State of early-stage VC, finding PMF, Caroline Ellison testifies & more with Zach Coelius | E1826

11 Oct 2023 · 1 h 11 min

Ask about this episode

Ask anything about it. ChatGPT or Claude reads this page and answers with the times it was said.

Connect VO and ask about every podcast you hear, including the moments you saved. Add to ChatGPT · Add to Claude

In short

Podcast Summary: This Week in Startups - E1826

Episode Title

State of early-stage VC, finding PMF, Caroline Ellison testifies & more with Zach Coelius

Episode Overview In this episode of *This Week in Startups*, host Jason Calacanis interviews Zach Coelius to discuss various topics including the phases of early-stage startups, the current state of venture capital (VC), and the significance of product-market fit (PMF). They also address audience questions and share insights on recent developments in the tech world, including Caroline Ellison's testimony in the Sam Bankman-Fried trial.

---

Key Topics and Discussions

  1. Phases of Early-Stage Startups (2:01)
  2. Phase 1: Pre-Seed/Idea Stage
  3. Fundraising typically from friends and family.
  4. Founders may leverage personal networks to secure initial funding.
  • Phase 2: Seed Stage
  • Startups develop a minimum viable product (MVP) and acquire initial users.
  • Key metrics and validation of the product concept are essential.
  • Phase 3: Seed Plus/Seed Extension
  • Involves iteration based on market feedback.
  • Founders often pivot their ideas based on customer insights and engagement. This phase is critical for achieving genuine product-market fit.
  1. Understanding Product-Market Fit (PMF) (22:36)
  2. PMF is identified when a product resonates with the market, leading to spontaneous word-of-mouth recommendations.
  3. Key indicators of PMF include:
  4. Customers actively promoting the product.
  5. High engagement and retention rates.
  6. Customers reaching out for improvements or features.
  1. Current State of Venture Capital (VC) (13:17)
  2. Discussion on the shifting dynamics in VC following a period of low-interest rates (ZIRP).
  3. Investors are now more cautious, focusing on capital efficiency and sustainable growth metrics.
  4. The importance of validating ideas and demonstrating traction before seeking funding is emphasized.
  1. Audience Questions and Insights
  2. How to describe PMF simply?: If customers are eager to engage and seek out a product, PMF is likely achieved.
  3. Challenges for First-Time Founders: Raising pre-seed funding can be difficult without connections or a proven track record. Validation of ideas is crucial.
  4. Advice for Pitching VCs: Building relationships and being helpful in the community can open doors. Networking is essential.
  1. Caroline Ellison Testifies (54:49)
  2. Caroline Ellison's testimony in the Sam Bankman-Fried trial highlights the misuse of customer funds at FTX and the systematic fraud at Alameda Research.
  3. The discussion emphasizes the broader implications of crypto's regulatory environment and the necessity for oversight in the industry.
  1. Cruise's Robotaxi Fleet Update (1:01:49)
  2. The deployment of Cruise's robotaxi fleet in San Francisco.
  3. Discussion on the potential impact of autonomous vehicles on road safety and the market opportunity.

---

Key Takeaways

  • The Landscape of Early-Stage Startups: Understanding the different phases and characteristics that define early-stage startups is crucial for founders and investors alike.
  • Importance of PMF: Achieving product-market fit is a pivotal moment for startups, suggesting they have a viable product that meets market demand.
  • Navigating VC Landscape: Current economic conditions have made fundraising more challenging, and startups must demonstrate viability and sustainable growth to attract investments.
  • Regulatory Environment: The testimony surrounding the FTX collapse underlines the need for increased regulatory scrutiny in the crypto space.
  • The Future of Autonomous Vehicles: Innovations like Cruise's robotaxi fleet promise to reshape urban transportation and improve safety.

---

Additional Resources

  • Follow Zach Coelius: [Twitter](https://twitter.com/zachcoelius)
  • Follow Jason Calacanis: [Twitter](https://twitter.com/jason)
  • Founder University: A program designed to assist entrepreneurs in building their startups.

For further insights and updates, subscribe to the *This Week in Startups* podcast and explore Jason's other ventures and resources.

Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.

Hear the part that matters, and keep it.Open this episode in VO. Double tap your headphones to save a moment as you listen.
Get VO free

Transcript

Automatic transcript. May contain errors.

0:28You got a space. and then all of a sudden you just like minor pivot just based on the feedback and now you're running a sunday shop now if you were the investor and you got sold on hey this is the best brisket sandwich you could ever have this is the best you know reuben in the world um and you come back and say hey we're making an ice cream parlor you're like what i didn't invest in an ice cream parlor but if you come back and you say look the ice cream uh sundaes we charge eight bucks for them cost us three and we're printing money and we sold 100 of them yesterday and uh guess what we suddenly find ourselves profitable we can pay our rent now you got the mat this week in startups is brought to you by found do you want access to the performance protocols that pro athletes and special ops use with found an elite military operator supercharges your focus sleep recovery and longevity, all powered by your unique data.

1:24Want a true edge in work and life? Go to fount.bio slash twist for$500 off. Coda is the all-in-one doc for teams, and they introduced an AI-powered assistant to take the busy out of the work. Get a$1 ,000 startup credit at poda.io slash twist. And Miro helps take ideas from in your head to out there in the world with its ability to democratize collaboration and input. Sign up for free at Miro.com slash startups. All right, everybody, welcome back to this week in startup today. My guy, Zach Coleus is back for another exciting episode of Ask an Angel. Now, we're both VCs, really. But we started as angels, as we write early stage checks um what is early stage i think we would define it zach you correct me if i'm wrong as uh pre-series a those that would be the earliest seed stage yeah we're in agreement there yeah yeah from from the very beginning from an idea all the way up to the point where like the line starts to extend in any 80 it can extend the lines if you got you know six months of month over month growth and you know all the metrics that the vcs love to see then they'll hit that bid but before that come talk to us yeah and we would call this starting point um what what are the characteristics of the uh startups in the zone where you and i invest this early stage what would you say is most characteristic of the work that gets done during that period and the startups who make it out of that period yeah so i tend to think of it as three sort of stages in the early stage, quote unquote.

3:10You've got sort of what traditionally is called pre-seed or concept stage or idea stage or sort of like, it's just getting started. And so that's where the founders are largely able, if they're able, they raise money from people they know, people who've learned and watched them over the years and seen that they have the ability to perform and succeed. And if they're successful, then people are very happy to give them capital because they've done it before. Sometimes those are people we know because they're famous. So, you know, if Travis was to go start another company, you and I would be running up there being like, hey, hey, hey, hey, please let us invest.

3:42Yeah. Some of those people are not famous, but we know them because we've, you know, spent a lot of time with entrepreneurs and we get to see them in the trenches, in the arena fighting it out. And, you know, it's easy to bet on those people if you know them. So that's phase one. Phase one is you got an idea and you pass the hat with your friends and family, thus the term friends and family round. Yeah, yeah. And there are some investors who invest at that stage from institutional funds or from their own capital. And even if they don't know you, one of the most well-known is a guy named Charles Hudson, a precursor.

4:19So he started doing this super early, a long time ago, when everyone thought he was crazy. And he would write relatively small checks into lots of startups. And the idea being, oh, if you invest in enough of them, some of them will break out and then you know power law being power law that will return the fund um and but traditionally worked out for charles who's been on the program many times yeah yeah yeah charles is charles is brilliant and he does good work so it's not surprising he's done very well yeah all right phase two you you got the friends and family past the half phase you got an idea you're in the ideation you know you've got an idea of a market what's the next phase in this early stage you said there were three phases so the that's what we would call our sort of like pre-seed traditionally Now we're into seed stage.

