#559: Bobby Goodlatte on Bitcoin, Design, And Investing

Bobby Goodlatte is the co-founder and General Partner at Form Capital, an early stage venture capital firm focused on leveraging their design expertise. Previously, Bobby has made over 50 angel investments and was a former early designer at Facebook. In this conversation, we discuss the importance of design, angel investing, hunting deals, rational vs irrational investors, Facebook, Coinbase, Form Capital, UX/UI in crypto, and Miami. ======================= Circle is a global financial technology firm that enables businesses of all sizes to harness the power of stablecoins and public blockchains for payments, commerce and financial applications worldwide. Circle is also a principal developer of USD Coin (USDC), the fastest growing, fully reserved and regulated dollar stablecoin in the world. The free Circle Account and suite of platform API services bridge the gap between traditional payments and crypto for trading, DeFi, and NFT marketplaces. Create seamless, user-friendly, mainstream customer experiences with crypto-native infrastructure under the hood with Circle. Learn more at circle.com ======================= OKEx is a leading crypto exchange known for providing the most options for crypto traders and investors. Whether you want to trade spot, futures, options or swaps, OKEx gives you institutional-grade tools and a best-in-class trading engine. The platform offers credit and debit card funding options and supports 40 different fiat currencies, including EUR, CAD, GBP, TRY, INR and RUB, to name just a few. You can invest, trade, and earn yield, all within one place at okex.com. OKEx is not available to customers in the United States. ======================= Exodus is an absolute game changer in the crypto wallet space, and we’ve teamed up to offer an exclusive discount for you, as listeners of the podcast. Sign up for Exodus today using my promo code Exodus.com/pomp. This is a no brainer for both newcomers and crypto heavyweights - go sign up today. =======================

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Bobby Goodlatte is the co-founder and general partner at Form Capital, an early-stage venture capital firm focused on leveraging their design expertise. Previously, Bobby has made over 50 angel investments and was a former early designer at Facebook. In this conversation, we discuss the importance of design, angel investing, hunting deals, rational versus irrational investors, Facebook, Coinbase, Form Capital, UX, UI, and crypto, and of course, Miami. I really enjoyed this conversation with Bobby, and I hope you do

• 0:42Anthony Pompliano?

  as well. Before we get into this episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. First up is Circle. Circle is a global financial technology firm that enables businesses of all sizes to harness the power of stablecoins and public blockchains for payments, commerce, and financial applications worldwide. Circle is also a principal developer of USD Coin, or known as USDC, which is the fastest-growing, regulated, fully-reserved dollar stablecoin in the world, now standing at more than $15 billion market cap and is adding nearly $300 million of net new digital dollars in circulation every single week. The free Circle account and their suite of platform API services bridge the gap between

• 1:24Anthony Pompliano?

  traditional payments and crypto for trading, DeFi, and NFT marketplaces. You can learn more at circle.com. I've had Jeremy, the CEO, on the podcast before. I'm a really big fan of what they're building, so I highly suggest you go check them out at circle.com. Stablecoins are going to be a big part of this market moving forward, and Circle's doing a fantastic job. So head on over to circle.com and let me know what you think. Next up is OKX. Crypto moves fast, and many crypto-focused companies can't keep up. Crypto exchanges that cut through the noise are the ones that give you access, wherever you are in the world, to the cutting-edge projects emerging in this new asset class. If you're looking for an industry leader that gives you access to a huge variety of crypto assets, tools, and services, I'd recommend OKX. As we all know,

• 2:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Bitcoin and other crypto prices can be volatile. If riding these price waves isn't your thing, OKX also lets you earn passive income with your crypto. Earn is OKX's portal to crypto earning opportunities, giving you easy access to DeFi earning protocols without the network fees, as well as other lending and saving opportunities where you can earn up to 15% APY on your crypto. Check out the latest high-yield crypto earning options on OKX Earn. Open up an account at OKX.com/pomp. Again, OKX.com/pomp. The folks over at OKX have been supporting Bitcoin development, so you know they're good in my book, so head over to OKEX.com/pomp.

• 2:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Last, but definitely not least, are my friends at Exodus. Exodus has been supporting this podcast for a while, so make sure you go check them out. They're leading the world out of the financial system by building beautiful and user-friendly blockchain products. With its focus on design and user experience, Exodus has become one of the most popular and loved cryptocurrency apps. It's supported on both desktop and mobile, allowing you to sync your wallet across multiple devices so you can have access to your funds anywhere. You can instantly exchange around 100 different cryptocurrencies straight from your wallet. Interactive charts let you view an asset's price history and your portfolio's performance over time. And maybe the best part, Exodus is integrated with the Treasure Hardware Wallet, making advanced security easy for everyone.

• 3:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Visit Exodus.com/pomp for your free download, or search Exodus on the App Store or the Play Store. Again, go to Exodus.com/pomp for your free download, or search Exodus on the App Store or the Play Store. All right, let's get into this episode with my friend Bobby. I hope that you enjoy this one.

• 3:55Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 4:18Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Bobby here. We're basically just gonna talk shit the entire time and tell everyone if you don't live in Miami, you should move here immediately. Just kidding. What's up, man? How are you?

• 4:29Speaker 02

  I'm great. And are we kidding? Like... Because I think people should move here to Miami.

• 4:34Anthony Pompliano?

  I think they should too. We will get to Miami in a second. What did you do before you moved to Miami? And what, out of school, you worked at Facebook first?

• 4:42Speaker 02

  I did. Anyways, thanks, Pom, for having me. And yeah, so my background is I'm a product designer by trade. Right out of school, I worked at Facebook. I was one of the first product designers there. I was their first designer on the user growth team. So I designed a lot of Facebook's kind of onboarding and registration system. So if you sign up for Facebook, kind of 2008, 2012, give or take, you probably use some of my interfaces. And yeah, that's kind of where I started out my career.

• 5:09Anthony Pompliano?

  So I worked on the, on the growth team at Facebook.

• 5:12Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 5:12Anthony Pompliano?

  We know a lot of the same people.

• 5:14Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 5:15Anthony Pompliano?

  They are fantastic. It's probably the best growth team in the world, I would say. I think you would probably agree.

• 5:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:22Anthony Pompliano?

  But you left in 2012?

• 5:24Speaker 02

  I did. I did.

• 5:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. What was the thought process between, I'm here at Facebook, things are going great, and then you leave to go do other stuff? What like, what drew you away?

• 5:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, look, to be honest, like, Facebook just completely changed my life. It was an incredible opportunity. And that, that user growth team in particular was just pretty legendary. You know, when I, when I first joined the company, it was not the sexiest assignment to get. You know, I was joining as a new designer and people wanted to work on, you know, the stuff that's like front and center, the newsfeed, the profiles, photos. And to work on the user growth team is like, not the most exciting assignment, but it kind of turned out that that team was this, this fairly legendary team. We kind of invented a lot of new design patterns for how to, how to build these social networks. But yeah, and then, and then I spent about four and a half years at Facebook.

• 6:16Speaker 02

  Totally incredible place. And, you know, honestly, I was, I was extremely excited to start angel investing and even had, had a specific investment in mind that I wanted to make, but I, but I couldn't. And at the time, you know, in 2012, if you wanted to do angel investing, you weren't really allowed to as, as an employee at the company. Now, People still did, and I found that out after the fact, that people kind of broke the rules and just didn't tell anybody. And so maybe had that been known to me, I maybe would have done things differently. But yeah, so I kind of left to start my investing career. And you know, kind of in retrospect, I think was fortunate that I left when I did.

