20 VC 078: BETAWORKS WEEK: Matt Hartman, Director of Seed Investments @ Betaworks

Matt Hartman is director of seed investments at betaworks. Prior to joining betaworks, he was co-founder of ReferBoost, a profitable b2b company in the real estate and social media space, and JustBecause, a mobile app used by Uber, Birchbox, Jackthreads, and other e-commerce companies for customer acquisition. He started his career building the technology platform for Trammell Crow Company (acquired by CBRE) before joining Hot Potato (acquired by Facebook). In this interview with Matt we talk about one of Betaworks investments in ProductHunt and I would love to direct you all to go check out ProductHunt’s new podcast section, it’s the best way to find new and amazing podcast episodes, check it out! To win a signed copy of Venture Deals by Brad Feld? All you have to do is leave a review on iTunes and then email [email protected] with the name that you left the review under! In Today's Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How you has Matt ended up at the amazing Betaworks, what was his career pre-Betaworks? 2.) How does Matt define betaworks and his role in particular in the Betaworks organisation? What makes this model the most effective and successful in Matt's view? 3.) How does Matt believe the structure of social networks alters user behavior and therefore impacts distribution? How do social networks include habit forming behaviours to ensure user retention on their networks? 4.) What does Matt think makes a strong community? What was it about ProductHunt that signaled to you this was the beginning of a rapidly growing community? 5.) With Betaworks investment in Gimlet Media, how does Matt see the future of podcasting? Does investing in Gimlet not break the rule that it has to be a potentially $bn exit? 6.) Question from Ryan Hoover, Founder at ProductHunt: ‘What product or app has impressed Matt the most in the past year and what really gets Matt excited when trying new products both as an investor and as a user’? Items Mentioned In Today's Show: Most Read Blog or Newsletter: Founder's Notebook by David Jaxson Matt's Favourite Book: The Psychology of Pursuasion by Robert Cialdini Matt's Fave Productivity Apps: Drafts Most Recent Investment: Disruptive Multimedia by Ryan Leslie As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Matt on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here!

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

• 0:00Harry Stebbings?

  You are listening to the 20 Minute VC with your host, Harry Stebbings. And this week, I'm very excited to bring you a very special line up of interviews as we enter one of the world's most successful startup studios. It is, of course, BetaWorks. And joining us today from BetaWorks is the one and only Matt Hartman. Matt is Director of Seed Investments at BetaWorks, who have invested in the likes of Tumblr, Airbnb, Groupon and Twitter, and have internally built startups such as Chart, Beat, Bitly and Socialflow. And prior to joining the company, he was co-founder of ReferBoost, a profitable B2B company in the real estate and social media space.

• 0:41Harry Stebbings?

  And he also founded Just Because, a mobile app used by Uber, Birchbox, Jackthreads and many other ecommerce companies for customer acquisition. He started his career building the technology platform for Trammell Crow Company, which was acquired by CBRE, before joining Hot Potato, which was acquired by Facebook. And in this interview with Matt, we talk about one of BetaWorks' investments in Product Hunt. And I'd love to direct you all to go check out Product Hunt's new podcast section. It's the best way to discover new and amazing podcasts. So please do check it out, and the links can be found in the show notes. And as if this episode couldn't get any better, would you like the chance to win a signed copy of Venture Deals by the legend that is Brad Feld?

• 1:25Harry Stebbings?

  Well, all you have to do is leave a review on iTunes and then email harry@thetwintiminetc dot com with the name that you left the review under on iTunes. But before we delve into today's interview, we often hear of VCs being founder-friendly, a term I would use to describe the brilliant team at Vidar Law. With decades of experience helping startups in the technology sector, they know the ins and outs of the startup world, which is why they offer a fixed fee structure. So you can essentially hire them as your general counsel without taking anyone on board full-time and without fearing an excessive legal bill. So check them out at www.vidarlaw.com or give my buddy Chris an email on [email protected].

• 2:10Harry Stebbings?

  That's C W E R N E R at V D A R V I D A R law dot com. But without further ado, ladies and gents, it's time to delve into the interview. So here is the man himself. It's Matt Hartman, Director of Seed Investments at Beta Works.

