E228: Balaji Srinivasan: “The Dollar Is Already Dead” and What Comes Next

27:54And so here's an example. Let me see. So here's earnings.superteam.fund. And so they've paid out$2 million for 1 ,000 projects, like 2 ,000 bucks a pop. That's a good amount of money in a lot of countries around the world. That's like a year's salary that a kid with a phone or a Chromebook or something can now just earn on the internet. And so some really interesting stuff. So that's the second big bucket. Let's call it community and bounties and crypto bounties and so on. So they do these projects and they complete these projects and they make money. A third big bucket is content. And I think you're going to start to see a lot more high quality movies, films, that kind of stuff come out.

28:42But initially podcasts for sure, content that's interesting to the community on cryptography, on distributed computing, decentralized systems, all that kind of stuff. And finally, a bucket that's pretty interesting to me nowadays are things like VitaDAO. So this is something I invest in. So it's trying to do research outside of academia. Because ultimately, if you think about it, who's funding research? It's the public. So can we, rather than going from the public to tax dollars to the government to NIH, to the researcher, can you cut out some of those middleman steps and you have people just back the research that they believe in, right?

29:25And so one that's definitely been working, at least, you know, it looks like it's working, VitaDAO, and it has researchers over here that get grants, okay, fund exceptional science, and supporters over here, and everybody who wants to, you know, target longevity can now go and buy into this, right? And what's the business model? Well, many of these people will go and found companies, you know, maybe they'll found longevity companies or things related to that. And then that VITA token might be something which, you know, those people who did that get some shares in the company or what have you. Somebody could take an ideological view about the FDA being too slow to procure drugs and to create some new framework where they could tie that into kind of funding research.

30:11Yeah, exactly. So here, like, here's the researchers tabs. Absolutely. Try type of ecosystem. Exactly. Exactly. Right. So here, you know, these are grants over here. So, you know, $4 million in research funded again, look, is it billions yet? No, but it's just started like a couple of years ago and, um, it's, it's pretty good. And then, you know, it's a, it's an avenue for, um, you know, people who want to be quote principal investigators, but, you know, maybe they don't want to wait until they're 60 years old. And if you can, you know, do something good online, right? So here's on the supporter side, there's actually a fair number of academics.

30:46So that's like a fourth bucket research, right? So those four buckets are software development, community, content, research. And I think as we start doing more in the physical world, some of these DAOs will start getting meetups and start buying real estate together. There's like a funny one called LynxDAO, which actually, you know, this is like the early days of the internet, it was like, oh, pets.com, it's so dumb, right? But nowadays, Chewy works, right? Chewy's a big company. It's like a$9 billion public company. I mean, that's legit, right? Even if the market is up or down, right? So pets.com, oh, it was so stupid.

31:25No, it wasn't. Pets.com wasn't stupid. It was just early and then it did eventually work, right? So I'll show you another one, which seems silly perhaps, but it seems to be working. and that is uh links dow right and these people just love golf and you know so on have been using crypto to go and like crowdfund golf courses around the world right and uh you know the thing about this is um where is this the links golf club like private golf for everyone you know so you can basically join this and it's like a crowdfunded golf club right and that might seem dumb or what have you. But when people came to the US in the early 20th century, a big motivation for people like a lot of Jewish people were locked out of country clubs, golf clubs, and being able to start their own was like a big signal of finally being accepted in society and so on.

32:16And so guess what? Now people can build their own golf club. I'm not a big golf guy or anything like that. But the real point is that you can crowdfund real estate with crypto, even if it starts with a seemingly silly application or this thing you might think is not that important. And that's something where the cloud, all of this gigantic amount of money that's swirling around online starts descending on the land, right? You're like printing out the cloud in real life in the same way that you'd like print out a document. This is a general concept I have, which is obviously we know the concept of printing out a document.

32:53But when you go and order something from, you know, Amazon or Uber Eats, right? In a sense, you're like printing something out because you're hitting a button and a digital process then results in a physical process. And that thing arrives at your door, potentially that you could just have like a city just arise like this with the capital and the people just coming out from the internet. And the one of that, um, so something that was network state inspired is something called Zuzalu. Have you heard of that? Yes. Yes, that's Vitalik's project. Yes, exactly. And Vitalik basically read the network state and he's written about it.

33:34And he talked about how that was an inspiration for Zuzalu. Zuzalu, basically they rented out like a village in Montenegro, right? Essentially, so I wrote the network state, which said that communities defined by common interests can start off as purely on discussion forums, but then materialize into person, you know, hubs over time. What's cool about this is if you could do this and you could prove this, maybe we're just at the beginning of a new age of community formation and participatory democracy and opt-in capitalism and so on, right? Taking the best values that shaped America, not saying, oh, I'm rejecting free speech or I'm rejecting free markets, but figuring out the version which people are opting into and which they like.

34:21And you might have 100 different or 1 ,000 different of these communities. I need to update this so it's a little bit out of date. But I have this thing, the network state dashboard, where I'm tracking all these startup societies around the world that are doing their own things that are kind of like Zuzalo. Did you see that dashboard? Yep. And I also had this conference, Network State. So this conference in Amsterdam, and this was a pretty big success, I think. If I show you the audience. Yep. I saw the selfie. Yeah, the selfie. There was a selfie. And this also shows us since the scale of the audience.

35:01You just announced the fund. So, Zoe, maybe you could bring up the current investor base. You have one of the most prolific investor bases of any funds. Here is the, you know, the Bology Fund, Techno Capital for Techno Radicals. So investors, Neville, Brian Armstrong, and Emily Choi of Coinbase, Mark Anderson, Chris Dixon of A second Z, David Sachs, Gary Tan, Toby Lucky, Ron Conway, Joe Lonsdale, Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, the Solana founders, Notion founder, Brian Johnson Blueprints. Steve Sanofsky was very senior at Microsoft. David Lee was one of the early people at SV Angel and also at Samsung now.

35:43And I could go through the list of names here, but Ajay runs Mithril, Bill & Dollar Fund, Jesse Powell, founder of Kraken. And outside of being some of the most prolific investors, there seems to be an ideological bet here. Are you looking for a specific type of LP for your fund as well? Yeah. If you like all these people, you're going to like the Balji fund. And if you don't, well, I'm sure there's plenty of other nice funds. It's really kind of that simple. What I think on balance, what these folks stand for is freedom. And in my view, the best of American values. And they stand for technological progress and they stand for all of these good things.

36:28And that's also the kind of stuff that I want to fund. Of course, it has to make money, and I think it will make a lot of money, but it'll also make freedom. And the focus of your fund, you call it high-risk seed. Sure. Sometimes categories get named in retrospect. Was there a category called an accelerator at the time Y Combinator started its thing? Or the Teal Fellowship sort of created a category. A6 and Z didn't look like a normal VC fund when it was doing its thing, and so on. I look at investing as a tool to build the world that we want to build. And one of the things that I had in this were there's a bunch of these failing institutions, and I'm going to list some of them off.

37:14Okay. So here are some problems, right? high inflation, privacy violations, lack of shared consensus, costly energy, election controversy, security breaches, loss of manufacturing capability, low impulse control, the declining post-war order, falling life expectancy, eroding freedoms, internet-disrupted institutions, inadequate education, blocked physical construction, clickbait journalism, lawfare, insufficient political choice, and above all, in my view, the inaccessibility of the physical frontier. And how do you solve these kinds of things? Well, for example, with privacy violation, zero-knowledge proofs, other kinds of things, end-to-end encryption, local storage, those can go after those.

38:00Loss of manufacturing capability. Well, robotics actually has a lot of promise in bringing manufacturing to anything, and maybe you can turn a lot of labor into electricity, which turns labor into capital. or other less obvious things like impulse control. So, you know, Mike Moritz, you know, one of the greatest investors of all time, he has this concept on the seven deadly sins. Do you know this thing? Yeah. About the core needs. What he means is that it's like, you know, it's just so it's so incredibly difficult to build a business that you need to have some visceral human need. You know, for example, Uber saves you time.

38:42So that's sloth. DoorDash gets you food. That's gluttony, right? Twitter raises your awareness of bad things. That's wrath. Instagram is pride. Match.com finds you a date, right? Robinhood facilitates your transactions. Greed. Zillow helps you get a better house. So in extremists, these things that are meeting legitimate human needs can become vices. So that's why in a tongue-in-cheek way, he says, every startup serves one of the seven deadly sins. The problem is though, that if those companies are no longer startups and they become really huge companies. I think they add value on balance, but there's some comments, for example, like the, like Netflix once, maybe tongue in cheek, but they said that their goal was to, was to make it so that you take away from a glass of wine with your spouse and just watch more Netflix.

39:29Remember there's like famous quote on that, right? And because they just want to maximize your time spent online. Okay. Now you start to get into maybe a vice of sloth, right? It goes from, you know, a human need of maybe entertainment to a vice of sloth, right? And so how could you possibly defend against something like that? Um, when you're at the checkout counter and there's all of this very highly optimized, you know, stuff there that's sugary, that is maybe maximizing the profit of the guy selling it, but it's not benefiting your health. Well, maybe you have a different kind of business that actually boosts not vice, but virtue.

40:03For example, you have like a community where you have a membership to it and it's keto kosher. And so there's no sugary food even allowed in it. I'm very much like kosher itself where there's dietary restrictions that are just put into the supply chain and you just kind of see that something's kosher. You just kind of enter this community and it's only salad and fresh fruit and fresh veggies and, and, you know, meat if you're, if you're into that. But there's no processed foods, there's no sugar. You have to get in the car and drive outside of it to go and eat unhealthy. So your defaults are set to a good level, right?

40:38And that's like one of several creative solutions to try to have a corporate virtue as opposed to corporate vice. And that's because the community is not optimizing on profit maximization. They're optimizing on other values. or more precisely that profit maximization is now aligned with the individual's values. It's a little bit like, you know, there was junk food, but now guess what? There's health food and there's companies that make money on health food. And there's, you know, there's now like results based gyms, which don't make money on the subscription, but make money if you actually achieve your fitness goals.

41:16Right. So it's a little bit like, you know, you probably manage just Salesforce, right? And not Salesforce, the company, but a Salesforce, like a, right? And they will do what you incentivize them to do, right? The saying is coin operate, right? You set up incentives and they will run to those incentives. It's almost like a really powerful stallion and you point in a direction and it's going to run in that direction. If you point it off the cliff or if you didn't realize that there was a bump in the road in the future, well, that's kind of your fault in that sense, right? You can do things where you incentivize sales people with equity.

41:48But really what you want to do is just constantly monitor the incentives and change the incentives. And so capital is this very powerful maximizing function, but it can't set the objective itself. And then some creativity comes out of, okay, well, we made a lot of money off of junk food. Can we make a lot of money off of health food? Well, probably we can. We just need to hit the right cultural moment. Anyway, so that's just like one subroutine of a subroutine of what I'm trying to do here, but really what it is, is all those problems I listed, I think they're internet first solutions to many of them.

42:20There are ways that, and when we have thinking about that, if there's hope, it comes from tech. Okay. That's the one thing that's working. Why did I say this one thing is working? Well, you have drug addiction and you have failing life expectancy and you have, military issues overseas and you have inflation. You have everything that the state is touching, which is real estate, it's healthcare, it's education. Those things are getting wildly expensive in price. Okay. And I can show you that graph. Do you know the graph I'm talking about? I think education has been compounding by 8 % for like three decades.

42:56Yeah. And Ackman actually had this great tweet where he's like, how is this thing getting so ridiculous expensive and the number of students isn't increasing? like what business has increased its prices at harvard you now have more administrators and students whatever the state props up rises in price whatever technology drops falls in price right so this is like you know everything that the government touches medical services uh these are obviously related to education right um housing even on this chart it doesn't look that bad um in certain markets it's like absolutely terrible right uh and whereas the stuff that technology touches like TVs or cell phones, those fall relative to baseline, but these things rise.

43:39There's a bunch of people who say, oh, no, no, you're just, that's Baumol's cost disease. Those things that go up in price, it's because there's labor associated with them and you're trying to blame it on the government. I'm like, well, ask yourself why they can't be automated. Why don't we have more automated medicine, it's because thanks to AMA and to some extent FDA and a bunch of other, and HHS and so on, you have to have a doctor in the loop for things that don't require a doctor. For example, like you need a doctor to get your genome sequenced, you know, in some places, you know, that's considered like a diagnostic test.

44:15This is like saying you need a doctor to step on the scale, you know, to a doctor to look in the mirror. Why do we need to put that through the medical system and register a billing event for everybody involved, that doesn't need to be like that. You want to push much more self-serve, you know? And similarly, with childcare, there's regulations that say there can only be so many children cared for per adult, but you have a much larger number of children cared for by teacher in elementary school. And yet that, you know, you could have 30 kids in a class, but there's a limit on childcare. It's one of the reasons childcare is very expensive in some jurisdictions.

44:48Obviously, housing regulations prohibit you in a variety of ways. There's also unions that make it tough. And I recognize, by the way, I'm sure some of the people watching this are managing large pensions or things like that. No offense to any of these folks, I'm talking about the systemic effects. The goal of having a high standard of living and a job with decency for workers, of course, one supports that. It's a mechanism that one can argue with. But anyway, My point is that when you start scratching on these areas that have supposedly bowel most cause disease and nothing can be done and so on and so forth, and then you go and look at construction abroad, you're like, why is this 100x or 1 ,000x literally faster?

45:33I'm not saying that as like some figure of speech. I mean, I've posted videos. I recognize that China is very unpopular. Nevertheless, they've built a lot very quickly, and there's something one can learn from their prefab and modular construction. There's videos, for example, of here, let me show you this. What's the speed up here? Okay. So it's nine hours. Nine hours to build a train station. If you were to unpack those scale efficiencies, what are those scale efficiencies? Seven trains, 23 diggers. They started at 6.30 PM. They're done by 3 AM. The reason I say that is that shows what's physically possible, right?

