#39 - Danielle Strachman, Co-Founder & GP at 1517

28:54People can jump on a call. It's with our staff and also with founders to talk about what people are working on, since if they haven't cross-pollinated since we have so many teams we work with. and then um and then it's a win and or a troubleshoot and today someone was asking about crowdfunding and i should probably write her an email later and be like all right all right i was a little aggressive earlier but she's like yeah what about a crowdfunding campaign and i was like no no like you're gonna over promise and under deliver this is what happens with everybody you're gonna have a angry mob of people at you and like the only time you should do a crowdfunding campaign is when you have your product, you've like gotten your manufacturing down and you're using it as, as basically an advertisement.

29:42Like that's like the only time this works. Usually I'm like a bit softer with my feedback, but this time I was like, no, the rocks, they're right there. You're going to crash. It's going to happen. And I think part of it is because we had a founder a few years ago who also was like, oh yeah, I'm going to do crowdfunding campaign and we were like no like danger danger rocks ahead and the founder insisted on doing it and you know they're the captain of the ship and uh we were like okay have fun storming the castle sure enough smashing into the rocks smashing into the rocks three years later still waiting for the product to come out people are overboard i mean it's happening the product is coming out but it is not the timeline that was originally set and so uh i i feel like i had like maybe like a uh like a knee-jerk response when another founder today brought up confronting because i'm like oh my god save yourself reasonably you might you might you know you've seen someone smash their head into a wall for three years and then the guy you know pops on the call and says i have an idea right you're like actually we've seen this right right we've seen this before We see people not listen.

30:59It's really painful. She's in the hospital. Like we don't want that to happen again. Right. Exactly. We can avoid all the next Friday calls. Yeah. Right. Yes. Right. Exactly. Well, and that's one reason why we love getting our founders on these calls to brainstorm with each other, too, is because, you know, people who are a couple of years ahead of you, you can kind of help, you know, you can learn from them of like, OK, because they're in the same market. It's like, OK, trust them in a different way. Absolutely. Investors. Right. Right. Yeah, absolutely. absolutely i'd be curious so what has been you know you give all you give this advice you're kind of like ideally trying to improve someone's kind of outcomes and also kind of improve their direction and trajectory and all those things has there been any particularly memorable moments where you told someone to do something and it really worked and it was a meaningful like massively impactful on their trajectory and has there also been any moments where you told someone to do something or recommended things and just absolutely went to shit.

31:59Sure. Gosh. Um, you know, it's interesting. A lot of the way that we work at 1517 is really through Socratic dialogue. So it's more like we're doing a review with the founder. Hey, what do you think the next three months are going to look like? Where do you think those rocks are going to be ahead? Um, what are the conversations that you should be having with your team that you're not, that you know you're delaying pain on like those types of questions um it's less of the hey have you thought of this thing you should do like we we bring those things up um but i think it's more pulling out of the founder like where they think something should go um and that dialogue that style of dialogue tends to be really helpful because it's like we're becoming a brainstorming partner, someone who's saying like, okay, hold on, like, you can take your head out of the weeds for at least 45 minutes to an hour.

32:57And we can like talk about high level how things are going. A lot of times people know that like, our expertise are probably more on, like, almost like the leadership development side of it. And then we're referring them out to founders, whether in the portfolio or people we know who might have technical expertise. So there's lots of different ways where I think this like style is, is working. And actually I think one part of the style is just that it's proactive. So with the founders, what we do is we set up, we do an onboarding call first of all. And, uh, the onboarding call I think is really powerful because what we're telling people is, uh, the big takeaway, the onboarding call is like, holy moly, congrats.

33:40Like we get to work with you. You get to work with us. This is a big moment. It's like rare that this relationship gets to happen. Hooray. And this moment gets to happen because we're delusional. As investors, we have to believe that every founder we're backing could be a portfolio multiplying company. And, you know, when our fourth, you know, our fourth fund is going to be 100 million in total, our last one was 80 million. Our intention is to forex every fund we have, we have forex our first fund, actually four and a half. And that's a huge moment to say, like, we believe in you, that you have the ability to potentially get there.

