How VCX Put Anthropic & OpenAI Into Public Markets

26:02Ben Miller:Yeah. So like I did this with real estate with the first democratized investing in real estate. Did it with private credit or asset-backed lending. And now I did it with venture. and I've, you know, I've, so I've been doing for 15 years. So I have a pretty good idea of how this plays out. And the thing about the, this type of investment structure is that it's cyclical and that the reality is all investment structures are cyclical, but I think this type of structure is more cyclical or pro-cyclical than an endowment might be. And so, you know, right now we're trading in this massive premium. It's an endorsement of the model.

26:39Ben Miller:There's probably some period where it's positive. And then I'm not going to be surprised that at some point the cycle turns negative. It could be because of a shock, an oil shock from some mysterious war. Let me take that back. Anyways, it could be from an oil shock. It could be from anything. But anyways, and so like, you know, I saw it in 2001. I saw it in 2008. I saw it in 2020. I saw it in 2022. too. I mean, it happens over and over again that things trade up and things trade down. And so what's going to happen with VCX is that we'll see both. And the benefit is that when we're trading at premium, we can raise money into the fund, deploy it into these private companies.

27:23Ben Miller:And when we're trading at a discount, it's not the company's problem. We're like an insulator. And I just think that the company needs to focus on building their business. And we need to focus on democratizing access. Going back into the portfolio, how did you structure out allocation into the different categories and companies? And to your point, when you have more capital to deploy into them, which companies are you going to continue to top up? Yeah, I mean, it's evolved because the markets changed so much in the last three years. Like my dream is to have the biggest, best companies say, okay, I want to democratize ownership.

28:04Ben Miller:I think that's important. I think democratized ownership is critical to successful AI implementation. If AI is concentrated ownership, I think it will actually be undermined, like it's successfully undermined by politics. So we have to democratize ownership. But to do that by exposing the company in public markets, I think has a lot of risk. So if they would endorse, if I could get some of these big AI labs to endorse this concept, whether it's us or someone else, hopefully us too, then I would try to deploy. I would want to put billions into Anthropic, OpenAI, the next wave of companies. I mean, these companies, I think that our investors are, we have 2 million customers at Fundrise.

28:51Ben Miller:Most of them had never heard of Anthropic until like three weeks ago. Really? For sure. What? Yes. No, there's no question. It was not a household name the way ChatGPT was. And so like when we were introducing it to people and rolling it out, like they had never heard of this company. Did the Pentagon drama help? That helped spread, you know, like it's like all things like there's no such thing as bad press. So so anyway, I mean, I'm making it. I mean, it's kind of a bald pitch and like, you know, like like our job is to be the bridge. Our job is to be the low cost, you know, structure that that democratizes access.

29:32Ben Miller:I think it's going to happen. I think that the fact that we're trading at this wild premium is endorsement that there's demand there, that the model works. And now we just need to connect the circuits and get the capital flowing to these companies so they can go and just build the next model. So did the 100 ,000 investors and the IPO come from your 2 million? 2 million customer, yeah. Customer base? Yes. Really? And then so how are you thinking of expanding that outwards? Well, everybody now is asking me about launching VCX2. And I'm like, it's only been three days. What's VCX2 going to be? I don't know.

30:13Ben Miller:I literally, I didn't even, I was just, I finally got this. It's like when you, you know, I actually have, my wife and I had a baby, our third son. And literally the nurse said to my wife, when are you going to have the next one? like literally like within minutes of having the first baby and she was like i'm gonna kill you and so as people ask me about vcx too i kind of feel that way i'm like oh my god this was so hard don't ask me about that yet but i i think the model of taking you know of raising in a non-traded vehicle you know where essentially in practice like a public like a private vehicle where raising from from people you're investing it's marked like a venture fund and at some point you We take it public and convert it to publicly traded.