• 2:33Speaker 01

  You have now arrived at your destination.

• 2:36Harry Stebbings?

  Well, Matthew, welcome to the 20 minute VC for this very special episode featuring the fantastic Beta Works. Thank you so much for joining us.

• 2:44Speaker 02

  Thanks so much for having me, I appreciate it.

• 2:46Harry Stebbings?

  Now, can you give us a little walkthrough of your career so far and how you ended up at the amazing Beta Works?

• 2:52Speaker 02

  Sure, so I started out as a computer programmer. I studied cognitive science and computer science in college where I was, I had programmed since I was probably about 13 and built a bunch of products. I, my, I started out totally outside of the startup and investment world at a company called Travel Pro, which is a real estate development company. It was a publicly traded company. I built their technology platform and then worked there for about five years, knew that I wanted to do something in startups. I had built lots of stuff on the side, but never really started a business. I went to business school and ended up working at a company called Hot Potato, which was a consumer social network, which ended up getting acquired by Facebook.

• 3:37Speaker 02

  After, after that, so that was sort of an exciting time. I didn't join Facebook, I went back, finished up school and after school I started a company called Refer Boost, which is kind of taking the real estate industry and what I learned about social networks and combining them together. I built a tool for property managers, it was distributed through apartments.com and, and, and turned that into profitable business, didn't raise any outside venture funding.

• 3:59Speaker 02

  When I moved, I was in Chicago at the time, when I moved back to New York, I was looking to work on the next thing and reached out to a few VCs who I know. And it turns out that Beta Works had actually been a seed investor in Hot Potato. And so I knew a bunch of people who had ended up after Hot Potato at Beta Works. So I started talking with them and decided that I would try to work on seed investments. And that was a couple, almost two years ago.

• 4:22Harry Stebbings?

  And Beta Works is a very wonderful, but I guess a rather confused organisation in terms of its definition. How would you define Beta Works?

• 4:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think hopefully it's it's confusing from the outside and not confused on the inside. Um, I, the way that I describe Beta Works is that we do two things. Our core business is what we call the studio, where we build new companies from scratch, consumer internet companies. Uh, so that's what we did with Bitly, a company called Chartbeat, Socialflow, more recently, an iPhone app, a game called Dots, and the animated search engine Giphy, and a number of others. I think we've done about, uh, built about nineteen companies from the ground up in various stages. And they, they're, if you come into our office, we have, there's probably a hundred, over a hundred people here, all working at the moment on ten different companies. As they get bigger, they move upstairs and then they get outside

• 5:14Speaker 02

  financing and they end up, you need to grow beyond Beta Works's, uh, physical space and so they get their own space.

• 5:19Harry Stebbings?

  But they still remain a Beta Works company?

• 5:22Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, so we, we are very intimately involved. We are the fir-, we are, we view ourselves as co-founders with those people. We're, we, the, the very first employee is an employee of Beta Works. We work on ideas together and then if the project seems like it's something that, um, the per, the person wants to work on, that we wanna work on, we turn into a company. And so they are Beta Works companies in that sense. Um, separately from that, but very highly related, we do seed stage investments alongside much more traditional venture capital investments, where we're investing in companies that don't, um, come through, they're, they're not physically started at Beta Works. They have their own space and we

• 5:59Speaker 02

  try to invest again in consumer internet companies that, um, are sort of hitting consistent themes with the things that we're building. So, social networks, data-driven products, um, that are, that are kind of targeted to our consumer and have an engineering focus and, and lead.

• 6:20Harry Stebbings?

  And what's your role then at Beta Works?

• 6:23Speaker 02

  So I work on our seed investing side.

• 6:25Harry Stebbings?

  Okay. And, and wha- wha- why do you like the seed investing side of the, the venture industry? I mean, why do you think this is the area of most opportunity?

• 6:35Speaker 02

  So I think, I think there's two ways to look at it. One is why seed investing and not starting a company? And the other is why seed investing and not later-stage investing? So for me, I came from the, the operating side, so I was working on, building things all the time. I love the act of that very first, um...