34:25Now that's the hurrah. Now there's another, the next slide, which is sort of this doom and gloom slide. And it's like, and while we believe this in our hearts and our souls to be true, we know the most realistic outcome of any one investment we make is that it completely goes to zero. And this is super philosophically grounding because we're never going to come knocking on the door and ask for that initial check back, that 100K, that 500K, that million dollar check. We're not going to be like, oh, hey, by the way, where is it? We need it now. Or, oh, your company's going under. What return is going to happen?

35:03No, we don't make money off of companies returning a small amount of capital when things aren't going well, we make money when people have extraordinary outcomes. And so what we tell founders in that call is that you got to swing for the fences and we want them to try as hard as they can at what they're doing. And we would much prefer for them to flame out really, really early and give it their best shot and then move on to something else than like Peter out over time, especially because the people we work with are so young. For me, it would keep me up at night if I thought someone was spending time on something they shouldn't be doing, especially early in their career because we know success but get success.

35:42Have you had people like that where you were interacting with them? What was that like? Yeah, yeah. We've had founders who are from Fund One, which is 10 years old now, who have been the most armored cockroaches out there who are like, you know, I have this one founder. It's driving nuclear blast after nuclear blast. I mean, he just keeps taking it, you know, COVID nearly shut the company down. Market downturn nearly shuts the company down. This founder actually just recently got a$2 million contract. And part of me is like, wow, that's amazing to see that over all this time. And now it's starting to turn the corner because some pivots that have happened.

36:26And I'm keeping it sort of vague because, you know, I don't want to totally reveal on this one. um do i think it was worth all the pain and suffering of like seven of those nine years probably not uh and i told this founder many times i was like listen it's okay if you want to just like close this out and wrap this up like no harm no foul put it on the shelf come back to it later like you know you're early in your adulthood and there's so many things you can do and every time i would have this conversation with him he would come back and be like i'm on a mission from God. This is what I'm doing.

37:03I was like, Oh, but that's really hard to argue with. Like, it's still so hard to argue with. I'm like, can't like God call you later for this? Like, I don't know. After you're nine, shouldn't you be questioning the faith? Right. No, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. And I think that part of being a great founder is you kind of just enjoy chewing the glass, especially when people tell you that you're doing the wrong thing. Well, and Steven from Lambda Labs, for example, he gave a great talk at our 1517 summit we had last year. And he got up in front of this group of a few hundred young people and he sort of ad libbed his whole talk.

37:47It was awesome. And his whole talk was just don't close the C Corp. He's like, I've had my C Corp for 12 years and I want to keep everybody happy that I've ever worked with in my life. So I kept this open and I've pivoted and pivoted and pivoted. When we invested in Lambda Labs, they were a photo sharing app. And at first they looked like they were doing really well. And then they plateaued and they couldn't figure out how to get out of it. And it was only through sort of a Hail Mary moment where they looked around their apartment that they were in and said, hmm, we have the second deep learning workstation.

38:24Maybe we could sell that. Like maybe that's the business of this company. They put up a dummy landing page. They sold their first computer over Amazon in one day to a guy in Cupertino and they were in Palo Alto. They put the computer in their car, drove it to this guy's house, sold it to him for $10 ,000. And they were like, oh, maybe this is our company. And then that turned into like what has become Lambda Labs of today. But his big lesson was just don't shut down the C Corp. And I thought that was interesting. I don't necessarily fully agree with that advice, but I thought it was interesting that he was just like, you just keep going.

38:59You're going to figure it out. And and yeah, one foot in front of the other. That sounds a lot like Tony Zhu and like the DoorDash story where they just like throw up the landing page. They're like, I wonder if we can, you know, allow people to order online or whatever. They throw up the landing page, which is just like a list of the restaurants, I believe, that were nearby or something that you could deliver from. And it was just the menus. And so someone would call the number on the website and then say, this is what I want. And one of the, you know, I think five co-founders would leave their Stanford class, go to the restaurant, order the food, bring it to the place.

39:33And then like, I think it was like cash, but they didn't, they didn't. That's hilarious. I didn't know this. And that was DoorDash. I think that's what they got into YC with. God, that's wild. Which is crazy. Yeah. Every morning I'm thinking to myself, like, what's the critical path today? And then I just keep on asking myself throughout the day, like, what am I on that right now? Yep. And like, what is the question that you find yourself asking yourself the most? And then also in the sense of the founders that you're talking to, what is the question that you most often are just nailing on? Sure.

