Inside the All-In Podcast: Lessons from Elon, Trump, Oprah, Travis Kalanick, Investing in 100+ Startups per Year with Jason Calacanis

21:45The great irony of it is they were our partner.

21:48Turner Novak:So we were making the money through their ads. But I think they were just like, yeah, these websites are giving people answers and we don't want them to grow anymore. So because if they grow, then people won't do searches. So therefore, we're going to cut eHow and HowTo and the HowToWiki and Mahalo. Anybody trying to give answers like this, we want to put those in the one box, which is that little box that gives you the answer at the top. I mean, this all seems like very, you know, insignificant in the face of AI being able to answer every question and steal everybody's content all at once. You would have been screwed either way.

22:26Turner Novak:It just happened earlier versus today. I mean, yeah, it's content creators are getting screwed big time. And it's going to take, I think, the New York Times and the music industry holding the line, Reddit, Quora. Whoever's being indexed without getting paid needs to really hold the line and insist on getting paid to be indexed. So if you were starting a new kind of media property or starting to create content today, and you talked about how you like playing around with this stuff. What do you think is just an interesting kind of vector to enter the arena on or start competing on just considering where we're at and where the world's probably going in the next couple years?

23:11I think video is very interesting, obviously. Audio still remains interesting for people. This short-form video to long-form is, I think, an opportunity. So catching people on short form videos and then pulling them into longer form discussions. I think, you know, that format's going to, I don't really see anybody doing it, but I have been thinking about it a lot.

23:40Turner Novak:So can you give me an example of that? Because you guys kind of already do that with All In, don't you? Yeah, we make shorts out of a podcast and everybody does that. And that can pull you into the podcast. In fact, like a lot of those went viral and then people found out about the podcast. But I think there's something to living in the short format and then stringing them together. And you're seeing that in Asia already with vertical soap operas. And I'm not sure what the category is called. They're like short dramas or something like that? Yeah, vertical dramas. I guess, yeah, micro dramas, mini dramas.

24:18These are all what they're being called. And they're made for your phone. They give you, like, just a little bit of content, and they're kind of corny right now. They're kind of like novellas or, like, romance novels. And a lot of times, great content starts with a genre. So, you know, genre pictures can be elevated, right? Like, Aliens is a horror sci-fi genre. It's, like, actually a cross-genre picture. But it actually asks a lot of important questions, you know, about where do we come from? which are revealed slowly over time in the series with Prometheus, et cetera, but it's a horror genre.

24:59Terminator is like a science fiction genre that asks a lot of important questions about AI. Think about how prescient that was. Blade Runner, a genre film, you know? So anyway, these are genre films. They tend to work in romance, and I think they're targeting middle-aged women, older women in Asia right now. But I think somebody like Tarantino could master this. Like there's a Tarantino of vertical short storytelling. We just haven't seen them yet. And so I always like, when I see these things, I just assume, what if it works? What if it works a hundred times as well? What if there's an artistic version of it?

25:44What if there's an award-winning version of it, right? So what's the award-winning version of shorts? Like, what does that look like? You know, we already know what the award-winning version of podcasts looks like, right? We know what the award-winning version of blogs look like. This were certainly some very influential ones that moved markets or, you know, we'll see an award-winning sub stack at some point. We'll win a Pulitzer type thing or an email newsletter will win a Pulitzer. Maybe they have already, I don't know, for original reporting or something to that effect. So I'm always looking at it and I just assume, what if it works?

26:21I also think there's going to be something that with this IP, you know, the Star Wars, Marvel IP, somebody will figure out a way to build new IP in new spaces. I think it might happen in VR or AR where somebody will create the next Star Wars and an experience like that, that will have legs and create a, you know, classic world building is what they call it. So Lord of the Rings or a Star Wars franchise coming out of not books and movies, but imagine it comes out of AR or VR, where you're walking around the world and experiencing Han Solo, Chewbacca, or Gollum.

27:02Turner Novak:But these are entirely new characters, right? It's not Lord of the Rings. It's not Star Wars. No, not reusing IP. Somebody's going to make new IP that works in this format. Some might say this K-pop Vampire Hunters might be an example of this new kind of thing. My daughters love that show. Yeah. Yeah, so you can go to sing-alongs with it. So they figured out how to get them to go to movie theaters. Like once a week, they have a sing-along of that Netflix streaming movie in movie theaters, and you can go and participate, which also would lead the mind to think people are online too much. They've got brain rot.

27:45How do they get rid of the brain rot

27:46Turner Novak:and being online and self-isolating? Oh, they go to a movie there and do a sing-along. That is the most, like, gay, fun thing you could do. When I lived in New York, we would go to the village, straight guys, straight couples, whatever, and you go to the village just to go have the joyous experience of sitting with a drag queen who was playing piano, singing Broadway show tunes. And it was kind of cool back then because there was no delineation between like gay, straight community in Manhattan. It was just, oh yeah, there's a cool thing going down at the Roxy, like it's roller skating disco night.

28:23It would be like 70 % gay, 30 % straight. Or if you went down to, you know, like these sing-along bars in the West Village, you know, they were, I don't know, 50-50, but you could go sing show tunes. It was like a fun thing to do at 2 a.m. after you've been out drinking or whatever, working late. And they kind of, I think this K-pop kind of realized

28:46Turner Novak:people love singing together. Like karaoke is like the thing people do in China and Korea and Asia. Like that is the social thing is getting a room and singing. And sometimes they do it alone. Like sometimes people go and they rent a room alone to practice singing. Interesting. It's pretty fun. Yeah. I mean, you think of just the power of just singing and like music dancing. TikTok, probably like the biggest recent kind of like emerged new platform. It started as this lip syncing dancing app. Like, just a throwaway. But yeah, it's like one of those. We're all doing that in our cars anyway. We're lip syncing to our favorite song, you know?

29:25Turner Novak:I was singing on the way here. What was I singing? I think I was singing Ed Sheeran. You were? With your 100 on the land and the sea. I actually I do like Taylor Swift song it's going crazy I do like Taylor Swift it's a guilty pleasure part of it is just having two daughters who like you know they like that stuff so you kind of lean into it so you kind of can't avoid it I really wanted to go to the Aeros tour I feel like an idiot that I missed that because I felt like a real cultural phenomenon somehow I missed it yeah I mean I'm assuming they I think she'll do another one. She can't not. You've seen the numbers.

30:04Turner Novak:She made like a billion dollars or whatever. She probably made less than profit. But the headline numbers, she made a shit ton of money. I think she made like two billion and maybe netted a billion for herself. But even still, hundreds of millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars. It is very interesting that short viral clips on YouTube result in ticket sales. So I, living in Austin now, I got to see ACL the last two years, Austin City Limits, like a music festival, like a Coachella, but in Austin. And I got to see Chaperone, Doce, Sabrina Carpenter. And like seeing them is a very weird experience because you hear their songs as the soundtrack to other people's videos constantly on the socials.

30:51And then you see them in person and you're like, oh, I know snippets of their songs. I don't even know full tracks.

30:58Turner Novak:which for me as a gen xer which just feel free to call me boomer anybody above 35 is a boomer at this point but as a gen xer we had the album right and you like the album was like the cd was sacrosanct you bought the brothers in arms cd and you played you bought the pink floyd dark side of the moon wish you were here like you played the album you experienced the album sometimes there was a 12 minute track telegraph road or you know whatever you listen all the way through right you And you would listen generally to the entirety of the album was how it was supposed to be consumed. It would be like, you know, listening to tracks from multiple albums would be like going to three different restaurants and having an appetizer and entree and a dessert at three different restaurants, which, by the way, is what I do in Japan.

31:46We call it Bang Bang. We can talk about that another time, but it's one of my favorite pursuits. Doing Bang Bang in Japan.

31:53Turner Novak:There's Bang Bang in Japan. There's a clip for the episode. Yeah. This could go viral. No, a bang bang is something I saw like these foodies do, like chefs. Instead of going to one restaurant, you go to two. So you make two reservations. You got your seven o 'clock, you get your nine o 'clock. You get like three or four dishes at each. So instead of, you know, everybody ordering three dishes each at one restaurant, you have four people, 12. You order six at one restaurant, six at the next. Or maybe you go seven, eight, you taste a lot of stuff. but you get to have the experience of like two different dinners two different appetizers whatever so in japan i hit 7.5 i think eight i think we hit eight bangs in one day two breakfasts two lunches two dinners and then an assortment of other stops along the way including like going to a vinyl bar speaking about like interesting pursuits there's a new thing there are vinyl bars where you go and you listen to music.

