This Week in Startups - What is a Vibe Capitalist? Bedrock’s Geoff Lewis on investing, crypto, city-states, defense & AI | E1340

Episode Date: December 7, 2021

Geoff Lewis is a Co-Founder and Managing Director at Bedrock Capital. He joins to discuss lessons from entrepreneurship (1:25), why "vibe" is the critical way he assesses founders (11:44), his investment in Praxis, a city-state building company (23:15), his unique answer to the contrarian question (31:17), defense tech, AI and much more.

coming up on this weekend startups. You and I are going to have a difference of opinion on Lyft versus Uber. I tend to be, you know, bullish on Lyft long term. I was on the board there for many years as we were brawling with Travis and crew over at Uber. And I think they've got a, you know, sort of like, what's not like going up against Travis? Hell on Earth. There's hell on Earth. It's hell on Earth. That's what I knew for sure. I was never going to found another company. And I'm like, what these guys are going through. Oh, man. The hygiene. behind the scenes. We can do a whole other live stream on that. Yeah, that could be a two-hour episode. This week in startups is brought to you by.

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All right. Next up on the program in his first appearance on this week in startups is, Jeff Lewis. He is a self-described, failed entrepreneur and now vibe capitalist. He's actually been doing quite well as an investor. He's with a bedrock capital and has been there since 2017, which he started after leaving Founders Fund. Bedrock, according to Pitchbock, has $6 billion in assets under management, 260 million in dry powder. You probably know some of the start Up's Canva, when we had Melanie on the program back on episode 939. He invested in Steve, my Greek brother, from Cameo, Episode 963, if you haven't seen that episode. He was a great guest, too.

And recently, we had Garrett Langley on from Flock Safety and Investment I missed, but I thought was absolutely incredible, a little controversial, but overall, I think a very important startup that tracks license plates in neighborhoods to reduce crime. That was episode 1249. He also led the series B in a startup called Lyft, which got absolutely demolished by Uber. Welcome to the program, Jeff Lewis. What's up, Jason? What a great intro.

I thought you had to have fun with the intro since you are absolutely an irrepressible, delightful, candid, personality on Twitter. Is that a, is that how you've been your whole life, just absolutely unfiltered and candid? Or is this a character you play on Twitter? Well, it's neither. It's neither.

It has, it's been a recent development, I'd say. I'd say, since, I'd say 2019 was kind of a turning point for me, where I decided, you know what, I've spent so much time hearing so much what other people think about me. I'm just going to stop caring.

And it was sort of an evolution. I'd say it started in 2019. It sort of got accelerated through COVID. And at this point, there's like one stakeholder who I care about, which is the entrepreneurs that I work with. That's the only person I care about. And beyond that, I'm just myself. If we vibe, we vibe.

If we don't, we don't. And that's kind of the way it is. Well, you know what? Having independent success as an investor and coming to this realization is completely freeing. and we'll make you a great guest on podcasts at the very least because I have an X, Y, access for great guests, which is, how successful are you and how candid are you? And typically, as people get more successful, they perceive they have something to lose so their answers become more staged and media trained. And then the best guests are, you know, Chamath or Keith Rubei or David Sachs or Mark Cuban or Chris Saka. because as their success goes up,

their candidness goes up, and it makes it just so much easier. So let's go back a little bit. Tell me about the failed startup and not being able, because I saw you talk about this in a talk you gave at Web Summit, which was pretty funny. In the Web Summit talk, you talked about how you wanted to be a legendary entrepreneur

and absolutely did not come close. You were pretty self-deprecating, which was charming. But that eventually led to you becoming, a investor. So let's start there. What was the startup you created and why didn't it succeed? And what did you learn? Well, the startup was ultimately this company called TopGest, which actually wasn't a failure. We sold the company and it was sort of two to three X for our investors and we made money as founders. But on a relative basis, it was a failure. But we didn't lose

anyone's money, which is always important when you're an entrepreneur, at least from my vantage point now as an investor certainly. And J-Cal, you were one of the first people that actually was pitched the startup. Okay. Because we launched the first version of the company at TechCrunch 50, which I believe you were the co-eer back in the time. I was. And it was called Udors initially.

We ended up pivoting it. We auditioned for TechCrunch 50 in the old Sequoia offices. Yep. And it was sort of a very auspicious start to a very inauspicious exit. So, you know, sort of fast forward, two and a half years, one pivot later. No product market fit. I'd burned through sort of several team members and there's sort of a shoe string team. What was the original business idea?

And then what was the pivot? People always love a good pivot. Yeah, I mean, the original business idea ended up getting executed correctly by quite honestly Instagram and Pinterest. So it was you could tag brands and places in your photos. So you're trying to create a new photo sharing app. We launched about a year before Instagram, or two or three years, pardon me. The execution was just horrible.

I mean, I'm not an engineer. I'm not a designer. I'm sort of like a business thinker type person. And we just never had those chops. So it was about tagging brands and places in your pictures. We then pivoted it when we saw that like four square, remember like 2010, 2011, four square guala getting momentum to basically be you could earn rewards, whether they were sort of like loyalty points from actual loyalty programs like airlines and

hotels or cash rewards for like checking into places. And we called that business top guess. ended up selling it to a privately held travel company. It was a brutal pivot. It was really like we had a business that didn't work. We kind of did a 180 and then ended up eking out an exit. And it was sort of a two-and-a-half-year journey for me from like 29 to mid-2011. So it sounds like the lessons there were, hey, design and execution are paramount.