• 6:56Speaker 02

  Early part of starting a product, before it's even a company. I I really enjoy that part of the process and Beta Works on the seed investing side really focuses on on that, both on our on our on our seed investing side and on our company creation side, on those very early days of the company, shaping the product and building the community around it and figuring out kind of what the network structure should be of the product if it's a social network. And that's the area that I really, that I that I enjoy. The advantage to me, I work on the venture capital side versus building at the moment, is that I get to work on lots of different things. So I get to work on a company, one company one day and another another day and help them out. And and that's really enjoyable for me.

• 7:38Harry Stebbings?

  And I'd love to delve into the nitty gritty now. You've mentioned social networks a few times. So I'd love to delve into that and discuss the structure of social networks and how you believe that that alters user behavior and therefore impacts their distribution.

• 7:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I I think the word social network has come to mean almost nothing, I guess now. I I'll tell you the way that I think about it, which is what you said, which is this sort of network structure. The classic example to me is the difference between Facebook and Twitter is a bidirectional arrow, basically. So if the follow versus friend model actually creates these totally different ecosystems. It's kind of like DNA replicating and it turns into a different type of organism. Well, I think Twitter has turned out to be much more about news, massive distribution of one to many. Facebook is much more interesting for your friends, people you actually know. And so that's kind of the classic example. I think we're seeing another, we saw even another iteration of that

• 8:38Speaker 02

  with Snapchat where they're saying, okay, well, this is, there's two sort of key differences here. One is ephemerality and another one is the fact that you're sending one to many, but then it actually gets sent out one to one. So you start, you're sort of starting this conversation with multiple people with the same thread. They may can all respond to you or not respond to you. On the ephemerality side, I think that that actually, if you think about that not as a feature but as a design pattern. What has ended up happening is that it lowered the friction to post. So I know that it's not going to everybody and I know that it's going to appear in an hour, in an hour. Maybe I'm more likely to take a selfie even though the picture's not perfect versus Instagram where I wanna make sure it's absolutely perfect before I. Blast it out to my entire network. I think that really does impact user behavior.

• 9:21Harry Stebbings?

  And do you think reducing the friction then ensures user retention by making it more of a habit-forming activity? Or what do you think these social networks can do to foster a habit-forming activity in their networks?

• 9:36Speaker 02

  You know, I think, I think that reducing friction makes it easier to do something. I don't know that that's always habit-forming. Um, there's, um. Nuryal and I think Ryan Hoover was involved with the, with the book Hooked and then they, and they put together sort of a very nice. Um, way to think about habit-forming activities. That is one of the key things that we look for in our investments is we were very introspective with our early companies that were, that were working with that. Haven't launched yet. The only thing we have is kind of. Um, our view of how we're using the product and how it fits into people's workflows and whether something is a daily recurring activity.

• 10:19Speaker 02

  Weekly recurring activity versus a twice a year activity impacts whether you can really build an engaged community around that product.

• 10:27Harry Stebbings?

  And talking of habit-forming and, and communities, you're also very interested in community building. So what do you think makes a strong community and what can you do to foster the growth of a strong community?

• 10:41Speaker 02

  Well, so we were talking before about network and I think that's. It just sort of, I think about that as the structure. So it's like if there's no one there, what does the thing look like? Where are the, your arrow is pointing? Community to me is the layer on top of that. It's the thing that gives that network life. And so. What we look for is engagement, is on the data side, is network density. I remember when we first started talking to Ryan from Product Hunt, one of the things that we had done was this network analysis with our data. I had sat down with our data scientists and started mapping out the networks of this on Twitter, because it's so public, of all the products that we were launching. And we kept, and what it does is it puts these, did you picture kind of this network graph?