32:52And I have a friend, Amanda, who likes to talk more than I do, if you can imagine. I don't think that's possible. It's not possible. So I found my foil. So Amanda's like loud and we're in this vinyl bar and the Japanese guy had to come up to her three times.

33:07Turner Novak:And she's like, he's like, no, please enjoy the music quietly. Please enjoy the music quietly because there's other people at the table. So you're drinking like this great Japanese scotch and their whiskey and they've got a vinyl there. And it was really interesting. You take a marble from a bowl and they have marbles by decade and they have marbles by genre and you can put the marbles together. I want like some, you know, I want some rock and roll from the 70s or I want some pop or jazz from the 50s. I want pop from the 2000s. And you put your marbles into a rack and the DJ gets the marbles. They look at them and then they go into a wall of vinyl and they pick a track.

33:53Turner Novak:Interesting. It was like a really fun, cool experience. So is it like a mashup, like pieces of the song or is it like one song after each other? They just play one song after another. You get to pick a track. So when you get there, there's like 10 marbles, so you get 10 songs ahead of your six. Maybe there were three or four marbles ahead of us. When we got there, we put in a couple of marbles. It was at six or seven. And they have giant speakers there, like these unbelievable, giant, classic, sought-after speakers and, you know, like these Macintosh amps from the different company than Apple, Macintosh.

34:27They have these giant musical amps there

34:30Turner Novak:with the tubes in them to make that really beautiful, rich sound. So you have the rich vinyl with the rich preamp or the amp and the rich speakers. Yeah, I'm getting into this audiophile stuff. It's really cool. Can you feel the vibration of the music in the seats and the floor and stuff? It's one of those places. Yeah, you feel it much differently than you would. And I think it's because, again, back to this isolation versus experience economy that we're going through. Never said it like that, but I think it pretty much encapsulates the high and low. The low being like, I'm isolated. I got AirPods in.

35:03the high being I went to ACL and was with 100 ,000 people when Sabrina Carpenter or Chaperone were at the peak of their popularity. Or I went to this bar and sat there with other people instead of sitting at home and listening to a really good music system and had a really good whiskey and had a really like, the vibes were immaculate, right? So I think that's like a big part of the future is getting people out of their isolation and get them into more shared experiences. I'm actually hearing young people are leaving their phones at home. They have a smartphone, but they also have a flip phone.

35:41And they'll move their SIM card and then go out with their flip phone and then with a camera. So they're buying used old pointy shoe cameras so that they can be more present with their friends. And I had dinner with Chamath and Friedberg at the F1 this weekend. We're sitting there with a couple of our other friends, Phil Hellmuth came in, Jason Kuhn, other poker players. And we were eating at this really cool Korean steakhouse, Kote, C-O-T-E, at the Venetian. And it's like a shared thing where you're doing the Korean barbecue, but with really prime cuts of meat. And I just said, stack your phones, put my phone down.

36:17Everybody stacked their phones, six phones sitting on top of each other. And we didn't touch our phones for dinner. We just talked. We were present, right? I think all this mental health problems are coming from the smartphone. I can see like the introduction of screens and people's unhappiness correlates perfectly. Sadly. So like instead of taking a bunch of pills to make you feel better about your screen use, maybe use your screen less, you know, and go expand stuff more.

36:47Turner Novak:It reminds me a little bit about like cigarettes, how it's probably like for decades, we both knew and didn't know that they were bad for you right like we kind of knew but also it was an ambiguity yeah yeah and it was and then we find out like hey this these give you cancer and they like objectively are not good and they're terrible it's like 50 years later they're not helping your asthma or clearing the phlegm from your throat like remember like the 70s and 80s people were like yeah no no i just need to clear us out i just have a cigarette and you're like what you're just Just like a smoke for an hour.

37:24Turner Novak:Like, that's not good for you. There's a great movie, The Insider, with Russell Crowe. I don't think it's Michael Mann. Oh, my God. I mean, I just need to, with you guys under 45 years old, I just need to tell you what to watch. Go watch The Insiders. 1999. Michael Mann. You should see anything by Michael Mann, by the way. Just go Michael Mann or Ridley Scott and just watch everything that Ridley Scott, Michael Mann have ever made. and then report back. But the insider is, you know, the story of the 60 Minutes interviews. And we want to talk about, like, when journalism was at height. And the CBS producer Lowell Bergman's struggle to get this on air with this guy, Jeffrey Weigand.

38:11And Jeffrey Weigand is played by Russell Crowe, famously.

38:17Turner Novak:Yeah. It's awesome. Yeah, I'm reading the IMDb. The description is a research chemist comes under personal and professional attack when he decides to appear in a 60 minutes expose on Big Tobacco. Sounds like that could be pretty good. Not a box office success, but nominated for seven Academy Awards. Really? Yeah. It's just incredible film. I want to kind of actually switch topics a little bit just because you mentioned Chamath and Friedberg. And I want to talk to you about All In a little bit. I think that's probably why people clicked on this one and wanted to listen. And how can you just take me back to, I can't remember when you guys started it, but what was kind of that moment of deciding to do it?

39:00It was during COVID. Chamath was leaving CNBC and he was like, called me on the phone. He's like, I want to do a podcast with you. I was like, yeah, come on, this thing is startups anytime. He's like, no, I want to do a new podcast, just me and you talking and whatever. And COVID had just hit and they were just starting to shut things down. And we couldn't see each other at the poker game. We played in a weekly poker game. And yeah. we were like, hey, we should talk about COVID. And David Sachs was famously posting himself with all the protective gear as a joke on social media. I forgot about that.

39:31Which was like, of course, the Republican lunatics give him a hard time about that photo. When that was absolutely the right thing to do if we didn't know this was going to be like... I mean, the original reports, and they were true, were the people who first got infected, a lot of them died because it was at its peak. COVID was at its peak, a deadliness, lethality. And then all of these diseases get less lethal. And one of the things we learned and discussed in the pod is over time, these things, you know, atrophied some way. And I'm not a scientist, so I can't tell you, but that is a trend that thankfully happens with them.

40:11And we also didn't know how to deal with it. So people were, you know, in hospitals getting put on respirators, Maybe they shouldn't have been put on respirators. And then Freeberg was at our poker game and was friends with the group, and he knew about science. So we were going to talk about COVID. We pulled him on. The four of us had a chemistry that was kind of undeniable. And, you know, I just based the format on the McLaughlin group, which is like, was an old Sunday morning show. But the guy, John McLaughlin, as the moderator, was kind of always a little bit full contact. He was a little bit pissed off.

40:44He was talking like a New Yorker or an East Coaster. like I do. And, you know, he'd give the guys a hard time. Wrong. I think it's a wrong answer. You know, he would, you know, force him to answer the question. Oh, you didn't answer the question. He'd push him a little bit, prod him a little bit. And then I added to it just breaking chops a little bit because I'm from Brooklyn, as we do. We just, we roast each other a bit. In the poker game, we roast each other. So that kind of vibe, I think, just resonated with people. And we had a captured audience at the time. But looking back on it, I look back on guests I've had on the pod or at events for Firesides or T-Notes, and there is this four-quadrant box, like how knowledgeable you are, how much experience you have, lived experience, knowledge, etc.

41:35And then how concerned you are with other people's opinions or not concerned with other people's opinions of you. How freewheeling you are.

41:46Turner Novak:This is like two scales of very expert, very concerned. Yeah. If you made four quadrants, you would have people on the bottom who didn't have a lot to say and a lot of knowledge. Well, they shouldn't be on a podcast. What's the point? You don't have much to share. Go back to life and get some shit done. So then you're in the top two quadrants, and you have in the top right, top left, people who have a lot of knowledge, but they're scared to say it. They're scared to tell the truth. And then you have the other one, truth tellers, who also have a lot of knowledge. And so if you look at the four of us, I think decent amount of knowledge.

