E228: Balaji Srinivasan: “The Dollar Is Already Dead” and What Comes Next

You know, just like Rome succeeded Greece and Britain succeeded Rome and America succeeded Britain, I think the internet eventually succeeds America.

And so how does that work?

Let me be a little more specific.

Right now what's happening, when you think of democracy, there's different definitions of democracy.

You can think of one definition of democracy is, let's call it blue democracy, and that is Democrat democracy.

Republicans have their own version.

They'll say it's not a democracy, it's a republic.

Partly because republic for Republicans, I'm sure that's some subconscious aspect, but partly because they say, oh, you know, for example, the Senate is important and the courts are important.

It's not just populist majority rule and so on and so forth.

There's a third very important version of democracy in the world, and that's Indian democracy.

That's like a dark horse that's kind of rising and it's becoming more and more relevant on the world stage.

You know, India is that democracy is a really big word.

Balji, you are the former CTO of Coinbase, a general partner at A16Zee.

You're also Wall Street Journal best-selling author of the Network State, which I did actually read over the Christmas break.

So welcome.

Great to be here.

And that's the Network State, by the way, behind me on my shoulder over there.

So you can kind of see it.

And you're working on version two of the book.

Tell me about that.

I got the first version of the Network State out July 4th, 2022, auspicious day, of course, for starting new countries.

And just as a pure Kindle book, and I basically became a book publisher and had to figure out all the Kindle formats and so on and so forth.

And it's actually, it hit number two globally on Amazon.

And I tweeted that out at that time.

You know what number one was?

So it's one of the most popular categories on Amazon.

It's billionaire romance.

I was competing for the number one spot with the, I think it's like the most eligible billionaire.

That book, I think, is

sort of a bestseller, but it really is sort of.

I feel it's catalyzed a movement.

There's a lot of people talking about quote network state

as a noun, as a phrase, sort of like Googling or Ubering or something like that.

What gets lost on a lot of people on network state is it's a little bit esoteric or a little bit in the clouds.

Can you give us an example of a network state that you believe will be built in the future?

Well, I give you one, an example of something that's close to a network state that was built in the past, and that's Israel.

In the sense of it was a group of people without a land that got a country.

Now, of course, I recognize that Israel is quite controversial and so on today, but

there's other precedents for the network state, like, for example, Singapore, startup country founded by Lee Kuan Yew.

Obviously, America itself, you know, maybe the original startup country, and actually India, which got its independence non-violently.

So if you kind of add up those four precedents, where you have the Israeli concept of a diasporic group of people that then assembles on a piece of territory, the Singaporean concept of a charismatic CEO founder, the American concept of Bill of Rights and negative rights and all the amazing things that the founders of the U.S.

came up with, and then the Indian concept of independence through nonviolence, that starts to get at the concept of what I think of as a network state, where, you know, in a sentence,

we've started new companies, we've started new currencies.

Can we start new cities or even countries?

And that's a premise.

How do you start a country?

Something like an Israel or Singapore was started historically.

Sure.

So they're very, both of those are quite different, where Singapore was, you know, it got its independence involuntarily from Malaysia, whereas Israel was something which started with a book.

And Der Judenstadt, which was Theodor Herzl's book, was

something that inspired a lot of people.

And they thought Zionism was crazy in the late 1800s.

And he actually didn't just do a book.

He also did a conference.

And he did a fund.

And that conference is still going today, the World Zionist Congress.

And he had a fund that actually today, the descendant of it, the Jewish National Fund, owns a big chunk of Israel.

So he was actually, if you go back and read the Jewish state,

Theodore Herzl was like a startup entrepreneur, right?

He was like a tech founder.

He talks about the death of distance due to the steamships that were carrying people abroad and so on and so forth.

He reads in a very modern kind of way about, you know, here's a vision of what's possible.

Can I, you know, get the people and the capital to make it happen.

I think that the

amazing aspect of Israel going from a group of people to reviving an ancient language and building the land,

there's something really interesting about that.

And I'll show you a visual of how the network state might work.

And if you kind of understand this visual, you basically kind of get the whole thing.

So the whole network state book is online at the networkstate.com, right?

And this is from the chapter titled or the sub-chapter titled The Network State in One Image.

And do you see that zoomed in version?

Yes.

Okay, so this is an example network state.

What is it?

It's like a physical social network.

It's a social network with, in this case, 1,729,314 people, but they've crowdfunded nodes that they live in around the world.

So little towns and cul-de-sacs and so on and so forth.

Imagine if every Chinatown was networked together, if every little India, if every

Brighton Beach, where the Jewish diaspora from the Soviet Union came.

If those communities were not just physical communities, but were networked together,

well, their collective population, annual income, and real estate footprint could be greater than that of a legacy nation state.

And the fundamental thing is that if Bitcoin was a decentralized currency, a network state is a decentralized country.

It's spread out all over the world, okay?

But their hearts are in one place.

Their minds are in one place.

All of these people could, in theory, be in the same Discord or in the same same social network

or in the same cryptocurrency, even if they're physically separated.

And that's actually the opposite of what's happened in countries that have extreme polarization.

If you have a lot of polarizations, people's heads and hearts are in two different places.

Like, you know, they're on Mastodon and Blue Sky for one group and they're on, you know, Parlor or Truth Social for another group.

So they may be in the same physical place, but their heads are separated.

This is the opposite.

People are aligned on the same values, even if they're physically separated.

And so here's how you'd actually build something something like that.

So, I'll refresh over here.

This is like the gift version.

You start with one person in Japan, and they get 17, 172, 1,000, 10,000, 100,000, and eventually a million-something people worldwide.

And you notice the buildings that they're crowdfunding increase in sophistication.

You know, you go to now like whole suburbs and then small cities, and then you're networking them together.

And one way of thinking about this, if you go and you look at the map of Indonesia, right?

So, you see how there's a a group of islands that constitute Indonesia but um

they're separated by ocean yet they think of themselves as one country right

so now imagine a group of pieces of land that are separated by internet but think of themselves as one country and shouldn't the purpose of every network state to be in one geographical area doesn't that simplify a lot of issues

Well, it also means you can get nuked and you can get invaded, right?

And, you know, I know that sounds like dark or we have, but if you think about, do you know why the internet was originally invented?

The military wanted a communications network that could stay up in the event of a nuclear attack.

So the internet was built to resist a nuclear attack.

And so one of the things that's happening now is we're starting to get a breakdown of the post-war order.

And

I certainly wouldn't wish for it to happen, but basically I think that

it's possible we actually do see, we came close maybe in 2022 and 2023 at various points to Putin's finger on the button or what have you, right?

And we can't always rely on that, right?

What percentage, for example, of your transactions and communications are done over the internet now?

Outside of real estate, probably over 90%.

Over 90%, right?

And probably communications might be even higher than that, right?

Like WhatsApp, Signal, et cetera, et cetera, if you count everyone.

And yet, we don't have election

we don't have internet native elections we don't have internet native legislation right i think people still aren't taking the internet seriously reminds me of the period like 1913 the british empire was dominant but world war one hadn't happened yet and the monarchies were still around and uh and and all of the old world was still around but underneath the surface all this technological change was bubbling you know and there was industrial revolution and communism all that stuff had been going on for decades and then the whole old world just kind of collapsed in like four years, five years, and then we entered roaring into the modern era, right?

Do you remember the social network movie?

You know what's amazing about that movie is if you go back and watch it, it's a great movie.

It's very well done, inspired a whole generation of entrepreneurs.

You know, if that wasn't Sorkin's intent, it was his result, right?

If you go back and watch that movie, there's something that is very notable by its absence from our

sort of 2020 hindsight.

You know what's missing?

No.

There's absolutely no mention of politics in the movie.

Right?

Social networking is portrayed as something which is like one young man's building's Roman.

You know, it's like his,

it's as if, okay, yeah, it's got 500 million users, but it's like saying Pepsi got to 500 million people drinking it.

It's fine and it's great, but it's not like, it's not like something of massive importance.

Everybody else can ignore it.

It's just like people poking and liking each other online.

That's what it was thought of in the early 2010s.

And yet at that time, in the early 2010s, the Arab Spring had happened.

You know, Twitter and Facebook had helped cause revolutions abroad.

Clearly, they were of political importance.

But if you had said in

2011 that 10 years from now, the most important political issue in the world for at least a few days will be whether the president of the United States of America is able to tweet, right?

No one would have believed you.

Even those people who had seen the Arab Spring and so uncatalyzed by these internet things, even those people who knew that these were were massively valuable companies with hundreds of millions of users that were highly engaged, it was a limit of imagination where they couldn't project out that all politics would become social media in the 2010s.

Right.

And my view is that we have something very similar happening where in 2021, if you take Bitcoin,

every bank and government knows about it.

We have hundreds of millions of holders worldwide.

There's many billion-dollar companies that have been started either on Bitcoin directly or around it and so on.

And you have El Salvador that has actually changed its laws to make Bitcoin the national currency of a legacy state.

And yet, despite all that, if I was to say that there's a scenario 10 years from now where the United States government and every government needs to hold Bitcoin in order to remain solvent,

just like the president of the United States of America would need to hold Twitter to remain in power, you know, that would seem like a crazy extrapolation from from where we are.

But that's what it means, in my view, to take the internet seriously.

I think if in the 2010s all politics became social media, I think in the 2020s, all politics becomes crypto-tribalism.

Let me pause there.

Is that because crypto is essentially diluting power from everybody, so it's not as noticeable?

It's not necessarily taking from Republicans or Democrats.

It's diluting everybody.

Diluting is one way to put it.

Another way of putting it is, do you see that graph?

Global currencies, 10-year returns versus dot, right?

So this was actually, you know, a few months ago, like three months ago.

So the numbers are actually even higher now because Bitcoin is higher than it was.

But essentially, every fiat currency over the last 10 years has collapsed against the dollar.

Some of them have been hyper-inflated away and destroyed and so on.

Others, better managed currencies like the Singapore dollar or the Swiss franc, have remained reasonably close to the dollar.

But one way of thinking about it is lots of debt around the world is dollar denominated.

The U.S.

prints a lot of money.

So therefore, everybody is sort of taxed invisibly or visibly by the money printing.

Okay.

So all fiat currencies collapse against the dollar, but the dollar has collapsed against Bitcoin.

So

since the inception of Bitcoin, you can calculate this out, but

you know, the typical thing for inflation is supposed to be like 0.1% or rather 2% annual inflation, right?

So that means...

between 0.1 to 0.2% a month, okay, multiplied by 12.

And you can get the exact square root of 12 version, but you know what I mean, right?

So between between 0.1 to 0.2% monthly inflation.

And hyperinflation is thought of as 50% monthly inflation.

But if you think about Bitcoin, it's definitely appreciated more or the dollar is depreciated more against Bitcoin by, it's not as much as 50% a month, but it's on the order of last I calculated about 8% a month for the last 10 years.

So that's not 0.1 or 0.2% inflation.

It's not yet 50% inflation a month, but 8% a month for 10 years.

What that means is since inception, the smart money has been exiting the dollar for Bitcoin, and Bitcoin has gone up by six orders of magnitude from one cent to like, you know, $30,000, $40,000, right?

That's a really, in historical timeframes, right?

If you, if you zoomed out, that would just look like voice, like this, like a just total step function rise, you know, even though it didn't feel like that during the rise.

And

so what that means, one way of thinking about it is all these people, rather than let's say driving across the border to Switzerland and storing gold in Switzerland,

they're taking a little shuttle up to the cloud and they're storing gold in the cloud.

Okay, it's like it's as if these cloud countries have arisen, or at least cloud jurisdictions, which have better property rights and rule of law for many people around the world than their legacy state.

And so if you think about it, what cryptocurrencies are is they're half of a government, the digital half, because they provide property rights,

smart contracts, dispute resolution, monetary policy, identity.

For example, if you look at ENS, the Ethereum name system, that provides like identity online.

Okay, so ENS.domains.

Okay.

And so, for example, if I go to,

let's say,

vitalic.eth, okay.

and look at his ENS

this is basically like a domain name that's also a username.

Okay, so it's got a lot of features with both and it's a crypto address and so on.

This is like what internet native names, I think, are going to look like.

And

so the reason I just bring all that up is

I just don't think people really take the internet seriously enough.

Here's one way of thinking about it.

You know like the omnibus spending bills, like the legislation that's passed?

Basically, it's like one giant bill and everybody shoves in their change at the last minute, and it's passed.

That's how it works in the U.S.

and other countries.

Okay.

If you know how software engineering is done, it isn't like one giant change to the code that's pushed through once a year, which is this huge political fight and so on.

That then is pushed to affect 300 million people.

If you have a user base, and we did a Coinbase, we had a user base in the hundreds of millions.

At Earn, I had like a million-something users.

So I've managed and certainly invested in companies with large two-sided marketplaces and social networks.

You don't usually roll a change out to every user without some testing.

Instead, you have a subset of them, like just 100,000 people, 10,000 people, and you test the feature there and you see if it's causing some dramatic issues.

Like if you're going to hike, let's say Uber would test it in Australia first before they put out their new fee schedule to the rest of the world, for example.

And you gather the data there and you make sure your code changes are having the desired effect before you push it out to the rest of the world.

That is just good government.

Often you can have a change that is negative sum.

Uber makes less money, the drivers make less money and the riders have a bad experience.

Everybody loses.

Or you can have a change that's a positive sum.

Everybody's happier, right?

Like maybe a better

rider locator thing and everybody's happier.

Everybody makes more money.

Everybody gets their destination faster.

You don't always know.

And often, very often, there's a change that's unintentionally bad.

It's a bug.

Oh, we did this, and we thought it would result in this, but it resulted in that.

Okay.

Now, compare that to how governments operate.

Governments, you know, democratic governments will make changes to the law.

It's a highly political process, and it's just like something is pushed in there, and then they figure out what, they just throw it over the fence, and they let the courts and the lawyers and the people all just fight it out.

There's no provision for bug tracking or feedback or anything like that.

There's no testing of what this law actually does on a 10,000 person population.

Everything is just pushed live to prod, if you used a software engineering analogy.

That's obviously not how it should be done.

And I believe that's not how it's going to be done in the future.

Winston Churchill famously said democracy is the worst form of government except every other one known to man.

And

I agree with that, but now comes digital currencies and digital truth.

Do you think that's the next evolution of an optimal society?

So I actually think that

what we're going to see is cryptocurrency, crypto democracy, crypto country, right?

Cryptocurrency puts capitalism online.

Crypto democracy can put democracy online.

Okay.

And then with the fusion of those two, we actually get democratic capitalism 2.0 or 3.0 or 4.0.

I think of, you know, just like Rome succeeded Greece and Britain succeeded Rome, and America succeeded Britain, I think the internet eventually succeeds America.

And so how does that work?

Let me be a little more specific.

Right now, what's happening, when you think of democracy, there's different definitions of democracy.

You can think of one definition of democracy is,

let's call it blue democracy, and that is Democrat democracy.

Republicans have their own version.

They'll say, it's not a democracy, it's a republic.

Partly because republic for Republicans, I'm sure that's some subconscious aspect, but partly because they say, oh, you know, for example, the Senate is important and the courts are important.

It's not just populist majority rule and so on and so forth.

There's a third very important version of democracy in the world, and that's Indian democracy.

That's like a dark horse that's kind of rising and that's becoming more and more relevant on the world stage.

You know, India is a player in world events that it wasn't 10 years ago.

And finally, there's techno-democracy or crypto democracy.

The reason I say there's at least four different versions, blue, red, Indian, and tech or crypto democracy, is that democracy is a really big word.

It's a word that can contain many things.

It's like if you think about Christianity, Christianity is a big word that contains both the ideology that tore down the Roman Empire and the ideology that buttressed the Holy Roman Empire.

Okay?

Like communism contains both the ideology that caused the Bolshevik Revolution and the modified version, which is

a hammer and chicle on a Chinese worship in the South China Sea.

So you have this very different version.

I mean, what Chinese communism is, is not what Marx envisioned, and Stalin is different from both of them, right?

And this is similar to, you know, in religions, we understand that you can have, for example, Protestant and Catholic and Russian Orthodox or Sunni and Shiite, right?

And so just like that, one realizes, okay, there's different flavors of democracy.

It's a big word and it contains a lot of things.

Once we understand that there's no, like, there's not one definition of democracy and there's going to be different versions, just like different versions of communism and different versions of Islam and different versions of Christianity.

These are huge, one way of thinking about it, these are social operating systems, right?

And just like the Chinese did, you know, communism with Chinese characteristics, the,

you know, the Indians have done democracy with dharmic developments, okay?

So they have their own fork of democracy.

They've taken a different direction.

And in fact, actually, if you think about it, that original British operating system, to take a metaphor, was forked by the Americans in one direction, the Israelis in another, the Singaporeans in another, and the Indians in yet another.

