pod. The podcast went like five or 10x that week. And then Friedberg and Sachs and Chamatha, I think for the first time, got a taste of what it's like to, you know, something you and I have experienced when you get a lot of attention at once. And everybody starts talking to you about it. And that's when they kind of clicked into it. And I said, if you want to be successful with this, we just have to do it every Friday. You have to mark off your calendars and tell your EAs and your assistants and your spouses. That time is sacrosan.

It cannot change Fridays at 11. And I would say four out of five Fridays, they bought into that. Yeah. it's funny but this week it hit number 42 the episode hit number 42 on all podcast episodes in the world which is mind-blowing after 55 episodes or 56 episodes yeah it's amazing but it's great let's say you you did a good job of i don't know if it's like you just picked your friends who you would balance each other but you did a good job of the origin story is chmoth chumoth pinged me and said hey i want to do the podcast and i was like yeah you can go on this week and start up anytime he's been on

six or seven times. And he said, no, no, I want to do a podcast with just the two of us. So you interview me, I interview you, we talk, you talk about startups, I talk about late stage, and we just chop it up. I was like, great, you know, we're in the middle of a pandemic. I don't get to see enough, great. So we started doing it. And then we're like, you know what?

Sachs wrote something really good about masks. And then we're like, yeah, and Friedberg talked a little bit about, you know, his theories on this and he's a science guy. Freiburg didn't have a Twitter handle at the time. And they both came on. And then it was like, wow, this is really working. And the only thing that is any debate now, I think, in the format is the amount of politics. I don't know how you feel about politics on the pod, but I'll just ask you, what do you think?

And for people in the chat room, what do you think about when we cover politics? Because it's been polarizing. Obviously, politics is the most polarizing thing. No, I like it. I like it. I mean, because I'm somewhere, you know, the problem, though, with any sort of group of like, you know, your group or like my friends, it's like all got to be kind of like libertarian-ish purple in the middle. There's not enough. I think it's not actually divisive enough.

Like, there's not people who are really taking far enough positions on opposite sides. I mean, sometimes you get Chamoth and, and, uh, sacks, you know, but like, really people are for, like, sensible policy based on, like, kind of some, you know, utility maximizing function, right? Which is, like, you know, radical for, like, America, perhaps. But, like, it's, you know, Silicon Valley is kind of like just in the middle. And so I just don't feel like it's that extreme. to me it's a little bit like predictable. Yeah, I agree that we're pretty like close to each other in this purple area where we, you know, the two,

which I think represents America and certainly represents the tech industry because we're used to not knowing the answer to a question, designing an experiment, aka product or service, deploying it in the real world and looking at the metrics and the anecdotal feedback and just saying, okay, let's iterate on that. Whereas in politics, you have to be like, I'm anti-immigration, I'm pro-immigration. no borders, all borders, you know, torture people in cages or, you know, let people just steal all of our jobs. It's just like, is there no thoughtful idea here?

Why don't we run a test for two years, examine the results of the test, and then iterate on the test? And nobody can have that conversation in politics, which feels like it's the end of the, this grand experiment in democracy that you can't admit that you've changed your opinion about something. Yeah, it's like you,

the definition of political or like an issue becoming political is that it is something that you like have decided a priori before there is any sort of data, which is, you know, an insane way to really run anything. It's like, look at immigration. You and I have seen over and over again in our contemporaries, extraordinary people come to this country or their parents and absolutely create massive, massive amounts of jobs, wealth, taxes, joy, and, you know, further support this great democratic experiment known as America against the communist in the country, communist in the world, and the authoritarian

in the world. And you try to talk about something like immigration and people are like, all or none. And it's like, how about point-based system or, or now we, we don't have, people don't want to go to work. So why not allow some people in who want the jobs? Like, is the post-pandemic world and what we do for immigration, should that be the same as the pre-pandemic world? I don't know. You know,

like, we can't even have a reasonable discussion about how do you think about immigration in this country? Did your parents immigrate here or? My dad was born here. My grandma on my dad's side was born here. So it's kind of like Chinese who came over

in like, you know, like, I don't know, like 19, early 1900s right? Wow. But my...