42:23We're all in our approximately 50 years old. So we've been through a bunch of cycles, been through wars. We also have FU money and don't care what other people think about us. Maybe Freeberg, I would say, used to care. I think in the beginning, he was a little more guarded, and then he became less guarded. Now he's totally masked off. He's like, socialism, let him take socialism in New York and burn it to the ground. People need to learn that socialism is garbage. I'm glad it's happening. I was like, whoa, Freeberg, whoa, it's a Yurkoff suddenly. But you have four people like that. And then, you know, there's always this palace intrigue of how Sachs wound up at the White House, how J.D.

43:02Vance wound up at the White House, what role did the podcast play in helping Trump get elected. A lot of people think the pod and Elon making big donations were like two of, and maybe those two things are simultaneously happening. So I think people probably over-index on the influence of the pod. They think the pod got the president elected. I would say the number one reason Trump got elected a second time is because they put somebody in cognitive decline against him and then replaced him with a DEI candidate. Like back-to-back bad decisions. Like, let the people pick their candidate, have a primary.

43:43That's the lesson. Like, subverting democracy means you get a captured candidate, whether it's Biden in cognitive decline or Kamala, who was picked as a DEI candidate, whether she is or not, they literally picked her. Biden said, I'm going to pick a black woman as my vice president. So now you've basically labeled her as that. So she has no credibility. She's obviously not great on podcasts, which would have been good for her. And then -

44:13Turner Novak:I was going back and actually looking at our DMs and I was like, oh, that like you guys got Trump on the podcast. That's a big land. Do you think you'll get, I think it was like Biden or Kamala and you're like, no, we're not going to get them. They don't do, they don't do unscripted podcasts. We invited them countless times, publicly, privately, back channels, et cetera. Chamath has said on the podcast, he was a major donor to the Democratic Party. So they literally let Chamath leave the party. They let Elon leave the party, Joe Rogan. And these were all lifelong Democrats. Some of them donated money to the party.

44:49Some of them supported it. And like, you don't go on Joe Rogan. You can't figure that out. Like, as the presidential candidate, part of it is understanding how to win. Like, I don't think Trump won this election as much as like they gifted it to him. If they had put any serious candidates out against him, if it had been Shapiro and Pritzker or Newsom and AOC, like I think it would have been really close. I'm not saying he wouldn't have won. He might have, but it would have been close. I mean, they just gifted the, I mean, how do you not even have a primary in August? I was like, just do a six-week primary, a four-week primary.

45:26It'd be exciting. It'd be box office for TV. Start with like eight people in a debate, go to four, go to six, go to four, go to two, and then pick. Like it would be the most exciting summer programming ever. And I told people in the Democratic Party who were significant players, in the Democratic Party what to do. Not that they're listening to Jason Calacanis, but that would have been box office. And now subsequently it's come out that that's what Obama wanted to do and other people wanted to do. They wanted to do the, what I called the speed run primary. And they didn't do it.

45:57Turner Novak:Because that would have been an insane momentum. Like you kind of go in and then you have it. I feel like the one risk is like, if the wrong person wins and you like, the momentum kind of dies or something. I don't know if you, I mean, how could the momentum dive more than having Joe Biden not be able to complete a coherent thought in a debate, followed by Kamala Harris cackling like a fool and not being willing to talk to anybody unless she brought her white support vice president. Remember she brought her vice president to the first CNN interview? And you're like, what? I don't remember that.

46:37But why can't you just go on CNN yourself? And why does everything have to be staged and massaged? And you went on Call Her Daddy, but allegedly it's scripted or less free will. Call Her Daddy is the podcast Coma's doing? Like, really? Who's running these campaigns? It was a disaster. But I hate politics. I hate talking about it every week. but it is what it is. Yeah, I'm not a fan of politics. I don't like politicians. I don't like politics generally. I would much prefer we were doing tech and markets and science and media. But, you know, listen, I'm but one of four players on that stage and the audience really wants us to check in on politics.

47:20So sometimes it's uncomfortable. I'm a moderate, independent. They paint me as a lunatic Democrat who listens to MSNBC. I think that's probably a debate technique. I've voted Republican one in three times and Democrat two or three times in my life, just statistically. And just all my beliefs are more about, I mean, I've been pegged as libertarian more than anything. I'm a pull yourself up by your bootstraps, less government guy. But I think for people who are MAGA, it's easier to try to paint somebody and just do the name calling and make them,

47:56Turner Novak:you know oh you're just a libtard oh you're just you know it's like have you been paying attention to my tweets or where i live or the fact that i wear a gun on my hip like okay i carry a pistol and i live in texas i'm obviously not like i could be living in mandami's new york or you know karen bass's los angeles i'm not so why do you guys lean so much into politics if you don't like it because i feel like you've definitely gotten well i think the other guys love it i think the audience expects at this point i've been trying to keep it more balanced but i think it's really just the rule of trump trump takes all the oxygen out of the room he has every time he's president and even when he's not president the guy's a master of taking over the conversation like if we tried to have a discussion today and you were like what's in the news it's like trump Trump in Ukraine, Trump in Venezuela, Trump in Mondami.

48:52Like, which one of the seven different flooding the zone Trump items would you like to talk about today? The Comey and, you know, Comey's case getting dismissed with the lawfare. I mean, there's just, he takes up every space. I mean, AI, cryptocurrency, like these are our natural topics. Who's having the biggest impact on AI and cryptocurrency? Trump. It's like literally setting the table for our industry's top issues. So in some ways, it's good that he wants to be in the mix in everything. But it can also be exhausting to like, and also Trump says a lot of things. So and then he says things, and then he doesn't mean them or he forgets he said them.

49:40So I have like rules of Trump, like one of them is wait three days. and before you react to anything he says. Because he might never mention it again. He might take the opposite opinion. You don't know. So he's like, I'm putting 150 % tariffs. And then he's like, well, okay, we're not. If you react in real time, you're just going to be constantly spinning. So wait 72 hours. And then also understand, if things are, the other rule of Trump is, when things are not popular and he misses, he quickly changes course. He quickly course corrects. So like, remember when the stock market crashed in the spring because he was doing the tariff stuff was too chaotic.

50:23And then he's like, you know what? We don't really have to focus on 150 countries. We just have to work at a focus on the top five or 10. And we're going to take our time on those. And he basically just walked back to tariffs completely. And all of a sudden the stock market came right back. And people were like, okay, he will. he wants to be popular more than anything, I think. And so you just have to learn, okay, it's going to be another three years. If he doesn't get any attention today for his projects, he's just going to say something crazier and crazier. Like I think he said yesterday or two days ago, I was in transit, that he was going to like try these Democrats for sedition and they were going to be put to death.

51:08It's like, okay. 72 hours later, has he confirmed that he's going to try to put people to death for having a different opinion than he does? Maybe? I don't know. I doubt it. I doubt he'll say it again.

51:26Turner Novak:Yeah. So I guess the interesting, probably the biggest takeaway is just he just throws stuff out there to kind of flood the zone and stay top of mind. And you've got to be able to understand if it's actually real, it's probably something he's going to hit on multiple times. Yes. Like if he's actually got something going on with Ukraine in a peace process or the Middle East in a peace process, you'll figure it out if he's talking about it every day for three weeks in a row and there's other people in the administration and the other side's talking about it. So like, for example, Ukraine, like he demanded they accept like a peace thing.

52:07They're accepting it. But OK, now if Putin says he's interested, OK, maybe you could start paying attention to it. But he said like 50 times in the last two years that Ukraine would be like peace day one, right? It's going to be like we're going to settle it on day one of his administration. Obviously, it's not going to happen, right? So I think he's like unique in all the world of politics and unique in media as well. It's like the it girl is the it girl forever. It just constantly takes over every media cycle. It's wild.

52:43Turner Novak:Is there, if you were thinking, we're going to try to tie this back to tech and startups. If you were trying to take that mindset as a founder, like what are lessons you think you can learn? Like, are there ways to kind of insert yourself in a way that isn't, that is like the correct way to do it, if that makes sense? I mean, there's a different playbook going on right now on Twitter, which is like launch videos and being a shit poster, replying, being a reply guy, being a thread guy. So there are versions of this. I think Trump is unique in the world. I would not try to base your startups marketing strategy of Trump as an 80 year old guy who's been in the media spotlight since the 80s.