30:59Ben Miller:I think that playbook we just followed. We've raised from our customer base and then take it public. I think that's a great playbook because it gives you some flexibility about when you want to go to market. And then we currently have VCX1, which would allow us to raise more money. And so, you know, it's simple. It's just so simple. You just want to get the best companies into the hands of most people. When I was meeting with Carly at your very cool property on West Adams in LA, and when I was talking to you beforehand, she and you were both talking about how you got allocation in the companies and essentially won them over because you have such tight partnerships and ways to do strategic things.

31:43So can you walk through some of the ways that you're strategically a value add, actually like a value add investor?

31:50Ben Miller:before i speak specifically about the value add the best value add is no value add my opinion is that you want long-term passive capital which is what the best capital second best is that is that then you add you add value so so um we have two million customers we actually did some data enrichment so now we know like a lot about the customers and so um and so we did a bunch of partnerships. The one that was most successful was Ramp. We actually only went to half our customers. We went out to a million customers. And Ramp, it was sort of perfect because it was sort of well-known, but hadn't really hit the public awareness about a year ago.

32:34Ben Miller:And we said, look, we invested in Ramp. One of the ways we underwrite companies is we use the companies at the at the fundrise and so like literally every one of our team members has a ramp card and there's like oh my god so much better so much better than amex it's like crazy and we just went out to our customers and said we use this product we're not getting paid to say this we're invested in this company genuinely is the best product and i think we were the most successful ramp partnership ever no way hundreds and hundreds of of of customers and so like for certain companies where they're just not household names we can really bring thousands of customers i mean we can bring thousands of customers and like that can be really meaningful for a company that's that's like high growth wow i have a credit card company to tell you about Have you heard of Brex?

33:32Ben Miller:I think they just get sold. I don't think they fit our model. They got acquired by Capital One. Yeah, yeah. Well, let me tell you about the next company I want to do this with. No, another one we're about to do this with is that Fundrise has millions of customers. So we adopted AI customer service about 18 months ago. And then we're invested in Intercom. Oh, yeah. You were telling me about Intercom. And I'm like, and I want to roll out intercom to all of our customers because AI customer service is such a no brainer. It was awesome for us. Our team loves it. Anyways, and so one of the things that like just some people ask me like, how did you know to invest in these companies?

34:16Ben Miller:Because it's not like it was a total accident. Is I got access recently to two companies. Somebody offered me like, well, I'll say it. So basically I got recently looked at Replit and Deal. And by the way, we love Deal. We love Deal. But the thing is that we at the company don't use either of those products today. Okay. And so I just couldn't get the ground of whether or not we should invest. like when we've whether it's intercom or ramp or anthropic like we use the product in the software we build we use the product like like we i've actually had our hrt and i was like we should go look at rippling and deal and all these companies and figure out which one we like best that's how we'll decide like it'll be a huge part of how we decide what to invest in because like if our if our i mean sometimes we've gone to companies and said like we love your product can we invest?

35:17Ben Miller:And they said, no. It's not like all of them said yes. But that's just a way to diligence the product because otherwise I just don't know if it's going to be a good product. Like I knew Anthropic was a world-class product because our team was using it on all the AI products we were building. And it was just for us, it just made it so much easier to know where to put the capital. So when you're investing into these companies, how much are you investing? Or how much were you investing and how much you said you want to invest up to billions into them in the future, potentially. So how does that scale?

35:55And what was the initial entry size?

35:58Ben Miller:Yeah, I mean, this is the whole challenge like building a business, right? Everything works much better at scale. When our fund was$100 million, you show up, we invested, I think,$5 million in Vanta. And now we want to write 50, hundred million dollar checks so it's like scale definitely makes it easier because companies will pay attention to you when you're talking about 50 100 million 200 million and they just like most great companies aren't gonna like i i think i remember which company it was so they weren't gonna get out of bed for like less than 20 million might have been kalshi so it's like tarik yeah so anyways the point is like um the bigger we get the easier it is to access, the more credible we are, the more it helps investors, the more we lower our fees, the more we get great companies.