• 7:01Speaker 02

  But again, like I owe Facebook just the world because it really launched my career.

• 7:07Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm in the exact same boat. I feel like I learned so much at Facebook. Given that the user growth team at Facebook, we can joke all we want and be like, oh, they're the best in the world. Like they legitimately are the best in the world at this. What are some of the things you took away from working with that team? And many of the leadership of that team is still there at Facebook, literally a decade later, right? So what were some of the takeaways for you?

• 7:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, that's a great question. I think like some of the takeaways were just ways of thinking about how to design new user experiences for startups. So we came up with this idea, I remember we called it the aha moment, which is that when a user is signing up for Facebook, they might be struggling through all these, all these, all these forms we throw their way. So we kind of asked them for all this information. It's kind of a lot of work. And then I remember we did this one user test back in the day where we had someone come in and she was kind of suffering through the status quo of the onboarding flow. And then all of a sudden kind of got to this one screen, which was the screen where we could show the user,

• 8:15Speaker 02

  here's, here's these folks that you might know. So based on the information she gave us, we could, we could show potential friends from, from high school, from college, from, from her hometown and just kind of this grid of faces. And then we were, I remember we were watching this and we had like an eye tracking computer that could see where her eyes were looking on the screen. And then she kind of got to this step. And by the way, had she not been in the user testing lab, she probably would have just given up because she had to go through all these error states and it was quite a, quite a mess to get here. But she got to this screen and then all of a sudden her eyes kind of darted to the friends she knew. And then her eyes like lit up, she kind of leaned into the computer or she was like, oh, wow. Okay, I understand the value of, of what, of what Facebook is. And so.

• 9:01Speaker 02

  That idea actually got us to completely re-architect the onboarding flow for Facebook. So we reordered steps, we took things that were kind of these really onerous steps, like confirming your email account, and we put those as far back in the process as we possibly could with the idea of like, how do we, how do we kind of backload the work behind the point where the users are like really sold on the value of the product? And so like, so that was kind of like one, I guess, I guess, and we kind of, we gave a talk about this idea and we kind of, you know, showed the kind of before and after.

• 9:41Anthony Pompliano?

  How much of this is like, you just tested a million things and eventually saw this, realized it, and then like execute on it versus this was like a preconceived, almost thesis, and then that's why you ran us like this specific test?

• 9:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, so a lot of the latter, a little bit of the former, you know, there were other cases where, for example, we had this registration form, which was like the primary form that, that everyone signed up to Facebook through circa 2008, give or take. And it had been A/B tested to death by all these different PMs, and someone said, okay, what if we, what if we kind of put this, you know, instruction text here, and what if we put this, you know, this subheader here, and if we kind of put clarifying text here and there? And basically, over time, the, the form had just been kind of, you know, layered upon,

• 10:35Speaker 02

  layered upon, and each successive test had actually gotten to a point where it actually marginally improved the numbers. But then, you know, one of the, one of the, one of the funny things about the success I had at Facebook was that in one afternoon, myself and this UI engineer, we were like fed up with this form, we were like, this thing sucks, like, let's, let's redesign it. And so I kind of just did a very basic cleanup of this thing. He, he built it, we had the thing test overnight, and in, on the course of like 24 hours... Hours, we were able to increase the top level registration rate of Facebook.

• 11:15Speaker 02

  And this is like in 2008 by something like 5% just by like cleaning up a bunch of of kind of A B test nonsense. And so, and so sometimes you have you have these kind of really easy wins that were just like, hey, let's just supply some some very basic design sensibilities towards this. Other times was more like, hey, let's let's really zoom out and look at what what the the bigger barriers are here. Like, how do we how do we kind of how do we do these bigger architecture projects? But yeah, I mean, I think I think it was just a very experimental team. And then also one where the the sort of eyes, the rest of the company were off of us. So we could, we could

• 11:58Speaker 02

  really get away with a lot and just like continually run a lot of tests where, you know, if we wanted to put it an obnoxiously big green button on things that maybe the other designers would be like, yeah, maybe we shouldn't ship that obnoxiously large green button. But but they didn't really see these flows because they weren't signing up for new accounts or they weren't using, you know, the blank states of of our of our of our apps. And so we were able to kind of get away with a lot of things and and and test a lot of things. And along the way, we actually really invented a lot of new design patterns.

• 12:30Anthony Pompliano?

  So when I was at Facebook, I was running the growth team for Facebook pages. And you were doing this 2008, 2009. This is now probably 2014 when I'm doing this. And one of the big wins that we had was on the kind of mobile web, like the M web or whatever, for really, really old non-smartphone phones, right? So kind of things where you would have to like click, almost like a T9 style. There would be a header. And so it would be things like, you know, home, profile, whatever, and you would have to click through to get to it. And so we literally one time moved create page from like the 27th slot to like, I don't know, slot eight. And all of a sudden,

• 13:15Anthony Pompliano?

  there was an explosion in the creation of pages. And everyone was like, oh, my God, this is like amazing. And I remember somebody on the team being like, no one's ever tested this because nobody uses those phones.

• 13:25Speaker 02

  Right.

• 13:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? At Facebook, like, like that's such an obscure thing.

• 13:28Speaker 02

  Right.

• 13:29Anthony Pompliano?

  You forget how much traffic and how many users use that very obscure thing. And so what you just said about this kind of registration page, that's also very unique to Facebook and was unique in 2008, but became even more unique over time, was just the volume, right? So you could run this test and 24 hours later have a statistically significant result that you knew as long as you ran that test correctly, right? Hey, is it better or is it not? Whereas a startup or somebody else, it could take them two months to get enough data.

• 13:57Speaker 02

  Right.

• 13:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? At Facebook, you got it in 24 hours. And so that iteration speed was just a complete superpower, I think, for the growth team.

• 14:03Speaker 02

  Yeah. And one of the, one of the takeaways from that, that I've applied to some of the companies I've worked with since Facebook is that there's a basic idea that the interfaces that the employee base of your company use. So, so if you're, you're on the team, you're kind of using the product day in and out, those interfaces tend to get refined and optimized just kind of naturally by the very course of employees kind of going about their way. If there's a bug, if there's a bug in kind of the core workflow of your product and employees are using that workflow every day, it'll naturally get fixed. But there's always these interfaces that employees don't use all the time, right? So signup flows are like the biggest category of this blank states where it's like, what

• 14:47Speaker 02

  happens when there's no data in the system and how do users interface with that? These things break constantly. And like, that was one of the big takeaways from working on that team at Facebook, which is like, we constantly had to do this cleanup work where everything that was in the eyes of the employee base was just totally scrutinized and cleaned up and optimized. Later in my career at Facebook, I was the lead designer for Facebook Photos and like, I redesigned the photo viewer and we kind of iterated in front of the whole company. We shipped a new version of the photo viewer like every single night for, for about a month. And like, believe, like every, every little detail gets scrutinized, right? But, but when I was on the user growth team, we were changing the signup flow for the products.

• 15:30Speaker 02

  Which is actually far more important, if you think about it, than like, you know, where the buttons go on the photo viewer. No one had any feedback whatsoever because they didn't use it. And so that, that, that lesson has, has very much stuck with me and it's actually almost a cheat code. When I, when I work with some of the companies I work with now, once they're at a kind of established point. You know, I think, I think, I think one of the things you can just tell them is like, have your employees go back and like, you know, use the interfaces that they're not regularly using. So have them sign up for the product again and again and again. Have them go through that new user experience again and again and again, and things will naturally get refined. Things will naturally evolve.