5:02So seed stage means you have some MVP, you have metrics, you have validation, which is like, hey, I've got this idea. And I went to the market and I figured out if it was any good or not. Here's my channel. For instance, I've gone and done marketing tests to see that, hey, I can acquire customers and people actually want this thing. But we don't have any metrics yet. And the MVP maybe works. Maybe you've made it in, you know, who knows how you made it. It's not a scalable product, but it appears that there is a real thing here that customers want. And it appears that we can scale this. And there's a big, big TAM, big market opportunity.

5:41All the things that seem good, look good, smell good. Now we got a potential VC investable opportunity here. The one thing that you don't have usually at this point is you don't have significant revenue. So you're not looking at hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in revenue. You've got something in revenue, but probably maybe not very much. You don't have month over month growth rates. And you don't have the core metrics that most VCs are really interested in, which is things like retention and churn and the virality of your product and your CAC LTV. And all the things that, you know, if you go and spend a lot of time looking at VC metrics, they're all this long list.

6:19You don't have any of those. But you do have something that seems like it's pretty good. And this is what we would normally call the seed stage. And it's pretty big category. It's and the checks there can run anywhere from hundreds of 1000s to millions of dollars from investors. Got it. So phase one, you're doing ideation, you're raising from friends and family phase two, you're raising from seed funds, you have an MVP, a minimum viable product, a prototype, some people have played with it, you have an idea of how you're going to reach them. That was the channel. So you got the MVP, you got the channel channel just, hey, where's the stream of users is going to flow from could be from a forum like reddit it could be from a mailing list it could be from a podcast it could be from instagram ads it could be from facebook ads any number of places uh could be your funnel and you do have maybe not the full complement of metrics but you may have 10 people using the product and you can study three of them and so you have some idea of how big this could get what it is uh and how do people like it so it's not strong product market fit it's not market pull of course where the market is seeking you out but it's something that's more than nothing yes yeah yeah okay so now the third phase you said there were three phases in the early stage that you look at broadly the third stage is what we would normally call seed plus or see extension.

7:42And so what happens here, and this is very, very common, is a startup will raise some money, they'll go into the market, they'll make contact with the market, and the market will rip their face off. Like, yeah, great. I have this awesome idea. I went and I built something and it didn't work. And not only did it not work, I got my ass handed to me. And most founders quit at that point. A few, the ones that I really like, they take that opportunity to look at what they've learned. They look at what the market is telling them and they iterate. They're like, oh, well, it turns out that they don't want this game that I built, but this chat program I built to help me build the game.

8:17Everybody loves that. I want to start working on that. And that iteration cycle is messy. And it's most investors get really skittish in that sort of iteration cycle because the companies that are flailing look very similar to the companies that are doing good things. And so usually your insiders are the only investors who want to invest in you, or occasionally you get outside investors who get comfortable in that iteration cycle. But that iteration cycle is usually where the most magic things happen. Because when you make contact with the market, very rarely does the company just go up into the right and like, off we go.

8:52The first original idea was brilliance and everything else is good to go from there. Like, for instance, in the video game turning into the chat, that's Slack. And like, it was, you know, Twitter, that was a podcast thing that turned into Twitter. So those iterations are magical. Yeah, those iterations are magical. And there's often, in my opinion, great opportunities there, both as an investor and for the entrepreneurs, when they can learn from making contact with the market about what the market really wants. And then they can go build something that people actually really want. And then, boom, you're off to the races, hopefully, if you find that.

9:27And so what I like to say is that moment is the moment where you have real product market fit. And by product market fit, I mean, you can cold call a customer at nine o 'clock at night on her cell phone while she's putting her kid to bed. Describe what you do in one sentence. And instead of her saying, why are you calling me? She's like, oh, my God, I need to talk to you tomorrow. I actually need that. I want that. That's my guest, please. And that's that product market fit is like we could talk about that for hours, but that's a magical moment. And I get really excited when I find companies that have that.

10:00You see these blue light glasses I'm wearing? I'm not wearing for style, although they are very stylish. They've totally changed my life. Why? I started having headaches, right? And had eye strain. So I got these blue light blocking glasses that do a little magnification because I need readers. Yeah, I look nuts. But my eye strain's gone down. My headaches have gone away. And I'm sleeping better. Do you know how I got on this? I got on it because I now have a health coach. Who's my health coach? It's Fount, F-O-U-N-T. It's a health company that's created custom health and performance programs that are tailored to your body, obviously, also your goals, and they take into account your lifestyle.

10:39My coach is incredible. I text with them all the time. They did a blood work for me. They check out my wearable data, and we do weekly calls to see if I'm on track and getting the results I want. They also told me about some supplements I should be taking based on the blood work, and they do it at a fraction of the cost. We upgraded my diet. I'm doing a little more protein. We've optimized my sleep. That's great. I got the supplement packs. I feel great. I feel like I'm in control of my destiny. If you want to be like me and you're concerned about your health and you want to just try to do better, have some experts on your team.

11:08Build your own program. Go to found.bio slash twist. That's F-O-U-N-T dot B-I-O slash twist. Get your free consultation. Mention Twist. You get$500 off your first month and get your own personal health coach. Health is well. And if you're running a startup, if you're a CEO, if you're a capital allocator, take it seriously i love this service found dot bio slash twist and a lot of founders uh give up they try one thing and they give up and this is why you know i think part of the magic of the early stage is when you have builder founders uh you know a developer a designer and a growth hacker walk into a startup you know that compliment you know you know they run out of capital or they're on fumes but they're still iterating on the product So hey, listen, if we were going to, you know, use an analogy here of a restaurant, you got a space, you got customers walking by, you start with the sandwich shop.

12:02Yeah, you know, nobody really likes your sandwiches. But everybody talks about the ice cream sundae at the end. And it's just because you made some really unique sundae. And then people start coming in just for the sundae. You know, hey, want a sandwich? Like, no, I'm just going to go right for the sundae. And I brought my kid with me. Oh, and I brought my co-worker. So, wow, what's unique about this, you know, sundae here? okay let's put three sundaes on and let's change the name of the place from you know zach and jason sandwich shop to zach and jason's sundaes and then all of a sudden you just like minor pivot just based on the feedback and now you're running a sunday shop now if you were the investor and you got sold on hey this is the best brisket sandwich you could ever have this is the best you know reuben in the world um and you come back and say hey we're making an ice cream parlor you're like what i didn't invest in an ice cream parlor but if you come back and you say look the ice cream sundaes we charge eight bucks for them cost us three and we're printing money and we sold a hundred of them yesterday and uh guess what we're suddenly find ourselves profitable we can pay our rent now you got the magic right so just keep that in mind folks i think if you figure something out and you're actually the chefs yourself as opposed to just an idea person who has to hire a chef you're going to go a lot further so watch the tv show the bear uh great uh show for entrepreneurship all right let's get to some questions here i think it's a really good overview.

13:19And this all everything, this is the suffering that we go through with startups, after you have product market fit, and that the Sundays are flying out the, the front door, and you got a line around the corner, then you need operators, you need to scale it, you got to get figure out a way to get from 1000 to, you know, from 100 to 1000. And you got to figure from one location to 10, yada, yada. So, and there are people who have expertise in that, that's typically when a series a happens. So let's talk about the state right now. The state of fundraising, I can tell you, Zach being out there on the road, raising our fourth fund, and we're halfway done with it.

