#1138 Eric Tarczynski | These Technologies Will Change The World

Eric Tarczynski is the Founder & Managing Partner at Contrary Capital. In this conversation, we discuss the future of venture capital, innovative technologies, seeking out people over companies, how Eric raised his first fund, and how he's building one of the most exciting venture capital firms in the world. ======================= LMAX Digital - the market-leading solution for institutional crypto trading & custodial services - offers clients a regulated, transparent and secure trading environment, together with the deepest pool of crypto liquidity. LMAX Digital is also a primary price discovery venue, streaming real-time market data to the industry’s leading analytics platforms. LMAX Digital - secure, liquid, trusted. Learn more at LMAXdigital.com/pomp ======================= Arculus is the next generation crypto & NFT cold storage wallet that combines one of the world’s strongest security protocols with the easiest to use form factor and app. Arculus requires 3-Factor Authentication to ensure only you have access to your digital assets – something you know – a PIN, something you have – the Arculus Key Card, and biometrics. Learn more and buy it now on getarculus.com. Use promo code POMP to save 15%. Remember, with Arculus, it’s your keys, your crypto. ======================= With a Messari Pro subscription, you gain access to exclusive industry-leading long-form daily research reports, daily crypto news & insights in your inbox, advanced asset screeners, curated sets of charts and metrics and so much more. Try Messari Pro today! Get up to 25% off their Messari Pro membership by visiting www.messari.io/pro and entering promo code "POMP" at checkout. =======================

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

• 0:02Anthony 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. Eric Tarzinski is the founder and managing partner at Contrary Capital. In this conversation, we talk about various innovative technologies. We talk about the future of venture capital, why they seek out people over companies, and what exactly he did to raise his first fund and build what is one of the most exciting venture capital firms in the world. I really enjoyed this conversation with Eric, and I hope you guys enjoy it as well. Once you get done listening, jump on Twitter and let us know what you liked, what you didn't like, where exactly we could have done better, and what you thought we did well. We always appreciate the feedback. Here is my conversation with Eric.

• 0:45Anthony Pompliano?

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• 1:30Anthony Pompliano?

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• 2:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Messari is your one stop shop for all your crypto data and research needs. With Messari Pro, you can gain access to exclusive, industry leading, long form, daily research reports, daily crypto news, advanced asset screeners, and curated sets of charts and protocol metrics. If you try Messari Pro today, listeners of the Pomp Podcast can get up to 25% off their Messari Pro membership by visiting www.messari.io/pomp or enter promo code POMP at checkout. That's www.messari.io/pomp and use promo code POMP.

• 2:47Speaker 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.

• 3:10Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Eric here with me. I thought a great place to start would be, you guys are very people focused. So what makes a great founder? How do you think about, you meet someone and you're like, you should start a company? Whereas you meet someone and you're like, you should not start a company.

• 3:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it's great here. So we actually think about it across two kind of pieces. We think, number one, in terms of kind of like potential future founders. And then, and then number two, like you're actually starting a company right now. Hey, how do we think about you as a founder? Right? And so if you think about that, that first one of kind of like potential future founders, we think kind of through a few different vectors. I think number one, like what is your body of work, right? Like what have you done in the past that shows some degree of, of, of kind of grit, of excellence? That's essentially a good predictor for, for kind of future success, right? And you know, odds are maybe you didn't even start a company in the past. That's fine. But maybe a world-class pianist or athlete or you've done something.

• 4:08Speaker 02

  So that's, that's piece one. And then number two is, is we kind of think about, okay, well, what do the people that know you best have to say about you? It's essentially just kind of character referencing, right? So managers, colleagues. Years, whatever it might be, and kind of getting an understanding of your work ethic, character, how well respected you are, all of those kinds of things. And then the last piece is just a good old fashioned conversation, right? I think one of the things we've learned over the past few years is if you kind of do your underwriting and kind of filtering the right way, the kinds of people that are going to start generational companies, no. And they'll tell you very clearly, hey, you know, I'm at startup X right now and I'm here to accomplish these three things, right? I'm here to learn what it takes to fundraise.

• 4:51Speaker 02

  I'm here to, you know, kind of basically learn on somebody else's dime. And then I'm here to learn what it takes to be a world-class manager. And in one to two years, like I expect to quit and start a company, right? So you're looking with people that have just tremendous conviction and understanding of like what they actually want to do on the future founder's side. I think when it comes to actual founders specifically and how we think about them kind of as people, I think number one is like, we're looking for, is this person deeply, deeply knowledgeable and sophisticated about the space they're building in, right? So we're not looking for, you know, Bobby, who has an app idea and is doing it because it's cool and everybody else is doing it, right? We're looking for, you know, Pavly, who has been doing synthetic biology research for a decade since he was in high school.

• 5:35Speaker 02

  And, you know, now he's starting a Sin Bio company and he's world-class in this space, right? And then we're also looking for, are they deeply technical? Are they good at sales? And are they scrappy, right? I think ultimately, you can be the best technologist in the world, but if you can't also clearly articulate and tell a compelling story and narrative around why this thing needs to exist in the world, you're dead in the water. So that's kind of how we think about it.

• 5:56Anthony Pompliano?

  So when you meet someone and they're like, I'm great at X.

• 5:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:59Anthony Pompliano?

  How do you actually know if they're great? It's easy if, you know, you won a world championship or you're an Olympic athlete and you got a gold medal. Like there are some external kind of validating components.

• 6:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:09Anthony Pompliano?

  But synthetic biology, how do you know that they're actually great?

• 6:13Speaker 02

  Yeah. So we'll quite literally, I mean, for synthetic biology, really, we'll actually go into the weeds with them, right? Like we'll have them in-depth walk us through their body of work over the past five or 10 years in Sin Bio, right? So we'll have them walk us through any research that they've done, projects they've worked on, professors that they've Worked with and talked to them, right? So we'll go as far down the rabbit hole for diligence as we possibly can. And then ultimately, you're able to suss out some, some understanding of, hey, scale one to 10, you know, how does this person kind of fit in? And then from there, you like, that's a piece of the puzzle, right? How deeply knowledgeable and sophisticated is this person? And then you're coupling it with everything else, right? With kind of like technical ability, what people say about them, their, their character, sales ability, all that kind of stuff. So.

• 6:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Move the microphone just in front, like pull it. There you go.

• 7:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:02Anthony Pompliano?

  And so as you're going through this, are you looking for specific things in the conversation? So, okay, you're a synthetic biologist, I guess is the right terminology. For the last five years, walk me through your work. Are you looking for command of the information? Are you looking for like creativity in their work? Are you looking for like persistence? Or are you just like, this person fucking knows what they're talking about? And like this other person got exposed and they don't know what they're talking about.

• 7:24Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, so I think that the, the single best heuristic that we've observed over the past five years of doing this now, when it comes to an early stage founder, is clarity of thought.

• 7:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Interesting.

• 7:39Speaker 02

  Right. And so you'll go and you'll talk to somebody, a potential founder, let's say, right? Synbio founder or direct consumer founder, whatever it might be, right? And there's a pretty standard set of questions that you might want to ask somebody, right? A user acquisition, or how are you building your team? Or what do you want to build? Whatever it might be, right? And the absolute top, you know, 0.1% founders, the, the, the level of clarity that they have about every single aspect of the business, it's pretty mind blowing to be honest, like for, for, for the, for the really best ones, right? I, I, I'll always kind of remember, uh, you know, one of our, one of our founders, we were talking about user acquisition. And a typical kind of, you know, founder for user acquisition might say something like, you know,

• 8:23Speaker 02

  oh, well, like, we're just going to do paid ads, right? Going to do Facebook or Instagram ads, right? And when you ask them how they would acquire their first 500 customers, right? And this founder was like, no, no, no. Actually, we're not doing any paid at all to begin with. Instead, what we're going to do is we're, this is like a, a kind of like pet wellness company. We're going to. Go to Washington Square Park and we're going to do it on a Saturday morning from nine to 12 and we're going to hand out these kinds of flyers and we're specifically looking for 25 to 35 year old women who have disposable income of 150 to $300,000 a year. And then like we're also building a community, it was just, they would, they would go on for five to 10 minutes on one small, specific piece of the business.

• 9:05Speaker 02

  And that is how you know, I think, like what, who, what's truly separating kind of like wheat from chaff when it comes to founders. Yeah.

• 9:13Anthony Pompliano?

  How did you guys get started? Like this is such like a relatively unique way to do this. But like, you're not doing it on Sand Hill Road. You're not doing it from the halls of some massive institution. You have a crazy, crazy story. Like just walk me through how this contract gets started.