• 16:10Anthony Pompliano?

  One of the things that I remember taking away from that team specifically was this idea that every single test, in order to know if you're right or not, you have to perfectly execute and then be right. And the reason why perfect, perfect execution of the way that the, the test is designed is so important is because if you design a test and then you screw up the execution and it doesn't work, you're left wondering, was it the execution of the test that was wrong? Or was actually the thing we were testing doesn't work, right? And I think that that's when you get into this like very kind of testing heavy, growth heavy type environment. There's plenty of people who yell and scream and say it's horrible, they're at least the bad things, whatever. But at the end of the day, as a, as a science, as a way to use software to grow the metrics of a business,

• 16:56Anthony Pompliano?

  bar none, nothing beats that, right? In terms of the actual adherence to truth and the seeking of truth, right? And kind of this belief that like the code wins the argument or the data wins the argument. And I think that's probably the thing that you took away from Facebook and I definitely took away was just like, that organization and that team specifically is, I think unrivaled in their like pursuit of that truth.

• 17:17Speaker 02

  Yes, and I think it gave me a very good anchoring in product design as a, as a discipline. I think a lot of folks think about design in a very unserious way. They think about it as this more artistic pursuit. It's about making things look pretty. And I've never really had that attitude. I've, I've always had the mindset, design is about solving problems. It's about kind of taking in a set of constraints and, and, and coming up with a solution that satisfies all those constraints. And then I think. In an environment like that early Facebook user growth team,

• 17:54Speaker 02

  that really forces one to say, okay, is my design solving the problem that's on the table here? And we should be able to measure that. And I think designers should really welcome that level of instrumentation and that level of metrics.

• 18:12Anthony Pompliano?

  So I think this is after you left. The data point that I always tell people to kind of hint at, like just how data-driven the organization is, is this is now 2015, I think. They were trying to measure sentiment on Facebook. And how do you move sentiment? How do you measure that, right? So what they essentially did was they created a metric called CAU. And it was the response to a survey question that was, does Facebook care about users? So cares about users, CAU. And what they would do is they would basically show you various experiences or products or functionality or whatever, and then they would hit you with the survey.

• 18:53Speaker 02

  Right.

• 18:53Anthony Pompliano?

  And they had surveyed you before, and then they surveyed you after. And what was so fascinating about this was they could not move the freaking metric.

• 19:01Speaker 02

  Interesting.

• 19:01Anthony Pompliano?

  They could not move it, right? And so I'm getting like a crash course in this, and I'm like, this is absolutely fascinating.

• 19:07Speaker 02

  Right.

• 19:07Anthony Pompliano?

  You have what is not a data-driven problem. It's usually more of like a psychological or sentiment-driven problem, but they're trying to measure it. And so what ultimately ended up being one of like the breakthroughs of this entire exercise was somebody put an interstitial at the top of the kind of newsfeed. And I forget what it was, I don't know, happy birthday or whatever. But they signed it from all of us at Facebook. From all of us at Facebook. Survey, bam, CAU moves this metric for the first time.

• 19:41Speaker 02

  Oh, interesting.

• 19:42Anthony Pompliano?

  And everyone's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, what was it? Like what moved, you know? And you can just imagine like now all of a sudden like there's movement, right? And everyone's getting really excited and trying to figure it out. And so they pin it down to from all of us at Facebook. That one phrase ended up moving sentiment and increasing people's belief that Facebook cared about the user.

• 19:59Speaker 02

  Right.

• 19:59Anthony Pompliano?

  And so in hindsight, I remember looking back and saying like, wow. You never, there is no path that you get to other than pure probability, just working in your favor of coming up with Facebook, from all of us at Facebook, that would endear a more positive view of a company unless you have that data-driven approach and you're actually measuring things and doing all this. But it's the adherence to like such a data-driven approach that not only makes Facebook Facebook, but it's what led to billions of users using the product, right? And things that you did on the design side go hand-in-hand with that, which I don't think people really kind of think of design and data really being the way that it works.

• 20:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's actually funny you kind of mentioned that change of messaging tone because, you know, way back in the day, we had, we had some philosophies around what the voice of Facebook should be like, and it wasn't, it wasn't that tone that you described. It was actually far more, you know, like this is meant to be more like an operating system and less like a person speaking to you. And I kind of, I had left the company at this point, but I do remember like at a certain point, you know, call it 2014, 2015, where I started seeing different, different styles of messaging coming from Facebook speaking to users. I was like, hang on a second, what's going on here? And so there you go.

• 21:24Speaker 02

  That's the explanation.

• 21:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Closed the loop for you.

• 21:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:27Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, so you leave Facebook 2012, and you want to go invest. I know the story, so I'm cheating, but tell us the story about like, what are the first two investments that you go do?

• 21:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, the first one was a payments company, which, which I think I was in the right, the right general strike area, but didn't hit, didn't hit Stripe. Second one, I was fortunate enough to invest into Coinbase. And so that was my second ever angel investment. I was actually not liquid in the seed round in 2012, but as soon as I kind of became liquid from Facebook in, at the start of 2013, I made my second ever angel investment into, into Coinbase.

• 22:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, how do you find Coinbase? Why do you know that, hey, I should do this? And then explain this hunting process. That you went through to track it down.

• 22:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's a great and something where I think like as an investor, I think it's really important to like study what your circle of competence is, how do you find deals and try to remember those things with like a certain amount of clarity. So like these days I write deal memos to every investment I make so that when I look back in time, I can remember what my thought process was like when I made the investment. Back then, unfortunately, I didn't do these things, but but yeah, I mean, I was basically a little bit of a Bitcoin nerd in 2012. And was in the r slash Bitcoin subreddit. And and I think

• 22:54Speaker 02

  we had bought my first Bitcoins, had to buy them through Mt. Gox, for those of us who remember Mt. Gox and and I really do think that

• 23:05Speaker 02

  for me, when Coinbase came around, it felt more like an obvious an obvious improvement relative to Mt. Gox. I think for anyone who was who was in the community at that time, who had kind of suffered through the terrible user experience of Mt. Gox, to contrast that with with what Coinbase offered was was really quite quite compelling. And so that's kind of become one of my theses around how do I find these new breakout companies? I like to call it communities which see the future. So and I think I've been maybe part of two of these, maybe three of these throughout my career. So the first one was was with Facebook where

• 23:44Speaker 02

  I was lucky enough to be a college student when Facebook started. And so I think if you were in college at the time when it was college only, no one outside of colleges could use Facebook. We all had this sort of glimpse of the future. And if you'd asked people in college in, you know, 2006, 2007, like, hey, do you think everyone's going to start using this Facebook thing? They would probably say yes, versus if you talk to somebody who was on the outside who didn't have access to Facebook, they might just scratch their heads and not really understand what you're talking about. And so so I think like There's this, you know, there's this famous quote by William Gibson, "The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed."

• 24:23Speaker 02

  And I think of that in like very literal terms. So when I was in, when I was in college, I was, I was kind of fortunate enough to be in this bubble of the future, which used Facebook. And then it became somewhat of a foregone conclusion to us inside of that bubble. Like, hey, this is going to expand to encompass a lot more people, maybe everybody. And then, and then I had a similar feeling with, um, with Bitcoin in 2012 and, and with Coinbase in particular, which is like, well, I thought Bitcoin was kind of this bubble of the future unto itself. But then even within that, I thought, hey, like, it just seems pretty obvious to me that like people are going to use Coinbase over something like Mt. Gox. And so at a minimum, like, this thing has some legs in terms of getting onto that level of market share.