You had the right idea, but you didn't execute at a high level. so you never got enough traction and product market fit. So that's just a super important lesson for founders. Why don't you double click on that and expand on it in terms of how you carry that lesson forward as an investor when you work with new entrepreneurs? How do you fix that problem, in other words? Well, it all comes down to the entrepreneurs starting the company. And so at least on our end here at Bad Rock, anything where you, that sort of heavily

product-driven. We're digging super deep on the on the sort of chops around engineering, around product and design. You know, the other pieces, if you're investing pre-product market fit, you sort of, I found that you always want sort of a not super great articulation of how the company is going to get to product market fit. I feel like the better the articulation is of like how you're going to get to product market fit before you have it, the less likely you already get to product market fit. So when I was pitching Udors, when I was pitching top guests, I had a great narrative on how that business was going to end up transcending, was going to end up being huge. Ultimately, I just didn't have the ability or the skill to actually architect

that product, nor was I successful in building a team that could do that. So, yeah, I was pretty much a failed entrepreneur on those vectors, not financially, but certainly executionally, and realized that I sucked at building software companies, but it turned out that I I felt like I was pretty good at figuring out which other software companies or tech companies that weren't my own were going to work, which sort of led to me becoming an investor a decade ago. Yeah, I mean, I think there's really important lessons that are like back to you when I'm hearing. Hey, you got the ideas right and you had the strategy right. And you were so good at the storytelling of the idea, of the strategy, and that you told the story right, so you got the money.

but at the end of the day, that money, that story, that market has to manifest itself in a product that then touches customers and they have to fall in love with it. And if you could go back and do it again, the next piece you talked about was recruiting talent that was elite. And that if you are not able to make a world-class product, the only other option, if you're not a designer, you X person yourself or a coder, is to be an incredible recruiter of talent. And that becomes a deciding factor, I think, in success. If you look at some of the great idea founders, strategists, Steve Jobs had great taste, but he also had Johnny Ive, right?

And, you know, you can go right down the line with other great entrepreneurs. Travis, you know, surrounded himself with great dealmakers, great product people, great designers. You can recruit and pay for those skills eventually. Do you want to increase your online security? Well, don't we all? If so, you need to hear about NordVPN. NordVPN offers a VPN that stands for a virtual private network with benefits such as helping

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Now that you're carried forward to an investor, we always get asked as investors, Jeff, what are the qualities of entrepreneurs that lead to success? We've identified some of the ones that were successful for you and you were able to get that exit, which is obviously speaks to your ability to tell the story and identify an opportunity. When you carry forward now and you've made these investments,

are there things that for you, you find important in founders? You know, it is always impossible to assess the founders outside of the context of the companies. And so I can, there's some people out that they're like, you know, someone like Sam Lesson who wants to invest just in the people before they have a company. So I can't do that. I have to know what is the business they're going to build and how do they tell me the story. And then I use how they tell me the story to basically, because I'm so good at storytelling, I'm so good at narrative. I think I have sort of an innate ability to figure out, okay, what are the holes here?

What doesn't quite add up? And or like really unpack and double click in your parlance, Jason, like every layer of that story. And then through that narrative, plus like what they've built and the team they've surrounded themselves with, it's always like a company specific bottom up build on, is this a great entrepreneur or not? And is this an entrepreneur going to go all the way? Like a few common threads are all, they're always cliched.

So I hate sort of giving the common threads. but it is sort of this like there is a real like really long time horizon mission. That feels even more important today now that I think sort of the, you know, public markets are sort of not not looking very good. So I think any, any company that's going to be valuable, 10, 15 years from now needs to be building on sort of a very long time horizon and and have an actual like vision that if it works can be one of the biggest companies, you know, if not in the US, in the world. So that's kind of what we're looking for now. So the authenticity of like how the founder tells that story and the way it manifests through the team members he or she or they have surrounded themselves with is obviously really relevant. And then I do sort of, I am really biased towards people that have some sort of like a

something they want to prove, a chip off their shoulder, not insecurity per se. I think you can sort of select for highly insecure people and that can work in certain contexts, but it can also blow up horribly. I'd rather find people that are confident, but that sort of really do have something to prove, which is like super cliched, but I think is true of a lot of these great founders. And I'd say like Garrett from Flock, it's a company that you mentioned, you know, we hear a bedrock led a very early round there, sort of a series A1, have doubled, tripled, quadrupled down into that company over every one of our funds, every one of their rounds.

He's the perfect combination of like huge ass mission. I mean crime in the U.S. We spend $100 billion a year on policing. It's not working very well to sort of put it mildly. Huge market. If you can actually be the technology company that solves crime, he is motivated by that mission and he does feel like he has something to prove, but he's not insecure. So like that is my modal sort of founder product.

Like everything lines up on that company. I think that was literally the company I was going to go to to build the example because if you look at what flock security does for people who don't know, they basically build a system that you could put outside of your house or on a road anywhere or on a phone pole, a lamppost, that will have a small computer in it with a camera, it reads license plates, it puts those license plates and timestamps, essentially the metadata, not pictures of the people because they care about privacy.

And then if you put these into your neighborhood, crime goes down 50%, 75%, Because when people commit crimes in neighborhoods, they typically drive a car in. Now you have every single license plate that's come into that neighborhood. They typically keep it on for 60 to 90 days. It's not infinite. And when there's a crime, they can look and say, who drove down Main Street, who drove to 7th Street? What were the license plates?

They can identify the license plates of the people who live in that neighborhood. And neighborhoods are buying these and individuals are buying them. And it is just one of the perfect ways, as you said, if you think about a 10 or 20-year mission, my lord, making a neighborhood safer through these cameras is a mission that's going to take decades. And who doesn't want to live in a more safe community? And we care about privacy, but you could tell when I talked to him, you know, Garrett, he was very attuned. When you talked about storytelling, not only of why this is important, obviously people want be safer. But he was incredibly thoughtful and considered about the details. And I think to build

on your assessment, when somebody really does care deeply about the mission and they tell the story correctly, inevitably, they have thought through each of those edge cases and details and they have a thoughtful answer to it that you may not agree with. But I don't know if you've had this experience with founders, but every question you can think of, they've already thought it through. They've got the answer. Now, they're going to test it. It may or may not be right. But that was what I loved about that particular investment that made. I'm super jealous that you were able to get in that one early because I was literally going to buy it for my neighborhood after we had a series of break-ins. And he told me, oh, yeah, by the way, I just looked up your zip code. Yeah, we weren't talking to

them. We're talking to your police department in your town. So congratulations on that one. When you look at Cameo and you look at Canva, when did you engage with those companies? What what did you love about those founders and their mission? Sure. Well, I can't take any credit for the cameo investment. I was one of my partners here at Bedrock who found that. But I loved the founder, Steve. I felt like he was someone who was just going to be underestimated by investors because

he's, you know, he's a real person. So so many people out there are just like these sort of like facts. Not real. They're just sort of standard talking points, no personality, no energy. Steve is just who he is. And it's all out there. And I'm like, this is someone who's going to really resonate with celebrities, with agents in that entire world.

