Titan tragedy, Meta removes news in Canada + Elizabeth Yin at Angel Summit | E1767

0:00I thought and I thought, well, what is a problem that I actually care about for the rest of my life? the next 40, 50, however many years I have left on this planet. And it was actually a really hard question. Like, what is something that you care so deeply about that you want to work on day in and day out for the next 50 years? It was a hard question that I couldn't answer for a couple of years. Meanwhile, I was mentoring all these companies at 500 startups and eventually got more sucked in there. And then one day it dawned on me, the answer was in front of me the whole time, which is I'm really passionate about startups.

0:33It was something that I understood well, Certainly having been a founder, having been through the whole roller coaster of being a founder, the ups and the downs. And it was also something where I really understood the nuances of the problems, like the problems that founders have. And so our mission at Hustle Fund, funny enough, a lot of people see us as a VC fund, but I actually see that as my startup. This Week in Startups is brought to you by Squarespace. Turn your idea into a new website. Go to squarespace.com slash twist for a free trial. When you're ready to launch, use offer code twist to save 10 % off your first purchase of a website or domain.

1:12OpenPhone brings your team's business calls, texts, and contacts into one delightful app that works anywhere. Get 20 % off your first six months at openphone.com slash twist. And Lemon.io. Need to speed up your product development without draining your budget? hire vetted engineers from europe at lemon.io go to lemon.io slash twist to get 15 off for the first four weeks all right everybody uh welcome back to this week in startups we've been having some great uh interviews from our angel summit on the podcast today will be no different elizabeth yin from hustle fund is going to talk about early stage investing both for founders and for investors but there's a lot of news and i thought i would take a chance uh here and talk about one controversial one that i have an important take on uh and then one that's uh a little just more straight up tech the first is i wanted to talk about this uh tragedy with the titanic submarine as everybody knows unless you've been living under a rock there is a submersible submarine called titan and it tragically imploded or collapsed uh under the massive uh pressure it was undergoing 12 000 feet down to look at the titanic this was uh an operation called ocean gate they make the submersible and they charge people 250 000 to uh go visit the titanic and And it is pretty unbelievable when you look at what happened here, how avoidable this was and how reckless it was.

2:57And it is, you know, the day after we've confirmed that these poor five souls have died quite unnecessarily, it turns out. And although we struggle as a society with how much time should go by before you talk about something candidly or you criticize somebody's behavior, who's passed, let alone make jokes about it, it does seem that we process things at hyperspeed. And so I thought I would talk about the problem I have with this and where I wouldn't have a problem with people taking these kind of risks. so you know uh this was an experimental vessel and they were taking taurus on it and they were taking young adults on it a 19 year old died here um which is particularly tragic um to have a soul that's just becoming an adult um die in this tragic unnecessary way and we see this sometimes in um my line of work people get rich they uh have a lot of money in their bank account and there is a term for it in our industry um called toxic wealth which is you rate make enough money that you're able to take on riskier and riskier behavior maybe chasing dopamine maybe trying to do interesting things with that money and in a vacuum dopamine chasing listen i went deep powder skiing in japan this year and i went far too fast on my skis this year as well uh you know have a tracking app that told me i broke 50 miles an hour way too fast and i since corrected my behavior and try to keep it to 40 or less and uh doing interesting things with your money sure why not um the problem here is this company was told over and over again by the industry that they were going to kill people they were told in a letter by all the people who had successfully dove to the bottom of literally the mariana trench which is three times further down than the titanic that they were unnecessarily risking people's lives with the design of this now if you are in fact a an explorer and this is your chosen profession that is one thing um and in fact james cameron built his own submersible and went with his great wealth uh down to the mariana trench so it seems on the surface to be a very similar behavior pattern but even he uh when he was on the news uh and as much of a risk taker as he is took an infinitely more measured approach to doing something this dangerous and he obviously did not take taurus with him knowing the risk and i think if this were if these were adults and not a kid um you know maybe you could start to say hey people i'm quite libertarian um i don't think there needs to be rules for everything but as a general warning between what is the law right and your complete freedom exists an a big wide gray area uh where there is judgment and where there is what i would call um your behavior when nobody's looking your behavior when you're not ruled by law or it's not obviously something inconsequential what you eat for dinner completely inconsequential um if you pay for that dinner or you steal it that's the law completely consequential and you need to behave um properly in a society and pay your bills and then in between those two uh you have the big gray area and this exists there now for people who get rich quick we've seen over and over again them take on this risky behavior i want to give you an example that you don't know 99.99 of you don't but in 1983 there was a company called eagle computer i remember it when i was 12 years old 13 years old i would open up pc magazine or byte and i would see their advertisements uh and i would choose between a dell a gateway an ibm pc jr or eagle computer there were dozens and dozens of these computer companies so eagle computer essentially think of it like dell or gateway and hours after the company went public the ceo dennis barnhart was driving back to his company's headquarters in los gatos here in slocan valley and he had bought himself a red ferrari because he was that successful and then according to the insurance investigator he drove the car 70 miles per hour in a 25 mile per hour zone he was 39 years old and he died and i saw this when an acquaintance of mine, Larry Page, landed at foo camp in a helicopter.