53:26He's playing a different game, having been the focus of attention for 50 years. And I think what works is talking about your customers a lot, celebrating your wins, showing your product, explaining your product. Making these like launch videos seems to get a little bit of attention back to video being the new currency. Appearing on podcasts is always good. You know, if you're Keith Rubey and you say a bunch of spicy things, but you build great companies. I think, does anybody remember any individual spicy thing? Or do they just remember Keith Raboy successful? They just remember Keith Raboy successful, entertaining.

54:09So if I'm starting a company, like do I want successful Keith Raboy involved? Yes.

54:14Turner Novak:Boom. Oh, I'm doing a startup. It's an early stage startup. Oh, Jason does this week in startups and all in. Maybe he can help my startup. Great. Maybe if it's early enough, I'll apply to founder university or launch accelerator. Boom. That's all I need. just to be in top of mind when you're looking for a partner. So I think being top of mind when people are looking for scheduling software or an assistant, Howie's done a good job of that. They've shared vibes that hopefully people will get into. It's an incredible product too. Product works. I am at the point where I have Athena assistants right now and I'm going to put my Athena assistants on Howie.

54:55So I'm going to have like a two-level chaotic. Oh, there's a lot of these systems.

55:00Turner Novak:So when did you first get into angel investing? Do you remember your very first angel investment? Yeah, so I was advising my friends on how to raise money, which venture capitalists to raise them, because I had just raised from Hollow and was doing stuff and had sold the company. So people would come to me like, Oh, you sold the company to AOL. How'd you do it? Oh, you raised money. How'd you do it from Sequoia? And so it was interesting because I had introduced Sequoia and had sent them emails to Michael Moritz, Doug Leone, and Ruloff. Hey, Elon's raising money for Tesla. Hey, Mark Pincus is doing Zynga.

55:38Hey, my friend Ev Williams is doing Twitter. And all three of those, they didn't wind up doing the early rounds of. And then at some point, Ruloff called me and was like, hey, I'm going to do the Scouts program. I want you to be the first Scout. The concept is pretty simple. You go invest money. We split the carry 50-50. and you put 25, 50K checks into stuff. It's just a way for us to meet more founders. And it probably wouldn't amount to much.

56:01Turner Novak:Was this their first kind of iteration of the Scout program? It was the first iteration of anybody's Scout program. It was like they created the category. Now everybody's got one. So yeah, they created the concept of a Scout. The first class was like eight of us. I think Brian Sugar, myself, guy from Meibo Seth Sternberg well so this may be a dumb question but I feel like people probably want me to ask like why wouldn't Sequoia just write the checks themselves like why do they why do they need you as a scout like why don't they just think they wanted to expand the reach of their network and not miss anything I think probably after missing Facebook Twitter and some things they started to feel like maybe we're missing stuff and like if a New York bc fred wilson can win the twitter deal You know, maybe we need to have more boots on the ground, right?

56:54So I think it was an experiment and it worked. Yeah, Seth Sternberg was from Mebo. And there was this little kid. He would look like he was in high school who was one of the first scouts, Sam Altman. He did Stripe as a scout investment. I did Uber, DataStax, Thumbtack, a couple other companies. It was pretty funny. And that turned out to be the highest multiple fund they've ever done, is what I'm told.

57:22Turner Novak:Really? Their scale fund? I don't know if it's a dollar on dollar. It's obviously not the most dollars they've ever made. But I think, you know, on a multiple basis, it performed spectacularly because it was a tiny fund. And I think it was the GPs of Sequoia's money because they did it as an experiment. Now it's formalized. They have hundreds of them. I think Andresen Horowitz has copied it. Everybody's copied it because it's just a great way to empower other people to make quick decisions with small checks, increased surface area. My belief in venture is that there's opportunities at the late stage and the early stage, but in the middle, it's incredibly competitive and the valuations are incredibly overvalued in the middle.

58:10and that makes portfolios really hard when you're doing Series A, Series B portfolios. It's really hard to make those work. Series A, B, C is like so crowded. Now, if you're doing very late stage and you've got two-year window, three-year window before the investment is realized and you can double your money in three years, okay, great. You got a 25 % IRR, fantastic. So that means the opportunities in the early stage, but in the early stage, you have 80 % of the companies go to zero, like seed investments, like 80 % go to zero, maybe 80 % pull through or 60 % pull through to the next round of investing.

58:50So you have to have a lot of surface area. You have to have a lot of bets and you don't know which one's going to hit. And then you have to have a strategy maybe to double down. And you also have to have a strategy to liquidate early because many companies get to 500 million, stall out and become worth zero, or they get to a billion or two and they stall out and they become more zero because the C rounds, the D rounds are so competitive. There's so much money in the ecosystem that they overvalued them in those rounds. And that would be actually the best time to start taking chips off the table.

59:20So you need to have like a, the strategies changed completely. There were a fraction of the number of companies being launched 12 years ago, 14 years ago when I started doing this. Now there's a lot more companies launched. Very few of them get to Decacorn status. It's incredibly rare to hit a Decacorn. I've hit two really, well, two Centurions, I guess, Uber and Robinhood. And I invested in both of those at their angel round, like really hard to do. And that was two of my first hundred investments.

59:49Turner Novak:Now I do a hundred investments a year. We'll probably hit 150 next year or so. When we do our fifth fund, we'll probably be 150 a year pays. And we expect 80 or 90 % of them to not make it to Series B, let's say. So we want to be high volume, small checks, accelerator, like Techstars and Y Combinator, or Founder University, where we'll give people, if they wanted, their first 25K check at a million dollar valuation when they just have an idea. So that was one of the experiments I ran. About half the people applying for funding, and we get like 20 ,000 applications a year. We got like five, four or 500 applications a week for funding.

1:00:36We sort through those. We meet with the top 100. We put it all into a database. We categorize it. I've got 22 people doing this. It's like a big data project. How many people did you say? We have 22 people in the company. That includes the media business and then 12 people on the investment team. So we have people doing four or five meetings a day, 20 meetings a week on the front line, and then some go to the second meeting. So it's high volume in terms of applications, high volume in terms of the number of applications, meetings, and second meetings, and then extremely low on a percentage basis.

1:01:15So we're investing in one in 150 or one in 200 people who apply for funding. But we found out half of the companies applying were not really even incorporated or didn't finish their product yet. We were getting them in year zero, in other words. So we started to found a university. It's a 12-week course, founded a lot, university. And people come there, we just teach them all the blocking and tackling stuff. Across 12 weeks, they come twice a week, one for like a talk by a notable speaker. And then on Thursdays, they have a pod of 20 companies and they kind of all share what they're working on, what's working, what's not.

1:01:50Anyway, we invest in 10 % of those companies. So 350 teams came to this latest one, our 11th in the United States. So we'll invest in 30 of those maybe. And we'll do it primarily through a 25K check at a million dollar valuation. So each week when they check in and tell us what they got accomplished, we just say, would you like the 25K check or would you like to come to our accelerator or both? And like two out of three people click both or either one or both. So most people would like amount of money and then we didn't realize it, but like 40, 50 % of people just want a 25K check to incorporate, like call it the friends and family check

1:02:28Turner Novak:to make it real. And so I think we've written 150 of those so far. And then we have the right to put a little bit of money like 100K or 250K in the next two rounds. So we have a little super pro rata, like very modest. Then we get to do a little bit more investing as it goes if it pops. And it's working. What does that mean? What are the stats you can share besides just that it's working? So I think about 60 % of the companies wind up raising another round of funding at a higher valuation in the first year after going to one of our programs. So 60 % pull through on those really nascent companies is pretty good.

1:03:11And so that to me is like the earliest sign of success. And we don't want it to be more than 50 or 60 % for Foundry University because we want to bet on crazy ideas and experiments. It's only$25K. So if we do 100 of them and we lose$2.5 million, or we do 200 of them and we lose$5 million in a$45 million fund, that's okay. We consider that the experimental budget. We get to feel out the entrepreneurs. Do they make progress every week? Are they good at hiring? Do they pivot well? And then we can pick off the ones we think are going to be really good and try to build an ownership in the company of seven, eight, nine, 10%.

1:03:55Turner Novak:So then why do you think someone would pick launch versus, you know, they could do YC, they could do Neo. I feel like A16Z has Speedrun. Speedrun, we've had about five of our companies go to Speedrun. So they kind of come to us first. I would say Founding University comes before all those programs. Speedrun comes after all of them. And then why come to YC versus Techstars versus ours? Well, you have to get into one of them first of all, and they all have less than a 1 % acceptance rate. So I would suggest applying to all three if I'm giving my best advice. NEO, Antler, Techstars, YC, Launch Accelerator.