And it's going to take it all the way because Steve, honestly, I thought he was a founder who wanted to get invited to quite all the best parties around the world. I thought that was going to be something that was going to be very motivating for him, the founder of Cameo. And in order to actualize on that, he was going to have to build a very valuable business. And Cameo was going to have to play sort of a key role in the entertainment industry. And it was just sort of a too dumb to fail idea. So sometimes you never want to overthink things.

It's sort of like, okay, letting this sort of long tale of influencers and celebrities have another way to monetize, have a way to connect one-on-one with their fans. That idea is just too dumb to fail. So our thesis on cameo was it's too dumb to fail. And then on Canva, it's actually a huge mess because I should have invested a lot more. I mean, there's the category of misses that you talked about where it's like you see something or you don't see it early enough and you miss it for that reason. In the case of Canva, I invested like a tiny amount personally. And then on behalf of Founders, when I was a partner there before I left to start Bedrock about four years ago, but did this back in 2015 in the series Seed in Canva. And if I'd only invested like, you know, whatever, 10x more, I would have been just a massive win.

At this point, it's still great. But I didn't put nearly enough into that. In that one, it was just the founders were unbelievable. I mean, Melanie and Cliff, again, it's like all of the stuff we've talked about already. You go through this set of questions. They have answers to everything. They've thought through all of these things. And they saw a market before it existed.

They saw this huge market of being able to design online very easily, not for front-end web development, like our other portfolio company, Varsel helps enables or something like Figma, but just for the everyday use case, like a social media manager or an assistant or like invitations or like everyday people. So I felt like it would just apply to a broad swat the population. But I made a huge error or sin. I like to call it sort of my original sin on that one, which is once I knew it was working after the seed investment, not like aggressively trying to get more capital into that company over the follow-on rounds. And I really learned from that one. I mean, friends of mine like Wesley Chan at Felis, he did the series A, then other people that I know did the series B

in the series scene, it's like every one of those rounds. I should have been like flying to Australia to their headquarters, like trying to like preempt the rounds and I just totally drop the ball there. Have Apple's new privacy updates impacted your attribution from paid ads? I bet it has. Well, good news. The folks at disruptive advertising can help you. Disruptive advertising manages over $250 million a year in advertising spend and they are trusted by hundreds of brands like Adobe and Scott's Miracle Grow. So, if you're Google and Facebook, Facebook ads are not scaling like they used to, you should do a consultation with disruptive. They will look to help you scale your spend profitably.

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Disruptiveadvertising.com slash twist for $1,000 off. Absolutely. You want to ride your winners, something we talk about on the All-Hod podcast over and over again. And Peter Thiel, actually, in the 2015 interview, perhaps was talking about Facebook, but just not plowing more and more money into the winners. And it was something I fixed in my game. When I went out to raise my second fund and then my third fund, you know, people were like, okay, you put 25K or 50K into this famous unicorn.

Why didn't you put more? And I was like, well, I didn't have any more capital. And then since that time, we now invest in five, six, seven rounds. Just every round, we put a little bit more money and try to keep our pro rata or sometimes even go super pro rata. And my lord, if you invested in the $250 million round of calm, The billion dollar round of com.com. You would feel pretty great about it, let alone an Uber or a which you did by the way. You did you did those rounds. With com, yeah, we did put a little bit of money in

and then we also took a little money off the table. And that's actually a new phenomenon. Companies like this are growing so quickly that you could have one set of LPs. That's happy to invest at a seed round. But after they get to 50 or 100 X on their investment would like some liquidity. And then you've got another group of investors who very much want to invest only when the company gets to a billion and they're looking for a 10x and they want to put a bigger check in, but they don't want to take all the zeros you get when you're investing in those seeds, stage companies. So it's actually a very interesting moment in time where you can, as a capital allocator, be doing both simultaneously.

You could be selling and you can be investing, just different pools of capital. And we're seeing that with people with multiple rounds of different pools of capital for growth, et cetera. I found this one company that you had invested in called Praxis, P-R-A-X-I-I-E. and they're trying to build a city? A country. They're trying to build a country. A crypto state?

Okay. So is this your jump the shark moment? Like your Peter Thiel, I'm going to start cease-steading and avoid taxes. What is the thesis on this seemingly crazy idea? Well, there's no way that it would enable me to avoid taxes because I'm just a minority shareholder. So there's definitely no angle like that there.

Oh, I think maybe for the citizens. of said crypto, you know, world. Are they trying to find an island and literally create a new country? Well, it's not going to be a C-Said, presumably. So they're looking for some land. Yeah, they're looking for some land in the Mediterranean. And they're going to, they have a plan to tokenize. You know, it's one where, so this is sort of, you know, goes to the another attribute I look for in people, which is tenacity. And so I met these founders Dryden and Charlie, like three years ago now, I think, two and a half or three years ago. And they just articulated sort of a very different version of this vision, but sort of they had a high-level vision that basically there should be a lot more, you know, innovation on countries and nation states. And the sea-steading idea was interesting, but the actual execution of doing it on a sea-stead as maybe not the right way to do it. People don't really want to live on sea-steads maybe. But all that said, maybe there is room for more new countries. And then they sort of have iterated and innovated over the years with really building a pretty large and hyper-engaged online community, which,

which you more than anyone know the value of having that, where they've got, I think at this point, almost 10,000 members in this online community that only launched recently, really that want to move to this new nation state once it exists, that are also have a lot of overlap with the crypto world. A lot of these folks have done really well in sort of meme currencies and Bitcoin and Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies. And so it's sort of all coming together now in this vision of can we actually build a crypto state? where people will move. And it's it's not actually about taxes at all. It's about trying to create a society that's sort of healthier, where people can live better lives, more flourishing lives,

with a new economic system and a new system of laws and governance built on the blockchain. Now, what in practice that means? I have no clue, but I like the pitch. I like the pitch. And, you know, is it worth, is it worth putting in a few million bucks and backing, backing this team? Absolutely. So we did it. We're delighted to have led the seed around there. And if it works, it's going to be bad. I mean, we would put that in the moonshot category of investing. Chances are very difficult for something like this to work. But you just have to ask yourself, what if it does? That would change the world. Absolutely. Okay. So for the people who are watching this episode of This Week in Startups Live, which we are increasingly doing live interviews with the guests who are brave enough to do it, you can. And if you want to become part of the notification gang, which we call the Notie Gang, you just go to YouTube.com slash this weekend, subscribe to our YouTube channel, and hit the bell. And then that means you'll get a notification whenever we go live.