Did they immigrate to San Francisco? No, she was, my grandma was born in Ellensburg, Washington, which is like this small town in Washington State. But my mom immigrated here, part of like 10 siblings who immigrated here. So it would be called like a chain migration now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What did she immigrate from? Did she immigrate from China? She came from, she was Chinese, but she came from Malaysia.

So she was Chinese in Malaysia. So, you know, there is, to me, we should be finding the most talented people in the world and we're educating them and that we should be stapling a visa with their diploma to stay here because, you know, like that's like that's a Silicon Valley. That's a pretty common thought in Silicon Valley. And I think we need like different quotas for different educational. Like, I mean, it should be based on like the capacity of the United States to generate jobs in that area. And I think we've had like a huge capacity that we've like to generate technology focused or into jobs. So like for engineering jobs, technology jobs, we want those people to stay

and build wealth and create industries and companies, you know, for other types of jobs. Like that might not be the case. I mean, for farm work or jobs we have like this huge capacity. If people don't want those jobs in America, we should, you know, maybe think about a different visa quota for that. And I think it should be job-based, yeah. Yeah, that seems completely logical. Like, what can, you know, How many people can we actually assimilate into this melting pot that is America so that they have a great experience and they become productive members of society? Obviously, it's such a popular place to come. You can't have everybody in the world come here, but you can have a lottery for people who could take entry-level jobs or trucking jobs that nobody wants because the ports are backed up or, you know, jobs working, you know, in menial tests that Americans don't seem to want to do.

What's your best advice to young people regarding what to do in the early parts of their career? taking like late high school and then into college to prepare themselves for the world in this 21st century, which is obviously a lot difference than the world you and I came into where your degree was pretty important. Yeah, I think the most important thing is to just optimize for learning. That's what I tell people. It's like you want to take the job when you're younger. You don't take the job or do the experience that's learning optimized. A lot of people have it backwards where they're like, I want to, you know, make money first,

then I'm going to do whatever I want and like going to the industry or want. But I think it's someone once told me like your 20s are for learning, your 30s are for earning. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah, I really believe that. I think like when you're young, you should optimize for learning as much as possible. And that could be a job choice. You know, it could be finding the right opportunity that exposes you to the most things.

It could be like what you're learning in school, like technically or engineering-wise. But, you know, I think I would, I think optimizing for learning and breadth of learning is very important. it does seem like coming to a startup where the startup is by definition resource constrained. If you come to a startup, typically there's no amount of work that you can't take on because they're they're shortstaffed. And when I went to work for big companies, you would get in trouble for doing things that weren't your job. It's hey, do your job. Don't do that. That's this person's job. You had five people doing one job. And at a startup, you got one person doing five jobs. It's pretty much the best place you can wind up, no?

Yeah, exactly. Like, startup, even if a startup doesn't work, you're going to learn a lot. And I know that sounds like something like the founder of a startup would say to try to convince, like, somebody to join. But, like, one example is like I just talked to, you know, a friend of my employee who used to work for me. He was very, you know, he joined Atrium. Like, he was, you know, just a couple years out of college, joined Atrium. And it didn't work, right? And he left after like a year or whatever.

It was kind of a cluster, you know, all sorts of different reasons. But he left every year. And obviously the company didn't work, but now he's running like a business that does like $5 million. He's basically bootstrapped a business like doing, you know, $5 million of revenue a year. And we had a catch up and he told me this and I was like, wow, you know, like, and from Atrium, you'd probably just learn a bunch of things and what not to do, to be honest. You know, instead of raising $75 million and turning into $25 or whatever, he raised no money and turned into $5 million a year business, great for him.

And, you know, that's an example of, I think, you know, you can get something out of any experience and experiences, even the ones that don't make you super financially successful, can prove be really valuable to you later on. Yeah, 100%. Oh, you know what I was going to ask you, too, as a follow-up, what skills are easy to acquire or take the least amount of time to acquire, but have the biggest benefit at a startup or in tech or in a desired skill? In other words, I want to get a job in a startup, but in the next six months,

what can I do every weekend, every night instead of watching TV and playing video games? What can I learn? Developing is the obvious. is one. Learn how to program smart contracts. Yeah, sure. Learn how to your developer, learn how to like do make solidity, right? Yeah, or like embed yourself in, let's say you don't want to be a programmer, you don't have programming skills or it's not your proclivity.