1:04:31Apply to all five. I think they're all really good programs. And what they do is because they only accept 1%, it sends a signal to the market of seed funds. Okay, somebody's done some vetting system here and they've done some polishing.

1:04:44Turner Novak:They're in the top 1%. Yeah. And I think we're probably wrong in picking the top 1%, but I don't think we're wrong in picking the top 10%. So I would say, why Combinator launch everybody? We probably do pick the top 10%, not perfectly, but it's actually 1%, which means it's highly imperfect. In other words, somebody who was number five or 10 on the list is probably equally as good as numbers one, two, three, four, or five. and we're imperfect in picking that. So apply to all of them. And if you get into two or three, just whoever's track record you like and vibe with the most. YC is obviously a large program, the most recognized program.

1:05:31There's a weird anti-Y Combinator kind of vibes on X with young people and founders.

1:05:38Turner Novak:Yeah, I don't know what that is. I mean, I guess maybe it's like whenever you become establishment, you're not punk rock anymore. So therefore, okay. It's the natural course of things. Yeah, I think there might be a common thread of like, maybe people are a little bit upset they didn't get in and there's like some resentment and they've tried a couple of times and they just, you know, you think you're better than someone who did get in and you kind of like, you know, YC sucks. Like, I feel like there might be a thread of that. For sure. I mean, we have everybody who meets with us rate us on how we did as a firm.

1:06:10So those hundred meetings, we send them after we've made our decision from my email account. So if they found his reply to it, I get it. We just say, hey, you met with this person at this date. Would you rate us? How likely would you be to refer a friend to launch and then tell us why? And then I have two Slack rooms, one for eights and betters and one for seven and below. If it's seven or below or six or below, I read every single one of those and it's almost universally the same thing. You You didn't understand what we were pitching you. So then I wrote language for the team that does the first calls, which was, can I repeat back your vision to you so I make sure I didn't miss anything?

1:06:52And once we started doing that, the ratings got much better because it required then us to really repeat back to the founder, okay, so you're making an AI agent that you CC on an email message with another person to book a meeting. And then it uses AI and human in the loop to book the meeting. And you charge$30 a month for$360 a year. And it's as good as a$75 ,000 a year assistant at that one job function. Do I understand how we correctly? Basically, you do. However, what you didn't mention is we're going to expand it to these three other categories. So we're going to be helping people book their travel.

1:07:35We're going to help them book their whatever, hotels and, you know, check their accounting for subscriptions that are run out. Okay, great. Yeah. So what I said, plus these three things. Okay. And when we did that, everybody's scores went up, including my own, because I get scored. And I think people get very disappointed if a high profile investor says no, they take it very personal, as opposed to just looking at the statistics, like, okay, one in 150, like, and we get really great companies applying. So if a third of those are really great companies, you have to beat out 20 exceptional companies.

1:08:11How would you ever expect me to get that right? Even if I've got a good track record, I can't bat 1 ,000. It's just totally unrealistic. But at least if people feel heard, and then we follow up with them, and then we do a little thing where we follow up with them and tell them, oh, by the way, we have all these free credits for this week in startups. If you want them, you can get them here at getstartupcredits.com. We'll get them some startup credits at the end to, you know, how can we be helpful? The famous, like, let me know if I can be helpful other, any other way, but giving you my money and my reputation, which is what everybody wants.

1:08:45But if you're a founder, just understand, like, it's a numbers game. You don't need a hundred out of a hundred people to invest in your company. You need three out of a hundred, two out of a hundred. And then you just meet with another hundred and you get two of those. And every time If you get product market fit and you have a chart, it gets better.

1:09:04Turner Novak:You'll get there eventually. But most founders are like, they do 20 meetings and they're like, venture capitalists are idiots. And it's like, it's the hard job. We kind of are idiots. I mean, it is, or the task is impossible because you are making an investment on incomplete information. Like poker, you know, you can call somebody's bluff and look like a genius, or you can call what you think is a bluff and they have the stone cold nuts and you lose your entire chip stack and you look like an idiot because they were so confident. And you unpacked it and were like, they're so confident. I think they're bluffing.

1:09:41Like we have partial information, folks. Like we don't know what's going to happen in the world. We don't know that AI is going to displace this whole category of startups. We don't know if, you know, some new technology is going to replace the old one and there's going to be a platform switch. There's so many unknowns that you're just trying to make intelligent bets as best you can, and then intelligently pair your positions as best you can, so as to hit two and a half times the amount of money that was given to you so you can keep doing the pursuit known as venture capital. That's it. And once you realize that as a founder, okay, these guys are just terrified human beings, just like me.

1:10:23They just have to hit two and a half percent. And they could have a 5X fund, a 10X fund, and then a 2X fund or a 1.5X fund. And then everybody thinks they're a loser and they think they're losers. And it's like, there's randomness. Like you got to look at the whole career and say, oh yeah, funds one and two, great. Fund three, that was a dud. Fund four, that's looking promising. Okay, I'll do fund five. like, it's hard. What we do is hard.

1:10:48Turner Novak:Yeah. It sounds like the biggest takeaway for founders is just, you just got to have a massive pipeline. Like it's just a volume game. Just don't give up with those first 20 people. You got to talk to 100, 200. I mean, maybe it'll take a thousand. Like if you've got a good product. I'd say low hundreds is what I see up until series A. Yeah. And if you get traction, then it gets your, it increases massively. So there is a theory to just focus on your traction and get modest traction. And then the seed funds are like, oh, this really impressive team has 300 ,000 in annual revenue and this team has none.

1:11:26I think I can make a safer bet here. I'll go with the one that already put 300 ,000 on the board. And that's what I see seed funds do all the time. They're like, okay, three people pursuing the same thing. One of them has more revenue and more growth. I'll go with that one.

1:11:38Turner Novak:Yeah, I mean, that's the thing to remember. Just everyone's trying to make money. Just make the investors believe they'll make money. by giving, like make more money by giving it to you. And if you pick a sky high valuation, like I'll have sometimes founders coming out of our programs, they want to raise at a 20 million valuation. They have no revenue. They haven't launched the product. And I'm like, you can go for it. It could happen, but you might be up against somebody with a million in revenue that's growing 50 % a year, 100 % a year. And they figured out more than you have. And maybe they'll get those investors dollars and they've got a$12 million cap on their notes.

1:12:14Turner Novak:So that's, that would be low. Million bucks doubling in a month. I don't know about 12 million. I would say, I was saying like they're growing 50 % a year, not a month. Like they're, they're showing some, like it's an imperfect, like, oh, they're showing some traction. They're figuring it out. Like some people might bet on that company. And, you know, so different investors have different philosophies of, you know, which team to invest in. And some people are not valuation sensitive. And I think that's why the entire category is underwater right now, is that the valuations at the early stages just make it impossible for these funds to perform unless they hit a Decacorn.

1:12:59And hitting a Decacorn is really hard.

1:13:02Turner Novak:Most people, most VCs will never do it. Yeah. Well, you said you've hit two already. Two Centurions. Centurions. Yeah. So those are Uber and Robinhood. What was going back? Was Uber, it was like$5 million pre-money, post-money,$4.5 million. I think Robinhood was$15 million. It was expensive. Both of those were pre-launch. So got lucky. So how did those come about? I think that Uber won. He pitched it an angel event. He came to Open Angel Forum. Yeah, I used to host a party for 10 angel investors in two or three cities where they would take pitches from five companies. We served burgers and beers.

1:13:42And you just pitched, took a couple questions, and then people would give you a commitment on the spot.

1:13:49Turner Novak:And did you charge people to attend those? Nope. It was free. I invite only. So Naval, myself, Chris Saka, Sian Bannister would do it in San Francisco. Myself, Matt Coffin would do it in LA. I had some folks doing it in New York. I kind of just was pissed off. There was a company called Koretsu Forum that was charging$5 ,000 to pitch supposedly angel investors. You actually pitching lawyers and accountants. Quote unquote. And I just said, I'm going to destroy this company. And I went on a holy jihad. I said, I'm going to go on a jihad to destroy the Koretsu Forum. Here I am 15 years later, and I'm still on that same jihad.