13:58And we'll finish up by the end of the year, I think we'll be oversubscribed again. But boy, is this a lot more work than previous times. So maybe you could explain to the audience, what is going on right now, in the underbelly, the plumbing, back rooms of the venture industry where limited partners, the people who give money to general partners, you know, venture firms, limited partners can take the form of high net worth individuals, fund to funds, endowments, sovereign wealth funds, etc. Those LPs and that GP relationship, those, there's some texture there going on right now. And then of course, there's what our GP is doing at venture firms in terms of investing in startups, give us the back channel what's going on the back room right now as you see it as that call is yeah i mean so the big the the big uh tldr is everyone got drunk when interest rates were zero and everything went to the moon i mean any idiot with a checkbook in our job literally any idiot in the checkbook looked like a genius genius for almost a decade from effectively from 2012 to 2022 everything went up so like over those years, it was like 50 % compounding IRR every year, everything going up, everybody's super duper smart.

15:14And the LPs looked at that and they're like, look at us, we're geniuses. We invested in all this venture capital and look at it go up. And if you look back, you know, a couple of years ago, there were LPs releasing returns from their venture portfolios that were just unbelievable. I mean, it was like, I think MIT was releasing a 50 % plus IRR for their entire portfolio, largely driven by venture and other things. But at the end of the day, Zerp, zero interest rates, like basically drove everything to the moon. And so like, for instance, I invested over those years in almost 80 companies and we only had to go bankrupt in all those years.

15:52So pre-seed early stage investing. And like, and that wasn't because I was smart. It was just because everything got funded again and again and again and again. And everything went up and every company had growth. And it was just like, it was amazing. it was it was there's a funny it used to be in uh there was a bumper sticker you'd see around san francisco in the valley every now and then they would say please god just one more bubble and they were referring to the 2000 bubble and they just wanted to have one because it was so good back then and now now we like it's like oh please god one more zerp uh that was it was like too easy it was a weird experience i have to say the the lack of shutdowns was always a red flag to me and And I had many a conversation with founders who, you know, we said, hey, third, fourth pivot, you know, big overhang, you've raised a bunch of money, lots of dilution on the cap table, you know, maybe after this pivot, we sell the company or shut it down.

16:48And then, you know, take a break and, you know, go work somewhere or, you know, let's work on our next idea because there's no way to get over this overhang. You raised 20 million, you raised 10 million, no product market fit, it's not working. Yeah. And sure enough, there was always another investor, sometimes a new investor who those founders who got really good at selling vision could get to put the incremental million dollar$2 million bridge into. And in fact, a lot of those companies maybe should have shut down, it would have been healthier, but they were able to hang on. But yeah, 2022 2023, I'm assuming the two out of 80 change to 10 or 20 out of 80.

17:27you know for me i haven't i haven't we haven't lost one yet but i mean god we are dancing through a stream of bullets i mean i had a company go through a fundraise where literally we like we were ready to do the shutdown we went out and like we did the the the soft landing attempts which none of them normally we would have had a whole bunch of yeses and like in this in this environment like nobody wanted to talk to this company i mean it was like explain the soft landing that we talk about in the industry. So what happens with a quote unquote, soft landing is when a company is getting ready to hit the wall, and you know, the product is not working, and the team is tired, and the investors are tired, and we're ready to we're ready to shut this company down.

18:09Usually we have some sort of asset that has built up, they could be customers, they could be a product, they could be just a team, they could be knowledge about how to build a particular thing. But usually there's some value in that entity that has accumulated over time. and you know historically all the way up until the last couple years because tech companies the big fangs of the world were growing so rapidly and then all the baby tech companies that were trying to become fangs were growing so rapidly they were always excited to acquire these small startups because you could get team you could get tech you could get ip you could get customers there's things you could get out of these and so they would we would go to them with a startup and be like, Hey, we got this startup.

18:49It's got 10 engineers, 20 people in total. They've raised, you know, call it$7 million. And one of these big companies would buy the company and usually pay off the investors. So the investors made some money out of the deal. Oh, got their money back. Usually you didn't make any money, but you got your money back. And then the founders and the team would get a job going to work for the big company. So this is traditional we call an acqui-hire. And I mean, for many years, it was really easy to do. And we've, I've sold, in my portfolio, we've sold, I think about 15 companies of the companies we've invested in.

19:26and everybody saves face it's a nice ending the founders can take a win you know sometimes these uh acquisitions and acquires happen and the investors get nothing or they get like 10 cents on the dollar but you know oh it gets an incredible tech crunch right oh this company's been acquired yeah and you know we know the truth on the inside that was a terrible sale it would to even qualify it as a sale would be dishonest in some cases it was a soft landing and so you know we we try to be de minimis in the industry i'm sorry um we try to be magnanimous in the industry you know there's no reason to like be like oh wow this failed or oh wow you returned two cents on the dollar you lost 98 cents on the dollar it was hey you made an effort hey you wound up at google or facebook or some other company and uh you know yeah we'll we'll see on the other side when you come up with your next idea yeah but now people are not interested in doing that i think in large part because they've laid off 20 000 people at google facebook microsoft pick the company salesforce they've laid off 10 or 20 000 people the idea of going even through the legal of a transaction to bring in you know a 10 person team a 20 person team a six person team the the juice it worth the squeeze because they got a line of people out the door that they could hire or rehire a boomerang so that is the issue as you see it as well i guess yeah no i mean it's the the sort of aqua hire soft landing market is, you know, a fraction of what it used to be.

20:54It still happens in the case of if you build something that's very strategic, and there's a partner who really wants that, you know, you know, there's there, there, those things do happen. But you know, it's, it's not like it used to be. It's become very challenging, to say the least. All right, everybody, product velocity is your goal. The faster you ship, the faster you get feedback, the more feedback you get from customers, the better you can make your product, but mind-numbing operational tasks are going to slow you down. So here's your solution. Coda's new AI-powered work assistant is going to help you get your product to market faster.

21:31Here's an insane demo if you're watching. You can use Coda AI to tag customer feedback, draft documents, suggest target audiences, and summarize your product discussions and more. It's like adding two or three staff members to your team, your sales team, you know, they bring in data from sources like Salesforce, and then they can use Coda AI to suggest action items, meeting agendas and source new leads. So get started with Coda AI today. I use Coda every day. We love it. What is Coda? If you haven't used Coda before, combines documents, workflow, and databases, basically, if you go to jtrading.com, we built that on Coda, everything we're doing with founder university built on Coda, you can take advantage of this special limited time offer for startups right now.

22:18They're going to give you$1 ,000 startup credit. Get the startup credit right now. Don't wait. Coda.io slash TWIST. Bank the$1 ,000 credit. Start playing with it. It is awesome. They are an awesome platform. Again, I use it all day long. I love Coda. Oh, what a great product. All right, so let's do a couple of questions here. How do you describe PMF, product market fit, in the simplest terms possibly? You had a great analogy earlier. They said, hey, you call this person on a Sunday and they have no time for you. Their kid's screaming, but they still say, hey, listen, I don't want to forget this.

22:54Can you email me and send me a calendar invite for tomorrow? Yeah. That was a really beautiful description of it. Let's unpack it a little bit more here. What else is a good sign that you have product market fit? So, I mean, think back to like when, you know, Travis started Uber. Like, you know, he and I, we were at this party. They hadn't even started Uber yet. And we were at a party and he told me about it. And I was like, oh my God, push a button, get a car. Oh my God, I want that so bad. Then, you know, given how brilliant I am, I convinced to argue with him for two hours about why I wouldn't work.

23:26I was like, dude, the taxi lobby is going to crush you. They're a big bunch of blah, blah, blah. He's like, I'm a fighter. I can beat them. And I mean, I wasn't investing then. So I don't know what I would have done. But given the fact that I told him that it was a bad idea, I probably wouldn't have invested. So I'm kind of an idiot. Well, you had cognitive dissonance, actually. So let's pause there for a second. And this is important for people to understand who are angel investors or parts of syndicates or who are on the other side of the table of founders. A lot of times the best ideas can be polarizing and you could have conflicting ideas.