40:05This might sound funny, but I think one of the things, there's sort of this like funny thing about investing where you're learning a lot over time, but there's always this question about if those learnings matter. So when we started 1517, we were super beginner's mind. We had never worked in another venture fund. We had no idea what we were doing. And we've made extraordinary returns for our investors. And over time, we've learned a lot. We've seen lots of industries. And so sometimes we end up getting in these debates on the team about market sizing or how hard an industry is. And we're like, is that what we should be talking about right now?

40:47Is that the right question? So the question that I kind of like lean back on is I think to myself when I'm talking with people like what I've wanted to meet this person in the Teal Fellowship finalist round years ago. Like, does this person match that kind of irrational, passionate, totally geeky, mutant level vibe? Like, is that there? And that gets me really excited. That's why I'm excited to talk to this young lady about her stuffed animals, because as weird as that might sound, it's like she's got that insatiable. No one in her life is talking about stuffed animal heads. No, no, exactly. She's fully doing an army of one.

41:33Yeah, she's an army of one. High conviction. She's probably fighting most of the people that she talks with. I don't know. Maybe. um but that's one of the things that comes up in my mind is like is there that that just incredible passion present for this person and then you know there's always a question of sometimes i think about what we do at 1517 a little bit like the harry potter sorting hat where it's like hey is this person in our community is this person a grantee with us is this person someone we invest in and if so at what level um because we've had a lot of people that have started with us on the community and the grant side and then become founders with us.

42:12And I think one thing that we're really good at at 1517 is watching for progress and development over time. Whereas I think a lot of funds, when they meet someone, they might box something into, oh, this is too early for us. But then somehow they box it into too early forever. And I've seen this a lot when I've tried to refer founders. And in fact, at this point, um i think for pre-seed and maybe seed investors relationship building works but i think at the series a plus level people want you to have the metrics they want to feel that like wow holy moly now is the moment strike when the iron is hot if you meet them too early and you don't have the metrics they're looking for what's crazy to me is i'll email some of those same investors hey met with this founder a year ago they've made great progress here's the traction and they're like oh we talked last year we weren't interested and i'm like wait what but they've changed and they have the progress and they have this and somehow people just kind of get boxed into that first meeting um so at this point what is that what is that like cognitive dissonance or is it's where you have this mental image of the idea it's like when someone you know meets a toddler right and then 15 years later they come they meet the same person they're like what the hell right right right Right.

43:26No, exactly. I mean, it's funny. My I have a well, she passed years ago, but I have an aunt who told me she said everyone in my family calls me Danny. She said, Danny, she was in her 80s at the time. She said, here's the weird thing about aging. You're aging, but your mental model has not caught up. And so you'll still think to yourself in your mind that, you know, for her, it was 35. She was like, I'm like in 35. And she was so funny. She's so cute. She's like, I'd walk by a mirror and be like, whoa, who is that? Because that's not who I think of myself as. And so I think we do get trapped in these mental models and with other people too of, oh, this person's the person I met last year.

44:06They're not the person of today. And so now I tell founders, especially for series A and above, you want to talk to people when you've got those metrics, when you're the big fish in the pond, like that's it. Because too often I see people get trapped. You feel as much momentum as possible. Yeah, absolutely. I, on the other hand, I love to see the growth and the change over time. And I think a lot of that is from my background as an educator. There's nothing more that I love to see than someone who has like developed themselves. And especially because the people we work with are so young. It's like, you know, so encouraging to get to talk to Ian, who's 11 and see like, OK, yeah, I'm so curious.

44:50Where is he going to be at even in two years, let alone like four, six, eight? Like. Yeah, something's going to happen there. I love I love this line from Sam Altman, and he says that basically like startups live or die on momentum. And basically the biggest thing that you want to be aiming for is just building momentum, You know, companies that win are winning, stay winning. And companies that aren't winning, you just got to do whatever, scrap, hustle, whatever, to get that first one on the board. When you're meeting with someone that's just at this project stage, what is that? Is momentum the driver?