All of them respect Great Britain, but they've taken it in different directions with a Chinese, Israeli, Indian, or American flavor, right?

So I say all of this to say there's not just one thing of, oh, that's not democracy, oh, you're not doing it right, and so on and so forth.

There's different versions of this that stress different things, but we recognize these as all having some origin in

British common law, right?

And people might say, oh, Singapore is in a democracy, or, oh, you know, this or that country, it's an eroding democracy, but let's at least say that they share some of the code base.

Okay.

So with all that said, what does the next version look like?

I do believe, you know, I actually believe in both, quote, capitalism and democracy, but if you think about capitalism, there's a huge difference between the techno-capitalism of today, the industrial capitalism of mid-century with General Mills and General Motors and General Electric, and the agrarian capitalism of the 1800s, where it was all about the family farm.

Yeah, we use the word capitalism, but that again, it's a huge word, big word that contains very different eras.

And if you had the metrics and the graphs on them, the number of transactions, the degree of decentralization, those things vary wildly among these things.

Even if there was the commonality in some ways of private property, things like the FDA or the SEC didn't even exist in the 1800s, yet we still consider that a capitalist country.

So what does that look like for democracy?

First, there's already, you know, that's saying the future is already here, but it's not yet,

it's just not evenly distributed, right?

So there's different versions of democracy that are already out there that are like, you know, next-gen versions or internet versions.

One that's immediately recognizable is what Esonia has done.

They have like crypto democracy, cryptographic democracy, where your votes are cryptographically verifiable.

It's a very, you know, that's a place that Esonia gave us Skype.

They gave us transfer-wise.

This is a very tech-forward country.

And they're real pioneers here, right?

Singapore has something that's also worthy of note.

They have something called SyncPass.

And what SyncPass is, is it's if your driver's license and passport were on your phone and you could use it to log into websites.

Okay.

And you sort of think, okay,

that's what identity becomes.

That's what your password becomes.

It becomes single sign-on.

That is to say, your Google login, your key card for your home, your API key, your private key for your cryptocurrency, your

ENS name, your passport, your driver's license.

All of those things combine into like one piece of digital digital identity that gains you access online and offline and does your photo verification.

Okay.

Now, that's not just theoretical.

If you go to a website, for example, like snapshot.org.

Okay, so these are all these DAOs.

These DAOs have, you know, in this case, that is 817,000 members, right?

That's actually pretty big.

You know, most members of the United Nations are actually small countries.

I can go and look at the exact numbers, but I believe 50% have less than 10 million people and 20% have less than 1 million people.

So many countries in the United Nations are actually smaller than this DAO.

You have these online organizations, you know, 800,000 members, 280,000 members.

And what do you see in each of these?

If you go there,

you will see proposals and you'll see votes, right?

And the vote starts in these hours.

who won the vote, right?

These are like extremely consensus kinds of votes, right?

But in other cases um you know i'm sure i can find one where there's some you know argument or something like that it may not be like totally you know a hundred percent right see this one option one option two they're holding an internet plebiscite and uh it's not exactly 99 it's like 57 versus 31 right and the thing is you might say oh this is like you know just dumb people playing you know online but they're allocating significant amounts of money here right i don't know exactly how much the arbitrum treasury has but you can go and look at it.

You know, $6 billion, right?

Like, it's not nothing.

And is it $6 trillion?

No, it's not $6 trillion.

But again, this is larger than the budget of many countries, and they're doing online binding votes to allocate that capital.

That's pretty, pretty important, right?

These people have all opted in to groups.

with governance

and the internet and the code is governing their interactions, their disputes,

their capital allocations.

This is actually something that's very similar to, like, you know, mid-1800s America, where people would go and self-organize on the frontier in various new towns and cities popping up in what is today Minnesota or Missouri.

Except this is not happening in the physical world yet.

It's happening on the internet in these DAOs.

Okay, so this is what I mean by like techno-democracy.

Would you categorize a DAO as a form of network state?

Is it a subset of network states?

It's on the path to a network state.

It's like maybe a DAO is to a network.

It's a network without a state.

Yeah, exactly.

That's right.

Or basically,

it doesn't have the physicality that I think is important, but the digital part is a very important predecessor.

Just the fact that people can self-organize into these communities with binding votes for very large amounts of money, by the way, right?

Remember, it's not some country's laws ultimately that is know governing the allocation of this huge amount of capital it is um you know a a blockchain right a blockchain is a digital government that is handling all of these flows of funds and it's completely auditable right everybody can see you know what transactions are happening and you know how much money there is there and and all this kind of stuff what are some resolutions that are relevant that that might be of interest as as use cases

good question so first of all they're definitely funding software development.

And that's something, you know, all your listeners understand.

You know, engineers are expensive, testing is expensive, all that kind of stuff, right?

So, that right there is a big bucket.

So, they're investing in securing protocols.

They're investing in making it more user-friendly to use.

They're investing in all of that kind of stuff, right?

Software development.

A second thing many of them do is they invest in the community.

And that is like, some of them are actually starting to do more meetups, like physical meetups.

It's the Discord, it is

bounties and prizes for the community.

For example, there's one called Super Team.

So basically,

if you join their community, you can do bounties, prizes, all this kind of stuff.

And so a kid in India or Nigeria or somewhere can just make money online by clicking buttons, right?

And

so here's like an example.

Let me see.

So

here's like earnings.superteam.fund, right?

And so they've paid out like $2 million for 1,000 projects, like 2,000 bucks a pop.

That's a good amount of money in a lot of countries around the world, right?

That's like a year's salary that a kid with a phone or like a Chromebook or something can now just earn on the internet, right?

And

so some really interesting stuff.

So that's that's the second big bucket.

Let's call it community and bounties and crypto bounties and so on.

Okay.

So they do these projects and they complete these projects and they make money.

A third big bucket is content, right?

And I think you're going to start to see a lot more high-quality

movies, films, that kind of stuff come out.

But initially, podcasts for sure,

content that's interesting to the community on cryptography, on distributed computing, decentralized systems, all that kind of stuff.

And finally,

a bucket that's pretty interesting to me nowadays are things like VitaDAO, right?

So this is something I invest in.

So it's like it's trying to do research outside of academia, right?

Because ultimately, if you think about it, who's funding research?

It's the public, right?

So can we, rather than going from, you know, the public to tax dollars to the government to NIH to the researcher, can you cut out some of those middlemen steps?

And you have people just back the research that they believe in, right?

And so one that's definitely been working, at least, you know, it looks like it's working, VitaDAO, and it has researchers over here that get grants, okay, fund exceptional science, and supporters over here.

And everybody who wants to, you know, target longevity

can now go and buy into this.

Right.

And what's the business model?

Well, many of these people will go and found companies.

You know, maybe they'll found longevity companies or things related to that.

And then that VITA token might be something which,

you know, those people who did that get some shares in the company or what have you.

Somebody could take an ideological view about the FDA being too slow to procure drugs and to create some new framework where they could tie that into kind of funding research.

Yeah, exactly.

So here, like, here's the researchers tabs.

A tri-type of ecosystem.

Exactly.

Exactly.

Right.

So here, you know, these are grants over here.

So, you know, $4 million in research funded.

Again, look, is it billions yet?

No.

But it's just started like a couple of years ago.

And it's pretty good.

And then, you know, it's an avenue for

people who want to be quote principal investigators, but maybe they don't want to wait till they're 60 years old.

And if you can, you know, do something good online.

Right.

So here's on the supporter side.

There's actually a fair number of academics.

So that's like a fourth bucket, research, right?

So those four buckets are software development.

community content research.

And I think as we start doing more in the physical world, some of these DAOs will will start getting meetups and start buying real estate together.

There's like a funny one called Lynx DAO, which actually,

you know, this is like the, you know, the early days of the internet.

It was like, oh, pets.com.

It's so dumb.

Right.

But nowadays, Chewy works, right?

Chewy is a big company.

It's like a $9 billion public company.

I mean, that's legit, right?

Even if the market is up or down, right?

So

pets.com.

Oh, it was so stupid.

No, it wasn't.

Pets.com wasn't stupid.

It was just early.

And then it did eventually work.

Right.

So I'll show you another one, which seems silly, perhaps, but it's like seems to be working.

And that is LynxDAO, right?

And these people just love golf and, you know, so on have been using crypto to go and like crowdfund golf courses around the world, right?

And, you know, the thing about this is,

where is this, the Lynx golf club, like private golf for everyone, you know?

So you can basically join this and it's like a crowdfunded golf club, right?

And that might seem dumb or what have you, but you know, when people came to the U.S.

in the early 20th century,

a big motivation for people like, you know, a lot of Jewish people were locked out of country clubs, golf clubs, and being able to start their own was like a big signal of, you know, finally, you know, being accepted in society and so on.

And so, you know, guess what?

Now people can build their own golf club.

I'm not a big golf guy or anything like that, right?

But the real point is that you can crowdfund real estate with crypto, even if it starts with a seemingly silly application or this thing you might think is not that important.

And that's something where the cloud, all of this gigantic amount of money that's swirling around online, starts descending on the land.

You're like printing out the cloud in real life in the same way that you'd print out a document.

This is a general concept I have, which is obviously we know the concept of printing out a document.

But when you go and order something from

Amazon or Uber Eats,

in a a sense, you're like printing something out

because you're hitting a button and a digital process then results in a physical process, and that thing arrives at your door.

Potentially, that you could just have like a city

just arise like this with the capital and the people just coming out from the internet.

And V1 of that, so something that was network state-inspired, is something called Zusalu.

Have you heard of that?

Yes.

Yes, that's Vitalik's project.

Yes, exactly.

And And Vitalik basically read the network state and he's written about it.

And

he

talked about how that was an inspiration for Zizulu.

Zizalu, basically, they rented out like a village in Montenegro, right?

Essentially, so I wrote the network state, which said that communities defined by common interests can start off as purely online discussion forums, but then materialize into person

hubs over time.

What's cool about this is if you could do this and you could prove this,

maybe we're just at the beginning of a new age of community formation and participatory democracy and opt-in capitalism and so on, right?

Taking the best values that shaped America, not saying, oh, I'm rejecting free speech or I'm rejecting free markets, but figuring out the version which people are opting into and which they like.

And you might have a hundred different or a thousand different of these communities.

I need to update this so it's a little bit out of date.

Okay.

But I have this thing, the network state dashboard, where I'm tracking all these startup societies around the world that are doing their own things that are kind of like Zizul.

Okay.

Did you see that dashboard?

Yep.

And I also had this conference, network state.

So this conference in Amsterdam.

And this was a pretty big success, I think.

If I show you the audience.

Yep.

I saw the selfie.

Yeah, the selfie, there was a selfie, and this also shows since of scale of the audience.

You just announced the fund.

So, Zoe, maybe you could bring up the current investor base.

You have one of the most prolific investor bases of any funds.

Here is the,

you know, the Bologna Fund, Techno Capital for Techno Radicals.

So investors Novell, Brian Armstrong, and Emily Choi of Coinbase, Mark Anderson, Chris Dixon, Vasicon Z, David Sachs, Gary Tan, Toby Lucky, Ron Conway, Joe Lonsdale, Tyler Cameron Winklevoss, the Solana founders, Notion founder, Brian Johnson Blueprint, Steve Sinofsky, who's very senior at Microsoft, David Lee, who's one of the early people at SV Angel and also at Samsung now.

And I could go through the list of names here, but AJ runs Mithril, Billion Dollar Fund, Jesse Powell, founder of Kraken.

And outside of being some of the most prolific investors, there seems to be an ideological bent here.

Are you looking for a specific type of LP for your fund as well?

Yeah, if you like all these people, you're going to like the Bology Fund.

And if you don't, well, I'm sure there's plenty of other nice funds.

It's really kind of that simple.

What I think on balance, what these folks stand for is,

you know, freedom.

And

in my view, the best of American values.

And, you know, they stand for technological progress and they stand for all of these good things.

And, you know, that's also the kind of stuff that I want to fund.

Of course, it has to make money, and I think it will make a lot of money, but it'll also make freedom.

And the focus of your fund, you call it high-risk seed.

Sure.

Sometimes

categories get named in retrospect.

Like, was there a category called an accelerator at the time Y Combinator started its thing?

Or, you know, the Teal Fellowship sort of created a category.

ASIC and Z didn't look like a normal VC fund when it was doing its thing and so on.

I look at investing as a tool to build the world that we want to build.

And one of the things that I had in this were:

there's a bunch of these failing institutions, and I'm going to list some of them off.

So here's some problems, right?

High inflation, privacy violations, lack of shared consensus, costly energy, election controversy, security breaches, loss of manufacturing capability, low input pulse control, the declining post-war order, falling life expectancy, eroding freedoms, internet-disrupted institutions, inadequate education, blocked physical construction, clickabait journalism, lawfare, insufficient political choice, and above all, in my view, the inaccessibility of the physical frontier.

And how do you solve these kinds of things?

Well, for example,

with privacy violation, zero-knowledge proofs, other kinds of things, end-to-end encryption, local storage, those can go after those uh loss of manufacturing capability well robotics actually has a lot of promise in you know bringing manufacturing to anything and you can just maybe you can turn a lot of labor into electricity which turns labor into capital um

or other less obvious things like uh impulse control so you know mike moritz you know one of the greatest investors of all time he has this uh concept on the seven deadly sins do you know this thing yeah about the the core needs what he means is that it's like, you know, it's just so,

it's so incredibly difficult to build a business that you need to have some visceral human need.

You know, for example, Uber saves you time, so that's sloth.

DoorDash gets you food.

That's gluttony, right?

Twitter raises your awareness of bad things.

That's wrath.

Instagram is pride.

Mash.com finds you a date, right?

Robinhood facilitates your transactions, greed.

Zillow helps you get a better house, envy.

So in extremists, these things that are providing, that are meeting legitimate human needs can become vices.

So that's why in a tongue-in-cheek way, he says every startup serves one of the seven deadly sins.

The problem is, though, that if those companies are no longer startups and they become really huge companies, I think they add value on balance.

But there's some comments, for example, like the Netflix once, maybe tongue-in-cheek, but they said that their goal was to

make it so that you

take away from a glass of wine with your spouse and just watch more Netflix.

Remember, there's like a famous quote on that, right?

And because they just want to maximize your time spent online.

Okay, now you start to get into maybe a vice of sloth, right?

It goes from a human need of maybe entertainment to a vice of sloth, right?

And so, how could you possibly defend against something like that when you're at the checkout counter and there's all of this very highly optimized

stuff there that's sugary that is maybe maximizing the profit of the guy selling it, but it's not benefiting your health?

Well, maybe you have a different kind of business that actually boosts not vice, but virtue.

For example, you have like a community where you have a membership to it, and it's keto kosher.

And so there's no sugary food even allowed in it.

Very much like kosher itself, where there's dietary restrictions that are just put into the supply chain and you just kind of see that something's kosher.

You just kind of enter this community.

and it's only salad and fresh fruit and fresh veggies and and you know meat if you're if you're into that um but there's no processed processed foods, there's no sugar.

You have to get in the car and drive outside of it to go and eat unhealthy.

So your defaults are set to a good level.

And that's like one of several creative solutions to try to have a corporate virtue as opposed to corporate vice.

And that's because the community is not optimizing on profit maximization.

They're optimizing on other values.

Or more precisely, that profit maximization is now aligned with the individual's values.

It's a little bit like, you know, there was junk food, but now, guess what?

There's health food and there's companies that make money on health food.

And there's, you know, there's now like results-based gyms, which don't make money on the subscription, but make money if you actually achieve your fitness goals, right?

So it's a little bit like, you know, you've probably managed a sales force, right?

And not Salesforce, the company, but a Salesforce, like a, like a, right?

And

they will do what you incentivize them to do, right?

They're, The saying is coin operate, right?

You set up incentives and they will run to those incentives.

It's almost like a really powerful stallion and you point in a direction and it's going to run in that direction.

If you point it off the cliff or if you didn't realize that there was a bump in the road in the future, well, that's kind of your fault in that sense, right?

You can do things where you incentivize salespeople with equity, but really what you want to do is just constantly monitor the incentives and change the incentives.

And so capital is this very powerful maximizing function, but it can't set the objective itself.

You know, you have to, and then some creativity comes out of, okay, well, we made a lot of money off of junk food.

Can we make a lot of money off of health food?

Well, probably we can.

We just need to hit the right cultural moment, right?

Anyway, so that's just like one subroutine of a subroutine of what I'm trying to do here.

But really

what it is, is all those problems I listed, I think there are internet-first solutions to many of them.

There are ways that, and one way of thinking about that,

If there is hope, it comes from tech.

Okay, that's the one thing that's working.

Why did I say this one thing that's working?

Well, you have drug addiction and you have failing life expectancy and you have

military issues overseas and you have inflation and you have everything that the state is touching, which is real estate, it's healthcare, it's education.