23:56One, regulation. You identified their number one headwind. It is regulation. The number one reason it's awesome is because you wanted it. You yourself could see using it. You understood the problem. So then we're left as investors or people looking to work at these companies or founders looking to pivot to say, hey, is it worth taking on that battle? Do I want to spend the time to try to solve that problem? Startups at their core are a series of problems to be solved. Whether the problem is this product doesn't exist and I have to write the code or nobody's ever used a product like this. So I've got to convince them to try it.

24:35There's all these series of things. And so that is part of the process. So I think you did the right thing by identifying those, but you don't want to over index on negativity. I've learned. Yeah, because a 1 % chance at a 5000 X return is worth taking implied odds wise, you know, let's talk about product market fit. The one I love most is when somebody who has the product in a company starts telling other people in the company about it. This could be called word of mouth in net promoter. this could be a promoter as opposed to a detractor or an indifferent person so one way you know you have this is when people come and start using your product and you ask them how did you find out about the product if word of mouth is in there a friend told me a colleague told me my lord you've done it you've done it that is product market fit when somebody tells another person to use it they use it and they become a customer that's it baby that's as good as it gets in my mind because now your product is growing while you're asleep and doing nothing yeah like literally your product's growing other signs for you of product market fit starting to collect things you've actually seen in the real world where you said ah you know there's something that's happening here that really nails the the core of it which is when the market starts pulling the product out of you and needing and wanting the product more and you are no longer pushing when you're no longer having to go out there and bang on heads and spend a lot of time trying to convince people to use your product but people instead are sending you long emails about all the things that are wrong with your product and what they would like you to fix and how they'd like you to prove it and the word of mouth is happening and all of a sudden there starts to be this sort of like movement around what you've built um then you know like for instance i'll give you an example i uh i invested a long time ago this thing called mud water which is the mushroom tea company yes and um fantastic product.

26:32It's an unbelievable product if you want to quit drinking coffee. Now, for many, many years, I've been a coffee drinker. And so I'm like, I love it, but I don't drink coffee. And then recently, I decided to try to stop, quit drinking coffee, see what happened. And oh my god, mud water is like magic. When it comes to when I'm really needing coffee, I have a mud instead, and it totally solves the problem. And that's when we get to product market fit, is when you have those sort of magic moments. And we saw that early on when we invested in the company was like the company was just like it was just growing like crazy and the word of mouth was happening and people were like i'm so excited about this and it was like that's just magic there's fireworks everywhere isn't product market fit i think is equally as important and one thing i will tell you is not product market fit is you ask your friends or you ask vcs or you ask civilians about your product they give you feedback they tell you it's amazing uh they tell you it's great they tell you all these ideas for your product the reason why that's super dangerous is you've manufactured that feedback that's not feedback that's unsolicited that is solicited feedback when you explicitly start asking people to give you feedback on your product you're giving them permission and people are gracious people generally speaking are rooting for entrepreneurs they're rooting for underdogs so they're going to give you a bunch of feedback but if they don't actually use your product what good is their feedback i'm not uh a couch surfing person so when airbnb and the 1.0 came out you know i had a lot of feelings on it i was like this is crazy you know you're going to wind up on a serial killers couch my as a you know 40 year old at the time my feedback as a 40 year old who could afford to stay in hotels uh and liked room service uh you know and and like you know i don't know about fancy but nicer hotels and nice linens and had a whole list of things was not pertinent yeah the 25 year old jay cow would have been like you know what i couldn't afford a hotel in tokyo i would have stayed for 10 days i would have worked out of there if possible this would open up a world of possibilities because i didn't want to stay in a hostel but i would have stayed in an extra bedroom sure so make sure that the feedback you're getting now airbnb today where they have full houses and i like to bring a family or maybe two families, you know, bring my sister in law or my brother, and their family and you have two families staying at a house, I have a long list of things.

28:49Yes, washer and dryer is important. Yes, pre ordering food, you know, having a barbecue, all that stuff is great having kids toys, whatever. I have a list of feedback for when I'm there with multiple families at a house when I'm traveling, that I would love to give and that's valid feedback. So just make sure you're not getting silly feedback. The feedback from customers who pay is so important, especially when they churn. And so just be careful that you're not manufacturing product market fit. I'll leave it at that. Okay. Let's take another question from our audience. How hard is it for first time founder to raise pre-seed?

29:26Any advice to help it or what to wait for? I'm going to say, hey, you know what to wait for as in what could improve about your startup that would increase your chances so let's take it um first how hard is it to raise pre-seed um i mean it really depends on who you know and how much they trust you and how much they believe in you so you know if you're you know the son of a billionaire you know somebody rich it's probably pretty easy you know yeah if you're um you know growing up in a community that doesn't have access to money and you don't know a lot of people have access to money it becomes a lot harder and so if you're if you have to move beyond the people who know you then and you don't know people who have the ability to write checks to help you get the thing off the ground um it becomes much much harder and and what i like to say is is that ideas are worthless so you have an idea and so does everybody else it doesn't mean anything validated ideas are priceless and so what that means is that If you can show that that idea could work, that people want the product, that you actually have a channel, that you actually can build it.

30:40If you can demonstrate that this thing is real and can be big, suddenly you move from something which is like everybody has an idea. And the hundreds of emails I get every day from people who have ideas are trying to raise money. And I just hit archive, archive, archive. But it doesn't matter. You move from that category to suddenly to a category of viability and potentially something that could raise money from people who don't know you. Then you've kind of broken into that. But even still, super duper hard because there's a whole series of challenges to get in front of someone like Jason, get in front of someone like me, to get into Y Combinator, to get into any of the other great accelerators that are out there, to find people to invest in you.

31:16You need to prepare for a full-time job of hustling. Hustling is harder than you've ever hustled before. And even then, it could take a very long time. So when I had my last company, we raised$15 ,000 in the first year. so from the first year of operation we had one person or two people three people five page a couple people a couple small angels yeah but that kept us alive yeah so let's pause for a second here um on uh raising money uh this is a really great insight uh the majority of people do not have a rich network so we'll just put it at that right six percent of the country are accredited investors who are legally allowed to invest in private companies now of course in the most private friends and family people raise money from non-accredited so we'll put that aside for now um the legal issues around it so you know talking about 90 of the company let's say is never invested in a small business uh whether it's a deli or you know uh airbnb so i think going through a test who are the 10 wealthiest people you know in your network and just emailing them and asking them or asking them over text um i'm starting a company i have two quick questions for you one have you ever invested in a startup before or a small business number two if no would you consider it um and just quickly assessing and you can tell them because i'm starting a company i just wanted to pitch you on it um and it's fine to say no and so you just get that really quick and if one and two are 10 out of 10 have never done it before i think you've got the answer they've never done it you might be able to convince them to but yeah it's going to be it's going to be hard.

32:54If nine out of 10 say, Yeah, of course, I've invested in three or four companies. And yeah, sure, I'd love to hear your pitch. Well, now you know, your network is a network with people in it who do this. So just be just run a little A B test. To your point about validation, the more validated you get, the more credibility you have, the easier it is to, you know, start meeting investors, angel investors in a Silicon Valley. So if you have 100 hours of work that you can do in the next month, right? Let's say you're doing this on the weekends. Would you allocate 100 hours? How would you allocate those 100 hours acts to validating your product, your thesis, building out your MVP, or reaching out to investors?

