Better Tomorrow Ventures' Sheel Mohnot Passed on Robinhood -- Then Built a Fintech Investing Powerhouse

0:00I'm Kent Lindstrom, co-founder of 8BitCapital, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm that invests in the software startups of the future. We focus on AI, cybersecurity, and fintech. I'm going to take you behind the scenes in Silicon Valley. This is the Something Venture Podcast.

0:22All right, welcome back. This is the Something Venture Podcast. I am Kent Lindstrom. I am your host, my guest, Shiel Manat. Thanks so much for doing this. Absolutely. Happy to be on. I had trouble with your name. I watched like 10 video things of people interviewing you. And don't think I'm that prepared. Don't get excited. But to figure out how to say your name, 9 out of 10 of them just said Shiel. They didn't say your last name. That's pretty cool to be well known enough in the venture world that you're like a one-name guy. well okay funny enough i'm not the only shield in venture there's a guy named shield tile who used to be at any aid then now he's at amplo and crazy enough like he's the only other shield that i know yeah and he works in venture yeah and then he recently bought um the portland blazers okay good for him and so we've gone through um you know he was way more popular on on the internet in terms of Google ranking for a while than I was, and then I bet he is going to be again now that he runs a sports team.

1:28Yeah, there's two Kents in Silicon Valley. I'm a Kent, and I've been called the other Kent, by the way. I don't know if I should be offended by that. But as far as I know, there's two of us as well. So, I will ask you, this is funny. Sheil has built and sold a couple companies, started a venture firm with a partner, Better Tomorrow Ventures, which I'm not sure if that means that tomorrow is going to be better. Maybe tomorrow is going to be better. You're going to be better. Or does it not mean anything? Oh, you're the first person to pick up on this. It means both. Oh, well, it's just because I was confused and I couldn't figure it out.

2:03Yeah, no, no, no. Okay, so Better Tomorrow, we invest for a better future. And then we want to improve ourselves. So actually, our management company is called Be Better Tomorrow. Yeah. Okay, because the initials BTV just sound like a boy band. Yeah. To me. so I'll ask you how you came to venture but it's funny I when I started doing this I listened to a bunch of venture podcasts and the the different VCs would talk about how they became a venture capitalist it's a pretty elite desirable job and they all said well I fell into it right like a stunning number of people said they fell into it and so I would ask them on my podcast like how did you fall into it and the answer would invariably be well I went to I went to Stanford and then I I worked at Google and my college roommate's dad founded Benchmark and I fell into it.

2:51I never fell into the housing projects. And so I'll tell this to a venture capitalist and without irony, they'll go, well, that's not my path at all. I went to Harvard. I worked at Facebook and my college roommate's dad founded Clare Perkins. So when I ask you how you came to venture. I just fell into it. Yeah. There you go. Thank you. So you started your path with you started here and you went to India. Like, that's not the normal. That's not. Yeah, that's not obvious. Totally. As a path. Yeah. So, yeah. OK, so I Indian heritage grew up in the United States and in Pittsburgh primarily went to Carnegie Mellon.

3:33Can I ask a question about that? Yeah, of course. OK, the Carnegie. How does that how does that relate to the guys on NPR who give them money who are called Carnegie? oh okay yeah so carnegie and carnegie yeah you you can say it both ways the same same same background same heritage and actually it's kind of funny because it's even in pittsburgh we call carnegie melon but there's a town called carnegie okay yeah it's like it stopped being the ukraine at some point just became ukraine yeah yeah here we are okay so sorry okay so go to carnegie melon make software for hospitals was a consultant then uh i decide uh to move to india and i was actually inspired by watching a movie um and i decide i'm gonna go to india and try to like try to like fix india really it was it was uh fixing myself i did nothing for india basically But I worked in microfinance and it was actually for a nonprofit based in San Francisco called Kiva.

4:45Okay. Oh, yeah. And I was helping individuals from the West give loans to individuals in India and other places via their credit card. So you could make a microloan and help somebody buy an irrigation pump for their farm, stuff like that. Yeah. that's pretty cool what's that there's a book that india book they always try to make it a movie it's been going on for like 15 years like shantaram shantaram yeah that's such a good book yeah a really good book i think they made it into a tv show no that's disappointing there were all these rumors it was going to be like johnny depp and yeah yeah that's a crazy book if you haven't read it so you start it's a fintech vc and i i normally think like focus by the way i had frank rotman on recently who had a has a fit had a fintech bc great so is he like your nemesis is he like your newman or is he like no he's my buddy okay yeah that's cool frank's great yeah oh he was actually like when i got started in venture 2016 he was the first person like i remember just calling him and he was just willing to chat for a long time yeah and i think a lot of people really welcomed me in and you know i didn't really know anything and maybe still don't but i i feel like a lot of people including frank really were just like hey we'll show you the ropes ask us anything and they really took time it was great yeah and you know those of you listening remember frank also founded um co-founded co-founded capital one i um i normally think The focus VCs, I generally think that they're sort of gimmicky and don't make any sense.

