How The Thiel Fellowship Created $750B+ In Value | Ethereum, Figma, OYO

24:52It's like the same thing that's happening with the Doche. Oh, a hundred percent. A hundred percent. Well, and one of the things that I kind of wonder about, and I used to always see this on homeschooling circles, is that when you're doing something different, what other people hear or see or imply about that difference is that what you're doing is better than what they're doing. There's always this comparison. It's not just like, oh, wow, that's wonderful that you went and worked with an organization or had a fellowship or whatever. It's like, oh, well, well, you think that dropping out of school is better than me being in school?

25:25It's like, we're not saying that. Like what we're saying is like different choices for different people. And so these reporters really went on the attack to individual fellows. And like we were flabbergasted about that. And that has toned down a lot over time. But those, especially the first couple of classes of fellows, I think that like pure bonding between them was also important because there was this spotlight on what they were doing, whether or not, you know, they wanted it to be there. Yeah. Wow. Adversity training. Yeah, very much so. Also, it sounds like you need the Ray Dalio dot system to make sure like people in these I don't think I know about this dot system.

26:03The dot system is like they, well, you wouldn't do it to this extent, but like they psychoanalyze everyone in every single interaction all the time so there is like a constant measurement of people's performance within Bridgewater it's it's a whole thing um but for that it would it would be less it would be less intense they should not play who should I be paying attention to during wolf like who's the one who keeps on I was gonna say that'd be a brutal brutal game for that kind of culture brutal game constantly being watched Yeah. OK, so I'm curious. Yeah. Why 20 people? Like, why are there 20 fellows into these cohorts and why didn't that not expand?

26:44So I think like on the top layer, the fellowship is really a cultural movement. It was about saying, hey, one path is not for all. There's huge problems with college. In some instances, like the meme of everyone should go to school is definitely a scam. Some people are coming out really encumbered in debt and that's just patently wrong. and you can spread that message without necessarily having to have a huge program to do that that was kind of one of the more interesting things that to me about the fellowship was we had this huge global impact and at the same time like the numbers of people that we were working with as the actual fellows was uh you know 20 people um i don't know how they came up with the exact number.

27:29I know that they had like Jim and and Peter and Luke Nozick had flown back on a plane from New York. This was right before the Sarah Lacey interview the next morning, actually. And I think they sort of brainstormed this number of 20 people. And then the idea of like 20 under 20 and just sounds kind of good. Like so I don't know that I wasn't there for that piece of the genesis. 20 ,000 steps, hours of sleep, all this stuff is arbitrary. I don't know if all of it's arbitrary, but some of it's arbitrary for sure. In today's high-speed business world, staying ahead means using the smartest tools possible, including the powerful capabilities of artificial intelligence.

28:09Meet Turing Intelligence. Turing builds customizable AI systems designed to solve your mission-critical challenges, no matter your industry. From expert guidance to tailored projects, Turing helps top companies realize AI that's more capable, more adaptable, and more effective. With Turing, discover how AI can accelerate your business growth. To learn more, visit Turing.com slash sorcery, spelt S-O-U-R-C-E-R-Y. That's Turing.com slash sorcery. But what I loved about the program was that we could be working individually with these people while making a really big impact on culture. We would have lots of people write to us all the time.

28:47Wow, this is giving me permission, even though I'm not a fellow. This is giving me permission and a talking point that I can have with my parents. about why I want to stop out of school, about why I want to take a gap year. The American gap year did not exist when the fellowship started. It was not a thing. No one talked about taking gap years here. And now it's super common. People take gap semesters, even on applications. Applications now ask, like, are you interested in taking gap semester or gap year? Like, they use it as part of their planning now. And I'd be curious on the admissions side.

29:17Do they see this as a positive? Do they see this as a negative? I have no idea how they weigh that kind of thing. but it's totally normalized at this point so I always thought it was quite incredible that we could make the amount of impact we did and then the other thing too to think about is that making that cultural statement also gave permission for other people to do fellowships like this like you look at O'Shaughnessy Ventures, 776 these types of programs are very much modeled off of things like the Teal Fellowship. And I love that. Everyone should have programs that they want to run to impact the next generation.

29:57And it shouldn't just be like one program doing it. If the Teal Fellowship has one, and I'm sure many would argue that it has, and dropping out is now acceptable, going your own path is acceptable, what comes next? Well, I think in general, just younger people being taken seriously is sort of what comes next, like even younger. So sometimes people will ask me, especially with 15, 17, where do you want it to be in 15 years? And where do you want that to look like? And I tell people I want to be funding 11 year olds because I think they're incredibly creative and interesting and can be starting things earlier.