33:38Let's say you have nothing right now but an idea. Month one, two and three, you have 100 hours of work. I'm only spending hours validating. Yeah, until I'm 100%. 100 % like I'm not even spending time working on my idea until I've validated that people actually want it so like for example here's a good way to validate it let's say you're building a consumer let's say you're just building any product you go onto google and you find the keywords that people would search for your product so let's say you're building a a new ai video tool to help parents uh do cool stuff um and like you go in there and you figure out what people would type into google because people type everything into Google to search for that.

34:18And you make an ad for what you're making for them, what you hope to make for them. And then you put that ad into Google and you write the ad for why it works. And then you make a landing page that says, coming soon, would you like to get on the invite list? Submit your email address. And then they submit their email address. And then the next page or the next panel is like, oh, why do you want this? What's important to you? And then you just keep asking them questions until you start noticing them falling off. and you spend some little bit of money on that and boom, you're very quickly going to realize, do people click on the first ad?

Read the full transcript

34:52Because if they don't want it, they're not going to click on it. If they really want it really bad, they're going to like click, click, click, click. You're going to have a high CTR and you're going to have something really, really viable. Do they submit the email address? Do they leave comments? Like that so quickly will prove - Classic landing page technique that takes a day of work. Nobody does it. Like literally, I see zero startups that come in when they're pitching, They're like, oh, here's our landing page technique approach. Here's the outcomes. And here's the metrics. And I'm like, they never, they never do it.

35:22And here I typed in AI tool, video tool. The auto correct or auto suggest on Google added the word free. So I thought I'd add that. Sure. And to your point, the first sponsored ad is from Vimeo. This product actually exists. Then one from Adobe, the new Adobe Express, grab the best AI video maker. It exists. Yeah. And then turn video into AI, create stunning videos with AI, video leap app. So I don't know who that is. And, you know, what you learn very quickly is not only is this validated, but you have two of the largest players in the world doing it. And then a third person who's a startup right here with that product and market.

36:00So do you have to validate from that point on? No, you've got massive competitors. You're too late to the market, perhaps. yeah or perhaps there's a good opportunity for you to do something that's got a beachhead market a channel a bigger niche maybe it's just for parents and baby pictures maybe it's just for family photos um so there you have it a very simple way for you to validate is landing pages and that's the the category you want to look at um someone needs to talk about this like just startup validation just like here's how to validate your startups so like and just like go through all different categories and like just with examples yeah yeah and you know to your point uh and to the person's question we saw this as an opportunity we have this founder university which we did as two days which we changed to a 12-week program now and we had 2 000 people apply zach for founder university uh for the 12-week course we accepted 450 people representing 220 teams and i added would you like to be considered for the launch funds 25 000 friends and family investment what percentage of people who filled out their weekly progress report do you think check that box you had to pick what 10 10 just because people are bad at that 60 oh yes and this is at a 1 million dollar valuation so it is a 25k check at a million dollar valuation six out of 10 people click it every week cool i did that as a test so talking about a b testing and product validation i didn't know i thought maybe you know people have their own 25k so they're just you know if I was starting a company today, I would put 250k in for my own pocket, you would put 500k and you've done really well for yourself.

37:34And then maybe you'd call some of your friends and say, Hey, I'm raising at a$5 million valuation$10 million valuation friends and family around I'm putting in 250 myself, you want to put in 250 again. Yeah. But you know, we forget the days where you were raising 15. It's a pretty scary concept to for you, Zach, at that time to find 15k in your own personal account, and then write it to the company. Yeah, I didn't have it. um and so i was just shocked you know how guess how many in the last two classes we have those checks we wrote take a guess uh 460 so 240 you wrote 100 of them 46 wow that's awesome that's cool that's quite an awesome portfolio 45k checks and i'm just like you know when this thing gets to 300 of these yeah which is only 7.5 million yeah i'm gonna be really interested to look at what of these yeah what i got right just little 25k micro checks what's in there and then uh you know so you we as uh investors also a b test concepts and try them and we'll see what happens right we're running the test we got there's a market for it now let's see if the returns are there right yeah so we'll see very quickly that that's really fascinating it's really different it kind of goes back to the original charles hudson idea of writing really small checks or really low valuations into a lot of companies and then seeing what happens from that but you've got because of your media empire and because of the footprint that you have all the infrastructure and the team and all the stuff that you've built you've got the ability to do that at scale which is like yeah i like that idea i'm i'm gonna be really curious to see what comes out of that yeah that's absolutely awesome yeah i got it's gonna be interesting it's kind of part of my launch for pitch if you want to read that launch.co slash memo i wrote a deal memo but well in this third fourth fund we're doing my plan is to have 300 of those checks in the fund and then to invest a second time in maybe the top 20 of those so maybe 60 of them would get 100 to a 500k check from us and then that would put us at you know five to ten percent ownership in those come the winners of that company if you think of it like a funnel yeah yeah um so we'll see it's a great way to do it i like it that's smart yeah it's an experiment right it'll be 7.5 percent of the hundred million fund, hopefully.

39:46Founders always ask me for pitch deck punch-ups and how to present their startup in a better way. Well, I've got some great news. We worked with a team at Miro, the awesome whiteboarding software to create an amazing pitch deck template for founders. You can see it if you're watching the video right now, or you can just go search for it. You go to miro.com slash miroverse and search for pitch deck. You'll find it immediately. And this pitch deck will help you go from zero to VC ready. Our founder university participants, they love using this template, it starts them on second or third base. And if you're hybrid or fully remote, Miro is incredibly useful to you.

40:22It's like an old school in person whiteboarding session, but distributed and asynchronous. So you can work on your time schedule. Miro lets you brainstorm ideas and collaborate on projects from anywhere in the world, whether you're in the Adirondacks, or you're in Cabo or you're skiing in Lake Tahoe. When you think about Miro, think zero to one, but faster. And Miro is so much more than a simple digital whiteboard. Your team can collaborate on planning, research design, and feedback cycles. Now remember, faster inputs equals faster outcomes, and velocity is how startup wins. We look for product velocity in all of our startups.

40:55So to access our new Miroverse template and thousands of others, sign up today for a free Miro account at miro.com.com. startups. Again, M I R O.com slash startups mirror.com slash startups. So an interesting question, somebody asks that they are going to be coming to the Bay Area for two weeks, starting Sunday, any advice on how to officially meet VCs and pitch my startup? Okay, so they're just showing up. They're showing up and they want to walk down. Well, Sandhill Road and just pitch folks. Yeah. Is that exactly how it works or uh no no no uh i would i would change the expectations uh at the end of the day silicon valley is a is a place of relationships and it's about uh honestly it's a place of giving which is like you in silicon valley when you show up the nobody knows you and the only way to really break in here the best way to break in here is to just do favors so it's funny when um joseph wallah who was the founder of hello sign um he uh was on my debate team and my ex-wife and him were really good friends.

42:03And so when he first moved to Silicon Valley, he was like, what do I do? How do I break in here? I was like, look, it's really simple. You just go to as many events as you possibly can. And you go, there's tons of events happening in San Francisco every day, all over. You meet people and you just help them. You figure out ways that you can be useful to them in scalable ways, like not where you're going to go work for them. We're going to put hours and hours of work in, but like where you can make an introduction or you can help them find a customer or you can do something useful for them. And you just plant these seeds throughout the city, throughout the valley.

42:32You're just constantly meeting people and helping. And you're helping in ways that are valuable to them, but low cost to you. And you just do it over and over and over again. And it takes a long time, but those seeds, they become an orchard. And that orchard bears fruit like you wouldn't believe. Because the valley creates so much amazing wealth and so much promise and potential and awesomeness that if you're out there helping people, they will give back to you like you wouldn't believe. But it takes time. You can't just come here and show up and be like, I'm just going to go pitch people and then everyone can give me money.