• 9:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure. So, so the story itself, actually, yes, it's pretty wild. So,

• 9:36Speaker 02

  yeah, so, so from New Jersey, right? School in Boston really kind of found my interest in.

• 9:43Anthony Pompliano?

  School in Boston, does that mean Harvard? No. Yes? No? Maybe?

• 9:47Speaker 02

  Northeastern.

• 9:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Northeastern. Ah, all right, all right. People say school in Boston, you never know.

• 9:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a 50 50. No. Yeah. So, so I went to Northeastern. I was one of those guys who got rejected from, you know, Penn or some of the other Ivies and kind of.

• 10:00Anthony Pompliano?

  I didn't even know those schools existed.

• 10:01Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, that's what happens when you go to like, when you go to like, kind of like, I don't know. But yeah, I went to like a, a, a public high school in, in rural New Jersey. And it was one of those places where the guidance counselors, as long as you got into any college at all, it was like, job well done.

• 10:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 10:17Anthony Pompliano?

  The, the whole college counselor in a high school really has a lot more power than people probably assigned to, like in hindsight, like literally kids would go talk and they'd be like, I don't think that you should even apply to these 40 top schools. Instead, let's apply to a local community college. Like that literally sets people off on different paths in life.

• 10:37Speaker 02

  It's egregious. I mean, 60% of my high school class went to a community college. 60%. It's crazy, right? And, and, and I think out of a class of 430.

• 10:48Speaker 02

  Ten of us, maybe fifteen, went to a private four-year university.

• 10:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Wow.

• 10:53Speaker 02

  Crazy.

• 10:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 10:55Speaker 02

  So I totally agree. It like sets you up on-

• 10:56Anthony Pompliano?

  So you're one of ten there. That's a sign of excellence.

• 10:59Speaker 02

  So got out, no. And so, yeah, so went to Northeastern. Basically found my interest in tech and startups while I was there. So worked in a payments company, which is funny, it's a good story there. Toast was actually our biggest competitor. There were, there were two seed-stage companies in Boston about a decade ago, working on payments for full-service restaurants. One was us, one was Toast. Toast became a $10 billion company. We died. So that was, but that was my first kind of experience in building. And that was actually where I hatched the idea for what became Contrary. Because I was in Boston, spending time with a dozen or so people from the different universities, right?

• 11:40Speaker 02

  And Delian, actually, was one of them, right? He was at MIT at the time. And this guy, Nasir Yasin, I don't know, Nas Daily, like Nas was at Harvard at the time, right? So there were a dozen of us, all of whom I thought were sharp, entrepreneurial, had good hustle, all of those kinds of things. And were going to go on and do great things. But it was really interesting to me that when you actually took a step back, for people like this, in their earliest days, nobody was actually doing anything in a systematic way to identify and capture that talent specifically. They were largely just left to this kind of random walk of life, right? And so had the idea originally for Contrary at the time, as a result of that. Went out to SF after graduating, was an early employee at a startup, and then maybe three, four years later,

• 12:23Speaker 02

  swung back around to it when I was thinking about what I wanted to do next. And I, I knew that I wanted to spend the next decade plus, building something really special. And, and thought about that concept for what became Contrary, and thought, look, you know, nothing like this exists in the, in, in the venture world, right? You know, venture is, is still pretty traditional. It's still pretty, you know, two people and a dog, you know, seed-stage fund in, in city acts that are doing yet the same thing as everybody else. What if you could actually build one of the best firms of our generation off of that insight of the person before the idea? And so just kind of jumped in and- This is history.

• 12:58Anthony Pompliano?

  No, you didn't jump in. Come on.

• 13:01Anthony Pompliano?

  So you guys have found LPs at blackjack tables, on ski trips, all kinds of, explain what is the fundraising strategy?

• 13:08Speaker 02

  Well, let's talk about the very first fund, right? So we're five years in, actually, and next week will be five years since starting, right? And so the first fund, right? So if we go back to kind of jumping right in, once I decided that I wanted to work on contrary, right? I had to be all in, right? And when you think about raising money for a fund versus a startup, you know, I always thought that raising money for a fund would, I knew it would be harder, right? But I thought it would be doable, maybe 30 to 50% harder, let's say, than raising money for a seed stage startup, right? Turns out, when you didn't go to Harvard, or you didn't work at Sequoia, or whatever it is,

• 13:49Speaker 02

  it's orders of magnitude harder, right, to raise your first fund when you have not worked in venture prior. And so one of our very first LPs, I essentially snuck into Salt.

• 14:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Salt Conference, like Anthony Scaramucci's conference.

• 14:06Speaker 02

  That's right. That's right. I saw him. I gotta tell, I gotta tell, I don't think I've ever told him.

• 14:10Anthony Pompliano?

  How did you sneak in? Did you just like walk in and they just didn't stop you? Or did you like go through the service door?

• 14:15Speaker 02

  So there was a, there was a guy that I had cold email. So I took a, I found like a $60 round trip flight from SF to Vegas. And I was.

• 14:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Those are lit. Those are wild. If you're going at the right time on like a Friday afternoon.

• 14:31Speaker 02

  Some of the most unbelievable experiences in my life. I once flew Spirit and an actual brawl started on directly across the aisle from me, and then it continued at the baggage claim.

• 14:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, people don't understand. So like you're on a plane from San Francisco going to Vegas, which means everyone is going to party. And some people start earlier. And so while you're on a Spirit airline. Flight, uh, it gets wild.

• 14:56Speaker 02

  Hundred percent. Yeah. Unbelievable. Yeah. So, so had the $60 Frontier flight in and then immediately, it was, it was a 24 hour gig, basically, right? So I, I kind of, you know, land, went straight to, I think it was Venetian or something like that, right? And I had cold emailed a few people beforehand and said, hey, saw that you're gonna also be at SALT, right? Uh, like,

• 15:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Let's meet up.

• 15:21Speaker 02

  Right? Yeah. And so, and so the one guy, uh, we were supposed to meet and he said, hey, like, I'm in this area, right, of, of, of, of the conference. Um, and so basically went to the security people, right, who are kind of blocking it all off. And I said, oh, like, I have a meeting with Mark, right? Uh, and like, I'm not like, I'm not, I basically don't have a ticket, but like, I'm meeting this guy down there. Like, can I get in? And they just let me in. Uh, and they didn't even really ask. And so, so that was how I got in. And then I, I didn't leave the cordoned off zone for like 12 hours.

• 15:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes. Yeah, of course. What's your in?

• 15:54Speaker 02

  Totally. Yeah. I was like, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not leaving this, right? So, so stayed in for the entire day. And then in the evening, I left because I saw a lot, a lot of people were kind of flooding out. And then I went and just started playing blackjack at the various blackjack tables with people who had the SALT name tags on them.

• 16:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, smart, smart.

• 16:10Speaker 02

  Yeah. And so I just could have kind of go sit right next to them, basically, and strike up, strike up conversation, tell them we were doing. And, and yeah, it landed, we got two LPs out of that, you know, for our first, our first one was only a couple of million dollars, right? But, you know, I got two LPs out of that. So,

• 16:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Good trip.

• 16:26Speaker 02

  15% of our first one. Yeah. And then I slept. Well, originally I, I was supposed to, the, the, the Frontier flight back was like 5:00, 6:00 AM the next morning. So in, in my mind, I was like, oh, I'll just stay up all night.

• 16:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course.

• 16:39Speaker 02

  And then you go back.

• 16:39Anthony Pompliano?

  How, how old are you at this time?

• 16:41Speaker 02

  23, 24.

• 16:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course. That's, well, that's what you were gonna do anyways in Vegas.

• 16:45Speaker 02

  Of course. But I set myself a budget, immediately lost it that evening, right? And so I, I, I literally, I, I will never forget this. I, I tried to sleep on the cold, hard floor of the Vegas, McCarran International Airport with my backpack and had the most

• 17:04Speaker 02

  Tripling lower back pain the next morning.

• 17:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, of course. Well, also, if you've ever slept in an airport, which I don't want to admit that I've slept many times in an airport.

• 17:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Sometimes miss flights, but other times like, ah, you know, I go get a hotel.

• 17:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, of course.

• 17:16Anthony Pompliano?

  I take a flight in the morning. And I actually have a video once I was, you can't lose your bag. That's one of the big things, right? You don't want somebody to steal your bag.

• 17:23Speaker 02

  Hundred percent.

• 17:24Anthony Pompliano?

  So you like basically somehow lay on your bag or tie it to yourself or whatever.

• 17:27Speaker 02

  Totally, yeah.

• 17:29Anthony Pompliano?