• 25:06Speaker 02

  Now, did I know in 2013 that it would, it would ultimately rise to where it is today? No, but, um, but I think that that lens of like, you know, what, which kind of bubbles of the future am I privy to? You know, what, what part of the future am I seeing that is maybe yet to be distributed to everybody? And I think like for a lot of folks, if you really, if you really kind of spend some time thinking about it, you can actually come up with some pretty interesting answers.

• 25:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And when you start to think about how to identify that, do you have to be in the community to know that that community knows something? Or is it possible for an outsider to understand?

• 25:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, obviously it helps, right? And, and, um, and there is something about that, you know, kind of, kind of firsthand experience where, where, you kind of feel like a bit like an underdog and you just know this thing's gonna, uh, gonna, gonna do really well. And then you see these people on the outside just don't quite get it. And there's something quite special about that. But yeah, I do think that, um, you can. Sort of systematically hunt for folks who have, who are part of these communities of the future. It's a little bit more difficult because I do, I do really feel like, at least for

• 26:22Speaker 02

  myself, my own experience, I think that the best wins are going to come from where you can authentically engage in something and actually get genuinely curious and excited about it. I think like, one of my criticisms, this isn't a criticism per se of, of kind of the venture capital world, but like, it's one of my dissatisfactions with how some folks approach the space, which is, I think, I think people don't get genuinely excited about the things they invest in, right? And when, when someone like truly finds something they actually care about and they really just get fired up about it, like that's, that's almost rare. And when someone's a professional investor and they're kind of, you know, tasked with,

• 27:05Speaker 02

  with hunting down these things and, and, and kind of putting out a number of investments on a regular interval, I think that, that passion, that, that, that falling into that, that, that, that special community that sees the future, like that doesn't happen. That's a more rare feeling. And so, even when you're like, when you're, when you're, when you're a professional investor, when you're getting a lot of inbound deal flow, it's very hard to get, you know, deeply immersed in everything you're seeing because you're, you're seeing so many pitches back to back to back. But then, you know, for my personal successes in my, in my career, each one has really fit this pattern of like, yeah, I was kind of part of this, this early community of folks

• 27:49Speaker 02

  that, that really saw the future and like, it was almost a sure thing to us when we were inside that bubble.

• 27:57Anthony Pompliano?

  So, how do you go from Bitcoin is gonna be a thing to I'm an investor in Coinbase? Like, what's the actual process?

• 28:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, maybe this is also my design background coming into play here, but I really biased towards thoughtfully designed interfaces, interfaces that reduce friction. If you have to ask me, like, what's the easiest way, what's the most straightforward way to make a product that's 10 times better? I think an answer that I would give you, although it's like kind of easier said than done answer is just create a 10 times better user experience, right? Again, it's easier said than done answer. So, for example, one of my companies these days is a company called Linear, and they're

• 28:49Speaker 02

  a competitor to Jira, the task management productivity tool company. And there's like a million little reasons why I could tell you why Linear is like so much better than Jira, and it's very hard to put your finger on it, but I think they all kind of sum up to this experience that is actually 10 times better. So, design is kind of this cheat code in some ways to creating a product that is meaningfully better than an incumbent product. That was certainly the case with Coinbase relative to Mt. Gox back in the day. And again, you could kind of like, you could kind of document every single reason why, you know, and in retrospect, the big reason why is because Mt. Gox turned out to be a scam, but...

• 29:30Anthony Pompliano?

  That helps when you're not a scam and your competitor is a scam.

• 29:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, turns out that's a good competitive advantage. But yeah, I mean, I genuinely think that like focusing on user experience, focusing on design really matters. I think especially in financial services companies like Coinbase where design is kind of a shortcut to communicating trust. So, you know, even before we knew Mt. Gox was a scam, it kind of just screamed scam when you looked at it because the design was terrible. It just looked like something that was a scam. And so if you start from a point where you actually have thoughtful, considerate design, that communicates to a user a certain degree of trust, and then you just have to make good on it not being a scam part, and then you're good.

• 30:18Anthony Pompliano?

  So, step one is don't create a scam. Step two is don't make it look like a scam.

• 30:22Speaker 02

  Right, right, right. And I can't help you, if it is a scam, I'm not going to help you with step two, but like, yeah, I mean...

• 30:28Anthony Pompliano?

  But when you see Coinbase and you're like, okay, this is beautifully designed, right? I think what's so fascinating is my understanding is a number of the best investments you've made, it was not like somebody called you up and was like, hey Bobby, we're like doing a fundraiser around, like, do you want to participate? You were just starting out as an investor and so you had to go hunting. You had to go get an introduction to the founder. You had to go and convince them to take your money, like walk through that process and and why you were so willing to go do the work to go hunting.

• 30:53Speaker 02

  And this is something that's like really high on my mind right now because as I've evolved in my career as an investor, I kind of naturally get more inbound deal flow. Like I get, I get a lot of people sending me deals right now. And then I always have to balance that against the fact that, hey, my best deal I ever did was not a deal that flowed to me. It was a deal that I found out about and I go, I went and knocked on the door and got into the deal. I would call that spearfishing, right? And I think in, in venture capital in general, we talk a lot about deal flow and we think about deal flow as like so much of a part of the game that you, you know, but I honestly think that it can be a double edged sword.

• 31:37Speaker 02

  And I think, I think some investors do better in different environments. And so for myself, like when I was first starting out as an investor, nobody knew who I was, no one was sending me deals, I got no deal flow. But what that does is that affords a certain amount of kind of white space where I can get genuinely excited about things. I could spend all these hours on r slash Bitcoin. I didn't have pitch meeting after pitch meeting to get, to take up my time. And so you could find this genuine curiosity, this genuine excitement and then, oh, well here you go, like here's this new company Coinbase. I've been in this community for a few months. Mt. Gox is terrible. I really need to do anything I can to go, to go get into this deal.

• 32:19Speaker 02

  And, and I think that that, that mode of spearfishing is, is a really compelling alternative to this idea of, um, you know, I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna have this gravitational pull of deal flow and have everyone come pitch me.

• 32:33Anthony Pompliano?

  When, what did you do to get an introduction to Brian?

• 32:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. So again, I leaned heavily on my background as a designer and I had a, I had a friend of ours, um, um, make an introduction. And, um, you know, basically I spent, um, two or three, uh, sessions in the office, just like, Helping them on their new user account flows on some very basic kind of onboarding interfaces for very early Coinbase. And then I said, hey, you know, look, I just made my first angel investment. I'd love to make my second one into this. Like, can I get into the next round? And they said, sure, no problem. And I think that idea of offering something very specific, in my case, like a very, a very minor amount of design support, which

• 33:20Speaker 02

  wound up kind of widening. And over the years, I helped them recruit a couple of designers. I connected them to two different design firms. Later did like a more intensive onboarding review for them. And then they, they kind of rewarded me with that, with allowing me to invest, you know, more capital into later rounds. And then ultimately was able to raise an SPV into the last round before they went public. And just all by, all by the virtue of kind of spending a little bit of time and help, helping them with something that I was, I was kind of, you know, relevant and informed to help them about.

• 33:55Anthony Pompliano?

  And so when you think about that deal, and when you deployed capital, obviously, you're going to have some hindsight bias. But do you think it's a $50 billion company? Or do you think it's like, hey, maybe they can, you know, grow and they'll get bought at 100 million? Like, what's kind of the upper bound of what you think that potential investment has at the time?