6:31Like, yeah, I focus on Stanford students. It's like, well, I can invest in Stanford students too. Or, oh, I focus in Atlanta ecosystem. I'm like, oh, they've got the internet in Atlanta. I can invest there. But fintech and healthcare too. But fintech seems big enough and specific, both specific enough and big enough that it does make sense for a focused fund. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's right. I would say it's not like one niche category. Like there's so many niche funds out there. You know, there's like very interesting funds like Convective Capital is strictly focused on wildfire prevention. And they have like, I think it's like an$85 million fund focused on wildfire.

7:18Yeah, that's pretty specific. And when we started in 2019, some of the LPs did tell us, hey, we think it's too small of a niche. And actually, fintech is quite large. If you look at overall venture funding, it's gone down since 20 – sorry, the percentage for fintech has gone down since 2021. In 2021, I think it was like a quarter. and now it's still, I think, around 15 % of all venture financing are fintech. So if you have a surface area that's around 15 % of all venture financings, that's pretty large. And there's so many different things that are included in fintech that I think it's not really one category.

8:10Yeah. And it ended up, you know, we invest only in software. where we invest in the, not an ad for a fund, but huge markets, amazing entrepreneurs, perfect guy for the thing, you tell us the future. And we ended up in a lot of fintech. Because it's just like, well, geez, that does sound like a big problem, and that does sound pretty exciting, and you do sound like the right guy to do it, and there you end up, basically. Totally. That's cool. And your office is in the Mission District in San Francisco, which, for those of you around, is that right? Yeah, that's right. For those of you listening around the world, the mission that I live there, too, it's the I think Lee Edwards, I think Root Ventures is there, too.

8:47But it's it's the cool part of San Francisco. Pretty Hispanic. Pretty cool. Oh, led by a supervisor who's a crazy person, by the way. Yeah. I think I'm getting that right. But most VCs wouldn't be caught dead there. Your Jackson Square crew. Yeah, that's true. You know, it's pretty cool. how'd you how'd you end up with that kind of uh okay so the the real story is i i live um so in 2015 so a while ago i bought a small building ended up being my home and my office so i live uh i live on the top floor where i am right now yeah and our office is on the ground floor so i i I live here. I love it. And it's really convenient for everyone.

9:39So we're kind of like right off the highway. So Jake lives in Menlo and he can come in. And it's been, it's been very, I mean, it's obviously very convenient. Wow. You're like a, you're like a 1920 seamstress living above the shop. Going down. One, one funny note on that or interesting note is, so where I'm from in India, it's called, it's Rajasthan and the people are called Marwaris. and there are a lot of stereotypes about us. And my wife was recently looking it up like on chat GPT, like what are the stereotypes about where you're from? And one of them is they live on top of their shop. And everything, it's so funny, like everything like basically described me to a T.

10:26And I was like, man, am I just not a real individual? I'm just doing what my ancestors have always done. Right. Do you have a little broom and you go out and sweep the sidewalk every morning? You really should. It would just be cool. Totally. So how has it gone? You've been a venture capitalist for not zero amount of time, right? It's been like eight years, 10 years? So we started BTB in 2019. But prior to that, I started a venture in 2016. So 10 years, actually. How has it gone? First of all, have you had the big hits? Yeah. I'd say it's gone very well. I think, you know, definitely had some hits.

11:06I think it's all kind of crazy now in the context of what hits means. Like, is a billion-dollar company a hit? Or does it have to be a trillion-dollar company? Yeah. Yeah, let me ask you about that. What is going on? Not only are there like trillion-dollar companies, which I kind of make sense when you just look at their cash flow like it's just yeah okay there's six billion people on the planet are on the internet now and there used to be like 300 million you know in the early 2000s but what what do you make of if you if you were if you're just to read the press um you know without much skepticism there's companies they start and they're like at 100 million dollars in ARR in like two months yeah I'm like well if you literally went to a company tomorrow and they just said we're going to do as fast as we can we're not even going to look at your product and your your dad runs the company right and we're just going to sign up like it would take like three months like just so how is it really companies really hitting 100 million air in two months or okay so there's there's so many things to talk about here but But one of them is none of these numbers are real.