7:47This was a very famous moment in 2007. I'll insert a little clip of the video here, Laughing Squid took.

8:03I heard it's Larry King. I heard it's Steve Jobs. I actually heard it's fake Steve. It's fake Larry Page.

8:16and we were all kids uh when this happened 20 years ago almost 15 years ago and we're like whoa larry page is taking helicopter lessons and i just thought and i talked to him afterwards i was like is that safe and uh maybe um is it necessary to fly yourself uh as a helicopter pilot he had a co-pilot with him obviously but i did get the sense like oh wow people are doing risky things uh with their money um and this eagle computer executive example the larry page example which wasn't as crazy uh obviously i think i'd taken a lot of precautions and then i look at this one or john denver you may or may not know the singer john denver um and his death he died in a plane crash in 1997 he was one year older than me 53 and he was flying an experimental two-seat plane not uh but two hours from where i sit today in monterey bay california and he plunged into the water from 500 feet and died that was yeah 25 years ago this is uh one of the things with success people can get a little bit risk taking and i've looked at all the risks i take and i've tried to lower them and when it comes to technology it is absolutely it is absolutely the responsibility of this company to really think through should they let people buy these tickets and be passengers again we have some basic amounts of freedom as humans to take risk this seems uh like a risk that didn't need to be taken and this james cameron clip sums it up um just and i tweeted this the other day but let me just play this for you here because i think it will fill you in on exactly how irresponsible the behavior here was and again to the families and for everybody who died uh my condolences but i think having this discussion frankly right now when it's top of mind could save lives um let's play the clip you know this is a mature art and many people in the community were very concerned about this sub and a number of of um you know of the top players in the in the uh deep submergence engineering community even wrote letters to the company saying that what they were doing was too experimental to carry passengers and that needed to be certified and so on.

10:43So I'm struck by the similarity of the Titanic disaster itself, where the captain was repeatedly warned about ice ahead of his ship, and yet he steamed at full speed into an ice field on a moonless night, and many people died as a result. And for a very similar tragedy where warnings went unheeded to take place at the same exact site, Yeah, powerful. And in this situation, there's been discussion tragically about the 19-year-old was terrified to do this, didn't want to do it, and felt pressured by his father to do it, according to the aunt. Anyway, I don't want to make it too personal. I don't want to be, obviously, when you talk about these kind of things, there's a risk that people will think you're trying to capitalize on it when you have a podcast.

11:30This podcast has been going on for 14 years. We go on until I'm dead, and we're not going for ratings here, nor will this get us any ratings we're not trying to capitalize on a story um i have this conversation privately with a lot of friends who get wealthy and i tell them about eagle computer and i send the link to a story about it just so they know hey when you're buying those ferraris when you're buying your lamborghini when you decide you want to pilot your own plane a helicopter or go to the you know depths of the ocean be thoughtful about it uh be really thoughtful about it and um life is precious you don't need to take insane risks and if you are responsible for other people's lives i mean take it seriously folks and i and i gotta say it's very clear this company did not take this seriously to receive letters explaining to you exactly how this disaster would happen because of the design of it and then to ignore it because you wanted to do something that was more innovative or use the new design and then put a bunch of you know i don't want to say uninformed but people who didn't build the sub customers who are paying a lot of money to me it's uh it's beyond irresponsible it's beyond irresponsible i think this company really did something incredibly incredibly evil if i have to use a word and i i really care about all of y 'all listening and i hope everybody pauses here and just looks at this toxic wealth situation and maybe how dangerous this stuff is and just think before you do stuff especially young people and sometimes rich powerful people young people their brains aren't fully developed till they're 25 years old the frontal lobes so they don't make good long-term decisions and then i gotta tell you something people who are rich and powerful don't make good decisions all the time why because everybody's trying to get something from rich and powerful people people will not tell you the truth when you're doing something stupid when you add a certain number of zeros to your net worth and every time you add one more, the advice you get becomes less and less correlated with reality.