1:14:31Turner Novak:Don't pay to pitch your startup to investors. That makes no logical sense. But, you know, yeah, Travis famously pitched there, and of the 21 people, myself, and first round, and Cyan invested. The rest is history. Yeah, so you get lucky sometimes. Most people thought it was a dumb idea. So what was the common pushback at the time, thinking it was a dumb idea? It was in the real world. It was a real-world startup where you had to deal with drivers and accidents and refunds. and nobody wanted to do anything in the real world. The only person, only entrepreneur really doing anything in the real world was Bezos shipping books and Elon doing cars and rocket ships.

1:15:16Everything was like, just make it software. Just make it software. Make it a marketplace, asset light. And so one high-profile VC who shall remain nameless was like, I'll invest in Uber if you convince Travis to make an enterprise software and you sell the software to the cab companies. And I was like, well, the cab companies are the problem. We're eliminating the cab companies We're making them go away because they don't provide enough value and they take 50%, 60 % of the economics. But if you get rid of them, we take 25 % of the economics. Then the price can go down and the drivers can make more and the drivers can have flexibility, yada, yada.

1:15:49But no, they wanted it to be the other way. They wanted to sell software to cap companies. And I was like, yeah, I'll get right on that. Let me go waste Travis's time with a terrible idea. I never told Travis.

1:16:04Turner Novak:I'm sure he got suggested that all the time, though. I mean, almost every Robin Hood got laughed at as well. How are you going to make money? What's the business? We're going to get millennials to trade stocks. It's like millennials who are on their parents' Netflix accounts. They don't have money. Yeah. They don't have money. They don't care about the future. You're going to get them. How are you going to do it? We're going to make it free. Oh, you're going to make it free and get a bunch of people who don't do this behavior. It's like the Canva pitch. It's like it's Photoshop for people who don't know how to use Photoshop.

1:16:31And it's like, okay, what are they using right now? It's like, they're not. They don't make invitations and they don't do cards and stuff like that. They just don't do graphic design. We're going to get them to do graphic design. It's like, so you're going to get people who don't do graphic design to pay you for graphic design software. It's like, yes, that's the opportunity. And it's just, some people are like, I don't understand the TAM. The TAM is zero. It's like, yes, the TAM is zero. We're going to manifest the TAM.

1:16:57Turner Novak:That's what Robinhood did. They manifested that TAM. So what did you see? what was the reason you invested if the TAM was, you know? I just said to myself, what if it works? Which is what I always say to myself. What if it works? Just like I do when we talk this conversation about media, like what if podcasting works? I'll be there first. I'll figure it out first. What if they get there first and like people start trading stocks, even if they're just trading one or two of them, eventually they'll be 35-year-olds and they'll know what 401k is or they'll have a kid and they'll want to get a 529 started or they'll want to do a Roth or they'll want to start putting a certain amount of money into index funds every month or maybe they'll want tax strategies.

1:17:39What if it works and you have 10 million people? It's like, okay, it worked and they have 30 or 40 million people.

1:17:46Turner Novak:Now they're doing mortgages. Can you get gold delivered to you or something? Like physical cash delivered to you? They literally will. And that was his vision from the beginning. And I said to him, I said, well, what if it works? And he's like, exactly. And it did. Airbnb is like the same kind of thing. What if people will rent their houses out when they're not using them? Or rooms in their houses or ADUs? It's like, well, that's a crazy, stupid idea. You're going to have a serial killer stay at your house or at your apartment when you're not there? What if they trash it? It's like, yeah, that's a possibility.

1:18:21We have insurance. What if it works? It's like, it works. Pretty amazing company.

1:18:27Turner Novak:so one one thing i've actually been super curious i don't i don't know the answer to this there's there's sort of this joke that you were like the third or fourth investor in uber why is there this like discrepancy of of which one you were because okay because i was talking to travis at some point i was like i want to be the first investor and he was like oh i think you're like the third or fourth i was like well okay you know like somebody else got there so So anyway, they asked me, like, you were the first, we hear you're the first, CNBC or something, they said, we hear you're the first investor in Uber.

1:18:58And I was like, I think I'm like the third or fourth. It's like, so then it just became like a bit of a meme, like where I just, when I wrote my book, Angel, it was like, hey, you know, here's a book about Angel investing in this incredible story of investing in Robinhood and investing in Uber and these other companies. And here's how I did it. And so during the press tour, somebody put, I think, in the notes for people, like, oh, yeah, he was the third or fourth investor. And they put he's the third investor.

1:19:28Turner Novak:So everyone would bring it up. So I kept putting or fourth in there because I thought it sounded more interesting for doing third or fourth. But then VC Braggs, which is my favorite account, and I'm super engaged with VC Braggs. like sometimes I'll tweet stuff and then I put at VC Braggs in the reply where like I call out myself. Yeah. Because I thought it was hilarious because they were going after they made like a YouTube video about like and they did a Batman YouTube video about me being the third or fourth. I was the first person to retweet it. I was like, this is great. I thought they did what about Prof G, you know, and he's like, Macy's is going to be bigger than Amazon and like all these terrible takes like Tesla's going to zero.

1:20:11This is going to zero. oh, Mason's gonna beat Amazon. And so I just thought these were hilarious. So I retweeted them. And then it literally has become like a meme. And I'm here for it. I'm here for the memes. I think it's, I have a sense of humor, so. Yeah.

1:20:27Turner Novak:Yeah, well, and I think when I tweeted a couple hours ago that you're coming on the show, I haven't read it in the past hour and a half, but like five, six, seven people responded, you know, ask him about if he was the third report. Like, it's just a meme. We'll never know. And we have to do some archaeology. We'll have to get the initial bank statements of whose wire came in. I think wire statements speak, but who knows? Maybe I'm the 30th. I don't know. Maybe it's all folklore. Who knows? Well, there's this one story. I think you were the first customer of one of the Tesla cars. I don't remember which one.

1:21:02Turner Novak:You know what I'm talking about? Yeah, I have the first Model S. Yeah. Very famous story. I was with Elon having dinner, and he's spoken about this. so I'm not speaking out of school, but, you know, I've been friends for a long time, and I was, like, very reticent to even bring him up ever because, you know, he's larger than life, and sometimes people are like, oh, you're riding on his coattails, like you're talking about your friendship, whatever, but he had talked about this one, so I don't mind talking about it, which was, we went to dinner, I went to BOA, he was feeling down because Tesla was dying, it was out of money, Valleywag was riding, like, there's, like, 10 days, there's two weeks left.

1:21:38SpaceX had just blown up a rocket. Didn't they say he had six weeks or something? It was like six weeks of cash left or whatever.

1:21:43Turner Novak:But he technically had two weeks or something like that? Yeah, so we went to dinner, and I said, oh, how's it going? He's like, it's terrible. The divorce, the SpaceX blew up the rocket. And I was like, is it true you have six weeks left of cash in Tesla? And he said, no, that's not true. And I said, oh, thank God. He said, yeah, it's two weeks. I said, I have a couple of million bucks. I can, you want me to wire you a million bucks or something? And he's like, no, it's not going to make a difference. that would just be like a couple days payroll, whatever. I said, well, certainly there's some good news.

1:22:15And there's always something that's good news, right? There must be something. And he took out his BlackBerry to date the conversation. He started swiping on the little ball. And he was showing me, he said, don't tell anybody, but this is the model, this is the sedan we're going to make. It's going to be Model S. He actually didn't have a name for it at the time. We were like actually brainstorming names. And we're going through it. And he said, I said, wow, that's gorgeous. This looks like this car from the future. I said, what is it going to cost? He said,$50 ,000. I said,$50 ,000? Wow, if you can make a$50 ,000 electric car, you'll change the world.

1:22:50And so then I went home, talked to my wife, Jade, and she was like, how's Elon doing? And I was like, that's a disaster. It's like, he might be sleeping on our couch in a couple of weeks. Like, this is not good. and I said but you know I think he's going to figure out Tesla I think he's got some like he's got this new car he's going to do it's going to be like 50 grand she goes oh I want one I said yeah I want one too so I said get me the checkbook I wrote two handwritten checks and I wrote a note E that car is going to change the world I'll take two and I put two$50 ,000 checks in it and I FedExed it to his head office just to make him feel good.