36:49Ben Miller:So it's a virtuous cycle. And it's a combination of executing well and having hopefully a good reputation of being a good partner. What's the most underrated company in the portfolio? Loyal. Really? Oh, yeah. Why? Oh, my God. So Loyal, you know, so I'll just say what Loyal is. So Loyal. So I met Celine, a year ago and I've been it's just like hey Celine we got we got to invest in your company and we have two million customers when you roll out loyal we're gonna be able to roll it out so loyal is the first longevity drug it I have a I have a I have a I had a dog actually that just recently died I'm sorry and it was 16 years old and loyal the loyal like pill essentially would help dogs live like three to five years longer, I think, like years longer, healthier.

37:42Ben Miller:So extends life, a life extending drug. Right. I mean, it sounds like magic. And I, when I heard about it and I met Celine, I was in like a session with her. I was like, this is like a blockbuster drug. This is going to be the most successful drug in history. And then she's going to go and create the next thing. She's going to create like longevity for humans, I think too. She's special. And so we invested in their last round. And I think we're going to roll it out to like, they want to be a consumer brand. So I think we're going to roll it out to our 2 million customers. And I'm sure we have hundreds of thousands of dog owners.

38:17Ben Miller:We probably have tens of thousands of vets, as veterinarians, as customers too. I actually will know. I can say these are the, because we've enriched our data. We know which of our investors are veterinarians. And then we can create a targeted campaign for Celine to like actually reach out to them. so we have like an investor network we had this concept trying to create this concept i'm trying to make fetch happen here so there's like we call it network investing there's social network so we have network investing where basically the the network of investors is a value add and so like with loyal i think loyal is um is just gonna be like a blockbuster and it's like it's a really example of like democratizing ownership i have a couple more questions on the fun structure and everything but for vcx like specifically how many people are on the team on the team depends what you mean like how did you did you create a team for this like how did this yeah happen like i mean mostly that that so like i think a lot of this is what i think is true but actually I never hear that many people talk about it is that a lot of times a company is a company within a company and there's like almost like layers of the onion or like we come and come to like the nuclear center and everybody wants to be in the room but I'm like the nuclear center is hot it's very like high high pressure so there's like a core team who've been working with building Fundrise together for like 15 years and wherever we sort of point the the the eye of Sauron like that's what gets the heat and so we like it was like me and some of my co-founders like and some of the software like product developers who really went and like attacked VCX over the last couple years and we hired some people but I don't believe in the theory that like this is something that some sort of theory out there that you can like delegate hire smart people and delegate to them expect success is not my experience if you want something done you get like the maniacs who know how to do things.

40:25Ben Miller:It's the core, core founding team and just have them go do the next thing. So we just, we just keep doing the next thing and it's so painful.

40:36What have been your biggest lessons in like, I guess, trying all these different projects out?

40:44Ben Miller:Oh man, pain, pain, suffering. I mean, that's what, that's like definitely the magic. Whatever is the most painful thing, that's the answer. Whatever the most like brutal, unfun thing is, that's what you got to do. So it's like so much of success is just your willingness and ability to take on misery. Now that's like, people are like, what does that mean in practice? This is like when things are hot, like right now tech's hot, you have to lean back. And when, and that like people give you so much grief for that. And then when things are really cold, people even like you know one of the worst parts of of what our model is we have a lot of people a lot of investors and they give you a lot of grief and all things are hot they give you a grief things are cold they give you a lot of grief and um i think that's why like a lot of sociopaths are successful they just aren't affected by it but if you are not a sociopath it's good to have some insulation and unfortunately like i haven't i don't think i've done a great I'm insulating myself from people like setting it like we get death threats.

41:50Ben Miller:We invested in a data center. We invested in this world-class, I mean, I can't tell what the tenant is, but it's a top AI lab. We're helping fund. One of our funds is we have real estate. We have tech. We have credit. Is it TerraFab? No. No. That's a fun one. I haven't seen that one. But anyways, some people apparently don't like data centers and they were sending us death threats. Wow. We had somebody actually try. I mean, the world's filled with crazy people. We had somebody try to invest and they signed the subscription agreements in blood. What? Mm-hmm. What? Yes. That person was not all right in their head.