43:04You need to know that your time in Silicon Valley, if you want to really come here, is about relationships. Now, once you have a company that's scaling and you're growing and you have month-over-month metrics, totally different story. But in the beginning, it's about helping people. Yeah, I call this the Johnny Appleseed strategy. Johnny Appleseed, actually a real person. And what he did was he planted a bunch of apple trees from apple seeds and then he took those um seedlings i guess whatever you call a small tree um and he sold those or gave them to people to start their own uh apple orchards and this uh planting of seeds and being you know in a minor way helpful to people um really scaled for him and uh that's the strategy you're talking about it could be just uh setting up dinner with three or four people you know and then this was my hack when i was trying to break into the industry i would find one or two people who wanted to have dinner with me i would get a reservation for six or eight at a mexican or pizza joint somewhere where i could put a super cheap and i could put a bunch of food on the table chinese food as well and i just say hey everybody um i see the two people hey did you know anybody interesting i have an extra seat or two and i'd ask those two people they'd say i know this person this person like okay great can you introduce me to them i'll talk to them on the phone hey what are you working on you listen you ask a couple questions then you invite them to come to dinner and they say oh by the way somebody dropped out i have one extra seat yeah you know anybody you know two or three interesting people um or you could just cold email people hey i'm having dinner with three or four people would you like to come to dinner i would do this constantly yeah i remember one time i was in at sundance with david sacks and elon musk it was the preview of thank you for smoking yeah and uh walter mosberg was there and i was having a talk with walter mosberg and i was like walter hey uh can i bring my friend elon and he walter uh now uh walter mosberg got a little upset at me he's like listen i don't want to take pitches you know i'm just here like you know whatever and i was like okay no i won't bring you and i didn't bring you on oh wow because he called me out on it he was savvy he knew i was using his name in my relationship with him from engadget yeah to help elon because i wanted him to review the tesla whatever when it came out so he kind of saw right through it he called me out on it i was like you know i got elon with me can i bring him elon didn't ask me to do that i was just doing it because i was trying to help elon out because the you know the car company was failing um and so those stories well those stories of me helping people whether it was travis before uber or elon you know when he had just uh started the the tesla journey those a lot of those are legendary stories now of just trying to be helpful to people be of service try to help people it all comes back so less focus on you more focus on um helping others and it all comes back it's a huge giant favor bank here and goodwill so keep building up that goodwill every chance you get all right dave asks you discuss money going after everything in a zerp environment a zero interest rate phenomenon i think is what the p stands for environment what attributes of companies uh that are getting funding today more stable and break even different industries what is working today.

46:15Great question. What is the profile? Let's leave out the type of company like AI, we everybody knows AI companies are getting funded. But what is the what are the attributes, the qualities of the variables that you see help people clear market in the seed stage? Let's put this on seed stage. And then we'll do series A as well. What are the qualities you see at the seed stage? Any of the three phases we outlined? And then at the series A? I mean, the biggest thing is that every everybody was able to raise money a few years ago in zirp um and raising capital was easy capital was free it was it was like it was quite quite a wild time today the bar is substantially higher and what that means is is like when you go into your buddy your friend you're raising and precede you go to your friend and you're like hey i got this crazy idea i want to do it two or three years ago they were getting zero percent on their bank deposits their the stock market was overly inflated so it didn't make sense to go buy public equities uh their house prices were through the roof so they didn't want to go buy more houses they had cash sitting in the bank and they were like i don't know what to do with it okay fine i'll invest this crazy startup you didn't have an alternative today you're making six plus percent on your cash sitting in a in a very safe investment uh vehicle uh houses are cheap uh cheaper theoretically cheaper depending on where you want to go.

47:41They're on the market for six months. So you're not like you're having to overpay and come over the top. So you can take your time and pick the right house for you. So that's true. Public equities are all over the place. So there's some things that are overpriced. Some things are massively underpriced. Like there's opportunities everywhere to deploy capital right now. And smart capital allocators who are sitting on capital, whether they're your friend, Bob, who's a dentist who has a couple extra hundred K or their multi-billion dollar fund, they've all got places to put their capital. So you're in competition.

48:09So you literally have gone from a place where the FOMO... Oh, by the way, and two or three years ago, everything was going up. Every startup went up 50%. So I would feel so dumb when I would pass on a startup and then see somebody come in and mark it up at a crazy price. Every time that happened, I was like, I'm an idiot. I should have done that deal. So the FOMO was raging back then. And now, not so much. Now, the alternative. We're all looking at startups that are fighting to stay alive. uh and we're looking at qualities of those startups the ones that you see getting a 500 to a k to a million dollar check from a seed fund let's start there you know pair first round uh you know some seed stage fund yourself me well what are the qualities of those companies yeah so we could we could break it into the three groups if we want or we can make it simple in the beginning you either you've either validated an idea and if you've a validated idea in a big market and it's it's a great opportunity and you can prove it call me call jason call other people you're very quickly going to figure out if we are excited about your validation or not or i'll tell you i'll be like um this is what i need to see um and that validation if you have that great now you doesn't really matter anyone who validates a big idea in a big market that has the chops to build it is going to find the investors are going to be excited to talk to them second piece you kind of just subtly put it in there has the chops to build it yeah is critically important yeah you know we could build a landing page and validate it but if you're just an idea guy or gal and you're a solo founder chances go way down oh yeah if you're a team of three man chances go way up because i think investors correctly see teams of three as having a greater chance of survival and it's more serious and you've proven that you can get two other people to come on the journey with you like shackleton getting people to go to the north or south pole or wherever he went like pretty pretty uh hard to convince people to come on a journey and if two or three of the people two out of the three are actual builders who can actually build the thing and have the chops to build it and have previously built stuff and are in the process of building the prototype and you can show each week or two hey we made a little more progress that's going to be specifically very attractive to our firm.

50:28We really like builder founders. We really like multiples of founders and we really like product velocities, the internal term we use. Yeah. I mean, so if you, if you come to me and you're like, Hey, I invented a new battery that runs a thousand miles, you know, unless you literally are the world's expert in batteries, I'm just going to hit archive on that. If you come to me and you're like, Hey, I got this idea that's trivial to build and I can build it really easily, you know, and there actually is a mode, you know, that's another hard part. Then, you know, suddenly you might find people get interested.

51:01So the question is not so much what, what are the capacities of your builders is what are you trying to build? And is it possible to be built by you and your team? Yeah. And so this is absolutely critical at the series. A, it's pretty straightforward. You're, you're looking for, I would say 10 % month over month growth, growth, two to three x growth year over year. So you're doubling from 250k to 500 to 750k. Or you're going from 500k to 1.2 million or from 700k to 1.7 something in that range, two to three x growth in the low millions of dollars is going to be interesting for a series A today, could be as little as 500k could be as much as two or 3 million to get a series a to get that vc to say this is one of my 10 boards i'm going to be on and this is one of my five million dollar i have 10 five million dollar series a checks to write uh you know i'm going to buy 10 of your business i'm going to spend the next 10 years with you uh if it works that's what you're looking at doubling your revenue year over year on a base of let's call 500 to 1 million something like that yeah yeah minimum and one thing that is really important right now, it's capital efficiency.

52:16So if you spent$5 million to get a million dollars in revenue, you're going to find that most investors are going to be very skeptical of that. The unit economics of how you acquire customers, and then what those customers are worth, really, really matters today. Two or three years ago, nobody cared. You had all sorts of crazy companies that were being funded that had negative unit economics, where it cost them more to acquire a customer than they would ever make from those customers. But people didn't care. As long as you that growth, you were able to raise more capital. Now people are going to look very closely at what is your cost of acquiring customers?