46:14And when you go from nine hours to three years or five years for a station, that is a greater than 1 ,000x difference. Divide 9 ,000 hours into 24 hours in a day. That is 2.5 times per day. Yeah, exactly. That's right. So if you go from nine hours to one year, that's about 1 ,000x. 9 ,000 hours roughly in a year. When you're 1 ,000x off from the state of the art, from what's physically feasible, you're going to fall way behind. You're not in the game. And this is something Elon actually replied to a tweet of mine where I said, look, California isn't 10 % off the state of the art. It's like 1 ,000x off the state of the art in terms of speed.

47:06And if you've done any real estate, that compounds really fast. If you can build a building 1 ,000x faster than the other guy, you can have it occupied and generating rent to build the next building and the next and the next and next. Your compounding rate is so much ridiculously faster than the other guy. You're just going to completely outrun them. So that's like a fourth bucket research, right? So those four buckets are software development, community, content, research. And I think as we start doing more in the physical world, some of these DAOs will start getting meetups and start buying real estate together.

47:41There's like a funny one called a link style, which actually, um, you know, this is like the, you know, the early days of the internet, it was like, Oh, pets.com. It's so dumb. Right. But nowadays Chewy works, right? Chewy is a big company, right? Actually, I don't know what's actual valuations nowadays, but before I say it works, but what's it, what's the market cap? I don't know. Um, okay. It's like a$9 billion public company. I mean, that's, that's legit, right? Even if the market is up or down, right? So pets.com, oh, it was so stupid. No, it wasn't. Pets.com wasn't stupid. It was just early.

48:16Same with Instacart. Um, you know, Instacart was, you know, webvan.com. Yeah, exactly. That's right. Webvan became Instacart. Exactly. That's right. Or rather webvan didn't become Instacart, but the most lampoon startup of webvan became a very successful company called Instacart or the concept exactly. And so I'll show you another one, which seems silly perhaps, but it's like, seems to be working. and that is uh links dow right and these people just love golf and you know so on have been using crypto to go and like crowdfund golf courses around the world right and uh you know the thing about this is um where is this the links golf club like private golf for everyone you know so you can basically join this and it's like a crowdfunded golf club right and that might seem dumb or what have you.

49:03But, uh, you know, when, uh, people came to the U S in the early 20th century, um, a big motivation for people like, you know, a lot of Jewish people were locked out of country clubs, golf clubs, and being able to start their own was like a big signal of, you know, finally, you know, being accepted in society and so on. And so, you know, guess what? Now people can build their own golf club as, as I'm not a big golf guy or anything like that. Right. Um, but the real point is that you can crowdfund real estate with crypto, even if it starts with a seemingly silly application or this thing you might think is, you know, not that important.

49:37And that's something where the cloud, all of this gigantic amount of money that's swirling around online starts descending on the land, right? You're like printing out the cloud in real life in the same way that you'd like print out a document. This is a general concept I have, which is obviously we know the concept of printing out a document, but when you go and order something from, you know, Amazon or Uber Eats, right? In a sense, you're like printing something out because you're hitting a button and a digital process then results in a physical process and that thing arrives at your door. Obviously there's humans in the loop now, but many of those steps from delivery to growing the food to cooking the food and so on and so forth, individual versions of each of the steps you could imagine.

50:23And I can show you examples of robots for every single one of those steps from, let's say, you know, you get tomatoes delivered to your door. There's agricultural robots, there's picking robots, there's robotic trucks, there's robotic packing plants. Every one of those steps could, in theory, be fully automated. And then you can imagine almost an electromechanical process where you hit a button and it goes, and all these things, spent action, and the tomatoes are delivered to your door, right? Someone could probably do that full stack right now just to prove a point that it could be done. And then what is that?

50:53That's like a printer on a larger scale where when you hit print, there's a head with some ink and it moves around electromechanically after you hit enter. It's that concept of building a complicated digital object online and hitting enter and then just printing it out. We can do that for a document. We can do that for goods. And then we might be able to do that for ever larger things. So the bad version of it is you print out a mob, the flash mobs and so on in person. Somebody comes, In New York, there was that Twitch streamer or something who held a thing a few weeks ago and just caused this whole ruckus in downtown.

51:29And you're seeing more and more pictures of these gigantic internet mobs that materialize into real life. You've seen quite a few of those over the last several years. That's a bad version. The good version is potentially that you could just have a city just arise like this with the capital and the people just coming out from the internet. And the one of that, so something that was network state inspired, is something called Zuzalu. Have you heard of that? Yes. Yes, that's Vitalik's project. Yes, exactly. And Vitalik basically read the network state, and he's written about it. And he talked about how that was an inspiration for Zuzalu.

52:13And one of the things that I had written about several years ago, let me see if I can find this. Here we go.

52:21So you see why I built Zuzlu? Yes. Right. So Zuzlu, basically they rented out like a village in, you know, Montenegro, right? And, you know, so essentially, so, you know, I wrote the network state, which said that communities defined by common interests can start off as purely on discussion forums, but then materialize into person, you know, hubs over time. Right. And so what's cool about this is if you could do this and you could prove this, maybe we're just at the beginning of a new age of community formation and participatory democracy and opt-in capitalism and so on, right? Taking the best values that shaped America, not saying, oh, I'm rejecting free speech or I'm rejecting free markets, but figuring out the version which people are opting into and which they like.

53:13And you might have 100 different or 1 ,000 different of these communities. And so one thing I have is something – I need to update this so it's a little bit out of date. But I have this thing, the network state dashboard, where I'm tracking all these startup societies around the world that are doing their own things that are kind of like Zuzalo. Did you see that dashboard? Yep. And I also had this conference in Amsterdam, and this was a pretty big success, I think. If I show you the – I saw the selfie. Yeah, the selfie. There was a selfie, and this also shows the scale of the audience. So let me see if I can – It's amazing.

54:00So let's transition to the fund. So I know you just announced the fund. So, Zoe, maybe you could bring up the current investor base. You have one of the most prolific investor bases of any funds. And let's project that. Biology Fund, Techno Capital for Technoradicals. So investors, Neville, Brian Armstrong, and Emily Choi of Coinbase, Mark Anderson, Chris Dixon of ASIC and Z, David Sachs, Gary Tan, Toby Lucky, Ron Conway, Joe Lonsdale, Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, the Solana founders, Notion founder, Brian Johnson Blueprint, Steve Sinofsky, who's very senior at Microsoft, David Lee, who's one of the early people at SV Angel and also at Samsung now.

54:44And I could go through the list of names here, but Ajay runs Mithril, Billion Dollar Fund. And outside of being some of the most prolific investors, there seems to be an ideological bent here. Are you looking for a specific type of LP for your fund as well? Yeah, if you like all these people, you're going to like the Balaji Fund. And if you don't, well, I'm sure there's plenty of other nice funds. It's really kind of that simple. What I think on balance, what these folks stand for is freedom. And in my view, the best of American values. And they stand for technological progress and they stand for all of these good things.

55:27and that's also the kind of stuff that I want to fund. Of course, it has to make money and I think it will make a lot of money, but it'll also make freedom. And the focus of your fund, you call it high risk seed. So tell me about that. Sure, sure, sure, sure. I mean, the thing is, sometimes categories get named in retrospect. Like, was there a category called an accelerator Raider at the time, Y Combinator started its thing, or, you know, the Teal Fellowship sort of created a category. A6 and Z didn't look like a normal VC fund when it was doing its thing and so on. I look at investing as a tool to build the world that we want to build.

56:09And, you know, one of the things that I had in this were, you know, there's a bunch of these failing institutions, and I'm going to list some of them off, okay? So here are some problems, right? high inflation, privacy violations, lack of shared consensus, costly energy, election controversy, security breaches, loss of manufacturing capability, low impulse control, the declining post-war order, falling life expectancy, eroding freedoms, internet-disrupted institutions, inadequate education, blocked physical construction, clickbait journalism, lawfare, insufficient political choice, and above all, in my view, the inaccessibility of the physical frontier.

56:53And how do you solve these kinds of things? Well, for example, with privacy violation, zero-knowledge proofs, other kinds of things, internet encryption, local storage, those can go after those. Loss of manufacturing capability. Well, robotics actually has a lot of promise in bringing manufacturing to anything, and maybe you can turn a lot of labor into electricity, which turns labor into capital. or other less obvious things like impulse control. So, you know, Mike Moritz, you know, one of the greatest investors of all time, he has this concept on the seven deadly sins. Do you know this thing?

57:30Yeah, about the core needs that every company solves. Yeah, right. And what he means is that it's like, you know, it's just so incredibly difficult to build a business that you need to have some visceral human need. For example, Uber saves you time, so that's sloth. DoorDash gets you food, that's gluttony, right? Twitter raises your awareness of bad things, that's wrath. Instagram is pride. Match.com finds you a date, right? Robinhood facilitates your transactions, greed. Zillow helps you get a better house. So in extremists, these things that are meeting legitimate human needs can become vices.

58:11So that's why in a tongue in cheek way, he says every startup serves one of the seven deadly sins, right? With me so far. The problem is though, that if those companies are no longer startups and they become really huge companies, um, you know, I think they add value on balance, but there's some comments, for example, like the, uh, like Netflix once maybe tongue in cheek, but they said, um, that their goal was to, um, was to make it so that you, uh, take away from a glass of wine with your spouse and just watch more Netflix. Remember there's like famous quote on that, right? And because they just want to maximize your time spent online.

58:48Okay. Now you start to get into maybe a vice of sloth, right? It goes from, you know, a human need of maybe entertainment to a vice of sloth, right? And so how could you possibly defend against something like that? Um, when you're at the checkout counter and there's all of this very highly optimized, you know, stuff there that's sugary, that is maybe maximizing the profit of the guy selling it, but it's not benefiting your health. Well, maybe you have a different kind of business that actually boosts not vice, but virtue. For example, you have like a community where you have a membership to it and it's keto kosher.

59:23And so there's no sugary food even allowed in it. Very much like kosher itself, where there's dietary restrictions that are just put into the supply chain and you just kind of see that something's kosher. You just kind of enter this community and it's only salad and fresh fruit and fresh veggies and, and, you know, meat if you're, if you're into that. Um, but there's no processed foods, there's no sugar. You have to get in the car and drive outside of it to go and eat unhealthy. So your defaults are set to a good level. Right. And that's like one of several creative solutions to try to have, um, a corporate virtue as opposed to corporate advice.

1:00:00Okay. So, and that's because the community is not optimizing on profit maximization. They're optimizing on other values. Or more precisely that profit maximization is now aligned with the individual's values. It's a little bit like, you know, there was junk food, but now guess what? There's health food and there's companies that make money on health food. And there's, you know, there's now like results-based gyms, which don't make money on the subscription, but make money if you actually achieve your fitness goals, right? So it's a little bit like, you know, you've probably managed a Salesforce, right?

1:00:36And not Salesforce, the company, but a Salesforce, like a, right? And they will do what you incentivize them to do, right? They're, the saying is coin operate, right? You set up incentives and they will run to - That's the best salesperson. People get upset at them for optimizing around the quote-unquote wrong incentives, but that's a sign of a very effective salesperson. Yeah, exactly. It's almost like a really powerful stallion, and you point in a direction, and it's going to run in that direction. If you point it off the cliff or if you didn't realize that there was a bump in the road in the future, well, that's kind of your fault in that sense, right?

1:01:11So now, you can do things where you incentivize salespeople with equity, but really what you want to do is just constantly monitor the incentives and change incentives. And so capital is this very powerful maximizing function, but it can't set the objective itself. And then some creativity comes out of, okay, well, we made a lot of money off of junk food. Can we make a lot of money off of health food? Well, probably we can. We just need to hit the right cultural moment. Anyway, so that's just like one subroutine of a subroutine of what I'm trying to do here. But really what it is, is all those problems I listed, I think there are internet-first solutions to many of them.

1:01:47There are ways that, and one way of thinking about that, if there is hope, it comes from tech. Okay, that's the one thing that's working. Why do I say this one thing that's working? Well, you have drug addiction, and you have failing life expectancy, and you have military issues overseas, and you have inflation. and you have everything that the state is touching, which is real estate, it's healthcare, it's education. Those things are getting wildly expensive in price. And I can show you that graph. Do you know the graph I'm talking about? Not that one specifically. And education, of course, as well.

1:02:25I think education has been compounding by 8 % for like three decades. Yeah. And Ackman actually had this great tweet where he's like, how is this thing getting so ridiculous expensive and the number of students isn't increasing? At Harvard, you now have more administrators than students. Yeah, exactly, right? And so, okay, so now I'm going to show you something that I've been thinking about for a long time. By the way, not just Harvard. Most Ivy League institutions. Yes, most Ivy League institutions. That's right. It's like they all kind of hike price together. They also collude on admissions and whatnot, right?

1:03:01So whatever the state props up rises in price. Whatever technology drops falls in price, right? So this is like everything that the government touches, medical services, these are obviously related to education, right? Housing, even on this chart, it doesn't look that bad. In certain markets, it's like absolutely terrible, right? And whereas the stuff that technology touches like TVs or cell phones, those fall relative to baseline, but these things rise. And now there's a bunch of people who say, oh, no, no, you're just, you know, that's Baumol's cost disease. Those things that go up in price, it's because there's labor associated with them and you're, you know, you're trying to blame it on the government.

1:03:43I'm like, well, ask yourself why they can't be automated. Why don't we have more automated medicine? It's because thanks to AMA and to some extent FDA and a bunch of other, and HHS and so on, you have to have a doctor in the loop for things that don't require a doctor. For example, like you need a doctor to get your genome sequenced in some places. That's considered like a diagnostic test. This is like saying you need a doctor to step on the scale, a doctor to look in the mirror. Why do we need to put that through the medical system and register a billing event for everybody involved? That doesn't need to be like that.