  It's a thing. It's a thing. I didn't make the rules. It's a thing. And so I was laying there and then all of a sudden I woke up at like 2:30 in the morning and a guy is vacuuming.

• 17:38Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Yeah.

• 17:39Anthony Pompliano?

  And I was like so arrogant. I was like, hey, man, I'm sleeping over here. And he was like, get the fuck out of my way.

• 17:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 17:48Anthony Pompliano?

  So you forget.

• 17:48Speaker 02

  Do my job, bro.

• 17:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, you forget that like you could try to sleep in the airport, but like it's not really that easy to sleep.

• 17:53Speaker 02

  It is not.

• 17:54Anthony Pompliano?

  When things are going on.

• 17:54Speaker 02

  It is not. And they had, because they during, during like the, I don't know, three to five AM, whatever, they don't let you even check in, right? So I wasn't even in the airport. I was in the lobby area.

• 18:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, you were in the lobby. Oh, see, so when I've done it, I've already been in.

• 18:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:09Anthony Pompliano?

  And then you stay, you can't go outside the gate.

• 18:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, if you have a connection or something, you can do that. But when you don't, like they shut down the airport for a few hours at night. And so it was literally just a cold, hard floor.

• 18:20Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. So then you just go back and you're like, I got two LPs. Good trip.

• 18:22Speaker 02

  Yeah. And so, and so it was that process for, you know, it took almost two years to raise our, our, our first fund, you know, which was ended up being like two and a half million, basically. And so, you know, it's.

• 18:36Anthony Pompliano?

  How many companies do you invest the two and a half million in?

• 18:38Speaker 02

  About 20. Yeah, we've always run a pretty concentrated book. So the first one was they call it 100K checks, basically into 20 or so companies. We've always been concentrated, still are today. But yeah, I mean, you know, the, the, the journey of Contrary in the early days was just, relentless scrappiness, right? Didn't really know anyone.

• 18:55Anthony Pompliano?

  So you're scrappiness to find the LPs, but there's also this story where your largest LP on your birthday is like, no mas.

• 19:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Ah, I'm going to sit this one out. Explain that.

• 19:06Speaker 02

  So same fund. Yeah. So same fund, right? So, so I spent, you know, almost two years running around, had 1,300 meetings.

• 19:14Speaker 02

  To raise our first fund, right? Didn't know anybody, didn't know anybody.

• 19:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Who are these people? Are they doctors, lawyers? Are they like other VCs? Are they founders?

• 19:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a combination. So, so I, it was a lot of, of tech folks or ended up being a lot of tech folks. And then I'd say it was mostly split between Wall Street folks and tech folks. And the reason I ended up actually moving out to SF and, and, and living out there was because I would go on these trips to SF. I would crash on my friend's couch and I would go meet people. And the number of folks that I would get pinballed around to was unbelievable. And so, you know, people talk about, you know, the demise of SF, whatever. And I, I don't know what it's going to be like post COVID, but pre COVID.

• 19:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Come on, don't softball it. Is it, is it going to come back or is it not?

• 20:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, look, I, I, I think that unequivocally, it is still one of the best places in the world to build a startup, right?

• 20:09Anthony Pompliano?

  I agree with that.

• 20:10Speaker 02

  I think people don't understand how long it takes to build dense ecosystems of talent.

• 20:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 20:16Speaker 02

  And, and so I think, you know, will it ever be what it was? No. But on like a percentage basis, will it still be the number one place to, to, to kind of start a company for some time? Absolutely. I think that's.

• 20:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Although Miami people get mad at me, but like, I think that there's a high probability, what you just said is accurate. But what happened was, uh, there's more like dissipation of talent across the, the country and maybe in the world. But it's still is like a very good, if I was 22, that's probably where I would go move.

• 20:47Speaker 02

  Hundred percent. Yeah. I, I think you either go, so, so when we look at our own network right now, 40% of them are in SF. 40% are in New York, which is staggering. And then 20% are everywhere else combined, right? But that New York piece is actually the most interesting, right? Because that was 5%, 10% pre pandemic, right? And, and, and so that's, that's like a, I mean, it's a massive tectonic shift, right? But, but I agree. I think like when you're in your twenties, being in SF, being in New York. If you're an ambitious person, I don't think you get so much better than that. I think kind of, you know, once you're a little bit older, that's right, and your network's built, you can kind of go wherever you want.

• 21:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, that makes sense. So, all right. What's the craziest company you guys have funded? Like the absolute most insane, people say like, wow, these guys are morons.

• 21:34Speaker 02

  Technology wise or, or, or the founders are just nuts?

• 21:37Anthony Pompliano?

  One of each.

• 21:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, okay. So.

• 21:42Speaker 02

  In terms of the founders, I'd say it has to be this company called Zephto.

• 21:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Zephto?

• 21:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, Zephto.

• 21:46Anthony Pompliano?

  How is it called?

• 21:47Speaker 02

  Z E P T O.

• 21:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 21:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, so.

• 21:49Anthony Pompliano?

  What does Zephto do?

• 21:51Speaker 02

  So it's, it's, it's actually, it's like a 10 minute delivery company, like a GoPuff but for India.

• 21:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 21:57Speaker 02

  And so we met the founders because they, they actually came inbound to us. And I think we've done a decent job of building kind of like a, a, a kind of a brand within a demographic of folks. And so they came in mount to us and we didn't, I don't know if we knew this at the time, but they were 17. And so, and they said, hey, you know, we both got into Stanford. We want to build this company in India.

• 22:27Speaker 02

  If you give us 100 K, we'll defer admission to Stanford and, and, and, and build this company. And so I said, okay, well, we've never done an investment in India before. Don't really have a network in India, don't really know anyone in India, right? But these guys, going back to clarity of thought, it was unbelievable. I mean, for, for, for 17 year olds, right? The, the level of clarity that they had about every single aspect of how they were going to go about, you know, getting their first customers, scaling this thing to the moon, like what they actually wanted to build long term was, was unreal. And so we said, okay, well, if we're really putting our money where our mouth is here and talent is, is what we believe in more than anything else, right? Like, let's just do it and see what happens, right?

• 23:06Speaker 02

  And so we gave them 100 K and then tracked them for six months and, and they continued, they actually dramatically surpassed our expectations. They made some great hires, they were executing like hell. And so we gave them another few hundred thousand, half a million, whatever it was. And fast forward to today, 18, 24 months later now, fastest growing startup in India's history. A thousand employees, hundreds of millions in revenue and they're 19 now?

• 23:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Mm hmm.

• 23:36Speaker 02

  I don't.

• 23:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Crazy.

• 23:38Speaker 02

  Unbelievable. Yeah.

• 23:40Anthony Pompliano?

  When you go back, was it just clarity of thought or was there other things that in hindsight, you're like, man, that was a really good signal as to like this was gonna happen?

• 23:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, I honestly, I do think it was clarity of thought. It was, you know, the level of sophistication and thought and maturity that they had.

• 23:57Speaker 02

  They could have easily gone toe to toe with somebody twice their age. And so even if you just extrapolate off of that, right? And you say, okay, well, these guys are 17. Like, can you only imagine how good they're going to be in five or 10 or 15 years? Right? Even if this company doesn't work out, you know, no hard feelings. It's $100,000. We live to fight another day. Right? But the upside is massive. So, yeah, I think ultimately it's just, it's just when you spoke with them, you knew, hey, like, these guys, these guys are special. Right? And we're in a business of benchmarking at the end of the day. Right? You're, you're talking to hundreds or thousands of founders and you're simply just trying to calibrate, hey, how, how, how sharp sophisticated is somebody relative to their age, experience, whatever? And, and these guys are off the charts. So.

• 24:41Anthony Pompliano?

  A lot of people don't realize how important big is in venture capital.

• 24:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? We've seen a lot of companies blow up in crypto world, all this stuff.

• 24:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:50Anthony Pompliano?

  And people are freaking out and they don't realize like, no, actually that is the entire venture capital model.

• 24:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Of it, you want it to be either as big as possible or it's going to end up being a big crater in the ground.

• 25:02Speaker 02

  Totally.

• 25:02Anthony Pompliano?

  But if it ends up being small, small victory or small loss, then actually it wasn't a venture type company.

• 25:09Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, we, we, exactly. I mean, we, you could, you could talk to LPs or whomever, right? Like if, if, if your loss ratio is zero, you're actually not doing it the right way. Right? In, in, in venture. I mean, so if you take, if you take, you know, our portfolio, let's say like, like ours, right? Which is typically, you know, pretty early stage. It's 75% of what we're doing is kind of pre-seed, seed, series A. The remainder is kind of maybe series A, series B, a little bit of early series C. But if you're looking at it from a purely kind of pre-seed, seed, series A point of view, at the seed, in a 20 company portfolio, you know, we're underwriting that half of these are going to go to zero. And out of the remaining 10, five to 10 do kind of, sorry, five of them do kind of one to two X in aggregate.