30:34So I think it's helping to show people that the barrier to entry on getting started doesn't need to be even when you're 18 anymore. It can be quite a bit younger than that. I think the fellowship does open up the field for other people to start fellowships. I was talking to a woman in Brazil who's starting basically an iterative teal fellowship project there that actually she just got 600 applicants in for in Brazil. Like this is pretty amazing and is starting a new program. And so I love to see that's spreading like, hey, this is like getting really out and really global at this point. So I think it's just giving more people permission.

31:15And even today, I ran into someone who's running like a climate program and they said like and we were talking and they were like, oh, your work has influenced so much of what I'm doing because we're bringing in people who are younger, who don't have degrees or people who have maybe gotten their degree, but are coming in, you know, outside of a field to come into it. And like, we just have this really open mindset. And so I think there's all these ripple effects of things like the fellowship, getting people to think about that you don't have to do things in systems. And lastly, I'll also say like, I think a next step is actually direct patronage.

31:50This is something that I'm really passionate about. And the fellowship is a direct patronage model where we said, hey, we're going to give this money to the individual. We're not going to give this to a system that's going to dole out money and we didn't ask for receipts. There was a lot of freedom in terms of how people use their fellowship dollars. And I think that that meme is really important. And I think in American culture in particular, what's gotten around is actually that you can't trust the individual and that you should give your money to an organization because they'll do better than you will.

32:22And I think we know why those organizations say that. But I would love to see more direct patronage happening. And I am seeing it more and more often. People will come tell me, hey, I gave a young person a thousand dollars because I thought they had some potential with what they were doing and I wanted to help them. And this is becoming more common. And I'd love for it to be something that is just like a normal thing. Like instead of families planning a, you know, a college fund for their children, why not have something where it's like a project fund where they could do something either now, you know, at home or later to work on something that could become, you know, research or startup or any number of things.

33:02Working closely with the Teal Foundation through Teal Fellows and being involved in this universe, why do you think people believe Teal is evil? I guess what I would say is that Peter is unafraid to say things that threaten people's beliefs, that threaten people's systems that they've built up over a lot of time. And that is inherently threatening for people. You know, it's very hard to take in ideas that maybe are an affront to everything that you've built your life on. It's really, really difficult to do that. You know, Peter has a lot of influence. And I think also, you know, when when Peter backed Trump in the first administration, that set a lot of people off and people are fairly stuck on that, is I guess what I would say.

34:02But I think Peter has done a lot of good that people also don't acknowledge. I think people, you know, what's wonderful about the fellowship is that people talk about the cost of higher ed now and the education bubble and the crazy inflation that it's outpaced without ever mentioning Peter. Like people have forgotten that he's actually the one who started that conversation and are making it possible for young people to take a different path and, you know, for families to make new decisions for themselves. What's the biggest lesson you've learned from him? there's a couple things that come to mind i think the like one the biggest one is that i truly think peter is a first principles thinker and i got to see this in action at the teal foundation when we would talk to him um he was never afraid to stop and pause and think about the answer to a question He never had these just canned answers that would come out like most anybody I would see.

35:05And that always amazed me. Now, sometimes it made him very difficult to work for, though, because you build up a mental model of a person and you think you know them. And so then you think you're oriented towards, you know, what their preferences are, what they like, where they want the foundation to go, all these things. things but Peter was constantly doing 180s on things and so you know at one point even with the fellowship like we went from okay it's not a startup program and we can have researchers and non-profit people and startup people to like a few years later he's like well maybe we should be a startup program and we're like wait what you know so he's always updating his mental model And it's hard to track somebody like that.

35:53And so and it's hard to keep that in mind of like, OK, this person is constantly updating themselves, which means that we need to be constantly updating on kind of what their thinking is. But I always really appreciated that he truly takes the time to really think through questions and answer things. I think sometimes, you know, in media, he'll get, you know, people sort of like make fun of like the pauses and whatnot. but to me that's just a real genuine act of him being thoughtful and we could use a lot more thoughtfulness and so I always try to think about that of is what I'm thinking like today something that I just decided was a point of view I had from years ago and do I need to update that thinking in some certain way and it's hard to do it's like not a very natural process but I was glad to be able to see it in someone who did it seamlessly and regularly.