13:36All right, let's keep moving on. We'll talk about some more stories. Just really sad. Listen, we have been doubling and tripling down on Founder University here at launch. In fact, it's kind of the future of our firm. And it's amazing for us to work with hundreds of early stage founders even before they incorporate, right? They have ideas, and they're trying to figure out what tools to use to make their ideas into a reality. And we're seeing so many of these founded university startups using Squarespace. Everybody knows Squarespace has beautiful design templates. They're all mobile optimized. And of course, they have powerful e-commerce integrations.

14:10But did you know that Squarespace also added member areas? This is where you can sell members only premium content, okay, educational stuff, etc. And if you're a consultant of some type, you have now appointment scheduling built into Squarespace. So listen, if you build it on Squarespace, everything's going to work. They keep adding amazing features and you're going to load super fast on your desktop and mobile. It's going to look great, super easy to edit, super easy to evolve. And if you're looking to start your business, you can't go wrong with Squarespace. We all know that. So I want you to head to squarespace.com slash twist for a free trial.

14:43And when you're ready to launch, use the offer code twist to save 10 % off your first purchase of a website or domain. We love you, Squarespace, our longest running partner here on This Week in startups thank you so much for supporting our founders and for supporting this week in startups meta is going to start blocking news on facebook and instagram in canada because the country is adopting its own version of australia's news law now this is a nuanced issue again that is being negotiated through laws the canadian senate passed the online news act on thursday bill's called c dash 18 it's designed to force google and facebook to share revenue with news publishers for stories that appear on their platforms the bill doesn't specifically name google or meta but it applies to companies that quote make news content available and have a significant bargaining power imbalance with the news business okay it's that's pretty clear uh here's a quote from the national post article bill c 18 was modeled on australia's legislation under that system google and facebook reached deals with publishers that kept the news media bargaining code from kicking in meaning neither has actually been designated as a digital platform subject to the code uh and canada's bill has a similar exemption so this is a backstop uh but if google and meta remove the news content entirely they um won't have to worry obviously about making these deals so meta use it you know they don't really need the news all that much uh and they've confirmed they're going to remove news content from Facebook and Instagram for all Canadian users.

16:18There is no confirmation here about how much and what is fair use is something I talk about all the time here on this program. Google hasn't confirmed if it's going to cut news content, which would basically mean, I guess, taking them out of the search index or taking them out of Google News. But they're holding last minute talks according to news reports. And Google spokespeople said they don't want to remove the news obviously they want to have it there but could be pretty wild if you didn't search on google in canada and you didn't see the new york times wall street journal cnn washington post fox news whatever it is and this is a pretty simple solution uh in my mind i think they should cut deals with the news companies and give them a menu and the menu should go something like this.

17:07Here are five different ways you can work with us. And in your robots.txt, a little file that exists on a website that you can go see New York Times.com slash robots.txt should show you their rules around scraping their website. Anyway, give them three options, give them five options. Number one, you can take all of this content. And number two, you can take none of this content. Number three, you can take the headline and the snippet that we wrote. Number four, you can take the headline, you can take the subhead, the author, and the first sentence, or it could be something simple, you can take the first 200 characters, but you have to include the following, right?

17:42And there could be some back and forth here where this is automated. And then if you want to take more, we are okay with that on a programmatic basis. In other words, automatically, if you want to take another 100 characters, it's$1 per 1 million characters you pull from our site. So if you want to put two paragraphs, and it's 300 cow characters, and 3000 people see it, we get a buck, right 3000 people 300 characters, about 900 ,000, if you charge$1 per million characters, you give them some sort of licensing fee. And this would go a long way, I think, to these companies, creating a better experience, because how terrible is the experience on facebook or google where you wind up at a paywall or you wind up in a browser window coming outside of the app and they have that janky browser built into you know facebook meta whatever app you're in and it just is a bad experience where maybe when you're in search you just want to get the first two paragraphs that'd be kind of delightful and maybe a third of people want that and the other two that want to click you come up with all kinds of interesting options and i think the reason for facebook and google to do this and actually be happy doing it is they would get more content and right now um they're in a perverse dance with the content creators where the content creators are just trying to game their algorithms do link baiting etc if they align themselves where good news not high quality news not good or bad who's in terms of tone but high quality news with high quality headlines if that was rewarded with more people clicking on it and there was a way for the news organization to make but one thousand dollars two thousand dollars on each story that you know in syndication fees well that kind of pays for the cost of the story in the majority of cases and people might be saying oh you know what we're making some advertising our site we're making some of these syndication fees so let's as an industry instead of going through the courts the industry should come up with a syndication fee and you know who should lead that facebook google twitter all the online services uh should make an offer and they should see if anybody takes it and you know what you know with vox vice buzzfeed all laying people off or in various uh you know stages of having their revenue go down flat and unions increasing their costs and that the standoffs they're having internally this could be a wonderful way for the tech industry to support independent journalism and content creation.