Like learn how to create community, you know, because people who are able to drive community online, especially, are able to drive, you know, like all of these, you know, it's momentum around these PFP, these profile picture and NFTs, like, it's like community-driven, people driving, you know, creating online movements. And I think that's like an individual skill set right now. I think it's such a good one. I was trying to find a community manager.

I realized it doesn't exist. And I couldn't find any. And so I was like, I'm just going to hire smart people and have them figure it out. And we'll do trial and error. We'll look at other communities. I mean, the people who run subreddits right now or who are great on hacker news

or just awesome on Cora and answer people, people's questions, like, I don't think they understand exactly how valuable they are. Because if you can get a hundred people to show up somewhere every day and talk about something and then get it to 500 or a thousand or 2,000, that's the start of a movement right there. Like, I mean, the first 100 customers, the first thousand customers are the hardest. If you can get them all to coalesce in a Discord or Slack or a subreddit, my lord, that is like kerosene for startups, is it not? Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, ultimately, moving people or like getting people aligned and like move a certain direction or like engaged. That's like an indelible leadership skill set. That's, you know. Super. The other one I love is if you're not into programming, maybe community is not your bag. Being able to do mockups like U-Act, UI design, build a figma or an envision that's clickable. And then you're sitting there next to the founder or founders and they're talking about an idea. and you whip it up in Figma

and then you send it to your boss and you're like, hey, you were talking about this like a little idea you had. I just made a couple mock-ups. All of a sudden, you've manifested the founder's ideas into a reality that's tangible.

And then you just took what was a discussion of an idea and then manifested it in a product in the real world. That is a superpower. That's like being a mutant in the X-Men. Like, it's such a powerful thing. You've probably worked with a UX designer who like grooves with you

and you say something and they just make it. Yeah, yeah, we have, I'm working on this one new startup project and, you know, we haven't written a line of code, but we have this amazing designer who's really breed life into like what the application is built on top of this protocol would look like. And it's like makes a huge amount of difference in inspiring people, getting people to join the project. Funding. I mean, as I tell people, like a picture's worth a thousand words. A video is worth like a million and a prototype is worth like a trillion. Once they have the prototype, they don't need any words. They just, they take the mouse out of your hand. They start clicking and they're like, I get it. No need to talk.

You don't need to tell me the vision. I clicked on your clickable. And then how many times you get pitches for angel investing and, you know, somebody, and somebody sends you a Figma design or an envision? Like, that's one out of a hundred pitches. That should be a hundred out of a hundred should come. Like, here's the Figma. Here's the vision.

Go click. Have fun. Here's a bubble, you know? Yeah. Yeah, it makes it so much. like more real, right? Like when someone can, the human beings are visual animals.

So like it makes it much, much more real to be able to see the product. Yes. And when we see something visually and then we can click it, now again, that credibility takes another leap up. It's like just the act of being able to click it, even though that's just two images,

basically, you know, loading one page. It's like hyperlinks from 1994 from the Mosaic browser. It still releases something in a human. Like screens want to be touched. They want to move and they want to click. And when you put that together, my credibility goes way, way up.

Here's a question from Andy O. I'm not sure from which of our communities. It could be from Justin Conn TV or this weekend on YouTube. Biggest missed opportunity and why. Hmm. Biggest missed opportunity and why. What do you think? I mean.

Like, I guess there's so many financially. You know, I have a long list. I'm sure you have the same. Yes, the anti-portfolio. Yeah, Airbnb, be getting, you know, helping them get into YC, but like my co-founder Emmett was going to invest

like 25K at a $300,000 valuation or something like that. And I just never, never followed up. And we could have, we could have invested in that one, you know, like my friend Ben showed me Pinterest before launched and I just didn't get it. I was like, oh, you know, I didn't get it. I mean, even more recently, I'll tell you one recently, like a year ago, I almost invested or whatnot. I really like the team, but then my, my,

explain what it is. What not is like a digital, like a live shopping for collectibles, like a live shopping app. And they just raised money on $1.5 billion valuation. Wow. And they came to you, of course, because you're the king of streaming,

yada, yada. Yeah. And even you didn't see that. Well, it was like, I actually was like really excited about the team. And then the space itself was like, I was just kind of, okay, whatever on the space.