36:48How involved was he in the program? Yeah, in the program itself, I mean, Peter has Founders Fund and the Teal Foundation and so many different things he was doing. He would come to some of the high-level programs, founders, you know, not founders, fellows would go over his house for dinner sometimes. In the later years of the fellowship, sometimes we would set up smaller dinners with like a small group of fellows and Peter, he has an annual Christmas party that fellows are invited to. So there is time for that interaction. But of course he is juggling a lot. Yeah. Busy guy. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

37:22The impact of the Teal Fellowship is truly felt throughout Silicon Valley and now the rest of America and I'm probably pretty sure the world. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm curious from your point of view, what do you think the biggest impacts are to venture capital and the tech ecosystem in general? Well, I mean, certainly younger people are getting taken more seriously, which is something that we always wanted to see. This is why we stepped aside from our roles at the foundation in 2015 and started 1517, because we couldn't find that many investors who would take a young person seriously and say, and at the time, and this has changed over time, there was a lot of lip service to young talent in Silicon Valley, but usually back in like 2010 through 2015, even through 2020, usually what that meant was come work at my portfolio company, not I want to give you money.

38:14And so I think the outcomes of the fellows have shown people, hey, this is an investable asset class. Like these people are interesting and deserving of being taken seriously. I do still think that too many people in venture are interested in looking for where, you know, where did you go to school? Where do you have an internship? Things like that. But I'm liking seeing that younger people are getting more access to resources. To flip this a little bit, Sorcery sponsored by Brex are all about performance. Spending smarter, moving faster. That's how we do it. From observing these founders from the earlier day of the fellowship to today.

38:56What would you say is like their number one, I guess, like not output, but what would be like the biggest surprise of like how they've continued to perform? I think the biggest surprise is that the barriers to get into like deep tech and sci-fi tech are getting lower and lower and lower. And we're seeing younger people tackling harder problems. that's been really interesting to see what hasn't changed is there's a trait that we look for that we call hyperfluency and all the old teal fellows had it people like dylan and vitalik and laura and now our new founders that we work with and some of which who have become fellows people like augustus from rainmaker ethan from mock and human from solkoa as examples they have this deep deep deep passion in an area and they can talk backward and forwards about it all day, all night.

39:53And there's an additional quality where they can scaffold their language so they can talk to the geekiest geek in their area, but they can also talk to just anybody about what they're doing. And we find that particular trait is a very high indicator. And what's been interesting to watch is people getting more and more on the deep tech side and having that same hyperfluency that we looked for in the early days also of the fellowship and that more young people seem to be able to get to that frontier of knowledge faster. I think it's undeniable that obviously, you know, things like LLMs are out there, but a lot of the, the like up and coming grades, it's like, okay, yeah, you could do all your deep diving when you were in your tweens on YouTube and you could do that.

40:39And And that rate of sort of download for them personally is just getting higher and higher. So I actually think the best is yet to come. I'm so incredibly amazed at the people that we've been able to work with from the fellowship onward. And I think there's even greater coming in the future. So excited. Yeah. Yeah. It makes me really excited. Because at 1517, we have our non-degree thesis. We're often the first check into a team. And then we have our sci-fi scientist side of things. But my favorites are the combo of both, where it's someone who is non-degreed, you know, and they're working on, you know, something sort of out of science fiction.

41:21This guy, Human, is a great example of that, where we offered him a$100 ,000 check to start working on extraction of rare earth metals at lower energy costs. and he's been able to do it. He's making some great progress. And I remember I was in his office or warehouse really in San Francisco about a year ago. And he's telling me about what he's doing. He said, hold on, back up. Like, how did you even think about doing this? How did this come to you? He's like, well, I was 13 and I was getting into thinking about the environment. My parents gave me a corner of the garage and I had no money and I had no resources.

41:58So I had to think really creatively about how I'd get started. And I love those types of stories. And we're seeing them more and more and more often right now. And so I'm very excited about like, OK, who are the next batch of people who are getting started as teenagers right now? Who in like 10, 12, 13, 14 years, we're going to be like, wow, mind blowing, earth shattering. And, you know, I'm not here to make predictions or anything like that. But it does excite me that I think we're working with those people now. Are there any other traits that you look for? Many traits. Okay. And we also have antitrates as well.