20:13I highly recommend they do it. It's worked for YouTube. It's worked for the app stores. So why not do it for news? Why exclude news from the ability to share in revenue on Google and Facebook? I think the leadership at these companies needs to rethink how they look at the news and maybe just try to come up with an industry standard. Everybody doesn't have to take it. But if 10 or 20 % of people do take it, hey, maybe it could be something that makes everybody win. the customers google facebook etc and the journalists and reporters and content creators on the other side all right next up on the program elizabeth yin and she is from the hustle fund uh you probably want to take this one you could even run it through chat gpt or get the transcript make a summary of it make bullet points take some notes and then you know use elizabeth's advice and report back to her to us if it was helpful what worked what didn't right and i think that's a a great way to use this show.

21:09Hopefully the show is very useful to founders and investors. All right, everybody have a great weekend. Are you still using your personal phone number at work at your startup in 2023? Stop. Such a common mistake founders make, but open phone has totally rethought every detail of what a business phone should look like in 2023. Open phone makes it so easy to do this and so affordable that you have no excuse and you really don't want your team using their personal phones for business. Why? Well, it could get creepy. People start texting people on your team. It could be that they leave your company and the salesperson has all of these text threads going with all your clients and they bring them to your competitor.

21:49Do you want to deal with this nonsense? You don't. I can tell you open phone is amazing because we use it. Our sales team, our ops teams, we use it daily. We also started using open phone for angel summit communications. It's rated number one on G2 for customer satisfaction. it. And let me tell you, those G2 rankings, those are dogged battles. If you win that, you really have to be the best. Twist listeners love open phone. My sales team uses it. Ops team uses it. Customer support uses it. And you know what's great about it? You can create a shared phone number like we did for the Angel Summit with multiple employees being able to field those calls and texts and keep it all sorted.

22:23It's affordable at just$13 per user per month. But Twist users are going to get 20 % off that already ridiculously affordable price for six months at openphone.com slash twist. And if you got an existing number, open phone will port it over at no extra cost. Head to openphone.com slash twist to start your free trial and get 20 % off. Give it up for Elizabeth.

22:46Thank you. Before we begin, actually, I'm just curious, how many of you are angel investors? Okay, almost everybody. And how many of you are VCs or you're thinking about starting a VC? Okay. And how many of you are LPs or thinking about starting a fund to fund or something like that? Okay, great. Cool. Well, my name is Elizabeth Yin. Thank you. People raise their hand for multiple categories. Okay. That was pretty good. Thank you. Well, thank you for the kind intro, Jason. I'm Elizabeth Yin, and I could say that at this point in my life, I am all in on startup. So quick bit about myself. For most of my career, I was a founder.

23:33I had a company that I started in the last recession in late 2008. I could not have picked my timing really any better to leave my cushy job at Google. It was about a week after Sequoia sent out this memo to all of their companies saying, rest in peace, good times, batten down the hatches. We're not funding anybody new. And I decided to leave my job anyway, because I was not really sure if I were to wait it out, what exactly I would be waiting for. So I left. I couldn't raise any money. But it actually turned out to be a good thing because I also had no idea what I was doing. I floundered for probably a good two, almost three years before finally figuring out some things, but still had a lot of hard lessons all the way through, built out essentially an ad network for email, and that company was acquired in 2014.

24:26And then I accidentally fell into startup investing. I actually didn't really know very much about investing in general prior to then. and certainly didn't really know a whole lot about VCs. As I mentioned, I couldn't really raise very much myself. So I didn't know anything about that world, but I did know that I really actually liked the accelerator program that we had gone through with our company, Launchbit, and that was 500 Startups. And so originally I went back to mentor some companies and I got more and more sucked in and ended up running their accelerator program where I invested in over 200 companies while there.