42:32Ben Miller:I mean, the thing about democratizing investing is you get. You really democratize it. You really get all types. And, yeah, I mean, I have, like, people reaching out to me. I mean, I have CEOs and C-suite people who are, like, you know, the biggest companies in the world. And I have, like, you know, Uber drivers, which is awesome, but it can be painful. So how do you communicate with all of them? AI now. That's the thing. That's what I'm telling you. We used to have 20 people on the team. We built a whole platform for this. This is Intercom. This is Fin, yeah. But we used to have 20 people. We used to have to hire one person for every 30 ,000 new investors.

43:10Ben Miller:And now we don't. That's why I'm such a big fan. But we've been doing this for 15 years. I mean, 15 years ago, there wasn't a term for it. No one's ever heard of the idea. When I went to the SEC, they thought it was hilarious. They just thought it was cute. Oh, hey, I'll tell you the founding story. So in 2011, I went out trying to do this. Because like the 2008 financial crisis was such a terrible experience for me. Like all my capital partners went bankrupt. And it was like, it was like, it was to me like it was a loss of innocence. If you're reading literature, talk about loss of innocence.

43:50Ben Miller:I lost all my innocence in the 2008 financial crisis. And I set out to try to build like an alternative model where people can invest in like real things. And so I went to 11 law firms trying to find a way to like democratize investing. and I got introduced to the, I think it's the number one law firm in New York, went to their office on the top of the Contenast building and I met with the head of their securities practice, the head of their real estate practice. This was May 2011 and I go in, it's like the conference room has this sunset and these guys are sitting there and I'm pitching them on how we have to democratize access, the system's broken and they look at me at the end of my impassioned speech and the guy says to me, why would you bother with a little guy?

44:39Ben Miller:I was like, what? He's like, why would you bother with a little guy? I was like, that's not what I was expecting him to say. I was like, because they're getting screwed. He's like, well, that's your opinion. Anyways, so like, so like the idea of democratizing access was like really like a strange, it was so, it was just a strange notion. Now, you know, whatever. 15 years later, it's like it's no longer as weird as it was. Now it's like, oh, this is like maybe the future retail has become such a dominant part of capital markets. It's so important to public markets. I think it's going to become important to private markets too.

45:19On your point of pain and misery, Mark Andreessen just went like mega viral talking about how he's not introspective and he thinks the greats of history, they're not introspective. They just

45:30Ben Miller:focus on building are you introspective i think i am i don't know what he's talking about i think i saw that i saw that tweet i mean it's just like he's good at like like takes i mean god knows what people were over the history like um yeah so no i mean like i don't even know where that what that comment comes from i feel like you ever read anything like by napoleon he was clearly introspective and like um i don't know that that but it's but being this is the problem like like i had a mentor who used to say the agony and ecstasy of empathy because basically you're empathetic you just get all the joy and all the pain of feeling other people's emotions and so yeah it sucks it sucks to be empathetic but like i think you're better off than not having it right i mean i don't know I guess it's, I mean, it hasn't, if I, do you believe he's not introspective?

46:24Ben Miller:Is that a thing? I don't know. I think at a certain point you kind of have to put on the blockers. But what if you can't? Who, how does that work? How do you put on blockers? Just don't listen to everyone or everything or feel everything. Yeah. I don't think that's an option. I think that like most people, you are how you are. You are who you are. I think it's like you can you can like create coping mechanisms. The worst part of building a business is the stress. There's so many crazy things happen so much like it's so hard. Miserable. It's miserable. But, you know, I mean, it's like like all things like you wouldn't have done it if you'd known.