• 34:13Speaker 02

  Yeah. And that's like, so I don't think I was, I think if I'm being honest, I didn't have these sorts of thought exercises fully established in my head as an investor when I did it. But that's part of how I think about investing now, which is, I think a really important question, wherever you see an opportunity is, you have to ask yourself, like, what if, what if this goes perfectly right? Which I know sounds like a silly thing to say. And it might seem particularly naive for Silicon Valley investors to say something like that. But I think, I think the default for most people is that they default to cynicism and skepticism. And when you, when you pitch someone a new idea, I think most people will

• 34:56Speaker 02

  start shooting down the reasons why it, it won't work. And those are really important to capture. And like, as an investor, you need to have that skepticism. You need to be able to do that level of, you know, Intellectual rigor, you need to apply that towards the idea. But before you do any of that, I think it's really important just to imagine that, you know, kind of unicorns and rainbows scenario where everything goes right. And what that does is that it basically lets you ask the question like, how much will this, like, where does this, where does this peter out? Like, where does this end? And I think for many ideas, you will find, you will come up with some kind of cap where you say, okay, I think if this thing goes really well, this is this kind of enterprise

• 35:41Speaker 02

  SaaS company, and I think it could get to this level of recurring revenue, and that would make it worth this amount of money. And this is what the world looks like when everything goes right for this company. And when you could find yourself coming up with like a very concrete cap, and thereby kind of coming up with a pretty concrete expected value calculation about it, I tend to shy away from those things versus going after things that I think have potentially uncapped outcomes. Where when I start assessing, okay, okay, what if this thing starts going right? And like, okay. And then with something like Coinbase and with Bitcoin in general, you start getting into these scenarios in your head where really you have to start thinking about like how

• 36:25Speaker 02

  governments are going to start responding to this thing. And that's a really good sign when you start to...

• 36:28Anthony Pompliano?

  If it's big enough for the government to be worried about it, then you probably did it right as an investor.

• 36:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, that probably enters in this uncapped category outcome. And, and yeah, I think those are worth swinging at because again, it all comes back to this sort of, I like to call it a fuzzy expected value calculus where, again, like, I think a lot of the, a lot of mistakes a lot of investors make are that they're kind of overly scrutinous of ideas, they kind of shoot them down. And then the only thing, the only thing that gets to the filter are these more capped outcomes, they're more sure bets. And, you know, when they, when they work, they, sure, they can, they can result in some great outcomes. But what I've found in practice is that, you know, the failure rate between the...

• 37:17Speaker 02

  These sort of kind of smaller base hit capped outcomes and the failure rate between that and these kind of grand slam, you know, launch the ball into orbit outcomes. It's actually not terribly different. And if you're going to take the risk on investing in something that can go to zero and that that takes on a lot of the same style of risks regardless of what the startup is, you might as well like really swing, really swing for the fences.

• 37:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. One of the things that to me is just absolutely fascinating is being rational is actually a hindrance to making good investments. Because what you're essentially doing is you're looking for something that's doing something different and right. And so it's an outlier and therefore it's irrational. And so if you're a rational person evaluating something from a rational standpoint, in most cases, you're going to miss the absolute most asymmetric things, right? You're definitely going to find things that are less likely to lose money. So it's, you know, low probability of losing money or lower probability, but the upside is capped. The more irrational you are, actually the higher the asymmetry is, but the lower probability of success. And as a venture investor, you want the latter, you don't want the former.

• 38:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Or like, I also, I also think that things that might feel really irrational can actually, you can flip over in your head to having a real rational belief in them. If you can just get past this like one like immediate point of skepticism, which is again, why I think, I think it's almost a cliche in, if you talk, if you talk to folks who work at these larger venture capital firms and they kind of hire, you know, like a junior person to come onto the team and they go to their first partner meeting. It's almost a cliche that this new person will just like start firing at all these reasons why the idea that's on the, on the table will fail.

• 39:11Speaker 02

  And it's really easy to do that. It's actually like, and I think like it's table stakes for any investor is to be able to kind of come up with this list of, of criticisms. And it's, it's a very, again, it's a very, it sounds very silly to say this, but I think. It actually is a worthwhile mental exercise to just like put those to the side and say, what if everything goes right? And like, let's just pretend for a moment, what does that scenario look like? Because at least that gives you this, this like upside calculation where you could start to get this fuzzy expected value calculation. Because again, like the downside risk of all these things is the same. You're, you're, the downside risk is you lose all your money. And so when, when,

• 39:54Speaker 02

  when you, when you find one of these things where you just can't even imagine how big the upside case is, even if the odds are quite slim, it, it, it tends, those tend to be things worth swinging at, especially when you're constructing a, you know, a balanced portfolio.

• 40:10Anthony Pompliano?

  When you think about investing, you obviously are good at it. You've had a number of hits. You now have started an actual fund, right? Form Capital, we can talk about that. What is it that you enjoy about this? Like, why do you enjoy it? Why did you not go and join another company and say, hey, I'm gonna go find, you know, Facebook 2.0 and, and kind of go do this all over again? Why have you spent so much time investing?

• 40:35Speaker 02

  Well, part of it is that I think I'm a bit scatterbrained. I really do enjoy going from working on a healthcare startup, to working on a crypto startup, to working on, you know, a social game. And I like, I like, as a designer, I really love getting involved in these companies and, and kind of just trying on a new set of problems and seeing how I can, I can resolve them. And so that somewhat speaks to our model with this new fund. So we're, we're a very small seed fund. We're kind of a supporting fund. So we invest alongside other investors typically.

• 41:15Speaker 02

  And then beyond just a check, we offer what we call a design sprint. So with every, with every investment, we offer roughly 40 hours of hands-on design support. So we have a small team of designers on staff that, that works with our founders. And that's what makes it interesting to me because...

• 41:35Speaker 02

  If I was just kind of writing a check and giving a wave bye-bye, I think it wouldn't be as meaningful, it wouldn't be as exciting to me, it wouldn't be as fulfilling. I think investing in a lot of ways is getting more commoditized, that's a good thing. And so for myself to make it exciting, to make it interesting, I really want to have that participatory aspect to it. And that's kind of what I've found with this new fund.

• 42:00Anthony Pompliano?

  The fund structure is very unique in that you intentionally are keeping the fund rather small, you're intentionally having a pretty large GP commit. Walk through just like, why are you doing things different than let's say a traditional fund would do? Obviously, you're very well-connected, you've got a great track record, you could probably go raise 50, 100 million dollar funds very easily. Why go after this specific strategy?

• 42:23Speaker 02

  Right, right. So I think there's two pieces to the fund. One is the value add, which is very exciting to me. It's kind of the reason why I do it. And then there's the economics of it. And the economic side of it also informs how I'm thinking about being an LP in other funds. So I'm an LP in about 15 different small seed funds, all around the same fund size as mine. And I generally have this current market thesis around seed-stage capital, which is that, obviously, we're all seeing an abundance

• 43:01Speaker 02

  of capital flow into this environment. There are a lot of funds that are lead check-writing funds, meaning they've raised, let's call it, between 50 and 80 million dollars. And when you raise a fund of that size, you wind up having to invest at a certain check size with every deal. And typically, for a seed fund, there would be something on the order of like, a million five per deal. And what I've seen just firsthand is...

