20VC: How I Lost Airbnb at Seed Because of an Exploding Term Sheet | Investing Lessons from Roelof Botha & Peter Thiel | Why VC is Less Collaborative Than Ever and Great Companies Are Being Destroyed by Too Much Cash with Kevin Hartz @ A*

25:33Like, you know, look, what we've seen, I want to say that operators are the best and they're used to be a vibe in the valley that said, oh, you've got to be an operator to be an investor, a venture investor. You've had to walk in the shoes and that's changing. You see a journalist become one of the greatest venture investor, Michael Moritz slash Harry Stevings. Thank you so much. So I'm jealous. And then what else have we seen? People just go build early, come from what was banking. Jeremy Levine from Bessamer was always in venture. He never operated and he's been an extraordinary investor over the years.

26:10Talked to me about the B side. That's an interesting one. How do you think about reserve allocations? Is that reserves on the precedes and the seeds? The Bs are separate. These are new investments. For example, we let a B about nine months ago and a 10 months ago in a company called WAP. How big a chat do you write for that, then? Not for that necessarily like the bees if you're leaving a bee 10 to 20 10 to 20 do you have a big enough fund if we say at the average sentence 15 and you need 10 to 15 You're a 175 to 100 on bees. I was told there would be no math But you know perhaps but I guess it's a world -class problem to have to be Constraint on capital like I've always found that it's hard to find good places to cook capital to work And when you find it, you just go for it and you'll find a way to get more capital there.

27:05So it just feels like the capital trickles out because you've got to be very patient and patient and patient and weight and weight for those great companies. Are you finding B a better place to be right now? People often talk about B is dad and C is dad. Oh, God. B is far from... I mean, all the time that, you know, especially 18 months ago when it was crickets, like what a great time to be investing in that area. I mean, it's been great. And so whenever somebody tells you that in areas dead, make sure you heavily canvas that area and go after it hard, because there's great stuff happening there.

27:42Have you found your mindset change on companies that you like moving from angel to VC? And what I mean by that is like, you know, you don't always need the massive outcome when you're an angel, for example, like a billion dollar company, if you get an early enough, great, fantastic. Awesome. But when you're a VC, like, yeah, but actually that might not even return the fund. And sometimes the mindset really changes. Were there any cool changes in how what you found attractive and investment changed between being an angel on a VC? I think I've just been lucky to have always been around people that have extremely high standards, aspirations far beyond just returning a fund.

28:20And I just kind of turn off if it's great if somebody wants to build a nice size business and have a good cash flow and operate things, but we're looking for those extraordinary outcomes. Do you think you can predict them? When you look at Bessima's Mammos, Proko was a $300 million company. It's not a $10 billion. Snap was a $500 million company. Shopify went public at 700, and I think they sold it all at two. Your biggest winners, you always underestimate the size of, if I told you Airbnb is the size that it is today, you'd be like, never expected that. Well, certainly I think that the internet space just expanded beyond our wildest notions.

29:02So these markets think about remittance where Zoom went public in 2013 and PayPal acquired it in 2015, but that market expanded so dramatically since then it's that vote or that reaffirmation that maybe you should stay independent because you can just keep compounding and compounding in the markets. Yeah, it's funny when you look at venture there's sourcing and selecting and servicing kind of three core pillars pre -selling that make a great venture ambassador. If I would ask you what are you best at and what are you worst at? Where would you rank the three? I'm lousy at selling. I can only be kind of sincere in what I offer.

29:41I might be a little hurt when I see somebody like overselling or biasing a lot or trying to find ways to kind of win a deal. I don't think you should win a deal. I think you should earn the right to work with a founder for many, many years. I think not the same. No, they're very different. I see a kind of slick use car salesman kind of mentality, which is almost like a dupe the founder in designing, you know, versus really what's best for their business and so on. And, you know, that's what I maybe offer sincerely. Sorcene is just a factor of, look, as I spend more time in the valley and have a lot of great relationships of founders or other investors or so on.