45:26Is there something else? No. Yeah, momentum on the project stage, like before they've gotten any form of investment, before they're thinking of themselves as a founder. Before company, but they're starting to – like the – you know, you take the stuffed animal heads. Yeah. Like, what is the biggest thing that you would want her to just keep on grinding on? I just want to keep her to keep making. I mean, this is what I would want for like, really anyone, like no matter what their age is, it's like keep making and building things and honing your craft. There's something that is so agency giving about, hey, I built this thing.

46:02In fact, we have a list of quotes from our founders that we've shared with the campers that that we have that's like, Hey, like, you know, what would you want your teenage self to know? And one of our founders, Bruno from Lumens, they're a hydrogen storage company. Um, he wrote, and I think I have it right that it was him who said this, like build anything, even if it's just a bench, because it will give you this confidence, like the completion of a project. And I think that's actually also what he was getting towards was the completion of the project, not just starting something, but finishing it will give you confidence that you can't get through any other mode.

46:40And I think that's really, really true. And so I'm always encouraging people, whether they're building a project through the Medici project or if they're a founder, it's like, see this through to completion. Like, even if the completion is like, hey, we got to spin this down. You still went all the way through and you gave it all you could. It's an important attribute. Do you think that you could do something where you almost have like a video game level up system where you say like at each given point you get like unlock more cash or whatever? And then you create some system where it's like do these different projects or like some subset of projects and choose one.

47:16Yeah, we're going to give you the first thousand dollars. You go cook on it, try to build it. We kind of think of 1517 a little bit in that way. Like we're not giving people the scaffolded projects of like these are the things we'd like to see. um michael did write in his appendix on uh paper belt on fire a list of and not just the list but descriptions of all these areas that he uh wants to see come to fruition and actually cloud seeding was one of them and augustus read his book and i don't know if he had already been thinking about cloud seeding but like augustus actually credits reading this chapter as like hey this gave me some of the like all right was this when he was working on taraseco i you know i don't know all the timeline on it um this is a few years ago uh and then we were the first check-in to rainmaker um so it's interesting to see that like maybe we should do more of that of like hey these are areas that we think are important to put out there to give people some different ideas of things um but i like to think about 15 17 kind of as a scaffolded method of like someone has a project we'll give them a thousand bucks um some of those projects have turned into startups and then we've said hey maybe like a hundred k check is the right way to go here for example we have this um young man human from solcoa who's here in san francisco started as a grantee with us when he was 15 16 years old was really interested in um extraction of rare earth metals at lower energy efficient cost and started like creating and making in his parents' basement.

48:54We ended up giving him a hundred thousand dollar investment check to say, Hey, you know what? You're coming up across questions you can't answer without more money. Let's give it a go. And so now he has a warehouse facility in San Francisco. He's got a team now. He's coming out with some really impressive stats on what he's doing and starting to go into like larger production. um so it's really amazing to see what happens there and then with our teams we're always thinking about you know we tongue-in-cheek say 1517 that we're like an atm machine the password is traction and so if you do have a startup and we've started giving you that belief capital of okay we want you to get through the r &d stage here's 100k or maybe you have some scrappy prototype and maybe you have a customer and you're doing like a pre-seed raise of maybe a million maybe two, we want to be the people to back the truck up really, really fast.

49:50I probably can't say what this particular founder is doing, but we have a founder from our first Flux cohort. This is a sort of a sci-fi program we put together where we knew that some people need an invitation, you know, to like try something. And most scientists wouldn't think, oh, I should go talk to a VC about what I'm doing because the VC world has not been super friendly to early stage science. So we started this program called Flux, which is a homage to the movie Back to the Future. And what we said is we'll give 100K investment. We don't have the ability to do 100K grant, but we'll help you get started on something.

50:29We have a founder who's working on something very novel at sort of like a, I'll call it a very deep infrastructure layer for literally everything that we do today. And this founder is making great progress. We said to this founder, hey, you've been making good progress. Like we want to put in another million, like you're building the team out a little bit. You have these other experiments you want to run. I've been wanting to put another 2 million into this founder for almost two months. We're waiting for one more experiment to kind of come through and be done. But like, we've got the money reserved, like it's, it's like in the bank account, ready to go.