1:23:33And, you know, maybe I could pay for one day or two days of payroll. And three months later, the check, he, a month later, he closed some financing. Three months later, the checks cashed. Then I get an email one day, hey, your reservation number one, your reservation number 73. And I forwarded it to him. And then I talked to him and I said, you know, you don't have to give me number one. He's like, don't worry, I got the mules and, you know, I got all the whatever. I want you to have number one because you're the first person to buy it. It It means a lot to me for you to have number one. And I said, okay.

1:24:08And then they sent it to me, and then they had shipped it, and they were a public company. So CNBC is, like, coming to my house, or, like, different news organizations are like, hey, we got to see the car. It's now out. It's out. You know, they've talked about their shipped cars. We know you have one, because I'm a loudmouth, and I had talked about having number one. And... You know, like, the car wasn't exactly perfectly ready at the time. So, like, I was getting updates on a thumb drive, you know, because it didn't have the radio in it yet to do over the air.

1:24:41Turner Novak:Oh, shit, to literally stick in a hard drive. Stick in a thumb drive to update the software. So I have, like, a Tesla engineer coming every week or two to update it. And, like, I was giving them my notes on it. It was very early, as you could suspect. And so, you know, I'm, like, giving all these notes of things that need to be fixed. like 10, 20 things, lists, and I'm sending it to the team over there. And then I go on CNBC or whatever. People are asking me how it is, and I said, flawless. This car is going to change the world. And it did. I'm sure they loved that, that soundbite, like the clip of you doing that.

1:25:17I would give them my classic CNBC, yum, yum. This car is going to change the world. And it did. And it's sitting in my garage. It's worth a million bucks now. Somebody offered me a million dollars for it. I'll never sell it. Wow. And I have 16 of the Roadster. So I have two of these. You have 16? And number 16 of the Roadster. Oh, no.

1:25:33Turner Novak:I thought you said you had 16. Not 16 of them. But those are worth a quarter million dollars each, I think. The original Roadsters. A lot of people crash them, and they don't crash very well. It's kind of a go-kart. So if you crash it, it's kind of over for the car. Oh, no. Jeez. So the number of Roadsters is going down precipitously because people love to drive them. I think that one will become worth more eventually because even though the other one's number one, the 16 is, I think there were like only 4 ,000 of those made. I don't know how many roadsters were actually made. They were pretty bespoke.

1:26:10But yeah, and now the self-driving is 95 % of the way there. I think they're going to figure it out the next year, too.

1:26:19Turner Novak:How did you meet Elon initially? Elon was roommates with my friend Adeo from New York. They were roommates in college at Penn, I believe, at the University of Pennsylvania. So yeah, just met him socially. And we vibed. We used to hang out in LA. We both live there. Now we both live in Austin. We hang out in Austin. Just a normal human being who started seven or eight companies that changed the world. Yeah, no big deal. What do you think people underestimate about him? He's a great engineer. I think people forget that. Like, he's actually a legit engineer who, like, understands the underpayings of these things.

1:26:59They probably also underestimate the amount of value you get from having built many factories. It turns out, like, building factories is the business of Tesla and SpaceX in many ways. It's not the thing that comes out of the factory. It's the thing that makes the thing that comes out of the factory. and there's probably only you know three or four people on the planet who know as much about factories as elon you know might be somebody who works for tim cook at apple foxconn samsung like there's a small number of people who understand factories to the level he does um but on a work ethic basis he's the hardest working human being i've ever seen like when i was at twitter with him, he'd be like midnight, 1 a.m.

1:27:47And, you know, everybody's exhausted. He's like, okay, two more meetings. And the next group comes in, next group comes in. It's 1.30 in the morning. I'm like, bro, we can get some sleep. We got to start again. We got a 10 a.m. meeting here with the NFL. Like, we need to go to bed. He's like, okay, one more meeting. I was like, okay, let's do one more meeting. But at 2 a.m., we can pack it in and get six hours of sleep and be back here to meet with Roger Goodell. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, we'll meet with Roger Goodell in the morning. You can't be late for a meeting with the NFL if you're Twitter.

1:28:16You know, I'm going to, you know. Yeah, but his work ethic is unbelievable. Like, it's not human. And inhuman, he's an alien when it comes to his work ethic, I would say. Is he one of those people that doesn't need as much sleep?

1:28:33Turner Novak:Like, only needs four hours of sleep kind of a thing? Or how do you pull that off? Maybe. I think it's just his drive. I think he probably could use some more sleep. But I think his drive is so high, and he wants to win. So, you know, it's just, it's preternatural. Is that the preternatural, the word? Preternatural is a word for like inhuman. Beyond what is normal or natural, extraordinary, and often inexplicable by ordinary means. Yeah, that's it. Qualities that are so unusual. Preternatural, yeah. Qualities that are so unusual that they seem impossible. Yeah, preternatural, that's him. Yeah, that would be what I would say.

1:29:12It's a good word, preternatural.

1:29:14Turner Novak:So you mentioned kind of the Twitter acquisition. What was it like when that was going down? I know you were kind of, I think you kind of worked at the company for a while. Like what all happened? I mean, it's a little overstated. I was consulting, just helping out unpaid, just friend hanging out for, you know, to make the vibes maybe on the margins, help with some decisions. But yeah, I certainly don't want to overstate it, but I was hanging out with Zax and everybody adoring it, Antonio, Gracias, all the people who funded it. And it was, in my opinion, the greatest heist in the history of business that occurred by those previous employees.

1:29:59A large portion of them were not working and making huge salaries, and they were spending money in a public company like drunken sailors. and there was SaaS software, office space that had never been touched, that was being paid for. There were people making lunches for 10 people at the office and we averaged out what each lunch cost. It was like each lunch cost$400.

1:30:24Turner Novak:It was like I'm going to a Michelin. You could have sent the staff that did show up for work to a Michelin star restaurant and save money based on the amount of food they were making and the cost of the staff. So it was like, yeah, just stealing from the public. Like, if you think of it as a public company, I was just aghast at the... And then, you know, people were just... There were people who were working hard, but there were people who were not working at all. And it was kind of like the abuse... There was abuse in that system that I think has never been matched combined with the COVID, like, stay-at-home kind of work ethic.

1:31:03And I think it really did break people's brains when he got rid of 85 % of the people and the service worked better and the product feature started flowing faster. And I think that's why there's less people working at Uber, Meta, Microsoft, Airbnb, Google now than there were four years ago. I think everybody realized these companies were massively overstaffed and you could do more with less. And the revenue for Google or Uber has grown 20 or whatever percent every year. Earnings, maybe more. And they keep growing with less people or the same number of people. And then with AI, I think it's going to become more pronounced.

1:31:46So I think we're going to be sitting here with these companies. I think we could be looking at Amazon, Uber, Google, Meta, all having less employees in 2030 than they have now. and having massively more earnings.

1:32:01Turner Novak:All the growth in the world with less people. That's the promise of this technology. Automate everything. I agree with you on the promise, but because this is a podcast, I mean, couldn't that be bad though? Like we're talking about job loss, like 85 % job loss, isn't that? Or was Twitter an extreme case? For the business we're in, startups, it's good because I think young people going to realize. I gave a talk last night to a bunch of young people at extern.com, one of our investments that does like externships. And I just named the title of my talk. Nobody's coming. Nobody's coming for you. Help is not on the way.

1:32:44It's over. You're on your own. And so start a company, get two or three really talented friends, learn all the skills in the world and start a company and build a product or service because people always love a new product or service in the world, but you're not going to get a job at one of the big companies. This is not happening. So, you know, and that's quite a change from just six, seven years ago. Pre-COVID, you would graduate college. You'd have an offer from Uber, an offer from Coinbase, an offer from Google. You'd have like three of the seven people you met with would make you a really nice offer and you would be picking between them.

1:33:18And now like the people who were working there, who were the managers giving you those offers are now your competition for a job. Holy cow. And that happened quickly. Now, a lot of people don't like me talking about this so candidly, but we are going to face the greatest job displacement in the history of humanity is my belief. There's a chance it doesn't happen. There's a chance this technology peters out and doesn't keep compounding as quick as it is, I think that's like a 10 % chance. I think there's a 90 % chance that this time is different. That instead of having a bunch of job displacement over 40 years, we're going to have it over four, maybe 10 years, four to 10 years.