Those things are getting wildly expensive in price.

Okay, and I can show you that graph.

Do you know the graph I'm talking about?

I think education has been compounding by 8% for like three decades.

Yeah.

And Ackman actually had this great tweet where he's like, how is this thing getting so ridiculously expensive and the number of students isn't increasing?

Like, what business has increased its prices?

At Harvard, you now have more administrators than students.

Whatever the state props up rises in price.

Whatever technology drops falls in price, right?

So this is like, you know, everything that the government touches, medical services,

these are obviously related to education, right?

Housing, even on this chart, it doesn't look that bad.

In certain markets, it's like absolutely terrible.

right?

And whereas the stuff that technology touches, like TVs or cell phones, those fall relative to baseline, but these things rise.

There's a bunch of people who say, oh, no, no, you're just, you know, that's Baumel's cost disease.

Those things that go up in price, it's because there's labor associated with them and you're, you know, you're trying to blame it on the government.

I'm like, well, ask yourself why they can't be automated.

Why don't we have more automated medicine?

It's because, thanks to AMA and to some extent FDA and a bunch of other HHS and so on, you have to have a doctor in the loop for things that don't require a doctor.

For example, like you need a doctor to get your genome sequenced

in some places.

That's considered like a diagnostic test.

This is like saying you need a doctor to step on the scale,

to a doctor to look in the mirror.

Why do we need to put that?

through the medical system and register a billing event for everybody involved.

That doesn't need to be like that.

You want to push much more self-serve, you know.

And similarly, with childcare, there's regulations that say there can only be so many children cared for per adult, but you have a much larger number of children cared for by teacher in elementary school.

And yet, that, you know, you could have 30 kids in a class, but there's a limit on childcare.

It's one of the reasons child care is very expensive in some jurisdictions.

Obviously, housing regulations prohibit you in a variety of ways.

There's also unions that make it tough.

And I recognize, by the way, I'm sure some of the people watching this are like, you know, managing large, you know, pensions or things like that.

No offense to any of these folks.

I'm talking about the systemic effects.

The goal of having a high standard of living and, you know, a job with decency for workers, of course, one supports that.

It's a mechanism, you know, that one can argue with.

But anyway, my point is that when you start scratching on these areas that have supposedly bowel moles, cause disease and nothing can be done and so on and so forth.

And then you go and look at construction abroad, you're like why is this a hundred x or a thousand x literally faster i'm not i'm not saying that as like some figure of speech i mean um you know i've posted videos uh i recognize that china is very unpopular um i have nevertheless they they've built a lot very quickly and there's there's something one can learn from their prefab and modular construction and there's videos for example of um here let me show you this what's the speed up here okay so it's nine hour nine hours to build a train station if you were to unpack those scale efficiencies, what are those scale efficiencies?

Seven trains, 23 diggers.

They started at 6.30 p.m.

They're done by 3 a.m.

The reason I say that is that shows what's like, what's physically possible, right?

And

when you go from nine hours to

three years or five years for a station, right?

That is a greater than thousand X difference, right?

You know, divide 9,000 hours, right, into 24 hours in a day, right?

And, you know, that is

2.5 times per day.

Yeah, exactly.

That's right.

So if you go from nine hours to one year, that's that's about a thousand X, right?

9,000 hours roughly in a year.

When you're 1,000 X off from the state of the art, from what's physically feasible, you're going to fall way behind.

You're not in the game.

And this is something, you know, Elon actually replied to a tweet of mine where I said, look, we're not, California isn't 10% off the state of the art.

It's like a thousand X off the state of the art in terms of speed.

And if you've done any real estate, that compounds really fast.

If you can build a building a thousand X faster than the other guy, you can have it occupied and generating rent to build the next building and the next and the next and the next,

your compounding rate is so much ridiculously faster than the other guy, you're just going to completely outrun them.

So that's like a fourth bucket research, right?

So those four buckets are software development, community, content, research.

And I think as we start doing more in the physical world, some of these DAOs will start getting meetups and start buying real estate together.

There's like a funny one called LinksDAO, which actually,

you know, this is like the, you know, the early days of the internet.

It was like, oh, pets.com, it's so dumb.

Right.

But nowadays, Chewy works.

Right.

Chewy is a big company.

Actually, I don't know what its actual valuation is nowadays, but before I

say it works, but what's it?

What's its market cap?

I don't know.

Okay, it's like a $9 billion public company.

I mean, that's legit, right?

Even if the market is up or down, right?

So

Pets.com.

Oh, it was so stupid.

No, it wasn't.

Pets.com wasn't stupid.

It was just early.

Same with Instacart.

Instacart was

webvan.com.

Yeah, exactly.

That's right.

Webvan became Instacart.

Exactly.

That's right.

Or rather, Webvan didn't become Instacart, but the most landpunk startup of WebVan became a very successful company called Instacart, or the concept exactly.

And so I'll share you another one, which seems silly, perhaps, but it's like seems to be working.

And that is LynxDAO, right?

And these people just love golf and so on have been using crypto to go and like crowdfund golf courses around the world.

Right.

And,

you know, the thing about this is,

whereas this, the Lynx Golf Club, like private golf for everyone, you know, so you can basically join this and it's like a crowdfunded golf club, right?

And that might seem dumb or what have you, but,

you know, when people came to the US in the early 20th century,

a big motivation for people like, you know, a lot of Jewish people were locked out of country clubs, golf clubs, and being able to start their own was like a big signal of, you know, finally, you know, being accepted in society and so on.

And so, you know, guess what?

Now people can build their own golf club.

I'm not a big golf guy or anything like that, right?

But the real point is that you can crowdfund real estate estate with crypto, even if it starts with a seemingly silly application or this thing you might think is not that important.

And that's something where the cloud, all of this gigantic amount of money that's swirling around online starts descending on the land.

You're like printing out the cloud in real life in the same way that you'd like print out a document.

This is a general concept I have, which is, obviously we know the concept of printing out a document.

But when you go and order something from,

you know, Amazon or Uber Eats, right, in a sense, you're like printing something out

because you're hitting a button and a digital process then results in a physical process and that thing arrives at your door.

Obviously, there's humans in the loop now.

But many of those steps from delivery to growing the food to cooking the food and so on and so forth, individual versions of each of the steps you could imagine.

And I can show you examples of robots for every single one of those steps.

From let's say, you know, if you get tomatoes delivered to your door, there's agricultural robots, there's picking robots, there's robotic trucks, there's robotic packing plants.

Every one of those steps could, in theory, be fully automated.

And then you can imagine almost an electromechanical process where you hit a button and it goes

and all these things spin into action, and the tomatoes are delivered to your door, right?

Someone could probably do that full stack right now, just to prove a point that it could be done.

And then what is that?

That's like a printer on a larger scale, where when you hit print, there's a head with some ink and it moves around electromechanically after you hit enter.

It's that concept of building a complicated digital object online and hitting enter and then just printing it out.

We can do that for a document.

We can do that for goods.

And then we might be able to do that for ever larger things.

So the bad version of it is you print out a mob, the flash mobs and so on in person.

Somebody comes, you know, in New York, there's that Twitch streamer or something who held

like a thing a few weeks ago and just caused this whole ruckus in downtown.

And you're seeing more and more pictures of these gigantic internet mobs that materialize into real life right you've seen quite a few of those over the last several years that's a bad version

the good version is uh potentially that you could just have like a city

just arise like this with the capital and the people just coming out from the internet and v1 of that um so something that was network state inspired is something called Zuzalu.

Have you heard of that?

Yes.

Yes, that's Vitalik's product.

Yes, exactly.

And Vitalik basically read the network state, and he's written about it.

And

he

talked about how that was an inspiration for Zuzalu.

And one of the things that I had written about several years ago, let me see if I can find this.

Here we go.

So you see why I built Zuzalu?

Yes.

Right.

So Zuzalu, basically, they rented out like a village in, you know, Montenegro.

Right.

And,

you know, so

essentially, so, you know, I wrote the network state, which said that communities defined by common interests can start off as purely online discussion forums, but then materialize into person, you know, hubs over time.

Right.

And

so what's cool about this is if you could do this and you could prove this,

Maybe we're just at the beginning of a new age of community formation and participatory democracy and opt-in capitalism and so on, right?

Taking the best values that shaped America, not saying, oh, I'm rejecting free speech or I'm rejecting free markets, but figuring out the version which people are opting into and which they like.

And you might have 100 different or 1,000 different of these communities.

And so

one thing I have is something,

I need to update this so it's a little bit out of date.

But I have this thing, the network state dashboard, where I'm tracking all these sort of societies around the world that are doing their own things that are kind of like Zoozo.

Okay, did you see that dashboard?

Yep.

And I also had this conference in Amsterdam,

and this was a pretty big success, I think.

If I show you the

I saw the selfie,

yeah, the selfie, there was a selfie, and this also shows a sense of the scale of the audience.

So let me see if I can

So let's transition to the fund.

So I know you just announced the fund.

So Zoe, maybe you could bring up the current investor base.

You have one of the most prolific investor bases of any funds.

And let's project that.

Apology Fund, Techno Capital for Techno-Radicals.

So investors Novell, Brian Armstrong, and Emily Choi of Coinbase, Mark Anderson, Chris Dixon, Vasic Monzee, David Sachs, Gary Tan, Toby Lucky, Ron Conway, Joe Lonsdale, Tyler and Cameron Winkleboss, the Solana founders, Notion Founder, Brian Johnson Blueprint, Steve Sinofsky, who's very senior at Microsoft, David Lee, who's one of the early people at SV Angel and also at Samsung now.

And I could go through the list of names here, but IJ runs Mitzero, Billion Dollar Fund.

And outside of being some of the most prolific investors, there seems to be an ideological bent here.

Are you looking for a specific type of LP for your fund as well?

Yeah, if you like all these people, you're going to like the Bology Fund.

And if you don't, well, I'm sure there's plenty of other nice funds.

It's really kind of that simple.

What I think on balance, what these folks stand for is

freedom.

And

in my view, the best of American values.

And

they stand for technological progress.

And they stand for all of these good things.

And

that's also the kind of stuff that I want to fund.

Of course, it has to make money, and I think it will make a lot of money, but it'll also make freedom.

And the focus of your fund, you call it high-risk seed.

So tell me about that.

Sure.

Sure, sure, sure.

I mean, the thing is,

sometimes

categories get named in retrospect.

Like, was there a category called an accelerator at the time Y Combinator started its thing or you know the Teal Fellowship sort of created a category.

ASIC and Z didn't look like a normal VC fund when it was doing its thing, and so on.

I look at investing as a tool to build the world that we want to build.

And one of the things that I had in this were,

there's a bunch of these failing institutions, and I'm going to list some of them off.

Here are some problems, right?

High inflation, privacy violations, lack of shared consensus, costly energy, election controversy, security breaches, loss of manufacturing capability, low input pulse control, the declining post-war order, falling life expectancy, eroding freedoms, internet disrupted institutions, inadequate education, blocked physical construction, clickbait journalism, lawfare, insufficient political choice, and above all, in my view, the inaccessibility of the physical frontier.

And how do you solve these kinds of things?

Well, for example,

with privacy violation, zero-knowledge proofs, other kinds of things, end-to-end encryption, local storage, those can go after those.

Loss of manufacturing capability.

Well, robotics actually has a lot of promise in

bringing manufacturing to anything.

And you can just maybe you can turn a lot of labor into electricity, which turns labor into capital.

Or other less obvious things like impulse control.

So, you know, Mike Moritz, you know, one of the greatest investors of all time, he has this concept on the seven deadly sins.

Do Do you know this thing?

Yeah, about the core needs that every company solves.

Yeah, right.

And

what he means is that it's like, you know, it's just so

incredibly difficult to build a business that you need to have some visceral human need.

You know, for example, Uber saves you time, so that's sloth.

DoorDash gets you food.

That's gluttony, right?

Twitter raises your awareness of bad things.

It's wrath.

Instagram is pride.

MASH.com finds you a date.

Robinhood facilitates your transactions.

Greed.

Zillow helps you get a better house.

Envy.

So in extremists, these things that are providing, that are meeting legitimate human needs can become vices.

So that's why, in a tongue-in-cheek way, he says every startup serves one of the seven deadly sins, right?

With me so far?

Yeah.

The problem is, though, that if those companies are no longer startups and they become really huge companies,

you know, I think they add value on balance, but there's some comments, for example, like the like Netflix once, maybe tongue-in-cheek, but they said that their goal was to

make it so that you

take away from a glass of wine with your spouse and just watch more Netflix.

Remember, there's like a famous quote on that, right?

And because they just want to maximize your time spent online.

Okay, now you start to get into maybe a vice of sloth, right?

It goes from a human need of maybe entertainment to a vice of sloth, right?

And so how could you possibly defend against something like that when you're at the checkout counter and there's all of this very highly optimized, you know, stuff there that's sugary that is maybe maximizing the profit of the guy selling it, but it's not benefiting your health?

Well, maybe you have a different kind of business that actually boosts not vice, but virtue.

For example, you have like a community where you have a membership to it and it's keto kosher.

And so there's no sugary food even allowed in it.

Very much like kosher itself, where there's dietary restrictions that are just put into the supply chain and you just kind of see that something's kosher.

You just kind of enter this community and it's only salad and fresh fruit and fresh veggies and meat if you're into that.

But there's no processed foods, there's no sugar.

You have to get in the car and drive outside of it to go and eat unhealthy.

So your defaults are set to a good level.

And that's like one of several creative solutions to try to have a corporate virtue as opposed to corporate vice.

vice.

And that's because the community is not optimizing on profit maximization.

They're optimizing on other values.

Or more precisely, that profit maximization is now aligned with the individual's values.

It's a little bit like, you know, there was junk food, but now, guess what?

There's health food and there's companies that make money on health food.

And there's, you know, there's now like results-based gems, which don't make money on the subscription, but make money if you actually achieve your fitness goals, right?

So it's a little bit like, you know, you've probably managed a sales force, right?

And not Salesforce, the company, but a Salesforce, like a, like a, right?

And

they will do what you incentivize them to do, right?

The saying is coin-operated, right?

You set up incentives and they will run to the business.

That's the best salesperson.

People get upset at them for optimizing around the quote-unquote wrong incentives.

That's a sign of a very effective salesperson.

Yeah, exactly.

It's almost like a really powerful stallion, and you point in a direction, and it's going to run in that direction.

If you point it off a cliff, or if you didn't realize that there was a bump in the road in the future, well, that's kind of your fault in that sense, right?

So now you can do things where you incentivize salespeople with equity, but really what you want to do is just constantly monitor the incentives and change the incentives.

And so capital is this very powerful maximizing function, but it can't set the objective itself.

You know, you have to, and then some creativity comes out of, okay, well, we made a lot of money off junk junk food.

Can we make a lot of money off of health food?

Well, probably we can.

We just need to hit the right cultural moment, right?

Anyway, so that's just like one subroutine of a subroutine of what I'm trying to do here.

But really,

what it is, is all those problems I listed, I think they're internet-first solutions to many of them.

There are ways that, and one way of thinking about that,

if there is hope, it comes from tech.

Okay, that's the one thing that's working.

Why did I say this one thing is working?

Well, you have,

you know, drug addiction and you have failing life expectancy and you have, you know, military issues overseas and you have inflation and you have everything that the state is touching, which is real estate, it's healthcare, it's education.

Those things are getting wildly expensive in price.

Okay, and I can show you that graph.

Do you know the graph I'm talking about?

Not that one specifically.

And education, of course, as well.

I think education has been compounding by 8% for like three decades.

Yeah.

And Ackman actually had this great tweet where he's like, how is this thing getting so ridiculously expensive and the number of students isn't increasing?

At Harvard, you now have more administrators than students.

Yeah, exactly.

Right.

And so, okay, so now

I'm going to show you something that I've been thinking about for a long time.

By the way, not just Harvard.

Most Ivy League institutions.

Excuse me.

Yes, most Ivy League institutions.

That's right.

It's like they all kind of hike price together.

They also collude on admissions and whatnot right so whatever the state props up rises in price whatever technology falls in price right so this is like you know everything that the government touches medical services uh these are obviously related to education right um housing even on this chart it doesn't look that bad um in certain markets it's like absolutely terrible right uh and whereas the stuff that technology touches like TVs or, you know, cell phones, those fall relative to baseline, but these things rise.

And now there's a bunch of people who say, oh, no, no, you're just, you know, that's Baumel's cost disease.

Those things that go up in price, it's because there's labor associated with them, and you're, you know, you're trying to blame it on the government.

I'm like, well, ask yourself why they can't be automated.

Why don't we have more automated medicine?

It's because, thanks to AMA and to some extent, FDA and a bunch of other HHS and so on, you have to have a doctor in the loop for things that don't require a doctor.