51:14Just with the name on it. Yeah. I mean, we've honestly, this is a fund three company and we're at the end of our deployment cycle where we have very little left. And so we have this earmarked for this one team. And so we've had other teams who were like, Hey, I need some cash too. And we're like, okay, cool. like, can we do it out of here? Do we need to do it out of somewhere else? Like, what does this look like? Do we have to say no sometimes? Because, you know, we do work on like a power law theory of it's going to be a handful of our companies that are going to be the ones who are going to be able to really multiply this fund.

51:47But that to me is like a really interesting way of how we work of like, if we are working with someone and things are going well, we can continue to work with them for a very long time. We also set up what's called special purpose vehicles for our founders, where I call it ringing the dinner bell with our investors. Those are called limited partners. And with those limited partners, they want to back the truck up and say, hey, 1517 has caught on to something that's doing really well. We did this with our company, Luminar Technologies, that IPO-ed in December of 2020. We set up four SPVs over the course of a few years before that IPO happened.

52:25We've set up four SPVs in Lambda Labs as well. And, yeah, those vehicles where we have super high conviction of like, this is either going to go to the moon or this is going to go to zero, like our investors are super interested in that. And we only create those vehicles for our highest conviction teams and companies. Yeah. like going back to the permission stuff um i think in my own experience from just observation i think the best thing is you see other people that are your age or that you can kind of like say oh they're like me and they succeed yep and you just see that and you're like oh well if they can do it they're not smarter than me you know if you see elon today it's like a godlike figure that runs multiple trillion dollar companies and it's impossible to live up to that yeah but if you're looking at Elon in 1996, he's just like walking to Netscape's office with a suit on.

53:20Yep. And he like sits on the bench for five hours and then he gets up and leaves because he's too embarrassed to like go up to the or anxious to go up to the front desk attendant and ask for a job. Wow. And when you're thinking about kind of that, you know, giving permission to people, what do you think the highest like leverage thing that people can do to kind of, I don't know, get more people to start? Gosh, I think there's a few things. I mean, one is that I think seeing people do something like, you know, we tend to model what we see in the world. And this is a phenomenon that you see a lot in sports.

53:57I can't remember the name of this effect, but it's like, hey, when someone, you know, does the high jump and they do it higher than anybody else. And what happens the following years, typically more people reach that point. And then there's like a new bar that is set. And I think that what's interesting about this is that it shows that a lot of what happens is our own limited perspective on something. If all of a sudden the next year, three more people can do that high jump, it's like, okay, well, what really stopped them before? And I think what we're seeing also with founders is we're seeing these great examples of people who, you know, started in their twenties, who are in their thirties.

54:36Now people like Dylan Field with Figma, people like Palmer Luckey, obviously. And I think there's a by osmosis process that happens where you can't not notice, wow, this person spent their entire 20s on building and being a founder, and here's where they're at now. And so I think it gives permission to the new generation to say, well, yeah, why not start something at 17, 18, 19, 20? I think that's a big piece. There's a whole ecosystem that has now developed over time, which has been fantastic. I run a program called the Renaissance Reimagined that brings fellowship leaders together to collaborate.

55:17And it's great. We had something like 70 fellowship leaders from all over the world, some who are giving cash to young people, some where it's a mentorship program, some where it's community, some where it's all of the above. And those types of programs are really, really great. I think fellowships are actually really big drivers of new innovation. And I think we're also going to see fellowships as new drivers of like culture and the arts as well. That's something I'm super passionate about. And, and just the ability for young people to apply to these programs is great. I keep a whole grant list of all these programs and it's got, it's probably has like, I don't know, over a hundred of these programs now.

55:58And when I was at the Teal Foundation, there were no fellowships for young people. There was like fellowships for postdocs, but there were not fellowships for teenagers or undergrads. It's probably one of those things where you're like filling out, you know, 15 pages of application form on like, here's exactly what I'm going to use the money for. Yeah. And, and they just didn't exist for those cohorts of people because people thought, no, you have to wait until you've accomplished what we say you need to accomplish before someone will trust you with money. I think this is actually a really like dangerous thing that's happened in society is that there are systems out there that want to collect the economics of the world.