1:04:19You want to push much more self-serve. And similarly with child care, there's regulations that say there can only be so many children cared for per adult. but you have a much larger number of children care for by teacher in elementary school. And yet that, you know, you could have 30 kids in a class, but there's a limit on childcare. It's one of the reasons childcare is very expensive in some jurisdictions, obviously housing regulations prohibit you in a variety of ways. Some there's there's also unions that, that make it tough. And I recognize, by the way, I'm sure some of the people watching this are like, you know, managing large, you know, pensions or things like that.

1:04:55No offense, any of these folks, I'm talking about the systemic. Well, speaking of pensions, there's this really interesting thing where basically the largest pensions in the world are, of course, unions. And they have political pressure to drive up their returns. So they're going into private equity and hedge funds that are then systematically going in and downsizing. It's so, I mean. The marriage is a two-way marriage, and as you mentioned, it's largely driven by politics and not the end goals of the individual members, which is where that delta is essentially the corruption or the politicization of the process.

1:05:35Right. I mean, the thing is like the, you know, the goal of having a high standard of living and, you know, a job with decency for workers, of course, one supports that mechanism, you know, that one can can argue with. But anyway, my point is that when you start scratching on these areas that have supposedly Baumol's cost disease and nothing can be done and so on and so forth, and then you go and look at construction abroad, you're like, why is this 100x or 1 ,000x literally faster? I'm not saying that as like some figure of speech. I mean, I've posted videos. I recognize that China is very unpopular.

1:06:14Nevertheless, they've built a lot very quickly. And there's something one can learn from their prefab and modular construction. If you were to unpack those scale efficiencies, what are those scale efficiencies?

1:06:30It's only 30 seconds. Just watch the seven trains, 23 diggers. They started at 6.30 p.m. They're done by 3 a.m.

1:06:48So the reason I say that is that shows what's physically possible, right? And when you go from nine hours to three years or five years for a station, right, that is a greater than 1 ,000x difference, right? You know, divide 9 ,000 hours, right, into 24 hours in a day, right? and you know that is um i think 2.5 times per day and then three years thousand from nine hours to one year that's that's about a thousand x right nine thousand hours roughly in a year um when you're a thousand x off from the state of the art from what's physically feasible you're going to fall way behind you're not in the game and this is something you know elon actually replied to a tweet of mine where he i said look we're not california isn't 10 off the state of the art, it's like a thousand X off the state of the art in terms of speed.

1:07:50And if you've done any real estate, that compounds really fast. If you can build a building a thousand X faster than the other guy, you can have it occupied and generating rent to build the next building and the next and the next and next. Your compounding rate is so much ridiculously faster than the other guy. you're just going to completely outrun them. Right. And so my point is that we're so far below capacity on this. And the reason is because of, in part, in large part, these regulations that are requiring either humans to be involved or new technologies to not be adopted or all of the above.

1:08:30And that's why the cost of construction, the cost of housing and so on goes up. It doesn't have to be like that, we could build way, way, way faster. So the point being that how do you do that, though? Let's say we've diagnosed it that the cost of housing and the cost of education, the cost of healthcare, all these things have skyrocketed. Everything touched by technology has dropped in price. Well, there's that famous Alan Kay saying, which is, if you're serious about software, you've got to build your own hardware. Let's see if Jobs got it right. So I feel if you're serious about technology, you need to build your own sovereignty.

1:09:11Because the problems are upstream of the technology. Exactly. Exactly. And let me give some concrete examples. The city of San Francisco and the current state of it, that's not something that you can solve by hitting keys on a keyboard, at least in a trivial way. That's a governance problem. Newsom and Linda Breed could click their fingers like this and clean up the city. And they admitted it. They said, it's true. They cleaned it up for the G to visit. Okay. Another example is this, you know, when a cruise was taken off the streets, a self-driving car was taken off the streets. That's a political thing, not a tech thing.

1:09:43When AI is getting the 640 K compute is enough for anyone ban, right? Like, there's a recent executive order that's banning AI compute. When you have a crypto being attacked by the government, right? And so you have AI, crypto, self-driving, any technology you can, obviously social media is being attacked, right? Any technology you can imagine is something where if it actually is increasing human freedom in some way, if it's giving people more ability to speak, more ability to transact, more ability to do X or Y or Z, that's undercutting several traditional power centers. And they want to clamp down on that because they think of it as rocking the system are causing instability either directly or indirectly.

1:10:26And you can see that more clearly all the way over in China, where even though they had done some, I think, some good things, I hesitate to ever say China's ever done anything. Why are you so focused on trolls and people criticizing? I think one of the things in our search for truth, we must be brave in stating things that are factually based. I'm not really focused on it, but it's more like defensive driving. Yeah. You know, conditioning. It's it goes back to the power structures. Somehow you are being influenced by by the implicit the implicit hands of online criticism. Well, yeah. I mean, in the sense of I want to state things precisely enough to deny an out of context clip.

1:11:09Yeah. And you also want the audience to be able to absorb the learning without being triggered. yeah sometimes right i mean but look is it true look you know if to really understand where china is let's just talk about china for a second as a sub subroutine pop right up okay or all right here we go um people are just totally totally totally unrealistic about you know where where china is right now in terms of how strong it is on some and i think the very the very basis of uh sun tzu art of war is to know, know your enemy. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. Like if, if you're, you know, if the whole thing is sort of, in my view, cope that says, of course, they're just going to fall into a ditch and, and win.

1:11:58And so that wasn't like the U S had to during the cold war and it took the Soviets very seriously. But anyway, so China's number one, steel, number one, trade, number one, shipbuilding, number one, high speed rail. Right. So here is the steel. Okay. And then people sometimes say, Oh, it's just like the 1970s and so on. Okay. In the 1970s, here was the U.S. in terms of steel production, and there was China. It's basically about a 10x ratio. Today, it's 10x the other way, and China is the number one steel producer in the entire world. And that's just a proxy for lots of physical stuff. I'll show a few more graphs.

1:12:29Here, back in the year 2000, all the blue countries are trade partners to the U.S. in this graph. By the year 2020, only really North America was mainly a U.S. trade partner, had the U.S.'s number one trade partner, and some countries in Western Europe. most of the world has their number one trade partner being China. So if you tell countries you must choose between America and China, they may not want to choose, but you may not like their choice. Knowing these facts governs what tactics are likely to work. You can't sanction China. China's like making the essentials for much of the world. And also people think it's all about a high-tech competition with China.

1:13:07That's not actually true, or not only that, it's also a medium-tech and a low-tech competition. China can screw you on the screws because they make all the screws and the nuts and the bolts too. They deny the screws. As it's saying, for want of a nail, the battle was lost. You know that old saying? Yeah. Yeah, so for want of a nail, the horse didn't get its shoe. And for want of a shoe, the horse didn't ride. So the messenger couldn't get to the king and couldn't tell them that the troops were there. So for want of a nail, the entire battle was lost. Right. So China can screw you on very low tech things by just denying them or, you know, having them sent, you know, a mistake.

1:13:44You know, we didn't understand your instructions. There's many different ways that they can sanction the countries that are hostile to them that they haven't really sort of flex it. The micron sanctions are just like V1 of that. The worst the U.S. can do is sort of keep China in a box maybe for a little bit in terms of denying the very highest tech stuff. the worst China can do is to undercut your very standard of living and cause very significant inflation by, by a sanctions weapon. So just understanding the state of the world is important, right? So, okay. So that's, you know, who you're going to call trade wise.

1:14:14Here is a slide from the U S Navy itself, by the way. Okay. That shows you love this illustration. It's saying China has 200 X greater shipbuilding capacity than the USA. That's a, that's a somewhat alarming slide. I think. Is that civilian vessels? No, military vessels. Or rather, okay, sorry. I think they're not making, sorry, let me be more precise. The U.S. Navy, the head of the U.S. Navy, is saying China has more capacity in one shipyard than all American shipyards combined. And many of those shipyards can be modified for military purposes. Do I know the exact breakdown of military or civilian production?

1:14:54I don't. Okay, but I do think that if you look at history, people can turn plowshares into swords. and the U.S. turned a lot of its domestic car production, for example, into tank factories and whatnot. So the fact that China has all the shipbuilding capacity is cause for worry if you're going to get into an extended conflict, which I think would be a disaster for the world, but it's worth actually understanding. So let's talk about there's a whole trend, American dynamism. Yes. Let me talk about that in one second. I'll show you one more. This is how China built the world's largest high-speed rail network, right?

1:15:30Now, while China is doing this from 2008 to 2022, California high-speed rail, they haven't laid a single line of track for$100 billion spent, right? Like they, you know, it's like I want to find the thing that says no track laid or it's like it's a very abortive kind of thing. So meanwhile, here's what's happening. Can you see this tab? Yep. So billions spent, still no track built, and still no trains. 14 years on, what happened to HS2, okay? So you have China and the U.S. basically starting 14 years ago, and China's built out this giant high-speed rail network for their entire country from scratch, and the U.S.

1:16:16with a lot more money seemingly, and all the resources in the world hasn't gotten anywhere in one state, whereas by contrast, this is what's happening in China and the entire country. Here's a graph, 2008 to 2020. Do you see that? Yeah. Okay. You know, when I say this kind of stuff and I point this out to people, I get a few reactions, right? The first reaction is, you're a China shill. You love China so much, right? And I'm like, you can't get better. The greatest strength is knowing your own weakness, right? You can't get better unless you know that you're actually behind and why you're behind.

1:17:02Imagine if Blockbuster called everybody who's pointing to Netflix's growth a Netflix shell. Perhaps that's what happened. Maybe BlackBerry called everybody an iPhone shell. That's something where you just lose to the competition if you deny the competition actually has any advantage on you, number one. The second reaction is people will say, oh, yeah, but it's all shoddy and it's going to fall apart and it's low quality and so on and so forth. And the thing is, the Chinese have ascended the value chain. They've gone from making plastic stuff at Walmart to assembling phones and things like that, all the way up to DGI drones in glowing cities.

1:17:44You know, also, by the way, if you looked at our engineering programs in the West, a very large percentage are, you know, graduate students of Chinese descent and of Indian descent and from other places. They aren't dumb people. They work hard and they're smart. And to always think they're only going to make plastic stuff, I think, doesn't give sufficient credit to, you know, what was one of the world's great civilizations. Do I agree with communism? Of course, I don't agree with communism. Do I think that they have executed phenomenally well in some ways over the last 40 years? I think that's undeniable.

1:18:18Otherwise, they wouldn't go from an agrarian nothing to what they've become because they've built up their whole country. They've shipped goods all around the world. And they own, you know, it was about a trillion dollars of U.S. debt. So they're also, you know, they're a creditor nation, right? They're extending credit to the world. They're not going into debt. If any one of those things wasn't true, if they hadn't built up their country, if they hadn't exported the goods, for example, if they were a net importer, Right. You could argue, you know, that that was actually what was causing it. But they're building up, they're exporting out and they're building up their cash reserves.

1:18:48So this massive unlock of just domestic production happened. And that doesn't mean that, you know, all is lost or something like that. But it does mean that it's worth actually taking them seriously. Now, the funny thing is, in many ways, what's been happening over the last five years, seven years, 10 years, is that the U.S. has actually been copying China without admitting it. Most of the time people say China's copying the U.S., right? Like, oh, Xiaomi is copying, you know, Apple or, you know, they're cloning Twitter or something like that for Weibo. That definitely does happen, absolutely does happen.

1:19:24But that's like admitted, you know. What I think is not admitted is China copying, the U.S. copying China. And what do I mean by that? Well, obviously COVID lockdown, okay? But it's more than that. It's restrictions on free speech and rejections of free markets. It's coming from both the left and the right where it's saying we need to ban this because China's banning our stuff. We need to ban this because it's influencing the minds of our youth. And what that is, I can go down the list. It's also China has a term for cancel culture. You know what they call it? Human flesh search. Very evocative.

1:20:00It's like you find somebody online, you're like, who's that guy? And then the whole internet tries to dig up and find that person or what have you, right? One of the things that also happened was, for example, China would censor the name of – or if you sent$64.89 on WeChat, that would get censored because it's$64.89, like CNN. But if you gave the name of the whistleblower on Facebook, Sierra Mello, this is like five years ago. Nobody cares now. But Facebook would censor that, right? So aspects of the same thing are kind of getting reinvented in parallel on the system. So people are copying China without admitting it, and that's bad, right?

1:20:42Because if you're copying without admitting it, people are, for example, trying to copy Chinese industrial policy with things like the TSMC plant. Are you familiar with this whole thing? So TSMC, just for background for those people who weren't following this, the U.S. used to be the world leader in chips. then Intel lost a bunch of steps, and somehow TSMC has rocketed out to the leader, and they're located in Taiwan. So that's a national security vulnerability for the U.S., arguably, and from one standpoint, if China takes Taiwan. And how do they take Taiwan? People think they're going to invade Taiwan.

1:21:12Maybe they invade Taiwan. Maybe they just win a cultural victory in Taiwan. They're also Chinese-speaking people. There's multiple parties in Taiwan, and not all of them are sympathetic to the U.S. Some of them want reunification with China and so on. But let's say that's a risk. Okay, fine. The U.S. allocates$50 billion. That's a lot of money, by the way. That's$50 billion venture capital funds to become the largest venture capitalists in the world. Okay. And the$50 billion is allocated towards bringing TSMC to America and building, you know, having our ally give us the technology transfer. Okay.

1:21:43Do you know what's happened with that? No, I've done it a bit. Okay. Remember this thing,$50 billion. It's supposed to prevent like a giant conflict with China. It's supposed to be a huge now security thing. You'd think all the stops get pulled out. Okay. So what's actually happened? Well, so first, and it's very sad that this is happening, but it also shows what's going on. Like, first, the unions were annoyed because basically they weren't doing the work that the, you know, Taiwan has a certain work ethic that is different than where America's work ethic is nowadays for at least some people.