• 25:52Speaker 02

  And five of those, out of those 20, but really two or three out of those 20 are the ones that are actually driving the returns. And so, yeah, I mean, that's, that's basically how the model works. And, and, and the loss ratio needs to be higher than zero. Otherwise the venture model won't work. So, yeah.

• 26:10Anthony Pompliano?

  What is the craziest technology that you guys have invested in?

• 26:13Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. So, um, let's go in there. A couple, a couple of options.

• 26:21Speaker 02

  So we invested in this in this company called Red Leader, which is essentially building software-defined LiDAR for all different kinds of applications, autonomous vehicles, whatever.

• 26:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Software-defined?

• 26:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 26:37Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, so LiDAR, just for those that don't know, explain it.

• 26:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it's essentially, you can think about it as kind of the Waymo and if you've ever seen any of those like Uber autonomous vehicles. Essentially, what happens is there it's sensors, right, that you're putting all around a vehicle. And ultimately, it's building an image of the world kind of in front, directly in front of you, right? And then you're using kind of autonomous technology to help the car or whatever you're dealing with, a helicopter, navigate that.

• 27:10Anthony Pompliano?

  And it's basically shooting light out and like, understanding the object, the depth, all that type of stuff, right? You described it much better than I would, hence why I offloaded that to you. But it is a technology that is really, I think, self-driving cars where how most people have learned about it. What is, you said, software-driven LiDAR?

• 27:26Speaker 02

  Software-defined.

• 27:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Software-defined, what does that mean?

• 27:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, and so what's interesting is if you look at some of the kind of incumbents in the space, companies like Velodyne or whomever, right? They are using a much more traditional kind of like tech and hardware stack. Whereas Red Leader, this company is like, software is at the core of the infrastructure. They're not, it's not so much the LiDAR itself that they're innovating on, right? It's the software and the code, actually, that they're writing, which enables them to image at a dramatically higher kind of frequency than any of the existing folks. And so if we're to pull this up, and I'll show you after, but you look at a demo video that they have, and relative to kind of like the current state of the art, and it's stunning.

• 28:11Speaker 02

  They literally invented math, like, to make this tech work. It's unbelievable. And so they've been working on it for Four or five years?

• 28:21Anthony Pompliano?

  What are they using it for?

• 28:23Speaker 02

  The initial application is going to be AVs, yeah, autonomous vehicles. But it has kind of a broad.

• 28:28Anthony Pompliano?

  I recently saw, hopefully this isn't a competitor of theirs, but I saw there was like a plane that was flying over the Amazon. And they were using, I think, LiDAR and they were uncovering civilizations. Along the Amazon River that were previously not known. And a huge piece of it was, people thought it was so uninhabitable or whatever. But by flying over, even though there's the tree canopy, they were shooting the LiDAR down and like uncovering this shit. And they were like, yo, people used to live there.

• 28:58Anthony Pompliano?

  And so like, again, it's different than autonomous vehicles, but like, I was blown away. I spent probably two hours, I don't want to admit that, but I spent two hours on the internet, like looking at images of people's lives from thousands of years ago.

• 29:09Speaker 02

  It's nuts. Yeah, it's absolutely nuts. Yeah. And so I think like these, like there are dozens of applications here. And frankly, a lot of LiDAR companies have been a total waste of money and time and effort, right? And there's been billions of, I mean, I think Ford has always has been, you know, two years away from, from autonomous vehicles for the past decade now. So.

• 29:28Anthony Pompliano?

  I saw Elon congratulate the Ford CEO on selling like a couple thousand electric vehicles.

• 29:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. So it's like, you know, the, the, the promise of, of LiDAR, the promise of AVs, who knows, right? But I think that the raw tech, when you look at what Red Leader and some of these others have built, it's, it's just stunning. And, and, and I think it makes you really excited for, for the future. So.

• 29:51Anthony Pompliano?

  So Tesla has autopilot, whatever name they want to use. But basically you can pull down twice on the freaking drive stick or whatever, and it stays in the lane on the highway. That was like, the only experience I'd ever seen was like, it stays in the lane on the highway, slows down if cars are in front of it. It can kind of tell, right? It's got the nice imagery, whatever. They have a recent update. Now it's driving in cities.

• 30:17Speaker 02

  Really?

• 30:17Anthony Pompliano?

  I have a friend who sent me the video. He's more courageous than me. He's sitting in his driveway. He puts in the coffee shop like, you know, probably on a mile and a half, two miles. And he has to go to red lights, stop signs, turn, like the whole thing.

• 30:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:30Anthony Pompliano?

  He like took a video.

• 30:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:32Anthony Pompliano?

  And I was like, oh shit.

• 30:34Speaker 02

  It's wild.

• 30:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, like, like you can just see like, okay, cool. Now, I don't think it's anywhere near where like, you know, the whole like people are going to be sitting in the back and no one's going to be at the, at the steering wheel.

• 30:43Speaker 02

  Have you seen what Cruise is doing though with the robo taxis?

• 30:45Anthony Pompliano?

  No, what are they doing?

• 30:46Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, so, so they have, they've done this. Yeah. So, so they're exactly the same. So if you go on, I think on Twitter, actually Kyle Vogt, who's the CEO, I think he has some, some videos. Of they just started it. They just opened it up to the public a couple of months ago. And it's only in SF. And yeah, you can hail a cruise, fully autonomous, end to end. And you sit in the backseat and the cruise just drives you.

• 31:13Anthony Pompliano?

  So an hour ago, Kyle tweeted and said, the press, they say autonomous vehicles are overhyped and are still five to 10 years away. And then he said, us, meaning Cruise.

• 31:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:24Anthony Pompliano?

  At this moment, there are a hundred Cruise autonomous vehicles in driverless mode in San Francisco, and many are currently carrying passengers. And he has an image from two nights ago with all the little dots on it.

• 31:35Speaker 02

  There you go.

• 31:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Holy shit.

• 31:39Speaker 02

  So it's, it's definitely real with Cruise and SF. I think the question now is like, how do you, how do you actually scale this? Right? I mean, they've been, the, the cruise cars have been driving around SF for years, right? Mapping it and, and, and, and, you know, I mean, there's just so many permutations of things that could go wrong, right? But they're doing it in SF. So, you know.

• 32:02Anthony Pompliano?

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• 32:46Anthony Pompliano?

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• 33:31Anthony Pompliano?

  With Compass, everyone can mine Bitcoin. You can do it at home or in one of their 23 hosting facilities around the world. All you need to do to start mining your own Bitcoin is go to compassmining.io today. Again, if you want to get into Bitcoin mining, go check out compassmining.io today. So they have the cars, they're all branded Cruze. And they have them like all parked in like a little parking lot. Then they're just taking off and they say, on your mark, get set, go.

• 34:00Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. Have you seen the video of the Cruze car getting pulled over by, by the police officers? This is hilarious. You gotta, you gotta, you gotta, maybe after this, whatever, you gotta, you gotta watch it. A Cruze, you know, AV taxi got, got pulled over by some cops. I don't think they realized that there wasn't a human in the car.

• 34:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Yo, so there's nobody in this car.

• 34:21Speaker 02

  There's nobody in this car. Yeah.

• 34:22Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm watching the video right now. YouTube will take it down if we put it up probably. But it says that they launched daytime driverless ride, services live for cruisers and will launch to public or whatever.

• 34:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:34Anthony Pompliano?

  And literally they have the video and there is nobody in the driver's seat.

• 34:37Speaker 02

  There's nobody in the car.

• 34:38Anthony Pompliano?

  And they're interviewing these two ladies and they're having the time of their life in the back.

• 34:44Speaker 02

  It's nuts. It's nuts. Yeah.

• 34:46Anthony Pompliano?

  So are they the farthest ahead?

• 34:49Speaker 02

  I think when it comes to actually, I mean, they're the only one that I know of that has done this end to end right now. But it's just in San Francisco, right? And so we'll be curious to see how much they can, basically how quickly they can scale out to different cities, right? But yeah, they're the only ones that I know right now that are doing it like truly end to end in a city. It's wild. Yeah.

• 35:10Anthony Pompliano?

  And they have videos of people, I guess, trying to trick the cruise vehicles at night. Like, there's a guy, they claim, I think it's real, I mean, they have a video of them trying to do it. He says, "The driverless cruise autonomous vehicle was tracking both the person and the dog and managed to swerve to avoid a collision. He said, 'Risking your life to prank an autonomous vehicle is stupid, but it's your call. Just leave your dog out of it.'" And it's literally a video of a guy, it's at night, the car's driving down the road, and he like, is in the road and darts at the cruise, and the cruise swerves, avoids, and then like immediately slams on the brake.