30:23The network is very, very broad. Yeah, selection. What can I say about that? It's always a sin of omission. You always think about the ones that you let through or didn't pursue. What one did you not pursue that you think of most? What is your subsequent reflection on that? Well, I think of Keith, when I was stepping down as CEO of Zoom, Keith in Rulof held a lunch for me in San Francisco and Keith was talking about this YouTube thing. And I was just kind of burnt out. It was like a very bittersweet shitty time to be stepping out of Zoom. And I'm just like video online. That's so stupid. You know, Chad was a graphic designer.

31:06How would Chad know how to, you know, so just completely miss that YouTube thing, for example, what's the reflection on that? The reflection is very clearly your mindset is always be positive and open -minded. Let's say you're having the worst day of your life and you meet a founder like you still have to believe and You still have to have that view and really really listen because that that mindset if it's off this little casual interaction becomes something really crazy It's the thing I love most about this business actually which is unlike any other job I think in the world one single meeting can change the life of you your family for many generations I say to the whole team, you can never be off with the founder.

31:50I think people forget that. Are you honest with feedback to founders? No, totally dishonest. It sucks. But I seriously, like it's, sometimes it is the founder that is the problem. And you're like, honestly, I just don't believe in you. I don't think it's right to send an email back and say, I don't believe in you. I'm probably wrong. Who am I to say that you're not good enough? But there's always good things to say to that. You could say like, what do you look for some complimentary expertise. Maybe you should bring on board a co -founder that can do this, this, and this or... But once you start explaining too much, you know, it just goes back and forth and back and forth.

32:24Exactly. And time is short. So what do you do? I've just unfortunately have to be very curred. You know, like I always remember seeing Michael Moritz give a talk about Google in the early 2000s and there are all these founders there. And he puts his phone up to his face and pretends to talk and then walks out of the building. And so nobody would bother him. And that's splitting the ocean to get away from that. How do you feel about exploding term sheets? I see them quite a lot nowadays. Well, little known secret is Keith Javit and I gave it an exploding term sheet to Airbnb. And Paul Graham said no bueno and teed off on us.

33:07It worked out. We got cut into that round. but you don't forget things like that. You just do not forget that. I don't think I've ever told that story. Were you nervous when he said no, Boana? I think he posted on it. He didn't call us out. You know, he chided us privately, but he didn't call us out publicly. He called out the practice of doing it. And, you know, really... He kind of understand as well. Explaining in terms, he's have a horrible signalling name. Like, they just sound... But actually, if someone's gonna let you go around and say, Hey, Kevin Hartz has given it to me at 25. does anyone want to do it at 30?

33:40Obviously that's not great. There is a reason for it. There is a reason for it, but you would hope that you found a partner that's not going to shop it, and maybe if they're going to shop it, then it maybe wasn't meant to be. But they're always going to shop it. They're running your process, and you could argue that they're job to run a process to get the highest price. Yeah. But that's my point. I don't want to be in a process. Yeah. Well, the issue is is that you put a term sheet out in it like it explodes on Friday at 5 p .m. but does that mean that at 5 .15 you no longer want to invest? No.

34:19Like the investor will always be there. I think it's fair for founders to go out and assess the market and more importantly assess the partner. And so we just have to unentangle ourselves. There's bad behavior on both sides. There's like the obnoxious shopping, like just give us the term sheet and I promise we're gonna get this done. I just need a couple days. And then you find out that they went and shopped it like crazy. But to the flip side, a fund can lock a founder down. That founder just hasn't done their work or hasn't been able to do the work to speak to other investors and find out how others could be of help.

34:57And so... How do you lock founders down, Kevin? This is something I, again, this is the first time Showers very successful now, because I think I'm very open with my struggles. My struggle in locking founders down. Well, we can't lock them down kind of like silence of the lane. Like handcuffs. Yeah, it sounds like cannibal lector. There's pink fluffy handcuffs that work. Like it has to be a very voluntary, you know, like we just have to use honey, not vinegar or what's a good British expect. I bet there's a very trait. Oh, there's a sun spread. I mean, butter. How quickly do you know when it deals working and when it's not working?