25:03And that was sort of my intro into investing into companies, had a lot of really hard lessons learned there as well. And in parallel, started doing some of my own angel investing. So at this point at Hustle Fund, I did not do the count this morning, but I know for sure we have invested in over 400 companies, probably closer to 500 at this point across funds one, two, and three, which were at the beginning of with Hustle Fund. And I'll talk a little bit more about Hustle Fund later, but about five, going on six years ago, I left 500 startups and started a VC firm, which I never thought I would do with two friends of mine from college called Hustle Fund.

25:42And that is what I'm up to in my day job today. But I'm very active all across the stack, both in my own angel investing, certainly Hustle Fund, and then have more recently become an LP in VC funds. my husband will probably kill me. But so I'm all in across the whole stack. So that's a bit about me. So a lot of people ask me, well, why did you not go and start another company? You know, Launchbit was a relatively modest exit. And I still have a lot of aspirations in my own life. And so people said, why didn't you go and start another, you know, another startup? And the thing about it is I realized after Launchbit that actually ads were not my life's work.

26:31And so I thought and I thought, well, what is a problem that I actually care about for the rest of my life, the next 40, 50, however many years I have left on this planet? And it was actually a really hard question. Like, what is something that you care so deeply about that you want to work on day in and day out for the next 50 years? It was a hard question that I couldn't answer for a couple of years. Meanwhile, I was mentoring all these companies at 500 startups and eventually got more sucked in there. And then one day it dawned on me, the answer was in front of me the whole time, which is I'm really passionate about startups.

27:06It was something that I understood well, certainly having been a founder, having been through the whole roller coaster of being a founder, the ups and the downs. And it was also something where I really understood the nuances of the problems, like the problems that founders have. And so our mission at Hustle Fund, funny enough, a lot of people see us as a VC fund, but I actually see that as my startup. And our mission is to democratize wealth through startups. Well, what does this mean? It actually means that I think that the world would be a much better place if we can empower more great founders to start companies.

27:42Because as we've heard from many of the prior talks this morning, for startups that are successful, they do job creation, they enhance productivity, as Brad alluded to in his talk, and just generally improve our society as a whole, whether you're involved in the startup or not. But the problem that as I saw as a founder is that most great founders, especially 10, 15 years ago when I was working on my stardom, they didn't actually really get a great shot, even if you were a phenomenal founder. When you think about all the things that a great founder needs to be successful, they need capital, they need knowledge, and they need networks.

28:23And I think for people who are super well connected, who have perhaps all three or some permutation of these, you can be off to the races. But there are many people, especially when you look at it from a global perspective, who are outside of Silicon Valley, you don't really have access to all of these three. You may have access to one, if even. Maybe you have a rich uncle who can help you with a little bit of seed money. But you don't really have access to all three. And when we were thinking about things at Hustle Fund about six years ago, in particular, the capital piece we felt had a real empty spot.

29:02We invest at the earliest stages at Hustle Fund. So two people in a garage, you have no revenue, you barely have a product, everything is so half-baked. There is really no institutional VC, especially back then, six years ago, who would invest in that. You might have your rich uncle again, but there were no institutional VCs. I could have counted about a handful of them at that point in time who were just getting started. Somebody I look up to, Charles Hudson, who runs a fund called Precursor, was one of those. But these five small micro funds were not going to be able to impact the world. So we decided to start Hustle Fund starting with capital in helping founders at those earliest stages who had pretty much nothing, get them going in business with a 25K check.

29:52So it sounds kind of ridiculous, a VC writing a 25K check, but that's how we started this fund. Fast forward to today, our mission involves helping founders with all three of these things. So we are now just starting Fund 3 with Hustle Fund. We are in process of actually launching a late-stage fund as well to help founders much later in the stack, and we run SPVs in between those stages. We also have in parallel what I would call a modern-day angel club. Some of you, I think, are in that called Angel Squad. We have over 1 ,400 members globally who have joined that to help us in our cause and mission in helping fund great founders globally, especially those outside of Silicon Valley.

30:39And then we also are pretty active in writing tactical content, in newsletters, in blogs. I even have my book here. And if anyone is brave enough to ask a question later, you can get my book. We run events such as Camp Hustle. We're doing one in Asia this September if you would love to join. So we do a lot of these three things because these are the ingredients that you need to build startup ecosystems to empower great entrepreneurs. and we'll continue to hone this over the course of the next 35, 45 years, however long we have. Okay, listen, you got an idea for a tech startup. Great. You think you want to change the world?