• 11:25Speaker 02

  It has the bubbles are different sizes of the people, how densely they're connected with other people on that network. And there was this, not the biggest bubble, but this medium sized bubble was at RR Hoover, which is Ryan's Twitter account, I had a note at the time. And it kept coming back up, and we're like, well, maybe this is somebody who's a big fan of data works. And then it turns out, we started doing the network maps on other companies, and he was showing up there too. And what that revealed sort of in the data was what was true, which is that he was being, he was engaging with other people, not even about the product, Product Hunt as a product. He was engaging people on all social networks. So he was really building a community that was greater than an actual product. I think that's, a lot of, a lot of times that's what this is, is kind of this, the, the,

• 12:08Speaker 02

  the social network ends up being reflect, a reflection of really what's going on in real life, which is able to capture so much of it.

• 12:14Harry Stebbings?

  And what was it about Product Hunt that signaled to you that this was the beginning of a rapidly growing community?

• 12:20Speaker 02

  It really was, it was a few things. First, we had met, we had met Ryan, a bunch of people there on the early, on an early version. I think it was email before it was even a website.

• 12:32Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah, an email newsletter, yeah.

• 12:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, and so a bunch of data works people were on that. So we knew what Product Hunt was, and had, had talked to Ryan. A couple of people had reached out and, and spoken very highly of him also. And then we really did do this network analysis, and it, and it was. It sort of proved what the intuition was. I think a lot of investing is this combination of data and intuition. And our intuition was this, this is addictive, this is really engaging, we're going to it every day. The conversations on Product Hunt were just like conversations that we're having in our private. It was this really, really good product, people having, debating things back and forth. And it was a fairly positive conversation. The way that

• 13:18Speaker 02

  he talked about keeping things positive and sort of letting some people gating whether or not you could have comments, I think is some part of that network structure that enabled that the the community to grow in the way that was really productive. And so that's, it was all of those, the confluence of of different data points is really what drove it.

• 13:37Harry Stebbings?

  And talking of Ryan Hoover, we've mentioned him a few times. Ryan has actually submitted a question for you today. The question that he submitted is, what product or app has impressed you the most in the past year? And what really gets you excited when trying new products, both as an investor and as a user? So let's break that down. What has impressed you in the most in the past year?

• 14:02Speaker 02

  So obviously, I'm I'm impressed with lots of the companies that we've invested in. I'll give you an example of a company that we didn't invest in that I think had, it was really impressive, which is Meerkat. I thought that that was, sort of in retrospect now, one of the best product launches I've seen in a while. I think the product itself was was well done and so tightly, it was more integrated, tightly integrated Twitter turned out than even Periscope was, which Twitter acquired. And so I thought that that that product launch was just masterfully done. And I think that they, it was, I don't know, I think it was a combination of the right time, a really good product. I also think

• 14:44Speaker 02

  Periscope was, had elements when I saw that of a really good product.

• 14:48Harry Stebbings?

  What do you, what do you make of the whole Periscope versus Meerkat? Do you feel as bad for Meerkat as I do?

• 14:55Speaker 02

  I don't think it's over yet, you know, I think that I feel like we're still in the days of the Twitter quote would be tweeting out pictures of your food. It's like people don't really know how to use it. Everyone's, there's something about this vertical video, the fact that whether it's a selfie or looking outwards, that's that's interesting. And I think that I'm sort of interested to see whether what gets built on top of things like Meerkat and Periscope. Because you really can, you can build, you could, you could have a podcast that is launched entirely on top of Meerkat. I think people have done that, these broadcasts that are, that are the broadcasts.

• 15:28Harry Stebbings?

  Do you think there's the potential for Facebook to acquire Meerkat and have a rival streaming service?

• 15:34Speaker 02

  You know, I hadn't thought about it. I mean, I think, I think there's a world where that makes sense. If I were Facebook, I don't have a sense of how hard some of, some of these things are. So, so you have Periscope, you have Meerkat, we had, we had invested a while ago into a company which then

• 15:54Speaker 02

  pivoted and merged and, and emerged as a company called Up Close. Which is another, another, it's, it's again, a different, slightly different take on, on video broadcasting. It strikes me that there are subtle differences in each of these that make them really interesting. So for example, Meerkat is not so good at very real time feedback. So it doesn't always broadcast in real time. I think Periscope is much better. I know that Up Close is much better at real time. And so what that means is having comments, if you ask a question and it's going to be thirty seconds before the person even hears the question, that that interaction isn't going to work so well. But it's probably really good for a bunch of other use cases.