1:22:26So the unions didn't want to do the work in the way that the Chinese or the Taiwanese wanted to do it. And so the TSMC said, okay, can we at least bring in 500 people from Taiwan who will work in the way that we're accustomed to working? And the unions opposed those visas. And to my knowledge, those visas still haven't been granted. So the decision to bring foreign workers to Arizona is a slap in the face. So these guys are treating this as if it's like some jobs program or whatever. Can you imagine, like, you know, the scientists of the Mahan Project involved a lot of European Jews, right? People who had been pushed out.

1:23:04Imagine. Yeah, like, imagine that these people, like, I don't know exactly what happened there, but if you said, oh, we couldn't process the visa and you brought that to FDR in the middle of, like, an actual conflict, he probably would have looked at you like you had four eyes and be like, why are you bringing this to my desk? Obviously bring them into the country and figure out the paperwork. I would think, right? And so this is where we're at. We're like, you know, even for a national security thing, these folks can't get visas into the country, and it's fought, right? And that's not the end of it.

1:23:36There's so much more. Like the – Morris Chang recently fired the – or TSMC head seems to have had issues because of Arizona. Rumors TSMC chairman Mark Liu forced to retire of an Arizona fab debacle. So it comes out in this article that the U.S. hasn't yet paid TSMC for this gigantic fab investment. And that's why TSMC's founder was very skeptical of the attempt to build a fab and the fact that they didn't get paid yet, you know, because the company hasn't yet received subsidies from the federal government, right? So we have something which the optics of it were, let's bring manufacturing back from Asia, build American again, and so on.

1:24:24The flag was waved, and money's reallocated, and everybody blew their kazoos. And now what's actually happened? Project is foundering. You literally can't get visas to get people into the country. The unions are holding it up. All the reasons you don't build in America are now being encountered. And it's not just about money. It's about basically alignment and coordination. And this brings us back to my very original point about when you have disaligned people, when you have people who just do not see things the same way, it doesn't matter how much money you throw at it. It'll get like, you know, just spent and burned in lawsuits and lawfare and environmental union reports and like strikes or whatever.

1:25:03We have people who are really aligned and locked on to a single single purpose. You can get a lot done with a very small group. Right. And so the question is how do we rebuild that consensus? And by the way, I'll just show you one more graph to quantify the level to which there isn't consensus. And then remind me how I got on this. It was something related to China and so on, right? You know, it's not one country, it's two parties. Okay. So support for today's episode comes from Square. It's all in one way for business owners to take payments, book appointments, man's staff, and keep everything running in one place.

1:25:35Whether you're selling lattes, cutting hair, running a boutique, or managing a service business, Square helps you run your business without running yourself into the ground. I was actually thinking about this the other day when I stopped by a local cafe here. They use Square and everything just works. Check out as fast, receipts are instant, and sometimes I get loyalty rewards automatically. There's something about businesses that use Square. They just feel more put together. The experience is smoother for them and it's smoother for me as a customer. Square makes it easy to sell wherever your customers are, in-store, online, on your phone, or even at pop-ups and everything stays synced in real time.

1:26:07You can track sales, manage inventory, book appointments, and see reports instantly, whether you're in your shop or on the go. And when you make a sale, you don't have to wait days to get paid. Square gives you fast access to your earnings through Square checking. They also have built-in tools like loyalty and marketing so your best customers keep coming back. And right now, you can get up to$200 off Square hardware when you sign up at square.com slash go slash how I invest. That's S-Q-U-A-R-E.com slash go slash how I invest. With Square, you get all the tools to run your business with none of the contracts or complexity.

1:26:40Run your business smarter with Square. Get started. So that's, this is, you know, each of these are congressmen. And the 50s, people of one party, another party used to vote together quite a bit on bills. By 2011, these had come apart into two totally separate graphs. And this is not like a one-year thing. This is like a 70-year trend, right? And this is something which has been happening for many years. And now it's reflected in a totally different graph. and this graph I'll show you next is a graph of social media in 2017. So this is rather than congressmen on both sides, it's individual users and it's like publications.

1:27:19And these are Democrats and Republicans. And they mostly follow each other. There's a few in the middle over here. And this is 2017 where they're all in one social network. And now you have blues on Mastodon and Blue Sky and Threads and Reds are on Parler and Gab and Truth Social and so on. And so not even fighting anymore. They're like already divorced and they've digitally split apart into their own apps. Okay. So that's the reason I say all that pulling it all the way back up. I got into this topic because we were talking about how prices have risen and how construction become impossible in the US.

1:27:59And as an example of that, that didn't need to be impossible. I showed how fast China builds. And I also showed how the U.S.'s attempts to build recently with TSMC and so on weren't working. And so what can work? Well, one answer is just double down on all the government processes that are obviously not working. The government processes, U.S. government processes that are leading to the TSMC debacle, to the California high-speed train debacle, to the AI regulations, to the crypto regulations, to the state of San Francisco, to high inflation, to too many other things to name. You can just keep doubling down on that, try to reform that system.

1:28:35or you can build a better one. And the fundamental question is, we know how to do that for things that look like companies. You can build a competitor to Blockbuster Video. You can build a competitor to Ford Motor Company with Tesla. How do you, now we know how to build it with currencies. And so you can build a competitor to the Federal Reserve with Bitcoin. You can build a competitor, in a sense, to the judiciary with smart contracts, at least a part of it. Okay. Elon has figured out how to build a competitor to NASA, a government agency with SpaceX. Okay. You start extending the domain of the kinds of things that you can build competitors to.

1:29:13And so the question is, how do we build a competitor to Harvard? How do we build a competitor to the New York times? How do we build a competitor to the Senate? How do we build a competitor to, you know, FDA and to NIH and so on and so forth. And we're starting to get versions of that, like Vita DAO that I showed you. It's very early. But that's the kind of thing which at a few billion dollars a year, you know, and crypto can go very fast upward when it when it works. That could start to become a competitor to NIH and maybe a small amount of money, but really aligned people does better. OK, so this is where my head is at is how do we build Internet first replacements to those failing institutions which we haven't yet been able to build competitors?

1:29:53Your thesis is the ethos of Silicon Valley. It's based on the innovator's dilemma that's written by Clayton Christensen, which basically says that it's much easier to start new organizations with first principles thinkings than it is to reform previous organizations due to all the entranced regions that you mentioned. So tell me about your fund. So what do you have outside of being a high risk seed fund, which I think is a great way to frame it? What are you looking to fund? What specific verticals are you looking to fund from your seed fund? What specific verticals? anything that is building an alternative to a failing institution.

1:30:31For example, internet homeschooling to replace broken K-12. Internet education like synthesis or replet to replace, you know, failing either higher ed with AI tutors or, you know, professional training with like online crypto bounties and online training like that. Um, if you have failing medicine, well, can we do medical tourism? Can we do AI diagnostics on your phone? Right. And if we have, you know, issues of manufacturing, can we do robotic manufacturing? So I'm essentially looking at these extremely valuable institutions that are in decline. And even an imperfect solution that gets you even 20 % of what they were is so valuable in many senses of the term, economically, of course, but also societally, that people will use them.

1:31:24And so crucially, it's not really necessarily about novel technology. Sometimes it is. AI tutoring is using novel technology. Crypto is novel. Robotic construction will be novel. Sometimes it is, but it's really starting first with a societal problem that's happening and trying to address that with a focused technological fix in that area. You know, so like AI tutors are not a solution for the manufacturing crisis. And so, but they do really improve homeschooling so that you can get a very high quality homeschooling experience better than any K through 12 school. But it's also customized to your child's needs.

1:32:00Something that really resonates, as you know, at the seed stage, it's all about power loss. It's not about how many wins you have or how many losses you have. It's about how big your wins are. A lot of times people have difficulty conceptualizing that. One example that I like to give people is a$10 billion outcome is better than seven$1 billion outcomes. Something that resonates with your strategy is you are not looking for incremental. You're not looking for a SaaS company that grows at 30 % versus 20%, which may lead to a 10x or might lead to maybe even a 15x return. How are you going about building out your portfolio?

1:32:40Great question. One comment I want to make on the previous thing is I have nothing against enterprise SaaS and stuff like that. In fact, many of the techniques to build those businesses may be applicable here. You're still going to need to know about churn. You're still going to need to do all the basic stuff like HR and so on and so forth. Being ambitious doesn't mean you don't do the blocking and tackling of having a CFO or whatever when you need one. So I'm a pragmatic ideologue. You have your eyes on the prize, but you are nailing all the details all the way. For example, with SpaceX, Elon wants to get to Mars, but there's a lot of details to make sure a rocket launch is pulled off.

1:33:20So I'm not at all negative or disdainful of, quote, boring SaaS businesses or stuff like that. In fact, they may be components of what's done. However, I do believe going after important societal problems could yield outsized returns, both societally and economically in many senses. Now, to your second point, what does portfolio construction look like? And the short answer is I'm just betting on the smart, young, early founders. And not always young. Sometimes actually they're in their 30s or 40s or 50s. They're serial entrepreneurs. But they feel energetic, right? Their past wins were just prologue to what they're about to do, okay?

1:34:02And there's a group of folks that I sort of – I think I attract a few different demographics. Being of Indian descent, a lot of Indian people like me from India. Why is that? It's kind of like – I don't know. It was a poor country, and it's just recently leveling up. And so for a lot of those kids, I'm somebody that they could aspire to be like, right? And I hope to invest in some of them. And actually, Indians are the single most common immigrant tech founder. And the second is Israelis, right? And so there's a lot of Indian tech talent. I mean, maybe obviously, right? And so that's like one important channel.

1:34:41You know, if you want to say, like, I sort of hate talking in like VC LP terms, but let me talk in those terms. So the unique deal flow is that, so A, I think there's a lot of, you know, Indian kids, Indian founders and so on who I think I could be the first check into. Very high IQ people who just got on the internet. So, you know, we can tap like a giant goldmine that just opened up because I do believe that India in this decade will be, or let me be more precise, Indians in this decade will be what China was last decade. And why do I say that? China had a miraculous 2010s. It was WeChat and Weibo and just a giant build out of their entire tech economy.

1:35:27I do believe, though, that it's more about the Indian network, whereas it was about the Chinese state. China's development is very much focused within China. Their internet is air-gapped from the rest of the world. It's got the Great Firewall. It's all in Chinese. Their apps are all controlled by the Chinese state. So it's its own island. India is the opposite where, because in English and its internet is connected to the rest of the world, most of your followers will probably soon be Indian. Most people on the English internet will soon be Indian. So India is a totally different phenomenon on the internet than China was.

1:35:56And it's almost like a mirror image in some ways. It's as open and connected as China was closed and siloed off, right? So that is a lot of interesting phenomena. One impact of it is there's a lot of visa restrictions that are being placed on Chinese nationals. And if you remember my comment about engineering departments, like Stanford Electrical Engineering, when I was there, it was on the order of 30 % or 40 % Chinese, 30%, 40 % Indian. I forget the exact numbers on that ballpark. With the Chinese talent basically dropping off, Indian talent is sort of surging to compensate. So a very large, so a lot more emigration of Indians to many tech roles around the world, just as India itself is rising.

1:36:33So that means it's not just about Indians in India or India, the country, but Indians globally. So I'm extremely bullish on Indians, moderately bullish on India. Okay. And so that means is you can get Indian founders out of India and you can place them into vehicles and they don't necessarily have to come to the US. They're global founders. They can be placed into vehicles and they can just crush it on a world stage. Let's call that one, like, you talk about portfolio construction, I'm just talking about deal flow first, right? That's one stream. The second stream, of course, is all of the, you know, crypto folks and so on.

1:37:05You know, I've been in crypto for a long time. And that's, I do think, by the way, crypto isn't just finance, parallel finance. It's parallel financiers, okay? At a certain price of cryptocurrency, a certain market cap, depending on how you calculate, around$200 ,000 of Bitcoin if it hits that, around half the world's billionaires become crypto. Thousands of new billionaires are created. If that happens, that means that we actually have a third global pool of capital that is distinct from, albeit interacting with, the American and Chinese pools. Like that to say, I think of crypto as, you know, people talk about Web3, and it is also like a third pool because it's like totally globally unlocked capital.

1:37:52One of the attractions of cryptocurrency and smart contracts is that they treat a Brazilian, a guy from Boston, and a guy from Bangalore equally. Even as the rules-based order is breaking down, the code-based order is rising up. There's no gaslighting in crypto. There's no gaslighting in crypto? Yeah, exactly. I mean, look, people say, what about all the hacks and the scams and sort of stuff that happened on Shade? Absolutely, those things happen. But it's like the Wild West where what's coming out of that is actually a generation of combat veterans in cybersecurity, right? All of these, like, you know, in Israel, they have the unit 8600.

1:38:32All these ex-NSA guys, all these amazing cybersecurity people are getting really good in crypto because, you know, just being one bite off can mean the loss of millions and millions of dollars. It's a very different kind of trial by fire than the sort of bureaucratic checkbox process that typical security consulting is, right? Typical security says, oh, you know, did you follow ISO 9000 or whatever guidelines for, you know, check this? Do you have a chief security officer? Do you have a security at email? It's just like a checklist of things. Crypto security is like, here's a billion dollars. Do you still have it tomorrow?

1:39:10Right? It is 24-7 unlimited internet warfare to try to capture the flag. As such, it's actually taking cybersecurity for real. So what crypto is, is it's another stream of talent besides the Indians, but it's more than just finance. It's cybersecurity. It's smart contracts. It's a pool of capital. And now it's funding things that those other two pools of capital are maybe more risk averse about funding. For example, we're funding things like longevity. We're funding things like startup cities. And what those have in common with crypto is not that they're about moving money online, but they're about a parallel system, right?