For example, like you need a doctor to get your genome sequenced

in some places.

That's considered like a diagnostic test.

This is like saying you need a doctor to step on the scale,

a doctor to look in the mirror.

Why do we need to put that through the medical system and register a billing event for everybody involved?

That doesn't need to be like that.

You want to push much more self-serve.

Similarly with childcare, there's regulations that say there can only be so many children cared for per adult.

But you have a much larger number of children cared for by teacher in elementary school, and yet that, you know, you could have 30 kids in a class, but there's a limit on childcare.

It's one of the reasons childcare is very expensive in some jurisdictions.

Obviously, housing regulations prohibit you in a variety of ways.

There's also unions that make it tough.

And I recognize, by the way, I'm sure some of the people watching this are like, you know, managing large pensions or things like that.

No offense to any of these folks.

I'm talking about the systemic efforts.

Well, speaking of pensions, there's this really interesting thing where basically the largest pensions in the world are, of course, unions, and they've been they have political pressure to drive up their returns, so they're going into private equity and hedge funds that are then systematically going in and downsizing.

It's so it's so I mean,

the marriage

is a two-way marriage, and as you mentioned, it's largely driven by politics and not the end goals of the individual members, which is where

that delta is essentially the corruption or the politicization of the process.

Right.

I mean, the thing is, like,

the goal of having a high standard of living and

a job with decency for workers, of course, one supports that.

It's a mechanism that one can argue with.

But anyway, my point is that when you start scratching on these areas that have supposedly bowel moles, cause disease and nothing can be done and so on and so forth.

And then you go and look at construction abroad, you're like, why is this 100x or 1,000x literally faster?

I'm not saying that as like some figure of speech.

I mean, you know, I've posted videos.

I recognize that China is very unpopular.

I have, nevertheless, they've built a lot very quickly, and there's something one can learn from their prefab and modular construction.

If you were to unpack those scale efficiencies, what are those scale efficiencies?

It's only 30 seconds.

Just watch the seven trains, 23 diggers.

They started at 6:30 p.m.

They're done by 3 a.m.

So the reason I say that is that shows what's like what's physically possible, right?

And

when you go from nine hours to

three years or five years for a station, right, that is

a greater than 1,000 X difference, right?

You know, divide 9,000 hours

into 24 hours in a day, right?

And that is

2.5 times per day and then three years to 1,000.

From nine hours to one year, that's about 1,000x, right?

9,000 hours roughly in a year.

When you're 1,000 X off from the state of the art, from what's physically feasible, you're going to fall way behind.

You're not in the game.

And this is something, you know, Elon actually replied to a tweet of mine where I said, look, we're not, California isn't 10% off the state of the art.

It's like 1,000 X off the state of the art in terms of speed.

And if you've done any real estate, that compounds really fast.

If you can build a building a thousand X faster than the other guy, you can have it occupied and generating rent to build the next building and the next and the next and next.

Your compounding rate is so much ridiculously faster than the other guy, you're just going to completely outrun them.

Right.

And so

my point is that we're so far below capacity on this.

And the reason is because of, in part, in large part, these regulations that are requiring either humans to be involved or new technology to not be adopted or all of the above.

And that's why the cost of construction, the cost of housing and so on goes up.

It doesn't have to be like that.

We could build way, way, way faster.

So

the point being that

how do you do that though?

Let's say we've diagnosed it that the

cost of housing and the calcium education, the cost of healthcare, all these things have skyrocketed.

Everything touched by technology has dropped in price.

Well, you know, there's that famous Alan Kay saying, which is, if you're serious about software, you've got to build your own hardware.

That Steve Jobs quoted, right?

So I feel if you're serious about technology, you need to build your own sovereignty.

Because the problems are upstream of the technology.

Exactly.

Exactly.

And let me give some concrete examples.

The city of San Francisco and the current state of it.

That's not something that you can solve by hitting keys on a keyboard in at least in a trivial way, right?

That's a governance problem.

Newsome and Le Debris could click their fingers like this and clean up the city, and they admitted it.

They said it's true.

They cleaned it up for G to visit.

Another example is

when cruise was taken off the streets, a self-driving car was taken off the streets.

That's a political thing, not a tech thing.

When AI is getting the 640K compute is enough for anyone ban, right?

Like there's a recent executive order that's banning AI compute.

When you have crypto being attacked by the government, right?

And so you have AI, crypto, self-driving,

any technology you can, obviously social media is being attacked, right?

Any technology you can imagine is something where if it actually is increasing human freedom in some way, if it's giving people more ability to speak, more ability to transact, more ability to do X or Y or Z, that's undercutting several traditional power centers.

And they want to clamp down on that.

because they think of it as rocking the system or causing instability either directly or indirectly.

And you can see that more clearly all the way over in China, where even though they had done some, I think, some

good things, I hesitate to ever say China's ever done anything.

Why are you so focused on trolls and people criticizing?

I think one of the things in our search for truth,

we must be brave in stating things that are

factually based.

I'm not like really focused on it, but it's more like defensive driving.

Yeah.

Conditioning.

It goes back to the power structures.

Somehow you are being influenced by the

implicit hands of online criticism.

Well, yeah, I mean, in the sense of I want to state things precisely enough to deny an out-of-context clip.

Yeah.

And you also want the audience to be able to absorb the learning without being triggered.

Yeah, sometimes, right?

I mean, but look, is it true?

Look, you know, if...

To really understand where China is, let's just talk about China for a second as a subroutine and pop right up.

Okay.

All right, Here we go.

People are just totally, totally, totally unrealistic about

where China is right now in terms of how strong it is on some debates.

And I think the very basis of Sun Tzu art of war is to know your enemy.

To know your enemy.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

Exactly.

Like if you're, you know, if the whole thing is sort of, in my view, cope that says, of course, they're just going to fall into a ditch and win.

And so that wasn't like the U.S.

had to during the Cold War.

It took the Soviets very seriously.

But anyway, so China is number one steel, number one trade, number one shipbuilding, number one high-speed rail, right?

So here is the steel, okay?

And then people sometimes say, oh, it's just like the 1970s and so on.

Okay, in the 1970s, here was the U.S.

in terms of steel production.

There was China.

It's basically about, that's about a 10x ratio.

Today, it's 10x the other way, and China is the number one steel producer in the entire world.

And that's just a proxy for lots of physical stuff.

I'll show a few more graphs.

Here, back back in the year 2000, the U.S.

was, you know, these are all the blue countries are trade partners of the U.S.

in this graph.

By the year 2020, only really North America was mainly a U.S.

trade partner, had the U.S.

as number one trade partner.

And some countries in Western Europe, most of the world has their number one trade partner being China.

So if you tell countries you must choose between America and China,

they may not want to choose, but you may not like their choice.

You know, knowing these facts governs what tactics are likely to work, right?

You can't sanction China.

China's like making the essentials for much of the world.

And also, people think it's all about a high-tech competition with China.

That's not actually true, or not only that, it's also a medium-tech and a low-tech competition.

China can screw you on the screws because they make all the screws and the nuts and the bolts, too.

You know, they deny the screws, as it's saying, you know, like the

for want of a nail, the battle was lost.

You know, that old saying?

Yeah.

Yeah, so like for want of a nail, like the horse didn't get its shoe, and for want of a shoe, the horse didn't ride.

So the messenger couldn't get to the king and couldn't tell them that, you know, the troops were there.

So for want of a nail, the entire battle was lost, right?

So China can screw you on very low-tech things by just denying them or, you know, having them sent, you know, a mistake.

You know,

we didn't understand your instructions.

There's many different ways that they can sanction.

the countries that are hostile to them that they haven't really sort of flexed yet.

The Micron sanctions are just like V1 of that.

The worst the U.S.

can do is sort of keep China in a box, maybe, for a little bit in terms of denying them the very highest tech stuff.

The worst China can do is to undercut your very standard of living and cause very significant inflation by a sanctions weapon.

So just understanding the state of the world is important, right?

So, okay, so that's you know, who you're going to call trade-wise.

Here is a slide from the U.S.

Navy itself, by the way, okay, that shows

you love this illustration.

It's saying China has 200x greater shipbuilding capacity than the USA.

That's a

somewhat alarming slide, I think.

Okay, did you see that?

Is that civilian vessels?

No, military vessels.

Or rather, okay, sorry.

I think they're not making sorry, let me be more precise.

The U.S.

Navy, the head of the U.S.

Navy, is saying China has more capacity in one shipyard than all American shipyards combined.

And many of those shipyards can be modified for military purposes.

Do I know the exact breakdown of military or civilian production?

I don't.

Okay, but I do think that

if you look at history, people can turn plowshares into swords.

And the U.S.

turned a lot of its domestic

car production, for example, into tank factories and whatnot.

So the fact that China has all the shipbuilding capacity is cause for worry if you're going to get into an extended conflict, which I think would be a disaster for the world, but it's worth actually understanding.

So let's talk about

there's a whole trend of American dynamism.

Yes,

let me talk about that in one second.

I'll show you one more.

This is how China built the world's largest high-speed rail network, right?

Now, while China is doing this from 2008 to 2022, California high-speed rail, they haven't laid a single line of track for $100 billion spent, right?

Like

they, you know,

it's like,

I want to find the thing that says no

track laid, or it's like

it's a very abortive kind of thing.

So meanwhile, here's what's happening.

Can you see this tab?

Yep.

Billions spent, still no track built, and still no trains.

14 years on, what happened to HS2?

Okay.

So you have China and the U.S.

basically starting 14 years ago, and China's built out this giant high-speed rail network for their entire country from scratch.

And the U.S.

with a lot more money seemingly,

and all the resource in the world

hasn't gotten anywhere in one state.

Whereas by contrast, this is what's happening in China and the entire country.

Here's a graph, 2008 to 2020.

Do you see that?

Yeah.

Okay.

When I say this kind of stuff and I point this out to people,

I get a few reactions, right?

The first reaction is,

you're a China shill.

You love China so much, right?

And I'm like,

I'm...

You know, you can't get better.

The greatest strength is knowing your own weakness, right?

You can't get better unless you know that you're actually behind and why you're behind.

Maybe they did, by the way, imagine if Blockbuster called everybody who's pointing to Netflix's growth a Netflix shell.

Perhaps that's what happened.

Maybe BlackBerry called everybody an iPhone shell.

That's something where you just lose to the competition if you deny the competition actually has any advantage on you.

Number one.

The second reaction is people will say, oh, yeah, but it's all shoddy and it's going to fall apart and it's low quality and so on and so forth.

And the thing is, the Chinese have ascended the value chain.

They've gone from making plastic stuff at Walmart to like assembling phones and things like that, all the way up to DGI drones and glowing cities.

Also, by the way, if you looked at our engineering programs in the West, A very large percentage are graduate students of Chinese descent and of Indian descent and from other places.

They aren't dumb people.

They work hard and they're smart.

And to always think that they're only going to make plastic stuff, I think, doesn't give sufficient credit to what was one of the world's great civilizations.

Do I agree with communism?

Of course, I don't agree with the communism.

Do I think that they have executed phenomenally well in some ways over the last 40 years?

I think that's undeniable.

Otherwise, they wouldn't go from an agrarian nothing to what they've become because they've built up their whole country.

They've shipped goods all around the world.

And they own, you know, it was about a trillion dollars of U.S.

debt.

So they're also, you know, they're a creditor nation, right?

They're extending credit to the world.

They're not going into debt.

If any one of those things wasn't true, if they hadn't built up their country, if they hadn't exported the goods, for example, if they were a net importer, right?

You could argue, you know, that that was actually what was causing it.

But they're building up, they're exporting out, and they're building up their cash reserves.

So this massive unlock of just domestic production happened.

And that doesn't mean that, you know,

all is lost or something like that.

but it does mean that it's worth actually taking them seriously now the funny thing is in many ways what's been happening over the last five years seven years ten years is that the US has actually been copying China without admitting it most of the time people say China's copying the US right like oh Xiaomi is copying you know Apple or or you know they're they're cloning Twitter or something like that for Weibo that definitely does happen absolutely does happen but that's like admitted you know what i think is not admitted is china copying the us copying china And what do I mean by that?

Well, obviously, COVID lockdown, okay?

But it's more than that.

It's

restrictions on free speech and rejections of free markets.

It's coming from both the left and the right, where it's saying, we need to ban this because China is banning our stuff.

We need to ban this because it's influencing the minds of our youth.

And what that is, I can go down the list.

It's also, you know, China is a term for cancel culture.

You know what they call it?

Human flesh search.

Very evocative.

right it's like you find somebody online you're like who's that guy and then the whole internet tries to dig up and find that person or what have you right um

one of the things that also happened was you know for example china would censor uh the name of uh or the you know if you sent 64.89 on rechat that would get censored because it's 64.89 like 10 in

but um

if you gave the name of the whistleblower on facebook uh you know sier remello this is like five years ago nobody cares now but facebook would censor that

So aspects of the same thing are kind of getting reinvented in parallel on the system.

So people are copying China without admitting it.

And

it's the

that's bad.

Right.

Because if you're copying without admitting it, you know, people are, for example, trying to copy Chinese industrial policy with things like the TSMC plant.

Are you familiar with this whole thing?

So TSMC, just for background, for those people who weren't following this,

the U.S.

used to be the world leader in chips.

Then Intel lost a bunch of steps, and somehow TSMC has rocketed out to leader, and they're located in Taiwan.

So that's a national security vulnerability for the U.S., arguably, from one standpoint, if China takes Taiwan.

And how do they take Taiwan?

People think they're going to invade Taiwan.

Maybe they invade Taiwan.

Maybe they just win a cultural victory in Taiwan.

They're also Chinese-speaking people.

There's multiple parties in Taiwan, and not all of them are sympathetic to the U.S.

Some of them want reunification with China and so on.

But let's say that's a risk.

Okay, fine.

The U.S.

allocates $50 billion.

That's a lot of money, by the way.

That's $50 billion venture capital funds to become the largest venture capitalist in the world.

And that $50 billion is allocated towards bringing TSMC to America and building, you know, having our ally give us the technology transfer.

Okay, do you know what's happened with that?

No, done on an update.

Okay, remember, this thing, $50 billion, it's supposed to prevent like a giant conflict with China.

It's supposed to be a huge noun-security thing.

You'd think all the stops get pulled out.

Okay.

So what's actually happened?

Well, so first,

and it's it's very sad that this is happening but it also shows you know what what is uh what's going on um like first the unions were annoyed because um

basically uh

the um

they weren't doing uh the the work that the you know taiwan has a certain work ethic that is different than where america's work is nowadays for at least some people so the unions weren't didn't want to do the work in the way that the chinese or the Taiwanese wanted to do it.

And so the TSMC said, okay, can we at least bring in 500 people from Taiwan who will work in the way that we're accustomed to working?

And the unions opposed those visas.

And to my knowledge, those visas still haven't been granted.

So

the decision to bring foreign workers to Arizona, a slap in the face.

So these guys are treating this as if it's like some jobs program or whatever.

Can you imagine, like,

you know, the scientists of the Manhan Project involved a lot of European Jews, right?

People who had been pushed out.

Imagine, yeah,

like imagine that these people, for now, like, if I don't know exactly what happened there, but if you said, oh, we couldn't process the visa and you brought that to FDR in the middle of like an actual conflict, he probably would have looked at you like you had four eyes and be like, why are you bringing this to my desk?

Obviously, bring them into the country and figure out the paperwork.

I would think, right?

And so

this is where we're at.

We're like, you know, even for a national security thing, these folks can't get visas into the country, and it's fought, right?

And

that's not the end of it.

There's so much more.

Like

Morris Chang recently fired the

TSMC head seems to have had issues because of Arizona.

Rumors were TSMC chairman Mark Lew forced retirement from Arizona fab debacle.

So it comes out in this article that the U.S.

hasn't yet paid TSMC for this gigantic fab investment.

And that's why TSMC's founder was very skeptical of the attempt to build a fab and the fact that they didn't get paid yet.

You know, so because the company hasn't yet received subsidies from the federal government, right?

So

we have something which the optics of it were, let's bring manufacturing back from Asia, you know, build American again, and so on and so forth.

And the flag was waved and monies were allocated, and everybody, you know, blew their kazoos.

Woo!

Yeah.

And now what's actually happened?

Project is foundering.

You literally can't get visas to get people into the country.

The unions are holding it up.

All the reasons you don't build in America are now being encountered.

And it's not just about money.

It's about basically alignment and coordination.

And this brings us back to my very original point about when you have disaligned people, when you have people who just do not see things the same way, It doesn't matter how much money you throw at it.

It'll get like, you know, just spent and burned in lawsuits and law affair and environmental union reports and like strikes or whatever.

When you have people who are really aligned and locked on to a single purpose, you can get a lot done with a very small group.

Right.

And so the question is, how do we rebuild that consensus?