• 35:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:44Anthony Pompliano?

  That is nuts.

• 35:45Speaker 02

  I don't doubt, I mean, people are stupid, right? But yeah, it's crazy.

• 35:48Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, so you guys got the LiDAR. What are some crazy technologies?

• 35:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 35:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, what is the future? That's what I want to talk about. What is the, what is the future stuff that people are like, there's no way that's gonna work?

• 35:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. What are your thoughts on Anduril?

• 36:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Anduril?

• 36:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:06Anthony Pompliano?

  I love it. I'm surprised that it took Palmer and the Anduril team to say, hey, we should use the most cutting-edge technology in the defense of our country.

• 36:17Speaker 02

  100%. Yeah, I mean, that's, that's what we should, that's what we should talk about, right? I mean, so we're, we're, we're investors in Anduril, and I think, you know, I mean, like you said, it's, it's, it's, it's the most logical extension of, of, you know, talk about like tech for the future, right? And in defense of not only the country, but just democracy, right? And it was funny, right? Because I think for a long time, Anduril was...

• 36:46Speaker 02

  I think kind of tacitly like poo-pooed, right? Amongst a lot of folks in the in the venture, the tech world, right? And then something like Ukraine happens and all of a sudden you realize, okay, well, actually, maybe defense is important, right? It is important for democracy and for this country, right? And and and kind of building the next gen Lockheed, right? The 21st century Lockheed is an incredibly important mission, right? And and and something that if we're not going to do it, China or whomever is going to do it and and and, you know, that's that's it, right? So, yeah, I mean, I think that that's been that's been fascinating. I was I had a chance to drop by the new, they just opened up some new headquarters in

• 37:29Speaker 02

  LA four or five months ago.

• 37:32Anthony Pompliano?

  It's cool.

• 37:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's awesome. Yeah, Matt has given me a kind of like a tour of some of the new tech and buildings.

• 37:37Anthony Pompliano?

  The, um, how much of it is war versus like other types of uses? So.

• 37:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Hostage rescue or humanitarian aid or whatever? Like, there's so many things that the quote-unquote government or the the defense contractors actually participate in. It's not all like, let's go kill people.

• 37:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:55Anthony Pompliano?

  But how much of that business is the other stuff?

• 37:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, so so so Andrew, their their their whole model is essentially kind of predicated around the inverse of the traditional kind of defense prime model, right? Which is, you know, typically kind of you, you, you know, kind of wait for the DOD or whomever to kind of like put out some RFP, right? And then kind of you build something for it and you bid and then and then you build the project, right?

• 38:15Anthony Pompliano?

  And you use the government's money to build the project. So basically, the government is taking the risk that you're going to be able to build it.

• 38:21Speaker 02

  That's right, yeah. Andrew's basically flipping it on its head, right? And so so they they're building through discussions with a lot of folks, obviously, in the defense community, right? But they're they're building products that they think will resonate ultimately, right? And they're taking that risk and then selling it, right? So so the first one, the first kind of product they launched was essentially just like a century, a century tower for initially for the border, right? And it's having a bunch of.

• 38:47Anthony Pompliano?

  What's a century tower mean?

• 38:48Speaker 02

  Uh, just like a, just like literally like a 25-foot tower that you'll put, you know, on a rant. In South Texas somewhere and it can be used to detect, you know, whether it's like illegal immigrants or drug.

• 39:02Anthony Pompliano?

  It's got probably cameras, it's got like a heat sensors.

• 39:06Speaker 02

  Exactly. Anything you might imagine like, yeah, sensors, like infrared, you know, you name it, right? And so, and then they're just putting all these different sentry towers every X, you know, miles and say along the border. And so that was the.

• 39:16Anthony Pompliano?

  So you're saying that Andrew built the wall?

• 39:19Speaker 02

  Building a digital wall.

• 39:23Speaker 02

  So, so that was kind of like the.

• 39:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Bullseye of the political aisle got excited there.

• 39:27Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 39:29Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, uh, so that was kind of V1, right? And, and, and now they have a bunch of other product lines essentially that they're launching. So they, they recently acquired this company, I forget the name of it, I think it's based out of Australia and, and they're building like an autonomous sub. And they have another one that's essentially like an autonomous helicopter, right? Or they have another one that.

• 39:49Anthony Pompliano?

  This shit sounds like video games.

• 39:50Speaker 02

  It's, it's unreal.

• 39:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, we're just gonna be sitting here with joysticks and we're like, oh, this, my submarine just blew up. Your submarine had, had no people in it.

• 39:57Speaker 02

  Well, speak about like the future, I mean, the future, right? Like the, the future of warfare is a largely humanless. Future, right? Like, that's just what we're going to trend towards. I mean, the, the, the reason why societies get upset with war at times, right? Is, is either, you know, it just goes on forever and costs hundreds of billions of dollars, number one, right? Or number two, like human casualties, right? So if you're able to remove human casualties from that equation, number one, it's a great thing for the world. But number two, you know, and this will be interesting, I, I do wonder if it actually ends up enabling more net new, like microaggression, right? Because if you can just send your drones out.

• 40:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, like my, my robots killed your robots, but like no humans died.

• 40:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. If I have a lot of money, well, whatever, right?

• 40:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you know what Talon robot is? Talon, T A L O N. So when I was in the military, um, at one point I was a combat engineer, which sounds, it has a word engineer in it. There's no engineering.

• 40:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Basically, they were like, you guys are gonna do roadside clangers, like go look for bombs and basically be bait, right? Like horrible. And so in the train up, uh, to go to Iraq, they're like, oh, we have these robots. And you're like, sweet, robots, that sounds cool. And they literally would, uh, train, there was like actual people trained and then they kind of like field trained a couple of people in case that person got hurt or like wasn't there or whatever. And so this robot would like get out of the vehicle like you'd like pull it out of the vehicle. You'd put it there and you're standing like as far away from obviously what you think could be a bomb.

• 41:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:26Anthony Pompliano?

  And so you like maneuver it down there like literally like a, you know, uh, like a, uh, a car or whatever, like a, um, you know, remote control car or whatever. You get it down there and it's got this big ass arm. And it has like the pinchers on the end.

• 41:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:40Anthony Pompliano?

  It had a camera. So you're like looking through to see what it sees.

• 41:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:43Anthony Pompliano?

  And the people who were very well trained could literally pick up like an M and M with the pinchers and not crush it.

• 41:49Speaker 02

  Oh, wow.

• 41:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Like that was the level of, uh, one sophistication, but also two, the ability of the, of the machine.

• 41:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:54Anthony Pompliano?

  So we're like, we think we're badasses. We're, let's go. We're there. We got the robot in the back, right? First couple of missions we go.

• 42:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:02Anthony Pompliano?

  And, uh, uh, all of a sudden we think we see a roadside bomb. We're like, get the robot.

• 42:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Pull that bad boy out, go down. Four hours later.

• 42:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Not a bomb. Robot comes back, pack it up, go.

• 42:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Half a mile down the road, we think we see a bomb.

• 42:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Guess what happened to that robot after like three missions? We're like, leave the robot at the, at the thing. If you're in one of the front vehicles, just run the shit over. We'll figure out if it's a bomb. And so like, I always think about like that specific experience as like, obviously the technology was incredible. Like at the time, it's 2008, 2009. So like, you know, more than 10 years ago, they had this technology. But like humans still had to use it.

• 42:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:45Anthony Pompliano?

  And whether we were smart or dumb.

• 42:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:47Anthony Pompliano?

  We just left it behind and then would just go use it. So like, how do you think about the human element to some of these technologies that get built? Like, are we now at a place where the humans recognize like, no, this is actually better than the humans doing it?

• 42:58Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, I think we're getting there, right? And like, I think per, per, per what you said, right? I think in, in oh eight, oh nine, like, you know, there's a lot of tech that's just too far ahead of its time. I mean, this is the definition of hype cycle, right? Like this is what happens every one or two, whatever years, right? I mean, right now we're in the generative AI hype sucker. I don't know if you saw the, the chat, you know, chat GPT three thing that came out yesterday, right? So like, you know, I think that's significantly more mature than the last AI ML hype cycle, three, four years ago, right? But it was, you know, AI ML, it was self-driving cars. It was, you know, uh,

• 43:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Crypto.

• 43:29Speaker 02

  For me. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was, um, I mean, I don't know, right? We could keep going back, back, back, back. Every one or two years.