• 16:36Speaker 02

  And so I think for somebody like Facebook, my guess is the way they're thinking, they would think about is if they saw some really strong use cases emerge, they have this massive distribution. If it made sense to, to build something like that or to acquire something like that, I, I could, it's certainly in that social media space. I could see them caring a lot about real time video if, if consumers had been caring about.

• 16:55Harry Stebbings?

  And then moving to the second part of Ryan's question, when trying new products, both as an investor and as a user, what gets you excited? Is it the design? Is it the ability backend? What is it to you?

• 17:08Speaker 02

  So I think I I have a specific thought here and it's it's designed, but maybe not in the way that a lot of people think about the design. So I think when I first heard, okay, this is really well-designed, I would think it's beautiful, it looks beautiful. And what I what really gets me when I products, both on the investment side and just as a user are are are experiences that are designed or apps or whatever they are that are designed, that feel so native and surprise you at how you didn't even realize you wanted that feature. So I will um I think of a couple of examples. I think that I we were just talking about about the video streaming apps. When Periscope

• 17:50Speaker 02

  launched and they had the feature for with the hearts, it's this really subtle thing. But I've done a bunch of I've done a little bit of video broadcasting, I shouldn't say a bunch. And one of the things that's really frustrating is when you, like I said, when you ask a question, you don't get the immediate feedback. Even if someone's typing in a response, you don't know that they're typing. And so you just sit there and you might be sitting there waiting for nothing or might be sitting there waiting for a question because someone's typing it. And I thought that the that subtle notion that when you touch the screen, it's going to immediately give the broadcaster feedback is, I think, an example of the types of things that we look for. There what what's native about the thing you're doing? In that case, it was live, so we need to make the feedback live.

• 18:30Speaker 02

  What's native about something like um an audio app, you know, is that is that probably you want to make sure that that the experience is native, that you can look at it, use it that way. And so things like that.

• 18:44Harry Stebbings?

  And I'd love to move on also to another one of your investments, uh which is in the one for Alex Bloomberg's Gimlet Media, which, you know, is personally very exciting for me as a podcaster. Uh you don't see many podcasting networks getting VC funding. So a very welcome investment there. Thank you for that one. But where do you think the future of podcasting lies then?

• 19:08Speaker 02

  I, you know, I think there's there's it seems that there's a a podcasting renaissance happening right now. The way that I think about podcasting is that it's this separate channel that actually doesn't have to take your attention away from the primary thing that you're doing. So if you're in a car and you have the iPhone and it's Easier to create, there's a whole bunch of things that happen. And with Gimlet, you know, to start out with Gimlet, I think at the moment, there is a. A disparity between the amount, the supply of really good podcasts, yours is is one of the great ones.

• 19:45Harry Stebbings?

  Thank you very much. I'll give you twenty quid later.

• 19:49Speaker 02

  And and and and the demand for podcasts, right? So so I think at the moment, there's not as many great podcasts. As there are people looking for great podcasts. There are a lot of podcasts, not necessarily great ones, right? So that's the kind of distinction I'm talking about. And I think the future is is really about that extra, that extra channel that I was talking about before. I just, I I'm a little bit of a data nerd, and so I spent a bit of time taking, I have an Instapaper. On Instapaper, there's a, which is a reader app for people who don't know. There is a feature that lets you listen to any article. And I noticed when they launched the feature, and it's a Betaworks company, so I get some of the early, the early features.

• 20:32Speaker 02

  When they launched it, I realized I was going through my, through my queue, my Instapaper queue much faster. And so because I'm a little bit of a data nerd, I actually started measuring the number of words that I was listening to.

• 20:43Speaker 02

  And what I found was that on my commute to work, basically, by just listening while I'm walking and while, and during my commute. I ended up listening to the equivalent of what would have taken me six hours to read.

• 20:54Harry Stebbings?

  Wow.