35:31There's some that you know is going to be a struggle. And then others that wander in the woods for, you know, that take a long, long, long, long time and people almost forget about them. Or you got investors telling these founders to return the money and they stick with it. The most important thing is just patience. Certainly you want them to maintain a sense of urgency, but you just have to see patience because you just see time and time again, time as the thing to solve the problems and to get into orbit. And then there's the ones that just work from day one. What have you talked about in your daily drive?

36:08Airbnb Pinterest Bitcoin. I was in Wyoming drinking whiskey with Wenceskassaris in October of 2011. And he started talking about this Bitcoin stuff. and I'm always seriously putting in a bit of that. Good amount. Investors never give you exact answers, you know, and you want exact numbers, but investors always like skirt around it. I mean, you know, I always have a soft spot. It was like a relatively mediocre return because of all the capital, but PayPal going public was like one of my first investments. From a multiple perspective, what was that? Not that great. I'd have to go look at it 20 or so.

36:53But you would think if I'd held it longer because what happened is that eBay acquired it and then eBay had a run in the early 2000s. What's your biggest there and what did you learn from that? Biggest zero. It was like a kind of trying out to be a kind of classic Sequoia Investment that I did with Rulof was in a company called Talkbox to okay B .O .X. And it was early live streaming No, oh, yes, he was there. Yeah, he was there Yeah, and which he went on to go to him. I am a student of this business. My God. Yeah. Wow I actually recruited him for that through because I knew Jack Abraham who started Milo That's so funny.

37:33Wow. I just blew my mind that you came up with that and like the most useless Encyclopedic knowledge of this business. No, that's far from useless like that's incredibly important to know the lineage Of those things history is right. Yes. Okay, it's a top box. So talk box was you know live video before kind of FaceTime and all this sort of stuff. And Rolloff got involved and led the series A, Keith, Javit and I had seated it, very actively involved in it. You know, just kind of everything that could go wrong went wrong, scaling issues, market fits. Tony and we even had Tony Bates join, who was, you know, he had joined the board of YouTube like after Rolloff and so we were kind of like, getting that group back together.

38:18and it just wouldn't take. Now the interesting thing is that, you know, Sukhoew found and, you know, helped it park with I think it was Spanish telecom acquired it for like 70 million. So we got like a small return or like a 2x or something, but just not worth the time and the pain and the broken glass of that. And then it's, you know, the hard part is is that, you know, it was at that time when Sean Parker was doing something with video, what was the name of that? Oh, um, and it was I know exactly the one where people would put their private So it was a different airtime. Play to was another one of his.

38:55Yeah, yeah, but airtime in what was the one where people would Live video and it was this rushing kid and it was it's kind of blew up It was like the earliest live video streaming. We're trivert key not that was actually I was at founders fund and we'd in That was big. That was awesome. That was, yeah. I remember the UK we used to leave work in the UK to be there for Trevor Rajki. Yeah. Somebody should bring that back with you. I think there was a tragic ending. I know. I think there's a real incubator business to be done in looking at pastoral successes that went wrong for reasons that could be mitigated.

39:34Completely. Yeah. Completely. You want to go find that in the UK? I'll put $10 million if you want to do it. I'll match yours. It's not a bad idea. We've got to do it. You actually have product market fit around ideas. The idea of time, dense, concentrated events is super cool. I mean, if you brought each contrivia back, you would also be this nostalgic vibe. But I think the other thing that people forget is just how hard it is to get attention to stay. I always say this to the team, but I say the only thing more competitive than the computer economy is the attention economy. and actually people don't think enough about how do I get like macro headlines.

40:08And actually if you bring back H .utrivia and you and I would put $10 million in each to bring back in incubator that brought back retro hits, you get in some of the biggest publications. You would get to a big number of users pretty quickly. What else would we bring back? I want to bring back harder not. Listen, I think B .Rill was a fantastic publication. Do you go? And so there is quite a lot that you could actually bring back very efficiently. What would you not bring back? Or that's a really good question. You know another one that I would bring back, it was a massive cash cow in London, Mad Bid.