And by the way, I'll just show you one more graph to quantify the level to which there isn't consensus.

And then remind me how I got on this.

It was something related to...

China and so on, right?

You know, it's not one country, it's two parties.

Okay.

So that's, this is, you know, each of these are congressmen in the 50s people of one party another party used to vote together quite a bit on bills by 2011 these had come apart into two totally separate graphs and this is not like a one-year thing this is like a 70-year trend right and uh this is something which has been happening for um for many years and now it's reflected in a totally different graph And this graph, I'll show you next, is a graph of social media in 2017.

So this is rather than congressmen on both sides, it's individual users, and it's like publications.

And these are Democrats and Republicans, and they mostly follow each other.

There's a few in the middle over here.

And this is 2017 when they were all in one social network.

And now you have blues on Mastodon and Blue Sky and Threads, and Reds are on Parlor and Gab and Shoot Social and so on.

And so they're not even fighting anymore.

They're like already divorced and they've digitally split apart into their own apps.

that's

the reason I say all that, pulling it all the way back up.

I got into this topic because we were talking about how prices have risen and how construction had become impossible in the U.S.

And as an example of that, that it didn't need to be impossible, I showed how fast China builds.

And I also showed how the U.S.'s attempts to build recently with TSMC and so on weren't working.

And so what can work?

Well, one answer is just double down down on all the government processes that are obviously not working.

The government processes, U.S.

government processes that are leading to the TSMC debacle, to the California high-speed train debacle, to the AI regulations, to the crypto regulations, to the state of San Francisco, to high inflation, to too many other things to name.

You can just keep doubling down on that, try to reform that system, right?

Or you can build a better one.

And the fundamental question is, We know how to do that for things that look like companies.

You can build a competitor to

Blockbuster Video.

You can build a competitor to Ford Motor Company with Tesla.

Now we know how to build it with currencies.

And so you can build a competitor to the Federal Reserve with Bitcoin.

You can build a competitor, in a sense, to the judiciary with smart contracts,

at least a part of it.

Elon has figured out how to build a competitor to NASA, a government agency with SpaceX.

You start extending the domain of the kinds of things that you can build competitors to.

And so the question is, how do we build a competitor to Harvard?

How do we build a competitor to the New York Times?

How do we build a competitor to the Senate?

How do we build a competitor to,

you know, FDA and to NIH and so on and so forth.

And we're starting to get versions of that, like VitaDAO that I showed you.

It's very early.

But that's the kind of thing which at a few billion dollars a year, you know, and crypto can go very fast upward when it works.

That could start to become a competitor to NIH.

And maybe a smaller amount of money, but among really aligned people, does better.

Okay.

So this is where my head is at is how do we build internet first replacements to those failing institutions which we haven't yet been able to build competitors for.

Your thesis is the ethos of Silicon Valley.

It's based on the innovator's dilemma that's written by Clayman Christensen, which basically says that it's much easier to start new organizations with first principles thinkings than it is to reform previous organizations.

due to all the entrenched reasons that you mentioned.

So tell me about your fund.

So what do you, outside of being a high-risk seat fund, which I think is a great way to frame it, what are you looking to fund?

What specific verticals are you looking to fund from your seed fund?

What specific verticals?

Anything that is building an alternative to a failing institution.

For example, internet homeschooling to replace broken K through 12.

Internet education like synthesis or Replit.

to replace

failing either higher ed with AI tutors or

professional training with like online crypto bounties and online training like that.

If you have failing medicine, well, can we do medical tourism?

Can we do AI diagnostics on your phone?

And if we have issues with manufacturing, can we do robotic manufacturing?

So I'm essentially looking at these extremely valuable institutions that are in decline.

And even an imperfect solution that gets you even 20% of what they were is so valuable in many sense of the term, economically, of course, but also societally, that people will use them.

And so crucially, it's not really necessarily about novel technology.

Sometimes it is.

AI tutoring is using novel technology.

Crypto is novel.

Robotic construction will be novel.

Sometimes it is.

But it's really starting first with the societal problem that's happening.

and trying to address that with a focused technological fix in that area.

So like AI tutors are not a solution for the manufacturing crisis,

but they do really improve homeschooling so that you can get a very high-quality homeschooling experience better than any K-12 school, but it's also customized to your child's needs.

Something that really resonates, as you know, at the seat stage, it's all about power loss.

It's not about how many wins you have or how many losses you have.

It's about how big your wins are.

A lot of times, people have difficulty conceptualizing that.

One example that I like to give people is a $10 billion outcome is better than seven, $1 billion outcomes.

Something that resonates with your strategy is you are not looking for incremental.

You're not looking for a SaaS company that grows

30% versus 20%, which may lead to a 10X or might lead to maybe even a 15X return.

How are you going about building out your portfolio?

Great question.

One comment I want to make on the previous thing is I have nothing against enterprise SaaS and stuff like that.

In fact, many of the techniques to build those businesses may be applicable here.

You're still going to need to know about churn.

You're still going to need to do all the basic stuff like HR and so on and so forth.

Being ambitious doesn't mean you don't

do the blocking and tackling of having a CFO or whatever when you need one.

So I'm a pragmatic ideologue.

You have your eyes on

the prize, but you are nailing all the details all the way.

So

with that said, for example,

SpaceX, Elon wants to get to Mars, but there's a lot of details to make sure a rocket launch is pulled off, you know.

So I'm not at all negative or disdainful of, you know, quote, boring SaaS businesses or stuff like that.

In fact, they may be components of what's done.

However, I do believe going after important societal problems could yield outsized returns both societally and economically in many senses.

Now, to your second point,

what does portfolio construction look like?

And the short answer is I'm just betting on the smart young early founders.

And not always young.

Sometimes actually they're in their 30s or 40s or 50s.

They're serial entrepreneurs.

But

they feel energetic.

Right.

They, you know, their past wins were just prologue to what they're about to do.

Okay.

And

there's a group of folks that I sort of...

I think I attract a few different demographics.

Being of Indian descent, a lot of Indian people like me from India.

Now, why is that?

It's kind of like,

I don't know, it was a poor country and it's just recently leveling up.

And so

for a lot of those kids, I'm somebody that they

could aspire to be like, right?

And I hope to invest in some of them.

And actually, Indians are the single most

common immigrant tech founder.

And

the second is Israelis.

And so

there's a lot of Indian tech talent.

I mean, maybe obviously.

And so that's like one important channel.

You know, if you want to say, like, I sort of hate talking in like VC LP terms, but

let me talk in those terms.

So the unique deal flow is that, so, A, I think there's a, there's a lot of, you know, Indian kids, Indian founders, and so on who I think I could be the first check-in to.

Very high IQ people who just got on the internet.

So,

you know, we can tap like a giant gold mine that just opened up because I do believe that India in this decade will be, or let me be more precise, Indians in this decade will be what China was last decade.

And why do I say that?

China had a miraculous 2010s.

It was WeChat and Weibo and just a giant build out of their entire tech economy.

I do believe, though, that it's more about the Indian network, whereas it was about the Chinese state.

China's development is very much focused within China.

Their internet is air gap from the rest of the world.

It's got the great firewall.

It's all in Chinese.

Their apps are all controlled by the Chinese state.

So it's its own island.

India is the opposite, where because in English and its internet is connected to the rest of the world, most of your followers will probably soon be Indian.

Most people on the English internet will soon be Indian.

So India is a totally different phenomenon on the internet than China was.

And it's almost like a mirror image in some ways.

It's as open and connected as China was closed and siloed off, right?

So

that has a lot of interesting phenomena.

One impact of it is

there's a lot of visa restrictions that are being placed on Chinese nationals.

And if you remember my comment about engineering departments, like Stanford Electrical Engineering, when I was was there, it was on the order of 30 or 40% Chinese, 30%, 40% Indian.

I forget the exact numbers on that ballpark.

With the Chinese talent basically dropping off, Indian talent is sort of surging to compensate.

So very large, so a lot more emigration of Indians to many tech roles around the world, just as India itself is rising.

So that means it's not just about Indians in India or India, the country, but Indians globally.

So I'm extremely bullish on Indians, moderately bullish on India.

Okay.

And so that means is you can get Indian founders out of India and you can place them into vehicles.

And they don't necessarily have to come to the U.S., they're global founders.

They can be placed into vehicles and they can just crush it on a world stage.

So let's call that one, like,

you talk about portfolio construction.

I'm just talking about deal flow first, right?

That's one stream.

The second stream, of course, is all of the crypto folks and so on.

I've been in crypto for a long time.

And that's, I do think, by the way,

crypto isn't just finance, parallel finance, it's parallel financiers.

At a certain price of cryptocurrency, a certain market cap,

depending on how you calculate, around $200,000 of Bitcoin, if it hits that, around half the world's billionaires become crypto.

Thousands of new billionaires are created.

If that happens, that means that we actually have a third global pool of capital that is distinct from, albeit interacting with, the American and Chinese pools.

Like that is to say, I think of crypto as you know people talk about web three and it is also like a third pool because it's like totally globally unlocked capital one of the attractions of cryptocurrency and smart contracts is that they treat a brazilian um a guy from boston and a guy from bangalore equally

right even as the rules-based order is breaking down the code-based order is rising up there's no gaslighting in crypto

there's no gaslighting crypto yeah exactly i mean look look there's like people say, what about all the hacks and the scams and so on stuff that happened on Shade?

Absolutely those stuff, those things happen.

But it's like the Wild West where what's coming out of that is

actually a generation of combat veterans in cybersecurity.

All of these, like, you know, in Israel, they have Unit 8600, all these ex-NSA guys, all these amazing cybersecurity people are getting

really

good in crypto because, you know, just being one bite off can mean the loss of millions and millions of dollars.

It's a very different kind of trial by fire than the sort of bureaucratic checkbox process that typical security consulting is, right?

Typical security says, Oh, you know, did you follow ISO 9000 or whatever guidelines for you know, check this?

Do you have a chief security officer?

Do you have a security at email?

It's just like a checklist of things.

Crypto security is like, here's a billion dollars.

Do you still have it tomorrow?

Right?

It is 24/7

unlimited internet warfare to try to capture the flag.

As such, it's actually taking cybersecurity for real.

So what crypto is, is it's another stream of talent besides the Indians, but it's more than just finance.

It's cybersecurity, it's smart contracts, it's a pool of capital.

And now it's funding things that those other two pools of capital are maybe more risk-averse about funding.

For example, we're funding things like longevity.

or funding things like startup cities.

And what those have in common with crypto is not that they're about moving money online, but they're about a parallel system.

Longevity is like parallel medicine.

Startup cities are like parallel San Francisco, just like crypto is like parallel Wall Street.

Okay.

So one stream is Indians, one stream is crypto.

And certainly I actually, my background is in biology and genomics and whatnot.

And so certainly I have those folks.

And, you know, for example, I was an investor in Benchling, which is a multi-billion dollar company that, you know, when I was at ACC and Z, that's done very well.

That's like laboratories for managing your clinical lab, all this.

Uh, that's actually like a SaaS company, by the way, but it's like a multi-billion dollar.

You talk a lot, but you don't talk a lot about your own success.

Um, so what are some other power law type outcomes that you've had in your personal portfolio?

Sure.

So, um, I'm early on just about every coin: um, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, Chainlink, um,

so many, um, Avalanche, Nier protocol.

Shows your non-ideological bent.

Yeah, no, I mean, basically, because all of these are smart founders, and you know, like if one of them works, then it's really worth it.

You know, one of the funny things is

crypto-tribalism, I understand why it exists.

And that's a whole topic we can get into.

And I think I can speak the language and understand many of the arguments of.

And in fact, I was probably one of the, I'm a person that people would mistake for a Bitcoin maximalist, but I do believe that we're going to need more financial financial assets than just Bitcoin.

Even somebody who lived in a world where there was only gold, where gold was a reserve currency, didn't believe that gold was the only asset, right?

So I think we need different tools for the job.

You don't just have a hammer, you need wrenches and screwdrivers and so on.

So, okay, so first is many, many, many of the crypto assets and crypto protocols out there.

A.

B,

at ASCII and Z, Benchling, DigitalOcean, you know, I did that deal in Peter Levine,

you know, that was in the

early 2014.

Then there was

Omada and OpenGov.

Those are both at billion-dollar valuations.

You know, knock on wood, I think they're doing well.

Yeah, Amada Health and OpenGov.

And

there were

some early investor in Superhuman, early investor in Replit.

And, you know, here's a nice comment.

You know, Replit's a multi-billion dollar company.

And

Hamshad had a nice comment about me.

Do you share your track record?

Do I share my track record?

I mean, I can, but

like, people kind of know.

I mean,

if you know, you know.

Well,

I don't know what I can say about this because of the regulatory blah, blah, blah stuff, right?

So, so what I can say is I invested in those companies, and they're currently at that valuation.

And, you know, a bunch of the best investors in Silicon Valley have invested in me.

And so I think I've been a positive sum contributor to the ecosystem over time.

So, in those companies, you have a unique thesis around check size.

A lot of people say your fund size is your strategy.

I say your check size is your strategy.

So,

tell me about your check size and how are you strategic about it?

What's your min check?

What's your max check?

And tell me about how that's evolved over time.

I'll give the short answer and then the long answer.

So, I tend to do a constant investment in every company that's above my bar.

And so you're making only one decision, the zero one of invest, and then you put in, let's say, 100K or 250K.

Now, you don't do too much.

Why?

As a seed fund, you have a different strategy than a VC fund.

As a VC fund, you want to gobble up 20% because you need to have 20% of a, you know, $5 billion company to get a billion-dollar exit, right?

You want to get double-digit ownership.

Percent ownership is the thing you're constantly optimizing for and you're doing doing everything to get that what that means is you have to elbow everybody out at the table to get the biggest chunk for yourself every other point of allocation is very precious and makes a big difference to your returns as a seed fund is very different you just essentially want to be part of lots of winning deals and if for example you saw a space early like cryptocurrency in 2013 a very good strategy was to just simply invest in everything that was above your bar right if you just took the top 20 companies, you would have gotten Coinbase, you would have gotten

Shapeshift, you know, a little bit later, you would have gotten a bunch of other things, right?

Blockchain at Info, these are multi-billion dollar results.

And you would have gotten a pretty good chunk for very little money, right?

Like maybe for a few million bucks, you could have gotten on the order of a point in many of these companies, right?

And crucially, you're playing nice with everybody.

Okay, you're not, you know, nobody dislikes you.

You are in every every deal, and you're helping people in general.

And of course, there's limits.

You can't go all in on one company that's a total competitor of another, and so on and so forth.

But in general, you can be an ecosystem-wide kind of player.

And you get very high ROI on a relatively small amount of money.

Now, that doesn't scale up if you go to a very large fund, then you need new tactics.

But if you keep your fund on the order of 100 mil or less, you can actually get very large ROI in multiples, in my view, relatively easily by basically just being in a lot of these great companies.

Does that make sense so far?

I can talk about.

And then a couple other things.

And this strategy has worked for me personally.

So I've just been investing 100% of my own money for many years.

I'm basically just doing exactly what I was doing personally, but now I've just got like a fund and some ops and stuff around.

So

the reason, by the way, to not like, you know, try to dial check size up and down and so on on each investment is

it's actually kind of when i when i go back and back test it

what you find is often you can diligence intelligence but you can't diligence diligence

what do you mean by that okay

so in a with a founder i can very quickly usually figure out kind of how smart they are how polished their app is how polished their website copy is and so on What's much harder to tell is where they have the grit and staying power and consistency to grind it out for 10 years.

And often, not always, but often I found that people who were above my minimum intelligence bar actually have much higher grit than you might think and outperform people who are smarter but have less grit.

And so if you just allocated, you know, more money to the

I mean, this is one of those things where it's a neural network that's trained and it's hard for me to fully articulate it in a few words, but that's the short version right you by investing in those people who are above your minimum intelligence to invest bar uh

you the remaining variance is explained by variables that you're not as good as assessing right because it's like long-term performance and i don't want to name individual people but there's specific people i'm thinking of that are not that showy in a conference room but they're just marathon runners you know because in a conference room when you're people are giving a pitch or something like that you're seeing their top speed but you're not seeing their endurance i'll name a couple brian armstrong was was not the hottest company in yc by a long shot uh it's so well known uh neither was a porva in the same class of instacart um these are both good friends of mine by the yeah so i'm calling out your friends uh also vitalic uh peter thiel had a chance to invest a lot of money into ethereum and and being a genius he he was not able to maximize that either and a lot of people did not see that happening also dylan from the Teal Fellowship, I think he spent, took five years to launch.

And those two are the two biggest outcomes so far on the Teal Fellowship.

So I think there's something there.

And I think

it shows your humility to show that you're not able to assess that potentially.

And you want the asymmetric exposure to everybody.

All four of those people are my friends.

And I think they would, you know, they tweeted nice things about me.