• 20:55Speaker 02

  And so if you picture, that's like almost a day at work. And so, you know, with lunch. And so, so you, you, as you start to, for me, as I started to notice that, I was thinking, there's a whole lot of. There's a lot of found time in the listening channel. So thinking that was a separate channel, I think, that's where I think there's a, there's a ton of room for it to grow.

• 21:16Harry Stebbings?

  And does investing in Gimlet not break the kind of traditional VC rule that it has to be a billion dollar exit? I mean, do you think a podcasting network could be a billion dollar company?

• 21:29Speaker 02

  Um, I so I mean, I I don't thi- I I have two things. One is I think that Gimlet could has the potential to be enormous. The, you know, we talked a bit about people listening and the supply and demand of of content. On the other side, you also have the advertising network. Looks a lot different than when a company like Facebook or Tumblr was launching when brands didn't know how to how to pay them, right? You didn't know what should the ad unit be? What's the native ad unit? In in the case of podcasting, there are, there's already an established ecosystem of how to do audio ads. And so I think there's actually, in that sense, it's much further along.

• 22:09Speaker 02

  And in in many ways can be monetized in a very straightforward way. I think there's, so that's one, and just in terms of monetization, that's one um bucket. And the other bucket is all of the ways that you can interact with people because it's audio. And you can see, I think Serial said donate if you want, a lot of a lot of the uh the public broadcast asks for donations.

• 22:31Speaker 02

  Because they're sitting in your ears again, and you don't, you can multitask, I think actually those end up being pretty useful and having high conversion rates. So I think there's a lot to be done on the business side, but there's also this existing business model. I think the confluence of those things ends up meaning, it ends up meaning that a really big, great quality podcast network can be pretty enormous.

• 22:50Harry Stebbings?

  And I'd love to delve into a quickfire round now. So deal sourcing, what tools do you use?

• 22:59Speaker 02

  You know, I use, I I I I would like to say human. Beta Works is is a special place partly because, I mentioned earlier, we have a hundred people here. We have now over a hundred portfolio companies also. They all have friends of friends. A lot of the ways that we get uh new deals is through through our network. People who come in and do it, say, my friend's working on something interesting, and they come in and demo it. We say, wow, that's awesome. We'd love to, you know, and then we get to know them and and ultimately invest. Um, so so that's a lot of the ways that that we end up. I I don't, you know, in in an industry with a lot of technology, there's not a lot of technology. I use I use Product Hunt as a way to find investment. We've made investments that indeed were initiated on Product Hunt.

• 23:43Harry Stebbings?

  And then what productivity tools are your must haves?

• 23:48Speaker 02

  I will tell you that um the my absolute favorite productivity tool right now is drafts. Do you use that?

• 23:55Harry Stebbings?

  What, in your email?

• 23:57Speaker 02

  Um, so, sorry, so there's a, there's an iPhone app called Drats. Uh, D R, D R A F T S.

• 24:04Harry Stebbings?

  No, I don't, I'm writing it down now, but.

• 24:06Speaker 02

  I, it is in my, so I'm looking at my, my home screen now and it is in my dock. It is, I'll, I'll just describe it to you briefly.

• 24:15Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 24:16Speaker 02

  You can type anything, you, you can type, it's basically a free form type. Typing, I don't know, text box, and then you can run macros on whatever you typed. And when you click to run a macro, for example, if you and me are talking and you say, hey, there's a, there's a product you should try. I can in one tap add that to my to do list on Evernote, because I've created a macro to send something to my to do list. Um, I have another one for our investments weekly agenda, so I can send a macro there. If there's companies that we're looking at, I can send it directly to, to, you can send things to Trello boards. Um, so it's basically an input box that then will output to any API that you want.

• 24:52Harry Stebbings?

  Wow.

• 24:53Speaker 02

  And I found that it, what it does is it means that I don't have to do a lot of tapping. Before just getting the thing in. So if you and me are in the middle of a conversation and I wanna make a note, I make it there. Send it to the place it should go as opposed to opening up Evernote, finding my to do list, if that's what we're talking about. Um, and, and sort of interrupting my workflow.