12:29Like they're not, first of all, what is ARR? Annual recurring revenue. And it's really, you can't really have 100 million of ARR in a couple months. There are companies that are growing tremendously fast and faster than I've ever seen before in my 10 years. and probably that you've ever seen. But a lot of them, first of all, are not ARR. Sometimes what they're calling ARR is really funny. Companies will announce their ARR number and then I'll talk to late stage investors or whatever that looked at the deal and they say, oh, none of that was ARR. They were counting trial revenue. They were counting all sorts of stuff that is not annual recurring revenue.

13:20Yeah. And, um, and then also companies that grow super fast also could fall super fast. So, you know, it wasn't that long ago that one of the fastest growing companies in the early, early GPT era was like Jasper. They had grown to$100 million of revenue, if I remember correctly. And yeah, they grew super fast. But then also, then chat GPT came out and people realized, hey, I can just do this with a$20 a month subscription. That gets me all sorts of other stuff too. And I'm assuming the revenue from Jasper fell pretty fast. And so I think in general, companies that grow super fast also can fall super fast.

14:17And I think the disruption by the model companies is a real concern. Yeah. Is it different this time in the sense that if you look at the history of companies, like what really happened, a lot of companies were around for a bit of time before they took off. I mean, if you look at Google, like there was some point where they tried to sell the whole thing for like a million bucks and Chime. Nobody gave a crap about the Series A and Homebrew kind of did it and they took off. A lot of companies have that story. Is that not going to be a story anymore? Or I don't know. What do you think? Yeah, it's a good question because people are looking for hyper growth, right?

15:03Because it's happening, you're kind of like, well, why would I invest in a company that isn't experiencing hyper growth? If I can invest in a company that's experiencing hyper growth. And so we have a company in our portfolio that went from 25 million, about 25 million of revenue a year ago to 50 million this year. And that's pretty good. And really great founder, great fundamentals. and they went out to raise and a lot of the investors said, um, you know what? Like we're looking for companies that are growing much faster. We're kind of looking for that 10 X growth and a company that by all metrics, you know, if you looked at a few years ago, if you said your company grew for 25 million to 50 million, you'd say, that's awesome.

16:01And actually I think it was a little more than that. I think it was, it was over two X growth. Um, and, and nowadays, a lot of funds are saying, Hey, that's not interesting. And, um, and I think there's opportunity there. I think, um, you know, we don't, we don't invest at a later stage, but I think probably these companies are very well priced and still will have tremendous growth. And this company is at no risk of disruption by any of the model companies. You know, it's FinTech dealing with money and has licenses and stuff like that. It seems like that might lead to that general attitude might lead to some sloppy company building and or fraud.

16:44I don't know. Yeah, I think both are correct. You do definitely have companies out there that are hyping crazy numbers. Yeah. And, uh, and when you look under the hood, it's not true. Yeah. Yeah. Because we, we have companies that are maybe not in that, that crazy 10 X growth mode, but you, but when you look at them and think like a, you know, a rational human being, you're like, okay, they're doing a really important thing at a really important segment of the economy. Nobody's no model is going to disrupt them. Clearly it's going to be an X zillion dollar company, but not, not in one year, it's going to take five years because they're selling to medical practices and guess what?

17:27You know, they, you're going to have to go put on a coat and tie and meet with them a couple of times. Like that kind of thing. It's just the normal economy. Um, have you had any, it's so funny adventure. Have you had any like misses, you know, where you, you, you're having lunch with Travis Kalnick and he said, you want to invest in Uber taxi or you're like, nah, any of those. It's so funny what a place those occupied people's minds too you know they're just a weird uh yeah i would say look we've had a ton of misses over the years right um i would say companies so there are a lot of companies that you know i wish i was in but i can't call them miss yet because they haven't you know achieved greatness.

18:18There are a few companies from back in the day that have achieved greatness that I can look back and say, you know, I didn't invest for a particular reason and I should have. So I can say back in the day as an angel, so pre me being in venture, and I wasn't really, you know, a serious angel or anything like that, but I had the opportunity to look at Robinhood. had the opportunity to look at chime and I can give you, um, reasons why I didn't do either of them and why I was obviously wrong. Um, so start with Robin hood. Um, you know, the, the founders had gone to Stanford with actually at the time, one of my roommates and they actually, I think came over to our place.