40:39Do you remember Mad Bid? No. You would buy a laptop for about 10 pounds. Oh my god. You're like, how do I buy a MacBook? You have to have 10 pounds. To bid, you have to put down a pound. And so to basically bid 100 times, you have to put down 100 pounds. And so for a MacBook, it has a cell for 10 pounds. It's actually $10 ,000. So for a 2000 laptop, they've been five times that in bits. Amazing. It's a gamified version of like eBay in a really cool way. I'd bring back Friendster. Oh, why? No, I wouldn't. Too difficult now. I'd be a friggin' nightmare. No, I don't. Do you think about market timing when you invest?

41:16Yeah, of course. You know, human nature is to look at things that are working now and think like, oh, let's build something. You know, you see, all of a sudden, everything kind of pop up. being memetically duplicative of something that's doing really, really well. And the response is no. Look, three, five, seven years ahead, not now. That is a big issue, is not looking far enough ahead. Kevin, is it wrong to ask your money back as an investor? It kind of depends on the level. I guess, you know, I'm again focused on more of the big outcomes. And things that aren't going to work, are going to work.

41:55kids the power law winners that are going to really drive the returns. Is there a power law winner that you thought would be a power law winner that didn't turn into a power law winner? You know, I think the jury's still out. There's still a lot of value there in Open Sea. I was just an investor in Open Sea and during the boom of 21 -22 it was valued at 13 .5 billion. Why would you not sell some then? Given doing the seed there, Kevin? Yeah, I you know often think a lot about that and you know my mindset was honestly You know when you see that fast level of growth You're thinking about what the GMV is gonna be you know over the coming quarters and you don't think of it as Drobbing dramatically you think of it as continuing to head up at a rapid pace, but it does I mean I mean this nicely when pushing back it doesn't matter, dude, that you get in at the seat.

42:49That is an astronomical return, that you should at least take some off the table, no? Would you have taken some off the table if you've done it with the fund at the seat? Well, I guess I should say yes, because it only perhooves me to answer yes. But in there is that round, that 13 billion dollar round with... Yeah, was extremely tight. Like they wanted more stock. And so the secondary was there and available. also there was a chance to sell, but you would say the same thing about the $10 billion around that Facebook did with Microsoft should people have sold down? I don't. You did the seed, honestly, which is pause.

43:27Of course you shouldn't have done from a pure quantitative assessment. But if you did the seed and you had the chance to sell 25 % of your holding and return a huge number, 300, 400 X and ride 75%. I don't think many people regret that much selling the 25%. Yeah, I think it depends on what your goals in outcomes are. You know, there's something to letting it ride like in the case of Facebook, which is now worth what, 7 or 800? Here are your 26. You know, you should be just compounding like your winners, just like keep them growing and growing. Do you wish you'd taken more risk when you were younger Kevin?

44:10It's very kind of you to mention the compounding nature in my age. Yeah, I mean, persistent. Or keep not take risk on that you wish you had. Yeah, I mean, it's always around an investment or working with a team. I mean, you know, I talked to Peter at the time he was putting the team together for PayPal. And I had invested in PayPal and I'm like, why would I join PayPal? now, like I'm already an investor and I already have shares, but the answer was go all in. Then when the day that the acquisition of PayPal by eBay was announced, Peter had resigned and I met him up at the Sundec restaurant up on St.

44:49Hill Road and he said, Kevin, I'm working on this business and we're taking the fraud algorithms from PayPal that find these associations between disparate nodes and we're going to use this to catch terrorists. And, you know, you want to get involved. And I said, Peter, you're a libertarian. Why would you want something so invasive of one's privacy? And that was the wrong response. Shouldn't done that. I should have joined Palantir. Can anyone do a deal? Can anyone do a deal? If somebody says with absolute conviction, I want to do this. And I'll put my life on the line for this, you know, than absolutely.

45:29I think it's really important. I got asked by an LP this morning, talking about your voting structure. I think voting structure is a complete bullshit. Seriously, I don't tell your LP just that. Oh no I do. Because I always present them in the outcome scenario, which is, you know, if you're actually strategic, you always vote a six out of 10. Because if it's Uber I was a yes. And if it's a terrible company, I was a weak yes. It was basically a five. It was weak. So it brings politics to a new level into a partnership that just doesn't need to be there. If I've hired you as my partner and I'm giving you equal or really meaningful carry and I dedicate years of my life away with you, if you really want to do a deal, why the fuck would I not like you?