• 25:13Harry Stebbings?

  And then your most read blog or newsletter?

• 25:16Speaker 02

  Hmm, um, so I'll give you, I'll give you a couple. I, I, this, I'm sorry, I'm not making this very lightning. This drives, so I use, I use Dig Deeper, which is, um, basically takes all of my. All of my people I follow on Twitter and gives me a digest of the things that they're sharing and I send that to Instapaper a lot. So that's the first thing. The one, the tech one that I really like is a founder's notebook by David Jaxson. Who, someone suggested to me, I don't know David, uh, but it was. Someone who suggested, it's like, I, I judge these by the things I haven't unsubscribed to, so that's one. And then the third one that I like that's sort of more in the, in the.

• 25:57Speaker 02

  Uh, fun one is a Lorham Ipsen, which is by uh, Margot, who's here at Beta Works. It's, I think it's their, their Twitter's Lorham Ipsen WTF or dot WTF. It's a, it's sort of a fun kind of lifestyle uh newsletter, and then I read this scam a ton.

• 26:15Harry Stebbings?

  And then your favorite book and why?

• 26:19Speaker 02

  I really like the psychology of persuasion.

• 26:23Harry Stebbings?

  By Robert Cialdini?

• 26:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I think it's, it's a nice, uh, the reason is because it's in between Kahneman, Tversky, which is sort of the, the pure psychology and predictably irrational, which is the pure.

• 26:35Harry Stebbings?

  We love predictably irrational.

• 26:36Speaker 02

  It's great. I mean, you can, I sort of think there's this lineage, Kahneman, Tversky's actual research, psychology of persuasion, which makes it understandable, and then predict predictably irrational, which applies it. Those are, to me, that's like a, those are three things that have a lineage.

• 26:50Harry Stebbings?

  And then what's your most recent investment and why did you say yes?

• 26:55Speaker 02

  Um, so the few, so, so the most recent investment, I think that's public, is a company called Disruptive Multimedia. So it's by a guy named, founder named Ryan Leslie, who's started out, he's, he's, he's a rapper, actually. And he had, he had built a product that makes it, if you go to his Twitter accounts, he posts his phone number publicly. And so he built almost like a personal mobile CRM for his fans, where he can communicate with them. They can buy his album through it, but he can also understand where his fans are and, and have a one-to-one. We were talking before about one-to-many, but feeling like one-to-one communication like Snapchat. This is that same network structure, but, but through text message. So you can actually text with him and he'll, he'll see it and respond.

• 27:41Speaker 02

  He's, and he's uh, he's got, you know, I don't know how many, how many, he's got half a million Twitter followers. I'm not sure if he has that many people who he texts in his contacts, but he, he'll message people who are in New York and say, hey, I'm gonna come to New York and doing this event and, and you should come by.

• 27:56Harry Stebbings?

  Wow. Wow, that's one to follow on Twitter. Well, Matthew, thank you so much for coming on the show today. It really has been fantastic and it's been so great to delve inside the world of BetaWorks. I'm so grateful.

• 28:10Speaker 02

  Thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure to be here.

• 28:13Harry Stebbings?

  What a fantastic interview we had there with Matt and a huge hand to him for giving up his time to be on the show today. And do not forget, if you would like the chance to win the incredible venture deals by the legend that is Brad Feld, all you have to do is leave a review on iTunes and then email harry@thetwenty minute vc.com with the name that you left the review under on iTunes. Before we leave you today, a little Greek mythology lesson on the origins of Vidar Law and why the name Vidar came about. Well, Vidar was the god who associated himself and was acknowledged as the chief of justice and vengeance, and he was known for doing the jobs that no one else could do and for getting results in them. And that really symbolises the operations at Vidar Law.

• 28:57Harry Stebbings?

  So if you want legal results for your business, head on over to www.vidarlaw.com or drop my good buddy Chris a line at [email protected]. That's C W E R N E R at V I D A R L A W dot com. Thanks so much, as always, for your continued support and we look so forward to seeing you in the next episode.