1:39:49Longevity is like parallel medicine. Startup cities are like parallel San Francisco, just like crypto is like parallel Wall Street, right? Okay. So one stream is Indians, one stream is crypto. And certainly, I actually, my background is in biology and genomics and whatnot, right? And so certainly I have those folks. And, you know, for example, I was an investor in Benchling, which is a multibillion-dollar company when I was at E.C. and Z. That's done very well. That's like laboratories for managing your clinical lab. That's actually like a SaaS company, by the way, but it's like a multi-billion dollar.

1:40:20You talk a lot, but you don't talk a lot about your own success. So what are some other power law type outcomes that you've had in your personal portfolio? Sure. So I'm early on just about every coin. Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, Chainlink, so many. avalanche near protocol. She's your non-ideological bent. Yeah, no, I mean, I basically, because all of these are smart founders and, you know, like if one of them works and it's really worth it. You know, one of the funny things is

1:40:59crypto tribalism, I understand why it exists. And that's a whole topic we can get into. And I can, I think I can speak the language and understand many of the arguments of. And in fact, I was probably one of the, I'm a person that people would mistake for a Bitcoin maximalist, but I do believe that we're going to need more financial assets than just Bitcoin. Even somebody who lived in a world where gold was a reserve currency didn't believe that gold was the only asset. So I think we need different tools for the job. You don't just have a hammer. You need wrenches and screwdrivers and so on. So first is many, many, many of the crypto assets and crypto protocols out there.

1:41:34A. B, at A, Benchling, DigitalOcean, you know, I did that deal in Peter Levine, you know, that was in early 2014. Then there was Omada and OpenGov. Those are both billion-dollar valuations, you know, knock on wood. I think they're doing well. Yeah, Omada Health and OpenGov. Um, and, uh, there were, uh, some early investor in superhuman, early investor in replet. Um, and you know, here's a nice comment, you know, replets multibillion dollar company. And, um, I'm sure I had a nice comment about me. Do you share your, your track record? Do I share my track record? Uh, I mean, I can, but no, but no, like people kind of know, I mean, if you know you know well i don't know i don't know what i can say about this because of the regulatory blah blah blah stuff right so so what i can say is i invest in those companies and they're currently at that valuation and you know a bunch of the best investors in silicon valley have invested in me and so i think i've been a positive sum contributor to the ecosystem over time so so in those companies you have a unique thesis around check size a lot of people say your fund size is your strategy.

1:42:56I say your check size is your strategy. So tell me about your check size and how are you strategic about it? What's your min check? What's your max check? And tell me about how that's evolved over time. I'll get a short answer and then the long answer. So I tend to do a constant investment in every company that's above my bar. And so you're making only one decision, the zero one of invest, and then you put in, let's say, 100K or 250K. Now, you don't do too much. Why? As a seed fund, you have a different strategy than a VC fund. As a VC fund, you want to gobble up 20 % because you need to have 20 % of a$5 billion company to get a billion dollar exit.

1:43:42You want to get double-digit ownership. Percent ownership is the thing you're constantly optimizing for, and you're doing everything to get that. What that means is you have to elbow everybody out at the table to get the biggest chunk for yourself. Every other point of allocation is very precious and makes a big difference to your returns. As a seed fund, it's very different. You just essentially want to be part of lots of winning deals. And if, for example, you saw a space early like cryptocurrency in 2013, a very good strategy was to just simply invest in everything that was above your bar. If you just took the top 20 companies, you would have gotten Coinbase, you would have gotten ShapeShift a little bit later, you would have gotten a bunch of other things.

1:44:23Blockchain at Info, these are multibillion-dollar results. And you would have gotten a pretty good chunk for very little money. Like maybe for a few million bucks, you could have gotten on the order of a point in many of these companies. And crucially, you're playing nice with everybody. Okay. You're not, you know, nobody dislikes you. You are in every deal and you're helping people in general. And of course there's limits. You can't, you know, you can't go all in on one company. It's a total competitor of another and so on and so forth. But in general, you can be an ecosystem wide kind of player and you get very high ROI on a relatively small amount of money.

1:45:01Now that doesn't scale up. If you go to a very large fund, then you need new tactics. But if you keep your fund on the order of 100 mil or less, you can actually get very large ROI multiples, in my view, relatively easily by basically just being in a lot of these great companies. Does that make sense so far? I can talk about it. And a couple other things. And this strategy has worked for me personally. So I've just been investing 100 % of my own money for many years. I'm basically just doing exactly what I was doing personally, but now I've just got like a fund and some ops and stuff around, right?

1:45:35So the reason, by the way, to not like, you know, try to dial check size up and down and so on on each investment is it's actually kind of when I go back and back test it. What you find is often you can diligence intelligence, but you can't diligence diligence. What do you mean by that? Okay. So with a founder, I can very quickly usually figure out kind of how smart they are, how polished their app is, how polished their website copy is, and so on. What's much harder to tell is where they have the grit and staying power and consistency to grind it out for 10 years. And often, not always, but often I found that people who were above my minimum intelligence bar actually have much higher grit than you might think and outperform people who are smarter but have less grit.

1:46:33And so if you just allocated more money to the... I mean, this is one of those things where it's a neural network that's trained and it's hard for me to fully articulate it in a few words, but that's the short version, right? By investing in those people who are above your minimum intelligence to invest bar, uh, the remaining variance is explained by variables that you're not as good as assessing, right? Because it's like long-term performance. And I don't want to name individual people, but there's specific people I'm thinking of that are not that showy in a conference room, but they're just marathon runners, you know, because in a conference room, when you're, people are giving a pitch or something like that, you're seeing their top speed, but you're not seeing their endurance.

1:47:15I'll name a couple. Brian Armstrong was not the hottest company in YC by a long shot. It's a well-known. Neither was Apoorva in the same class of Instacart. These are both good friends of mine. Yeah, I'm calling out your friends. Also, Vitalik, Peter Thiel had a chance to invest a lot of money into Ethereum. And being a genius, he was not able to maximize that either. And a lot of people did not see that happening. Also, Dylan from the Teal Fellowship, I think he spent – took five years to launch. And those two are the two biggest outcomes so far on the Teal Fellowship. So I think there's something there.

1:47:55And I think it shows your humility to show that you're not able to assess that potentially. And you want the asymmetric exposure to everybody. All four of those people are my friends. And I think they would – they tweeted nice things about me. And I say it as a compliment to them, by the way, as their genius was not known early on. I will say one thing. They both got into, Brian and Apoorov got into Y Combinator, and Vitalik and Dylan got into the Teal Fellowship. So if you had just said they're above my bar and I'm going to index in everybody, that's essentially my strategy. If you had just said they're above the bar of getting into this organization and then you index in them, that actually turns out to work very well empirically.

1:48:38So let me play a contrarian thesis to you. One thing that I've noticed in Teal Fellows versus YC is they do seem to have another standard deviation on average of intelligence. They are, from a purely IQ standpoint, they have that bar. And the returns on the Teal Fellowship have been phenomenal, as I'm sure you know. So one thing that was not obvious to me is that IQ actually plays a very large part, especially when you account for highly power-low outcomes like creating Ethereum. And you seem to have a different thesis, which is IQ, once you get to the top 1%, is kind of like table stakes, and then it's hard to – isn't there an argument to be made for the opposite?

1:49:21So, yeah. So Camilla Benbow has actually collected some of the data on this. There isn't a diminishing return to IQ. In fact, to the extent that you can measure it, it just keeps becoming more valuable. However, I think what I'm saying is just for academic pursuits, right? I think, you know, there's multiple variables that go into great founders. Two of them we just discussed, which are intelligence and diligence. I feel I have much, I'll put it like this, diligence, I have much higher error bars on measuring in the short run. you know, the kinds of ways by the things that might correlate with diligence, physical fitness to some extent, right.

1:49:58That's like, you know, to, to, to how, how consistent somebody is. Um, you'd have to study that, but I think that's, that's a hypothesis. Mental health. That's really meant. Yeah, maybe, maybe. In both directions. There's a, there's a, there's a, there's a book. Yeah. They might be, they might be crazy consistent. Yeah. Go ahead. There's a book called hypomanic edge that showed that some, some, yes, I was going to say that. Bipolar disorder actually helped founders. It's pretty wild. That's right. It's like, gosh, it was this guy by John something something. And he wrote it in the early 2000s.

1:50:32It's funny. I was just going to mention that book. You know how I know about that book? Did I mention it on a podcast? A dear friend gifted it to me. I didn't appreciate it. He's like, I'm not saying anything. What other factors? So you mentioned physical. Physical, I would add mental health. What other kind of non-trivial factors have you found leads to success? So there's intelligence, diligence, and then the third is maybe the most important for what we're doing, risk tolerance. And, you know, it's called contrarianness or whatever. But, for example, early Y Combinator had a really impressive list of people there, right?

1:51:13There's a founder of Reddit. There's a founder of Twitch. There's Sam Altman. Like that group of people in those early photos with Paul Graham includes some very, very, very impressive people, you know. And that's kind of like, you know, the Teal Fellowship's first class. I mean, Wycombe has still attracted a lot of great folks. And, you know, Gary's also an investor in the fund, by the way, and Gary's a friend. And, you know, I think they're doing great. Yeah, incredible CEO, and they're doing great. That first class of Wycombe is like the first few classes of the Teal Fellowship, which pulled out Vitalik and Dylan Field.

1:51:50And actually, there's other people there in those classes that aren't as famous, but they've made also billions of dollars. There's like multiple unicorn founders there 10 years later. Those are smashing successes. And part of it is that I think what they selected for was not simply IQ, but a willingness to do unconventional but good things, you know, or unconventional things that would be proven smart later. It was absolutely not – nobody knew what Y Combinator was. It didn't give you a status increase in the mid-2000s, right? It wasn't like I'm YC06. That didn't mean anything back then, right?

1:52:27But the Teal Fellowship was hit and attacked by so many people at the time that it was launched, if you remember that. This is the stupidest idea ever. Peter Teal needs his head exam, all these negative articles, right? Recently, the Washington Post admitted defeat. Michael Gibson, who founded the Teal Fellowship, spoke at the New York State Conference. Again, long-time friend of mine. And he took a victory lap recently in his book on the paper belt on fire, right, which is actually named after. Higher education isn't doing itself any favors. It's not really. Yeah, it's a great. Like Peter was 10 years, 12 years ahead of that.

1:52:59I mean, people saw that, but he really, you know, he started to build at least a prototype of what the alternative would be with the Teal Fellowship. So my point on those is, so then what then attracted a bunch of talent that was very non-consensus five or six years later? Crypto did, in my view, right? Then also AGI. People, until ChatGPT, people didn't really take it seriously, and now a lot of people then took it seriously, right? Right. And so and of course, what Elon did with with SpaceX, he turned space into an investable category. Nobody thought that was an investable thing. They're like, why don't you get back to what do you think the distinction there is?

1:53:35So the early YC people did it for the love of technology. And later on, it was a status seeking kind of NBA type activity. What's the distinction? Frontier mentality. The frontier mentality is just to build great things or is it the absence of something? So it's funny, you know, there's this great article. Let's see, hold on. I'm going to find this one.

1:54:06Okay, so the triumph and terror of Wang Huning. Okay, this is a great article that made the rounds a while ago. Okay, and you should read this because this guy is a very important theorist in China. and he's been around for a long time, and he's important intellectually there, and if he's not very well known in the West. What's the point of citing him? He wrote a book a long time ago, and it's amazing how well it holds up now. He said, you know, Americans, because of capitalism, they're very practical, but there is something that is, you know, spiritual about them, and that is, they're still spiritual, and that is futurism, their vision of the future.

1:54:52That is something which is powerful enough to overcome the short-term dollars and cents and focus on the long-term future. Now, of course, techno-capitalism marries the two where that long-term future still has to have some possible payoff, but it could be distant, right? And that turns, quote, you know, you've heard the saying, I don't love it, but the saying, that turns short-term greedy into long-term greedy, right? You're still going to make money, but you're taking such a long-term view of it that you're not like jostling for position to the same extent. You're not as short-term oriented, right?

1:55:28And so that pioneer mentality, that frontier mentality is very different than the day trader, right? It's very different than the arbitrager. I have nothing against those kinds of people. They're making a living, whatever, right? But that's not the spirit of the frontier. That's not the risk tolerance and the vision of what can be and the boldness to do something when it's low status. I actually believe that people are more willing to tolerate low money than low status. Um, you can argue with that depends on, you know, like, but in a, in a sense, those people who join early by comment or the early teal fellowship, we're not simply saying, okay, I'm going to go a few years of living on ramen and, you know, not starving, obviously, but living way below what they would have lived at as an engineer at Google.

1:56:22Okay. But not simply taking the money hit, we're taking a status hit because at that time that was not cool, right? Today, you know, yes, YC or the Teal Fellowship is almost like an alternative MBA and that's fine. And that's good. It's good that these things grow up and become like that, right? They become institutionalized and you know what? Everything has to become institutionalized eventually if it's successful, The pirates become the Navy. I totally get that. That's fine.

1:56:49However, there's always the next frontier, right? What's the next level? What is the crazy thing out there that might just be technically possible? And I do think that we're going to go, as I said, from starting new companies like Google and new communities like Facebook and new currencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum to starting new cities and even new countries. We're already actually at the city level, like cul-de-sac.com in Arizona, investor in that, Prospera in Honduras, Cabin. These cities are now on the scale of hundreds to thousands of people. And it's like crypto was at a billion dollars, Bitcoin was at a billion dollars in 2013.

1:57:26It's close to a trillion dollars today. And so that's 1 ,000x growth in 10 years. Do I think those things could go from hundreds and thousands of people to hundreds of thousands of people? I do think they can get there in 10 years or so, maybe 20 years. I don't know. Okay. I think it's possible. I think we can make that happen. I think also, you know, here's a funny comment, right? In tech. You know, Elon wants to build a Mars colony. Okay. Sam Altman and others want to build a machine god, AGI. Brian Johnson and others want to live forever. I just want to start new countries. That's been done hundreds of times in the past.