46:07Yeah, yeah. I admire Founders Fund for how individually driven it is around conviction of a single partner. Did you have any big lessons from being there? Oh, endless. What are the biggest things that you took with you? You know, so many. I think it's such a great form of venture that they practice. It is very conviction driven. It is the emanation of the power law. It was Peter and Brian Singerman Napoleon that took what did they take? I think they sold Spotify at the $8 billion price, pissed off Daniel Eck and rolled it all into Airbnb at the two and a half billion. And so they'd doubly like went into things.

46:52And so that kind of going all in is very important. And when you look back at a fund, you just don't want something that's just kind of like blah, you know, a little bit of moisture of everything and it doesn't have its like big parallel winners. Like you just boil funds down to the SpaceX fund and the Facebook fund and the Airbnb fund and the, you know, and so on and so on. I remember Brian singing and telling me the enemy of great venture returns is capital concentration limits on a per company basis. That's so Brian. Yeah, you should be 30 % in on your big winner. We were on Airbnb. We were on Bitcoin.

47:31Whatever that was. Always remember that. I did push them at their AGM around the Airbnb deal. And so I give myself a little credit because I'm a venture capitalist. You're supposed to give yourself credit for all these things. You basically founded Facebook. Yeah, I found it. You know, facing the crowd, that was mine. But I remember really saying, like you guys need to look at this company. But all that is petting on back, Brian's so interesting because he would just, when I was like ready to go with a company, he'd just say, Kevin, he really, really, really believe this will be the one, you know, he just like shakes you, you know, and it used to, you know, agitate me a tiny bit, but I appreciate that now.

48:15Do you ever tell founders when you don't believe anymore? When things are not going well, do you just quiet quit? A rule ofism is when things are going really poorly, that's when you're supportive and nurturing and not hammering, believe it or not. When things are going great, then you dig in and like hit them hard. That was a rule ofism that's been so key. It's incredibly helpful. Really? I know for a fact. So you think when it's not going well, it's okay and your supportive and that's nice, it's better than actually, hey, we need to fucking turn this around. We can do this and that you're much more tough.

48:53Sometimes tough love is needed. Tough love is needed when it's doing extraordinarily well. When things are going terribly wrong and there are the butterflies and stomach, you know, it's like seized up and teammates are quitting and somebody's hacked the site or whatever, you know, all these things like really being a solid productive voice of calmness and support is extraordinary help extraordinarily helpful. I think it's about like Understanding what the person needs in the moment. Some people do need that absolutely and it's unbelievable But some people don't resonate with that and actually they need like for me when it's really hard I've had some shit times Kevin.

49:36It was my mom giving me a kick up the awesome saying He got to wake up tomorrow and fucking stop moaning get on with this. It's so individual left. Kind of a weird one, Kevin, but what are your biggest lessons on what it means to be a great father and what great parenting is today? I have to be careful not to put too much pressure on my grourals to, you know, in this age of so much intensity in the Bay Area and school year's in college. Oh, absolutely. My 16 year old, we found she had a very severe eating disorder at end of December. We caught it luckily because it was fairly early on because of her annual exam.

50:15And so we saw the significant drop in weight. She's dancer. She has something called SIBO, stomach intestinal issues that had been another driver of having her limit her food. She was straight a student. She was under a lot of pressure, dancing 20 plus hours a week, and she just stopped eating, and she's ended up in the hospital now three times. And, you know, it's this multifactorial illness that is so prevalent for this time that we're not aware of, that it comes from social media and dance and all these other pressures, and it's culminated in this terrible illness. So I'm very cognizant of the pressures we put on our kids.

50:57I didn't talk about this too much, but I was blemish when I was young. Most hard, I think, additional problem to deal with. Hard thing with food, you can't just stop eating. You can't stop your interaction with food. I understand and believe me, there is also some gratification post or some endorphins or... 100%. In the recivitism for eating disorders is off the charts. So like everything else, it seems like if you have cancer or diabetes, you know, there's so many different treatments and scientifically focused treatments, but in eating disorders, there's nothing. And so these kids just go over and over and back in the circular motion.