47:06Ben Miller:But then when you get there, like what else are you going to do? You keep going. Yeah. Well, speaking of Marc Andreessen, A16Z has now shifted into this mega firm. like they're not really a fund anymore i don't think they even go by that sequoia doesn't go by fund general catalyst also says they're a firm they're a company thrive mentions that they're a company they operate like a company do you think these mega funds are going to go public what do you think is going to happen to the long tail of venture capital in the industry how big is um a16's 80 billion i think they're around that 80 billion they're the biggest and And the next biggest is like, what are they, 50 billion or something?

47:46I think Sequoia, General Catalyst, and A16Z are between like 60 to 80 billion. Yeah.

47:53Ben Miller:It's so funny because like BlackRock's like 15 trillion. Yeah. Like, you know, these companies are not actually that big compared to public markets. And so I feel like this is, have you ever heard the saying, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny? No. So ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny means that the nature of something is dictated by its structure. So phylogeny means structure. Ontogeny, ontological means the nature of something. And so the nature of these partnerships is eventually they want to monetize. And the best way to monetize is to go public. This happened in all the investment banks. They've all went public.

48:37Ben Miller:and so yeah I mean most of them will eventually go public and then they'll end up looking and acting like all the other public companies that are Goldman Sachs and BlackRock and Blackstone and so it's just the arc of all financial industry so I think they do go public and And that'll be like the final chapter for their businesses. VCX by Fundrise, the public ticker for private tech, allowing investors of all sizes to invest in venture capital. View the portfolio at getvcx.com. That's getvcx.com. Some of you may not have heard this yet, but our sponsor Public just launched something called Generated Assets, And it brings AI into investing in a way I've honestly never seen before.

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50:51What's the biggest vulnerability for the VC industry? I mean, we've gone through several waves and there was the Tiger crossover wave. Then there's the Middle East LP capital wave. Like there's a lot of different components that are keeping it alive. And so what happens next and what's the biggest vulnerability?

51:10Ben Miller:Short-term, long-term? Both. Oh my God, that's a hard question. I mean, short term, right? Like it's, it feels like there's going to be a shock from the war in Iran. I feel like that shock could be, could affect capital flows into, into venture. I mean, a lot of the marginal dollar has been from the Middle East over the last three or four years. I was, I was actually tweeting at Mark Suster about this. He thought that they'd want to invest more as a result of the war in Iran. I think they'll want to invest less because I think they're going to be trying to like deal with domestic issues. So I think that there's a possibility that we see a downturn coming out of this that that could shock venture industry.

51:55Ben Miller:And that shock is the kind of there was that shock in 2022 where you have all these unicorns and they all sort of like it happened in real estate to real estate. They call it extended pretend where you sort of kick the can on the problem. And if there's a downturn, then I think that will cause a final like, okay, let's deal with these companies that aren't going to go public. Same thing with the real estate sector. Same with a lot of the market. So I think that reckoning could happen in the short term. In the long term, I think it's all but AI. And how AI affects venture industry is anyone's guess, but it probably affects everything.

52:40Ben Miller:And venture is not going to be like some exception. There was this crazy pitch book stat that I told you beforehand. It was like 40 % of unicorns have not raised capital in three plus years. That's a lot of zombies. Yeah. I don't think zombie is the nicest way to describe it. I had this podcast I did. I do a little podcast. I called it the great deleveraging. But we went through 15 years of zero interest rate environment. We came out of that environment. and then we went through a transition period, which I think we'll look back and see 23, 24, 25 transition period. This happened also in the 80s.

53:21Ben Miller:If you look, the SNL crisis was one of the worst savings and loan crisis in the 80s. And 1987 was Black Monday, but the crisis didn't happen until 1992, the recession from it. There was this long lag because everybody tries to delay, hoping that it'll get better. And so I think that is what's something like that's coming. It always happens. It's sort of inevitable. And I think that will cause some like, you know, a lot of companies will probably merge. I mean, it's just going to be sort of like a sorting out. And that's like a healthy, painful part of the process. Do you think a real downturn is coming, though?

54:07like we've seen through the last at least like five years since covid like we've had these crazy volatile micro downturns and the market just correct itself like we just like turn on the switches we do some things click the buttons and like it's back to normal like do you think it's possible to keep on doing that we do by the way have over 37 trillion in deficit so there's a lot of debt piling up alongside that but like will it actually ever break or will we always bolster the system?