56:36And these are both for profit and nonprofit institutions that are putting messages out there that it is patently bad to give individuals money. Because I think that they know like, what they're saying is, oh, if you give the money to me, it's trustworthy, but you can't possibly trust other people with money. And I just think that is, it's bad advice. I think, you know, I meet so many people today who are doing direct patronage of just interesting young people they're meeting, and they're doing it without any credit, without any tax write-up. They're just doing it because they know someone gave them a leg up, and I love to see that.

57:11And then some people are formalizing these things, like the Nautilus program started by Zelda Poem. um you know i've known zelda for a few years now and it's been really cool to see her package some of these ideas in a way that might encourage more people to give who maybe aren't ready to do it yet on their own um you know but want to support that ecosystem yeah when when you think about what you're doing at 1517 and let's say you know 10 or 15 years you know you're some billionaire um and money is no longer constrained you know raising other people's capital and like having those incentives is no longer an issue.

57:47Actually, let's just do the hypothetical. Let's say you have $10 billion in your bank account right now, and you have this mission of you want more people to try and start these things. What is the most effective way? What are the things that you could do right now with that$10 billion? I think what I think about top line, people ask me this question a lot lately of what does 1517 become? I think one potential iteration of 1517 is that we just become some massive family office. If we were a family office with $10 billion, then I'd be like, cool, maybe we have an investment arm. Maybe we're a fund of funds for funds that back young people.

58:23Maybe we're also giving, you know, nonprofit dollars to all these groups that are running fellowship programs. And then we're becoming this massive umbrella for supporting the whole ecosystem. And I think we've been supporting that ecosystem a lot from like a community standpoint and we have the funding to work with our founders and our grantees but for example with this renaissance reimagined group i would love to be able to cut checks to all of these players just be like okay cool keep doing what you're doing um you know i have a like a i've been calling her protege but this young woman out of brazil who is working with a group to start a teal fellowship in brazil it's like i would love to give her money and be like here you go go do it and so i think that you know at some point yeah should we have something like 10 billion dollars i mean i don't it wouldn't even take that much like there are ways that we would start doing this much much sooner um is there any other constraints on like you can't just infinitely scale a community and you kind of lose some of the essence of what makes it special like sure you know in the early days of yc you know paul graham's like cooking up dinner on friday or saturday night um and over time you get further and further away from that and like those small things kind of make yeah the thing special well that's why i would want to fund all these different programs because they are each a niche thing looking for the people they're looking for and working with them in a particular way um because that is special like the care that people put into something and the making the dinner yourself.

59:56Um, we did that one year for our, like, uh, you know, yearly 15, 17 meeting with our investors, me and Michael both like cooked chicken and vegetables and all this stuff. And it's like, okay, cool. We have enough investors now where we can't make that dinner anymore. Um, so those things are really, really special. And being able to like work with people who can put that level of care into what they're doing is important and those people are hard to find. There's a lot of people who I think young talent is cool. They're jumping on a bandwagon, but they're using it as a stepping stone to like, I want to become an investor or I want to be known as a thing.

1:00:33To me, that's very different than someone whose heart and soul is in the game and does it because it's like a calling. Like I want to find those people where this is their calling to work with these types of cohorts of people in their specific nuanced way and give them the ability to do that. Yeah, that would be like my big, big dream. And like we've continued to build towards that over time. And I even have like small programs that I've wanted to do. And we've started testing a little bit of some of this with 1517, but I have a lot of hunches in the art world of, hey, what if we gave grants to artists who are making things?

1:01:13And we've done it a little bit. But this stuffed animal project is definitely in the art realm. But I've wanted to do a project where I just drive all over the Bay Area during a summer, meet tons of painters who are non-degreed, haven't gone the MFA route, and give them a thousand bucks and tell them, hey, listen, you can use this for rent. You can use this for paint. You can use food, whatever you want to spend it on. That's fine. But we're going to do a showcase at the end of the summer. You can bring your current work. You can bring any new work. I'll bring the tech community together. Hopefully we will buy a bunch of your work and keep supporting these things.