And I think.

And I say it as a compliment to them, by the way,

as their genius was not known early on.

I will say one thing.

They both got into, Brian and Apurba got into Y Combinator, and Vitalik and Dylan got into the Teal Fellowship.

So if you had just said they're above my bar and I'm going to index in everybody, that's essentially my strategy.

If you had just said they're above the bar of getting into this organization and then you index in them, that actually turns out to work very well empirically.

So let me play a contrarian thesis to you.

One thing that I've noticed in Teal Fellows versus YC is they do seem to have another standard of deviation on average of intelligence.

They are, from a purely IQ standpoint, they have that bar.

And the returns on the TEAL Fellowship have been phenomenal, as I'm sure you know.

One thing that was not obvious to me is that IQ actually plays a very large part, especially when you account for highly power law outcomes, like creating Ethereum.

You seem to have a different thesis, which is IQ, once you get to the top 1%, is kind of like table stakes and then it's hard to.

Isn't there an argument to be made for the opposite?

So, yeah, so Camilla Benbau has actually collected some of the data on this.

There isn't a diminishing return to IQ.

In fact, to the extent that you can measure it, it just keeps becoming more valuable.

However,

I think what I'm saying is just

for academic pursuits, right?

I think, you know, there's multiple variables that go into great founders.

Two of them we just discussed, which are intelligence and diligence.

I feel I have much, put it like this: diligence, I have much higher error bars on measuring in the short run.

You know, the kinds of ways, by the things that might correlate with diligence, physical fitness to some extent, right?

That's like, you know,

to how consistent somebody is.

You'd have to study that, but I think that's that's a hypothesis.

Mental health.

That's really

mental.

Yeah, maybe, maybe.

In both directions.

There's a there's a

there's a um there's a book yeah they might be they might be crazy consistent.

Go ahead.

There's a book called Hypomanic Edge that showed that some people

bipolar disorder actually helped founders.

It's pretty well.

That's right.

It's like, gosh, it was a guy by John Something Something.

He wrote it in the early 2000s.

It's funny.

I was just going to mention that book.

You know how I know about that book?

Did I mention it on a podcast?

A dear friend gifted it to me, which I didn't appreciate at the time.

He's like, i'm not saying anything what other factors so so you mentioned he's like so

physical i would actually add mental health what other kind of non-trivial factors have you found uh leads to success so there's intelligence diligence and then the third is maybe the most important for what we're doing risk tolerance and

you know it's it's called contrarianness or whatever but for example early why combinator had a really impressive list of people there, right?

There's a founder of Reddit, you know, the founder of, you know, of Twitch.

There's Sam Altman.

Like that group of people in those early photos with Paul Graham include some very, very, very impressive people, you know?

And

that's kind of like, you know, the Teal Fellowship's first class.

I mean, Y Commoners still attract a lot of great folks.

And, you know, it's, you know,

Gary's also an investor in the fund, by the way, and Gary's a friend.

And, you know,

I think they're doing great.

Yep.

Incredible CEO, and they're doing great.

That first class of Y Commoners, is like the first few classes of the Teal Fellowship, which pulled out Vitalik and Dylan Field.

And actually, there's other people there

in those classes that aren't as famous, but they've made also billions of dollars.

There's like multiple unicorn founders there 10 years later.

Those are smashing successes.

And part of it is that I think what they selected for was not simply IQ,

but

a willingness to do unconventional but good things, you know, or unconventional things that would be proven proven smart later.

It was absolutely not, nobody knew what Y Combinator was.

It didn't give you a status increase in the mid-2000s, right?

It wasn't like I'm YC06.

That didn't mean anything back then, right?

The Teal Fellowship was hit and attacked by so many people at the time that it was launched, if you remember that.

This is the stupidest idea ever.

Peter Teal needs his head examined, all these negative articles, right?

Recently, the Washington Post admitted defeat.

Michael Gibson, who founded the Teal Fellowship, spoke at the New York State Conference, again, long-time friend of mine.

And he took a victory lap lap recently in his book on

the paper belt on fire, right?

Which is actually named after.

Well, higher education isn't doing itself any favors.

It's not really.

Yeah, it's a great.

Like Peter was 10 years, 12 years ahead of that.

I mean, people saw that, but he really, you know, he started to build at least a prototype of what the alternative would be with the Teal Fellowship.

So my point on those is, so then, what then attracted a bunch of talent that was very non-consensus five or six years later?

Crypto did, in my view, right?

Then also AGI,

people, until ChatGPT, people didn't really take it seriously.

And now a lot of people then took it seriously, right?

And so, and of course, what Elon did with SpaceX, he turned space into an investable category.

Nobody thought that was an investable thing.

They're like, why don't you get back to the center?

What do you think the distinction there is?

So the early YC people did it for the love of technology, and later on it was a status-seeking kind of NBA-type activity.

What's the distinction?

Frontier mentality.

The frontier mentality.

What is behind that frontier mentality?

Is it just to build great things?

Or is it the absence of something?

So it's funny.

You know, there's

this great

article.

Let's see.

Hold on.

I'm going to find this one.

Okay.

So the triumph and terror of Wang Huning.

Okay.

This is a great article that made the rounds a while ago.

Okay.

And

you should read this because this guy is a very important theorist

in China, and he's been around for a long time, and he's important intellectually there, even if he's not very well known in the West.

What's the point of citing him?

He wrote a book a long time ago, and it's amazing how well it holds up now in some ways.

Where he said, you know, Americans,

because of capitalism, they're very practical, but there is something that is, you know, spiritual about them, and that is, they're still spiritual, and that is futurism, their vision of the future.

That is something which is powerful enough to overcome the short-term dollars and cents and focus on the long-term future.

Now, of course, techno-capitalism marries the two, where that long-term future still has to have some possible payoff, but it could be distant.

Right.

And that turns, quote, you know, you've heard the saying, I don't love it, but the saying that turns short-term greedy into long-term greedy, right?

You're still going to make money, but you're taking such a long-term view of it that you're not like jostling for position to the same extent.

You're not as short-term oriented, right?

And so that pioneer mentality, that frontier mentality, is very different than

the day trader,

right?

It's very different than

the arbitrager.

I have nothing against those kinds of people.

They're making a living, whatever, right?

But that's not the spirit of the frontier.

That's not the risk tolerance and the vision of what can be and the boldness to do something when it's low status.

I actually believe that people are more willing to tolerate low money than low status.

You can argue with that.

It depends on, you know, like, but

in a sense, those people who joined early Waikamat or the Early Teal Fellowship were not simply saying, okay, I'm going to go a few years of living on ramen and, you know,

not starving, obviously, but living way below what they would have lived at as an engineer at Google.

Okay.

They're not simply taking the money hit.

They're taking a status hit because at that time, that was not cool.

Today, you know, yes, YC or Teal Fellowship is almost like an alternative MBA.

And that's fine.

And that's good.

It's good that these things grow up and they strong like that.

They become institutionalized.

And you know what?

Everything has to become institutionalized eventually if it's successful.

The pirates become the Navy.

I totally get all that.

That's fine.

However,

there's always the next frontier, right?

What's the next level?

What is the crazy thing out there that might just be technically possible?

And I do think that we're going to go, as I said, from starting new companies like Google and new communities like Facebook and new currencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum to starting new cities and even new countries.

We're already actually at the city level, like cul-de-sac.com in Arizona, an investor in that.

Prospera in Honduras, Cabin.

We're starting, these cities are now on the scale of hundreds to thousands of people.

And you know, it's like crypto was at a billion dollars, Bitcoin is at a billion dollars in 2013, it's close to a trillion dollars today.

Okay, and so that's a thousand X growth in 10 years.

Do I think those things could go from hundreds and thousands of people to hundreds of thousands of people?

I do think they can get there in 10 years or so, maybe 20 years.

I don't know.

Okay,

I think it's possible.

I think we can make that happen.

I think also, you know, here's a funny funny comment, right?

In tech,

you know, Elon wants to build a Mars colony, okay?

Sam Altman and others want to build a machine god, AGI.

Brian Johnson and others want to live forever.

I just want to start new countries.

That's been done hundreds of times in the past, right?

In a sense, I actually am the boring enterprise SaaS founder that you talked about.

This is the boring enterprise SaaS of crazy tech, in a sense, right?

Being able to start

new cities, new countries, new jurisdictions.

Yeah, absolutely.

And you mentioned Israel and Singapore, and I would even argue Dubai and Abu Dhabi.

Yes.

Fascinating, very fascinating cities.

I call kind of Dubai run,

if you create a city run by an LLC, there's a lot of alignment.

The police is responsive.

It's really a

fascinating place to go.

Yes.

I do want to triple-click, I guess, on the frontier.

It's essentially an optimization.

The premise there is that it's people that are optimizing on wanting to actually create change.

So instead of doing a SaaS startup, which makes them rich, they're doing something so groundbreaking that might actually change things.

Not because they want to do something groundbreaking, but because they want the eventual change, they want to improve society.

Is that a fair characterization?

I think that's right.

With a couple of edits, which are

their

improvement of society is constrained by the fact that all the people are opting in to their vision.

That's the big thing, right?

With communism or other kinds of ideologies, people have maybe wanted to improve the world, but everybody's forced in, right?

That's different.

Whereas, let's say something like

ChatGPT or Dropbox or Tesla or, you know, Coinbase, like people are opting into that.

No one's forcing them to sign up, set an account, to put in their information.

It's consensual, right?

So it's a vision of the good that is constrained by the fact that other people need to buy into it,

but not necessarily right away.

You know, at the very beginning, they might think it's totally crazy.

And you get more proof points, you convince 10 people, 100 people, 1,000 people, 10,000 people, and eventually you get the same thing.

People forget how weird online dating was and how normalized it is today.

Oh, man.

I mean, everything.

Everything

or getting into somebody else's car.

I remember in San Francisco, people are like, you're going into a lift, you're going into somebody's random car.

It was one of the most absurd things to a lot of people.

And two years later, it was completely yes.

Completely, exactly.

Right.

And so that is why you have to tolerate some status laws at the beginning to do things that seem weird, but that are actually interesting, you know, to shift social norms in a hopefully positive direction.

There was something else that you said that I just wanted to address.

Oh, so the frontier, right?

You mentioned Singapore, mentioned Dubai, mentioned Israel.

More recently, there's El Salvador, there's Malay and Argentina, there's the head of Bhutan, who's actually doing Bitcoin mining, right?

And all of them are powered by the internet in a really fundamental way.

We're not necessarily seeing that, but it's sort of like they're gaining power from above from the cloud because their Twitter is huge, right?

They're posting videos online.

They're getting their message out to English-speaking audiences.

Like Bataan, for example, is doing Bitcoin mining.

You're going to hear big things from them.

They just announced a new special economic zone on the border of India.

They're just like putting themselves on the map, just like El Salvador put itself on the map.

And no one was talking about El Salvador before Naib Bukeley became like the startup CEO of a country.

And so what's sort of happening in a sense is the cloud is like, imagine like

sunlight coming from the cloud down to land and patches getting opened up on the land that are now being turned into frontier areas that weren't.

And one way of thinking about this is

I have a few macro theses and one of them is that history is running in reverse.

So starting in like 1950, if you go backwards and forwards in time, 1950 was peak centralization.

You had one telephone company, AT ⁇ T, and you had two superpowers, US and USSR.

You had three telephone companies, CBS, ABC, NBC.

And everybody watched I Love Lucy and they and it was a very centralized world with like less than 50 UN member countries, everybody being rolled up into these giant nation-states like China and India and the USSR and actually Germany and France and America.

That had been a process that had taken hundreds of years.

Before the Civil War, people used to say the United States are, and after they said the United States is.

Before Bismarck, all the German, you know,

the things that we now think of as Germany were independent like countries or principalities and they got merged together.

Before the French Revolution, lots of little French

or things that are in the area we now think of as France that got rolled up into France.

Even within living memory, India was a bunch of princely states before it got independence.

The British had delegated power to a bunch of princes.

It got rolled up.

So 1950 was like massive centralization.

The world maybe had never been this centralized before in history, with just a few people holding sway over the entire world.

And then as you go forwards and backwards in time with the invention of the transistor, things start to unwind.

You go to the transistor, you have the personal computer, you have cable news, you have

the internet, you have mobile phones, social media, and cryptocurrency, and you start radically decentralizing technologically.

And then you have decentralized AI, so you can have an intelligence on your phone.

But if you go backwards in time, it also decentralizes.

And lots of things are happening today in the opposite order they did in the past.

Example, you go backwards in time to 1890, the frontier closes.

Forwards in time to 1991, the internet frontier opens.

Backwards in time, you have the robber barons.

Forwards in time, the tech billionaires.

Backwards in time, you have COVID-19, or backwards, you have Spanish flu.

Forwards in time, you have COVID-19.

And this holds for lots of interesting political events.

You go backwards in time,

and you have Russia, the senior partner in the Russia-China relationship.

You go forwards in time, China is the senior partner in the Russia-China relationship.

Backwards in time, there's a British guy running India.

Forwards in time, you've got an Indian guy running Britain.

Lol.

Okay.

Right?

And so, I mean, there's, I compile many examples of this in the network state book.

There's so many examples.

And why is that even happening?

And one way of thinking about it is,

you know, have you ever seen those sort of like origami things that people do with their hands where like the complicated, you know,

yeah.

And imagine you fold it and you unfold it and you and you get the same complicated thing in reverse, right?

All of this centralizing technology of mass media and mass production resulted in the centralization of these iron-fisted guys like Stalin and Mao and so on in the mid-20th century, Hitler, et cetera.

And then decentralization,

especially for

the fists just started to loosen, the ability of states to control reduced.

And it's happening faster in reverse than it did.

It took maybe 500 years to go up and we're taking like 50 years to go down.

And so in many ways, I think of our future as more similar to the 1800s and maybe the 1700s

than it was to like the recent past.

The way that I look at it is human beings have two paradoxical drives.

One is for order and one is for freedom.

And

you talk about the

history in reverse.

I would use a SAS term of bundling and unbundling.

You have these bundling and unbundlings.

And I think what we might be seeing is the crypto centrality is essentially a new type of system of control and order that satisfies the needs of both having a central truth, but also having maximal freedom.

That would be the thesis, I think, on the crypto future.

And you know what's interesting about that is there's a third word.

Actually, that's funny.

This exact thing you're talking about, I discussed in the last chapter of the network today, maybe the most important culmination of it, which is it's bundling, unbundling, rebundling.

Centralization, decentralization, recentralization.

This comes from like the famous Chinese epic where it starts with

the empire, long united, must divide, long divided must unite.

The cyclicity of this is because we have a lot of order.

It's too much control.

I want to break free.

Now you've got freedom.

Okay, it's anarchy.

Oh my God, someone bring order.

Right.

And so that's the loop that keeps happening in history.

It's not to say, by the way, that it's only a loop and we just come back to where we are.

One of the things I talk about in the book is the helical theory of history, where it's like cyclic in a plane, but you're ascending on the Z-axis.

So our technology, and in a sense, our progress keeps getting better, even if there's certain very human things that we just keep doing.

And

so to your point,

for example, you had bundling in CDs, you unbundle into MP3s, and you've rebundled into Spotify playlists.

You had the bundling in newspapers, you unbundle into individual article URLs, and you've rebundled into Twitter feeds, and you follow those people.

So you have the bundling into countries.

We have the unbundling of like internet anarchy and social media and so on, which is kind of happening now.

And I think we have the rebundling into opt-in countries, what I call network states.

And that's going to be so messy and so crazy, as crazy as everything that's happened over the last 20 or 30 years.

But

I think that at least it's better than just being in a state of total anarchy.

You have some vision for rebundling and recentralization on the other side.

You know, we didn't start the fire.

Okay.

And I think to your point, the opt-in nature of it is very powerful.

Yes.

Giving people the freedom to choose and to vote both with their time, money, and energy.

You know, one way to look at money is how you accumulate and spend your energy.

And the reason that's so important is actually,

you know, people talk about Elon, for example, as a strong leader.

And he is a strong leader, okay?

Zuck is a strong leader.

But why are they strong leaders?

Yes, in part because they're a CEO and they have total control and authority over the whole thing.

But in part because every single person who works for Zuck opted in to be there and can opt out.

It's mutual opt-in.

Every single person who's got an account there has opted in to be there and can opt out.

Now, you can argue with me at the limits, right?

Like somebody did an experiment.

Can you actually block Facebook.com on the internet and still have a normal internet experience?

At a certain scale, you can argue these networks get get so big that it's hard to practically opt out.

Fine.

Okay, that's a different.

Then I would argue, yes, we need to fund competitors and so on to that to preserve practical choice.

Still, the moral legitimacy comes from the fact that people consented.

And

the funny thing is, is you can opt into constraints.

That's what signing a contract is.