But then, we had just invested in a bunch of companies and had come burned out on investing at that moment that like one moment like they got me the wrong like week right and so then I was just like let it let it go and then obviously you know I mean it's funny I emailed the founder

was like oh well you proved me wrong like you know it's amazing yes congratulations there's just so many so many it's so many you don't have to hit everything you know for me we're on re-stream right now the software's incredible they contacted me like three years ago and I never responded because I at some point my inbound peak so much that I had to hire two researchers, two associates,

and just a whole group of people just to respond to my emails coming in to make sure I don't miss stuff. And, you know, apologies to people over the last five years where I never got back to. But, you know, it's hard to hit super router status in the world. You've had to deal with this where it's just you literally could have 10 of you and not respond even but briefly to the people who are inbound. And so that was a tough one. And then, of course, before I was an angel investor and really was thinking about that. One of my friends were starting a car company,

another one was starting Twitter, and the third one was starting online poker or Zinga. And I didn't even think of asking or saying yes when they offered for me to invest. So, you know, you can have your regrets, but I mean, when you wind up doing so well, I don't even think about that now. Like, it's not even on my mind, like what I didn't hit.

How do you deal with setbacks building a tech product? I realize you have to change your tech stack, et cetera. It was a good technical blocking and tackling question, Justin. How do you deal with, God, you know, you build something and you got the sunken cost, and now you have this emotional wreckage of having to throw it away? Well, I generally question, like, you know, a lot of people want to rewrite their product all the time, and, like, I just nine times out of ten, or maybe like four times out of five, it's probably, like, not necessary. I question whether that's truly necessary.

I think for engineers, and I've been in that position as an engineer, it's like, it's easy to say, oh, if we rewrite it, it's going to solve everything. And, like, oftentimes I did not, that wasn't the right move. You know, it was like an investment of resources that didn't really yield, like, the result that we wanted or, like, create a different downstream mistakes. So I would challenge the assumption. Yeah, it's, sometimes people don't want to take the hard medicine of, hey, we have a problem with product, market fit or we don't understand our customers. So what can we do that doesn't involve engaging the customer and figuring out this fundamental problem? I know what we can do. We can upgrade all the servers, move to this

new thing, rewrite the stack and we'll kick this problem, this can down the road of the problem of like, do consumers even want what we're building for six months? And it's better sometimes to just stay in the same code base, iterate, and figure out what your customers want. I think it was the genius of Eric Reese and Steve Blank with the lean startup as they were like, don't invest all this technical baggage, build an MVP. Now you have all the no-code platforms, web flow, bubble, Notion, Squarespace, whatever, you know, if this, then that. You can build all these really interesting MVPs and just test it and see if people like it.

So much easier. Yeah. Yeah. 100%. Okay. What's the most misunderstood business or crypto currently? That's a great question. What are people not understand in the crypto space that you think is brilliant and going to

change everything. I'm building on the question. Or in the regular world. Yeah. I mean, I've been pretty red-pilled on crypto now. You know, I was always holding it. But now I'm really excited for the projects, like kind of, you know, I was never super interested in defy.

It like seemed like a lot of crypto was just speculation on things. But now I feel like there are actual applications that people are creating and, and they're, you know, consumer applications. And so, you know, I'm pretty excited about what I think. think it's the most interesting thing about crypto to me is it's a way to distribute incentives, right? It's a way to change incentives. So by a lot of people that have ownership for this token, they basically flip from, you know, someone who's just like a random person to somebody who's like incentivized to evangelize this community. And, you know, one of my friends

started this company called Brain Trust or project called Brain Trust, which is like distributed upward. It's like a freelancing network. And they're making it on crypto. It was a crypto project. I'm like, why should this be crypto? I just didn't get it for years. And finally, he explained it to me as like, well, if you think equity is a great way to incentivize employees in Silicon Valley to build something great,

imagine if you gave equity, had a vehicle for giving equity to like 100,000 freelancers who make their market. And that's what they did. And now they're, I think the protocols worth $2 billion or something around there. E-T-R-S-T. And so if you are a freelancer, you get some brain trust coins as part of being in the network, I guess in addition to getting money, where maybe you substitute one or the other. It looks like usebraintrust.com is the website really interesting.