1:01:48And what I'd be curious about is, does someone who starts with a thousand bucks and a nudge and some belief capital who's an artist, does that have an effect on their long or medium term? I don't know yet. I haven't gotten to run these experiments, but I have a real sense that it would. So I'd like to do more things in more areas like this. And I'd like to see more people doing these types of experiments. has there been anything special about like prolific people so like when i think of like picasso i i remember do you listen to founders podcast at all i don't listen okay podcast that's fine that's terrible i'm the worst no but he he did this episode on picasso and he talked about basically i think from like the age of 16 or 18 until basically the day he died he made some piece of artwork every single day almost all that artwork yeah no one knows or cares about that a lot of it was trash yeah but the few pieces of artwork that were like really really special Yeah.

1:02:42You know, made Picasso Picasso is just doing things kind of leads eventually to you in your mind saying like, well, I've already done these other stuff, you know, this other stuff. Sure. Maybe I can do the big thing. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that that prolificness and that generative energy and that discipline of creating regularly, I think that all compounds over time. And you're making me think about Josie Zahner from the Los Angeles Project, which is now renaming to the Embryo Corporation. And when I think about Josie at the top, I think Josie is really an artist and a provocateur.

1:03:19And Josie's medium happens to be in biology at this point. But Josie has had like lots of different things that she has worked on over time between art projects and tech things, starting the Odin, starting the new startup, and many of these things juggling at the same time. and that's interesting to me and I've noticed this with a lot of our founders is that they do have this really big creative maker streak in fact we had a founder years ago who put in our founder group chat hey I'm trying to earn a little extra money here's here's some art I made on eBay if anyone wants to buy it and I'm looking at his art and I'm like oh that's kind of interesting and then it dawned on me I was like I wonder who else in here makes art I was like hey who else makes art in here.

1:04:07And a bunch of our founders took pictures of things that they made. Like one of our founders, um, this guy, Marcus from Cal wave, which is energy tech company. Um, you know, German guy, he puts this beautiful painting in the chat. And I was like, Oh my God, like I had not put this together. Like, of course you all are making these other things and, and are experimenting because that's who you are. And it happens to be that your medium right now is energy tech or this particular startup you're doing, but it's not your only medium. And we've seen that a lot with the people we work with, that they also tend to be extremely curious about the world and very playful as people.

1:04:46And so going back to what we started with, a lot of it is I think that that playfulness was not taken out of them. Somehow they were able to retain it. And I think there's questions there of how is that able to happen? Because those people are very generative and are the types who are going to make a bunch of junk and not care that it's junk. And then they land on, oh, hey, here's my masterpiece. I would almost think that being prolific has to be directly correlated with being a missionary. Because if you're a missionary, you're kind of doing the thing for the thing's sake. And you want to just express this thing in the world.

1:05:21And by definition, if you are prolific and you're kind of doing it, maybe when no one even knows, then you got to kind of be a missionary because you just care about it so much. Right. Right. Yeah. It's interesting. I don't remember who said this, but I either read this somewhere or someone says something to me about this, but they're like, and I'm sure like both artists and entrepreneurs want to kill me here and be like, no, I disagree. But everyone has pitchforks. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Pitchforks everywhere. You're crashing into the rocks. Yeah, exactly. Here we go. Boom. Someone said something like, you know, artists create like because they have to create, but it's really for themselves.

1:06:00And like, they don't care about what other people think of it. And like, that's a really beautiful thing. And entrepreneurs create and they have to care about what people think about it because that's how you find a customer. And so like, they're both coming from this generative place, but the, the like motivations are a little bit different. And what's interesting to me too, are the, the artists who also move into entrepreneurship and like those transitions and how that happens. and surely the entrepreneurs who like move into art or like, I'm sure that there's a lot of simultaneous things happening there.

1:06:38And you're thinking about, Hey, no, this is something I'm just doing for myself versus something that has like this mission or calling to it that I have to get out into the world, which means it has to resonate with other people. There has to be a response here. Well, the other nice thing is that we are actually not that different than each other. no not at all it's kind of like the the most magical thing is like music where if you create a song that you really love odds are probably there's other people in the world that will like it yeah yeah exactly and you find your people yeah you know um and i think that's an important piece too actually is like finding one's tribe and what you're doing we've heard the phrase for literally 15 years at this point i don't get to meet other young people like me all the time luckily we're starting to hear it a little bit less um because in the old days of the teal fellowship, it was really rare for a young person to find other peers who weren't automatically asking them, what college do you go to?