You give up some freedom, in a sense, in order for mutual benefit for you and the other party on their side.

Opt into constraints, right?

So you can actually get order out of that anarchy,

but the moral legitimacy of it comes from the consent.

The Republican, Democrat, and libertarian.

In today's world,

libertarian has become almost just pseudo-conservative, but ultimately libertarian borrows ideas from both Democrats and Republicans, which is about maximizing on freedom.

Yeah, so you asked about, like, for example, American dynamism, right?

And

I like Catherine Boyle.

She's also a friend.

All these people are friends of mine.

One way of thinking about it is technology is sort of forking into Silicon Valley and the internet.

Okay.

Where Silicon Valley is going more nationalist, right?

Military stuff, right?

Double down on America and wave the flag and so on and so forth.

I totally understand where that comes from.

It comes from a good place of turning the thing around.

There's another direction you can take it, though, and that is to go more internationalist.

And that is blockchain, that is crypto, that is,

you know, international capitalism as opposed to ultra-nationalism.

And again, these don't necessarily have to be completely at odds, but they're just different ways of thinking.

And the way of thinking is

for the international capitalist, guess what?

80% of the world is neither American nor Chinese.

How do we build a rules-based order that works for them and that also benefits American and Chinese people.

Because,

you know,

that's not something people are thinking about.

They're thinking, oh, it's just a fight between the U.S.

and China or they're thinking it's still a unipolar world or something like that.

They're not thinking about everybody else except as bystanders are thinking it's going to be like

the Cold War or it's just the U.S.

and USSR.

But it's not like that.

Actually, most of the GDP is actually outside of the U.S.

and China, even now, as big as both of those are.

And the reason I say that is because

if you have an American, they certainly don't want to be involved with the Chinese court system nowadays.

So you can't make money in China, you can't invest in China.

Nowadays, for a Chinese person, it's the reverse.

After there's a lady from Huawei who was like arrested in Canada, a lot of Chinese nationals are kind of scared of coming to the U.S.

or to U.S.

allied regions.

And perhaps for a good reason, because lots of people are suspected of being spies.

There's lots of, you know, sanctions and so on and so forth.

You don't want to get caught in any of that stuff.

So Americans and Chinese no longer trust each other's legal systems.

That's bad, given that that was like the engine of the world for like 40 years.

You know, lots and lots of deals were based, like Apple is straddled between America and China.

They're still making a lot of stuff and a lot of tooling is over there.

Right.

So,

and all these people who built all those companies, you know, in 2012, you're doing a deal for 10 years and you don't know that the U.S.

and China are going to fight in the future.

Maybe you can guess that they might, but that certainly wasn't on the radar there.

And you'd be called a paranoid, crazy person if you did it then, right?

So, that's my point.

If Americans don't trust Chinese courts and Chinese don't trust American courts, what can anybody trust?

Well, there actually is something, a forum, that hundreds of millions of people globally, including certainly tens of millions of Americans and probably hundreds of millions of Chinese, all trust.

You know what that is?

Bitcoin.

Bitcoin.

And that's a more profound statement than we might think, right?

Amidst this era of deep fakes and fake news and political strife and back and forth,

there's a lot of Americans and a lot of Chinese people and a lot of people who are neither American nor Chinese that all like Bitcoin.

And similarly for Ethereum and similarly for other coins, this is, in my view, it's hiding in plain sight, the next, the basis of the next rules-based order, the mammals that will eventually succeed the dinosaurs.

Or that could, right?

And that are fair, right?

The thing is, an American knows that the Bitcoin blockchain will not favor them or a Chinese person against each other.

The rules are constant, they're written in code, they're enforced by cryptography, and if you don't speak either English or Chinese, you can diligence them there in the language of code.

Okay, maybe code is often in English, but you know what I mean.

People even who don't speak English can read code, right?

And that's globally fair in a way that the rules-based order isn't.

It's globally wealth-creating

in a way that the declining rules-based order isn't because it's about contracts that you're abiding by.

And now, guess what?

A Bangladeshi or a Brazilian can be on the same plane as somebody in Beijing or Boston, right?

That's really important.

Because, you know, in a sense, right now, by the way, like, you know, I'll say something, and I'm kind of exaggerating, but kind of not.

Like, international law for like corporations kind of doesn't exist.

And what I mean by that is,

take that example of Bangladeshi and Brazilian.

If you're a guy in Brazil, you're trying to acquire a company in Bangladesh, which, by the way, could increasingly happen because internet has made all these communications across borders.

You're trying to acquire that.

Who speaks both like Portuguese and Urdu or Portuguese and Bengali?

Very, very few people.

Who knows what the tax and whatever obligations are between those two countries?

Nobody knows that, probably.

Instead, what you do is you set up like an adapter company in the USA.

And then that has enough deals with the US and Brazil and the US and Bangladesh that you can make that deal probably happen.

So you have like a hub and and spoke.

Or China also nowadays does enough trade with both of them.

You could probably make it work through China.

But what that means is, like,

does international law even exist?

Right?

Because everything is actually hub and spoke when you come back to it.

You go back to the hub and spoke of the U.S.

or the newer hub and spoke of China to do these international deals until the blockchain.

which actually gives a system of property rights where that Brazilian and Bangladeshi can at least do a transaction today.

They can do a contract today.

And I think in the future, you won't just have on-chain transactions, you have on-chain accounting and on-chain companies.

That's kind of already happening for these DAOs, right?

Many of the features are there.

And all that is required is sort of some backwards compatibility, like the Wyoming Dow law or the Tennessee Dow law.

People are starting to recognize these internet objects as being important

in legal code.

This is what I mean by internet first law.

So, what I'm describing there is complementary to, I think it's another great part of America.

It's not just the military and nationalism and defending the USS.

I get where that comes from.

I think it comes from a good place.

But there's another strain, which is the Thomas Jefferson, Ron Paul

line of things, which is peace and trade and so on.

That's more my vibe.

And I think also

we've been criticizing America quite a bit, I think, with good reason.

But one of the secret sauces and one of the most powerful things about America on a relative basis is America's private property and secure

personal property.

I think

few countries in the world over the last 250 years or 300 years have the track record of securing personal property like the United States.

I think that's a very big aspect of our economy.

I hope if you look at the whole transcript and so on and context, you know, like

there's many aspects of the U.S.

that I admire.

I'm talking about the ability to do, it's really Washington, D.C., and the kinds of regulations and rules that have strained the whole thing.

But there's still that strain of the tech American, the pioneer American, the frontier American,

the American that builds stuff with their hands.

Of course, you know, that I respect, that one should respect.

And the private property rights that you described, I mean, an interesting question, you know, sort of maybe a provocative question.

Is Bitcoin American?

Say probably no.

no.

Well, it reflects many of the best values of America.

It's certainly property rights.

It is freedom of contract.

It's freedom of association.

You can argue it's freedom of speech because you can use the blockchain to write things.

And some of the concepts come and you can encrypt things with them.

But I would argue Bitcoin is about as American as America was British.

It takes those things.

And and then, you know, America took a lot of the great things of Britain, and then it had the new world to apply them.

Right?

So there's a continuity, but then also an innovation.

And the new new world is the internet.

And so, like,

you know, Bitcoin is just one of the first forms, maybe the most important, but an internet native form that is the next in this lineage of Greece to Rome, to Britain, to America, to the internet, in my view.

So let's tie that all together.

So you are raising a fund.

It's 506C, so it's a general solicitation.

So tell me a little bit about the form.

A lot of people might not know about a rolling fund.

Tell me about that.

And then tell me about the type of investors that you're looking for in terms of connectivity, ideology, value add.

Great.

So the kind of investors that I'm looking for, and also the...

people that I have.

And, you know, to be clear, by the way,

I have enough capital to do what we need to do.

One of the awesome things about rolling funds is

you can just accept new investors at any time.

You don't have, oh, the fund is closing today, and so forth.

There's a fund close every quarter.

And if you want to be in, you can literally go to Bology.com.

Zoe, maybe you can put that on screen.

Bolly.com.

No, no, no, no.

No, but yeah.

1-800 Bology.

Right, right, right, right, right.

Exactly.

You know what?

It's funny.

No, but,

you know,

it's like literally my first name.com.

So if you can spell my first name,

which I grant is somewhat challenging,

but B-A-L-H-A-I.

If you go to that domain, it's an Angelus landing page.

I'll put it on screen for a second.

Let's see here.

Have you got it up?

Yeah, there you go.

That's right.

Yeah, that's it.

So go to Bology.com and you land there, right?

And

you can literally just click down there to apply.

Okay.

And

you can take it off screen.

I'll just comment on it.

Okay.

And so

what's the premise of the fund?

So

we are,

A, it's a rolling fund.

So you can just kind of click online.

And so what kind of investor is the kind of investor who wants to do it self-serve?

I mean, I can talk to them if they really need it, but

the kind of person who wants to go there, click, wire, and just basically be done with it on the same terms as everybody else.

And that's how you know it's fair.

This is what I was talking about, like the rules-based order, right?

And there's one kind of person who just wants to haggle and negotiate over everything, and the other person who's like, I'd like to click and be done with it, and it takes me 10 minutes.

you know, go with God and make me money and so on, right?

And it's very modern because you can just just refresh a dashboard, see your investments, get your K1s or what have you, right?

So it works for high net worth.

It works for entities.

Angelist, the platform takes care of all the compliance.

It takes care of the wires.

It takes care of distributions.

It takes care of all of that kind of stuff.

So you don't have to send 40 emails.

You don't have to ask for anything.

It all just gets pushed to you in a dashboard.

Which is so much more efficient than emailing a bunch of people.

So in that sense, it's very modern.

Now, I recognize there's some conservative LPs or folks who are bound in certain ways that can't do that.

And that's fine.

I mean, like, maybe hopefully you can update your thing to be able to do something on AngelList.

Then, in terms of how the fund is structured, we're using fees to hold conferences, publish books.

We're going to professionalize the podcast.

We're going to generate a lot more content.

And we're basically just going to generate a ton of deal flow this way.

And this is kind of, again, I've got proof points on all of these things.

I've got a best-selling book.

I've got a million-person Twitter feed.

I've got a sold-out conference.

I'm just saying, whatever.

I have prototype versions of each of these things where I've just been like tweeting from being in the line at Starbucks.

I've done zero optimization of any of that, really.

Maybe, okay, I did set up like a camera or something here, or let's say 0.1 optimization of what could be done.

And so, like a small team that actually just goes and does that.

And also, many of those people who will be on that team will be folks probably who we fund as future CEOs in two or three or four years, right?

They're like fellows.

Okay.

And so that itself is like a meta version of DealFlow.

Okay.

So

A, the kind of investor is the kind of person who or entity that can self-serve on AngelList.

B, or we're using fees for,

you know, they're used to basically hire people and build things.

Okay.

C,

we already talked about what we're going to invest in.

D, they have to be basically qualified purchasers, all investors,

because

there's just like we very quickly hit the cap on the number of accredited investors there.

And the minimum is $10,000.

So this is made to be really accessible by a large number.

Well,

$10,000 for

10 quarters.

So it's $100,000.

Right.

So,

yeah, but a qualified purchaser is considered by the law to basically basically be a big boy.

You know, they have 5 million in investments.

And

I believe that also includes like a founder who has 5 million in equity and thereabouts.

But you'd have to go and check that.

Angelus takes care of the accreditation.

And so

the big thing about it is

there's different kinds of investors.

And some types of LPs are like

They're like activists or they want to get lots of reports and lots of personalized updates, and they're offended if you say, if you don't reply to them right away, and oh, I put in my money, why don't you give me a report right away?

And so on and so forth.

And then there's another kind of investor, and this is more like what I am for the companies I invest in, where I make the decision of where or not to invest, and then I realize I'm putting in capital, I'm not putting in labor.

Right?

So I'm putting in capital, and being a backseat driver doesn't improve results.

So if my companies ask ask me for help, if they have WhatsApp or signal me and

it's an acquisition or it's a serious inflection point for the company, I will respond

if I have the time and usually I do.

Sometimes it'll be 20 startups.

They'll ping me in a day and I have to triage a little bit.

But basically if it's an important thing, I'll get back to them.

But I won't actively interfere.

They're going with God.

You add value by, quote, not adding value.

This is actually closer to the founder's fund mentality of pick the founder and then let them go with God.

i have found that experience the people that phrase things as you do are the most value-added investors by by a long shot and the ones that the ones that are humble and actually responsive that's like not top one percent of investors but but i didn't want to cut you off go ahead

sure yeah well so i i hope i i think you know i mean look can i say that everybody

uh you know i Here is, I thought this was a pretty nice.

Yeah, I would look at your portfolio.

I think you would very quickly see how much value you've added i'll show just a tweet or what have you um

here this was a nice

this was a nice tweet by

you know one thing that uh we interview a lot of of billion dollar funds and One thing that was very interesting is a fund that went off record.

They have an acknowledgement letter for anybody that invests less than $10 million.

And what does this acknowledgement letter say?

It says, I will not go to the annual meeting.

I will not respond to emails.

This is a very large private equity fund.

And as I mentioned every time I talk about this acknowledgement letter, if Benchmark or Bology ever wants to meet, gives me allocation, wants me to sign acknowledgement letters, I'm very happy because the worst thing in investing is not actually getting up to date from the GP.

It's backing the top GPs that are going out there and executing for their founders.

So there is an inverse relationship to people that are building LP relationship protocols and those that are actually going out and funding groundbreaking startups.

That's exactly right.

And I think that,

of course, that's not to say that one

shouldn't treat LPs properly and so and so forth.

But the dashboard, I think Angelus is a good reconciliation of that, where you can get whatever information you want at any time, day or night, quickly through a dashboard that goes out to all LPs, all tax filings, all that kind of stuff.

Here's just like, you know, a couple of nice comments that I thought were nice or whatever.

So, so this is Amjad, you know, CER of Replit.

Pretty nice comment.

Maybe you can, can you see the screen?

So, you know, I feel embarrassed to read that, but it's a very nice comment.

Okay.

And here's, you know, like Julie Fredrickson.

And so, you know, I believe Slate Sar Codex, which is Scott Alexander, was to academic online culture as biology as being to tech.

So early with the vibe shift, they were given hell, and now so mainstream people don't recognize the source.

Meaning, like, I'm sort of like the fish, you know, the water in which a lot of these things swim.

Like the idea maze.

I think you created the concept of the idea maze, right?

Yeah, that's right.

And so, like,

I think I am.

What about Russell Conjugation?

Did you create that?

I have a specific thing.

You popularized.

So, Bertrand.

Well, Bertrand Russell created it, and Eric Weinstein has also cited it.

And I think I have been one of the people to popularize it.

I think I came up,

I know I came up with this concept idea, Maze, and this is like an old lecture where I gave that.

And whatever.

I hate kind of thumping my chest or whatever like this, you know, in the sense that

if you like me, if you like Biology, if you like what I tweet, if you like the companies that I've built, if you like

Coinbase and crypto, if you like the network state book, I think you're going to probably like investing in the fund.

And if you don't, there's a lot of others out there.

And, you know, like I, I won't feel, I won't feel badly about it.

The

gosh, there was something else you said.

Oh, yeah.

In terms of, oh, here's one thing I will say.

You know, the famous phrase, how can I help?

Right?

The VC phrase, it's like a VC cash phrase.

Now, this is a cash phrase that

that's the Suarez thing, right?

Okay.

This is a funny phrase because,

first of all, it has become a cliche, right?

On the other hand, how can I help is way better than the Wall Street style, how are you trying to F me

kind of thing, right?

Like in general,

it's better to have like a friendly culture, even if it's fake friendly in some ways than unfriendly, I think, right?

How can I help?

Sometimes is said sincerely, which is can I make an intro for you or something like that or what have you.

Sometimes it's said insincerely.

Sometimes it's a pain for the founder to like break out a task for the investor to help.

Because it's like,

okay, will you take on a task that actually takes you a minute?

Or will you do something that's like an hour?

Or will you actually help me recruit somebody?

That's like a whole different thing.

There's no product.

Yeah, exactly.

And founders are often badly calibrated on how investors should help.

Okay.

So

I actually think there's two models of investor help.

There's a founder's fund model, which is the help that they just don't interfere with you at all.

You can take extremely risky decisions, and because you're the founder and because they're in the business of variance, they'll never veto the help.

Who else could you put in this account?

Me, in the sense of like, that's my kind of thing.

I'd say

Novell is kind of like that, my friend, you know, Nuffle Robicon.

Let's see, who else is like that?

A fair number of crypto investors are kind of like that.

But I can't speak for everybody.

I think those three are kind of like that.

First, do no harm and go with God and crush it.

And if you're not going to succeed, you aren't going to succeed anyways.

Well,

yeah, exactly.

It's kind of one of these things where it's like they're smart enough to know that what they want is effectively the brand endorsement.

Because a brand endorsement is scalable.