51:37And I'm like in shock of how barbaric the treatments are for the, they're just not existent. There's something called family -based therapy, which is you sit down with your child, meal after meal after meal, and it's agonizing because it's like having a phobia and having to, you know, if you're scared of spiders being from the spiders all day. The hardest thing is they have to be the ones to initiate the change. Yes. Was it your daughter that did that? She, we don't know if she's still ready. She has to, you're exactly right. It's like there is the thrill of the notion of being thin and being a certain way and not wanting, you know, to change.

52:17And that's how we've ended up in the hospital three times. and we hope now she's making that right move and that she wants to get better and understands. She had a withdrawal from school. She is finishing her semester online through online school, which is God's end. It's incredible. It's like the Oxford Tutorial Method online, but she is, yeah, you do have to want it, but I could never imagine like an American kid, like my sophomore year in high school was great years, like so much fun, close friendships. And I don't never knew anyone even withdrawing from our high school before for any kind of medical and then for her For her to go through this is just agonizing with my mother my mother's now Colleague too and it was the hardest thing because for a good few years I just had to watch the person I love more than anything Suffer and there's nothing that you can do.

53:09That is really hard. Yeah, I think there are there are many more treatments that Should be applied you know, that should be more prevalent. I don't know whether it's TMS, if you've heard of trans migral stimulation, if I said that correctly, trans magnetic stimulation, different ways to kind of provoke the area of the brain and correct whether it's an eating disorder or alcoholism or addiction pathways or so on. But before we do a quick fight, two of my biggest concerns is actually like eating sort of thing, also young eating sort of the man is one that's really not talked about as well, especially for boys who seem more evoked.

53:44And then just like depression and loneliness. Hardly is Kevin. Our job is to invest in amazing products that hopefully make the world better, have great impact, I think. I can't find businesses in that calm or headspace of the world, which makes mental wellness help. They're not great businesses. Is this our job? The challenge of this era of our era is neurological issues. Peter always tends to be three steps ahead of us on all of this. He's been after this area for a while, but as we beat back cancer, as we beat back heart diseases, which diseased, which unequipulchally has happened, Alzheimer's, Louis body dementia, you know, all these mental illnesses bipolar, like these are the prominent illnesses of our time, and there need to be therapeutics developed for it.

54:33Yeah, this should be just as I think it was Richard Nixon, and like the 70s said, let's go after cancer, you know, we need to go after these neurological disorders that are becoming I mean, it's still prevalent in our society. I totally agree. I can talk to you all day, Kevin. I love the way I haven't really looked at the schedule. I've been hours, supposedly, doing it. But, okay, so I wanna do a quick fight. So I say, a statement, you give me your immediate thoughts. Does that sound okay? Yes. So what if you changed your mind almost in the last 12 months? The rapid ascension of the defense segment, like how it's gone from zero to 60, certainly palantir than endoral, but now, you know, how the world has dramatically changed and how unprepared the United States is.

55:18What VCG most respects and learn from? You know who I spent some time with when they were getting their first fun going was a group called VY Capital. Yeah, John Herring and Alexander Tamas. Their style and pace and patience and wisdom is extraordinary. I completely agree with you and actually very much aligned to your thinking on upside maximization. Truly focused on the mega outcomes. So I totally agree with that. I mean, a lot of funds and holy mozes that fund one is in Fuego. What's the biggest advice to someone entering Angel and Weston Kevin? That just rope off some money you want to lose because you've got to look at, you've got to like take a lot of swings at bat.

55:58So I think, you know, the node has like a corollary to this that you've got to like burn through like 40 million in venture before you really know what you're doing and you know, Angel is, you just gotta start learning and pattern recognizing you do that by taking risks. I totally agree with you. I'd also say write the same size check every day. Everyone thinks, I get a different conviction level. I'll write 100 care check and I'll write in 25. You're not that smart at pre -seed. Just write 50 care checks every time. Super important. Which VC would you most like to swap portfolios with? Why commentator continues to have this like ideal venture model In every class that comes around, like the whole valley says, oh, now they've really jumped the shark.