• 43:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Genomics.

• 43:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. And, and the vast majority of them.

• 43:41Speaker 02

  Don't fulfill the stated aims, right? And they're just too far ahead of the time for the hype. But I think ultimately what happens, right, is your tech that in 08 or 09 was incredible for the time, but still very little real world human applicability. You know, I think we're inching pretty close. I mean, you look at some of the videos now, what the military is using or some of the robots, or even you look at like what Boston Dynamics has done, right? And, you know, I, we're not there yet with, I think, kind of human, like, hand to hand combat, for example, right?

• 44:20Anthony Pompliano?

  You're saying humans could still beat up the robot, but like, it's getting harder.

• 44:24Speaker 02

  I think, and it's getting closer, yeah. And I think, I think, I think when it comes to drones, I think we're pretty close, right? Like, I think we're already pretty close, right? And so.

• 44:35Anthony Pompliano?

  I have a friend who lives in Texas, and, you know, in Texas, they, they think that they can't be fucked with. And so he, I remember joking with one day, I was like, what are you gonna do when the drones come? And he was like, I'm gonna shoot them out of the sky. And I was like, that's a great answer. But I was like, do you understand how quick these things are or whatever? And he like started thinking about it, and like, you could tell that he didn't want to say it, but he was like, oh shit, I can't shoot that out of the sky.

• 44:57Speaker 02

  No way. Or if you have drone swarms, right? If you imagine having, you've sent 400 drones at you that cost a couple hundred dollars each to manufacture, and they're all attached with, you know, some small bomb or whatever, right?

• 45:10Anthony Pompliano?

  What's that with San Francisco? They're arming the robots now to kill people?

• 45:13Speaker 02

  I saw that just yesterday.

• 45:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Is that real?

• 45:15Speaker 02

  It's unbelievable. I mean, I didn't, I didn't actually read the article, but.

• 45:18Anthony Pompliano?

  It's on the internet. You don't have to read the article, just read the headline.

• 45:21Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. If it's legitimate, then it's bizarre. Why would San Francisco be the first city to?

• 45:31Anthony Pompliano?

  No, I don't think it's bizarre. I think this is like a perfect San Francisco thing to do. Yeah. Is to like, oh, we have no law and order, to like, now we have robots with weapons as our law and order. But it's the same thing like the bathroom, like the $5 million bathroom, whatever they have, I forget how much it was. They have like a ribbon cutting ceremony because they built a public bathroom, right? And it's like, oh, we have no infrastructure? No, look at this bathroom that we built. Same thing here, it's like, we have no law and order, people get mad, like, you know what the solution is? Not just like, put police officers on beat in the city. Let's get robots with guns.

• 46:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:08Anthony Pompliano?

  To any normal person outside of like the bureaucratic like apparatus, you're like, uh, I can think of a lot of ways this goes really bad. And then by the way, like, God forbid that these robots kill somebody.

• 46:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:21Anthony Pompliano?

  And it comes out that they shouldn't have.

• 46:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Who gets in trouble?

• 46:24Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, I mean,

• 46:25Anthony Pompliano?

  You go put the robot in jail?

• 46:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, this goes back to the self-driving thing with like a cruise or whatever, right? I mean, this is why they spent years and billions of dollars and millions of miles driven, right? Like to prevent this because all it takes is one.

• 46:38Anthony Pompliano?

  What's going on with GPT three and all these AI models? Like, uh, the generative art, for those that don't know, you basically type in a prompt. A prompt is just like a sentence you could say like, uh, uh, show me a photo of a person sitting on a park bench with water behind them or whatever. And it creates, it's awesome, like super cool.

• 46:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Not very clear how people will use that, but like, cool.

• 47:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:01Anthony Pompliano?

  And now there's like, okay, now we have the chat. Now we have like more and more and more. What do you, how do you guys look at this?

• 47:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, I, I think for us, um, we always, I should say, number one, we, we rarely, if ever, chase hype cycles. So I think as a firm, the, the view is that the hype cycles themselves, maybe you have one or two companies that emerge from these, um, that end up being some degree of successful. But the companies that are going to be multi-billion dollar companies a decade from now are often spaces that, you know, people aren't really looking in, right? Uh, they're kind of undiscovered, they're unsexy, like almost by definition, there's not a ton of hype behind them. So, so I should caveat all this by saying like, yeah, we, we rarely kind of like engage in hype cycles. I think when it comes to something like GPT three specifically, or the generated, generative

• 47:51Speaker 02

  AI stuff, you know, I, I think for me, there's always a question of like, what is the durable source of value that is being created at the end of the day? And is it sustainable, right? And you look at, um,

• 48:04Anthony Pompliano?

  But how do you, how do you measure that?

• 48:06Speaker 02

  I, I mean, I think you just, you can just look at it and, and like, like, like art is a good example, right? Like what, like the real world utility of, of me saying like, hey, draw a picture of, you know, Anthony sitting in the park, right? It's nice, it's helpful, but it feels a lot more like a feature than it does like a meaningful platform or something that people are going to pay, you know, SaaS style model of revenue off of, right? And so, yeah, I guess what I'd say is like, we're, we tend to be skeptics of these kinds of things. And when you look at different like innovation waves, right? Kind of like SaaS and mobile and whatever it might be.

• 48:50Speaker 02

  Whether the advantages accrue to the startups or the incumbents, I think, tells a lot, too. So, Elad Gil kind of wrote a post about this recently, which, which I think did a good job of encapsulating some of my views here, too. But, you know, I think the reason the mobile wave, for example, wasn't super protracted relative to SaaS, as an example, is because the incumbents, the Facebooks, the Googles, or whatever, they ended up capturing a lot of that value pretty quickly, right? Within like a, really like the burst of time was like three to four year periods, like 2009.

• 49:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Are there any companies that ended up being fucking massive that didn't work out of the gate?

• 49:29Speaker 02

  Oh, all the time. But-

• 49:30Anthony Pompliano?

  No, I don't, which one?

• 49:31Speaker 02

  With a pivot, though. Yeah.

• 49:33Anthony Pompliano?

  But like, that's not, but that's not the same company, right?

• 49:35Speaker 02

  So you're saying like, oh, okay, yeah, I can't think of any.

• 49:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Like Slack, right? I think you'd be like, oh, it was the video game or whatever, right? But like Slack was a different product.

• 49:43Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 49:43Anthony Pompliano?

  And then it was like, pretty obvious, I think, from what I understand from that story, like, immediately. Twitter was out of ODEO, but like, pretty quickly, people were like, oh, this is cool. And it started to take off.

• 49:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:52Anthony Pompliano?

  So like, I do think a lot about, like, the 90 day or 180 day shot clock.

• 49:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, if you start something and in 180 days, it's not working, there is, it doesn't mean that it won't work, it just means that it's unlikely to be really, really big.

• 50:06Speaker 02

  I think that's right. Yeah. I think when you, when you think about like, real generational companies, right? Like, the 10 billion plus companies, there's usually something that almost from inception feels like it's working.

• 50:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I agree. I agree.

• 50:21Speaker 02

  I think, I think there are other companies that you can make work over time, but those end up being- Smaller outcomes. Yeah, I mean, we could talk. I definitely have some views on on just kind of like the the ability of kind of like lock versus timing versus hard work versus whenever when it comes to building companies.

• 50:42Anthony Pompliano?

  What are your thoughts?

• 50:43Speaker 02

  I mean, I think ultimately, like this, the simplified version is that these, a lot of these 10, 15, 20 billion dollar plus outcomes, it is the confluence of all of those factors, right? Whereas if you're, I pretty strongly believe that like if you're a sharp person, building in the right space, and somebody who can kind of like listen to customers, with enough grit over a five, 10 year period, like, you can make something happen, right? I mean, I think you had Max Levchin on recently, right? And like, this is kind of what they do with with a firm, right? It's like a firm kind of like, it's been around for a while, but you kind of listen and tweak the model and like inevitably, you kind of hit on like a burning need for a customer, and then you kind of hit the gas and go from there, right? So like, these things exist all the time. But I think for the truly big outcomes, like

• 51:26Speaker 02

  in Airbnb or whatever, like, pretty much from the beginning, you know, it was working, right? So, yeah.

• 51:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Where are you guys looking now? Like, okay, you're not chasing the hype cycles.

• 51:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:38Anthony Pompliano?

  What are we all missing?

• 51:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Where are the areas that you find interesting?