42:34Oh, okay. Let's hear them. I'll go for an antitrate. One antitrate is called the cloud of abstractions. It's when someone is way up in the stratosphere on what they're talking about. And every time you try to pull them back down to earth and you're like, hey, cool. Amazing. This sounds brilliant. What are you doing on Friday though to like get this done? They can't answer those types of questions. They usually like go right back up into the stratosphere. They'll say something like, well, I can't really get started until I get capital to do this. There's always something that you can do to get started.

43:05So that's been an anti-trait that like we use in our evaluation. There's a new trait that's not written about anywhere. A new trait? Yeah, we're always thinking about new verbiage for things. One of the new ones is alchemy. And this is a team's ability to stretch resources in a really surprising, almost magical way. So we have a team that they're working on a hydrogen storage company called Lumint, and they needed a particular material. And this material you can buy off the shelf, but it's kind of expensive. And then they figured out, oh, wait a second, you can get this material in old Toyotas.

43:51So the team went to the junkyard. There's great pictures of like feet, you know, sticking out of old Toyotas, like taking things apart to get this material, bringing it back to their warehouse and like getting started on their first pilots. And, you know, obviously that doesn't scale, but they needed to find out, like, could they run these pilots and like what was going to work? And they wanted to do it as resource efficient as possible. And they did that. And so this is another trait that we look for in people is like, okay, do they have some sense of how to do alchemy uh one of our founders we were talking to last week who is working on um he he is working on a new type of like i'm sorry he's working on a replacement for copper wires which is like as infrastructure as you could possibly get and he was telling us this is always fun to talk to founder you talk to your geeky lab founders about where they're getting their materials they love to go on ebay and find a great deal on a broken piece of equipment.

44:51And, you know, this founder, Amir, was talking to us about, oh, hey, found this piece of equipment that's usually$100 ,000, found it on eBay for $7 ,000, and I'm going to get it to the lab, and I'm going to fix it, and it's going to be great. So that's alchemy, and we love to see that. So those are a couple of the traits that we look for. You mentioned it a couple times, but we haven't formally talked about it. Can you talk about 1517? Oh, sure. Yeah, absolutely. So 1517 started 10 years ago and Michael and I were at the Teal Foundation and we really wanted to scale our work further. And as generous as the foundation is with the grants that they give, we had a sense of like, okay, it's going to remain about 20 grants per year, probably for the foreseeable future.

45:34And, you know, and that has been true all this time. And we thought if we were going to, and what we were also noticing was that the investment community did not take young founders seriously. And so we thought if the investment community is not going to take young founders seriously, maybe we become investors because we see that we think we're sitting on just an incredible resource here and we could scale this and do more with it. So we raised our first fund 10 years ago. Peter was our anchor check actually. Um, that was a$20 million fund. We're typically the first check into a company. Uh, and sometimes the first and only check into the company for, for quite a while.

46:16Um, and we back predominantly people who don't have degrees or these sort of like mad scientists that we love to work with. Uh, and we've been doing this for 10 years now. And sometimes people will ask me like, where do I see this going in another, you know, 15 years or something like that. And sometimes in my mind what I see is sort of I've been calling it 1517 family where like we have a family office or something like that where we have an even bigger umbrella with what we're doing with 1517 and we're you know we have venture funds that work with young people we maybe have philanthropic programs that back all these different programs that I love so much that are kind of iterations of the Teal Fellowship there's some interesting things we think we could do to sort of disrupt the art world as well.

47:02But we don't get to do those things in 1517, at least not quite yet. So I think there's some different places that 1517 will go in the future.

47:30from production, shipping, customer support, taxes, even giveaways. When it's time to level up and make gear that people are actually proud to wear, that's when it's time to use Fourth Wall. And that's why we've trusted Fourth Wall for all of our brand wear at Sorcery since day one. Use my link in the description to get free credits for your first order. And for any VCs, DM me on X, and I can get all your portfolio companies set up with a free samples credit deal. I'd love to hear from you. How did you first get involved and what was that like? Oh, wow. Yeah. Let's see. I got a phone call one day and the phone call was from a woman named Lindy Fishburne who worked at the Teal Foundation.

48:12And I picked up and her exact words to me were, Danielle, the foundation has lost their minds. They're starting this new program. They have nobody running it and you have to get over here. And I had seen the announcement, I think it was the day before on TechCrunch Disrupt. Peter did an interview with Sarah Lacey and it looked like the program was all fleshed out and speaking about it in the present tense. And previous to the fellowship, I had been a charter school leader and founder, and it takes a lot of operations work to get a charter school off the ground. So sometimes we assume what we had to do for something else might be similar elsewhere, but this was not the case.