1:58:06Right. In a sense, I actually am the boring enterprise SaaS founder that you talked about. This is the boring enterprise SaaS of crazy tech, in a sense. Right. Being able to start new cities, new countries, new jurisdictions. Yeah, absolutely. And you mentioned Israel and Singapore, and I would even argue Dubai and Abu Dhabi. Yes. Fascinating. Very important. Fascinating cities. I call kind of Dubai, if you create a city run by an LLC, there's a lot of alignment. The police is responsive. It's really a fascinating place to go. Yes. Yes, I do want to triple click, I guess, on the frontierism. It's essentially an optimization.

1:58:51The premise there is that it's people that are optimizing on wanting to actually create change. So instead of doing a SaaS startup, which may make them rich, they're doing something so groundbreaking that might actually change things, not because they want to do something groundbreaking, but because they want the eventual change. They want to improve society. Is that a fair characterization? I think that's right. With a couple of edits, which are their improvement of society is constrained by the fact that all the people are opting in to their vision. That's the big thing, right? With communism or other kinds of ideologies, people have maybe wanted to improve the world, but everybody's forced in, right?

1:59:34That's different. whereas let's say something like chat gpt or dropbox or tesla or you know coinbase like people are opting into that no one's forcing them to sign up set an account to put in their information it's consensual right so it's a vision of the good that is constrained by the fact that other people need to buy into it but not necessarily right away you know at the very beginning they might think it's totally crazy and you get more proof points you convince 10 people 100 people a thousand people, 10 ,000 people, and eventually you get there. People forget how weird online dating was and how normalized it is today.

2:00:12Oh, man. I mean, everything. Everything is weird. Or getting into somebody else's car. I remember in San Francisco, people were like, what? You're going into Lyft? You're going into somebody's random car? It was one of the most absurd things to a lot of people. And two years later, it was completely lost. Yes. Exactly, right? And so that is why you have to tolerate some status loss at the beginning to do things that seem weird but that are actually interesting, you know, to shift social norms in a hopefully positive direction.

2:00:45There was something else that you said that I just wanted to address. Oh, so the frontier, right? You mentioned Singapore, mentioned Dubai, mentioned Israel. More recently, there's El Salvador, there's Malay in Argentina, there's the head of Bhutan who's actually doing Bitcoin mining, right? And all of them are powered by the internet in a really fundamental way. We're not necessarily seeing that, but it's sort of like they're gaining power from above from the cloud because their Twitter is huge, right? They're posting videos online. They're getting their message out to English-speaking audiences, okay?

2:01:18Like Bhutan, for example, is doing Bitcoin mining. You're going to hear big things from them. They just announced a new special economic zone on the border of India. They're just like putting themselves on the map, just like El Salvador put itself on the map. And no one was talking about El Salvador before Naive Bichel became like the startup CEO of a country. Right. And so what's sort of happening in a sense is the cloud is like imagine like sunlight coming from the cloud down to land and patches getting opened up on the land that are now being turned into frontier areas that weren't. And one way of thinking about this is I have a few macro theses, and one of them is that history is running in reverse.

2:01:57So starting in like 1950, if you go backwards and forwards in time, 1950 was peak centralization. You had one telephone company, AT &T, and you had two superpowers, US and USSR. You had three telephone companies, CBS, ABC, NBC. And everybody watched I Love Lucy, and it was a very centralized world with like less than 50 UN member countries. everybody being rolled up into these giant nation states like China and India and the USSR and actually Germany and France and America. That had been a process that had taken hundreds of years. Before the Civil War, people used to say the United States are, and after they said the United States is.

2:02:35Before Bismarck, all the German, you know, the things that we now think of as Germany were independent countries or principalities, and they got merged together. before the French Revolution, lots of little, you know, French or things that are in the area we now think of as France that got rolled up into France. Even within living memory, India was a bunch of princely states before it got independence. The British had delegated power to a bunch of princes that got rolled up. So 1950 was like massive centralization. The world maybe had never been this centralized before in history with just a few people holding sway over the entire world.

2:03:09Okay. And then as you go forwards and backwards in time with the invention of the transistor, things start to unwind. You go to the transistor, you have the personal computer, you have cable news, you have the internet, you have mobile phones, social media and cryptocurrency, and you start radically decentralizing technologically. And then you have decentralized AI, so you can have an intelligence on your phone. But if you go backwards in time, it also decentralizes. And lots of things are happening today in the opposite order they did in the past. Example, you go backwards in time to 1890, the frontier closes.

2:03:44Forwards in time to 1991, the internet frontier opens. Okay. Backwards in time, you have the robber barons. Forwards in time, the tech billionaires. Okay. Backwards in time, you have COVID-19 or backwards in time, you have the Spanish flu. Forwards in time, you have COVID-19. Okay. And this holds for lots of interesting political events. So you go backwards in time and you have Russia, the senior partner in the Russia-China relationship. You go forwards in time, China's a senior partner in the Russia-China relationship. Backwards in time, there's a British guy running India. Forwards in time, you've got an Indian guy running Britain.

2:04:18Lol, okay, right? And so, I mean, I compile many examples of this in the Network State book. There's so many examples. And why is that even happening? And one way of thinking about it is, have you ever seen those sort of like origami things that people do with their hands where like the complicated, You know, yeah. And imagine you fold it and you unfold it and you get the same complicated thing in reverse, right? All of this centralizing technology of mass media and mass production resulted in, like, the centralization of these, like, iron-fisted, you know, guys like Stalin and Mao and so on in the mid-20th century, Hitler, et cetera.

2:04:56And then decentralization, like, especially for – the fists just started to loosen. and the ability of states to control reduced. And it's happening faster in reverse than it did. It took maybe 500 years to go up and we're taking like 50 years to go down. And so in many ways, I think of our future as more similar to the 1800s and maybe the 1700s than it was to like the recent past. The way that I look at it is human beings have two paradoxical drives. One is for order and one is for freedom. And you talk about the history in reverse. I would use a SaaS term of bundling and unbundling. Yeah, it's bundling and unbundlings.

2:05:42And I think what we might be seeing is the crypto centrality is essentially a new type of system of control and order that satisfies the needs of both having a central truth, but also having maximal freedom. That would be the thesis, I think, on the crypto future. And you know what's interesting about that is there's a third word. Actually, it's funny. This exact thing you're talking about, I discussed in the last chapter of the network, maybe the most important culmination of it, which is it's bundling, unbundling, re-bundling. Centralization, decentralization, re-centralization. This comes from the famous Chinese epic where it starts with, the empire long united must divide, long divided must unite.

2:06:27right the cyclicity of this is because we have a lot of order it's too much control i want to break free now you've got freedom okay it's anarchy oh my god someone bring order right and so that's the loop that that keeps happening in history it's not to say by the way that's only a loop and we just come back to where we are one of the things i talk about in the book is the helical theory of history where it's like cyclic in in a plane but you're ascending on the z-axis so our technology and in a sense our progress keeps getting better even if there's certain very human things that we just keep doing, you know?

2:06:57And, um, so to your point, uh, you know, you, you know, for example, you had bundling in CDs, you unbundle into MP3s and you've rebundled into Spotify playlists, right? You had the bundling in newspapers, you unbundle into individual article URLs and you've rebundled into Twitter feeds and you follow those people. right? So you have the bundling into countries. We have the unbundling of like internet anarchy and social media and so on, which is kind of happening now. And I think we have the rebundling into opt-in countries, what I call network states. And that's going to be so messy and so crazy, as crazy as everything that's happened over the last 20 or 30 years.

2:07:39But I think that at least it's better than just being in the state of total anarchy. You have some vision for rebundling and recentralization on their side. You know, we didn't start the fire. Okay. And I think to your point, the opt-in nature of it is very powerful. It's giving people the freedom to choose and to vote both with their time, money, and energy. You know, one way to look at money is how you accumulate and spend your energy. And the reason that's so important is actually, you know, people talk about Elon, for example, is a strong leader. And he is a strong leader. Zuck is a strong leader.

2:08:16But why are they strong leaders? Yes, in part because they're a CEO and they have total control and authority over the whole thing. But in part because every single person who works for Zuck opted in to be there and can opt out. It's mutual opt-in. Every single person who's got an account there has opted in to be there and can opt out. Now, you can argue with me at the limits, right? Like somebody did an experiment. Can you actually block Facebook.com on the internet and still have a normal internet experience. At a certain scale, you can argue these networks get so big that it's hard to practically opt out.

2:08:48Fine. Okay. That's a different... Then I would argue, yes, we need to fund competitors and so on to that to preserve practical choice. Still, the moral legitimacy comes from the fact that people consented. And the funny thing is, is you can opt into constraints. That's what signing a contract is. You give up some freedom, in a sense, in order for mutual benefit for you and the other party on their side. Opt into constraints, right? So you can actually get order out of that anarchy, but the moral legitimacy of it comes from the consent. The Republican, Democrat, and Libertarian. In today's world, Libertarian has become almost just pseudo-conservative, but ultimately Libertarian borrows ideas from both Democrats and Republicans, which is about maximizing on freedom.

2:09:39Yeah, so you asked about, like, for example, American dynamism, right? And I like Catherine Boyle. She's also a friend. Other people are friends of mine, right? So one way of thinking about it is technology is sort of forking into Silicon Valley and the Internet, okay, where Silicon Valley is going more nationalist, right, military stuff, right? double down on America and wave the flag and so on and so forth. I totally understand where that comes from. It comes from a good place of turning the thing around. There's another direction you can take it, though, and that is to go more internationalist.

2:10:16And that is blockchain, that is crypto, that is international capitalism as opposed to ultranationalism, right? And again, these don't necessarily have to be completely at odds, but they're just different ways of thinking. And the way of thinking is, for the international capitalist, guess what? 80 % of the world is neither American nor Chinese, right? How do we build a rules-based order that works for them and that also benefits American and Chinese people? Because, you know, that's not something people are thinking about. They're thinking, oh, it's just a fight between the U.S. and China, or they're thinking it's still a unipolar world or something like that.

2:10:54They're not thinking about everybody else except as bystanders. They're thinking it's going to be like, you know, the Cold War where it's just the U.S. and USSR. But it's not like that, actually. Most of the GDP is actually outside of the U.S. and China, even now, as big as both of those are. And the reason I say that is because if you have an American, they certainly don't want to be involved with the Chinese court system nowadays. So you can't make money in China. You can't invest in China. Nowadays, for a Chinese person, it's a reverse. After there's a lady from Huawei who was, like, arrested in Canada.

2:11:28A lot of Chinese nationals are kind of scared of coming to the U.S. or to U.S. allied regions. And perhaps for good reason, because, you know, lots of people are suspected of being spies. There's lots of, you know, sanctions and so on and so forth. You don't want to get caught in any of that stuff. So Americans and Chinese no longer trust each other's legal systems. That's bad, given that that was like the engine of the world for like 40 years. You know, lots and lots of deals were based, like Apple is straddled between America and China. They're still making a lot of stuff and a lot of tooling is over there.

2:12:00So, and all these people who built all those companies, you know, in 2012, you're doing a deal for 10 years and you don't know that the U S and China are going to fight in the future. Maybe you can guess that they might, but certainly wasn't on the radar there. And you'd be called a paranoid, crazy person if you did it then. So it's my point. If Americans don't trust Chinese courts and Chinese don't trust American courts, what can anybody trust? Well, there actually is something, a forum that hundreds of millions of people globally, including certainly tens of millions of Americans and probably hundreds of millions of Chinese, all trust.

2:12:34You know what that is? Bitcoin. Bitcoin. And that's a more profound statement than we might think, right? Amidst this era of deep fakes and fake news and political strife and back and forth, there's a lot of Americans and a lot of Chinese people and a lot of people who are neither American or Chinese that all like Bitcoin. And similarly for Ethereum and similarly for other coins, this is, in my view, it's hiding in plain sight, the base of the next rules-based order, the mammals that will eventually succeed the dinosaurs or that could, right? And that are fair, right? The thing is, an American knows that the Bitcoin blockchain will not favor them or a Chinese person against each other.

2:13:22The rules are constant. They're written in code. They're enforced by cryptography. And if you don't speak either English or Chinese, you can diligence them. They're in the language of code. Okay. Maybe code is often in English, but you know what I mean? People even who don't speak English can read code, right? And that's globally fair in a way that the rules-based order isn't. It's globally wealth creating in a way that declining rules-based order isn't because it's about contracts that you're abiding by. And now guess what? A Bangladesh Bangladesh or Brazilian can be on the same plane as somebody in Beijing or Boston, right?

2:13:57That's really important because, you know, in a sense right now, by the way, like, you know, I'll say something and I'm kind of exaggerating, but kind of not like international law for like corporations kind of doesn't exist. And what I mean by that is take that example of Bangladesh and Brazilian. If you're, if you're a guy in Brazil, you're trying to acquire a company in Bangladesh, which by the way, could increasingly happen because internet has made all these communications across borders, okay? You're trying to acquire that. Who speaks both like Portuguese and Urdu or Portuguese and Bengali, right?

2:14:27Very, very few people. Who knows what the tax and whatever obligations are between those two countries? Nobody knows that probably. Instead, what you do is you set up like an adapter company in the USA, and then that has enough deals with the US and Brazil and the US and Bangladesh that you can make that deal probably happen, right? So you have like like a hub and spoke or China also nowadays does enough trade with both of them. You could probably make it work through China. But what that means is like, does international law even exist, right? Because everything is actually hub and spoke. When you come back to it, you go back to the hub and spoke of the U S or the newer hub and spoke of China to do these international deals until the blockchain, which actually gives a system of property rights where that Brazilian and Bangladesh, you can at least do a transaction today.