19:13Um, I was thinking at the time and they, they had difficulty raising their first round, first couple rounds, I believe. And I looked at the company and I thought, okay, you guys are offering free trading. That's cool. But you know what? A lot of folks have offered discounted trading before. There were companies like Zekko Free Trade out there that were doing, if not free trading, like$1 trades,$2 trades. and they sold for like some money, nothing crazy. And I was just thinking like, what is different about you guys and what's different about now? And I think what I completely missed was it wasn't just the free trades.

19:59And by the way, at that point, they didn't really know how they were gonna make a lot of money. So that's another thing that had to be figured out. But what I missed was they weren't competing with interactive brokers so like interactive brokers or any you know like schwab td these are places where people like professionals or semi-professionals or individuals like us might trade um and i thought okay if you're competing with those guys like those guys will bring their prices down and for me you know i think at the time i was paying six or eight dollars of trade. And I was thinking like, it doesn't really matter.

20:42Like six or$8 on a trade makes almost no difference to me anyway. So are people who actually trade going to care? And I had the examples of those companies previously that tried and didn't get anywhere. And I think what I totally missed was Robinhood was bringing a whole new generation of people into trading. And if you look at the average account today of a Schwab or a Fidelity, it's probably like a few hundred thousand dollars on average. And if you look at a Robinhood, it's probably like$10 ,000. And they really were able to bring in that, I don't even know what the generation was uh millennial gen z i can't keep it straight why now it now it's like alpha yeah but you know i think they were able to bring on this whole new crowd into investing and then were able to monetize that really well and then actually expanded and and now i'm a customer.

21:50And I think people realized that these products they had built for a different class of investor actually were quite good for folks like myself. And a lot of larger net worth, semi-professional folks started using Robinhood too. but I totally missed that mobile was a whole new beast and they were reaching a totally different class of investor and typically it's hard to make money off somebody who doesn't have that much money but they found a way yeah that it's such an interesting thing in venture too which is the sort of that so many hits were not I mean if you look at uber like yeah lyft was their first but It was kind of pretty much the first one.

22:41But so many things. Like Google was search engine number 400. And Facebook was social network number 4 ,000. I mean, this concept where you kind of talk to a founder and they're like, no one else is doing this. You're like, oh, that's not a very good idea. And they're like, oh, 100 people are doing this. Oh, it's too crowded. But the too crowded doesn't mean that it's over. Yeah, absolutely. Like time and time again. yeah absolutely i think um i think there's yeah like you said um you know it's some people say like oh okay actually facebook wasn't competing but really they were with you know all the companies you you and i remember yeah um and and you probably remember better better than me yeah obviously yeah friendster well and they came in very and they came in they came they got lucky you know but they came in late and could kind of you can also look at everyone else and go grant doesn't work that doesn't work oh that's a good idea i'll just take that one and yeah you kind of start on third base you know totally things whereas when the social networks before that started you could sit in a you know meeting with a venture capitalist and they'd be like well this is ridiculous no one's ever going to put a digital image of themselves online that That would be crazy.

24:02That would be nuts. It is funny. Do you think you would get... My partner rented space to Travis Galnick, knew him, got the memo about Uber, did not invest. And probably would not if he had it to do over. Because at the time, Travis Galnick wasn't even going to run the company. Yeah. And so if somebody came to us today with an amazing idea, they said, yeah, just FYI, I'd like to raise some money from you guys but i'm not gonna be running this i'm gonna put up an ad on you know twitter and see if i can find somebody we still wouldn't invest do you think you would get robin hood right now if you if you got another shot it's a great question hard to answer um and that that point about travis is a really good one that's gonna stick with me um but i don't know honestly i don't know i could and another one i got wrong by the way we talked about it you talked about it earlier was chime and that one you know they're building a neobank and there'd been a lot of neobanks people had tried yeah uh and it's the same thing basically as robin hood which is like simple had tried i knew the guys from simple quite well it sold for 120 million it was you know not not a terrible outcome but but wasn't a great venture outcome and um and they were trying to reach folks like me and really chime reaches a totally different population so i think in both robin hood and chime i missed who the customer really was yeah and um and that was early and i think i don't think i would make those mistakes today but there are definitely other mistakes i would make and actually i can think of two of my great companies from 2016 era that I probably would not have invested in today.

25:58Right. And what are the great ones? Well, a couple of them. So at this point I was running a fund called 500 FinTech. I ran an accelerator program and I had the luxury of investing in companies at a two and a half million dollar valuation. And we had in that first cohort, I think we had like seven companies and, you know, a couple, a couple of unicorns. And in the next cohort, it was a sort of similar thing. We had two, two big successes. And each of them, if I look at today, I can tell you what they are so um the first one uh a company called albert albert.com and it's under the radar but recently less so because they just took the jersey patch on the la lakers so if you look right here on the la lakers it says albert and that's that's my portfolio company um and they you know they reportedly paid$30 million a year for that.