48:49And Peter had the idea for the fellowship, launched it immediately, and then we got to build it together thereafter. But yeah, that first phone call was really amazing because I remember seeing the interview and thinking, wow, this sounds really right up my alley, a perfect thing. But I had assumed that they had a team and a staff and everything like that. I interviewed that same week with Jonathan Cain, who was the president of the Teal Foundation. And what I loved about interviewing there or that interview was that it was really clear that it was a blank slate and a tabula rasa and that they were interested in what I brought to the table in terms of educational theory and pedagogy and program building and not just, hey, we have this vision and we want you to execute on it.

49:35But hey, we're looking for the team to build this vision together. And so that was back in September of 2010. Wow. Yeah. There was no team. There was no team. I mean, there was Jonathan Cain, who is the president of the foundation, Jim O 'Neill, who is now at HHS. He was on the board of the foundation. Michael Gibson, that was his first day of work, actually. And he wasn't expecting to be there working on a fellowship. He was expecting to be doing research for Peter on the hedge fund side. And Depali Roy was also on the trading team. And she also came in on the fellowship side on the initial programming.

50:17So it was a wily small group of us getting started building things from scratch and just getting going from from that day one Sarah Lacey interview. That's amazing. Yeah. Yeah. It was really amazing. It was interesting timing, too, because the social network was coming out that week on Friday. And Peter knew that maybe he wouldn't be presented in the best light through that movie. and part of the fellowship was also showcasing, hey, these types of resources can actually help build people up and our motto is some ideas can't wait and we wanted to spread that even further. So it was really interesting timing as well.

50:58I think Peter is a genius when it comes to timing as far as getting certain messages out there. He is a genius. Yeah, on many levels. How are you and the teams and the teams that you're around thinking about AGI and superintelligence? You know, we all and we've said this from the fellowship days is like. We want to meet the people who are going to bring us to the frontiers of knowledge. We don't necessarily have like definitive theses of what things are going to look like, but we love to meet people who do have that definitive thinking. I don't know the timeline for which AGI is coming. That is the question.

51:32I know. Yeah, I don't I don't have. You know, I was talking to someone recently who thinks that we're still at least like 20 years out. 20 years. And I was like, and to me, I was like, that seems long. That's long. Do you remember ChatGPT in like 2023? Like that's when it just started. It was like, what's your favorite color? And then it'll say like unicorn, you know? That said, we did a sci-fi tech tour around the Bay and I entered in all of our, you know, founders addresses and said, hey, tell me which order I should do these in. And I didn't double check it. Not doing that again. Really? It was terrible.

52:07apparently I was I was around a bunch of AI geeks when I was telling them this and they're all nodding their heads they're like yeah it's terrible at mapping like you know we don't we don't have that layer built in yet um so to that kind of point there's an opportunity you know there's lots of opportunities I don't I think 20 years is too far out I think five years is probably too soon yeah I don't know I want to say between seven and ten something like that okay um But a lot of this is just based on like, OK, who we talk to and where where they think the frontiers will be and what that will look like.

52:41I'm really curious about these things because it's going to have a profound effect on our work and also on the types of young people we back in the future because of being able to get to the frontier of knowledge so much faster. So much faster. Yeah. Have you been seeing like 15 year old, 16 year olds pick this up and bring you a book of knowledge that you're like, how are you? Yeah, young. Absolutely. So we run a teen camp through 15, 17 years ago. We thought, hmm, we think we need to go earlier. We think like meeting people when they're like college aged is probably not like too late, but like we want to start meeting people when they're even younger.

53:17And so we have a teen camp we call 2E, which is out of the educational literature, meaning twice exceptional. And so usually that means you have really high aptitude, multiple standard deviations in a particular area. but it also means like maybe you're kind of normal in other areas and so in some sense in the education world that can look like a deficit when someone's really far ahead you know but still kind of in their near peer group on something else and what we found over time with these teams we're running it for a third time is that yeah they're insatiable about what they know and their knowledge and I've been speaking with educators recently and they're like yeah I have someone in my class who is a total geek about history and knows more than I do.