And if you get in there, you'll then watch this episode live or future episodes live as opposed to waiting a day or two for us to process the video and release it to our podcasting stream, which means you do get to ask a question to our guests. and we're going to start going to guest questions in just a moment. So if you're listening to us live, go ahead and put in a concise question. And it can be anything from capital allocation to startups, to product, to business, to careers, any of that is on the table. Let's talk for a moment, Jeff, about valuations and people getting credit for extremely high

valuations before they reach the milestones. You and I work in an industry, capital allocators, venture capitalists, which has traditionally been a milestone-based system of investment. You get 12 to 24 months of capital. You make some promises, some plans for what you'll achieve, and then if you hit those goals or exceed them, you then are typically able to raise more capital in order to reach the next milestone in today's market. We're seeing people get credit for two or three milestones before they actually hit them. You started five or six years ago in this game and it has changed wildly.

How are you thinking about valuations that are not to measure it with milestones in 2021 going into 2022? Well, it's always been the same for me, which is I've actually been doing investing in tech companies since 2012. And I thought we're in a bubble on valuation since like 2016. I felt particularly at sort of gross stage enterprise SaaS, anything that can easily comp to the public markets, I felt the valuations are generally like way too high. And so you have to basically find the few counter examples. And, you know, I think we're in a few of them, things like for sell, things like flock safety, rippling arguably at the gross stage where there's something really special with that company

and the founder and the momentum where a super high multiple can be justified where you can give them the credit, even in a correction. But basically we've been in an environment where all anyone's thinking about is the micro. It's like, oh, it's the company. It's the revenue multiples. And if you're a founder, you shouldn't be focused on the micro. But the job of an investor, in my opinion, is you have to also think about the macro and the markets. And I do think that things are clearly massively correcting.

So I'm elated, to be honest with you, Jason, because I've been waiting for this moment for five, six years. I thought things are overvalued since 2016. and I'm delighted for this moment to finally come. I think founders need a moment being a correction and maybe people coming back down to Earth. Yeah, it's going to take a while to filter down to where we play in the private markets and, you know, in the case of Bedrock. And I think the stuff that you do, it's a little bit earlier stage. So like the latest will usually go here as like a series D at the very late stage. Most of what we do is series A and B.

And then, you know, other weird things like crypto and things like that and a little bit of seed. but so it'll take a year or two years to trickle down, I think, to valuations here at the early stages. But yeah, there's going to be a correction, I think, because you have the growth, companies are just being revalued now by the market, given, you know, all of the crazy macro conditions, which aren't news to anyone. I'm sure you've talked about these with other guests. All around the world, tech companies are innovating and driving return for investors. Well, Our crowd analyzes many of these companies. They search across the global private market.

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One of the best parts about being an investor is getting to read those deal memos. That's our crowd.com slash TWIST to sign up for free today. So here's a question from our notification gang, the notie gang. Paul asks, what's the one thing Jeff believes that most people don't believe? I guess this is the Peter Thiel contrarian question. There's something that you believe that you find most people disagree with you on. Yeah, I believe that anyone who's familiar with that question should never answer it. So that's the one thing I believe. So I'm familiar with the question. I strongly believe

that one should never answer to fast. So that's my answer to the question. In other words, if you figured something out about how to win at poker, best you keep that to yourself. If you have an edge, why would you ever give it away? I've always felt the same way about that question. When people ask me that question, what do you figure it out? Never answer that one. Why would I tell you? That makes Absolutely no sense. Okay. Zen Profit asks a quick question here. How important is a Stanford EE?

And I'll expand that question for you, which is, in our line of work in 2021, going into 2022, how important are these Ivy League degrees or even a technical degree versus just the overall ability to execute making brilliant products? there might even be net negatives at this point. You know, I can only speak from experience. In my case, I went to sort of a random school in Canada. I grew up in Canada. I didn't go to any son of tools, two school teachers. I didn't go to an Ivy League school or Stanford, no engineering background.

It's worked out pretty well for me. And quite honestly, the best founders in our portfolio, I don't think any of them went to Stanford. Maybe there's one exception. But when I think about our transcendent founders, the next generation that I'm super bullish on, they don't have these pedigrees. And there's a way in which it's, yeah, it's kind of, you think that things are going to be much easier than they are if you go to one of these schools maybe, and it's particularly in

like E or Simis of Stanford. It's like, okay, everything's going to be super easy for me. And that has been true for the last decade. So it has been very easy as a founder on a relative basis, relative to history, over the past decade. And I do think that it's going to just be much harder going forward. and it's better if you're not trained that your life is going to be super easy. That's my one person's opinion here.

Yeah, and I can't disagree that, you know, people who come out of those schools have had incredible opportunities presented to them historically. But in today's market where, you know, these degrees are incredibly expensive, you might actually limit the risk you're about to take or allowed to take or just practically can take because you're 250 in debt. or $100,000 in debt, whatever it is, you can't afford to take a $60,000 job or a 5K a month draw to be a founder

because you've got $3K a month in, you know, bills you have to pay on this master's degree you got or your MBA. It's very hard to take risk, and you might have to take this job as an analyst at Goldman Sachs and just push paper around and do reports as opposed to do something actually creative with your life.

And most people, the skills that are being taught, in these schools are now so much further behind the reality of what tools are being built, you know, on the edge of technology. There's no course at MIT, I'm certain on how to, you know, work on the blockchain or build technologies. You're going to learn that by going into a Discord server or GitHub or wherever or learn it, you know, in some chat room. So we're both in absolute alignment on that.

And I will say, like, to his credit, Peter Thiel was right about that before anyone else. I mean, Peter Thiel called out this college thing, really before anyone else did. And I think he was with his T.L fellowship or whatever back in like 2010 or 2011. And now that's just consensus knowledge that like, yeah, there's like this huge insane student debt problem with college. I don't think you should answer the Peter Thiel question, but credit where it's due on calling out the college bubble very early there. All right. Notie gang member original OG Bob G asks, if you could invest in one category, What is your favorite and why? Do you have a top category that you just find delightful to invest in?