27:10And the company is doing extremely well, is very profitable, probably will go public in the near future. And it started out as a personal finance manager. And that's like, you know, back in the day there was Mint and so many others along the way. There's no way I would invest in a personal finance manager today. but at the time I was naive and I really liked the founder and I and I was just like there's something about this like I think it's gonna work and then ultimately it worked because the founder was excellent founders and they you know pivoted their way around to making it work but along the way it took them a very long time you know they raised it two and a half then six then 15 then 20 and like these are all different rounds right right right right and then now you know it's uh you know many hundreds of millions in in revenue and and profit um so is it it's funny the misses are so much so much more fun yeah for some reason the uh the favorite you know the ron wayne story the the apple guy yeah the guy who owned like 10 of apple or something and he sold for 800 bucks or something yeah something like that it's pretty bad it's a great story although it is like when you think about these things like to be fair it should be worth like a hundred billion dollars today or something like that if you didn't sell if you didn't sell but to be fair like you would have to the thing that one i think there was actually some reasonable reason for it like they had debt and he owned a house and like he was like if something went wrong they'd actually come after me.

28:48But also you'd have to hold that Apple stock when it went to$30 million and then went back down to 8 million and then went up to 60 million and went back. Like, would any of us, like none of us invested in Apple on day one and held it for 20 years. So, you know, we feel like we're a little bit smarter than him, but maybe not. Totally. It's like I worked at Amazon briefly. I interned at Amazon back in the day and then I chose not to go back afterwards. But yeah, if I had, you know, whatever they had offered me in equity at the time, it was like a few hundred thousand dollars of equity, you know, investing over a few years, you know, that would be worth a lot of money today.

29:34Yeah. But I probably would have just sold it. Well, and that's the crypto thing. Like you got to kind of be, oh, this guy's worth like, you know,$200 million in crypto. And that means that that guy who spent$10 on whatever sat there when it went to$800 ,000 and down to$50 and then back up to – you got to be like, yeah. And that's why you see I lost my password and that's why it's worth$200 million. I was just going to say that. Yeah, exactly. So AI comes in. It seems like it's one of the real things. What do you think? I mean, we're getting maybe not past the bubble, but you can kind of start to see the outlines of what's happening.

30:16What do you think in terms of what it's not really taking off as fast as you might think or where it's having a surprising impact? I'll give you an example. When I talk to people, other venture managers, and I ask them what they're doing with AI for their business. I'm very excited to hear what they're doing, so I copy the best practices. Yeah. And it's always kind of like nothing's really blown. It's sort of like, oh, we have it write our memos. Or we have it, it looks at LinkedIn and figures out who's starting a new company. And how does that work? It's like, well, it just sees who's changed their job title.

30:51I'm like, you don't really need AI for that. I don't think. Like, what is your sense of what's kind of, oh, this is, it's far more interesting in this area. It's far less interesting in this other area. You know, it's interesting. I think we're all doing the same. We're all building the same stuff with Adventure. Like all the stuff you described and then it's kind of like piecing stuff together for us and, you know, just doing some automation such that like my notes are automatically put here and there. And yeah, like it feels like it feels meh, but it is kind of a big deal. That's true. It saves so much time.

31:33I was talking to a partner at a large venture fund a couple days ago, and she was telling me they actually are going to get rid of some EAs because there's less work to do because now so much of it is automated. yeah and i think there's going to be more of that but okay to your point meh on the margins yeah it feels like magic sometimes to me still i still have that feeling of wow this is this is awesome yeah and it you know like different phases of ai like you have it and you don't like i think you know living in san francisco i think i took my first waymo like three and a half years ago okay that's magic yeah that it felt like magic then but now you're just like kind of used to it yeah yeah and actually like the first one was really magic yeah and then now like you know i have a tesla that mostly drives itself um and it's just normal now um but i still i still get that magical feeling from stuff from time to time yeah like i started using um this company town um and uh it just like pulls together a bunch of stuff and like automatically drafts my emails for me and there's stuff like that that is just like pretty good when it gets it right it's pretty damn good yeah yeah you know i found a lot of magic in the certainly waymo is funny the first time you see it you're like that's crazy there's nobody driving it and like the fifth time you see it you're like that's that makes sense like why is there a dude driving that other car that seems weird it's crazy yeah but we we traveled recently in europe like in germany and the small things that ai can do are kind of interesting like we were on a train in germany we're like couldn't figure out how to open the bathroom door just couldn't figure it out totally took a picture of it and the eyes like oh yeah that's a blah blah there's a little tab way up at the top and you got to pull the and it's just like oh totally that's that's pretty impressive and and it's a small thing totally there's a million things like that um one uh there's a billboard when you're driving north into marin that says ai will not fix your ac and it's it's like a sign for some like hvac company yeah and they're wrong because i had an issue with my third with actually my parents thermostat.