54:36Ben Miller:Yeah. Like, I don't know. I mean, it's, it's, it's kind of crazy to me because I've been through a bunch that we keep it. We're able to, the last 15 years, we're able to like, keep dodging the bullet. Like we're like the matrix or something. So what, well, yeah. So like, you know, those types of things are contingent. So you could tell, you could, you could, I like to do scenario planning. So you could see a scenario where there's a shock, there's political dysfunction, and as a result, there's no bailout. Mostly what's happened is the government's been able to bail out Silicon Valley Bank, they bailed out during the COVID.

55:14Ben Miller:There's an ability for the government and the Federal Reserve to compensate for this, and essentially the government's ended up taking on these deficits to have absorbed the losses, privatized gains and publicized losses or subsidized them. And so, I mean, it's contingent on politics. And it's hard for me to imagine that the political system will rally together to solve a crisis now, but maybe it'll rise to the occasion. What do you think the biggest questions are that no one's asking right now? No one's asking. I mean, it's funny. So I'm going to give you one slight dodge. But mostly no one was asking what happens.

56:09Ben Miller:What did success look like for AI outside of Silicon Valley? Everyone was asking what would failure look like? What would a bubble look like? And even now, like there's no vision for how AI actually ends up being socially constructive. Like, how does it work? Like, what does winning look like? Not as what is what is like able to lose their job and others on it? There's unemployment and there's UBI, universal based income. Everyone's focused on what goes wrong. And no one. I really don't think if I've heard anybody articulate a vision for what what is what is, I guess, outcome that's good. And I feel like no one's really been able to articulate that question.

56:52Ben Miller:like okay how how do we how do we end up with a win-win here like i literally haven't heard anybody say that so that's my i guess my my best answer that's a really good answer okay all right just made it up on the spot good well well done um as we wrap up let me see are there any topics we didn't cover that you want to cover i mean the big question right for our venture Fund and everybody is, you know, what, how far does AI go? Because I think that the question of VCX, question of democratizing venture today is a derivative of, is AI going to go to, you know, I mean, to the limit, to the, does it go to infinity, right?

57:34Ben Miller:Does it basically replace most white collar jobs? Does it create like this abundant society? And if it does, who owns it? How is ownership distributed rather than how is income distributed? I think ends up being existential to society. And, you know, people I know in these companies think that we're going the limit here. If that's true and we haven't figured out how to spread the success, I think we have like serious problems. And I think that that question about like, you know, what we invest in is all downstream of like, is there an application layer? You know, at the end of the day, we built a real estate AI vertical product called Real AI.

58:23Ben Miller:And we're constantly trying to work out like, okay, where's our moat? Data, data is the moat. You know, no, expertise is the moat. Like it's very difficult to build in this environment. We talked about this before, but you asked me what percentage of white collar jobs will be there. And I think it was like five or 10 years. Five, I think I said five years. five years yeah what how many jobs are displaced by ai or something like that what do you think what do i think um i think more than 20 percent but less than 50 so like let's say 20 to 30 five years 20 to 30 percent of jobs are not to not not just displaced but also suppressed so you don't you don't make that marginal hire and that adds up to tens of millions of jobs How has it changed in your organization?

59:15You've said you've created your own products and that kind of thing.

59:18Ben Miller:Yeah. I mean, for us, for sure. We were 350 people. Now we're 200 people. I mean, every month we can do more with less people. I think we're at the cutting edge of every department, product development, real estate analysis, accounting. I mean, processes. These processes are so much... You're not only just like cheaper, way better. I mean, it's like, what is an abundance vision for AI? I just don't think I've heard one. Very optimistic. Well, I didn't give you an answer. I just said it's a question. So our presenting sponsor is Brex, and they're all about performance, spending smarter, moving faster.

1:00:00For you, how do you measure success?