• 51:42Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, so I think for us, it depends on kind of what stage we're at as a firm, right? So pre-seed, seed, series A, we're laser focused on the person, right? We actually don't care what they're like, what space they're building, right? I don't care if it's digital health, or, you know, fintech, or infrastructure, or whatever it is, as long as this is a person that, you know, we've known for a period of time, we think is top 0.1%, and is doing something really interesting, like, we have enough conviction to write them a check at the early stage and see what they can make happen. When we get to a later stage, right, kind of call it series B and beyond, that's when we start to get more thematic, I'd say, as a firm, right? So I think that's, that's when you look at a company, let's say, you know, fintech infrastructure, right? And you're looking

• 52:25Speaker 02

  at, hey, in the FPNA space, and what are the five companies that we think are world class in this space right now? And what is the one company in that space that we think is going to win, right? That we think is going to be a multi-billion dollar outcome? So depends on the stage, but I'd say in general, right now, we're still spending a lot of our time in like digital health, and then what I'll call like fintech infrastructure, like those are two spaces that we're.

• 52:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Will you guys not back a founder if you haven't known them before?

• 52:52Speaker 02

  No, we will. We will. But I'd say it's it's the minority of what we do. Yeah. So if I kind of look at where we're deploying capital today, probably 30 to 35% of what we're doing is kind of from this closed loop network of folks that we've built that we've gotten to know, you know, through our fellowship community, whatever it might be. I think probably 30, 35% is from our software platforms. We built a pretty sophisticated software platform. It's kind of systematically identifying and tracking great talent. And then we'd have what I'll call like traditional sources, right? Founder referrals, whatever it might be. And that's the remaining 20, 30%. That's essentially what the breakdown looks like. But all things equal, we like backing people that come from our network and folks that ultimately kind of like have a

• 53:37Speaker 02

  we have some kind of edge in finding them first and understanding like, hey, why is Contrary seeing this deal, right? Not just getting the the deal that everybody else has passed on. So it's like real adverse selection there, I think.

• 53:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Is this the future of venture capital firms? Like, is this what they're going to look like?

• 53:54Speaker 02

  It's a great question. I mean, I think the answer is yes, but.

• 53:57Anthony Pompliano?

  But is it just one type of firm? Or will there will this be one of many strategies that can be successful?

• 54:01Speaker 02

  I think it'll be. I think it'll be one of several. But if we look at a decade from now and you ask yourself, hey, Eric, like, what like, what does venture look like in a decade? And I essentially think three things will win. I think, number one, you'll need some degree of technology at your core. I think number two, you'll need talent and community. And number three, you'll need distribution, you know, content, media, whatever, right? And I think the firms that will win, right, the the next kind of Andreessen's or YC's or whatever, will have all three of those in spades. And then I think, you know, there will be firms that exist that do one or two of those very well, right? Or even individuals, right? I mean, obviously, like, you've done a great job, right, of kind of building it like that last one, a distribution, right?

• 54:44Speaker 02

  Like, you have, you know, world-class brand and community and whatever, right? And so there will be pieces of the puzzle and people who can kind of carve out their niches within those. But I think if you're trying to build the next Andreessen ever, like, I think you need to ultimately have those three things in spades. So, yeah.

• 55:00Anthony Pompliano?

  What are the strategies that people are chasing now that you think won't work in venture?

• 55:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:06Speaker 02

  I tend to be not as much of a fan of what I'll call thematic venture funds, right? And there are some that do exceptional work and I think are best in class. I think like a rivet for fintech or you know, amplify with enterprise infrastructure. Like there are some world-class firms that do that. But I think there are a lot of firms that do that and it's principally a marketing endeavor more than anything else, right? So they'll say, oh, you know, we're a cybersecurity fund, right? And as a result of that, you know, you should give us capital because we're deeply, deeply knowledgeable about this, right? And so from an LP point of view, I think it can be enticing or alluring, right?

• 55:50Speaker 02

  Because you're saying, wow, well, I'm looking for a cyber fund and these guys brand themselves as a cyber fund, so they must be the best, right? But when you look at the best venture platforms in the world, right? The Sequoias, the Andreessen's, the founders' funds, whomever, they're all generalists, right? And they're all generalists for a reason, right? They're generalists because the best companies don't discriminate, right? You know, the best companies are in enterprise SaaS and fintech and consumer and everything between, right? Like your job at the end of the day should be to identify and back the best founders full stop, regardless of what they're building, right? Regardless of the space that they're building in. So, yeah, I think that's kind of, I think, one that I feel pretty strongly about.

• 56:34Speaker 02

  There's also some, I think, somebody like, kind of, some of the, kind of like, tier two, tier three accelerators as well. Like, I think that's a ship that has long since sailed. I think YC is, I mean, they've just built such brand equity at this point, but, yeah.

• 56:48Anthony Pompliano?

  One of my last questions for you is, if I want to start a company in the future, what is the things that I should do beforehand to get positioned to have the skillset, experience, network, et cetera, to be able to start that business? Let's say I'm coming out of college and I'm like, one day I want to start a company. What is a, maybe not the only path, but a good path for me to pursue?

• 57:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it depends on the kind of company that you want to start, right? So I think if you're interested in starting... You know, in in enterprise infrastructure company, right? And I think that's a much different path than if you want to go start a fintech company or whatever company, right? And I think in enterprise infrastructure, for example, when you look at many of the very successful companies that have been started in that space. Or if you look at a Rubrik or a Samsara or whomever, right?

• 57:41Speaker 02

  They're started by people who are oftentimes in their 40s typically, right? Who have spent 20 years, basically, like deeply understanding like how infrastructure works at large scale enterprises, right? So that's that tack, right? But I'd say for your for your typical kind of new grad, if you're thinking about, hey, you know, I want to start a company. The best advice that I could possibly give them is to go work at a series A to series C hyper growth startup. One that's backed by, you know, a top five, maybe top 10 firm, one that has somewhere from 20 to 50 people. And then just go do whatever it possibly takes to learn, just get your hands dirty, right?

• 58:26Speaker 02

  I mean, I think about it as like a ramp or a retool or whatever, right? Like, if you can get in early at one of those companies. The velocity of learning that you'll have over the next two, three, four years will be unequivocally higher than anything that you could ever get by working at a FAANG company or working at a series D or C or, you know, soon to be public kind of company. And you learn so much on somebody else's dime, brand, credibility, reputation, right? That by the time you're ready to kind of spin out and start your own company, you know, the fundamentals and and, you know, let's say you're working at Ramp, right? You don't have to go start a fintech company, right? It doesn't matter. At that point, you've learned a broad based skill set that's pretty generalizable, right?

• 59:11Speaker 02

  And then you go build. So that would be my best advice is like if you're a new grad thinking about starting a company over the next two to four years. And you don't already have the idea that you want to work on today. Go work at, you know, a ramp style company.

• 59:27Speaker 02

  For a couple of years, learn under some of the best, most ambitious entrepreneurial people in the world. And then spin out and do your own thing.

• 59:34Anthony Pompliano?

  I think that's a great idea. What about friend groups? Like founders who end up being successful usually tend to be around other founders that are successful. Is that fair?

• 59:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, I think it's fair. I think like when we look at even kind of within country, like the, the, the networks of people that have been formed. Or even if I go all the way back to the genesis of, of country, right? You know, a decade or so ago. And I think the, the most ambitious people associate themselves with other really ambitious entrepreneurial people. And so when I look at the founders that were backing, who are, you know, earlier in their careers, right? I think kind of call it like 20 to, you know, 26, 27. Yeah, for the most part, I mean, they, they have a small pocket of half a dozen to dozen friends in their city that they're living with. You know, living in a hacker house with, like spending time with, working on projects with, right?

• 1:00:28Speaker 02

  And, and, and this stuff matters, right? It matters because you're building trust, you're building long-term relationships, you're getting to know someone. We just back to company, actually seed stage, but, uh, you know, the founders went to college together, live together, have stayed close. Sorry, both in SF together and, and, you know, one just recruited another one from a startup to go start the company together. Right? So like these things can take time to play out, but ultimately, you know, finding your tribe, right? Like finding your group of people is super important. And then that carries on to the company that you're at as well, right? If you look at, again, like a ramp or an and or whomever, right? The, the, you know, the, the early employees at those companies end up building their own versions of mafias, right?

• 1:01:09Speaker 02

  And, and they spin out and they all angel invest in one another's companies and they start companies together, right? And it's really powerful, right? And you, there are, there are a small number of companies that have large numbers of entrepreneurial people. And again, like if you're a new grad or whomever, like those are the pockets that you want to look for, both in friend group and also in, in colleague group. So, yeah.

• 1:01:31Anthony Pompliano?

  And when you think about your day to day, what does your like normal schedule look like?

• 1:01:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, um, ebbs and flows by the time of the year, I'd say, but, uh, you know, I, you know, I'd say typically today, I'm.