31:18You think you got this? This is the one? Well, you've got that same problem that we all do. You don't have an engineer or you don't have enough engineers to make this happen. And you need product velocity. You need to go fast. And how are you going to go fast? And how are you going to control your burn rate if you got no engineers? Well, what if you had a partner who could provide you with more than a thousand on-demand developers. And those developers were all vetted, experienced, result-oriented, and passionate about startups and building great products. Well, what if they also charge competitive rates?

31:45Does this all sound too good to be true? I know it does. Well, then you need to head to Lemon.io because your dreams have come true right now. Startups, choose Lemon.io because they only offer hand-picked developers with three or more years of experience and ones that have strong portfolios. Only 1 % of candidates who apply to work at lemon.io actually get accepted. And if anything goes wrong, lemon will get you a replacement ASAP. A couple of great launch founders have worked with lemon.io, people in our portfolio, and they have had great experiences. So I want you to learn more at lemon.io slash twist.

32:16And when you go there, you're going to find your perfect developer or an entire tech team. And you're going to do that in 48 hours or less. And twist listeners get 15 % off the first four weeks. I want you to stop burning money. I want you to hire developers smarter and faster. Visit lemon.io slash twist and give it a shot. But you're like, okay, blah, blah, you know, that that's nice and sort of kumbaya and everything. But why should I really care about it? I'm here to make money. I think the other interesting observation is I think some things about the markets have changed over the last couple of decades.

32:49So I would actually argue that Dodd-Frank killed the public stock market returns. And here's an example. Amazon went IPO at around 300 million market cap. You do not get any company IPO-ing at that anymore. I think I looked at the handful of companies that supposedly are rumored to IPO in whatever the next few months or year, Instacart, Stripe, any time, any of these. They're all in the tens of billions of dollars that they're going to IPO for. So that means that your upside is fairly capped. Maybe Stripe will be a trillion dollar company someday. But you're talking about, all right, best case scenario, now you're getting like 100x.

33:28But most likely in many of these IPOs, you're getting 10x, maybe. In contrast, in the startup markets, and Jason can probably talk about this more than anybody, if you had put 5k into Uber, and you had waited until the IPO, supposedly, you would get $25 million or thereabouts, which is pretty incredible. I guess it just goes to show you that these kinds of asymmetric bets are the kinds of things that are great for returns that no one really actually thinks about. Everyone thinks about how startups are so risky. And yes, there's certainly a lot of risk, and we'll talk about that as well. But the returns in private markets are so large, especially now that the public markets have shifted so much, that actually I think startups are the best place to put your money.

34:18And as I kind of mentioned earlier, I'm all in on it. So obviously I'm very biased. But I think if we just sort of run some of the numbers here, and this may be hard to see, if you put your money in index funds, traditionally you might get 7%, 8 % IRR on average. And I realize some of the markets have been frothy more recently. But across all the decades, 7 % to 8%, meaning you double your money in about 10 years or so. So if you put in, let's say,$250K, like let's say that you work your job in your 20s and you save up a lot of money every year for the next 10 years or so, and$25K a year, and you sock away$250K.

34:58And then by age 70, you're ready to retire, and that$250K will be worth about$3.74 million. So that's index fund investing. So that's great. It's fine. But what happens if actually you put 90 % of that into index funds and 10 % into startups? And we'll talk about how do you actually do that. But, you know, there's certainly a range in what your IRR could be. We've heard from some phenomenal investors here whose IRR is like super high, 30%, 40%, 60%, etc. But let's just say that you're okay, maybe on the not so great side, 15%. Or let's just say that your IRR actually just zero, you just lost it all for whatever reason.

35:49If we even just look at those scenarios, like let's say you get 15 % IRR on that 10 % that you're socking away, instead of$3.74 million at retirement, you're retiring with$10 million. dollars. That's 10 % of$250K or$25K. It's a small investment, but it's because of compounding. And that is the amazing thing about the startup asset class. Like if you have your strategy right, you can make a lot of money with very little. The key is the time and the compounding. And this is probably my number one regret, not having learned about this asset class earlier. Had I learned about this asset class when I was 22 and even just started stocking a few thousand away every year, that would have been amazing.

36:41But it's not too late for anybody. And then let's look at the down scenario of, let's say, you just end up losing all your money. Your portfolio construction was terrible. You picked all the wrong companies, etc. Actually, you know, because it's only 10%, actually, you are still retiring with$3.3 million. So I want everyone to pause and think about that for a moment. And I actually encourage you to run this spreadsheet exercise yourself if you haven't already. A fun one to run is if you invest$750K, and let's say you're actually pretty good at this, and you get 20 % IRR, you'll be a billionaire.