1:34:02I think we're already seeing it. Companies are like, maybe we should stop hiring and just automate this. And oh, if we hire a young person out of school, we're going to have to train them and they're going to slow everybody down.

1:34:15Turner Novak:And then they're going to leave in two years? Yeah. So maybe we just automate it or we find a third party you can outsource it to. Somebody was dogging me for having two assistants on Athena. And I'm like, it's$3 ,000 a month per assistant. It's$72 ,000 a year for two assistants. I couldn't hire an assistant for$75K or$100K. And if you did, they would leave in six months or 12 months or 18 months. They don't want that job. They don't want to do that work. It's just, how can you blame a business person for wanting to outsource to a better solution? With two Athena assistants, I have 80 hours of coverage a week, not 40.

1:34:52And they don't leave every 12 months. And if they do leave, they get replaced by Athena. It's their job to replace them. So go to athenawow.com. You get a couple of weeks off.

1:35:05Turner Novak:There's my plug. I'm first investor. Jonathan had me, I was the first investor in Thumbtack and the first investor in Athena. Wow. Wow. Athena, wow. There you go. Yeah, Athena. Athena, wow. I came up with that because of Christopher Walken. Athena, wow. One of my friends asked you or asked me, he's like, you've been pretty public about GLP-1s. He's been super curious. Can we talk about that really quick? Absolutely. GLP-1s have changed my life, perhaps saved my life. I gained two pounds a year for 20 years of being an entrepreneur. and having kids. That'll accrue over time, man. Yeah. And I used to be a marathon runner.

1:35:45I was like super shvelte.

1:35:48Turner Novak:I didn't know that. And then just over time, I didn't pay attention to it. I was very ashamed of it and like kept trying. And I would go from 213 pounds down to 190, back up to 200. It was just brutal. And I'm five, eight and a half. So I'm like on a good day. So that's pretty chunky. And my face was really fat on TV. and I heard Tim Ferriss and Kevin Rose, two good friends of mine, talking about Ozempic four years ago on their random podcast where they talk about random shit. And they were talking about it, and it wasn't for weight loss, but they were using it off. Kevin Rose was using it off-label to get rid of some visceral fat that he couldn't get rid of.

1:36:31And I guess then I went to my doctor and I lobbied them about it. and anyway this all ends in a commercial because now i am literally a spokesperson for road.co so road.co i was talking to the founder at an event he's like it's really inspiring and i was like yeah you know i'm you guys are doing glp ones now i'm going to move my glp over to there because i have to pay for it now because i'm not a fat bastard anymore anyway he was like would you consider being a spokesperson for us and i was like like serena williams and he's like yeah and Charles Barkley. It'd be like you and those two. And I was like, okay.

1:37:07So we did a sponsorship deal. So I'm going to be in commercials for row.co. I'm Jason Calacanis. I was a fat bastard. I'm no longer fat. Look at me on my podcast when I was 213 pounds. Now look at me, a spelt fighting weight of 170. I mean, it's like a 43 pound difference. It's crazy.

1:37:25Turner Novak:Yeah. And that's huge at 5 '8". Like that's a massive change. I mean, I now put on a 35 pound weight vest to to walk around my ranch to give myself the feeling. And then I'm like, wow, I was walking around like this every day. Now I know why I was exhausted and I was low energy. It's because I was wearing a weight vest of 35 pounds, 24 hours a day. Like that's a lot of fat to have on your body. So I will just tell people like, look, I didn't talk about it for the first couple of years because I was like, this is experimental. But now I think we're past the experimental phase. So I just say no shame in the GLP game.

1:38:03If you're thinking about it, go research it at row.com.

1:38:08Turner Novak:Yeah, row.com. I don't actually have a code or anything. Just go to row.com. It's all good. So are there, I think I hear people talk about kind of like the benefits of it. Are there any downsides to it that you experience? I think you can get indigestion. You could belch, fart. You know, it slows down the food in your system. so you will, if you talk to people candidly about it, if you forget that you took it and then you go eat three or four slices of pizza, you might like literally vomit. That happened to me twice where I just ate too much sushi and too much pizza. I forgot that I was on GLPs and I was just starting out with them and I was like figuring out the dosage and all that stuff.

1:38:49Now it's pretty well established like what the right dosage is. You just slowly move up and you start to tolerate it and the food goes through your system, just simplifying here, slower. So you feel fuller quicker and then you don't have food noise. So I didn't realize how often I was thinking about food. I was thinking about food all the time. Now I don't think about food all the time. And it gives me time for my kids, for work, for reading a book, whatever. I'm not like, I need more food. So I think that's actually one of the big upsides to it as well.

1:39:21Turner Novak:Interesting. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, well, I don't know if the sponsorship will be live by the time. This episode comes out, but we'll throw a link in the show notes. It's already live. Row.co is fine. All right. Awesome. You tweet a lot, right? People can find you at Jason? X.com slash Jason. Instagram.com slash Jason if you want to see my food pics. And yeah, founder.university. Yeah, apply if you want to start a company. Launch.co. Launch.co. Launch.co, yeah. All in. What's the all in? Launch.co slash apply. All in.com. I got the domain. All in.com. Took me two years. Yeah, I got it. Wow, nice. Took a lot.

1:39:59Yeah, that was another hard one. I have begin.com. I got begin.com. That's what I'm looking for an idea for.

1:40:05Turner Novak:I never asked you, how many people actually listen all in? What are the stats you guys are public about? I think it's millions a week. Yeah, millions a week. That's pretty good by the... I mean, it's pretty crazy. I cannot believe the nature of the audience either. I think that's kind of the big low-key secret is that heads of state, CEOs listen to it. That's why it's, I think, as influential as it is and why we don't dumb it down too much to broaden the appeal. We keep it high level. Even when I do try to explain terms, it's a high-level discussion. You got to keep up with it because it's for people who are running companies, countries, venture firms, running books of capital.

1:40:52Turner Novak:So yeah, well done. Yeah. How do you decide what to talk about and then who to bring on? Yeah, pretty basic. Every week, people just vote on what they want to talk about. So if I want to talk about something, everybody just submits URLs. There's a producer, Lisa, who's amazing, and we just give her our picks. And then I run through it. And then I sort it by how many people want to talk about the topic. So if three people want to talk about Epstein or two people want to talk about Epstein, or one person wants to meet up with Epstein, it'll move up and down the docket, right? Based on that. We always try to have whatever the consensus top news story in the world is as the number one story because people expect, oh, well, if Trump was elected president, we're going to start with that, right?

1:41:35Turner Novak:Yeah. So I guess I can see that if Chamath and Sachs and Friedberg all want to hit on a political thing, you reluctantly, even if you don't want to, you got to throw it in. Yeah, I don't decide on the docket. Everybody just does theirs. Everybody puts in their two cents And what you will see is, like, if only one person wanted to talk about it, then, you know, sometimes you'll hear me do something critical of Trump, let's say. And then the three other castmates might have nothing to say because it's critical of Trump. And then it just sort of sits there, and then we move on to the next subject.

1:42:08Fair. You know, balls and strikes. Like, they're big boys. They can handle me being critical of Trump, even if they're in the administration or adjacent to the administration. It's not the first time that, like, anybody's been critical of Trump. So we've kind of worked that out, I think, pretty nicely. We talked about Epstein on the pod last week as an example.

1:42:26Turner Novak:Oh, really? I'll have to check that one out. Well, cool. Well, this is a lot of fun. Thanks for doing this. Cool, brother. I'll talk to you soon. Really enjoyed it. And I hope you enjoyed it. Thanks again to Numeral for supporting this episode. Head to numeral.com to put your sales tax on autopilot. If you missed it, make sure to check out the past few episodes with Will Gabrick at Stripe, Rahul Vora at Superhuman, and Matteo Franceschetti at 8Sleep. and tune in next week for Marcelo Libre, co-founder and CEO of Global Payroll and HR Juggernaut, Remote.com. If you like this conversation, please like, comment, subscribe and invite me on your podcast.

1:43:00Turner Novak:If you don't wanna miss a future episode, subscribe to my newsletter, The Split, linked in the description to get each episode plus a transcript emailed directly to your inbox every week. Thanks again for listening. See you next time.