• 1:01:47Speaker 02

  I'm in more of like a CEO style role at Contrary. So we have about 20 people on the team now, five on the investment team, 15 kind of helping us build the talent identification machine right across engineering and data science and talent and so on. And so I spend probably maybe a third of my time recruiting, you know, trying to kind of bring world-class people on the team and kind of level up with every single hire. And I spend probably a third of my time on some combination of fundraising or managing the team, right? Kind of like setting strategy vision. And then probably the remaining third on investing

• 1:02:28Speaker 02

  and supporting existing founders. So that's roughly the allocation of time, but it can ebb and flow if we're fundraising.

• 1:02:36Anthony Pompliano?

  You're remote or you have an office?

• 1:02:37Speaker 02

  Remote, but we have a, we have a, we call like a third space in New York. Actually, we just opened it up a couple of months ago. It's called Contrary NYC. And basically like it's an extension of the whole thesis, right? Which is we're trying to build infrastructure to support people at every step of their journeys, right? We're trying to help them find their first jobs, write them their first check, provide a home for them to meet like-minded technologists, you know, all the way through, you know, supporting them for their whole journey. So yeah, we have a space that we just opened up in New York recently. It's, it's pretty awesome, but um, remote first is a firm. Yeah.

• 1:03:10Anthony Pompliano?

  And then how do you communicate with the team? Slack, email, meetings?

• 1:03:14Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. We use, uh, we use Microsoft Teams.

• 1:03:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Teams?

• 1:03:18Speaker 02

  No, I'm just kidding.

• 1:03:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Some people do.

• 1:03:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, uh, we.

• 1:03:25Anthony Pompliano?

  I've banned Teams by the way.

• 1:03:27Speaker 02

  Good.

• 1:03:27Anthony Pompliano?

  We, one of the companies, uh, I don't know why the founder always wanted to use Teams. And like, if you don't have the app on your phone or whatever, you like can't like call into it. Like, it's just like, it doesn't make any sense. And so I finally got frustrated. And I was like, if I see another Teams, like, I'll freak out.

• 1:03:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's brutal. Yeah. So no, no Teams. Uh, no. So we're, we just, we use a pretty traditional stack. So it's, it's, it's, uh, you know, Slack, Zoom, email, whatever. And then the cadence that's been pretty good for us actually is, um, you know, remote first as a team. I'd say out of the 20, maybe. A little less than half of us are in SF and then we have a couple in LA, New York, whatever. And then we kind of marry that cadence with a quarterly in-person team offsite. So every quarter, we basically go somewhere in person, usually just in the US, right? And to kind of take three, four, five days to, you know, do feedback, level set on where we've been, where we're headed,

• 1:04:23Speaker 02

  and just have some team bonding time in person. I think it's been, there are certain people who are obviously more energized than others by in-person. And so it's been a good balance for us that allows everybody the flexibility to kind of do what they want, live where they want, live their own life, but, but also kind of show up for their colleagues.

• 1:04:39Anthony Pompliano?

  You think people work as much remote as they would in the office? Or you think they work more remote than they would in the office?

• 1:04:45Speaker 02

  I think it depends on the person, right? I think you have to, you have to be internally motivated, right? And, and you have to have ambition and want to build. I, I think, you know, if you're talking about, you know, Google style scale, I mean, there's no, there's no, there's no doubt that it's becoming massively less productive company. But I think when you're a team of us with 20, where there's really high accountability across the board, right? It's like every single day, like you, you have your responsibilities, right? And if you don't have your responsibilities, you're not doing them, it's obvious, right? And so I think in those kinds of environments, it's actually fine. You have, you know, for the most part, senior, ambitious, motivated people who are going to show up and do great work regardless of where they live.

• 1:05:28Speaker 02

  But I think once you start scaling meaningfully, right? Call it past the century mark, yeah, I, I, I would, I don't know if I'd do it if I were, if I were a CEO, so. But there's a war of talent, right? You end up with a, with a, you know, game theory.

• 1:05:42Anthony Pompliano?

  There's not a war of talent. Here's my, here's, this might be one of the things people disagree with me on. There's not a war of talent for the best companies. If you are a generational company, people are knocking down your door trying to work there.

• 1:05:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? Think of Anduril as a great example.

• 1:05:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:05:59Anthony Pompliano?

  How many companies are actually competing with Anduril for talent? I don't know the answer.

• 1:06:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:06:04Anthony Pompliano?

  But like, I bet, I mean, I went and I looked one day, they have like 200 open roles.

• 1:06:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:06:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Right?

• 1:06:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:06:10Anthony Pompliano?

  And when you look at a business like that, if you're into defense tech, like where do you go work?

• 1:06:14Speaker 02

  For sure.

• 1:06:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And then maybe you're just like into tech.

• 1:06:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:06:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Like where else are you going to get to build this stuff?

• 1:06:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:06:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Like it's just so differentiated than everything else that again, it's bombastic to say it's not a war on talent. But it is a very, very big competitive advantage, just simply the mission that you're doing. And so naturally you are able to attract talent that other people can't.

• 1:06:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that's right. And I think that's right, but I think there's, you know, a handful of companies, we can probably count on one or two hands, those companies. And I mean, frankly, those are probably the companies that people should be trying to go to work for.

• 1:06:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course.

• 1:06:45Speaker 02

  But like.

• 1:06:45Anthony Pompliano?

  There's a reason why people want to go work there.

• 1:06:47Speaker 02

  Totally. Yeah. But for the rest, right? Like it's, it's, uh, you know, I think it's a much tougher sled, right? If you're, if you don't have the visibility yet, if you don't have the brand yet and you know, employer X says, oh yeah, you can stay remote. And you say, oh no, you have to be in person.

• 1:07:04Speaker 02

  You know, I think, I think many founders that I've talked to feel like it puts them in a hard spot. Right? Where like, especially if you're a seed or series A, right? Like you're still building your company. You're just trying to get the best engineers kind of full stop, right? And if 95% of your competitors are saying that engineers can, can work, you know, remote. It's just hard, right? And you don't have the time necessarily to be, to be, you know, spinning your wheels on trying to find amazing engineers who also want to work full time. So, uh, yeah, it's, it's a hard one, but I think it just depends on like where you're at in the company's evolution. So.

• 1:07:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, that, that makes sense. Where can we send people to find you on the internet?

• 1:07:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, we're at Contrary.com or, uh, my Twitter.

• 1:07:46Anthony Pompliano?

  What's your Twitter account?

• 1:07:48Speaker 02

  It's just first, first initial, last name. So E Tarczynski, but it's a brutal one to spell. So.

• 1:07:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Contrary.com, how'd you get that?

• 1:07:54Speaker 02

  Yeah. It just was a slog, but we got it. Yeah.

• 1:07:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. It just paid up?

• 1:07:59Speaker 02

  Yeah. So we, uh, we paid, but we, we found if we have a fantastic broker that we use. And this person, uh, talk about hustle. They have unrelenting hustle. We said, we, we said, we sent him to. Oh man, half a dozen of our own portfolio companies to this point, too. Yeah, he will spare no, spare nothing really to help, to help, help people get the domains they want. So I think one time he called up, he found the, so he found the owner of the domain, right?

• 1:08:38Speaker 02

  And then he called up the spouse of the owner of the domain and told, because they originally didn't want to sell. And then he told them that, did you know that so and so, like your, your partner has an offer to buy X.com or whatever it was for, it's like $50,000. I don't know what it was. And he doesn't want to do it. And they were

• 1:09:06Anthony Pompliano?

  They went crazy.

• 1:09:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, they went nuts. Literally the next day, sold. So this guy, this guy's pretty good. Yeah.

• 1:09:16Anthony Pompliano?

  You just gotta love people who understand how the world works.

• 1:09:18Speaker 02

  That's right. That's hustle. Yeah, that's absolute hustle.

• 1:09:20Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. Thank you so much for coming and doing this. We will, we will definitely do this again in the future.

• 1:09:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, appreciate it.

• 1:09:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. I really hope you enjoyed this one. Make sure you're subscribed on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player. And if you're looking to transition into a brand new job in the Bitcoin or crypto industry, we've got you covered. Head over to thecryptoacademy.io. My team and I have been working with the top HR teams in the industry to develop an intensive three-week training program with over 50 live events. We teach you exactly what you need to know to break into the industry, including live interview prep and resume review. Our students have been hired at over 75 of the world's best Bitcoin and crypto companies. Go to thecryptoacademy.io to learn more. Again, that's thecryptoacademy.io. If you enjoyed today's episode, make sure you share it with your friends and I'll see you all for the next episode.