1:07:33What's your major? Wait, why aren't you in school? And just wanted to talk on the project level. And it shocks me that even today we hear that in our community events of like, wow, I don't get to meet other young people like me. And luckily, like I said, it's getting less because I think there are more opportunities out there for people. but finding people that you can jam with your ideas on who aren't going to be criticizing or going to, you know, be encouraging and interested in maybe a collaborator. It's just really important. Let's do the final question. What's the hardest thing you've overcome?

1:08:07What's the hardest thing I've overcome? Oh gosh. Hmm. The thing that comes to mind here is I started a charter school called Innovations Academy. We founded the school in 2006. It took us two years to found it. And then we opened in 2008. What I didn't know about 2008 was that we were going through a recession. I was 28 years old. I didn't know anything about global macro. And actually, when we were starting school before even the recession hit, we had an interview with the Walton Foundation for a grant for the school that we were told was basically guaranteed. It was like, if you've gone through all these charter school steps and you've gotten approved and you have a building lease, you're going to get this $250 ,000 grant to open your doors.

1:08:59Because the way charter school works is that you only get money when you have, they're called butts in the seat in California. So it's like, you have to have your students before you get funding from the state. And the Waltons hated everything about us. So we were doing things sort of in a very startup-y way, but we didn't have startup vernacular. Then me and my co-founder were co-founders. We were going to co-principal. They were asking us who's school leadership. And we were like, oh, well, we're going to co-principal. Well, you can't do that. One of you has to be the one who makes the final decision who's on top.

1:09:34So which one of it is you it's going to be you we're like neither like we're going to do it together could not handle that answer and it just was one of those situations where they just had some checklists they have they must have i mean i think they must have had a checklist but also they didn't like things like we're on a first name basis with our students i'm not miss danielle i'm just danielle there we had a no homework policy um we had a social emotional curriculum At the time, you know, 16 years ago, nobody knew what a social emotional curriculum was or why you might want to have one in a school.

1:10:08So we just looked strange to them. And especially because we weren't going to have some sort of hierarchy of leadership. It was a no go on that funding. So we had already signed a lease for a building. We had no students. So we had no money. Yet we still had to make this happen. So I went to a friend's mom and, well, I went to my friend and I told her about our situation. She went to her mom and her mom lent us$75 ,000. My colleague went to her brother and he lent us$75 ,000. And we thought we were going to need the money for maybe four months. And then the recession hit and we didn't have any way to think about this.

1:10:48It caused a bunch of financial delays in school systems, and it took us four years to pay back that money. I could not look my friend's mom in the eye for years. I was like, oh my gosh, Teresa's mom. She actually was someone in global macro. So she really understood what was going on and understood that this was not like us being irresponsible or something like that. And we did pay them back. It did happen with interest, not a ton of interest because they were kind to us. but that was a really hard moment to like not get this funding and then have to say how are we going to figure this out because we literally had I think it was 130 students who are ready to start and ready to go but we couldn't open the doors until we had this funding so we had to go find it elsewhere did that kind of lead you into basically when you give the you know$1 ,000 check or even$100 ,000 check or or bigger kind of really hammering in the idea this is your money or not asking for it back.

1:11:48Oh, that's funny. No, that, that time period, I've never thought about it like that. I've never thought about it like that to us. It's more of like this philosophical stance of like, we make money on extraordinary returns, not from someone like eking out some money. And in fact, I was talking to a founder recently, um, who did take money from an investor who knows that they're, you know, they run a fund and this founder was so scared about not being able to pay this investor back that he took on contracting gigs, paid this investor back, I think$250 ,000 and wrote to me about it the other day and was like, I don't remember how he brought it up.

1:12:26I was like, wait, why did you pay that money back? He's like, I was so scared to like piss this guy off. I was like, but that guy knows that everything goes to zero or at least so many things do. And I can't, and, and, you know, he didn't inform this founder of like, Hey, no harm, no foul. You tried your best and that's it. You know, while this founder was like sending checks and I just found that totally ridiculous. So for us, it's like this philosophical ethos level thing, but I never tied it back to the charter school thing. Um, yeah, just different place where that comes from.