34:10And I just like, over the course of an hour, like I took a bunch of pictures around the house of the thermostat and it was like, Hey, things are good. That shouldn't be the issue. You know, here's the wiring that you did. It looks fine. And then I went down to the HVAC system and it had me open up a bunch of panels and I did fix the HVAC system with AI. And that's the kind of thing you're talking about. It's like a little small thing that's pretty magical. And that probably would have cost you know a few hundred bucks yeah and time and and you can just do it yourself you have the satisfaction the taking the pictures that's a get off track but taking the pictures is great because like the classic thing that happens is you'll be reading instructions or you're learning software it's like click on the reset button and you're like there is no reset button so you take a picture and you go you tell me where the reset button is and i do it with that little snarky attitude totally and it's like oh you're correct there's no reset button it's the something you know it's the little curly thing in the corner it's it's pretty neat um what do you make of the the change in venture that i've found fascinating is the entrance into um the political arena of the big famous rich guys like i just don't remember it just used to be kind of you're here in san francisco and everybody's left of trotsky and you know that's what it is and then the last three years yeah almost with a certain amount of glee in the case of mark andresen these guys yeah gauged what and also by the way through guys like gary tan at the local level in san francisco yeah what what do you make of all that yeah it's very interesting um i think people for the longest time felt like we're doing our own thing here in california and like in spite of of the government, like we're doing it.

35:59And then I think really Peter Thiel, I think was, you know, one of the early folks to get political. He spoke at the 2016 Republican National Convention and supported Trump. And I thought like, that was crazy.

36:17And he, you know, he was right. Or he was right to support Trump in that it, Trump ended up winning. you know, whatever, J.D. Vance ended up there because of Peter. And it's all really interesting. I think in California, I think we saw how messed up things got. And it was for Gary, I think, at risk of threatening sort of like what makes San Francisco, you know, California special was being ruined by local politics. And so he got involved and I think did a great job. At the national level, I think I have a lot of skepticism. I would say I'm very centrist. I'm definitely not straight Democrat, definitely not straight Republican.

37:15I think there could be good things on both sides. I think Trump is insanely corrupt, and I think that's bad for capitalism. And I think just everything we're doing reminds me of growing up in America, but with an eye towards India, just making fun of everything that was happening in India in the 80s and 90s. And the corruption, just everything really reminds me of India. And I remember being a kid going over there making fun of my cousins for how stupid their politics were and we've got the same thing going on now it's it's really frustrating yeah um but i think i think about it in a maybe cynical way which is there's this there's this like little game that i play with my friends called sheriff of nottingham it's like a board game and you have to like you're like a um customs importer and you like uh let stuff get in or not and and the strategy the winning strategy in that game is if you find a corrupt importer you work with them a lot and you just bribe the shit out of them and that's kind of how you win and there's some analog there yeah that's interesting i um yeah that's my sense is that what kind of happened is people are just ignoring it just take the local san francisco thing for example the tech guys were just doing their thing but they were turning over like 17 billion dollars a year to the city yeah and so a whole bunch of people went and got involved and decided to do with that money and so when you're working away at doing whatever you're doing there were people who were showing up at the meeting tuesday afternoon at two o 'clock and assigning themselves a bunch of money which was also fine until it just got to the point where people were like, I'm stepping over a junkie to get to my job at Uber.

39:20And what the hell is going, like it's gone way too far. And Gary Tan stepped in. I think at the national level too, you had like, the last administration was, they weren't letting mergers happen. They weren't letting IPOs happen. They were cracking down crypto. And I think people finally went, oh my God, you're going to kill us. Like you're going to - Totally. Like put us out of business. And I do not like Donald Trump, but oh, my God, what are we going to do? Yeah, totally. And I agree with that. I think like they I think the previous administration in particular just made it so difficult to operate.