2:15:15They can do a contract today. And I think in the future, you won't just have on-chain transactions. You have on-chain accounting and on-chain companies. That's kind of already happening for these DAOs, right? Many of the features are there. And all that is required is sort of some backwards compatibility, like the Wyoming DAO law or the Tennessee DAO law. People are starting to recognize these internet objects as being important in legal code. This is what I mean by internet first law. So what I'm describing there is complementary, too. I think it's another great part of America. It's not just the military and nationalism and defending the US.

2:15:50I get where that comes from. I think it comes from a good place. But there's another strain, which is the Thomas Jefferson, Ron Paul line of things, which is peace and trade and so on. That's more my vibe. And I think also we've been criticizing America quite a bit, I think, with good reason. But one of the secret sauces and one of the most powerful things about America on a relative basis is America's private property and secure personal property. I think, you know, few countries in the world over the last 250 years or 300 years have the track record of securing personal property like the United States.

2:16:32I think that's a very big aspect of our economy. I hope if you look at the whole transcript and so on in context, you know, like there's many aspects of the U.S. that I admire. I'm talking about the ability to do it's really Washington, D.C. and the kinds of regulations and rules that have that have strained the whole thing. But there's still that strain of the tech American, the pioneer American, the frontier American, the American that builds stuff with their hands. of course, you know, that I respect, that one should respect. And the private property rights that you described, I mean, an interesting question, you know, sort of maybe a provocative question.

2:17:10Is Bitcoin American? I'd say probably no. Well, it reflects many of the best values of America. It's, you know, it's certainly property rights. It is freedom of contract. It's freedom of association. You can argue it's freedom of speech because you can use the blockchain to write things. And some of the concepts come and you can encrypt things with them. But I would argue Bitcoin is about as American as America was British. It takes those things. And then, you know, America took a lot of the great things of Britain and then it had the new world to apply them. Right. So there's a continuity, but then also an innovation.

2:17:55And the new new world is the Internet. And so, like, you know, Bitcoin is just one of the first forms, maybe the most important, but an internet native form that is the next in this lineage of Greece to Rome to Britain to America to the internet, in my view. So let's tie that all together. So you are raising a fund. It's 506C. So it's a general solicitation. So tell me a little bit about the form. A lot of people might not know about a rolling fund. Tell me about that. and then tell me about the type of investors that you're looking for in terms of connectivity, ideology, value add. Great. So the kind of investors that I'm looking for and also the people that I have.

2:18:39And to be clear, by the way, I have enough capital to do what we need to do. One of the awesome things about rolling funds is you can just accept new investors at any time. You don't have, oh, the fund is closing today and so on and so forth. There's a fund close every quarter. And if you want to be in, you can literally go to Bology.com. Zoe, maybe you can put that on screen. Bology.com. No, no, no. 1-800-Bology-B-A-L-A-G-A-I. Right, right, right, right. Exactly. No, that's funny. No, but, you know, it's like literally myfirstname.com. So if you can spell my first name, which I grant is somewhat challenging, you know, but B-A-L-A-G-A-I.

2:19:24If you go to that domain, it's an Angel-less landing page. I'll put it on screen for a second.

2:19:36Let's see here.

2:19:41Are you got it up? Yeah, there you go. That's right. Yeah, that's it. So go to biology.com and you land there, right? And you can literally just click down there to apply, okay? And you can take it off screen. I'll just comment on it. Okay. And so what's the premise of the fund? So we are, A, it's a rolling fund. So you can just kind of click online. And so what kind of investor? It's the kind of investor who wants to do it self-serve. I mean, I can talk to them if they really need it. but, um, you know, the kind of person who wants to go there, click wire, and just basically be done with it on the same terms as everybody else.

2:20:27And that's how, you know, it's fair. This is what I was talking about, like the rules based order. Right. And there's one kind of person who just wants to haggle and negotiate over everything. And the other person who's like, I'd like to click and be done with it. And it takes me 10 minutes and, you know, go with God and make me money and, and, and so on. Right. And it's very modern because you can just refresh a dashboard, see your investments, get your K-1s or what have you, right? So it works for high net worth. It works for entities. AngelList, the platform, takes care of all the compliance.

2:20:55It takes care of the wires. It takes care of distributions. It takes care of all of that kind of stuff, right? So you don't have to send 40 emails. You don't have to ask for anything. It all just gets pushed to you in a dashboard, right, which is so much more efficient than emailing a bunch of people. So that's very modern. Now, I recognize there's some conservative LPs or folks who are bound in certain ways that can't do that. Um, that's fine. I mean, like maybe hopefully you can update your thing to be able to do something on AngelList. Um, then in terms of how the fund is structured, uh, we're using fees to hold conferences, publish books.

2:21:32Uh, we're going to professionalize the podcast. Uh, we're going to generate a lot more content and we're basically just going to generate a ton of deal flow this way. And this is kind of, again, I've got proof points on all of these things. I've got, you know, I've got a bestselling book. I've got a million person Twitter feed. I've got a sold out conference. I'm just saying whatever. I have prototype versions of each of these things where I've just been like tweeting from being in the line at Starbucks. I have I've done zero optimization of any of that really. Right. Maybe. OK, I did. I did set up like a camera or something here.

2:22:06Or let's say point one optimization of what could be done. OK. And so like a small team that actually just goes and does that. and also many of those people who will be on that team will be folks probably who we fund as future CEOs in two or three or four years, right? They're like fellows, okay? And so that itself is like a meta version of deal flow, okay? So A, the kind of investor is the kind of person who or entity that can self-serve on AngelList. B, we're using fees for, you know, they're used to basically hire people and build things, okay? C, we already talked about what we're going to invest in.

2:22:47D, they have to be basically qualified purchasers, all investors, because we very quickly hit the cap on the number of accredited investors there. And the minimum is$10 ,000. So this is made to be really accessible by a large network. Well,$10 ,000 for 10 quarters. So it's$100 ,000, right? Right. So, yeah, but a qualified purchaser is considered by the law to basically be a big boy. You know, they have five million in investments. And I believe that also includes like a founder who has five million in equity and thereabouts. But you have to go and check that. Angelus takes care of the accreditation.

2:23:29And so the big thing about it is, you know, there's different kinds of investors. And some types of LPs are like they're like activists or they want to get lots of reports and lots of personalized updates. And they're offended if you say if you don't reply to them right away and, oh, I put in my money. Why don't you give me a report right away? And so on and so forth. And then there's another kind of investor. And this is more like what I am for the companies I invest in where I make the decision of where not to invest. And then I realize I'm putting in capital. I'm not putting in labor. right?

2:24:07So I'm putting in capital and being a backseat driver doesn't improve results, right? So if my company's asking me for help, if they WhatsApp or signal me and, you know, it's a, it's a, it's an acquisition or it's a serious inflection point for the company, I will respond, you know, if I, if I had the time and usually I do, um, sometimes it'll be 20 startups. They'll ping me in a day and I have to triage a little bit, but basically if it's an important thing. I'll get back to them, but I, but I won't like actively interfere. They're going with God. You know, you add value by quote, not adding value.

2:24:39This is actually closer to the founder's fund mentality of pick the founder and then let them go with God. You know, I have how many I experienced the people that phrase things as you do are the most value added investors by a long shot. And the ones that, the ones that are humble and actually responsive, that's like not top 1 % of investors, but I didn't want to cut you off. Go ahead. Sure. Yeah. Well, so I hope I think, you know, I mean, look, can I say that everybody, you know, here is I thought this was a pretty nice. Yeah, I would look at your portfolio. I think I think you would very quickly see how much value you've added.

2:25:18I'll show just a tweet or what have you.

2:25:23Here, this was a nice.

2:25:29this was a nice tweet by you know one thing that uh we interview a lot of uh billion dollar funds and one thing that was very interesting is a fund that went off record they have an acknowledgement letter for anybody that invests less than 10 million dollars and what does this acknowledgement letter say it says i will not go to the annual meeting i will not respond to emails this is a very large private equity fund. And as I mentioned, every time I talk about this acknowledgement letter, if benchmark or Balogy ever wants to meet, gives me allocation, wants me to sign acknowledgement letters, I'm very happy because the worst thing in investing is not actually getting up to date from the GP.

2:26:11It's backing the top GPs that are going out there and executing for their founders. So there is an inverse relationship to people that are building LP relationship protocols and those that are actually going out and funding groundbreaking startups. That's exactly right. And I think that, of course, that's not to say that one, you know, shouldn't treat LPs properly and so on and so forth. But the dashboard, I think Angelus is a good reconciliation of that, where you can get whatever information you want at any time, day or night, quickly through a dashboard that goes out to all LPs, all tax filings, all that kind of stuff.

2:26:46Here's just like, you know, a couple of nice comments that I thought were nice or whatever. So this is Amjad, you know, CEO of Replit. Pretty nice comment. Can you see the screen?

2:27:00So, you know, I feel embarrassed to read that, but it's a very nice comment. Okay. And here's, you know, like Julie Fredrickson. And so, you know, I believe Slate Sarkodex, which is Scott Alexander, was to academic online culture as biology as being to tech. So early with the vibe shift, they were given hell. And now so mainstream, people don't recognize the source. meaning like i'm sort of like the fish you know the water in which a lot of these things swim like the idea i think i created the concept of the idea maze correct yeah that's right and and so like um i think i am what about russell conjugation did you create that uh i have a specific you popularized so bertrand well bertrand russell created it and eric weinstein has also cited it and i think i have been one of the people to popularize it i think i came up i i know i came up with this concept idea maze.

2:27:49And this is like an old lecture where I gave that and whatever. I hate kind of thumping my chest or whatever like this, you know, in the sense that if you, if you like me, if you like biology, if you like what I tweet, if you like the companies that I've, you know, built, if you like Coinbase and crypto, if you like the network state book, I think you're going to probably like investing in the fund. And if you don't, there's a lot of others out there and you know, like I, I, I won't feel, I won't feel badly about it. Um, the, um, gosh, there was something else you said. Oh yeah. In terms of, oh, here's one thing I will say, you know, the famous, uh, phrase, how can I help?

2:28:34Right. The VC phrase is like a VC cash phrase. Now this is a cash phrase that that's the Suarez thing, right? Okay. This is a funny phrase because first of all, it has become a cliche, right? On the other hand, how can I help is way better than, you know, the Wall Street style, how are you trying to F me kind of thing, right? Like in general, it's like it's better to have like a friendly culture, even if it's fake friendly in some ways than unfriendly, I think, right?

2:29:08How can I help sometimes is said sincerely, which is, can I make an intro for you or something like that or whatever. Sometimes it's said insincerely. Sometimes it's a pain for the founder to like break out a task for the investor to help. Because it's like, okay, will you take on a task that actually takes you a minute? Or will you do something that's like an hour? Or will you actually help me recruit somebody that's like a whole day? There's no productization of it. Yeah, exactly. And founders are often badly calibrated on how investors should help. Okay. So I actually think there's two models of investor help.

2:29:45There's a founder's fund model, which is the help is that they just don't interfere with you at all. You can take extremely risky decisions. And because you're the founder and because you're in the business of variance, they'll never veto them. Who else would you put in that camp? Me. In the sense of like that's my kind of thing. I'd say Novel is kind of like that. My friend, you know, Novel Rovicon.

2:30:11let's see who else is like that. Um, fair number of crypto investors are kind of like that. Um, but I can't speak for everybody. I think those three are kind of like that. First do no harm and go with God and crush it. And, uh, if you're not going to succeed, you weren't going to succeed anyways. Well, yeah, exactly. It's kind of one of these things where it's like, They're smart enough to know that what they want is effectively the brand endorsement because a brand endorsement is scalable. You don't have to be like Neville or me or we don't have to be in every single meeting on the call. That person could just say so-and-so invested.

2:30:52That scales our presence. It's like, and that's a non-op. How do you deal with a three standard deviation founder that's always asking you for things? that's a great question um the squeaky wheel squeaky wheel uh i set the expectation i say sometimes i'll say here let me do a screen share with you and i'm just going to show you all the names nothing else of all the companies i've invested in right just like a long table that's public information all the companies i've invested in and i'll just slowly scroll down that while we're on the call. And after about like two minutes in, he's like, okay, I get it.

2:31:33Because there's so many companies there. Have you ever thought about productizing to your point saying, these are the three things I could do. I could introduce you to these. So, so that I'm coming to that, right? Basically now the other model, so the answer is yes. Okay. And, and, uh, and so I'm going to talk about ways that I think investors can help. Uh, so how VCs can help founders and how LPs can help VCs and then vice versa. Right. But, um, though vice versa is less important because you know, you're mostly, mostly important. So founders fund helps by not doing anything or rather by they will hold some annual events and stuff like that, but it's all optional.

2:32:10You can come to them if you're busy, don't worry about it, go kill it. You know, we're with you, right. Uh, they'll never get political on you. They'll never, you know, do anything like that. They just will not interfere extremely helpful. Right. and they're wealthy enough that they can just write off any check so they can go through the rough ride in tough waters and so on. A6 and Z, which I also – Founders Fund backed my first company. We made the money. A6 and Z, I was a partner there, and I love all those guys. And Mark and Ben – or rather, Mark and Chris are investing in this one. And Mark and Ben and I, we've worked together on many deals over the years.

2:32:47They have a different model, which is they actually help. They don't say, how can I help? They say, we can help in A, B, C, D, and E forms, right? Now, of those different services they have, the most important two are the – so most people don't know about exactly how A6 and Z works. They might know, but I'll give a quick summary. They don't just invest in your company. They've used the fees to build a tank of all of these professional services, and they're the first ones really to do that. One of those services is what they call the Enterprise Briefing Center. And what that is, is it's that all of these VCs at A7Z, all the partners are senior enough that they know, let's say, the CEO of Coca-Cola and the CEO of Johnson & Johnson, the CEO of Pfizer.