The thing that's got me, so I really think that's interesting. In other words, the thing that I hated most, all these ICOs and the scamming and this anonymous, like, you know, grift and trying to find a new bag holder and pump and dumps, and all that kind of stuff, that's the most negative framing of it and like a horrible behavior where people are going to lose their money. Then on the other side,

well, wait a second, if properly deployed and people aren't speculating, but they're participating, well, that's super inspiring. It's a way to give equity to everybody in a distributed way where there's no central authority to it. And so if the token grows like crazy, everybody wins and everybody's incentivized to make it grow.

The problem is like making it grow by, you know, being toxic and be like, have fun being forward. poor, you don't own any Bitcoin, huh, huh, you're going to be poor. It's like gross. Yeah.

It has to be considered. Exactly. And it's like equity, right? Like, you know, there's been examples of people who, you know, start immoral startup founders who are like, hey, instead of taking a salary, you should be going to get paid entirely in equity.

And then they like, it's the whole thing is a fraud or whatever. And then employees lose their shirts. And that's like, obviously, equity is a tool, right? That can be used in a way that is, great for your employee base. It can be used in a way that's probably exploitative on your

employee base. The same thing is true of like creating a token system, like a crypto token. It can be used in a way that's like extremely exploitative, which is, you know, like some scam, pump and dump. Or it can be used in a way that incentivizes a pool of people to create a shared outcome, right? Or to try to move towards a shared outcome or to push them new vision of the world. Building infrastructure to do certain things in the world, whether it's file coin for file storage or there's one for music now and distributing music files or

you know, uh, doing money transfer and running service is all interesting. The thing that's got me, uh, that I the bug I can't get rid of is the Dow's. Um, I keep watching this and going, when do I jump in? Like, I have funds. I've got

a syndicate. My syndicate is basically a Dow. Except I make the decision. They decide what I decide which company we're going to put forward. they decide how much they're going to put into it. If I could do that on a global basis and have an unlimited supply of pools of capital come in, they may not be best to decide which companies get funded, but maybe there is something to that, you know.

So I've been looking at these DAOs, not for trading NFTs like Flamingo and other stuff, but I wonder if like venture capital or, you know, the syndicate or an accelerator could have a DAW. Like if there was a YC Dow or a Launch Dow or TechStars Dow, How would that work? Have you thought about that? Have you had conversations about that?

What do you think of DAW? There's some YC alumni who are creating a DAO to do like investments in YC companies and like build a community around, you know, doing the investments. And I think it's interesting. I like the idea of like a DAO as an organization, a way that humans organize. Right now you have like corporations, you have nonprofits, but like a DAO is like something that's a little bit different. And we're still like figuring out how that works exactly.

but I like the idea of it and I'm particularly What part of the idea do you like of that? I like the idea of like it's like it's like a so with an employee with like a company right you have people or employees or you have people or not right like it's kind of binary.

Shareholders employees yeah. Yeah, yeah. Shareholders and employees and then and then like customers. That's it right. Customers. With a Dow you can, it's kind of like you know, my understanding seeing how some of these new Dow startups are going to be created, they have, you know,

they're actually like allowing people to sit somewhere between like full employee and like, you know, freelancer and they have like can make more, you know, they're basically, it's like the whole thing is like run by freelancers almost, right? And then how much they're getting paid is kind of voted on by like a community prioritization. And it's a very democratic way of running organization, which may be good for certain types of organizations, right? Like, I'm not convinced that like every company should be a doubt because in some companies it's better for it to be a benevolent dictatorship, right?

We want one person who's like, this is the direction. I'm the product genius. You do what I say, right? Yeah, SpaceX with Elon, right? You're building a spaceship. Like, you can't be iterating on 17 different designs concurrently in voting. Like, you need to pick a design and iterate and get to Mars. Yeah.