• 43:35Speaker 02

  There's a lot of competition to be that lead investor. I think there's a certain degree of adverse selection challenges that come with that. In other words, if you can't be the lead investor, it's a binary proposition. You're either in the deal or you're not. Versus these smaller fund managers and angel investors who put in these smaller checks. Let's say they put in a 200K check as opposed to a 1.5 million dollar check. They tend to get access to the deals they want to invest in. And when they want to deploy an amount of capital into a deal, they tend to secure that allocation. Versus someone writing, running a lead fund may more often than the smaller investor

• 44:20Speaker 02

  get rebuffed entirely. Or if the lead investor says, hey, I would like to invest a million five and the founder comes back to them and says, how about 200K? Well, that's kind of fatal to that investor. You can't make the fund math work on an investment that size. Versus if someone who's running a smaller fund comes to them and says, hey, I'd like 300K and the fund manager comes back and says, how about 200? Well, you can kind of make that work and still return the entire fund. And so when I think about how to structure both my LP checks throughout the industry and also how to structure my own fund in terms of like, how do I maximize the returns that I want to pursue?

• 45:02Speaker 02

  I think it's really important to be able to invest every time I want to be able to invest. And I think if you're running a lead fund and seed, you need to have a very, I think you need to be very honest with yourself and ask yourself, am I able to invest every time I want to invest? And I'm increasingly seeing that answer as no. And

• 45:25Speaker 02

  Again, I think like some of these, some of these seed funds that I'm LPing are probably some of the smartest investment checks I'll ever write. I actually feel, I feel very similarly about the LP checks that I'm writing right now as I did about the angel checks I wrote eight years ago. It has a very similar kind of feeling to me about it. And I kind of like this, this strategy. We call it like a nano fund strategy.

• 45:50Anthony Pompliano?

  What does that mean?

• 45:52Speaker 02

  Sub fifteen million dollar funds.

• 45:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. So sub fifteen million dollars, not lead. How many companies on average you think go into these funds?

• 46:00Speaker 02

  It depends. Our, our structure is a little bit more weighted in that we like to put kind of more wood behind fewer arrows. But I've invested in other smaller managers who do, you know, sixty, sixty deals per fund, which I think is too much. But, but even so, it's a, it's a very big difference to me when you're, when you're able to get the allocation you ask for. I think that's, it's almost like the most critical thing in terms of being a fund manager where it's like, it's, it's like, when you talk about investing, you know, you kind of have to see the deal, right? You have to say yes to the deal. And then you have to win the deal. And, you know, let's just say that, you know, those first two things

• 46:45Speaker 02

  are somewhat, somewhat table stakes in the sense that like, okay, you have to have, you have to have good deal flow or kind of know where to look. And you have to have good judgment and you have to say yes to the thing that's going to work. This latter category is like, is so much in control by the structure of how you, how you run your business, right? Again, if, you know, investing is, is, is, you know, startup investing is like one of the few forms of investing where the asset picks the manager. Right.

• 47:17Anthony Pompliano?

  What do you mean by that?

• 47:18Speaker 02

  Well, again, it's not enough for me to say, oh, I think this startup's really great. I'm going to go invest in it. Well, they might tell you, well, great, there's no allocation for you. Right?

• 47:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Or we don't like you.

• 47:29Speaker 02

  Or we don't like you, or any other things, right? And so, and so, and so, I think a lot of, a lot of investors focus on things like, again, like, how do I maximize deal flow? How do I, how do I think about picking skills? I think a really important quality of any good investors, their being picked skill. Right? And then there's like, I think there's, the two dimensions I can think of offhand to optimize for that is like, have something valuable to offer. You know, we've kind of, we've kind of gone with this design value offering and we think that's compelling. And then two, like, you know, just structurally position yourself such that you can, you can be accommodated into these rounds. And when you have to eat up the whole thing, well, that's just going to limit the number of opportunities you can pursue.

• 48:14Speaker 02

  And so hopefully, one of those lead checks, you know, a lead writer will write, will wind up, you know, kind of being the grand slam they hope it is. But for myself, for my style of investing, I really like to structure myself in a way where, where I'm focused on like, finding things I really enjoy, that I really want to invest in. And I don't like optimizing for like, doing this battle royale with some other startup investor, like, who's going to lead the deal? Like, I don't want to get into that competition. And so, and nor do I want the fund managers that I back to be involved in that competition. I'd rather just kind of get into everything interesting and, and, and kind of, I think, I think go, you know, kind of an inch deep and a mile wide in, in, in this category.

• 48:59Anthony Pompliano?

  When you think about crypto, it's something that seems like you're dabbling a little bit in, it's intellectually stimulating, the design is horrendous, right? We spend a lot of time talking about early-stage investing. Crypto is everything we just talked about on steroids. Asymmetry, weirdness, you know, all this kind of stuff.

• 49:22Anthony Pompliano?

  What is going on with the design, the user experience, the user interfaces? Like, one, why is it so atrocious? And two, like, do you expect it to get better?

• 49:30Speaker 02

  Well, it is getting better. And I think, and again, maybe this is, you know, me having a hammer and thinking everything is a nail, but I can really track the ease of use of crypto and I think runs in complete correlation with the mainstream adoption of it. As you've seen either companies or projects that have extended the user base of crypto, I think they all have one thing in common, which is they tend to be well-designed. They tend to be, they tend to value user experience.

• 50:09Speaker 02

  And I think there's a few cases of like, some more esoteric, highly technical use cases evolving that I think can be very financially lucrative, and that can drive adoption as well. But we were talking about like, the mainstream, general public adopting crypto. I think design has almost always been the limiting factor and will kind of continue to be for a long time. And so, again, that's why it was very exciting for me to back Coinbase back in the day, because I saw that as like, this really enabling factor for crypto overall. And I think a lot of folks in crypto really have a bias towards thinking about the technology,

• 50:50Speaker 02

  the protocols, the, you know, the kind of technical developments going on in the space. It's like, that's what's creating the adoption. But I think you really have to give credit to folks that make this easy to use, that make it accessible to everybody, folks like Coinbase, who have brought so many more people into the crypto universe.

• 51:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Is that probably the number one limiting factor to more mainstream adoption? Is just the user experience, the user interfaces of these products?

• 51:20Speaker 02

  I think so. And I think I'm... I think in general, like, design tends to, you know, follow behind the technical developments. In other words, like, there's a few projects where I think, I think the end-user experience becomes a goal at which the technology gets warped to accommodate, but that's kind of the exception, not the norm. In other words, like, the technology is kind of created as it exists, and then it's up to the designers to try to, you know, bang this thing into shape to actually make it easy to use. And I think, I think some of the, you know, some of the most exciting projects that I see on the horizon are ones that really think about, like, how do we make this easy to

• 52:04Speaker 02

  use from, from the get-go?

• 52:06Anthony Pompliano?

  And it feels almost like the idea of crypto is so antithetical to, like, the way people have thought historically, that already you're asking people to make a big leap on, like, the philosophical or kind of the point of whatever the product or service is. And so the more you can make the design in some ways similar to what they're used to, right? Being user, very user-friendly, being easy to quickly sign up, being able to understand, hey, if I click on that tray, I know exactly what the action is going to be inside the app. Like, that seems to be, in some ways, missing, but also, like, the lowest-hanging fruit. Again, earlier you said, like, this idea of, like, design is the fastest way to kind of build trust or signal trust. In crypto, like, where else do you need that with some of these products than, you know, that industry?