56:39They're no good anymore. But like year after year after year, keep producing these incredible companies with these. I think with Gary coming back as well. Yeah, Gary that. That's right again. So totally, if you that. Why is that? I passed on Gary when he was working on Posterous. It wasn't a great outcome. No, I just thought I'd throw that out there. So weird flex. Well, he might have earned billions in. And he's helping San Francisco though. He's doing a good job. I mean, this guy is incredible. Yeah, he's having his day. Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. Tell me, why is now a good time to be a founder?

57:12We are blessed with the Capitol Gods. Like, this is an incredible period. Like, don't get me wrong. And I haven't, I'm going to say, like, I have strong conviction that we're in the early years of the biggest bubble. And I say bubble because we're in this world of capitalism. The signs that I see and video becoming the most valuable company on the planet is just the precursor towards the bubble of all bubbles of the AI bubble. There's going to be so much made and created and of course there's going to be so much foolishness to come. But then you also have these compounding like add -on bubbles of crypto and fintech and You know, this worldwide economy and tech economy that's emerging, new areas of clean energy, we just got involved in an industrial biotech company called General Biological.

58:03So, there's so many different platforms to build off. I always look for platforms to invest, like the why now question is, in the beginning, the transformers came and Sam created chat GPT and there was plenty full of their fastest growing company. He came out of that and that tells you that the platform is here and build apps on top. And we're going to have so many different opportunities around this. So will Venture numbers be better or what's moving for us? More capital, more platforms, more breakthrough technologies? Well, there'll be much better than that 21, 22 catastrophe that we just saw of, oh my god, that was horrible.

58:42So, yes, I want, I want to say venture returns will absolutely be better because if you index against that, that's not too hard to compete against. Did you fuck up in 21 or 22? Oh, yeah. Who didn't? Final one for you, Kevin. What question are you now? You've had done many interviews over the years. You've been asked so many questions by so many different brilliant people. What question are you never asked that you should be asked? Perhaps it would be just that question that everyone always answers instantarily about with their weaknesses, but like what is your mental illness? Is it depression, anxiety, bipolar, addiction, and to be honest about it?

59:21Kevin listen dude, I so appreciate you. You've always been so kind to me and so supportive of what I was very, very young and I just really appreciate you. So thank you for doing this. You're still very, very young. Less young than I was but you're a strong. You're younger than Harry Styles, right? That's crazy. I mean that was just so much fun to I have to say so much of that show got edited out because it was maybe a little bit less PG rated and utterly hilarious But I wish we had a bloopers edition where you could see behind the scenes for that But sadly not quite yet I want to say huge thank you again to Kevin for being such an amazing guest and that was so much fun to do But before we leave you today all of you listening use tons of software every day Sometimes it fills us with rage you can't figure something out the chat that bottom right is useless.

1:00:09You keep getting bombarded with these useless pop -ups. And for those of you who build products, no one wants their product to feel like this. Thankfully, a company exists to help users without annoying them. Command bar. It does a couple of very helpful things. First, it's a chatbot that uses AI to give users extremely personalized responses and deflect tickets. But it can be beyond just text. It can also co -brows with the user and show them how to do things inside the UI. magic, but it can also detect when users would benefit from a proactive nudge, like a helpful hint, or an invitation to start a free trial.

1:00:42Command Bar is already used by world -class companies like Gusto, Haschicorp, Yachtpo, and Angelist. If you're a product CX or marketing leader, check them out at commandbar .com slash Harry. And talking about incredible companies with Command Bar, I want to talk to you about a new venture fund making waves by taking a very different approach. It's a public venture fund anyone can invest in, not just institutions and accredited investors. The Fundri's Innovation Fund is democratising venture capital, which could have big consequences for the industry. The fund is already off to a good start with $100 million into some of the largest most in -demand AI and data infrastructure companies, companies like OpenAI, Anthropic and Databricks.

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1:02:43As always I so appreciate all your support and stay tuned for an incredible episode this coming Wednesday with one of the leading AI founders with the co -founder and CEO of DeepL.