2:33:25And they can call them up and WhatsApp them or text them and be like, hey, you know, we've got, we know you've got a problem in terms of dealing with X or Y or Z procurement issue. And we have a startup that's good for exactly that. Okay. And so they get their VP who has the decision-making power to come in to Anderson Horwitz, and they sit through a briefing where founders come in and they basically pitch Coca-Cola, Johnson & Johnson, and Pfizer on their product. Now, why does this work insanely well? First is if you're a startup, it's very hard for you to even get that meeting with Coca-Cola, Johnson & Johnson, and Pfizer.

2:34:07Second, you're coming in endorsed by A6 and Z. Third, sometimes, you know, this is something where there have been five deals like this that have been done before. And Coca-Cola, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer love A &Z because it's like their shop where they can click like Amazon and just get, okay, let me upgrade this enterprise offer, this one, and this one. I'll take five, right? So A &Z is a repeat player in the ecosystem that makes the deal close because it's like a two-sided market of enterprise SaaS vendors and enterprise SaaS buyers. And you have this scaled VC firm in the center that's putting those together, like a skilled matchmaker.

2:34:44And the reason it works is A &Z is investing in these companies, of course, and wants to make money. But its reputation is on the line with these large institutional buyers. And so it wants to make both parties happy. Does that make sense? Yeah, it's a marketplace. Okay. It's a marketplace, right? Okay. So that's the enterprise briefing center. The second thing that's, and that's really valuable for a founder because often a series A, series B founder just doesn't have the connections to, or what we call the distribution to get to all of those Fortune 500 CEOs, right? So this levels them up. Product is merit, but distribution is connections.

2:35:19They have merit, but not connections. Okay. So they sell some of their company and now they get a bunch of distribution and it massively increases the value. It's almost something where ASK and Z, when an enterprise SaaS company was working at A or B, they could almost deterministically level them up with like 100 big brand names that they could just slot them into like this. Really great.

2:35:42So that was EBC. The other thing that ASK and Z did that worked is the corporate development. So they hired these ninjas there who knew everybody at Facebook, at Google, and so on, who buys companies for a living, right? Now, it's the event of a founder's life when Google knocks with a possible acquisition. It is Tuesday for the corporate development guy on the other side. this is a radically asymmetric thing where that founder is like microanalyzing every period and sentence and comma and so on on this transaction that could be the most important thing in their life and the corp dev person is like yawn they could forget about the deal it's in their inbox and so because they're not getting paid usually you know extreme amounts right now i'm not saying all corp dev people are like that right corp dev but it's a job for them yeah it's a job for them and it is an absolutely life-changing, world-changing outcome for the founder on the other side, right?

2:36:41So A &Z CorpDev is in between these where they know all of Google and Facebook and, you know, all these other guys, they know all of the CorpDev people there. They're on a first-name basis with them. And if they say one of our companies is at Google and it's got an offer of X, Facebook will you match? Sorry, meta. Sorry. Alphabet is making an offer. Meta, will you match? Okay. Right. I can't say Google and Facebook. So Meta knows that that's not a bluff, right? The founder has an incentive to bluff. It's a recurring game. Exactly. So again, A &C corporate development is a marketplace, two-step marketplace of company sellers and company buyers.

2:37:28And it's not just buyers. It's also the next round, right? Series C investors, Series D investors. If AXE has the financials of these companies, these guys know that it's representing them correctly to them for the purpose of an investment. So those are two extremely value-add functions where the founder cannot be expected to – I mean cannot be expected. Great founders can do anything. But it's hard for a founder to have hundreds of possible buyers or their enterprise. You can't build it just in time. It takes years and most. Yeah, exactly. It's not a function of, you know, there's certain problems that I call, you can just type faster and solve them.

2:38:12Coding, type faster, right? Content, type faster, okay? Debugging, obviously it's not exactly typing faster, but you get my point. It's entirely within your control and the sequence of keystrokes that you input to your device is the quality of your software, the quality of your design. Everybody starts to replace. Yeah, exactly, right? Which is very important. Global equality of opportunity is this device right here, this keyboard.

2:38:39But the relationships with LPs or with enterprise software buyers, that's not a type faster thing or it's not easily reducible to that. Okay. So those two were massive, massive, massive value adds for A16Z that they just did better than anybody else and they made a more efficient marketplace out of it, right? Right. There were other functions which are also valuable. Actually, one function that used to be very valuable was PR. And in the early days, agency did PR when no one else was doing PR. And that was like phenomenally successful. More recently, I think the right approach is just for founders to go direct and build their own media organizations.

2:39:17That was not reasonable 15 years ago. And I look at it as table stakes today. Right. So that's a technological shift where due to the rise of social media, the rise of podcasting, and so on and so forth, many founders are actually not founding engineers, but founding influencers. They come in not with an amazing engineering background, but with an amazing community background, and then they hire an engineer to build a product. That is actually also a reasonable approach. How did you, you know, everybody knows how you went from 100 ,000 followers to a million followers, but how did you go from zero to one?

2:39:51And did you have to propagate less radical ideas when you were starting out to be taken seriously? And how did that evolution? No. How did that happen? Well, I think that – so I taught a MOOC on – so first, I had no public profile until 2013. I was basically just a career academic. I mean, like my nature is that of a math guy, right? I say, you know, based on my background briefly, BS, MS, PhD, Electrical Engineering, Stanford, MS, Chemical Engineering, Stanford. I taught genomics and stats at Stanford for a few years after getting my PhD. Then I founded a genomics company, clinical genomics company that Founders Fund invested in and was sold later for 375, so clinical diagnostics.

2:40:43Until 2013, I had no public profile. I was just like a deep, quiet, deep tech fan. work. I actually thought I was, well, yeah, I was doing work, but I also thought, and I think incorrectly. So this is one of the things I got wrong. Um, I was late to social media because I thought it was just a waste of time. I thought it was tweeting breakfast. I thought it was, um, like, you know, sharing, you know, updates about, you know, that is eco-centric. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I was like, do I care about whether somebody went to Tahoe or not? I mean, good for them. Great. Yeah. It's, you know, like how monkeys will like pet each other's fur and so on and so forth.

2:41:24And like, so I was like, okay, that's great. It's not my thing, you know? And, um, I saw this chit chat, idle chit chat. Then one day, uh, there was a friend of mine who had attended a genomics conference and he posted a summary of the conference on Twitter as what we now call a tweet storm or thread or something like that. And he was a, he was like a, he was a professor. And so he included details like, here's how the BAM files were set up. And here's what they were doing with FastQ and so on and so forth. Stuff that no journalist would ever have written up from that. And it was like getting a lunchtime conversation with a really smart friend of mine that saved me a plane trip out.

2:42:05And it just distilled. It was like taking the juice of an orange. And I could just slurp that up and learn what was at this conference, not in a week of time flying back and forth or four days flying back and forth, but in 30 seconds, right? And I was like, Twitter is useful for me, okay? That is, I mean, now, of course, like, who would ever pitch that as the application of Twitter, right? That's such a niche, niche, niche. You have to get to massive scale before you start getting that as the application of Twitter. That's kind of, though, what Twitter has become, where whatever vertical there is, If you want to learn about real estate, you can really learn about it by just looking at the top, I don't know, 50 real estate people on Twitter and you learn cap rate.

2:42:52You learn all this stuff. At least you'll distill the language of the people in a community that you could really find hard to learn about how they actually talk about things outside of a textbook. A textbook presentation is one thing. The conversational presentation is another, right? So that made me – Are you on the for you or following setting on your Twitter? I switched back and forth between them. I think I probably, it keeps going back to for you and I think for you is fine. I don't know. I have to go back. I have found time and time again, the most successful people on the, on the following setting.

2:43:28And that's really binary. Because that's one of the hacks. I had a viral on the Harvard situation that Bill Ackman literally retweeted and wrote an entire essay on what I wrote. And I started getting all the tech luminaries and I just started, now I realized they were all on their for you setting, because they started to interact and my content hadn't improved. But suddenly it was actually being propagated on their form. And I found when I went from following to for you, my mental health significantly improved because I wasn't now, it was thoughtful, smart people versus whatever is like the most polarizing and antagonizing content.

2:44:10You mean from for you to following? Yeah, from for you to following, yeah. Right. Yeah, no, I think I keep switching it back to following, but I think it keeps going back to for you or something like that. So I think Elon Musk is susceptible to profit maximization. Maybe, maybe, right? Though I think on balance, I'm a big fan of what Twitter is today. I'm a very big Elon fan as well. Yeah. Yeah. So, but I want to, I want to answer your question, which said, how did I go from zero to 20 ,000 or so? So the answer is basically in late 2013, I gave a talk at startup school. So I did a few things in 2013, but one of them I did mid-year I gave a MOOC course, startup engineering MOOC, that that's where the idea maze lecture and other things were from.

2:45:01And it's funny, You know, the idea maze was just sort of, it was like one subchapter in a bunch of lecture notes that I think were well received at the time. And you don't necessarily know what is going to become really popular or whatever from that, right? But it put, I think, a finger on something that people were thinking of, and then that propagates. So that course, which had the idea maze and various other concepts, actually totally organically just got to 250 ,000 students on Coursera. and I did no promotion of it whatsoever. It was just like, I think it was just quality content and word of mouth and Coursera's distribution in the platform.

2:45:41So that course did fairly well, and that was in mid-2013. And then when I got on Twitter later in the year, like November, December, I also, by the way, somebody had been squatting Bologias, and I had had Bologias at this and Bologias at that for a long time, and I was just trying to get that. And then when I managed to get the Bologias handle, then I actually tweeted, and it just ticked up quickly to, I think, like 10 or 20 ,000 followers pretty quickly because a lot of the kids from my startup engineering course followed me there. And so that was like my first pump. I didn't know what was good or bad or whatever at that time.

2:46:24Then it was announced as a partner at A, C, and Z, and I got a few more, and then that's kind of what I was doing. what I was doing. So I guess the answer is I contributed a lot of value, at least in their perception. I, I think it was valuable. That was like a, here, here's what I was going to know. So in many ways you grew through offline, not necessarily offline, but off, off X and off Twitter accomplishments. Yeah. So here, if you want to see how early I was to certain things, right here, this is, this is not the entirety of the course, but it was as part of it. Do you see this headline from Coindesk 2013, July 2013?

2:47:04Build a Bitcoin crowdfunding site, right? So what was Bitcoin's price? It was like 50 bucks then. It was like 1 ,000 X smaller than it is today, right? So this was, you know, the course given by biologists from Yves Austin. Of course, so, of course, young entrepreneurs requires them to build a Bitcoin crowdfunding system, the inclusion of, you know, right? And guest lecturers from a range of Silicon Valley startups. and you know i basically just had some of my friends engineers and stuff give talks i wasn't as senior as i was at that time but it was like the kind of course which i wish i had had when i was first starting a company it was just like everything that i that i was fresh in my mind that a phd in engineering didn't know about the business of technology right so that proved successful and also that you know that was like early to crypto early to i mean very early that's 2013, right?

2:47:53That's like, you know, a thousand X less valuable than it is today. So anyway, that shows at least I'm early to something sometimes. Absolutely. You know what the most predictive of somebody that has a fund returner based on data of 11 and a half thousand companies by David Clark, it's an existing fund returner. So it sounds like a joke, but it is actually the most predictive to somebody that is able to find a fund return or somebody that has done it once. It's the most highly predictive aspect. So on that note, you know, I think, Balaji, you're one of the most fascinating people certainly I've ever interviewed.

2:48:33But I think it's important to note that like Elon Musk, you are also accelerating people to improve themselves and to think bigger. It's kind of this meta thing where like Elon Musk is not only accomplishing these great things, but he's also inspiring people to accomplish great things. I think you have that order effect that I think really inspires people such as myself and others who might have been maximizing on just capital to think bigger. So it's been a real pleasure to sit down and chat. How could people find you and how could the community help you in your pursuits? well um if you want to help uh i'm at biology.com for the fund and twitter.com biology s for the feed um oh i will say one thing this is like maybe a little extension of the end but it's like a postscript we had asked how how can lps help if they want to help well they don't have to help they can just put in capital at biology.com and just call it a day and that's totally good right We'll use the fees to hire people, build things.

2:49:43But if they want to help, there's four ways they can help. First, there'll be an annual conference at the Network State Conference in Singapore. You saw the video for the last one and how packed that auditorium was. That was on relatively short notice, thousands of people came to Amsterdam. This one, I think, will be, I don't know, several thousand people. So it'll be pretty big. And I'm going to invite all my portfolio companies and all the LPs there. So we'll have a really great LP dinner, and you'll be able to meet lots of portfolio companies, so that'll be kind of fun, A. B is, of course, you can invest and so on and refer others online.

2:50:19C is, if I post about our portfolio companies, which I don't often do, I only do it when, A, they need the publicity, and B, the publicity can benefit them. And C, crucially, they're in a state where it's useful to followers, right? And that's the most important. You have to always add value to your followers, teach them something, get them something, and so on and so forth, rather than ask something of them. So in that event, then you can tweet, like, RT, et cetera, the portfolio companies. And then D is, of course, you can always refer good companies and we'll have like a form for that, right?

2:50:52The reason those are good is those are four very scalable ways to help if you wanted to help as an LP that are actually helping. They're not just asking time and so on and so forth, right? And I think other fund managers who are sort of internet first fund managers could do things like that as well. So it can basically say to your LPs, do X, Y, and Z if you want to help. Otherwise, you're putting in capital rather than labor. And let me spend the time on finding great deals and making all of you guys money. Well, I think this has been an incredible interview and really appreciate your time. This has been by far, I think by order of magnitude, the longest interview I've done.

2:51:33I was strategizing on how to make this 30 to 45 minutes and I epically failed, but it's to the audience's benefit and to my own benefit as well. And I look forward to being at the conference in Singapore and also always happy to host you in New York City or Miami. Great. Thank you very much. Thank you, Balaji. Thanks for listening to my conversation. If you enjoyed this episode, please share with a friend. This helps us grow. Also provides the very best feedback when we review the episode's analytics. Thank you for your support.