54:01And I have to sort of pass the baton. And I had these experiences a long time ago when I worked with homeschoolers. But it was more that those children could get to the frontier because there was no one telling them that they had to wait to get there or that they couldn't read that more advanced book because they weren't in the right grade for it or something like that. But now we're seeing like people have so much more access today. And so I'm not surprised that I'm hearing from like school teachers of today of like, hey, I've got this teen in my class who knows more than I do. And I'm having to kind of hand over the reins to them because, you know, I'm not gonna, I can't lie anymore.

54:40There's no way to get away with it. Well, that's a really good point. And that kind of like brings multiple themes together, it's Teal Fellowship. It's kind of the impact on education. It's the advancements of super intelligence and AI and just knowledge in general. But like all this comes back to like, what is the state of education and what will be the future of education? There are some weird things going on that are like controversial. Like they found out that Zuckerberg has like a secret private like homeschool group and are trying to crack it down. Oh boy, God forbid the kids want to learn.

55:20But because of all of this access, we are getting so many different levels of education. How do you think that is actually playing out? Like, I think you had a specific example when we were on the phone. I'm trying to remember. Well, we're seeing a lot of different changes. So like Alpha School right now, their program in Austin, their private school, and they do most of their standardized test taking prep using AI. And so then those high schoolers will be able to take all the tests they need for whatever they need and ideally be scoring incredibly high. But outside of that, it's mostly projects.

55:56And so I've been to Austin five times this year. There's a great ecosystem. And I was emailing with one of our grantees, who's also one of our campers who goes to Alpha School. His name is Alex. and he was like I was like oh can you can you meet at I don't know one o 'clock on you know tomorrow whenever I was in town and he's like actually I can yeah we can go off campus and we can do different things at our school and I was like wait you can go off campus like that's so different so different schools are giving their students a lot more freedom and opportunities now the hard part is going to be that that's a private school doing that and they're able to set their own rules for things.

56:38It's when we get into the district and the public schools that I think we're going to start seeing just really, I don't know how to say it, like deep divides of those children. Maybe they can do some project-based learning at their school, but are they going to be given like the reins to like go off campus and do something? probably pretty unlikely at this point. But I am excited about, I was on an education panel yesterday and we had a teacher there who's been teaching for 20 years. And she made this great point. She said, you know, I think these tech tools are going to be so amazing in public school because as the teachers, we really want something different.

57:20And the district is harping on us to keep everything the same. And the thing she was talking about was the bell schedule. She said, I've wanted to abolish the bell schedule for 20 years. It makes no sense for a bell to go off and everyone to have to stop what they're doing and move on to the next thing. And I think AI is going to really change that because each student can be doing their own thing. And as a teacher, I can go and say, hey, everyone's doing their own thing now. We can start getting rid of these bells and let people move at their own pace. And it's crazy to me that something like a bell schedule, school as simple as that is it's just hindering actual learning and like that deep geekery that we've been talking about happening at school when it could happen like it it is something that the teachers I'm seeing really want to see these shifts but they're not in a position of power to be able to make it happen how do you see this playing out on the parent side and like choosing where they send their kids and if they choose to stay in a state or a district or even the country.

58:24Yeah. Gosh, it's, you know, I think parents are getting more savvy to thinking about not only like what school should their child go to, but thinking about for each child in the family, like, hey, one school is good for one child. Another school is good for another child. Thinking about developmental needs over time and that I think it's becoming less common for children to go to one school just throughout the entire life cycle. I think more parents are choosing sometimes even to homeschool for a bit. There's a lot of people who now homeschool during those middle school years because they don't want the tumultuous of that time.

59:01There's people now who do like K through three, four, sometimes five, and then homeschool after. They're like, okay, I didn't want to teach basic skills. I wanted to get that somewhere else. And now we're going to homeschool after. So I think parents are making more decisions. And I think being able to get some of these tools in the home, of course, are already happening and are important. And so I'm sure the rate of like learning at home with what children are doing is also going up over time. Wow. This is reminding me of my Coursera super user days. Oh, interesting. Interesting. What courses were you taking?

59:38I was taking like business classes because so I went to college for studio art and then I quickly like pivoted into entrepreneurship. Yeah. But because I went for art, I had like a huge chip on my shoulder to like learn finance as much as possible. So I would take finance classes for like Wharton and blah, blah, blah. And I just maxed out Coursera. Yeah. It was amazing. Yeah. And you could do that. And how long did it take you to max out those courses? not very long yeah yeah exactly and what did you do after you maxed out or do you look for other things or you're like okay I'm good like no I kept on looking for more things and like I kind of evolved it really quickly so I went to school for studio art I started a company shortly thereafter then I worked for Google's incubator I got exposed to investing through that and I was like oh I definitely want to do investing so then I was like all right how do I re-architect my education to fit that.