And exactly. You want Elon who's, you know, going to give his blood, blood, sweat and tears to figure that out, right? like he's in charge. You want that guy, right? And but I think there's interesting, like, you know, I've always been interested in, it was just like every other techie. I want to, I've been interested in how do you create like a new city or town, you know?

And I think that would be a project that, you know, you could, you make a Dow from the beginning because it's like very, it's inherently democratic, right? But like, and so you could, I think there's, there's, the Dow has an opportunity to create like new forms of organization and self-organization. I think is really fascinating and I'm not even sure that we know what they're going to be

good for yet. They're programmable and they're votable and they're online and social so there's like a very interesting sort of comparative

here, you know, they have LLCs, structures or partnerships in them. These are like programmable LLCs in a way and they, you know,

can share the decision making and when the tools come out where you can go to a website just like building a Squarespace website or whatever or Twilio and you just type in what you want your DAO to do.

You write the code, okay, here's how we do voting. Here's how what happens if people want to sell their shares and get out of the Dow. And you think about Burning Man and like camps, people can build camps. They get a certain amount of space. They self-organize and then the camps make up Burning Man. It's the city idea is really clever because it's like, okay, we're going to put a bunch of money together. We're going to buy a city. Well, we're going to put a bunch of money together.

We're going to buy three cities. And we're going to develop them. And you can live in one or two or three of those cities, however many you want. and you get to vote on them. So do you want to have fiber as our first project to bring fiber into the community? Or do you want to bring satellite into the community? What do you want to,

how are we going to bring internet to the community? How are we going to do education in the community? Could be really interesting, right? And people have skin in the game and the own shares in the community. I find it super inspiring to really rethink all of that. So what is the highest leverage use of time? Hmm. What is the highest leverage use of time?

I guess I'll add to that your time. What's the highest use of Justin's time? I think for me it's like to inspire other people. You know, that's not what I think my highest leverage use of time. It's like I'm not going to be the programmer or program something myself anymore. I'm not even going to be the manager who like manages a project. What I really love to do is like I love to sell a vision and excite people. I catalyze a group of people to do something.

And so for me, I spend a lot of my time figuring out, how can I inspire people to, like, build things that I want to see in the world? So my YouTube channel is like that. It's like, hey, people want to build startups. I want to help them on their hero's journey. And so a lot of what I talk about is like just trying to, or my videos are about trying to help inspire people. And then the projects I work on, it's like, I'm not going to be the CEO anymore.

You don't even want me as a CEO. I'm like, like we talked about earlier. I am too, I'm too, I'm too rich now. I'm like not, you know, I'm not do or die anymore. I'm the guy who's like shutting down the startup instead of laying off, you know, seven people. Like, because I'm like, I don't need the pain anymore. But what I can do is help inspire a new CEO who is hungry and really wants to go to like to do his best and to help him or her and get, you know, get off the ground and and get running. And so that's, that's my, that's what I love to do now.

And that's, I think that's the highest leverage use of my time. I think that's brilliant. I, you know, to answer to myself, I'd say, I am, I've turned out to be a really good friend to people. I don't know how that happened. That's like my great skill set. I like to think I'm good at communicating in media. I like to think I'm good at investing or, you know, building media brands and I enjoy those things. The thing is actually being a bestie to people, like being a good friend to people, whether it's somebody who I invest in their company or just somebody in my personal life.

Being there to help people solve their problems and being of service them is, I think, the highest oil. or the one where I feel the most joy, you know, and I'm lucky to have a lot of friends who are very successful. And, you know, it's nice to be on the short list of people where they say, yeah, can you help me with something? Like, okay, sure, I'd love to help you with something. It feels great to be of service. So you think we have some overlap there.

This question's great. How do you go from working at a no-name tech company, Google, I'm guessing, the bigger players. Let's say this is from a Stanford of a data scientist. So I'll expand that to, hey, maybe you could, become a player yourself as a data scientist or find like, you know, become a bigger player or a bigger player?