No, I don't like categories. The best assets are like N of one asset. So it's like, you know, everything great gets mistakenly categorized into something out, some category that doesn't really exist. I don't like the categories. You and I are in alignment on this one. I always tell people, you know, when I invested in Uber or other people invested in, you know, postmates or Airbnb, the concept of on-demand,

was not a term. That term came five years later when some analyst or journalist decided to say, oh, you know what, you can get things on demand by pressing a button on Instacart. And that's kind of similar to Airbnb and it's kind of similar to Hotel Tonight. So it's the on demand economy. But that wasn't a category. And the only things I can think of are business models as category. So I'm going to build upon Bob's great question. Are there business models, ways of making money that you find scale very nicely or appealing for a venture investment. Yeah, sure. I mean, look, obviously, like to state sort of a truism, software is super special.

So if you have an ultra high margin software business, that's very valuable. And there's no other category of asset like that. Even things like Bitcoin, which I am quite bullish long term on cryptocurrency writ large, A lot of this is just speculation today. Software, high margin software is like a one-of-a-kind category, business model to invest in. I'd say maybe the sort of undervalued version of this would be all of the heat on software for so many years has been, you know, high-margin SaaS, high-margin enterprise SaaS. I'd say something like what you did with Com, Jason, consumer SaaS, consumer subscription where people are consumers, they're not companies, they're not businesses,

their people and they're paying a monthly subscription for software. Now, not media, like software you're engaging with that makes your life better, like Com or like Duolingo or businesses like that. We have a thesis at Bad Rock that those businesses, you know, there's a lot of those opportunities that are going to be very valuable in the future. So like consumer SaaS is a business model I'm pretty interested in right now. And we are here on the team. Yeah, 100% in agreement. After our experience with Com, we went on to invest in FitNod, which is like fitness as a subscription, then Steasy, dance as a subscription. Then we did two in music, tone base, classical music, subscription, musician, music, singing, guitar, piano as a subscription. And right on down

the line, brilliant, teaching you math and science, physics as a subscription. And if you think about it, I like how you broke that down, which is it's not just music and Netflix, Spotify, and Netflix. Those ones are obvious. They were the first tip of the spear. But after music and movies and television shows, people have other interests. And just like magazines, I always make the magazine analogy in the 90s, if you were passionate about fly fishing or bow and arrow hunting or muscle cars or Italian sports cars, there was a magazine that you could give $5 a month to, $50 a year to $30 a year to have a subscription. And then that went away. And now it exists as apps or, you know, otherwise online subscriptions

so, uh, consumer subscriptions are just so delightful. They have higher churn than SaaS, like business SaaS, but you know, and I've seen so many of my contemporaries, I introduce them to companies and so many people turn down doing the series A, series B of Steezy or Fit pod or calm even,

uh, because they were like, it churn's too high and I'm like, yeah, but the product is so affordable and people want to try guitar, but it doesn't stick for them. It's not like Zoom or Slack. or Salesforce or, you know, whatever, you know, Zendesk, whatever product people become

obsessive with as a SaaS product that becomes integrated into their workflow. It's just completely different. Question comes in from BairScript. Do you invest in competitors in your portfolio? I'm going to expand this question to add one, which is, what do you do when you've got 50, 100, 300 investments? And then, you know, some new technology like Dow's, Cryptos, NFTs, happen. And hey, maybe people start adding that functionality into their products. And now companies that weren't competitors in your portfolio are now, you know, pivoting or evolving to be actual competitors. It does happen. How do you manage that? Yeah, I mean, it's, it's a tricky situation. I'd say like two cuts on it. One is sort of applicable to everyone. One is specific DOSA

bedrock. The applicable to everyone cut is I think that sort of ex ante, if you're a VC, you shouldn't invest in two directly competitive companies unless the entrepreneurs know that you're doing that and are okay with it. So ex ante, we would not day one if the company is directly competitive invest in two directly competitive companies. Typically, if there's lots of competition, we don't even want to invest. If there's like 20 of the companies and we bedrock have to use our sleuthing skills to find the best one, we don't even want to get involved in that category. Now, there is an ex post scenario, which you alluded to, where like two companies start off doing very different things over a many years or a decade converge.

In that situation, it's not our problem. Look, and I'm straight up with the entrepreneurs. If you guys are converging, we're going to, we can do information silos. We can like roll off the board if you want. We can not share information between the two companies. We're happy to give up all of that like and just like let it ride. But if the companies converge over many years, like that's that that just happens in business. That's part of like what it means to be.

business. And then the bedrock specific cut is we actually just don't invest in very many companies. So I think that's one of the unique thing with us. I think we have less than 50 companies across our whole portfolio, across all our funds. We don't do that much. We try and pick things we really like and then concentrate capital and the few winners. So we've never actually run into this issue yet in our portfolio of two directly competitive companies. And I think that does speak to being a series A, series B investor. You're placing a very large bet on a small number of companies. to build on your answer. When you have an accelerator,

you've got an exception from this. Accelerators tend to invest in, you know, very small amounts of money and a large number of companies who are still figuring out what their products are. So we do not avoid conflicts in our accelerator

unless it's a copycat product, which I just find offensive and don't, like if somebody just photocopies, calm, but we had a company that did, you know, a story app for putting children to bed.

So arguably it's 5 or 10% overlapping with com. And we felt, you know, and I've talked to the confounders about this, hey, if we have people who are adjacent and we invest in them, that's actually good because if there is an acquisition down the road, we obviously wouldn't share information about the two companies, but we could make the introduction at some point and we have some common DNA. And then for platforms like the syndicate.com, increasingly now that we have multiple syndicates,

unless something's a copycat product, which I just did have a copycat product, but I said, I'm not comfortable syndicating where it's a platform where companies can syndicate their deal, so it's not exactly like I'm picking them. But when I do pick them, some of the companies I pick, some of them are picked by the audience of investors. If I pick them, I'm avoiding conflicts. If the audience picks them, we're kind of independent about that. All right, let's take a look at your questions coming in again. If you want to ask questions, you will find out about live interviews, live news,

is going on when Molly Wood joins the program in January, you'll be able to ask Molly Wood questions and hear us in our new co-hosting roles, chopping up the news live every day in the mornings typically, sometimes in the afternoon if there's a breaking news story, you can do that by going to YouTube.com slash this weekend, click the subscribe button right next to it is a bell. You want to click that bell, and about five times a week, six times a week. You can get an alert when I go live. You get to jump in here and ask questions. So another question coming in. should NFTs have a block style ledger to avoid theft and copying?