52:48And then what is the value of those customers? And what's the long term value of the business? Because right now in the public markets, you can buy SaaS companies very, very cheaply, like you can buy SaaS companies at a very low price. And so 1015 times revenue. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's amazing how cheap. It's amazing. Yeah, I mean, and so if you were in that position, and you, if you're trying to pitch David Sachs for your series A or Lemkin, Jason Lemkin, two really great SaaS investors, and you'd play 10 million to get to 1 million ARR, that is wildly inefficient. yeah uh now if you spent three million to get to one million arr they're going to say hey wow for the first million in great how much is it going to cost you to get the next uh million is it going to cost you two million to get a million in is going to cost you one million and the closer you get to that one to one ratio i spent a million to make a million in reoccurring revenue i think they're going to be delighted when you start to get to three four or five times they're going to go huh are you just throwing parties and flying first class to conferences and just not being thoughtful about the growth so if you are lucky enough to have growth it has to be thoughtful growth it cannot be spastic um you know wasteful growth so capital efficiency you're going to hear that term all the time multiple founders and builder founders are also capital efficient the other piece of capital efficiency that we love internally is the company doesn't go out of business.

54:17If the company is capital efficient, they get a they might have 24 months of runway. When we see people raising money, they got six months of runway, they're constantly coming to us nine months, and they're in a panic. We're like, this person is not doing great financial planning. And it's usually because it's three idea founders who want to pay themselves 200k each, and then hire a third party dev shop for a million dollars a year. That may have worked in Zerp that you're blowing 1.6 million that way not going to work here, hire your own developers, get them internal. that's the key um or have them as co-founders ideally all right uh listen big big breaking news story while zach and i were taping here sbf's former romantic partner who was the ceo of alameda research took to the stand for the first time today zach in the sbf trial according to reports from inside the courtroom it's not televised but people are reporting from inside the courtroom um allison admitted to fraud during her time in alameda under sbf's direction that second part, really important.

55:17This is Carolyn Ellison, I believe is her first name. She placed the blame for misuse of FTX user funds directly on SPF claiming he quote set up the systems leading to Alameda taking roughly 14 billion from FTX. Some more quotes from Carolyn Ellison Alameda took several billion billions of dollars from FTX customers and used it for investments. I sent balance sheets that made alameda look less risky than it was prosecutors made ellison's point made ellison point out spf and say everything was under his direction um and uh here is an excerpt from ellison's back and forth with prosecutors these are from uh inner city press um on x thank you to them who uh they cover sdny trials that's the southern district of new york the hardcore folks uh prosecutors how do you know the defendant ellison we met at jane street then alameda we dated for a couple of years uh jane street i met the founders of that uh firm really interesting uh savvy firm prosecutors did you commit crimes ellison fraud what others with others yes prosecutors do you see sam back but freed ellison he's over there prosecutors what's his involvement in the crimes ellison he was the head of alameda then ftx he directed me to commit these crimes prosecutors what makes you guilty ellison alameda took several billions of dollars from ftx customers and used it for investments.

56:41Prosecutors, what was the defendant's role? He set up the system and told us to take the money. How much did Alameda take to repay its lenders? In the Ellison, in the ballpark of 10 billion, ultimately around 14 billion. Prosecutors, how did you defraud Alameda lenders? Ellison, I sent balance sheets that made Alameda look less risky than it was. Prosecutors, why was there not enough money for customers in November 22? Ellison, we had taken we had taken it to repay lenders wow uh well i guess she's flipped and is going for a smaller sentence but what do you think of this entire crypto space writ large did you invest in it and what do you think this trial um which is obviously going to result in a massive sentence for spf i think he's getting life in prison or at least 30 plus years i set the over under at 30 years everybody took me over so i mean i didn't set a great line but what do you what do you think this case represents in the bigger picture here i mean i've always been highly skeptical of crypto because it's it's it's fundamentally it has beautiful product market fit for doing illegal like it's amazing it's amazing product market fit for illegal things it's so good and i think a lot of people like they see the growth and they see the money that's flowing into crypto and they're like oh there's a real thing here it's like no it's really good for illegal amazingly good at that yeah um and you know i think i think this is a great example of that which is you know they they engaged in a giant fraud um because of the nature of crypto crypto facilitates and makes it so easy to do this and they just they they it's amazing the the amazing digital digital money and the ability to create your pop up your own currency if they didn't have this ftt token they made if they didn't have the ability to move money around seamlessly if people didn't pour money into the system to gamble in their casino uh they wouldn't have had the opportunity to do this if this was actual real dollars there would have been real controls in place if this was equities this was people's netflix shares there would be really serious controls in place but because they were playing with an entirely new paradigm shifting i'm using air quotes there paradigm shifting technology all regulation all controls were removed what do you think happens if you play chaos and we had a poker game where one time chamath and sky date my friends were like okay let's play an orbit of no rules poker there's now no rules uh you can do whatever you want and so me and chamath lead over to each other we put our four cards together and said we're playing from the same four cards yeah and then somebody else said okay great i get to take two cards from the bottom of the deck because i'm the button the button now gets the day to and it immediately turned into chaos it was lord of the flies uh and and then then it was like okay if i have a deuce i get everybody's stack first person to turn over deuce and then i turn over and do seven i get everybody's stack it was complete chaos what do you think when a bunch of young entitled and i don't want to say brilliant but you know above average intelligence let's say and above average tech savvy you give them their own casino and say do whatever you want make any rule you want they're like okay great uh let's tell everybody that they are guaranteed to double their money playing roulette and then let's have everybody lose 90 of the time go yeah yeah i mean it's just the michael lewis quotes were just did you watch any of the michael michael lewis quotes go by some of the things he appeared to have gotten snowed pretty hard so i um it's really from weird yeah i'm i'm i'm really really uh interested to see if tethers role and all this comes out because the end of the day tether is literally has the ability to print money whenever they want wherever they want at billions and billions of dollars and it appears that what they do is they basically take that and they fund all these exchanges like the biggest one they had ftx and they give them the ability to print billions of dollars as a loan quote unquote um so that the exchange is able to basically have access to free capital to go to go gamble and that it appears what happened here is that ftx at the end of the day they gambled with their loans they lost them and then they had to steal from their customers to pay them back and the great part of all this is one of the bets they placed was on anthropic and apparently like i don't know exactly what the numbers were but supposedly there's this 500 million dollar number now i don't know if that's how much they put into anthropic or how much their anthropic stake is worth but um supposedly they wanted to bring that up in the trial and the judge is like yeah prosecutors are like no you don't get to you know do a parlay with the jets and the giants and then you hit some crazy parlay and you win with stolen money and then because you paid back the grandma you stole it from yeah and then gave her interest yeah you don't you sorry that's not how uh stealing works um anyway yeah it's uh this is uh absolutely disastrous speaking of disastrous the city of san francisco has lost their mind and i know correct me if i'm wrong uh but cruz was one of your great investments of all time am i correct it was one of my first uh so we invested is the first second investment i ever made first obviously billion dollar eggs that i've ever had so i was like woohoo look at that and you know what it really really makes my heart warm to see them getting all the progress that they're getting because every year 40 000 people in america die from human driver error there's no other the only cause of people dying from car crashes is humans being stupid they're looking at their phone they're drunk they're not paying attention they're just driving like morons 40 000 dead people a year just in the u.s alone and robot cars are going to eliminate that we literally have virtually no deaths from that every again it's like curing cancer it's like so freaking huge so i get really excited when i see them driving around well and we we talked on all in if you just look at the top three or four reasons people die in car accidents is you know drunk driving speeding distracted driving not wearing a seat belt yeah all four of those are opt-in by stupid humans yeah like stupid humans get in cars don't use their seatbelt use their phone drink and speed uh and so cars just automated cars can't do any of those so the top four killers are removed immediately um what did you see that was a deep tech investment that you made i think a decade ago right first investments how did you make that deep tech investment that you knew was going to be a long bet what what gave you the courage to do it at that time and make that long bet.