1:00:36I went to NYU, like NYU is pretty flexible with education, but the school I was in, like they had too much attrition. So like they didn't want more people like leaving. Attrition is the right word, right? Yeah. Okay. So they didn't want more people leaving. So like me switching my school was too hard. So I would go around circles and like find different things. I found a professor. I got into a graduate level course. I got into all these different business courses through the Stern school. And then I would just like supplement and like take all of these Coursera classes on the side and like do that.

1:01:11But yeah, I mean, like I just learned you have to learn yourself. Right. Yeah. And it also sounds like what you did was also find people who would support you in that, which is important. I think there are certainly families and parents and teachers out there who want to support the young people in their lives to do that. And finding those people is important because they become advocates for like making that permission piece happen of like hey you're going to do something different and it's totally fine I know I love that and I think it's I think it's truly important for like kids to just like pursue their curiosities to the fullest extent and like support all of them because if they find out that they're actually not that excited about like pottery very quickly that's cool right if they're not very excited about like I don't know the history of like yeah right fine who knows what okay yeah but find the thing.

1:01:59Yeah. I think it's great. Okay. So as we close out, what are you most looking forward to for the next year? One of the things that we've come to learn over time is that spending unstructured time with people is a huge value add in terms of getting to know people over time. And just building relationships with people before you end up funding them is a great way to get to know folks. And so we're doing our first like larger camp, actually an all ages camp, we're calling 1517 Unplugged. It's happening in September. And I'm really excited to see what comes out of it, because from past events we used to do at the Teal Foundation and the Teal Summits and things like that, we would hear these outcomes from people like, oh, I met my co-founder at that summit or, you know, I met my like dearest friends at this and we're still friends to this day or like we've built companies together.

1:02:47And I'm very curious to see what comes out of putting people in this like unplugged sort of nature environment for 36 hours and just getting to actually be with each other instead of sort of the FOMO of running around the city with there's seven things happening tonight and I'm going to try to go to all seven and things like that. So I'm excited to do some, I'm like, I love programming. Like I love building these types of environments for people and seeing what comes out of them. So that's one thing I'm really excited seeing younger and younger people working on sci-fi tech. That is just what gets me really excited.

1:03:22We're in our fourth fund now, and so we're leaning really heavily into that with the new people that we're going to be backing. And so I have a lot of curiosity in that space as well. So much fun. It's so exciting. Yeah. No, I tell people, like, I've been sort of joking with a new title, which is Professional Fairy Godmother. I'm like, I get to drink from the fountain of youth, And I get to give people resources to make their dreams come true. And I just have the most like charmed life. Like it's just really amazing to get to work with these people and support them and see them through to like their biggest dreams.

1:03:58I was with Mike earlier today from Long Journey Ventures. Yeah, yeah. He's wonderful. The one thing, the one comment he left me was I love Danielle so much because she has so much energy and she has like this like youthful energy that it makes me feel like it's acceptable for me to continue to act like this. That's so sweet. That's so sweet. Yeah. We vibe really well with each other. He's he's really wonderful. He led a, I went to something that had like a meditation at it and he actually facilitated an integration piece afterwards. And I've been meaning to actually send him a message and say, hey, that integration piece was really nice.

1:04:39Like you're really, really good at that. And I'd never seen him in that sort of facilitator role before. And I think it's really special when people at firms can bring themselves to the firm. And it's not just about making that investment. It's about making connections with people and being yourself. And one of the ways we like to think what we do at 1517, and I'm sure Long Journey feels similarly, is that all of us are sort of growing into becoming more of ourselves over time. And that's true for our founders, especially of like, hey, we want you to dive into your weird and into your biggest dreams and become more of that, not less over time.

1:05:17Yeah. Wow. That's a great way to end this. Thank you so much, Danielle. Oh, this is fun. It's a pleasure. Thanks for having me. Hey, it's Molly. If you enjoy our interviews, check out our newsletter, sorcery.bc, where we deliver a once a week top deals and tech headlines email, and also go deeper on our podcast interviews. Subscribe to Sorcery today. And don't forget to subscribe to the podcast on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you listen. Link in description to sign up.