1:00:03Ben Miller:I think it's a combination of great returns and broad ownership. so we you know can we get a million investors into vc act how far can we broaden ownership and how much and and if we have these big you know these the best tech companies saying like of course we always have an allocation for the people like then i know we've won are they saying that yet i don't want to say which company but it was a defense tech company and they were like way more open-minded they were like they went from like very skeptical to very open-minded over the last 24 months. I can't say which company it was, but I've watched people go from being skeptical to being constructive about it.

1:00:47Ben Miller:It takes more independent-minded people to lead, to change, and I'm seeing it. I'm seeing it. It's really been gratifying. As we wrap up, what are you most looking forward to in the next year for VCX? Oh, man. I would love to write. If we could write a massive check into one of these rounds, one of our advisors was the CFO of Schwab. And he asked me like last week after ECX went public, he said, you know, you invested in like nine of these top tech companies. Was it luck? I was like nine? so people still wonder like you know like you're only as good as your next hit and so i think we need to like we need to write some big checks in these into these great companies and validate the model because this could you know like these crossover ideas they're not i mean they could fail because it's a bubble and you invest poorly all you have to do is do a bad job and the whole thing goes down in flames.

1:01:54Ben Miller:But if we can validate it, then I think that it would become normalized. It becomes so normalized that it becomes like not an innovation, becomes invisible. And that's how you succeed in technology where technology is no longer considered technology. And so this is a financial technology innovation. And if we do it right, it just becomes totally standard like trading. Trading is a technological innovation. And people don't think of it as technology, mutual funds, passive investing, money markets. All these things were like these cutting edge ideas. You probably heard this thing that the arc of financial history bends towards democracy.

1:02:36Ben Miller:You know, when you introduce technology, it lowers costs and drives more access, broadens access. So I think that's exactly what's happening here. It's totally true to the historical pattern, but we have to like deliver. So how do you manage the capital and with deployments and allocation? Like everybody, we know the companies we want to invest in. And it's just like persuading them that this is a good idea. That's why I'm on this show. Okay, so then I guess for the skeptics, so we can be inclusive here. What are the biggest skeptic questions that you get? I mean, I think the first one is more a misunderstanding.

1:03:19Ben Miller:They're like, they think it's like an SPV or they're afraid it has too many people on their cap table. They don't think of it as like, to the company, to the private company, it's like a venture fund. A venture fund has lots of investors. You don't know about them. It's not your problem. You're just dealing with the principal at the fund. so I think that there's first the skeptics are confused by the model because it seems so novel to have so many people and then the next one I mean they're always skeptical about you know they want I mean everybody's funny they they want a name brand that oh Sequoia a16z like and I'm like well a16z didn't even exist like 2007 like they're new like they they became this I mean they're the dominant player and it's so recent.

1:04:08Ben Miller:I think that like there's a graduation in terms of credibility and the skeptics are just skeptical that you know do you go to Wharton? Do you have an NBA? I hate that stuff. People want it. Anything else? Any hot takes? Hot takes? I mean it's almost always feel like it's the most volatile time in history but it does feel like, I mean, I actually grew up in the 90s. Man, the 90s were great. It's just the world moving faster and faster every year. And I think that ultimately means the stakes are higher because the technology amplifies us all. And nothing's inevitable. We have to rise to the occasion.

1:04:55Ben Miller:We have to rise to essentially transcend our interests and do us right for society. That's a lot. That's a lot to ask of political leadership, our technology leaders. When I hear people criticizing the AI companies, I look back in history. I was like, we could be a lot worse off. We're lucky to have the leadership we do. I'm really hopeful we pull this thing off because there's a lot of deficits. Well, Ben, it was a pleasure to have you on. Thank you so much for sharing all of your knowledge from real estate to credit to now VC and public markets. It was like such a pleasure. And thank you for letting me ask so many peppered questions.

1:05:48Ben Miller:Yeah, you didn't prep me at all for this.

1:05:52Okay.

1:05:53Ben Miller: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.