You don't have to be like Novell or me or, you know, we don't have to be in every single meeting on the call.

That person could just say, so-and-so invested.

That scales our presence.

Right.

It's like, you know, and that's a non-How do you deal with the three-standard deviation founder that's always asking you for things?

That's a great question.

The squeaky wheel.

Squeaky wheel.

I set the expectation.

I say, sometimes I'll say, here, let me do a screen share with you, and I'm just going to show you all the names, nothing else, of all the companies I've invested in, right?

Just like a long table.

That's public information, all the companies I've invested in.

And I'll just slowly scroll down that while we're on the call.

And after about like two minutes in, he's like, okay, I get it.

Because there's so many companies there.

Have you ever thought about productizing to your point, saying these are the three things I could do?

I could introduce you to these.

So, so now I'm coming to that, right?

Basically, now the other model, so the answer is yes, okay, and and uh and so I'm going to talk about ways that I think investors can help.

Uh, so how VCs can help founders and how LPs can help VCs

and then vice versa, right?

But um, though vice versa is less important because, you know, you're mostly most important.

So, founders fund helps by not doing anything.

Or rather, by they will hold some annual events and stuff like that, but it's all optional.

You can come to them if you're busy.

Don't worry about it, go kill it.

You know, we're with you, right?

They'll never get political on you.

They'll never, you know, do anything like that.

They just will not interfere.

Extremely helpful.

Right.

And they're wealthy enough that they can just write off any check.

So they can go through the rough ride and in tough waters and so on.

ASICs and Z, which, you know, I also, you know, founders fund back my first company.

You know, we made the money.

ASIC and Z, I was a partner there.

And I love all those guys.

And Mark and Ben, or rather, Mark and Chris are investing in this one.

And Mark and Ben and I have, we've worked together on many deals over the years.

They have a different model, which is they actually help.

They don't say, how can I help?

They say, we can help in A, B, C, D, and E forms, right?

Now, of those different services they have,

the most important two are

the, so most people don't know about exactly how ACC and Z works.

They might know, you know, but I'll give a quick summary.

They don't just invest in your company.

They've used the fees to build a tank.

of all of these professional services.

And they're the first ones really to do that.

One of those services is what they call the Enterprise Briefing Center.

And what that is, is it's that all of these VCs at AC and Z, all the partners, are senior enough that they know, let's say, the CEO of Coca-Cola and the CEO of Johnson Johnson, the CEO of Pfizer.

And they can call them up and WhatsApp them or text them and be like, hey, you know, we've got,

we know you've got a problem in terms of dealing with

X or Y or Z

procurement issue.

And we have a startup that's good for exactly that.

Okay.

And so they get their VP who has the decision-making power

to come in to Anderson Harwitz, and they sit through a briefing where founders come in and they basically pitch Coca-Cola, Johnson, Johnson, and Pfizer on their product.

Now, why does this work insanely well?

First is, if you're a startup, it's very hard for you to even get that meeting with Coca-Cola, Johnson, Johnson, and Pfizer.

Second, you're coming in endorsed by A6 and Z.

Third, sometimes,

you know, this is something where there have been five deals like this that have been done before.

And Coca-Cola, Johnson, Johnson, Pfizer love async Z because it's like their shop where they can click like Amazon and just get, okay, let me upgrade this enterprise offer, this one, and this one.

I'll take five, right?

So AsyncZ is a repeat player in the ecosystem that makes the deal close because it's like a two-sided market of enterprise-SaaS vendors and enterprise-saaS buyers.

And you have this scaled VC firm in the center that's putting those together, like a skilled matchmaker.

And the reason it works is ACEN-Z has invested in these companies, of course, and wants to make money, but its reputation is on the line with these large institutional buyers.

And so it wants to make both parties happy.

Does that make sense?

Yeah, it's a marketplace.

Okay.

It's a marketplace, right?

Okay.

So that's the enterprise briefing center.

The second thing that's, and that's really valuable for a founder, because often a series A, Series B founder just doesn't have the connections to, or what we call the distribution to get to all of those Fortune 500 CEOs, right?

So this levels them up.

Product is merit, but distribution is connections.

They have merit, but not connections.

So they sell some of their company, and now they get a bunch of distribution, and it massively increases the value.

It's almost something where ACNZ,

when an enterprise SaaS company is working at A or B, they could almost deterministically level them up with like 100

big brand names that they could just slot them into

like this.

Really great, right?

So

that was EBC.

The other thing that ACMZ did that worked is the corporate development.

So they hired these ninjas there who knew everybody at Facebook, at Google, and so on who buys companies for a living.

Now,

it's the event of a founder's life when Google knocks with a possible acquisition.

It is Tuesday for the corporate development guy on the other side.

This is a radically asymmetric thing where that founder is like microanalyzing every period and sentence and comma and so on on this transaction that could be the most important thing in their life.

And the corp dev person is like, yawn, they could forget about the deal.

It's in their inbox and so forth.

Because they're not getting paid usually, you know, extreme amounts of money.

Now, I'm not saying all corp dev people are special, obviously, right?

Corp dev, but it's a job for them.

Yeah, it's a job for them.

And it is an absolutely life-changing, world-changing outcome for the founder and that their side, right?

So

async Z corp dev is in between these, where they know all of the Google and Facebook and, you know, Dropbox, all these other guys, they know all of the Corp Dev people there.

They're on a first name basis with them.

And if they say one of our companies is at Google and it's got an offer of X, Facebook, will you match?

Sorry, Meta.

Sorry.

Alphabet is making an offer.

Meta, will you match?

Okay, right.

I can't say Google and Facebook, whatever.

So

Meta knows that that's not a bluff, right?

The founder has an incentive to bluff.

It's a recurring game.

Exactly.

So again, ACMC corporate development is a marketplace, two-set marketplace of company sellers and company buyers.

And it's not just buyers.

It's also the next round, right?

Series C investors, Series D investors.

If ACMC has the financials of these companies, these guys know that it's representing them correctly to them for the purpose of an investment, right?

So those are two extremely value-added functions where the founder cannot be expected to,

I mean, cannot be expected.

Great founders can do anything.

Okay.

But it's hard for a founder to have hundreds of possible buyers or their entry

offers.

It takes years and multiple.

Yeah.

Exactly.

It's not a function of, you know, there's certain problems that I call

you can just type faster and solve them.

Coding, type faster, right?

Content, type faster.

Okay.

Debugging, obviously, it's not exactly typing faster, but you get my point.

It's entirely within your control.

And the sequence of keystrokes that you input to your device is the quality of your software, the quality of your design, all of that.

Everybody starts.

Yeah, exactly, right?

Which is very important.

Global equality of opportunity is this, you know, this device right here, this keyboard.

But

the relationships with LPs or with enterprise software buyers, that's not a type faster thing, or it's much, it's not easily reducible to that.

Okay.

So those two were massive, massive, massive value adds for A16Z that they just did better than anybody else and they made a more efficient marketplace out of it.

There were other functions which are also valuable.

Actually, one function that used to be very valuable was PR.

And in the early days, ACNZ did PR when no one else was doing PR.

And that was phenomenally successful to them.

More recently, I think the right approach is just for founders to go direct and build their own media organizations.

That was not reasonable 15 years ago, and is, I look at it as table stakes today.

So that's a technological shift where, due to the rise of social media, the rise of podcasting, and so on and so forth, many founders are actually not

founding engineers, but founding influencers.

They come in not with an amazing engineering background, but with an amazing community background, and then they hire an engineer to build a product.

That is actually also reasonable.

everybody knows how you went from 100,000 followers to a million followers, but how did you go from zero to one?

And did you have to, did you have to

propagate less radical ideas when you were starting out to be taken seriously?

And how did that evolution?

No,

how did that happen?

Well,

I think that,

so I taught a MOOC on, so first of all, I had no public profile until 2013.

I was basically

just a career academic.

I mean, like my nature is that of a math guy, right?

Let's say, you know,

basically my background briefly,

BSMS, PhD, electrical engineering, Stanford, MS Chemical Engineering, Stanford.

I taught genomics and stats at Stanford for a few years after getting my PhD.

And then I founded a genomics company, Clinical Genomics Company that Founders Fund invested in, and it was sold later for $375.

So Clinical Diagnostics.

Until 2013, I had no public profile.

I was just like, like a deep, quiet, deep technology.

I actually thought, I was, well, yeah, I was doing work.

But I also thought, and I think incorrectly, so this is one of the things I got wrong.

I was late to social media because I thought it was just a waste of time.

I thought it was tweeting breakfast.

I thought it was

like, you know, sharing, you know, updates about,

you know,

what?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I was like, do I care about about whether somebody went to tahoo or not i mean good for them

great yeah it's you know like how monkeys will like pet each other's fur and so on and so forth and like so i was like okay that's great saw my thing you know and um i saw it as chit chat idle chit chat then one day uh there was a friend of mine who had attended a genomics conference and he posted a summary of the conference on twitter as what we now call a tweet storm or thread or something like that.

And he was a, he was like, he was a professor, and so he included details like: here's how the BAM files were set up, and here's what they were doing with FastQ, and so on and so forth.

Stuff that no journalist would ever have written up from that.

And it was like getting a lunchtime conversation with a really smart friend of mine that saved me a plane trip out, and it just like distilled.

It was like taking the juice of an orange, and I could just slurp that up and learn what was at this conference, not in

a week of time flying back and forth or four days flying back and forth, but in 30 seconds, right?

And I was like,

Twitter is useful for me.

Okay.

That is, I mean, now, of course, like, who would ever pitch that as the application of Twitter, right?

That's such a niche, niche, niche.

You have to get to massive scale before you start getting

that as the application of Twitter.

That's kind of, though, what Twitter has become, where whatever vertical there is, if you want to learn about real estate, you can really learn about it by just looking at the top, I don't know, 50 real estate people on Twitter.

And you learn cap rate, you learn all this stuff.

At least you'll distill the language of the people in a community that you could really find hard to learn about how they actually talk about things outside of a textbook.

A textbook presentation is one thing, the conversational presentation is another, right?

So that made me.

Are you on the for you or following setting on your Twitter?

I switch back and forth between them.

I think I probably, it keeps going back to for you, and I think for you is fine.

I don't know.

I have to go back to the next one.

I have found time and time again the most successful people on the following

setting.

And that's really binary.

That's one of the hacks.

I had a viral

on the Harvard situation that Bill Ackman literally...

retweeted and wrote an entire essay on what I wrote.

And I started getting all the tech luminaries, and I just start, start, now I realized they were all on their 4U setting because they started to interact.

And my content hadn't improved.

But suddenly it was actually being propagated on their form.

And I found when I went from

following to for you, my mental health significantly improved because I wasn't now,

it was thoughtful, smart people versus whatever is like the most polarizing and

antagonizing content.

You mean from for you to following?

Yeah, from for you to following, yeah.

Right, right.

Yeah.

no, I think I keep switching it back to following, but I think he keeps going back to for you or something like that.

So I have to.

Even Elon Musk is not as susceptible to profit maximization.

Maybe, maybe, right?

Though I think on balance, he's on.

I'm a big fan of what Twitter is today versus what it was.

I was a very big Elon fan as well.

Yeah.

So.

But I want to answer your question, which said, how did I go from zero to 20,000 or so?

So

the answer is basically in late 2013, I gave a talk at startup school.

So I did a few things in 2013, but one of them I did mid-year, I gave a MOOC course,

Startup Engineering MOOC, that that's where the IdearMaze lecture and other things were from.

And it's funny, you know, the IdearMaze was just sort of it was like one sub-chapter in a bunch of lecture notes that I think were well received at the time.

And you don't necessarily know what

is going to become really popular or whatever from that, right?

But it put, I think, a finger on something that people were thinking of, and then that propagates.

So that course, which had the idea maze and various other concepts, actually totally organically just got to 250,000

students on Coursera.

And I did no promotion of it whatsoever.

It was just like, I think it was just quality of content and word of mouth, it just, and Coursera's distribution and the platform.

So that course

did fairly well.

And that was in mid-2013.

And then when I got on Twitter later in the year, like

November, December, I also, by the way, somebody had been squatting Bolla GS, and I had had Bolla GS at this and Bolla GS at that for a long time.

And I was just trying to get that.

And then when I managed to get the Bolla GS handle, then I actually tweeted, and it just ticked up quickly to, I think, like 10 or 20,000 followers pretty quickly.

Because a lot of the kids from my startup engineering course followed me there.

Right.

And so that was like my first pump of, and then I didn't even, I didn't know what was good or bad or whatever at that time.

I just kind of did it.

Then it was announced as a partner at ASIC and Z, and I got a few more.

And then that's kind of how what I was, you know, doing what I was doing.

So I guess the answer is I contributed a lot of value, at least in their perception.

I think it was valuable.

That was like, here, here's what I'm doing.

So in many ways, you grew through offline, not necessarily offline, but off, off-X and Twitter accomplishments.

Yeah.

So here, if you want to see how early I was to certain things, right, here,

this is not the entirety of the course, but it was just part of it.

Do you see this headline from Coindesk 2013, July 2013?

Build a Bitcoin crowdfunding site, right?

So what was Bitcoin's price?

It was like 50 bucks then.

It was like a thousand X smaller than it is today, right?

So this was, you know, the course given by Biology Srimivalis.

And of course, so a course young entrepreneurs requires and build a Bitcoin crowdfunding system, the inclusion of, you know, right,

and guest lectures from a range of Silicon Valley startups.

And, you know, I basically just had some of my friends, engineers, and stuff give talks.

I wasn't as senior as I was at that time, but it was like the kind of course which I wished I had had when I was first starting a company.

It was just like everything that I, that I was fresh in my mind that a PhD in engineering didn't know about the business of technology, Right.

So that proved successful.

And also that, you know, that was like early to crypto, early to, I mean, very early crypto.

That's 2013.

Right.

That's like, you know, a thousand X less valuable than it is today.

So

anyway, that shows at least I'm early to something sometimes.

Absolutely.

You know what the most predictive of somebody that has a fund returner?

They send it out of 11 and a half thousand companies by David Clark, it's an existing fund returner.

So So the most predictive,

it sounds like a joke, but it is actually the most predictive to somebody that is able to find a fund return or somebody that has done it once.

It's the most highly predictive aspect.

So on that note, I think Baliji,

you're one of the most fascinating people certainly I've ever interviewed, but I think it's important to note that like Elon Musk, you are also accelerating people to improve themselves and to think bigger.

It's kind of this meta thing where like Elon Musk is not only accomplishing these great things, but he's also inspiring people to accomplish great things.

I think you have that order effect

that I think really inspires people such as myself and others who might have been maximizing on just capital

to think bigger.

So it's been a real pleasure to sit down and chat.

How could people find you and how could the community help you in your pursuits?

Well,

if you want to help, I'm at biology.com for the fund and twitter.com biology

for the feed.

Oh, I will say one thing.

This is like maybe a little extension of the end, but it's like a postscript.

We had asked,

how can LPs help if they want to help?

Well, they don't have to help.

They can just put in capital at biology.com and just call it a day, and that's totally good, right?

We'll use the fees to hire people, build things.

But if they want to help, there's four ways they can help um

first there'll be an annual conference at the network state conference in singapore you saw the video from the last one and how packed that auditorium was that was on relatively short notice thousands of people came to amsterdam this one i think will be i don't know several thousand people so it'll be pretty big and i'm going to invite all my portfolio companies and all the lps there so we'll have a really great lp dinner and you'll be able to meet lots of portfolio companies so that'll be kind of fun a

b B is, of course, you can invest and so on and refer others online.

C is, if I post about our portfolio companies, which I don't often do, I only do it when A, they need the publicity, and B, the publicity can benefit them.

And C, crucially, they're in a state where it's useful to followers, right?

And that's the most important.

You have to always add value to your followers, teach them something, get them something, and so on and so forth, rather than ask something of them.

So, in that event, then you can tweet, like, RT, et cetera, the portfolio companies.

And then D is, of course, you can always refer good companies and we'll have like a form for that.

The reason those are good is those are four very scalable ways to help if you wanted to help as an LP that are actually helping.

They're not just asking time and so on and so forth.

And I think other fund managers who are sort of internet first fund managers could do things like that as well.

So it can basically say to your LPs, do X, Y, and Z if you want to help.

Otherwise, you're putting in capital rather than labor.

And, you know,

let me spend the time on finding great deals and making all of you guys money.

Well,

I think this has been an incredible interview and really appreciate your time.

This has been by far, I think, by order of magnitude, the longest interview I've done.

I was strategizing on how to make this 30 to 45 minutes, and I epically failed.

But it's to the audience's benefit and to my own benefit as well.

And look forward to being at the conference in Singapore and also always happy to host you in New York City or Miami.

Great.

Thank you very much.

Thank you, Balaji.

Thanks for listening to my conversation.

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