How do you level up either way, becoming indie or becoming bigger part of the machine? It was from the point of view of a data scientist. I'm sure you have some ideas. Yeah, I think, you know, I saw a lot of people do this. Actually, in the early days of Justin TV or Twitch, they would like go from like no name or like maybe a student to like working for us and then they'd catch up like Facebook. and it didn't like go over there. And, you know, I think that it's just about finding, you know, you're working at this company

and it's kind of like what I talked about earlier where you're optimizing for learning. It's like go do the projects that are going to challenge you, do the projects that are, you know, that are, where you're going to learn a lot and then figure out how, you know, be good at articulating or learn how to articulate the things you learned and how you surmounted those challenges. And then go interview at a better company or better. job and like be able to articulate what you learned and that is the key you know that's when you're interviewing someone like this is true for startups and i'm sure you feel the same way but also for like employees it's like i want to hire people where i learn from them and so generally in an interview

process setting yeah yeah you're looking for like can this person do these jobs you know can do this job do this company or whatever but then you're also like oftentimes i'm looking what do i learn from this interaction and the people i learn from that's who i want to hire all right everybody who's watching give a smash the thumbs up button on both channels remember you can subscribe to justin's amazing channel at youtube.com slash justin con tv justin k an tv and you can subscribe to youtube dot com slash this weekend for this week in startups go ahead and smash the thumbs up button on both channels that basically hacks the algorithm at youtube you smash the thumbs up you hit the subscribe more people find these videos more people get advice from it i think you know, becoming a media brand

is something that people think will take a lot of work. It's really simple. If your name is Dina and you're in data science and you become data science Dina and you change her, you know,

Twitter handle, your Instagram handle to that. And but once or twice a week, you write a blog post or do a short video or interview somebody in audio only or make an infographic or do a thread on Twitter,

you would be surprised after 52 weeks of doing that. The consistency of publishing, how much higher your profile will get. And then people will come find you. So instead of trying to convince people over long emails or whatever, demonstrate it in the real world.

When you demonstrate in the real world that you're good at something, my God, the inbound goes crazy because we as leaders and Justin and I have to make a lot of hiring decisions, right, or investment decisions, you're looking at a group of people. Let's say there's 10 people. And two of them are out there in the world doing stuff that is related to the needs. you have as a leader who gets to decide who gets the job, who gets the gig, who gets the financing. And the other eight people are telling you they can do it. And two people are showing you can do it. Who are you going to go with Justin? Exactly. Exactly. The person who's showing,

that's always a good luck. Yeah. I mean, you might take a chance of somebody if there's not somebody out there's showing it, but man, just thinking about like what could a data scientist do? Just, I mean, just talking about data science problems, just or becoming the number one or number two person answering data science questions on Quora. All of a sudden, you know, if somebody came to me and said, I've answered a thousand questions about startups and angel investing and podcasting. I'd love to come work for you on Quora. Here's my thing.

I got 10,000 followers. I'd be like, okay, you're hired. You couldn't have done that. You answered 1,000 questions, you know, like you're good at it. Something happens after a thousand things. The 10,000 hours, I think after a thousand podcast or a thousand quora questions, you're going to be good. All right.

Listen, this has been great. Justin, you're awesome. It's great to know you. You're awesome. Well, I honestly, like, I feel like you and I never really got to be bros, but we see each other once in a while socially or otherwise. But I've always respected your absolute enthusiasm for what we do in our industry of creating the new and just being creative and relentlessly supportive of other people. You know, it's very easy to make the money, kick the ladder out from behind you. And I've always just respected your enthusiasm for helping other people and building cool shit in the world.

I appreciate your time and just knowing you. It's good to know you. Thank you. Thank you. It's good to know you. And thank you for the podcast, by the way. You provided me countless of hours of entertainment. It really has been a pleasure.

People always say, like, I went to a party this weekend. Literally the first four people at the party said I love all in. On the way into the party, it was an industry party. So, you know, but I thought four out of four. It's pretty crazy. And they all said the same thing. I just love it. I look forward to every week.

And I said, I got a new response to people. I was like, that's so amazing. You love it half as much as we love making it. So thanks for tuning in. You know, it's like, it's such a joy to make it every week and making it fun every week. And so I wish you luck with your all in with Michael and your other co-founders. And we'll see you all next time on Justin Conn TV or this week in startups or wherever you're watching this.