I'll expand this question so you can start with, aside from this specific question about theft and copying. Do you F with NFTs? Do you think that's an intelligent, interesting business model? Do you think it's nonsense or somewhere in between? Well, I definitely F with them. I created one. I minted one and sold it on OpenC and donated the proceeds to the graphic designer

helped me make it. I assume this was you with your shirt off in an ocean in Hawaii because when you're doing your hot, when you do your vibe updates with your shirt off? I was, I was shirtless, but it was a, it was a, it was a rendering of me. So it wasn't an actual shirtless photo. It was just a rendering. God, it was the metaverse version of you. Got it was the metaverse.

It was the metaverse shirtless, Jeff. That's right. I think I might have been pantsless as well, but there was some sort of loincloth or something. So I have with them. But I do, I do think that, you know, there's the, the new stuff now with, uh, with Cryptopubub So the popularize up. I don't really love what's going on there. I've looked at sort of like the board apes and the lazy lion stuff.

I think we're in very much like 1999 world on NFTs. I think it's 1999 on the mean cryptocurrencies. I don't. And I lump those together. I know they're very different, but I lump this together. It's 1999. They're very well might be real future of NFTs. I don't think we are in a world now.

We're like long term, massive, valuable. I don't think it's like the next massive asset class. I might be wrong. I would love to be wrong, actually, not for my own bank account because I mean, I'm missing out on a lot of gains,

but because I think that'd be really cool. I think a lot of the people that are engaged heavily in NFTs today are just incredibly talented, like very interesting people. And it would be great for there to be a wealth transfer from sort of the type of people who collect lots of art,

old school art, to like the people that are like minting NFTs or collecting NFTs. That would be great for society, but I don't think we're there yet. So I'm pretty skeptical, but I feel like you just have to, you have to dabble in these things if you want to invest because there's always a chance I'm wrong and you can't miss like the next wave or it's detrimental. When a new technology like NFTs comes out, there are more problems and issues and edge cases than there maybe are problems that have been solved and tightened up. here at Art Basel, where I am now, which I'm referring to as NFT, Basel, because it's more about

NFTs than it is about art. Really? Really? Wow. There's more crypto people here than old, rich people with more money than time looking to spend their last, you know, to buy a million dollar paintings. But one, the most interesting trend I was alerted to here was the fact that, you know, people who are running galleries or auction houses have now had a portion of their business absolutely

had the rug pulled out from under them, which is you buy an NFT, it appreciates in value. The artist gets 10% of every resale. I decide I'm going to buy this. You bought it for 10,000. I'm going to buy it for 20,000. Instead of the gallery getting 30% or 40% of that sale, the original artist gets whatever it is, 10 or 20%. you and I trade the asset.

We never go to a gallery. You buy 100 NFTs. You immediately put them all up on OpenC or whatever other platform and say, hey, make me an offer. Or you put them in your wallet and say, I own these. Offers can come in and you can sell them independent of an intermediary. This is absolutely completely disruptive to the command and control that galleries and art dealers have. their business is absolutely going to go to zero in the digital art space. They do not provide value in that sense.

And I was spending a bunch of time with Mike, aka Beeple, when I was here, the guy who sold the $70 million NFT. And, you know, he did sell that through a, at Sotheby's or whoever, one of the auction houses. But in the future, like, people's a brand. People makes a piece of art a day. it sells as an NFT or they sell 100 pieces of it, whatever it is. Beeple is the distribution.

He does not need distribution. He is the distribution. And it would be the equivalent of, you know, Quentin Tarantino being able to produce movies directly for his audience who are buying tickets for it from him, right? And they just, which actually seems like a pretty killer idea now that I think of it. I mean, if they're trying to do that with music too, like with Royal. Yeah, I mean, that could happen, Jason. Like, NFTs might enable that.

Well, music sounds like an easier one because you're talking about, you're not talking about a three-year project to make once upon a time in Hollywood for 100 million and get the actors and spend years making it. You're talking about making a song, which could take a week or two or three or 10 minutes if it's the Beatles, you know, and their savants. They could just be making a song a day. Do you buy the rights to it? Everybody splits it.

I mean, it really is, I have to say, store of value and money transfer to me were inane, not important for the modern world, use utilizations. I mean, I'm sure in an emerging country where, you know, you have a dictator or currency, appreciation, and inflation, that's out of control. Those things are very important. But for the rest of the world, we don't have money

transfer or storage problems. But, you know, these other pieces, I find super, super compelling. You have described yourself as a vibe capitalist. The audience wants to know, what is the difference, Jeff, between a vibe capitalist and a venture capitalist. Well, you know, look, it really is that, well, the short answer is that it's about the energy and the connection with the people. And so ultimately, you know, the Zoom world that we were living in for like a year and a half, that world does not work well for Vibe Capitalists.

I like to meet people in person, connect with entrepreneurs, connect with teams. There's a lot about interpersonal chemistry. And then it's about what the companies are actually doing or what the business are actually doing. So like NFTs, those are those are vibe assets, man. Like there's like a creative energy. There's, it's not about efficiency. It's about actually creativity and sort of having the creators capture more of the value.

That's a positive vibe. you know, there's, there's a lot of companies out there. I would argue something like, like TikTok, looks like it's about a vibe because there's all these funny videos, but it's actually just about efficiency. It's about hooking you in for as long as possible to like this pointless, mindless content and gathering as much data as possible on you. So I would juxtapose sort of vibe capitalism, vibe companies versus efficiency companies. And, and I like to, I like to invest in things with vibes and I like to invest in people with vibes. My vibes are not right. for everyone. Very polarizing vibes. But if it's a fit, it's like a really good fit for life.