39:58And and then you kind of have to embrace or, you know, maybe don't have to. But then a lot of people were like, let me brace what's on the other side. I think the part I struggle with is how much they've embraced it. And some people think like he's done nothing wrong. And that's the part I, you know, find fault with. But I totally, I totally get why it happened. Like, yeah, the, the Dems were, you know, very difficult to work with from a technology perspective. Well, between those two things, you have California. I've done a few billionaire tax just on my own. And having read, so California has what's called a billionaire tax.

40:43And California is just famous for naming propositions. We vote on propositions because we don't have a representative government, apparently. and like the proposition will be called like the clean water act for children and it's like a tax break for coal miners i mean it's just it's nuts how these things work but the billionaire's tax i read it it's like lets the legislature make it any amount for any period of time for any income level basically which is kind of nuts that one is interesting because it actually is not a failure of our elected officials um in fact the way this whole thing started was one of the dsa guys um i think it was two years ago like one of the dsa representatives of which there are only a few actually in california um brought up brought up this billionaire tax.

41:40And it was so unpopular, even in California's house that they didn't even bring it to a vote. So it was, it didn't get to a vote. And then he took it to the SEIU and they were like, because of our crazy system that you can bring anything on the ballot with signatures, you just need a little bit of money. They are the ones who are bringing it, But actually, very few politicians in California are supporting it. Yeah. So even though I guess that is one, like, I think the politicians realize it's a bad thing for California. It's called a billionaire's tax, though. It's the kind of thing people might vote for.

42:26And this is complicated. There's two other things on the ballot that actually counter. Yeah, exactly. And you have to confuse the electorate, which is so stupid. It's crazy. I mean, there's so many of these things that you got to realize there's like a second order effect because the thing that can be kind of chilling, like just take the simple example that people are talking about, well, we should charge people per mile they drive because you don't get gas tax from electric cars, right? So let's say California is going to have a mileage tax. Yeah. Okay. How do you do that? Well, you put a tracker in everybody's car to figure out how many miles they drive.

43:00Now the government's got a tracker in everybody's car. Like, did you want that? And so the billionaire's tax, remember, you don't really know who's a billionaire. Yeah. I heard that Larry's a billionaire or whatever, but is that real estate guy in Orange County a billionaire? Totally. Well, what do you do? Every single person in California lists all of their tangible and intangible assets, reports that to the government. It just gets into that kind of stuff. But how serious, I'll kind of wrap up on this a little bit. Because you guys like David Freeberg, he's got pretty far into the doomerism.

43:31I don't know if you listened to any of his stuff, but he's pretty concerned about the rise of socialism in America. Oh, okay. That kind of new. Within a few years. Yeah. I don't remember this in previous tech cycles, but the anti-tech thing, the anti-self-driving car, even though. It's crazy. 16 times safer. Doesn't matter. Doesn't matter. And by the way, do you know who the biggest lobby? You think it's the unions, the biggest lobby. Trial. Trial. Trial lawyers. because if people don't get hurt and killed, they don't make money. Totally. Data centers, to a lesser extent, nuclear power. Yep. This didn't happen.

44:07When the mobile phone came out, people weren't a little bit like, oh, privacy, you're tracking my pocket. But people are really stopping data centers. I know. Boston's really not going to have Waymos and probably New York. Yeah. What do you make of the kind of anti-tech AI doom-brism? I don't know what to call it. Yeah. Yeah, I think it's, well, I think AI Doomerism is something different. Okay, fair. I think, when I think of AI Doomerism, and maybe I don't have this terminology right, but I think AI Doomerism is, AI is going to get so powerful that it's going to kill us all. Oh, by the way, I've asked on this podcast, like Richard Sochi, all kinds of smart people.

44:51Yeah. At the end, as a joke, because I think I'm kind of funny. Are we going to have to blow up the data centers? and they always they never say no they're always like yeah i don't think so you know the first person that scared me about ai was actually elon musk and it was in 2015 and actually elon and peter thiel both put money into this um kind of like saved humanity from AI nonprofit. And I was at a conference where Elon was talking about it. And at the time, he actually was on that side. And I don't, actually, I couldn't say where he lies today, but it doesn't seem like he's on that side right now.

45:50I'm kind of of the opinion that things are going to be fine. And like, I'm not, I'm not worried about humanity because we are resilient people and kind of have gone through many different shifts. Yeah. On the anti-data center, anti-self-driving car, I think, look, in, there are nuggets that make sense there. Self-driving cars, it's tough. I think like there's job displacement fears that are real. um now i tend to think that all job displacement fears don't really make that much sense like as a society we need to get past it and technology helps like and mark andreason has always said like what's really happening when we create like a million jobs is we're wiping out you know 10 million and adding 11 right like we ended some cab driver jobs and then added like 11 million uber driver like that yeah kind of thing like in the 40s i think like close to like a half to one percent of americans were like telephone switchboard operators yeah and like that job went away completely um yeah you know a generation before that almost everyone was a farmer right um and and now very few are so i i think you know we're resilient humans are resilient so i'm not really worried about it.