• 52:51Speaker 02

  Right, right. And, um, yeah, I mean, I think, I think, um, oftentimes, it's, it's a, it's a smart idea to maybe build an interface that, that borrows heavily on kind of a mainstream financial interface that folks might already be familiar with, that maybe has to be a bit shoehorned into crypto, but, but, but if it's something that people can immediately grok and understand, like, it's, it's almost worth having that, that simplification, that reduction, just in order to get people to, to understand it. And I think, I think sometimes we build, uh, we really reinvent the wheel. We build highly technical interfaces when a more simplistic, reductive interface, maybe

• 53:34Speaker 02

  something that hides some of the options that people don't necessarily need to tweak, um, is going to be the better choice.

• 53:40Anthony Pompliano?

  And how much of, um... What you're looking at in crypto is like infrastructure. So like Coinbase is an exchange, it's a piece of infrastructure. There's hundreds of other pieces of infrastructure versus more like protocols, tokens, and like what I'll consider like more of the extreme end of crypto. That's not necessarily infrastructure. It's kind of more the quote unquote new stuff.

• 54:03Speaker 02

  Right. Well, I'm looking at a spattering of things right now. At the moment, I have like very specific, there's like specific apps that I want to exist and I'm like hunting for those.

• 54:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you want to share them so that people can come inbound or no?

• 54:22Anthony Pompliano?

  You don't have to.

• 54:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean.

• 54:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Give us one.

• 54:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. So, and I'm already looking at some things in this category as well. So, so I don't necessarily need a bunch of inbound pitches, but, but please, you know, [email protected], please drop me a line. So if you think about Bitcoin as creating a sense of digital scarcity, and obviously there's a financial product attached to that with Bitcoins, I think something about this whole NFT explosion that's excited me is this idea of can we take objects in the physical world that already have real world scarcity and can we digitize them? Can we

• 55:07Speaker 02

  financialize them? And so for example, collectible cars, trading cards, collectible watches, these things in a sense already have a scarcity algorithm, if you will. In other words, in 1952, Mercedes made only so many 300 SL gullwing cars, right? And so the, the, the minting for that, for that car has already happened in the past. And so as, as you, as you look at, at, at digital currencies as sort of this means of creating artificial scarcity and then mapping a financial instrument to that, can we take?

• 55:47Speaker 02

  Actually scarce, physical objects and then pair them with a digital token, a fractionalized digital token and then make that into a financial instrument. So that's like one thing that I'm kind of broadly interested in.

• 56:00Anthony Pompliano?

  And that's really trying to anchor physical goods in the digital world, but still be able to prove kind of provenance over it and also the scarcity, who originally made it, created it, where to trade hands, etc. But it's a physical item, not a digital item, but the digital world still kind of respects or acknowledges the physical item.

• 56:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I think like, in terms of this becoming an asset class, I think, you know, maybe a lot of your listeners would agree that gold is sort of under fire as taking this hedging position in people's portfolios and something like Bitcoin offers a pretty interesting alternative, but I can even imagine a future where there's a basket of actually scarce, kind of provably scarce goods, some of them digital, some of them physical, that replace what has been gold. Maybe gold is a piece of this basket, but it's not the entire basket. And so this idea of like, financializing scarce assets is interesting to me.

• 57:00Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, we're recording in Miami, we're in person. I think you may be one of the only people other than like Keith and Delian who like Miami more than I do. Why did you move to Miami and then what are your thoughts so far?

• 57:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, well, so far it's been fantastic. As to why I moved, I've lived in San Francisco for about 10 years and kind of just watched this wave emerge, starting in last November, and kind of got to the point in December where I was like, you know what, this seems pretty fun, a lot of people I respect are coming here, why not take a bit of a flyer on this? And then if I don't like it, I can kind of, you know, go back with my tail between my legs. And we kind of got here in January and have really just only seen upside from this, have just been tremendously happy.

• 57:56Speaker 02

  Happy about the move. You know, one kind of thought process I had was for myself as an investor, you know, I could be one of thousands upon thousands of small new seed funds in the Bay Area, or I can be one of a tiny handful here, be part of this, this kind of exciting wave. It feels like very rebellious, very, very exciting. There's, there's a lot of camaraderie about it. And, um, you know, have, have the mayor hype us up. And, um, and, and I said, yeah, it's like, it's almost a no brainer. And, um, again, I really have, um, I've really felt very little downside to the move so far and a whole ton of upside. A lot of friends of mine kind of told me, you know,

• 58:41Speaker 02

  you'll, you'll move here and then you'll just kind of be kind of bored to tears. You're, you're gonna be all these pretty boring people. And it's been the exact opposite. It's like I've had, I've had interesting person after interesting person kind of come into my life. My, my, my calendar is completely booked in terms of deal flow, in terms of, um, work. It's, it's, I've never been busier. And, um, that's very much taken me by surprise. And, um, it just makes, it just kind of makes it all the more exciting.

• 59:08Anthony Pompliano?

  So the two things I always tell people is one, people who moved here are not moving here to retire.

• 59:13Speaker 02

  Right.

• 59:13Anthony Pompliano?

  People are moving here with a chip on their shoulder and they're here to work. And, uh, that alone, you can feel the energy when you're here, when you're meeting with people, et cetera, is that, uh, the folks who are here are not going to stop until this is successful.

• 59:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh, and then two is, uh, I think you're very similar to me in that like, I'm just happier here.

• 59:30Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 59:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And I literally don't know if it's as stupid as like, it's sunny all the time, right? And so therefore you're happy. I don't know if it's because it's a new place. I don't know if it's because somehow I'm, uh, eating healthier food. Like, I, I literally have no clue. Right? I just know that when I'm here, I feel happier than anywhere else.

• 59:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:49Anthony Pompliano?

  And that alone is the reason for me to be like, yes, I should live here.

• 59:53Speaker 02

  And we all want to make it work. And I think like that is, like, if I had to pitch a founder on coming here and, and starting their company here as opposed to the Bay Area, I think that the camaraderie and the, the kind of, um, The this like unified sense of like, hey, we're all trying to make this thing happen. And and so you're you you wind up getting a lot of support and contribution from people who, if this was all back in the Bay Area, like, you know, they wouldn't, they wouldn't give you the time of day. But because we're all just like trying to make this thing happen. It's really, it's really an awesome feeling. It's something I haven't felt in this industry. Since maybe like 2010.

• 1:00:38Speaker 02

  And I remember like going to, you know, going to parties in San Francisco, like 2011, like the Airbnb people. They had a house party. It's like, okay, has similar vibes to what I'm feeling here. Or like South by Southwest or 2008, where it was a small enough community, you can kind of get to know people. You can, you can, I've, I've kind of converted a lot of online friendships to in-person friendships. This, you know, our self included and like, it's awesome. It's like.

• 1:01:05Anthony Pompliano?

  There's honor among thieves.

• 1:01:07Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:01:07Anthony Pompliano?

  That's the way I think about it, right? Is we're all in this together.

• 1:01:10Speaker 02

  Right, right. And it does feel like a little bit of a rebellion. Like it feels, and you know, there's, there's people who really take umbrage with this. And that kind of makes it more fun. You know, I saw, I saw today that Tyler Cowen had an article where he's, you know, not, not so excited about Miami being a tech hub. I'm like, you know, I respect the hell out of Tyler Cowen, but like, almost the, almost the doubters give us some, some amount of energy.

• 1:01:38Anthony Pompliano?

  I was gonna say, that literally means we're on to something.

• 1:01:40Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:01:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Right, right. It's kind of like a startup. If you keep hearing no a bunch of times, you're probably on to something.

• 1:01:45Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:01:45Anthony Pompliano?

  More so than not, if you're right. And same thing here. It's like the more people yelling, screaming like, no, it can't happen. No, it can't happen. It actually convinces me like, it's gonna happen.