And so that's just how we operate here. And it basically means that we have real personalities. We state what we think in the boardroom. If you have a bedrock board member, you're going to hear our actual opinion on things. And we might not vibe, in which case we won't invest and we'll leave you alone. But it's just a different approach to how we do things here. Did you invest in Andrew? Is that a president, Andrew? Explain that company, why you invested, and what's the vibe in safety, security, civil defense for you as a category? Well, there can't be any vibes if the U.S. is destroyed by China. So that would be sort of the starting point.

There won't be vibes at all if we don't have. We don't have strong. We'll be lifeless and vibeless. So that's sort of like part one. Part two, obviously, that's a founding team with insane vibes. You know, it's incubated out of the firm that I used to work at, Founders Fund, that founding team with Palmer Lucky, Matt Grimm, Brian, Tray Stevens. Like, that's incredible vibes on the team.

And then they're building. What are they building? Well, they're building a lot of stuff. I mean, Anderl basically is effectively integrating all of the hardware and software into a common operating system. It's sort of like an OS for defense. And then they obviously have like hardware. They've got all sorts of pieces to their hardware, but like their whole lattice

infrastructure sort of integrating everything in defense with this one common operating picture. Like that's a big deal. And they've built an insane go-to-market machine like next level go-to-market machine. So like, yeah, we're not huge investors there. I wish we had a lot more capital in that company. But it's definitely a vibe company. I'd say like quite honestly, everything defense tech almost that's not.

the old school primes that have been, you know, had this sort of crazy sort of cartel on the U.S. defense budget for the last, you know, 50 years. Everything other than the primes like Raytheon and those guys are vibe companies, anyone doing anything in defense that's a startup, I'm like super interested in digging into because I think it's so important. Would you invest in drones, robots, or any autonomous weapons? Some people have said they won't do that. Google says they won't support the military.

Google has made a ton of money and they live in a free country, but their employees refuse to support the government that gives them the ability to do that. I feel that's kind of lame. But there is this issue of autonomous weapons, weapons that can go find humans and kill them without a human behind the controls. Kind of controversial. You can be certain, North Korea, China, Iran, other assortices. a dictators or build them in a heartbeat if they aren't already built, would you invest in one of

those? Yes or no? Well, we know, but we have invested in a company that is counter unmanned autonomous systems, counter UAS, called EPRES, which we are extremely excited about. This business was incubated by my friend Joe Lonsdale and his firm 8VC. They have a high-powered microwave technology, which basically has multiple defense applications, as well as dual use, which means like commercial applications as well

for those of the viewers who aren't aware. But their initial go-to-market is with the U.S. and its allies around counter-UAS using this breakthrough high-powered microwave chip. And just explain UAS again for the audience. So yeah, it's basically like you talk about drones that are killing people. So autonomous weapons, this is a system that, you know, shoots down those autonomous weapons, not with shooting them, but with sending a high-powered microwave beam to zap them out of the sky.

And it's been tested now many, many times with an incredible hit rate. So it's to basically protect us and our allies from these autonomous weapons. So if it's something that is going to protect us against these autonomous weapons, yes, we would invest in it. Would I invest in sort of a, you know, weapon, like actually making weapons? Not sure yet. I'd have to check our LPA, our limited partner agreement. We might have to make some. I mean, it becomes a really interesting line in the sand.

I don't have an answer for it either. It really depends on the orientation of the team and what they're, who they are working for. And that's often hard to do you. But that's hard to diligence oftentimes. We have, there are unmanned aircraft systems, aka drones, which don't have humans on them, but they have humans somewhere. You know, the thing that's, you know, obviously. coming is at some point the Chinese or the Russians or some dictatorship will make a quadcopter

that's able to identify the uniforms of American soldiers, let's say, or South Korean soldiers. And let's say some deranged North Korean leader decides, I'm just going to send drones that are packed with explosives. And when they see somebody in this uniform, in these coordinates, it's going to just zip a 70 mile per hour drone and kill them. These are coming. And, you know, if we don't have them, the other side's going to have them. And it really becomes this arms race like nuclear or what we've seen in space, which is, you know, reportedly some authoritarian countries are already experimenting with disrupting satellites in space with unmanned, autonomous, flying machines. And

it's going to be a crazy world if we're not, you know, on top of it. I got to think we are, you know, we have the ability to put a bomb on top of anything, obviously. And we already have computer vision. So all the components are there. Really interesting moment. I haven't thought I through enough. I'll be honest. I'm asking you.

Very important sector with an added bonus. If you're an investor of these companies are like, There was no crazy run-up on, like, defense companies in the public markets. And so they are, they are not going to be hit in a downturn in the public market. So it's another reason why I'm very bullish defense technology sectorally. Yeah. Let's take another couple of questions from our audience. What are your thoughts on AI?

Do you invest specifically in the AI space or are you partial towards that category? Question comes from Bob. again, OG Bob G. I'm curious who this OG Bob G is now. He's asking interesting questions. Basically, one of the first 10 people, he's got his notifications on. He's always one of the first 10 to show up

for these. And he's always got tight questions. Bob G. OG. Nice. Always with the tight questions. Mad props, Bob G. Look, yeah, I do think AI plays an important role in the future. And so a lot of folks that I know are very skeptical of AI or think

that AI is evil or things like that. I don't think things are black and white on AI. I think it's shades of gray and it can be used for evil. We're very far from AGI. You have to differentiate like artificial general intelligence from just like narrow applications of AI. We have several investments that are sort of narrow applications of AI. And we also have some exposure and interest in sort of bigger AI projects, longer term AI projects. And I think it's really important.

I think it's one of the most important things that engineers could be working on, and it's an important part of our portfolio here at Bedrock. And as we wrap up here, that's on the market turmoil of the last week. We had the Friday after Thanksgiving, I think it was the 26th. This new coronavirus strain sent the markets into a towel spin. It wasn't a strain. It wasn't the strain that did it, but anyways. Okay. So the stream was announced, the market collapsed, but I guess you're basically thinking maybe that was the excuse, if I'm interpreting correctly, or just people wanted to take chips off the table, so why not do it that day?