47:15But I see that concern, I do understand. But it doesn't mean that we should... By no means does it mean we shouldn't do self-driving cars or anything like that. We should. But it's also obviously better for society to have these things. The data center thing, also, there's some nuggets of it, I understand. But on the whole... And the part I understand is... So data centers, like, you kind of want them, if they're not giving you any benefit, like, they don't create that many jobs. And it is a strain on the grid. So if you don't, like, adequately account for those things, then I understand why you wouldn't want it in your backyard.

48:07Because you can get all the benefits of AI without having it in your backyard. Right, but you also wouldn't want a water sewage treatment plant in your backyard. That's right. That's right. so i i think it's like the ai companies and governments like and they're doing a good job of this in virginia i think people are like generally happy they're getting the tax revenue and and that's great um but i do i understand some nugget of the negative folks but then they're going way too far and they're saying like it's using up all of our water and all this bullshit that isn't true. But anyway, to your point, there's a lot of anti-tech sentiment out there and it's very unfortunate.

48:46And I think some of it, like we could have done better messaging around this. I think the AI stuff, people are like, you know, I think Dario might still be saying like, you know, we're taking all the jobs and that doesn't help anything. I don't know if that's actually what's causing the problem i think there's just a lot of folks that like anytime like tech has power now yeah and anytime any group has power there are going to be people fighting it yeah i mean do you believe the hypothesis that um open ai and anthropic are basically fear-mongering like including the hugging face breach thing that happened recently to get regulated such that they're inside the tent and everyone else is on the outside of the tent i think they're definitely i don't know if those incidents specifically but i think you know obviously they're arguing to be regulated and they're arguing against uh open source ai yeah um which really like threatens their business model yeah um and you know when you get to that scale of course you've got to do you've got to fight however you can everybody does it yeah uber is fighting against self-driving cars too right so um you know you you kind of that's the nature of the game like yeah you're you're doing what's in the best interest of your shareholders and that's going to be fighting against anyone any way you can including lobbying yeah well let me i'll wrap up on this year um what are you like looking forward to you know you're you had your vc firm for a while but in some sense not that far along what do you what are you excited about technology what are you looking forward to like what's the good yeah i mean there's so many things i think like we have ai to do a lot of stuff for us but there's just like the the future is so exciting like yeah you know um we have you know full self-driving it's not really full self-driving but um it's really great for what it is but you know i'm excited for being able to just get out of the car and have it park for me that's a total gate changer um and probably coming in the not too distant future obviously like waymo waymo is a different beast but that kind of thing it'll change how we think about travel traveling around the city yeah um and that kind of automation in every aspect of life is really exciting and i think the like the incremental changes we've gotten in ai over the past few years are incredible yeah um and it it feels like each individual new model it's not even really the models it's partially the harness around it they're just it's so incredible that i i'm i'm excited it's also possible we haven't seen the thing yet right like mobile came out and everybody's doing check-ins on foursquare and yeah that was fun and then uber came along and said no here's what you do with a mobile phone totally transform transportation i wonder if it's not like that with ai where we're like oh it's a note-taking app great and it's cool but the thing just it's not in our imaginations yet it's in someone's imagination but not mine totally and then there's there's like the hardware stuff right Like, what can that change?

52:14And I sometimes wear the meta glasses and, you know, it's like a V2, V3 thing right now. But you can imagine that being an interface for the future. You and I fortunately already wear glasses. So it'll be easy for us if that is the interface of the future. And then AI will probably invent a thing that renders glasses useless. Yeah, yeah, totally. Well, how do people – well, first of all, I'll tell you one way. You're an excellent poster with an A on X. Thank you. So follow S.H.I.E.L.D. on X. But how do people, like, if they want to follow your – get in touch with you or follow what you're thinking, what's the best way?

52:53Yeah, I feel like X is pretty good. I'm at Pitt, they see P-I-T-D-E-S-I. And I think that's probably the best way. And then, you know, my email is easy to find if you want to get a hold of me. All right. Well, thanks so much for doing this. Absolutely. Thanks, Ken. It was fun. All right. This has been the Something Butchered podcast. Sheil Amanat, my guest. Talk to you next time.