• 1:01:55Speaker 02

  Right. There's a certain amount of like self-compounding narrative to this. That, that, that people who are, you know, very vigorously against it, I think they don't fully appreciate how much they contribute towards it.

• 1:02:11Speaker 02

  And then I think it just leaves folks like yourself and me to just be. Generally positive about it because again, I'm only seeing positives and it's just such a fun thing to be part of and such an easy welcoming community to join that it's just a really fun, fun thing to do.

• 1:02:30Anthony Pompliano?

  I couldn't agree more. I got three questions before we end. You could ask me one. First is what's the most important book you've ever read?

• 1:02:38Speaker 02

  Um, man, I didn't get any notice this is coming. Yeah. So there's a book called The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker. It's kind of a psychology slash philosophy book.

• 1:02:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Why is that one stick out to you?

• 1:02:54Speaker 02

  Um, I think it, it helps explain and frame how people think and how, um, you know, our mortality is this like very, um, interesting motivator and guiding force for, for, uh, for how we, how we view the world.

• 1:03:17Anthony Pompliano?

  It's fascinating, uh, the topic of mortality and how important that is, right? Uh, cause I think when you get reminded of that, it focuses everything else.

• 1:03:25Speaker 02

  Right, right. And so much of our society is designed, and this is what the book talks about, is kind of designed to build these trappings that help you forget about the fundamental mortality.

• 1:03:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Sleep. Second question, uh, comes from our friends over at Eight Sleep.

• 1:03:42Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:03:42Anthony Pompliano?

  They have this thermo-regulated bed. I sleep on it every night. I love it. Um, I put mine really, really cold and I sleep like a little baby. What's your sleep schedule now and how's that changed over the years?

• 1:03:54Speaker 02

  Um, I also have an Eight Sleep.

• 1:03:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Nice.

• 1:03:59Speaker 02

  And it has markedly improved my sleep. So cheers to them. And

• 1:04:05Anthony Pompliano?

  This is becoming a trend now on the podcast. Ask this question. Oh, I have an Eight Sleep?

• 1:04:08Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 1:04:09Anthony Pompliano?

  And then they go and they cut the clip and they put it on the internet and they're like, look at how smart we are.

• 1:04:14Speaker 02

  I mean, it's probably one of the few things that actually can make you like notably smarter on a day-to-day basis, just getting a good night's sleep. So, yeah.

• 1:04:22Anthony Pompliano?

  It's crazy. It literally is crazy.

• 1:04:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, why not?

• 1:04:25Anthony Pompliano?

  What did you used to do? Did you used to sleep like five, six hours? Or were you always a pretty good sleeper?

• 1:04:29Speaker 02

  Well, again, I'm very pro Miami, so I don't mean to be anti SF, but I'll be anti SF in one dimension, which is no one has air conditioning in San Francisco. And so I was just sleeping, you know, sweating, you know, sweating bullets. And everyone said, "Oh, you're gonna be so warm here in Miami." I'm like, "No, no, actually, I'm having to adjust to like, set the AC to the right temperature. I'm actually too cold most of the time, so I gotta adjust to that new reality."

• 1:04:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes. I love it being cold. Most people ask me, like, "You're in Miami, why do you always wear a hoodie?" It's because literally we keep the office cold as well, right?

• 1:05:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, look at me, man.

• 1:05:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Last question to Aliens. Are you a believer or non-believer?

• 1:05:07Speaker 02

  In the, in the science fiction movie Aliens, I think it's one of the best movies of all time. And I actually just re-watched it the other night. As far as the, as far as the actual extraterrestrials, I don't know. I think, I think that's the only fair answer to give, but.

• 1:05:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Alright.

• 1:05:24Speaker 02

  I sure hope they're not like the James Cameron Aliens.

• 1:05:28Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm with you. I think everyone's with you on that one.

• 1:05:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, that would be bad. That would be bad.

• 1:05:32Anthony Pompliano?

  What one question you have for me?

• 1:05:35Speaker 02

  You know, where, so what would you like to see happen in Miami next? Like, what's your vision for the next year of all this?

• 1:05:43Anthony Pompliano?

  I think just having more founders start more companies here and having more success. Like, I'm a big believer that success begets success. And therefore, if you have big companies built here, then people will spin out, they'll create their own companies, big exits, then people get capital, they can invest. And like, it just, you start the flywheel, right? It's like, that's kind of like a bland answer, frankly, but like, I think it's just like blocking and tackling. Like, hey, how do you make a place a tech hub? Same way that Silicon Valley made themselves a tech hub, right? Like, get investment, build big companies, start new companies, get investment, build big companies. And like, and you just start the flywheel. And the next thing you know, like, the institutional knowledge of how do you build big companies, gets built up in a space, people come to that place because they want capital, they want knowledge, and they want...

• 1:06:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Workers, right? And you're off to the races. And so like, we're pretty damn far down the road already.

• 1:06:30Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:06:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh, in terms of some of the companies that have moved here. Now you just gotta start the flywheel and do more and more and more of it faster and faster.

• 1:06:36Speaker 02

  Well, we should look at co-investing on a Miami company together.

• 1:06:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:06:40Speaker 02

  I'm, I'm actually. Uh, maybe. I don't wanna, I don't wanna spill the beans here on camera, but like, let's, let's, let's. Let's work together on this.

• 1:06:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Just send it my way. All right. Where can people find you? What? [email protected]?

• 1:06:52Speaker 02

  [email protected]. I'm @RSG on Twitter, and that's about it.

• 1:06:56Anthony Pompliano?

  How did you get RSG? Let's add, hold on.

• 1:06:58Speaker 02

  Well, those are my initials. I was just, I was just really early.

• 1:07:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Just really early, got the initials and done.

• 1:07:03Speaker 02

  If you want to add me on Facebook, here's a, here's a flex for the kids at home, right? Uh, facebook.com slash G.

• 1:07:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Wow.

• 1:07:10Speaker 02

  Too bad, no one actually uses Facebook usernames for anything. So that one was wasted.

• 1:07:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Facebook.com slash G. That's pretty good.

• 1:07:20Speaker 02

  But that one's a total whiff because, uh, no one, like, who, who cares about Facebook usernames, right?

• 1:07:25Anthony Pompliano?

  So I have facebook.com/pomp.

• 1:07:28Speaker 02

  That's pretty good.

• 1:07:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh, and at the time when I was working there, they didn't give out the four-letter names. And I like begged. I was like, come on, like, I gotta get this. I gotta get it.

• 1:07:39Speaker 02

  You gotta get it.

• 1:07:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh, and eventually I got it and I was like, yes. And the, I kept on about to tell the story. The way that I convinced them to give it to me was, uh, Boz.

• 1:07:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:07:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Has slash Boz, B-O-Z. And I was like, he's got three letters. I'll even take a fourth letter. Just give me slash pomp. So finally I found out who, who was doing it and got it and whatever. But slash G, I've never heard of a one-letter.

• 1:08:00Speaker 02

  There's, there are a few of us. Obviously, there's less than, uh, less than the numbers in the alphabet. Yeah, less than the number of letters in the alphabet.

• 1:08:07Anthony Pompliano?

  I love it. All right. And then, uh, formcapital.com, uh, dot co, dot com?

• 1:08:13Speaker 02

  Formcapital.com, yeah.

• 1:08:14Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. Awesome, man. Thank you so much for doing this. We'll do it again.

• 1:08:16Speaker 02

  This was so fun. Yeah. Thanks for having me.