People got loaded. People have gotten loaded over the last two years. You know, and there's a lot, Fed's going to raise rates. And look, like ultimately, there's a narrow Jeff Lewis experience of every time I've sold a stock, I've regretted it. Literally every single time. Anytime I've sold anything, I've regretted it. That said, I don't think that's always going to be true. And so I think I might end up being vindicated over the next few months and some of my poor sales decisions in the past. So we'll see. It is a, you know, when it is a great company, if you believe the company will be here for 10 or 20 years,

liquidating is almost never a good idea if it's going to stand the test of time. If you were to look at public market companies, let's take out the top 10 that are obviously, you know, we know Apple and Microsoft, Facebook, Tesla, Google, these companies, you know, we can be pretty assured they're going to be here in 10 and 20 years. Well, Facebook's not here anymore. It doesn't exist anymore. Yeah, it doesn't exist. It's gone already.

It's gone already. Yeah. The collection of assets formally known as very. But if we look at, you know, everybody else, let's call it the under $200 billion crowd, the Coinbase is the Robin Hoods, the Pelotons, the Airbnbs, the Lyfts, the Ubers, the DoorDashes, the Instacarts. When you look at that cohort of companies, I mentioned some, which ones do you think will be here in 10 years and be doing better than they are today?

I mean, Airbnb is going to be a lot more valuable in the future, I think. It is super highly valued today. Like I was just looking at it today because I was like, okay, do I own too much of this company or what should I be doing? And in terms of my portfolio of public companies. And it is valued like more, I think, than all the hotel companies combined or something at this point. So it feels like the valuation is very high, but it feels like that should be more valuable. I'm obviously, you know, you and I are going to have a difference of opinion on Lyft versus Uber. I tend to be, you know, bullish on Lyft long term.

I was on the board there for many years as we were brawling with Travis and crew over at Uber. And I think they've got a, what was that like? What was that like going up against Travis? Hell on earth. There's hell on earth. It's hell on earth. That's what I knew for sure. I was never going to found another company.

And I'm like, what these guys are going through? Oh, man, the hijinks behind the scenes, we can do a whole other live stream on that. Yeah, that could be a two-hour episode. I mean, the good news is I actually think both of them have an incredibly bright future. I can't imagine a world in which DoorDash Airbnb Yeah, I mean, and they're all no longer discounting.

They're all hitting profitability. And when people actually look at the core businesses, whether it's Airbnb, DoorDash, you know, Lyft or Uber, the potential to throw a free cash flow from those businesses and the number of people who use it, I mean, you're talking about tens of millions or even in Uber's case,

over 100 million Airbnb. These are such large, passionate user bases that are only growing. And if those businesses weren't there, I mean, can you imagine what life would be like without those companies? I mean, those are vibe companies. They make life better. That's what a vibe company is, makes life better. Those are all vibe companies.

DocuSign is not. Yeah. Well, DocuSign does seem like a feature. inside of Microsoft Word or Carta or any other piece of software. I think Peloton's a vibe company, but it's getting demolished because they were just too popular during the pandemic. But my God, I love that product. And they're just such a passionate group of people.

They may have gotten ahead of their skis and valuation. But I got to think Peloton has five more products in them. I have the hydro, and I can't imagine that that's not part of Peloton or Peloton doesn't build a competitor product. I have the tonal system. I can't imagine Peloton doesn't buy that company or come out with their own. Smart equipment like that is going to be the default equipment in gyms. I went to a gym that had a tonal when I was at the Austin hotel in the proper hotel in Austin.

Cool. They had the tonal. Have you used a tonal before? My friend is the CMO of Tonal. So I'd like to give them a huge plug. I should have invested in that company. Me too. Yeah.

But here's a great part. I go into this hotel. you know, the hotel gyms are not giant typically. The proper hotel in Austin had a decent-sized gym. And I look and I see a tonal. I'm like, oh, wow, that's pretty cool. I wonder how that works. Do I log in?

I've never seen a tonal in a gym. You go and it says, if you have a tonal membership, take out your app and scan this barcode, that QR code. I scan the QR code. I kid you not, all of my workouts, all of my history pops up in one second. I was like, my mind just melted. And then I was like, wait a second. Is there a Peloton tread hair? And there was a Peloton tread, but it doesn't do that.

Or I didn't see obviously how to do that. But I think that's going to be the vibe, which is you move into an apartment building and they got that tiny little gym that's like the size of a two bedroom. And they've got two pelotones, two tonals, two hydros. Jason works out. You know, this is the problem with the live audience. You guys didn't notice I lost 21 pounds? Come on.

Give me some credit here. Live audience is dragging me through the comments. But that's him to me is the vibe. take your shirt off you look pretty good to me you got to take your shirt off you chumath and profjee

all with your shirts off are like you're making a super team of capital allocators and in six more pounds I will be taking my shirt I'm going to be good I'm just giving people fair warning 2022

I'm going to be wearing a shirt on this weekend startups and all in about 50% of the time half the time I'm going to be in a sarong me and chamov are committing to all

all in sarongs and so is sacks because he's lost so much space listen you're a great guest appreciate you coming on i think we got to book you and uh you put you on the calendar for one year from today we do a catch up call uh if people want to pitch you what's the best way uh to reach you to pitch you and and what uh zone what stage what would you like to see in a company when they pitch you what's too early what's too late what's the goldilocks zone for jeff Lock Zone is if you think you're going to be one of the most important companies in the world want to talk to you. And the best way to pitch me is to figure out what my email is and email me. It's not that hard if you're capable person.

If you can't guess the email of somebody in a 20 person company, you failed the first test. For me, I have to say, when people come to me and they're like, I have the greatest idea. I can't find a co-founder. I'm like, you done fell the first test, son. Like, if you can't convince one person to come on the journey with you for a bucket full of stock and be your co-founder, I know it's not easy. But if you don't have the wherewithal to spend a year or six months finding a co-founder, you're just not good enough. I hate to say it. You're just not going to be a founder because that is not the hardest task in the world. It's a hard task, but that is not the hardest thing you will face.

All right, listen, it's been a vibe. Thanks for coming on the show. I think we got everything. You have a podcast or a book or a Twitter handle to plug. I gave everybody your Twitter handle before. We'll throw it up on the screen one more time. No plugs? Any plugs you want to get out here before we go, Jeff?

Nothing to plug. Peace out. Thanks for having me. All right. And we'll see you all next time on this week's startups. Bye bye.