1:03:26It was all Kyle. So Kyle, the founder of Cruise, I had tried to hire him to work for me for many, many years, for over a decade. I met him when he first started with Justin TV and I was like, wow, this guy's brilliant. He's like, he's really, really good. And I was like, please come work for me. Please come work for me. And he was like, yeah, no, yeah, no. He's smart enough to avoid that. And so when the Justin TV team split off and they ended up starting Twitch, they ended up starting Exact, which was justin's thing uh and then they ended up starting uh social social cam yeah michael's thing was social cam and then kyle went and started um cruise um i was just like in love i'm like this guy's really good and so and the market is so big i mean you think about the scale of the market for autonomous driving is like it's huge trillions and trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars i mean it's like it's probably one of the biggest markets in the world we have yeah it's the tem is ridiculous so san francisco is uh one of the test beds uh a hit and run driver hit an individual yeah that individual tragically ricocheted off the hit and run driver the human yeah and got pinned under a cruise car yeah uh no problems with the cruise car yet the local socialist communist lunatics fringe in san francisco including the san francisco chronicle which is i think a bunch of lunatic communist commie bastards over there uh feel free to quote this they just said they have mind worms their brains their brains have literally like become so convinced of their own rectitude and righteousness about the beliefs the political beliefs that they hold that they just literally just engage in falsehoods constantly and the falsehood here was they framed this as cruz yeah was responsible here which quickly got debunked um your thoughts just on um the progress how do we how do we continue to accelerate progress of the human species in the face of uh lunatic fringe trying to including sadly some members of the press were part of this lunatic fringe which are just so anti-tech how does the tech industry deal with this i mean the good news is that we've always had stupid people they've always been around They've always done stupid things.

1:05:41And I don't think that they've stopped us before. They're going to do the best they can to slow things down, to try to create their own narratives and to try to change the future in the ways that they want them to be. But if you look back at the history of technology, it's a history of constant improvement and progress. Like, you can look at the cost of solar power now. I mean, it's falling so rapidly that there's a real hope that we actually will have clean, safe power that we can use everywhere, everywhere, every now. It's so crazy you bring that up. Literally, in Australia, they hit 126 % capacity with solar.

1:06:24And now they're having to figure out what to do with it. So because rooftop solar and solar farms, they are doing so well, they're just planning on doing a bunch of batteries. And the amount of coal being used went down 80 % as wind and solar levels started hitting these record this summer. And so congratulations to the people of Australia. Germany had hit that as well during some particularly sunny days. it's not always sunny in new jordan yeah australia's got a lot of sun so the the the southern part of australia is just gonna have free energy forever and so they're doing a major major push there so yeah and you can think about all the things that we could do with free energy like it's like the world the world could be a very cool place if we have free free clean safe energy um and so you look at people have been fighting technological improvement for the history of humanity the luddites have always been there they'll always be there and so the the people who run san francisco they they are they are luddites at the core they don't want any more housing built they want their museum to stay the way it is they don't want anything to change in their their little museum city and they don't they don't like technology and they don't like technology companies and so like but at the end of the day the cruise is safer cheaper better it literally is going to replace all human driving.

1:07:55Our kids will not drive cars. There's no reason to. You know what? We'll be thrilled with that. Check this out. This is just so insane. That's awesome. The season of renewable records on Australia's main grid continues apace. With the first days of spring, also adding a new milestone for solar in South Australia, the country's most advanced renewable state, combined output of rooftop and large-scale solar reached a record 120 % of local demand at 1255pm on Sunday, according to data provided yada yada. Rooftop solar alone contributed 93.7 % of the state's demand with peak production of 130 1332 megawatts large scale solar added another 23 % of 374 megawatts.

1:08:43This is extraordinary. And the state was reporting more than 400 megawatts of excess power to victoria so now different when they say states they mean regions of australia just people uh so different states inside of australia are shipping their energy to each other because they've got so much and so abundance is upon us folks all we need to do is keep executing and what we need most of all is great entrepreneurs to take money from zach and jay cal let us slide in that 100k let us slide in that 250 get on the cap table 100 exit for us so that we can keep doing this job because it is the greatest job true on the planet to be able to sit with entrepreneurs zach how lucky are we two lucky bastards does not suck it's just great even in this sucky 18 month period where like i have to do five times as many meetings to raise 10 as much it's like a it's a 50x lift i think right now raising the phone right now i mean we'll get there it's no big deal but um how lucky are we even in you know with the shutdowns and the hard work to get to witness things like uber and cruise change the world robin hood whatever you get to you know invest in it's just fantastic what a job we're so lucky life does not suck i like it a lot all right everybody you know how to get to zach you figure it out you're an entrepreneur and uh if you want to come to the founder university i mentioned founder.university we're doing it quarterly now so and i do maybe three in-person sessions with the teams so you get to spend get some face time with jacal as well uh so founder.university it's my new passion we'll see you all next time on this week in startups thanks zach

From the publisher

This Week in Startups is brought to you by…

Fount. Do you want access to the performance protocols that pro athletes and special ops use? With Fount, an elite military operator supercharges your focus, sleep, recovery, and longevity, all powered by your unique data. Want a true edge in work and life? Go to fount.bio/TWIST for $500 off.

Coda. A new doc that brings words, tables and teams together. All your valuable data, plans, objectives, and strategies in one place. Go to https://coda.io/twist to get a $1,000 credit!

Miro. Working remotely doesn’t mean you need to feel disconnected from your team. Miro is an online whiteboard that brings teams together - anytime, anywhere. Go to https://miro.com/startups to sign up for a FREE account with unlimited team members.

*

Today’s show:

Zach Coelius joins Jason to discuss the phases of early-stage startups (2:01), break down the state of VC (13:17), answer live questions from the audience (22:36), and much more!

*

Time stamps:

(0:00) Zach Coelius joins Jason

(2:01) The three phases of early-stage startups

(10:00) Fount - Get $500 off an executive health coach at https://fount.bio/twist 

(11:31) Advantages that Builder/Founder startups possess

(13:17) The state of VC: The LP and GP relationship, post-ZIRP, and startup soft landings

(21:10) Coda - Get a $1,000 startup credit at https://coda.io/twist 

(22:36) Question: How do you describe PMF in the simplest terms possible

(29:20) Question: How hard is it for first-time founders to raise pre-seed?

(39:46) Miro - Sign up for a free account at https://miro.com/startups

(41:11) Question: I will be in the Bay Area for two weeks… any advice on how to efficiently meet VCs to pitch my startup?

(45:56) Question: What are attributes of companies that are getting funded today? More stable and breakeven? Different industries? What is working today?

(54:49) Breaking news: Caroline Ellison, CEO of Alameda Research testifies for first time today in SBF’s trial

(1:01:49) Cruise robotaxi fleet deployed in San Francisco

*

Follow Zach: https://twitter.com/zachcoelius

*

Read LAUNCH Fund 4 Deal Memo: https://www.launch.co/four

Apply for Funding: https://www.launch.co/apply

Buy ANGEL: https://www.angelthebook.com

Great recent interviews: Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland, PrayingForExits, Jenny Lefcourt

Check out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis

*

Follow Jason:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/jason

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jason

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis

*

Follow TWiST:

Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com

Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin

*

Subscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.founder.university/podcast

More from This Week in Startups

All 653 episodes
State of early-stage VC, finding PMF, Caroline Ellison testifies & more with Zach CoeliusThis Week in Startups · 1 h 11 min
Listen in VO